The Price of Words Unspoken

From Science:

Words_2 Humans are hard-wired to notice race. The average person registers the race of another human face in less than 100 milliseconds, according to past studies. This instantaneous perception clashes sharply with the American cultural taboo against using race to identify someone. Watch people at a party trying to describe another person, says Michael Norton, a marketing researcher at Harvard Business School. “They’ll launch into these long explanations until someone in the group might eventually say, ‘Oh, you mean the Asian guy?'” To measure the impact of such verbal gymnastics on cognition, Norton, Sommers, and colleagues employed a modified version of the children’s game “Guess Who?” Cards depicting people of different genders and races are laid face-up on a table, and one player mentally selects a card. The second player has to figure out as quickly as possible which card the first player picked using as few yes-or-no questions as possible, such as “Is your person blonde?”

Past studies have suggested that children internalize social taboos about discussing race at about age 10. The researchers compared the performances of 51 kids that were 8 to 9 years old with a similarly sized group of 10- to 11-year-olds. Both groups were equally composed of girls and boys, and the participants were predominantly white. In this game, asking about race was perfectly legitimate, because it could help the child pick the target card faster, Sommers says. Whereas almost 77% of the younger children asked about race, only 37% of the older children did. Consequently, the younger group guessed the target card after an average of 7.4 questions, but the older students averaged 8.3 questions, the team reports online this week in Developmental Psychology.

More here.



Tuesday, October 7, 2008

No Nobel for You: Top 10 Nobel Snubs

Erica Westly in Scientific American:

1.) Lise Meitner–left out of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission
Screenhunter_11_oct_07_2117In 1907 Meitner, a physicist by training, began collaborating with German chemist, Otto Hahn. They worked together for 30 years until 1938 when Meitner, an Austrian Jew, was forced to leave Nazi Germany. She moved to Sweden, but they continued their collaboration by mail. The letters between the two scientists indicate that Meitner guided Hahn through the experiments that led to the discovery of nuclear fission, according to her biographer, Ruth Lewin Sime. But Hahn published the results without including Meitner as a co-author, a move she understood at the time given the political climate. �Historians say that Hahn initially indicated that he intended to credit Meitner when it was safe to do so but that, in the end, he took sole credit, claiming that the discovery was his alone. Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Meitner was nominated multiple times in both the physics and chemistry categories, but the award always eluded her. Many Nobel omissions are debatable, but, most physicists today agree that Meitner was robbed, says Phillip Schewe, chief science writer for the American Institute of Physics.

More here.

Mystery, Alaska

DScreenhunter_10_oct_07_1716avid Gargill travels to Anchorage to examine the roots of Sarah Palin’s spectacular and sudden ascent from the depths of obscurity to the heat of the national spotlight.

From The National:

The slow drip of unflattering news from the north and a handful of disastrous media appearances sent Palin’s poll numbers tumbling, but she continued to attract record crowds of fervent admirers to the previously somnambulant McCain roadshow. But for a candidate thrust into stardom fuelled by her folksy authenticity, the real Sarah Palin remained an enigma, cloaked in the protective embrace of a campaign determined to shield her from scrutiny.

Was she a moral paragon ready to “clean up Washington” – or an abuser of power who conducted state business on private e-mail accounts to avoid oversight and used her office to settle family vendettas, dismissing Alaska’s respected Public Safety Commissioner because he refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband?

Was she a woman of faith and family to whom the majority of Americans could relate – or an End Times-awaiting creationist book-banner? The archetype of Alaska’s fabled frontier spirit – or a pork-barrel grifter in the mould of Alaska pols like Congressman Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, both under investigation for corruption?

More here.

1 American, 2 Japanese Share Nobel Physics Prize

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

Nobel_medalAn American and two Japanese physicists on Tuesday won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work exploring the hidden symmetries between elementary particles that are the deepest constituents of nature.

Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, will receive half of the 10 million kroner prize (about $1.3 million) awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, will each receive a quarter of the prize.

Ever since Galileo, physicists have been guided in their quest for the ultimate laws of nature by the search for symmetries, or properties of nature that appear the same under different circumstances.

However, in the 1960s, Dr. Nambu, who was born in Tokyo in 1921, suggested that some symmetries in the laws of nature might be hidden or “broken” in actual practice.

A pencil standing on its end, for example, is symmetrical but unstable and will wind up on the table pointing in only one direction or the other. The principle is now embedded in all of modern particle physics.

More here.

ends and beginnings

20071024_commentator_jonathan_chait

Last year, I published a book describing how right-wing economics had come to dominate American politics. Whenever you write a book about something bad that’s happening, you get asked for the solution. I’d shrug and admit that I didn’t have one. The questioner would usually look slightly disappointed, so I’d add that nothing lasts forever, and eventually something will come along to change things. The financial crisis might be that something.

When liberals talk about turning economic lemons into political lemonade, the usual model is the New Deal. The free market failed, government swept in, and the political landscape was transformed. Of course, the economy has recessions all the time, and most of them fail to result in a New Deal. In 1982 and 1992, to name a couple of examples, lousy economic conditions led to major Democratic victories. But neither led to any major transformation, and each was followed, in 1984 and 1994, by blowout Republican wins.

more from TNR here.

memory at 1AM

Paulsonin__1223100195_6214

IN THE DARKNESS, from a distance, the park is a sea of glowing spots – indistinct, eerie, even spectral. But up closer, details emerge. Row after row of stainless steel benches curve up from the ground like fins, or wings of a creature arrested in motion. These 184 benches hover over 184 pools of illuminated water, one for each man, woman, and child killed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

I’ve long had a thing for visiting memorials at night. When I lived in Washington, I loved to go to the FDR Memorial in the wee hours, when the tour buses and the teenagers had gone and the bright sun had given way to the city lights and the stars, when the senses could be saturated by the sound of falling water. The blackness of night, of course, is evocative of death, but it is the stillness, I think, that transforms the experience; absent the familiar sights and sounds that distract our senses during the day, we are guided not by the footsteps of fellow travelers, but by our own response to architecture, to history, to memory, to loss.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

the doo-doo 32 and other signs of doom

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I recently discovered Reggie Middleton’s BoomBustBlog. He is simply a very smart and witty guy from whom one can learn a lot quickly about what is going on…

I’ve noticed a few queries as to my opinion of whether financial stocks will get better or if the worst is behind us. I actually thought I made my viewpoint clear. Obviously not, so let me be a bit more blunt. Things are going to get very ugly, starting this week – and from there it will get even uglier – and after that the bad part will start. Since I cannot predict the future I will shy away from X will happen in Y months, but the world’s credit and real asset markets are in a bad way and need a severe correction to reach a level of peaceful equilibrium. The central banks and governments appear to be dead set against letting capitalistic nature take its course, thus we will be in a tug of war akin to farmers trying to prevent tornadoes from destroying their crops. Best efforts may appear valiant, but in the end fruitless. Don’t mess with Mother Nature. I will put a post up in a few hours (partially free) that consists of the research that finally explains, in explicit detail, the industrial/manufacturing portion of my investment thesis and leads into the official global macro theme (it’s 33 pages and consumed a lot of resources at a very trying time, so the bulk of it will be for subscribers), followed by bankruptcy candidates that made it to the shortlists but were not selected for final analysis.

more from Reggie here.

Plus, an explanation of Credit Default Swaps and why anyone should care here.

Tuesday Poem

“…he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
    –Bob Dylan, It’s Alright Ma

We Are the Music Makers
A. W. E. O’Shaughnessy

We are the music makers,
..And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

  And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

  On whom the pale moon gleams;

Yet we are the movers and shakers

  Of the world forever, it seems.
…………………………………………….

With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world’s great cities,

  And out of a fabulous story

  We fashion an empire’s glory:

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

  Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song’s measure

  Can trample a kingdom down.
…………………………………………….

We in the ages lying

  In the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

  And Babel itself with our mirth;

And o’erthrew them with prophesying

  To the old of the new world’s worth;

For each age is a dream that is dying,

  Or one that is coming to birth.

///

Nobel Prize Surprise

From Science:

Nobel_2 In a snub to one of the world’s most famous virologists, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, announced today that it has awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine to Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute in Paris for their discovery of the virus that causes AIDS. The decision passes over Robert Gallo of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, with whom Montagnier had a long-running battle over both credit for the AIDS virus’s discovery and the patents related to the test used to detect the virus in blood.

Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi together receive half of the $1.4 million award; the other half goes to German virologist Harald zur Hausen for finding that the human papillomavirus (HPV) can cause cervical cancer. Although the HPV discovery ultimately led to two recently approved cancer vaccines now being widely introduced in developed countries, zur Hausen’s prize has been overshadowed by the controversial choice of his fellow laureates.

The Nobel committee credits Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi for first isolating the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from a French patient with swollen lymph nodes. The researchers also detected activity of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, proof that the infectious agent belonged to a group called retroviruses, which insert their own DNA into the genome of the hosts. But Montagnier’s lab did not prove that their virus caused AIDS. That evidence first came 1 year later from Gallo and co-workers, who published four papers in Science that persuasively tied similar viruses they had found to the disease. Gallo says all three recipients of the prize deserved it, and he’s happy to see that the Nobel Assembly at long last gave an award to the HIV/AIDS field. But he acknowledged that he was “disappointed” to be left out. “Yes, I’m a little down about it, but not terribly,” Gallo told Science. “The only thing I worry about is that it may give people the notion that I might have done something wrong.”

“I’m very sorry for Robert Gallo,” Montagnier told Science today from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where he is attending an HIV meeting. Montagnier says he was “surprised” as well: “It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that.” Gallo, who was famously competitive with Montagnier and other labs during the race to find the cause of AIDS, also stressed that he’s mellowed a lot. “Twenty-five years ago, I’d be stuttering and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ As long as everything is not taken away from my legacy, that’s fundamentally what matters to me.”

More here.

Citizen Enforcers Take Aim

From The New York Times:

Fair_450 Last month a Georgia woman named DeShan Fishel was driving near a school and saw a Jeep rush past a stop signal on a school bus, clipping a 5-year-old boy. The other driver sped away. Ms. Fishel whipped a U-turn and gave chase. She stayed with the Jeep on surface streets and caught the driver on a highway in Dawson County, Ga., making him pull over. She watched the driver until police officers arrived. “All I could think about was that little kid, getting hit, and this person getting away with it,” Ms. Fishel said at a news conference. “It just really upset me.”

The public urge for punishment that helped delay the passage of Washington’s economic rescue plan is more than a simple case of Wall Street loathing, according to scientists who study the psychology of forgiveness and retaliation. The fury is based in instincts that have had a protective and often stabilizing effect on communities throughout human history. Small, integrated groups in particular often contain members who will stand up and — often at significant risk to themselves — punish cheaters, liars and freeloaders. Scientists debate how common these citizen enforcers are, and whether an urge to punish infractions amounts to an overall gain or loss, given that it is costly for both parties. But recent research suggests that in individuals, the fairness instinct is a highly variable psychological impulse, rising and falling in response to what is happening in the world. And there is strong evidence that it hardens in times of crisis and uncertainty, like the current one.

The catch in this highly sensitive system, most researchers agree, is that it most likely evolved to inoculate small groups against invasive rogues, and not to set right the excesses of a vast and wildly diverse community like the American economy.

More here.

Monday, October 6, 2008

My Summer with Stalin

Michael Blim

For me, summer reading choices have always been something of the voice of the unconscious speaking. If I am lucky, I figure out why I devoted my summer to one topic or another before the next summer rolls around.

Last year, as some of you may remember from a fall column, I spent the summer with Hitler – or rather reading accounts of his life and regime. It didn’t seem an odd choice. In the small town library I was using over the summer, non-fiction choices came down to three – or two and a half – topics: Hitler and the Second World War or the American Civil War. Their only rival was the children’s section, which prompted the wicked in me to wonder if tales of gruesome wars and a venomous dictator are in practice children’s books for adults.

This summer it was Stalin. In comparison to Hitler, he has inspired no universal obsession, no midnight reading in the garden of evil. As in the case of Mao, you might say that Stalin’s accomplishments are still vastly under-appreciated in relation to those of Hitler. Perhaps as the body counts under their regimes rise, Stalin and Mao may yet achieve admission into the pantheon of great 20th Century evil-doers. Hitler may yet find his peers.

Yet will Stalin’s admission be whole-hearted? Look around us: nothing draws universal outrage and dramatic protests as quickly and easily as the neo-Nazi movements that pop up in Europe and America.

By contrast, Vladimir Putin has made Stalin and Stalinism fashionable in Russia again. In Putin’s Russia, state authority is unitary and inviolate. The state develops Russia’s economy and dictates the terms of life and labor for the Russian people. When force and violence are necessary to defeat anti-state forces, they will be used, and the use will be held accountable only by the agents of the state itself. In other words, Stalinism without the millions dead.

Communism’s kulaks have won. The Soviet state class has not only survived the empire’s collapse, but has parlayed its prior advantage into a new system of privilege. The stakes are no longer two cows and a plow, but access to enormous wealth and power held once more via the state.

Stalinism is not in style in the West, but indifference to its effects, save in the survival of the new satellites the West has acquired, is palpable. If the Russian state creates something of a neo-Stalinist hell for its people, the West appears only vaguely interested in their fate.

Then too, the West has seemed to treat Stalinism as the lesser of two evils when compared with Hitlerism. Perhaps it was a matter of their priorities rather than ours. Hitler had no use for creating Nazis. He had all he needed to rule the world, and for him, the rest of us were low-life mongrels useful only in murderous domination. Revolutionary Stalin was a universalist: he sent out Communists of all nationalities to convert and revolutionize their own. Consequently, no European country since the Thirties has lived without some home-grown Stalinists in their midst. Even the United States has had its Stalinists, or what’s a Gus Hall for? R.I.P.

Perhaps the presence of home-grown Stalinists for three generations in the West humanized Stalin’s Stalinism in ways that Hitler, save for Mel Brooks’ The Producers, has never found.

Still, the monstrous facts of Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union have been known for generations. Khrushchev’s 1956 finally not so “secret” speech to the 20th Soviet Union Communist Party Congress put Stalin’s crimes into circulation throughout the socialist world and into the hands of the West’s spymasters and anti-Communist intellectuals and policy advisors. George Kennan, 20th Century America’s master foreign policy intellectual had published extensive accounts in the sixties of the costs of the Soviet Union’s brutal journey to world economic and political power.

The obituaries commemorating Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s death short weeks ago are also reminders that accounts of Stalin and his deeds still circulate widely in the public domain.

No one can pretend ignorance of Stalin’s record as one of the supreme killers in the 20th Century.

But it is not only Putin that is propelling Stalin back into style. The decade-long thaw that occurred in Russia immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union enabled researchers to finally get their hands on documents in archives that had long been sequestered, or whose very existence had heretofore been unknown. We have a better chance now at understanding Stalin and Stalinism in its historical context.

The thaw and the newly opened archives have fueled accounts of two kinds. One is the re-exploration of Stalin’s life and character, as well as his relation to the Soviet regime. The other focuses on the impact of state terror on the everyday lives of citizens caught up in the chaos and upheavals of post-revolutionary Soviet society.

Regarding Stalin, well surely it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy, and that’s nothing new. But the vast amount of new material available has enabled historians to take a closer look at Stalin’s character. The result is: complexity, thy name is Stalin.

I rely on Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar for providing me some of the facts from which I derive my impressions.

I’ve gotten to know another Stalin. Malice, murder, and mayhem there are in requisite abundance for satisfying one’s earlier stereotype. But Montefiore in spite of himself as well finds a Stalin possessed of vast intelligence and a cultural literacy that would easily surpass that possessed by any American president in the 20th Century:

“’He worked very hard to improve himself,” said Molotov. His library consisted of 20,000 well-used volumes. Svetlana (Stalin’s daughter – MB) found books there from the Life of Jesus to the novels of Galsworthy, Wilde, Maupassant and later Steinbeck and Hemingway. His granddaughter later noticed him reading Gogol, Chekhov, Hugo, Thackeray and Balzac. In old age, he was still discovering Goethe. He “’worshipped Zola.’” (2003: 97)

According to Montefiore, Stalin “adored the Last of the Mohicans, amazing a young translator whom he greeted in faux-Red Indian: ‘Big chief greets paleface!’”

Stalin experienced enormous love and friendship. He inspired devotion as well as fear among his closest associates. As for Sergei Kirov, the fabled Leningrad party chief as his only likely successor, one will never know if Stalin’s love for him was faux, or Kirov’s end at Stalin’s hands was like Otello’s parting kiss.

No one would ever say that Stalin was not the author of his crimes. He signed tens of thousands of death warrants personally, occasionally with comments appended such as “make him really suffer.” He rendered pitch-perfect the endless propaganda campaigns against enemies of the people that exposed people to torture, exile, and death by privation or execution, and in the millions. The mandates given his henchmen were explicit, as were the body counts sent back to Stalin at the Kremlin.

The henchmen too lived in a state of frenzied activity on behalf of the regime while at the same time possessed of abject fear that they too, or their loved ones, would be caught up as victims of the terrors. In one of the strangest tales from this schizoid world, Stalin imprisoned Molotov’s wife for associating with Jewish nationalist even as Molotov was helping Stalin keep Hitler at bay via the 1939 non-aggression pact. Molotov’s wife would go to prison a second time after World War II; her husband would remain loyal to Stalin until the latter’s death.

Stalin, in my view, was no madman. He was possessed of the Manichean worldview of a revolutionary caught up in a violent struggle for power who believed it virtuous to transform Soviet society by any means necessary. But the more he succeeded in subjecting Soviet society to his demands, force and violence became ends in themselves. They became the normal tools in perfecting and finishing the task of revolution.

As with Molotov, so too with so many of the millions of real victims of Stalin’s regime. New scholarship, access to archives and frank oral histories, reveal something even more fascinating to recount than the extraordinary career of Stalin. Several new books allow us a glimpse of how Soviet citizens were reformed or reformed themselves in the caldron of post-revolutionary terrors. Some citizens hid their characters and beliefs from the state, hoping to avoid death or social annihilation. Others sought to change and perfect new characters that would be at one with the revolution’s mission and final triumph in a truly transformed, just, communist society.

Orlando Figes, eminent scholar of the revolution and of the post-revolutionary period, argues for his part that many people resisted “conversion” to a Soviet-ophile character through concealment, the creation of false identities, the aid of kin, and even the occasional kindness of strangers. In The Whisperers (2007), Figes also relates the stories of people’s whose beliefs and characters had been colonized by the Stalinist state. Bolsheviks languished in prisons still believing in the cause. Others might not have believed that their accused father, for instance, was an enemy of the people, but this is in no way diminished their belief in enemies of the people. Still others believed that if their father were accused, he must be guilty.

In Figes, we have an exemplary account of the power of fear. In Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (2006), we see the workings of desire, as he shows how people worked to transform themselves into instruments of revolution and a new communist society. His discovery and recounting of diaries written by ordinary persons during the terrors reveals how people worked on their basic characters to create revolutionary subjects. For society to hurl itself into the new world, so must its devoted citizens. Their diaries were the account books for their change.

There are those who work with rapture daily to be one with the proletarian revolutionary movement represented in the party. There are others for whom the pain of denunciation redoubles their efforts to become worthy Soviet citizens. There are still others who recount their psychic battles to contain or destroy the bourgeois impulses of the past.

The greatest impression left by my summer with Stalin is that Stalin, save as a subject for “big-man” history, is not finally the source of useful knowledge that the study of life under his regime is.

Why? Because we live in times no less subject to mass persuasion, coercion by force, and state violence. What lives do we fashion, re-fashion, under their influence?

Of the heroic tales we tell ourselves, can the strength of character as a human absolute be the biggest whopper of them all? In the story of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, Stalin hardened his character into a violent force of nature. Ordinary Soviet citizens discovered how fragile, how plastic, and how friable were theirs.

And so might we.

Did you have a good summer? And what did you learn?

Monday Poem

///
Image_anantashayana

Death is the least we have to fear.
We are all in the hands of God,
Whatever happens happens by His Will.
            
Attention Please, by Peter Porter

Until the Sacred Cows Come Home
Jim Culleny

Vishnu reclines and sleeps
dreaming up the world.

He lounges upon a coiled snake
in the image of ananta shayana
floating on a raft
upon an ocean of milk
pacifying the characters of his dreams,
protecting his turf: his realm of
pleasure and pain; concocting
his improbable dream of a universe,
making it up as he goes.

Here and there Vishnu floats
in the logic of dreams
sailing his ship of tales
–at sea but ever in sight of land;
mything point after point
he goes dreaming on,
sailing and sinking simultaneously;
doing and undoing his work at once
within the same thought;
bobbing on waves of light
while flinging its particles
into black holes.

But he’s never fickle.
Vishnu can never be fickle
because he’s divine.

Any ordinary Joe or Ananda
would be ridiculed for insisting yes
and no in the same breath,
but not Vishnu.

All gods may contradict themselves
without flaw,
say men,
who always give their God
the benefit of a doubt
in any argument.

Faults may never be divine
(not earthquake nor plague,
and especially not
the death-rattle of love).

So Vishnu will sail on
upon his coiled snake,
upon his raft,
upon his ocean of milk,
with his sidekicks Brahma and Shiva
manning the staysail and jib,
dreaming, thinking, uttering
without pause,

forever,
or until the sacred cows come home
and the last man disappears,
whichever comes first.

///

Sunday, October 5, 2008

the word in sweden

Gustafsson_lars1

Any overview of a country’s contemporary literature throws up an inescapable paradox. The works that serve as the best examples in any account of “the current situation” are rarely the most artistically convincing. These representative books draw their strength precisely from the fact that they are so representative – from the ease with which reviewers can draw obvious parallels between literature and its directly political, social, or whatever, context. It is these titles, too, that attract the most attention at the time of publication. They are ripe subjects for media debates and are keenly discussed by commentators who have not read them but are more than happy to express opinions on them, since the concepts they contain are familiar and topical.

One example was Sisela Lindblom’s novel De skamlösa (The shameless, 2007), which, in conjunction with an interview with the author, sparked off the “cultural debate” of last autumn. It was all about handbags. Immensely expensive designer bags as symbols of an absurd consumer culture. The question of whether it can be considered reasonable to spend 40 000 Swedish kronor (approx. 4000 euros) on a handbag became a frame of reference for everything from globalization to gender perspectives.

more from Eurozine here.

milosz: the final days

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“This longing for God — he had that quite strongly,” says Krysiewicz. He was invited to the apartment on Boguslawskiego, where the poet grilled him provocatively, for Milosz was as famous for his doubts as for his certainties. Their conversations became a fixture: two or three hours once a week, sometimes once a month. What did they discuss? “Let’s say you had an experience with a great fire once — you have a vague memory of it,” Krysiewicz recalls. “You have spent a lot of years trying to describe it, and read a lot of books describing it. What you remember is an echo of it. You search and look for someone who can testify about this fire — that it is real — who can testify beyond words, because we know that words are too weak.”

Krysiewicz speaks reluctantly, haltingly; he was Milosz’s confessor, after all, and performed last rites. “My position was to be in the shade, and remain in the shade,” he says. “He went reconciled, certainly. But there are some things I can’t tell you.” He pauses. “He was a mystic, his poetry is mystical and metaphysical.”

more from The LA Times here.

Make-Believe Maverick

A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty.

Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone:

2331576323315766slargeThis is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

More here.

Pinker on Palin

In case you missed it yesterday, in the NYT:

SINCE the vice presidential debate on Thursday night, two opposing myths have quickly taken hold about Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. The first, advanced by her supporters, is that she made it through a gantlet of fire; the second, embraced by her detractors, is that her speaking style betrays her naïveté. Both are wrong.

Let’s take the first myth: Governor Palin subjected herself to the most demanding test possible — a televised debate. By surviving, she won. As the front page of The Daily News of New York screamed this morning, “No Baked Alaska.”

But as a test of clear thinking, the debate format was far less demanding than a face-to-face interview — the kind Ms. Palin had with Katie Couric of CBS.

Why? Because in a one-on-one conversation, you can’t launch into a prepared speech on a topic unrelated to the question. Imagine this exchange — based on the first question that the moderator, Gwen Ifill, gave Ms. Palin and Senator Joe Biden — if it took place in casual conversation over coffee:

LISA How about that bailout? Was this Washington at its best or at its worst?

MICHAEL You know, I think a good barometer here, as we try to figure out has this been a good time or a bad time in America’s economy, is go to a kid’s soccer game on Saturday, and turn to any parent there on the sideline and ask them, “How are you feeling about the economy?”

Lisa would flee. (This was, in fact, Ms. Palin’s response.) In a conversation, you have to build your sentence phrase by phrase, monitoring the reaction of your listener, while aiming for relevance to the question. That’s what led Ms. Palin into word salad with Ms. Couric. But when the questioner is 30 feet away on the floor and you’re on a stage talking to a camera, which can’t interrupt or make faces, you can reel off a script without embarrassment. The concerns raised by the Couric interviews — that Ms. Palin memorizes talking points rather than grasping issues — should not be allayed by her performance in the forgiving format of a debate.

Is ‘Muslim’ Democracy Synonymous with ‘Constitutional’ Democracy?

Ayşen Candaş Bilgen in Reset DOC:

The first point I would like to make is that in suggesting that a Muslim democracy is not compatible with constitutional democracy, I am not claiming that there is something essentially ‘wrong’ about Islam nor I am assuming that Islam’s theology is ‘essentially’ different from the theologies of other monotheistic religions. Although I am not an expert in theology, I think it is accurate to suggest that Islam’s theology is not essentially different from the theologies of either Judaism or Christianity. The differences of Islamic theology which differentiate it from other monotheistic religions’ do not seem to amount to an ‘essential inability’ for Islam’s liberalization. This essential similarity of Islam with other monotheistic theologies implies that insofar as other monotheistic religions have liberalized, both through struggles and in time, so can Islam, and so can Muslim societies. Therefore when I suggest that a Muslim democracy is not a constitutional democracy, I do not want to suggest that Islam in specific is incompatible with constitutional democracy but other monotheistic religions were. In fact, I find it also plausible to argue that a Jewish or a Christian democracy would also be incompatible with the idea of constitutional democracy.

If we could possibly convince ourselves that a constitutional democracy and a Muslim (or Jewish or Christian democracy) are the same thing, then we would not have felt the need to use the adjective “Muslim,” (or “Jewish” or Christian”) before the word ‘democracy’ in that specific context. We, at least intuitively, seem to know that there would be something anomalous in a Muslim, or a religious, democracy that would render that political regime less than a constitutional democracy. A religious political system which attempts to rule a complex society is an oxymoron if it also calls itself a democracy. A Muslim democracy must necessarily refer to a regime that is streaked by the culture and the vision of Islam and its world view.

The second point of clarification I want to make is about the perspective that I am taking in making the observations I am about to make about Turkey. The complexity of the context sometimes remains partly invisible to the observers’ perspective, especially if they are looking to find some ‘otherness,’ and if out of sheer good will they portray this ‘otherness’ that they encounter as something necessarily and unquestionably benign. That is partly what happens to European and American liberals when they analyze a predominantly Muslim country such as Turkey.

Obsessing Over Islam

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’. In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. ‘The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today,’ the sleeve announces. ‘It’s our responsibility to ensure we can make an informed vote in November.’ The Clarion Fund, the supplement’s sponsor, doesn’t explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just happened to coincide with Obama’s leap in the polls.

The Clarion Fund is a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure groups. It has an office, or at least an address, in Manhattan at Grace Corporate Park Executive Suites, which rents out ‘virtual office identity packages’ for $75 a month. Its website, clarionfund.org, provides neither a list of staff nor a board of directors, and the group still hasn’t disclosed where it gets its money, as required by the IRS. Who paid to make ‘Obsession’ isn’t clear – it cost $400,000. According to Rabbi Raphael Shore, the film’s Canadian-Israeli producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer ‘Peter Mier’, but that’s just an alias, as is the name of the film’s production manager, ‘Brett Halperin’. Shore claims ‘Mier’ and ‘Halperin’, whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it isn’t clear against what. The danger (whatever it is) hasn’t stopped Shore – or the director, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from going on television to promote their work.