One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).

Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its ‘interstices’.

Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us.’

more from the LRB here.

How much trouble are we really in? Charles Zentay in Safe Haven:

Ben Bernanke: Hello, how may I help you?

Robert Rubin: Dr. Chairman, it’s your old friend Bob over at Citi.

Bernanke: Oh Bob, what a pleasure. It’s nice to hear from you again. What can I do for you?

Rubin: Well Ben, we’ve got some problems over here. Now I trust you will be discrete on this. We can’t let this get out in the market. I think we’re insolvent.

Bernanke: What?

Rubin: See we have about $65 billion in capital, but we have $55 billion in Super Senior CDOs, and no one will buy them from us.

Bernanke: No one?

Rubin: We can’t sell them for $1. I’m now being told that if no one wants to buy pieces of paper from you, it turns out they are worthless. Believe me. I’m as shocked as you are.

Bernanke: But don’t you have a lot of cash flow? That’s what I’ve been hearing on CNBC.

Rubin: Well, in addition, we have $80 billion in SIV exposure, an additional $80 billion in conduit exposure, and a lot, lot more in derivative exposure that might not be worth what we said it was when we paid out our bonuses over the last couple years. I talked to some ex-traders, but they aren’t inclined to give back the bonuses. You add it all up, and we don’t have enough money to meet our liabilities.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]

From Wired:

Where was this mesmerizing book when we were kids? We would have been obsessed with artist and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman’s collection of ultra-hi-res photographs of our fellow animals. Flawlessly lit and captured in hyperfrozen moments against a pure white backdrop, even the lowly goldfish is like you’ve never seen it before. The minimalist aesthetic makes for an immediate, emotional connection with the creatures. Confronted with such striking examples of evolved physiologies and behavior, we can’t help but ponder our own origins and place in the world. These images prove we are not so different from the mirthful warthog, the mischievous gray squirrel, or the Dr. Seussian slow loris.

More here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen have enchanted children the world over for more than two centuries with their verbal sorcery and expressive intensity. Now their iconic power has drawn the attention of a Harvard professor, who hopes to broaden our understanding of how those eye-widening fairy tales expand the imaginations of children.

The stories deserve serious intellectual investigation, says Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Tatar is taking a critical look at Andersen to show how these stories have become part of our folklore, playing a formative role in the shaping of childhood identities.

“We need to engage our critical faculties in order to understand what makes these stories so emotionally addictive. Why have these Danish cultural stories taken hold in the United States to become instruments for navigating childhood?” Tatar asks. “How do the stories enable the reader to get lost in the book, to drink the heady elixir of fantasy? And how do they arouse the intellectual curiosity of children?” According to Tatar, a strong moral message is not the key to Andersen’s appeal. Rather, she says, Andersen’s descriptive techniques create moments with “ignition power” that kindle the imagination.

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

In a new book, “Inside the Mind of BTK,” the eminent F.B.I. criminal profiler John Douglas tells the story of a serial killer who stalked the streets of Wichita, Kansas, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Douglas was the model for Agent Jack Crawford in “The Silence of the Lambs.” He was the protégé of the pioneering F.B.I. profiler Howard Teten, who helped establish the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, at Quantico, in 1972, and who was a protégé of Brussel—which, in the close-knit fraternity of profilers, is like being analyzed by the analyst who was analyzed by Freud. To Douglas, Brussel was the father of criminal profiling, and, in both style and logic, “Inside the Mind of BTK” pays homage to “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist” at every turn.

“BTK” stood for “Bind, Torture, Kill”—the three words that the killer used to identify himself in his taunting notes to the Wichita police. He had struck first in January, 1974, when he killed thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Otero in his home, along with his wife, Julie, their son, Joey, and their eleven-year-old daughter, who was found hanging from a water pipe in the basement with semen on her leg. The following April, he stabbed a twenty-four-year-old woman. In March, 1977, he bound and strangled another young woman, and over the next few years he committed at least four more murders. The city of Wichita was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. In 1984, in desperation, two police detectives from Wichita paid a visit to Quantico.

More here.

Michelle Tsai in Slate:

An 18-year-old in Finland shot and killed eight people at his school on Wednesday. The killer, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, then committed suicide by turning his .22-caliber gun on himself. Although gun violence is very rare in Finland, the country has the highest rate of firearm ownership in Europe and the third highest in the world, behind only the United States and Yemen. Why do so many Finns own firearms?

They’re hunters. The Finns have hunted and fished for food for thousands of years, with agriculture only catching up as a major food source in the 20^th century. Today, hunting (PDF) remains a popular weekend, or even after-work, activity. Finland is one of the largest European countries, and there are ample grounds for hunters. (Forests cover more than half of the country.)

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth.]

Via boing boing, a “surefire strategy” for winning a game of Monopoly by Tim Darling:

* Always buy Railroads; never buy Utilities (at full price)*

* For every other property type, only buy them to complete a monopoly or to prevent opponents from completing one. Often this may mean buying as many properties as you can early in the game, but watch your cash reserves.

* At the beginning of the game, focus on acquiring a complete C-G (Color Group) in Sides 1+2, even if it means trading away properties on Sides 2+3. After acquiring one of these C-Gs, build 3 houses as quickly as possible: no more houses, no less!

* Once your first C-G starts to generate some cash, focus on completing a C-G and building 3 houses in Sides 3+4.

* Note: 3 houses is the “sweet spot” in the game as shown in Table 1 below. That’s where you’re making the best use of your money.*

* Single properties are the least good investment if you don’t build on them.

* The only exception to the above rules are when you need to acquire stray properties to prevent your opponents from completing their C-Gs to accomplish the above strategy.

The blog over at Lewis Lapham’s new journal, Lapham’s Quarterly (soon to release its first issue), is substantively and formally very cool, and jointly work to preserve, what for lack of a better phrase we’ll call, historic wisdom. Read this brief article on the new plans for an MGM casino in Atlantic City and click on the picture. [H/t: Kira and Timothy]

“ART cannot do the conceptual work we need if we are to understand ourselves,” philosopher Raimond Gaita said in a recent interview, arguing that moral clarity was best achieved by philosophical thinking. Hearing him speak of the danger of lucidity losing out to the seductions of literature, I wanted to ask if he had read Alex Miller.

I suspect that, for Miller, the search for moral clarity is something like the terrible climb up the escarpment in the Expedition Ranges in his latest novel, Landscape of Farewell. Two old and damaged men, one a German professor and the other an Aboriginal leader, exhilarated by their quest but full of self-doubt and fearful of what they will find, clamber up ridge after ridge in the stone country seeking a sacred cave. And because fact and fiction are refracted through art and the play of imagination, we are not simply observing their struggle from the plain below.

“As a novelist, I have been not so much a liar as a re-arranger of facts,” Miller writes in an author’s note for a recent reissue of his 1989 novel The Tivington Nott. “The purely imaginary has never interested me as much as the actualities of our daily lives, and it is of these that I have written … not autobiography in the conventional sense, it is nevertheless deeply self-revealing of its author.”

more from The Australian here.

Coming upon sculptures by Martin Puryear, the subject of a strong retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, is always an arresting pleasure, like entering a zone where time slows. I’m drawn into a relationship with something unique (the hardworking but unprolific Puryear almost never repeats himself, as if relaunching his career with each piece) which is both rawly physical and somehow fanciful. It’s usually carved or carpentered wood, subtly evocative of animate, utilitarian, or architectural entities, and mysterious and friendly. As strange as a piece’s form may be, it seems consolingly familiar, like a family friend who was often around in your childhood. It imparts a holiday feeling. In advance of the MOMA show, I wondered how Puryears, when displayed in quantity, could preserve their respective quotients of sweet surprise. Wouldn’t they crowd one another? They don’t. Each keeps its own counsel, cordially indifferent to its neighbors.

more from the New Yorker here.

As a quality of mind and character, Wordsworth’s “egotism” was central to his nature; it is therefore bound to lie at the heart of his greatest verse. It is present even when he writes about moods or states of being that in fact appear so generalized as to be strangely at odds with our usual notions of individuality and self-consciousness. At his best he was a peculiarly physiological poet – by which I mean that he managed to articulate the anonymous, humble, non-volitional bodily processes that precede all thought, and without which thinking cannot take place. In addition to all the other modes in which he wrote, he was in effect a poet of the autonomic nervous system, the spinal cord, the digestive tract, the circulation of the blood; he was also preoccupied to an exceptional degree with the capacity of people to notice things without being conscious of having done so, and to retain an unrecognized memory of them until some later circumstance should stir it into life.

At one point in The Prelude he writes that his “theme has been / What passed within me”, as if his “me”, his conscious, reflective, composing self, were not the initiator of what he is doing, but merely the site or arena within which certain activities – memories, moods, appetites – may or may not reveal themselves to him. In the same passage he says that this theme is “far hidden from the reach of words”, which implies that in his writing he has to do much more than find an approximate verbal mode of representing his experience.

more from the TLS here.

From The New Republic:

Jack Goldsmith’s book is quite possibly the first sober account of the pressures that a post-9/11 president faces in the attempt to respond under the rule of law to the security threats facing this country. The book is largely a memoir of Goldsmith’s service as an assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and of his terrible predicament as he found himself in the midst of an extraordinary debate among administration officials about how best to respond to the threat of terrorism. While OLC operates in relative obscurity for most Americans, it is in fact a genuinely significant institution of American government: all thorny legal questions within the executive branch are supposed to be submitted to this tiny elite office. OLC is the “decider” of these questions, and its judgments bind the entire executive branch.

In the fulfillment of his duties at OLC, Goldsmith said no to the White House on various matters, including torture and electronic surveillance. As a result, he soon left his Justice Department position and decamped to Harvard Law School. Now he has written this remarkable book — a book that anyone concerned about civil liberties in the war on terror must read. Goldsmith is not a civil libertarian. And this is not a kiss-and-tell book. It is a serious book with a serious lesson: that the war on terror is here to stay and will continue to pose extraordinary challenges to our current legal framework. Those inclined to think that the next administration will instantly shut down mass detention centers such as Guantanamo, or promptly terminate massive electronic surveillance under the Patriot Act, are likely to be sorely disappointed, no matter who sits in the Oval Office.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Fear may be linked to the sense of smell and can be switched off simply by shutting down certain receptors in the brain, Japanese scientists have found. In an experiment with mice, the researchers identified and removed certain receptors on the olfactory bulb of their brains — and the result was a batch of fearless rodents. To prove their point, the scientists showed pictures of a brown mouse within an inch of a cat, sniffing up its ear, kissing it and playing with its predator’s collar.

“They detect the smell of predators … like a cat and urine of a fox or snow leopard, but they don’t display any fear. They even show very strong curiosity but they can’t tell the smell is a sign of danger,” said Hitoshi Sakano at the University of Tokyo’s department of biophysics and biochemistry. “So these mice are very happy with cats. They play with cats. But before taking the picture, we had to feed the cat,” he said.

More here.

Benazir Bhutto in a CNN exclusive:

I have long claimed that the rise of extremism and militancy in Pakistan could not happen without support from elements within the current administration. My return to my country poses a threat to the forces of extremism that have thrived under a dictatorship. They want to stop the restoration of democracy at any price. They have exploited a poor, desperate, and powerless people and allowed extremists the right environment in which to flourish.

The ruling party is an artificial, political party created in the headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence (Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA) during the General Elections of 2002. Its core support comes from the political partners of the military dictator of the ’80s, General Zia al-Haq, who empowered the most radical elements within the Afghan Mujahedeen who went on to morph into al-Qaeda, Taliban and the Pakistani militants of today.

This party has called for a banning of outdoor rallies, demonstrations and caravans. They would thus suspend all activity that demonstrates to the people of Pakistan and to the people of the world which parties enjoy mass support amongst the people.

More here.

A nice feature from the University of Chicago Press website:

The “Gospel Temperance Railroad Map” is an example of an allegorical map. It was published in 1908 by G. E. Bula and looks very much like the typical American railroad map of its day. It presents the traveler with three main lines diverging from Decisionville in the State of Accountability at the left-hand side of the map. The routes of the lower two lines, the Way That Seemeth Right Division and the Great Destruction Way Route, pass at first through towns representing relatively minor vices and self-deceptions of alcohol use, but lead inevitably to more serious “states” of Depravity, Intemperance, and Bondage. A River of Salvation offers hope for some, but those who stubbornly remain on the path of drink and debauchery end, without escape, in the City of Destruction. The upper line from Decisionville, the Great Celestial Route, is not without its trials, represented by such station stops as Bearingcross, Abandonment, and Long Suffering; but the final destination, The Celestial City, is clearly more desirable than its counterpart.

More here.

George Johnson of the The Santa Fe Review and Christine Kenneally, author of the The First Word, discuss language and its relationship to physics among issues over at bloggingheads.tv.

In the Economist:

At the precise moment the universe began, its constituents—which today appear as fundamental forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, and subatomic particles such as electrons and quarks—were unified into a single substance in the extreme heat of the explosion. As the universe expanded, though, it cooled. And as it did so, it went through phase changes, just as steam condenses to liquid water that then forms ice as the temperature falls. At each point at which the phase of the universe changed, one of the forces of nature became distinct, or a type of matter emerged as being different from the others. Only when this process was complete did the familiar pattern that makes up the laws of physics properly emerge.

One theory, devised several years ago, has it that each of these phase transitions is marked by the formation of defects. Such imperfections are analogous to the misalignments between ice crystals that often form when water freezes. These can be seen both in ice cubes and on frost-covered windowpanes in the places where growing crystals have met. Cosmic-defect theory, as it is known, holds that a similar process would have happened as the newborn universe cooled.