Abbas Milani in the Boston Review:

What policies should the United States adopt toward Tehran?

Two answers dominate current discussion. The first advocates a grand bargain with the Iranian regime: we provide security guarantees and convince them that “regime change” is no longer part of U.S. policy; in return, the regime abandons its nuclear ambitions. The second proposes to continue the Bush policy: the Islamic Republic gives up its enrichment activities; we respond by opening discussions. The first strategy offers what the regime most covets before starting to talk; the second insists that the regime surrender its most important bargaining chip before negotiations begin.

Neither approach is very promising. Moreover, they share a common weakness. Both concentrate on Iran’s nuclear program and forgo any concern for the fate of human rights and democracy there. That is why many Iranian democrats fear a Libyan scenario, whereby an oppressive regime promises to dismantle its nuclear program in exchange for American and European good will. As a practical matter, “good will” means little more than a disregard for human rights violations in the country graced by it.

To find an alternative strategy, we need to step back from the current impasse and consider a deeper point of convergence between the United States and Iran.

More here.

James Randerson in The Guardian:

In a late response to Edge.org's annual New Year challenge to the world's leading thinkers, Prof Richard Dawkins has submitted his entry. Edge.org asked scientists, philosophers, artists and journalists “What will change everything?“

Dawkins – author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion – muses on the effect of breaking down the barrier between humans and animals, perhaps by the creation of a chimera in a lab or a “successful hybridisation between a human and a chimpanzee”.

Here's what he had to say.

Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and 'animal' is absolute. 'Pro-life', to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia.

What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human'. No other cells enjoy this exalted status.

More here.

David Segal in Slate:

My big Bollywood break came while I was walking down a side street in Mumbai, talking on a cell phone to a man named Imran.

“How many people with you?” he asked.
“Just me.”
“No problem. You got long hair, short hair?”
“No hair,” I said.
“No problem. You how old?
“Forty-four.”

“No problem. OK, meet tomorrow at the Bandra train station, west ticket counter. Eight a.m., work till 8 p.m. Give you food, makeup, costume, transport. Pay 500 rupees. Put you in Bollywood movie, OK?”

You could call Imran a freelance talent scout for the film industry of India, except—as our interview suggests—he's not looking for talent. He's looking for white people. Bollywood requires a few dozen Western extras every day, to add vérité to crowd scenes in ostensibly exotic locales. Imran's job is to find foreigners and chaperon them to Film City, an expansive badlands of rocks and shrubs at the northern edge of this megalopolis, where most of India's movies are made. I got his phone number through a reporter in Delhi, but usually he finds you, trolling local tourist sites.

More here.

An excellent short story read by our good friend and sometimes 3QD contributor J.M. Tyree… click here to listen.

Of the many influences on Shakespeare, his Warwickshire origins were most important. As the grandson of a yeoman farmer and the son of a failing Stratford-upon-Avon shopkeeper, he belonged to the country, not the city. He did not accumulate property in London, and may even have felt uncomfortable there. Unlike his theatrical contemporaries, he set scenes in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. He had a wide and detailed knowledge of country lore and the medicinal uses of plants, using names which baffled the London compositors who set his plays into print. Bate believes that Shakespeare invented “deep England”, a rustic idyll centred on the Midlands that delights in mingling morris men and royal spectacle. In As You Like It the action is set in Arden, not the Ardennes as in Shakespeare’s source, and the Duke and his men play at being “Robin Hood”. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Athenian wood is full of very English fairies and artisans. An idea of “deep England” first appears in Justice Shallow’s scenes in Henry IV Part 2, and is increasingly voiced in the History plays, until in King John Shakespeare asks who will speak for England during a bloody war of succession, when power-hungry leaders cannot agree. “Deep England” is part of the Elizabethan reshaping of national and regional identities. Map-making and “chorography” (the topographical and historical description of a locality) were in vogue.

more from the TLS here.

In 1999, the Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić visited The Hague to observe the trials for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. Among the defendants was Goran Jelisić, a thirty-year-old Serb from Bosnia, who struck her as “a man you can trust.” With his “clear, serene face, lively eyes, and big reassuring grin,” he reminded Drakulić of one of her daughter’s friends. Many of the witnesses at The Hague shared this view of the defendant—even many Muslims, who told the court how Jelisić helped an old Muslim neighbor repair her windows after they were shattered by a bomb, or how he helped another Muslim friend escape Bosnia with his family. But the Bosnian Muslims who had known Jelisić seven years earlier, when he was a guard at the Luka prison camp, had different stories to tell. Over a period of eighteen days in 1992, they testified, Jelisić himself killed more than a hundred prisoners. As Drakulić writes, he chose his victims at random, by asking “a man to kneel down and place his head over a metal drainage grating. Then he would execute him with two bullets in the back of the head from his pistol, which was equipped with a silencer.” He liked to introduce himself with the words “Hitler was the first Adolf, I am the second.” He was sentenced to forty years in prison.

more from The New Yorker here.

///
I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And oaths were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To stuggle on without a break thus far,—
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

Rashid Khalidi in The New York Times:

NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.

THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.

THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gaza’s air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will. As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

More here.

Jimmy Carter in The Washington Post:

After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act of terrorism. Although casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years), the town was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions. About 3,000 residents had moved to other communities, and the streets, playgrounds and shopping centers were almost empty. Mayor Eli Moyal assembled a group of citizens in his office to meet us and complained that the government of Israel was not stopping the rockets, either through diplomacy or military action.

Knowing that we would soon be seeing Hamas leaders from Gaza and also in Damascus, we promised to assess prospects for a cease-fire. From Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who was negotiating between the Israelis and Hamas, we learned that there was a fundamental difference between the two sides. Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza.

More here.

From Nature:

The huge black holes that lie at the centre of galaxies grow by devouring gas and stars that come too close, but their gravitational attraction can also encourage the birth of stars and the growth of galaxies. This dual role as creator and destroyer has left astronomers with a puzzle: which came first, the black hole or the galaxy? Research from radio astronomers now suggests that black holes got off to a faster start, at least in four galaxies that existed in the early Universe. “The significant implication is that the black holes formed first and then somehow they formed a stellar galaxy around them,” says Chris Carilli, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, who presented the research at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California, on 6 January.

Astronomers had already identified what seemed to be a predictable relationship between the mass of the black hole at a galaxy's heart, and the mass of the galaxy's central bulge of stars and gas. The galactic bulge tends to be 700 times the mass of the black hole, a proportion that holds true for galaxies throughout billions of years of the Universe's history. But the ratio for the oldest galaxies — formed within the first billion years after the Universe's birth some 13.7 billion years ago — remained a mystery. Quasar black holes at the centre of these galaxies glow so brightly that they prevent optical telescopes from seeing the surrounding galaxies in detail, so that galactic mass estimates were mostly impossible.

More here.

Charles Fishman in Fast Company:

As the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command. Four identical machines, running identical software, pull information from thousands of sensors, make hundreds of milli-second decisions, vote on every decision, check with each other 250 times a second. A fifth computer, with different software, stands by to take control should the other four malfunction.

At T-minus 6.6 seconds, if the pressures, pumps, and temperatures are nominal, the computers give the order to light the shuttle main engines — each of the three engines firing off precisely 160 milliseconds apart, tons of super-cooled liquid fuel pouring into combustion chambers, the ship rocking on its launch pad, held to the ground only by bolts. As the main engines come to one million pounds of thrust, their exhausts tighten into blue diamonds of flame.

Then and only then at T-minus zero seconds, if the computers are satisfied that the engines are running true, they give the order to light the solid rocket boosters. In less than one second, they achieve 6.6 million pounds of thrust. And at that exact same moment, the computers give the order for the explosive bolts to blow, and 4.5 million pounds of spacecraft lifts majestically off its launch pad.

It's an awesome display of hardware prowess. But no human pushes a button to make it happen, no astronaut jockeys a joy stick to settle the shuttle into orbit.

The right stuff is the software. The software gives the orders to gimbal the main engines, executing the dramatic belly roll the shuttle does soon after it clears the tower. The software throttles the engines to make sure the craft doesn't accelerate too fast. It keeps track of where the shuttle is, orders the solid rocket boosters to fall away, makes minor course corrections, and after about 10 minutes, directs the shuttle into orbit more than 100 miles up. When the software is satisfied with the shuttle's position in space, it orders the main engines to shut down — weightlessness begins and everything starts to float.

But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved.

More here.

From here.

SOURCE: London Times, 5 May 2006, titled, Truth in Mapping

“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
— David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99

Read more »

by Shiko Behar

The otherwise simple, straightforward question raised at 3QD (“who ended the cease-fire in Gaza?”) has now also been explored by mainstream global venues, such as CNN, which no sane person can deem unfriendly to Israel. While this development perhaps merits few additional thoughts on the issue, it is important to keep sight of the whole situation at stake: the question raised vis-à-vis the NYT is certainly intriguing – and might even help some to better understand tendencies in Israel/Palestine news coverage; yet its importance significantly pales amid Gaza’s more recent developments. Of these, foremost are the horrific civilian deaths. Bearing this in mind, I still feel some urge to verbalize the one main issue that a week ago transformed me into an irksome-nerd unearthing the sequence of events producing the breakup of the short-lived Israel/Hamas cease-fire: this issue was, and remains, the arrogance and pompousness of the NYT editors who – in what appears to be a rather majestic sloppiness – have propagated what was supposed to be an informed and important editorial into one devoid of the most basic properties it should (and must) have embodied: critical skepticism, and modesty and humbleness, on the on hand, and minimal journalistic balance, on the other.

It is difficult to tolerate any individual who pompously presents fallacies as facts, and does so without even a symbolic blinking or sober awareness of the gravity and magnitude of the deadly issues at stake. More troubling in this respect are individuals who are unwilling to recognize an error and correct it, let alone a fundamental one. Such immature, stubborn refusals become all the more annoying in cases where the error is nothing more than countless other errors that all humans occasionally commit. That, unfortunately, does not seem to be the case with the recent error by the NYT editors: they seem needlessly chauvinist, arrogant machos who apparently prefer not to budge from what after only five days looks like a pathetic text commencing with the (by now) immortal phrase “Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory.” George Orwell wouldn’t have been able to put this better.

It is precisely the absence of a simple correction that prompted me to waste even more time than I already have on this nonsense. Upon further research I was able to find for the NYT one additional view that can perhaps shed brighter light on the “who-ended-the-cease-fire” question. The single most supreme and authoritative Israeli body that deals with issues of terror and security is the Israeli Security Agency (ISA); it is also known in Hebrew (and colloquial English) as the Shabak (or the Shin Bet). Like deadly punctual state organs in every country, the Shabak too publishes every single week an update called “Terror Data and Trends.” Here is what the Shabak’s November 6, 2008 report had to say about that month’s first week (and, by proxy, perhaps also about the NYT/cease-fire question):

This week there was a sharp increase in the number of high trajectory weapon attacks (rockets/mortars) from the Gaza Strip into Israel, including towards Ashkelon. This was preceded by an ISA-IDF operation on the evening between November 4th and 5th, which exposed a tunnel ready for use, which was intended for the purpose of a large terror attack within Israel. This Israeli activity was undertaken in order to deal with an impending and urgent threat, and thus was not a rupture of the “Lull.”

Read more »

Willem Buiter over the FT blog maverecon:

Little progress has been made in the past century or so towards understanding how economic policy, rules, legislation and regulation influence economic fluctuations, financial stability, growth, poverty or inequality. We know that a few extreme approaches that have been tried yield lousy results – central planning, self-regulating financial markets – but we don’t know much that is constructive beyond that.

The main uses of economics as a scholarly discipline are therefore negative or destructive – pointing out that certain things don’t make sense and won’t deliver the promised results. This blog post falls into that category.

Much bad policy advice derives from a misunderstanding of the short-run and long-run impacts of events and policies. Too often for comfort I hear variations on the following statements: “The long run is just a sequence of short runs, so if we make sure things always make sense in the short run, the long run will take care of itself.” This fallacy, which I shall, unfairly, label the Keynesian fallacy, compounds three errors.

[H/t: Mona Ali]

The first time I laid eyes on him was on the 18 or 19 August 1980. It was midday, the early days of the Gdańsk strike, the sky was clear, the sun was hot. In two dextrous movements he swung himself on top of the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyards’ second gate, raised his hands and shook his closed fists above his head. I was astonished. There I was, looking at a man who knew no fear and whose very demeanour wiped fear from everyone else’s hearts. I stood ten steps away from him, beneath the wooden cross stuck in the earth, listening to his voice from above the gate adorned by carnations, a portrait of the Pope and a picture of the Virgin of Jasna Góra, and could not believe my ears. His voice rang out with an incredible, indisputable, strong, iron certainty: “We shall win!” And a few minutes later, when an electric cart drove out of the shipyard gates carrying a plaster model of the Three Crosses Memorial which was to be erected outside the shipyards a few months later, I just shook my head: “This is sheer madness!” I heard people say that a few kilometres from Gdańsk large security squads were massing, getting ready to overpower the strikers but here he was, a few steps away from me, standing on that famous gate endlessly shown by the world’s TV stations all day long, shaking his fists high above his head, taunting the party leadership and the Eastern empire with that brazen smile beneath his black moustache.

more from Salon) here.

A viewer familiar with early- and mid-nineteenth-century American decorative arts, specifically with the painted ornamentation on the furniture, clocks, and china of the time—the squat travelers on their way, the sailboats with their pointy sails, the trees with their one-brushstroke boughs—might do a double take looking at the work of Thomas Chambers. It is as if all the curvy, streamlined, and dexterously executed flourishes on those pre–Civil War wood, fabric, and lusterware domestic items have been captured by, or perhaps stolen by, this British-born, American marine and landscape artist of the time. Whether he paints shipping in Boston harbor, with flags and clouds stretched by the wind, or sloops making their way up the Hudson River on a glistening autumn afternoon, or his subject is the wonder of being face to face with a giant waterfall, Chambers’s work, currently the subject of a rousing exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, seems at first less like the product of a particular person than an emanation of antebellum American life as a whole.

more from the NYRB here.

I am grateful to Mr. Kirsch for the time and effort he put into running over so many of my books in order to find incriminating passages that would support his thesis on my anti-Semitic Fascism-Communism. Perhaps, however, it would have been better for him to stick to just one or two books and read them with a simple unprejudiced attention – in this way, he would have been able to avoid many unfortunate misreadings, like the one apropos Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, where Mr. Kirsch writes:

Zizek’s dialectic allows him to have it all: the jihadis are not really motivated by religion, as they say they are; they are actually casualties of global capitalism, and thus “objectively” on the left. “The only way to conceive of what happened on September 11,” he writes, “is to locate it in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism.”

Well … first, in my Violence, I claim that jihadis are really motivated neither by religion nor by a Leftist sense of justice, but by resentment, which in no way puts them on the Left, neither “objectively” nor “subjectively.” I simply never wrote that Islamic fundamentalists are in any sense on the Left–the whole point of my writing on this topic is that the “antagonism” between liberal tolerance and ethnic or religious fundamentalism is inherent to the universe of global capitalism: in their very opposition, they are the two faces of the same system. The true Left starts with the insight into this complicity.

more from TNR here.

///
Lone, Glasgow
Kevin McFadden

Where I first learned to say things, Ohio, my accent
was the local legal tender: good in Edinburg
as in Dublin or London. Then came Glasgow (proper).
One year abroad in Glaswegian, the notes
brought home bouncing everywhere, overdrawn.
Want a wild time? In Glasgow it was tame.
See the town? You had to hear the tune. New loans,
including my name; I began saying Cave-in
if I wanted the right introduction to a pub. The road
was rude, the power sometimes poor, My voice
skim milk in that butterchirn of gutterals, Scots vowels
clotted and spread like cream, I learned to hear
everything twice and nothing the same. Glasgow
still hasn't left me alone: it's left me a lane.
//

From The New York Times:

LONDON — The advertisement on the bus was fairly mild, just a passage from the Bible and the address of a Christian Web site. But when Ariane Sherine, a comedy writer, looked on the Web site in June, she was startled to learn that she and her nonbelieving friends were headed straight to hell, to “spend all eternity in torment.” That’s a bit extreme, she thought, as well as hard to prove. “If I wanted to run a bus ad saying ‘Beware — there is a giant lion from London Zoo on the loose!’ or ‘The “bits” in orange juice aren’t orange but plastic — don’t drink them or you’ll die!’ I think I might be asked to show my working and back up my claims,” Ms. Sherine wrote in a commentary on the Web site of The Guardian.

And then she thought, how about putting some atheist messages on the bus, as a corrective to the religious ones? And so were planted the seeds of the Atheist Bus Campaign, an effort to disseminate a godless message to the greater public. When the organizers announced the effort in October, they said they hoped to raise a modest $8,000 or so. But something seized people’s imagination. Supported by the scientist and author Richard Dawkins, the philosopher A. C. Grayling and the British Humanist Association, among others, the campaign raised nearly $150,000 in four days. Now it has more than $200,000, and last Wednesday it unveiled its advertisements on 800 buses across Britain.

More here.