by Genese Sodikoff

The rabid opposition of American gun owners to stricter gun regulations in the wake of mass shootings is reminiscent of dog owners' opposition to rabies-control measures amidst rashes of “mad dog” attacks in in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Poodles in the 1920s were especially mad, for some reason).

Every disease has its particular cultural expression. Societies have their unique spins on the causes and treatments of disease and the experience of suffering. And as I read old newspapers about rabies, it struck me how efforts to control the virus in the United States stirred a familiar anti-government, Freedom-loving, dog-loving ethos, along with a deep distrust of policy-makers and their reasons. In the anti-dog-vax, anti-dog-tax days, some doubted that “hydrophobia,” the clinical term for human rabies, even existed.

Until the 1950s, canine rabies blighted the American cultural landscape and people's inner lives. In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus (2012), Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy explain that the rising popularity of pet-keeping in the West made the threat of rabies “an object of disproportionate panic throughout the nineteenth century.” Their gripping book follows the the virus from Ancient Greece to modern medical labs, where scientists are exploiting the rabies peptide as a means to penetrate the blood-brain barrier.

Transported from Europe to America during colonization, and then frequently spilling over from foxes, wolves, raccoons, skunks and bats into domestic animal populations, rabies brought wildness into American towns and cities. Before Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux developed the human rabies vaccine in 1885, the virus destroyed families. Children frequently died of mad dog attacks, as did beloved pets and farm animals.

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by Jalees Rehman

“These terrorists aren't true Muslims” is a phrase that I have often heard being used by American Muslims when talking about terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam. Recently, I encountered another version of this comment. Parents at a suburban Islamic Sunday School were encouraged to use this same approach when talking to their children about the recent spate of terrorist attacks. Arguments for denying the Muslim identity of the perpetrators include the moral incompatibility of the atrocities committed by the terrorists with Islamic law, which does not sanction the extrajudicial killing of civilians or suicide, which is frequent element of the attacks. This is an understandable reaction. The views of the perpetrators and their actions seem so abhorrent that it is impossible to reconcile their perception of Islam with those of the vast majority of American Muslims. However, even though one may sympathize with the desire to distance oneself from the terrorists, declaring terrorists to be non-Muslims or not “true” Muslims is the wrong answer.

The first problem with the arbitrary post-hoc excommunication of terrorists is that it is not really grounded in Islamic law. The process of takfir (excommunication Islam) requires very strong evidence and is difficult to uphold in most Islamic legal traditions if the person in question continues to see himself or herself as a Muslim. Someone may commit a grave sin or terrible crime, but these actions alone do not propel the person outside of the faith.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

In last month's column, we introduced a name for what we suppose is a familiar phenomenon. Spitballing is a tactic of deflection, where a speaker repeatedly interjects vague, but self-contained, and overtly provocative statements into a discussion. The aim of the spitballer is to overwhelm his interlocutors and critics by providing them with so many outrageous claims that they are unable to adequately reply to any of them. Spitballing is rampant in public political discussion because, in the forums were such discussion commonly occurs, significant benefits accrue to those who appear to the onlooking audience as having gotten the last word.

Spitballing is closely allied with a companion tactic that is also rampant in contemporary public political discussion. Swamping is a tactic for controlling public discourse. Like the spitballer, the swamper introduces into a discussion multiple pointed, self-contained, and overtly provocative statements. Yet the swamper's aim is not to overload his interlocutors, but to dominate the political conversations conducted by others. The swamper's intention is to say something so overtly bizarre or inflammatory as to force others to discuss what he said. In doing so, the swamper seeks not to deflect criticism, but rather to direct political discussion away from the ideas, proposals, policies, and platform of his political competition. As a consequence, the swamper stays at the center of the conversation, forcing every other topic to the periphery. One important motive for swamping is that, in making oneself the topic of conversation by being overtly either vague or controversial, one crowds out time for critical exchange with others. One swamps the competition.

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by Yohan J. John

Human decision-making routinely confounds our attempts at understanding. Right now, the western world is in a state of bafflement and anxiety brought on by unprecedented collective decisions. From the British public's vote to leave the European Union to Republican voters' selection of Donald Trump as their presidential candidate, the past month or so has been a vivid illustration of the unpredictability of human choice.

There is a temptation, particularly among elites who see themselves as well-educated, to see Brexit and the rise of Trump as a failure of intelligence. According to this perspective, disgruntled working class voters are stupid: willfully ignoring the “facts” offered to them by the experts. (Michael Gove has surely captured the spirit of the era with the statement: “People in this country have had enough of experts”.) There may be some truth in the Stupidity Hypothesis, but a far more interesting thing to think about is how statements come to be seen as relevant facts in the first place. And perhaps even more fundamentally, how exactly do facts influence our decisions?

What I would like to say about decision-making strikes me as both obvious and easy to miss. The process of arriving at a decision necessarily involves ignoring information. However much information is available beforehand, at the time a decision is made, much of it is effectively disregarded. And this is not just true of democratic decisions, for which the opinions of the losing side have little or no direct effect on subsequent events. Whenever a situation involves multiple facets, the process of deciding on a course of action involves a simplification that must abstract away from the initial complexity. From a mathematical perspective, decision-making is the process of collapsing a high-dimensional system into a one-dimensional system.

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5 White cops fatally shot in Dallas: 7/7/2016
Philando Castile fatally shot in Falcon Heights: 7/6/16
Alston Sterling fatally shot in Baton Rouge: 7/5/16,
David Duke’s back: 2016 … and more.
………………………………………… —US News
.

Jittering on a Rim

with all this shooting going on
it’s hard to tell who’s good
and who’s bad.

it must be one or the other
nuance having no place
in the middle of a race war.

injustice, divide
the lid’s been on for many years
which made many glad,

but now it’s jittering on a rim
steam shooting out the sides
clanging like bell
threatening to blow
a locked door
.

by Jim Culleny
7/8/16

.

by Katalin Balog

This is the first of a series of three essays on understanding the mind.

As I am writing this, I am behind schedule for my deadline. In the past I thought procrastination was a moral issue; perhaps not a failing, but a moral issue: a choice. Growing up in a Communist country, I have viewed career and achievement – like many of my peers in disaffected opposition circles – with a certain amount of suspicion. I have often told myself ever since my move to the United States that I don't want to put professional advancement ahead of life: family, daydreaming, various interests mundane and arcane take precedence over productivity.

But a recent diagnosis of ADD has cast these self-stories in a different light. I now have another explanation, one that doesn't have to do with the inner recesses of the self, but chemicals in my brain. I have been prescribed medication that, on the occasions I take it, is enough to stop my mind from wandering, from making extraneous connections, perfectly useful in a general sense, but not conducive to the focused attention needed to actually complete projects. My condition turns out to be a chemical deficiency of sorts, my behavior the result of my brain working in slightly abnormal ways.

Are these two stories complementary? Or does the chemical explanation obviate, or even disqualify my earlier, non-scientific understanding? The problem of “double take”; that we have two, seemingly incongruent modes of understanding the human being, once as embodied, there for the whole world to observe, once as possessed of a mind aware of itself, is not exactly new, and in some sense has been with us, I suspect, since the beginning. We are bodies and minds – and the intimate connection between them is one of the basic facts of life. We can investigate how our behavior is affected by the stuff we ingest, the health of our body, and the state of our brain, the same way as we would study any other human. But we are also capable of self-awareness and insight into our own soul that defies third person observation. And more than just acquiring knowledge, we have a great ability to be transformed by our own experience and insight.

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by Elise Hempel

As a traveling companion, my dog, Groucho, is both good and bad. He's quiet. He mostly just sleeps, sprawled on the torn wool blanket on my Pontiac Vibe's back seat, occasionally sitting up and looking around at the passing cornfields, signs and trucks. He gobbles down his whole McDonald's sausage biscuit when we start out, and he puts up with my steady baby-talked commentary (Gritch – Look at the sweet cows! Oh, Gritch, here comes that bridge!). Best of all, he never throws up.

But he's tentative and skittish. And stubborn. Last month, on another trip to my sister's house in Minnesota, he repeated his traditional refusal to get out of the car at the first rest area. I put on his collar, hooked his leash, and tugged and tugged. But nothing. So I made a quick trip to the bathroom, and we drove on. The second rest area was more successful. This time, as I tugged, he slid himself out, cautiously sniffed the grass, and finally let me take him on a five-minute walk.

After that, I had no need to stop again: I didn't need gas, caffeine or bathroom, and I wasn't hungry. But I figured the now-confident Groucho could use an extra stretch, and suddenly there was the sign for another rest area, with the intriguing added words “Scenic Overlook.” This time, as I'd hoped, Groucho got right out, happily exploring the parking lot and the weedy pet-walking area behind it. So where was this so-called scenic overlook? We kept walking, getting further from the car, arriving at the very back of the rest area, at an inconspicuous educational sign describing that part of Wisconsin's natural resources. And next to it was an even more inconspicuous entranceway. Groucho and I entered….

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by Saurabh Jha

Stephen J. Gould

When diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, a rare cancer with a blighted future, evolutionary biologist and writer, Stephen Jay Gould, turned his attention to the statistics; specifically, the central tendency of survival with the tumor. The central tendency – mean (average), median and mode – project like skyscrapers in a populated city and are the summary statements of a statistical distribution.

The “average” is both meaningful and meaningless – you could say that the average utility of average is zero. Consider a gamble – fair coin toss where you get $50 if it lands heads and lose $50 if it lands tails. The average (net) gains of this coin toss, if the coin is thrown hundreds of time, is zero. But no one gets nothing – you either get $50 or lose $50. The average is twice wrong – it over estimates for some and under estimates for others. Yet the average of this gamble has important information. It helps you decide if you could profit from making people play this gamble – you wouldn’t profit unless you charged a small fee to play the gamble.

The median is the mid-point of a distribution. Gould’s cancer had a median survival of eight months. This means that half (unlucky half) lived fewer than eight months and half (lucky half) lived more than eight months with this tumor. The mean is affected by outliers but the median is not – billionaires of Mumbai raise the average, not median, income of the city. That is skewness of a distribution affects the mean, not the median. Put another way, the median (Mumbai’s slums) conceals the skewness (Bollywood).

Gould, describing in his classic essay “The median is not the message,” ignored the median but looked at the skewness, which was right-sided – some who lucked out with survival lucked out big. Gould was initially despondent when he saw that the median survival of his cancer was only eight months. Gould was naturally disposed to optimism. He was dealt a rough hand but was not going down without a fight. His optimism, and fight, increased as he unraveled the distribution – first with the hope that he could be in the lucky half of the distribution, then with the hope that he could be one of the outliers in that skewed distribution, then with the hope that the treatment that he was being given, an experimental cocktail, could make him an outlier.

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by Max Sirak

“I freed thousands of slaves; I could have freed more if they knew they were slaves.” (Harriet Tubman.) (Although there's no historical evidence she ever said it. But it's a good line. And she was a bad bitch.)

Freedom has been on my mind a lot lately. This makes sense. I'm an American. It's July. And, a week ago today, I did my patriotic duty – gorging myself on grilled flesh, drinking cheap beer, and watching fake bombs burst in the air.

‘Merica!

4th of July half-kidding aside, the real reason I've been thinking about freedom is because a couple weeks prior, I was thinking a lot about it's opposite. See – I co-host a podcast appropriately titled, Ignorant and Uninformed. Last week we were discussing the topic, “What gives you the right?” Over the course of the EpiDose (that's what we call them. It's not a typo. I mean, sure, it was originally. But still.) the topic of slavery came up.

Now, the whole premise of the podcast is myself and two friends randomly drawing listener submitted topics and talking about them for thirty minutes. We don't edit. We don't use the Internet. We just sit down, pull a piece of paper out of a bowl, discuss, and see where it goes.

About a year ago or so ago, I started toying around with the idea of producing additional content inspired by our weekly release. I came up with two ideas. The first was fact checking all the ridiculous nonsense we say and calling us out. The second, in attempts to make us all a little less ignorant and uninformed, was to shine light on an idea, concept, event, etc. that came up during the show.

All of this is to say, while doing research for that EpiDoses' auxiliary releases, I found a website and it made me sad. Then I got real mad.

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by Maniza Naqvi

‘We will be taking evidence from you today in your roles as Governorate Coordinator for Kirkuk, and then Governance Advisor to CPA North from 2003-4, and your subsequent role as an advisor to the US military, both General Odierno and General Petraeus, between 2007 and 10.' So said, Sir John Chilcot, Head of the Iraq Inquiry, to Emma Sky at the start of her testimony to the Iraq Inquiry Committee on January 14, 2011.

In November 2009, a couple of years before this testimony was taken, an article was published about Emma Sky, it read:Rarely does the hulking commander of American forces in Iraq meet with Iraqis or go to a news conference without a slight, dark-haired woman standing just a little to one side — as if to give him space, but almost always in his line of sight and within earshot' (here and here).

Emma Sky—the woman who assisted in the unravelling of Iraq and the region, who became the right hand of General Odierno in Iraq—and the architect of the ‘Sunni Awakening'—is perhaps, the Mother of Daesh, the word for terror in Iraq and Syria and the entire region or as the West calls it, ISIS. To understand how such a catastrophe, could have been unleashed we must shed a light on the characters who played a critical role in its making. What happened when and who was where when it happened—and who and what event caused the next one.

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by Chris Bacas

I asked my friend about April weather in Siberia.

“You will need jacket” he said evenly and without article.

Part of a festival celebrating Victory in the “Great Patriotic War” and the incredible efforts at the Far East factories, our gig was booked for springtime. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the trip was rescheduled for late November. To prepare, I read Solzhenitsyn's “Gulag Archipelago”; its' sweep encompassing a full history of the Soviet Police state and camps, detailed etymologies of prison slang, the geography and anthropology of a vast territory and hundreds of individual tales so grim and heroic each merited a film. After more than a thousand soul-burning pages, I could recite countless camp torments in the author's majestic, ironic voice, but was unable to order a dumpling and a soda in his mother tongue, nor read nyet and da in Cyrillic. I had a full beard and hair I could tie in a two-foot ponytail. Friends pointed out my resemblance to Rasputin. Other than a valid passport and some skills as a musician, my qualifications for this trip were slight.

The itinerary filled out with dates in St Peterburg, Moscow, and a few more in the East. We left after Thanksgiving. My colleague, a Russian-born musician who long anchored the most accomplished and well-known jazz band in the USSR, arranged the tour. He'd left his homeland and wife, for work, during the tumultuous months of perestroika; an American musician as his visa sponsor and host. The two men proved incompatible and I offered our second-floor as an alternative. Sharing the Siberian invitation came more of reciprocity and true friendship than musical or entrepreneurial designs. There were plenty of players more well-known or skilled to make the trip. I was lucky.

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by Holly A. Case

Attila Kiss

Attila Kiss speaks beautiful English. He has been a simultaneous interpreter—from Hungarian to English and English to Hungarian—for various intellectual and spiritual luminaries, among them the Dalai Lama, and for the European Union. When he speaks of interpreting, it is with uncanny precision, betraying an awareness that even speech is an act of simultaneous translation from thought to word.

Ten years ago, Kiss (pronounced “Kish”) was on an interpreting assignment for the EU in Brussels. One evening after work, he attended the screening of a new film on the 1956 revolution in Hungary. Heading back to his hotel he crossed through a park. Someone approached him, said “Good evening,” and then stabbed him with a knife. A struggle ensued. The man fled. Kiss spent a week in intensive care and underwent periodic operations for years thereafter. His attacker has never been identified or apprehended.

Interpretations of the episode began even prior to Kiss's release from the hospital. Initially the Belgian police thought he had gone to the park for a homosexual hook-up that went sour; they found no evidence to back up this hypothesis. Another of their theories involved a disgruntled student, upset about a grade. Their attention focused on one man, who was indeed a former student, but had not received a low grade from Kiss, and in fact counted as a family friend. And thus another narrative bubble burst over the case. One explanation remained. In the police report, Kiss had indicated that he believed his assailant to have been “an Arab.” The police ultimately concluded that he had been attacked by one of a group of young Moroccan fundamentalists who had been targeting EU officials. Given that Kiss was wearing a suit, carrying a laptop case, and walking in the vicinity of the EU Parliament, he may have been mistaken for a Union official.

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by Libby Bishop

Happy Fourth of July. This is the United States holiday that celebrates the American colonies throwing off the shackles of undemocratic rule by a controlling European power and purports to honour freedom. I am an American, living in the now-less-United Kingdom, where, on the 23^rd of June, 37% of the electorate voted to free itself from the European Union, or so it believes. It is impossible to say that the result was about a single issue, be it immigration, xenophobia, European Union bureaucracy, or anti-elitism. But there is no doubt that the Leave campaign promised freedom. The campaign fanned fears that Britain was being controlled by Brussels, and voting Leave would free Great Britain to be Great again. Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the Leave movement, even called the 23^rd of June Britain's Independence Day. In the referendum, the issues were framed in simplistic and binary terms: in or out, controlled or free.

This idea of sovereign freedom is a potent elixir. Its synonyms connote positive associations such as liberty and emancipation, whereas most words that describe limitations on freedom are negative: restriction, dependence, weakness, subjection, suppression, slavery, and as in the referendum, controlled. I have come to question this bipolar perspective of free versus controlled. Indeed, rather than being opposites, I claim that freedom and control co-exist, indeed, that authentic freedom can exist only in finely honed tension with control.

In my experience, freedom with control occurs across widely diverse disciplines and practices: horseback riding, music and political economy. I have ridden horses for over fifty years, starting as a horse-crazy girl, riding in jumping competitions in my teens, and as an adult, practicing dressage. Dressage, the French word for “training”, is a method of training a horse in obedience and precision of movement. It is about evoking a particular way of moving—forward, energetic, but always balanced, calm, and responsive. Yet as is so often the case, translation cannot convey the full meaning of the original word. Training implies basic fitness and obedience to commands, but dressage is concerned with training to higher levels of ability, akin to training a dog to be a guide for a blind person. Henry Wynmalen says, “…dressage is the art of improving one's horse beyond the stage of plain usefulness” (p. 4).*

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No Address

—in memory of B.D.

my oldest friend has left us

he now has no address or
his address is now not numbered
there’s no street to be remembered
no place that I can place him and
now ephemeral I miss him

he was a bollard I could tie to
I could call him when I’d want to
I could talk with him of childhood and
the changes that we went through
(how that world seemed less in torment)
and though we knew our days were numbered
we could go there in a phone call but
palpable as past was when we
laughed about our dreaming we
could riff on time still streaming
in the moments we were living, we
could pick up where we’d left off
the last time we were speaking as if
years had lost their meaning,
as if nothing really mattered but the
talk that we were having, which we
owed to long affection and

as we swapped our thoughts in breaths
there was no reason to be grieving
.

by Jim Culleny
6/23/16
.

by Richard King

BEARDED MAN: Could you be quiet please? What was that?

WISEGUY: I dunno; I was too busy talking to Bignose.

SPECTATOR: I think it was “Blessed are the cheesemakers”.

BEARDED MAN'S WIFE: What's so great about the cheesemakers?

BEARDED MAN: Well obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

— Monty Python's Life of Brian, 1979

The scene takes place at the edge of a crowd, which has gathered to hear – or to try to hear – Christ deliver the Sermon on the Mount. The punchline is delivered with a knowing air, as if nothing could be more natural than that Jesus would decide to set out his creed with a certain amount of poetic obfuscation. “Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally …” And yet, as we know, much ink will be spilled over precisely how literally to take Christ's words, and the words of many a prophet besides. Much ink, much blood, and an ocean of tears …

*

As I write this, Istanbul's Ataturk Airport is a scene of devastation and chaos. On Tuesday evening, local time, three attackers armed with guns and explosives laid siege to Europe's third busiest airport in what appears to be a well organised operation, one calculated to maximise casualties. The victims include people from Iraq, China, Tunisia, Jordan, Iran and Ukraine. Most of them, of course, were Turkish citizens. At this moment – around 1 am GMT on 29 June 2016 – the death toll stands at 42, though some outlets put it at 41. Hundreds are injured. Thousands are grieving. The Turkish people are in shock, again.

In the coming hours certain statements will be made. Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan will come on television to say that this was a crime against humanity and an attack on Turkey's national soul, or sentiments to that effect. He will urge unity and resolve in the face of intimidation. Turkey must not give in to terror. He may well say that the dead are martyrs. Such platitudes are to be expected, and not all of them are to be despised.

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by Emrys Westacott

Whether we like or not, whether we admit or not, those of us who live in the modernized world are heirs of the Enlightenment. We know from experience and from scientific studies that there are numerous ways in which human beings are often quite irrational. Nevertheless, rational, informed deliberation in which evidence and arguments are critically and carefully evaluated remains an ideal that most of us subscribe to. It is how we think (and say we think) most decisions should be made, both in our personal lives and when we act politically as citizens, whether we are hiring an electrician or voting in an election.

So when we see people acting, as we see it, out of ignorance, or unwittingly against their rational self-interest, or swayed by emotions we don’t respect, such as racial hatred, xenophobia, or machismo, we are naturally critical. We are also, if not shocked! shocked! often bewildered. How can people not see what is so obvious to us?

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