big tests in the netherlands

In the end, Buruma spreads those arguments out in front of us rather than tying them up in a bundle; he has no concrete suggestions to make and no clear sense of where the Netherlands is headed. But of course, those who think they do know, know wrong; in this case, at least, Buruma’s sense of the lay of the land is itself invaluable: “The murder of Theo van Gogh was committed by one Dutch convert to a revolutionary war,” he concludes, in a passage that should recommend his book to anyone interested in European history as well as Europe’s future. “Such revolutionaries in Europe are still few in number. But the murder, like the bomb attacks in Madrid and London, the fatwah against Salman Rushdie, and the worldwide Muslim protests against cartoons of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper, exposed dangerous fractures that run through all European nations. Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theaters, and places of entertainment. . . . How Europeans, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, cope with this is the question that will decide our future. And what better place to watch the drama unfold than the Netherlands, where freedom came from a revolt against Catholic Spain, where ideals of tolerance and diversity became a badge of national honor, and where political Islam struck its first blow against a man whose deepest conviction was that freedom of speech included the freedom to insult.”

more from Bookforum here.



ART MUSEUMS: WHAT’S THE POINT?

Bilbao_town1

The paradox of a contemporary museum becomes most overt when an institution that deals in established status enters a realm where doubt is both inevitable and essential. It isn’t clear that the museum is the best place for new objects to be tested. With so much invested-financially, culturally, and even politically-in these institutions, their tendency is to cover up the vital uncertainty of the moment (everything from the quality of the work to its meaning and eventual role in history) with a wealth of supporting material.

At the Dana Schutz exhibit at the Rose in Waltham, a wall paragraph informed visitors that her ouvre tells “the story of the history of painting in the twentieth century (German Expressionism, Matisse and the Fauves, Gauguin and the Symbolists, and Philip Guston, among others)…[in] a unique pictorial language that, just like her own narratives, has no beginning or end.”

The oblique grandeur of this claim-typical of curatorial attempts to prematurely canonize artists-inspires nothing so much as a nostalgia for commercial galleries, where at least they are only trying to sell you the thing.

More from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Tragedy and War in the Age of Digital Transmission

In the English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, Pascal Lardellier on 9/11, the internet, and the shape of information.

MEDIA coverage of the events of 11 September 2001 had to deal with an unexpected newcomer: the internet. But is the net a new medium or is it a counter-medium? We have to ask that question because the internet has encouraged circulation of a different type of information, while the conventional media relayed the standard version of the events as gospel, repeatedly showing nightmare images accompanied by a familiar institutional commentary, given by cohorts of pontificating experts.

Now, information highways are a spaghetti junction of alternative routes easily accessible to anyone who wants to get away from the main routes of the politically correct and ethnocentric, and that egress is often a good thing. Yet the digital counter-information saturating the net seems to be produced by some new version of the old socialist International organisations: internet users who want to spread the word about their findings or feelings, perhaps about 9/11. Their output spreads wide and loud, as the internet’s characteristic viral circulation has amplified the old word of mouth into unprecedented resonance. Electronic mail circulates files continuously, and can reach hundreds of contacts with a single mouse click.

The meeting between relatively new technology and the historic disaster of 9/11 coincided with the emergence of blogs, those sites where people are at electronic liberty to air own views. While in internet chat rooms there are no holds barred over challenging partisan official versions, adducing technical, economic or political arguments in support.

The net is a powerful tool that allows us to escape our hang-ups. Everyone who surfs can take part in the debate (often anonymously, which is also significant). They get involved in information in the making. Some might be over-zealous in their search for the truth. It is easy to take shortcuts when interpreting numerical data of no fixed abode or to consider the net an open outlet: catharsis is inherent in the venting of resentment.

Women in Science, the National Academies Weighs In

In ScienceNOW:

U.S. universities foster “a culture that fundamentally discriminates against women,” says a report on the status of women in academic science and engineering issued today by the National Academies. Their underrepresentation is “deeply troubling and embarrassing,” according to the report, which suggests that institutions should create a body to collect data, set standards, and ultimately monitor compliance to increase the number of women in technical fields.

“Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” cites research demonstrating that women are paid less, promoted more slowly, bypassed for honors, and subjected to implicit gender bias from both their male and female colleagues. The 18-member panel–chaired by University of Miami president Donna Shalala and made up primarily of female university presidents, provosts, and senior professors–also finds no scientific basis to the argument that inherent differences between the genders are at the root of the problem.

The fundamental issue, the panel notes, is not attracting women into science but retaining them once they are trained. For example, the report says the culture still favors academics with a stay-at-home spouse–typically a wife. Fewer than half the spouses of male faculty members in the sciences are employed fulltime, whereas 90% of the husbands of women faculty work outside the home.

Poor beggars!—they’ll never see ’ome!

Seema Sirohi looks at the Indian soldiers who died on the fields of Europe during the Great War, in Outlook India.

More Indians than Belgians died defending the then neutral country. The names weigh down on people who gather daily in great numbers at this most visited WW-I monument.

As I read the names—only 54,896 are recorded—names like Baijnath Singh, Naik Ranbir Singh and Jemadar.

Sidh Nath begin to take form. In November 2002, the Indian government installed a small memorial in the garden hugging the memorial for “those from the Indian Army who fought gallantly in Flanders”. More than 60 per cent of the Indian deaths in WW-I were in the vicious fields around Ypres, a key town which stood in the way of Germany’s planned sweep across Belgium and into France. The Germans attacked the town from three sides, resulting in what are today known as the first and second battles of Ypres. The Indian Expeditionary Force was crucial in stemming the German tide from the start. Its strength in Europe rose to over 1,40,000 during the war, with India providing the most number of troops from any single country after the British. Although Indian soldiers died for the British across the world—in Egypt, Turkey, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Sudan, East Africa and West Europe—in Ypres they died even more.

Satire in America

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has a thoughtful piece by Wyatt Mason on satire in America.

The business of scoring this frustratingly debased game of contemporary conversation has been the main focus of “The Daily Show.” Stewart et al. have built careers as liberal foils to conservative talk radio. Where the Limbaughosphere thrives on a muscular, hectoring rhetoric, the mode of “The Daily Show” has been a lampooning of such bullying. Although “The Daily Show” can revel in the same kind of posturing, even if the stance is far more liberal, the best of its work is restrained in the Horatian manner. The show’s “artful ridicule” is at its most scrupulous when attentive to, critical of and vocal about abuses of language. When James Frey, author of the fraudulent memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” was being torn apart by an array of talking heads indignant over his distortions, Stewart offered a deadpan summation that spoke to the perfervid journalistic outrage. Pundits were upset with Frey, Stewart explained, “because he misled us. . .into a book we had no business getting into.” Armed with scrupulous syntax alone, Stewart ironically evoked two infamies that rhymed with Frey’s: the claim that the Bush administration had misled us into war and the observation that the media, so severe in its judgments of Frey’s lie-world, had remained less dogged before the administration’s possible untruths.

This is artful indeed, but a high point both for “The Daily Show” and contemporary satire more generally came shortly after The New Yorker published Seymour Hersh’s 2004 exposé, “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” …The irony — uncomplicatedly galling — seemed obvious enough, but its precise grade was measured nowhere more finely than in an exchange between Stewart and Rob Corddry, a player who has since departed. As Corddry explained to Stewart, his voice that of a schoolteacher instructing an uncommonly simple-minded child:

Jon, there’s no question what took place in that prison was horrible, but the Arab world has to realize that the U.S. shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a. . .well, that we shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter; our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember, Jon, just because torturing prisoners is something we did doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.

Hitchens on I.F. Stone

In Vanity Fair, Hitchens reviews Myra MacPherson’s biography of the great I.F. Stone, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone and the companion collection The Best of I. F. Stone.

Here is the kind of convention coverage you do not read anymore, will not read again, and have to be quite old even to remember. An unobtrusive freelancer, equipped only with hearing aid, notebook, and Coke-bottle glasses, was squinting and cupping his hand at the G.O.P.’s Nixonian cheerfest in Miami Beach in 1968:

“It was hard to listen to Goldwater and realize that a man could be half Jewish and yet sometimes appear to be twice as dense as the normal gentile. As for Agnew, even at a convention where every speech seemed to outdo the other in wholesome clichés and delicious anticlimaxes, his speech putting Nixon into nomination topped all the rest. If the race that produced Isaiah is down to Goldwater and the race that produced Pericles is down to Agnew, the time has come to give the country back to the WASPs.”

This could have been H. L. Mencken or Murray Kempton on his best day, but it was written by the great Isador Feinstein, always called “Izzy” but in 1937 amending his byline to I. F. Stone. This unusual American humanist didn’t really believe in “race” at all, could easily have quoted at length from both Isaiah and Pericles, sometimes in the original, and, as you readily see, could in a wry way make you laugh.

In the review, Hitchens makes a remarkable claim:

MacPherson makes the slightly glib assumption—as do the editors of the excellent companion volume, The Best of I. F. Stone—that, if he were around today, Izzy would be as staunchly anti-war and anti-Bush as she is. Having known him a bit, I am not so absolutely sure. That he would have found the president excruciating is a certainty. But he had a real horror of sadistic dictators, and would not have confused Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein with the Vietcong…Finally, I think he would have waited for some more documents to surface, and helped unearth them himself, before making any conclusive judgments about weapons programs or terror connections in Iraq.

The Brief Success of the World’s First Penis Transplant

In the Guardian:

Chinese surgeons have performed the world’s first penis transplant on a man whose organ was damaged beyond repair in an accident this year. The incident left the man with a 1cm-long stump with which he was unable to urinate or have sexual intercourse. “His quality of life was affected severely,” said Dr Weilie Hu, a surgeon at Guangzhou General Hospital….

Although the operation was a surgical success, surgeons said they had to remove the penis two weeks later. “Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off,” Dr Hu said. An examination of the organ showed no signs of it being rejected by the body.

Jean-Michel Dubernard, the French surgeon who performed the world’s first face transplant on a woman who had been attacked by a dog this year, said psychological factors were a serious issue for many patients receiving certain “allografts”, or organs from donors. “Psychological consequences of hand and face allografts show that it is not so easy to use and see permanently a dead person’s hands, nor is it easy to look in a mirror to see a dead person’s face,” he wrote in the journal. “Clearly, in the Chinese case the failure at a very early stage was first psychological. It involved the recipient’s wife and raised many questions.”

Monday, September 18, 2006

Lives of the Cannibals: In Search Of

I am most often described by those who know me as venerable, though I am not particularly old. Sagacious, Solomonic and wise are other frequently used descriptors. Once, a lady who lived above me in a beleaguered section of Oakland, California, and whose business it was to know these things, said that I was a judge of some kind in a previous life. This did not surprise me. I have felt myself, from a very young age, standing just above and a bit to the side, perceiving you in your true form, despite your efforts to conceal the raw nature of your soul. I am regularly called upon to settle disputes of all kinds, ranging from the picayune to the momentous, by those who know me and understand the depth of my comprehension, and by anonymous passers-by as well, who are overcome with sudden knowledge of the rarefied workings of my mind. I would make a fine Senator, Supreme, or delegate to the UN, but I would find the duties gravely limiting–to court the benighted electorate, to interpret a relic, to navigate the shoals of global bureaucracy. None of these interests me. Better to remain aloof, I say, a generalist. Better to be a wizard for the benefit of Everyman.

I am sexually adored by all who lay eyes on me, and frequently by those who do not. The blind make clumsy passes, tossing away their canes and leashes so that their hands may be free to caress. The developmentally disabled and emotionally disturbed suffer spasmodic fits of desire when in my presence. Autistics are especially enamored of my voice, to which they pay unrelenting attention. Gay men queue at my front door, hoping to interest me in their society, and straight men forsake their wives and children in hope of brief union. Lesbians reconfigure their sexual identities when I pass them on the street, rending their clothes and falling to their knees. In fact, women of all ages and descriptions are powerless to withstand my appeal. I have been assaulted by crones, who employ their walkers to cage me, and by prepubescent schoolgirls, whose ceaseless screams of delight fill the streets after 3 pm.

Animals travel great distances to walk at my side. Dogs lunge and tear at those who would approach without permission. Cats submit their kill for approval, exposing their bellies as evidence of their submission. Birds nest below my window to raise their young in close proximity to my benevolence. Wolves cross mountain ranges to stand sentinel at my door, baying in harmonic fifths to mark my comings and goings. Insects, too, pay me their fealty: Ants construct their colonies at the foot of my stoop, and bees renounce the biological imperative of the hive to fly in formation in my wake.

There is a physical genius about me that captivates professional athletes, whose accomplishments become laughable when considered beside the potentials of my own muscle and sinew. I am known for my grace as well as my ferocity, for the force collected in the clutch of my fist, and for the kinetic beauty of my leaping form. Every major professional sport has petitioned me–not to participate, for that would obliterate parity, but for my talismanic presence, as an object of aspiration, an instance of superiority. Olympic teams from no fewer than 16 countries have requested my peak-performance expertise. Lance Armstrong credits me with every one of his Tour de France triumphs.

I have been offered fellowships at scores of major universities in the United States and Western Europe. Deans and Provosts clamber for my advice on organizational psychology, as applied in academic settings. Professors of English beg me to elucidate the subtleties of Beckett and Gaddis; Professors of Astrophysics humbly request my thoughts on the perturbations of orbiting bodies in distant solar systems. Hawking threatened to throw himself from his chair in a fit of pique at the shining light of my intellect.

I am a master thespian, flawlessly embodying the dramatic roles I undertake. Directors, shame-faced and desperate, request critiques of their conceptual frameworks, and feverishly take notes when I humor them with my insight. Actors weep for the sheer transformative power of pathos in my performances. Aesthetes are driven to suicide. Uta Hagen herself once dissolved into tears in the face of my one-man interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I am regularly accosted by mothers who would have their babies touched with grace from my lips. The maimed and deformed claw at one another in their seething masses, to enjoy the restorative powers of my healing hands. Holy men prostrate themselves on my doorstep, to resurrect their flagging faith.

I am 37 years-old, 5’9, with brown, wavy hair, almond-shaped eyes and an aquiline nose. My complexion is clear. My weight fluctuates between 165 and 170 pounds. I work out four times a week at Crunch, on the stationary bicycle, with free weights, and on the elliptical machine. My pectoral muscles are massive and mobile. My abdomen is corrugated.

DWM

ISO

SWF, 19 – 25 years-old, brunette or blonde, who enjoys films, walks in the park, chinese food, and margaritas. Education unimportant. Appearance primary. The surgically enhanced are encouraged to apply. Respond to box #3678. Your pic gets mine.

Thanx!

–Leonard.

[a bloody tip of the scalp to Joe Frank]

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Geneticist Bruce Lahn discusses ongoing evolution of humans

C. E. Atkins in Seed Magazine:

Screenhunter_2_12Geneticist Bruce Lahn first made a name for himself when he paired with David Page, director of MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, to craft a novel theory on the origins of the Y chromosome. But Lahn is perhaps best known for his paper on the evolution of the human brain, and the implications for intelligence and race that have become attached to it.

Lahn’s paper on the recent evolution of the human brain asserts that new versions of two genes are currently spreading through the human population, and that these genes are more prevalent in some geographic regions than others. He has speculated that these genes may be linked to brain size and intelligence and has wondered if the mutations—one of which took place roughly 40,000 years ago, the other, 5,800 years ago—correlate with the development of art, written language, and the founding of cities. And he stepped on more than a few feet when he noted that, geographically speaking, the changes had occurred pretty much everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa.

More here.

My Mother and the Dahlia

James Elroy in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

Ellroy_hillikerMotion pictures pervade the culture far more broadly and immediately than books. It’s a quick-march progression of advance publicity and saturation screen-time. My signature novel will now be a film in wide release. The film will possibly expedite book sales in career-unprecedented numbers. Because of the film, more people may read The Black Dahlia than have read all my other books to date. This affords me a narrative opportunity of stern moment. I will gratefully capitalize on it here. A personal story attends both novel and film. It inextricably links me to two women savaged eleven years apart. These women comprise the central myth of my life. I want to honor them both. I want this piece to redress imbalances in my previous writings about them. I want to close out their myth with an elegy. I want to grant them the peace of denied disclosure and never say another public word about them.

My mother’s name was Geneva Hilliker. She dropped the “Ellroy” when she renounced my father. I laud her repudiation and commend her desire to live without a male-surname appendage. She haunts me in deep and unfathomable ways. I often travel her life at a brisk or painstakingly slow mental speed. I start in rural Wisconsin and end on an access road in L.A. The in-between stops are often filled with conjecture. I lived with her for ten years. The passage of time marks my childhood memories suspect. I later granted her a rich dramatic status and further distorted my memory. I did not know her in life. I am determined to know her in death. Summaries of her forty-three years often provide insight. Brevity enhances my process of refraction.

More here.

New novels by John le Carré and Ward Just

John Updike in The New Yorker:

Hugger-mugger takes a lot of explaining, a lot of diagramming. An additional trouble with it, which keeps the suspense thriller, however skillful and polished, a subgenre, is that the novelist, manipulating his human counters on the board, must keep them somewhat blank, with selective disclosure of their inner lives, lest the killer or mole or whatever be prematurely unmasked. Even the most intimate human matters are turned into diagrams. Salvo’s love, Hannah (not to be confused with his wife, Penelope), is thus addressed by an Americanized friend, Baptiste:

“Let’s do facts. Here are the facts. Your friend here fucks you, right? Your friend’s friend knows he fucks you, so he comes to your friend. And he tells your friend a story, which your friend repeats to you because he’s fucking you. You are rightly incensed by this story, so you bring your friend who is fucking you to me, so that he can tell it all over again, which is what your friend’s friend reckoned would happen all along. We call that disinformation.”

Between information and disinformation, characters don’t have much breathing room.

More here.

Booker shortlist signals ‘turning of literary tide’

Louise Jury in The Independent:

Booker_2Nearly all the favourites to win this year’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize have fallen at the penultimate fence after the judges chose one of the youngest and most eclectic shortlists in years.

In a move that has saved bookmakers a fortune, writers including two-time Booker winner Peter Carey, the highly-acclaimed Andrew O’Hagan and David Mitchell, who was the hottest favourite in the entire history of the prize the last time he was in the running, were all excluded from the final list of six.

Sarah Waters with The Night Watch remains the biggest name in contention and was immediately installed as favourite to take the prestigious prize at the ceremony on 10 October. She has been shortlisted before, for Fingersmith in 2002.

More here.

Lightning, the Mind, and a World Before Scientists

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

LightningBefore 1833 there were no scientists.

It was in that year that William Whewell, a British philosopher, geologist, and all-around bright bulb, coined the word scientist. His mentor, the poet Samuel Coleridge, thought the English language needed a term for someone who studied the natural world but who did not inhabit the lofty heights of philosophy (like Coleridge).

There are plenty of people who lived before 1833 that most of us would call scientists–Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, Edmund Halley, Carol Linnaeus to name just a few. But the word would have been meaningless to them. The closest term they might use was “natural philosopher.” Their work and ideas were still deeply rooted in medieval ways of thinking about the world, and about the work they did.

Science did not emerge suddenly in a sudden onslaught of Modern Reason crushing Old Ignorance. Its rise was much slower and much more interesting. One of the most important parts of science as we know it is a way for people to share their observations and experiments. Today peer-reviewed journals are at the core of the scientific process. But until the seventeenth century, nothing like them existed. Natural philosophers generally were more interested in what the ancient Greeks and Romans had to say about medicine, physics, and biology, than what they might observe for themselves. In 1665, a group of natural philosophers in England got together and decided to publish what is arguably the first scientific journal: the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

It’s still going strong today, putting out a lot of important papers. And for the next couple months, the Royal Society is making the entire archive–all the way back to 1665–available for free.

In a press release, the Royal Society pointed to some particularly neat papers, such as Ben Franklin’s 1752 description of flying a kite in a thunderstorm. But I immediately looked up a much older paper about lightning from 1666, entitled “A relation of an accident by thunder and lightning, at Oxford.”

More here.

How I Lost My Leg in Tehran

Barbara Rose in the Wall Street Journal:

091406legToday, some of the most original contemporary Iranian artists, such as Shirín Neshat, whose work is now banned in Iran, are living and working in exile in the U.S. And an exhibition of contemporary Iranian photography, organized by the Tehran museum, is touring U.S. museums without the blessings of either government. In this ironic and unwitting cultural exchange, Iran owns historic U.S. paintings that American museums cannot afford and the works of gifted Iranian artists are celebrated by American museums as the cutting edge of the avant-garde. No one knows what will happen to the masterpieces of modern Western art in Tehran. They are said to be worth billions of dollars now and are too expensive to be destroyed. Will they be sold or traded?

More here.

A Peace at the Price of Justice?

In openDemocracy, Tristan McConnell considers the price of amensty and impunity for the crimes of the Lord’s Resistance Army for peace in Uganda.

A conflict marked by horrendous atrocity – forced abduction, rape, mutilation and massacre – could be dying in the embers of the Opit fire and dozens like it across northern Uganda. For two months, the hot and dusty south Sudanese capital of Juba has hosted peace talks between the LRA and Yoweri Museveni’s Ugandan government. In two decades of war, this is the first time a significant third-party has been heavily involved in attempting to bring peace. South Sudan’s vice-president Riek Machar, fresh from the peace agreement that ended Sudan’s equally lengthy north-south civil war in July 2005, has been instrumental in pushing both sides to the negotiating table…

In December 2003, Museveni invited the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to launch an investigation into the LRA’s war crimes; the ICC announced the opening of its investigation in July 2004. In July 2005 the court arraigned Kony and his top four commanders (Vincent Otti, Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen), and now seeks their arrest and transfer. But this legal process has collided with the regional political one that seeks an end to the war, one that is now underpinned too by a local justice process of which the Opit meeting may be a foretaste.

For different reasons, both combatants in Uganda’s war are unenthusiastic about the ICC. Yoweri Museveni announced in July that if the LRA rebels lay down their arms he will protect them from prosecution; Joseph Kony has stated that we will not leave the bush until the indictments are withdrawn. These announcements have had the effect of making the ICC charges increasingly appear to be a barrier to peace.

On the Pope’s Comments on Holy War

Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham college Oxford, in Ekklesia on Pope Benedict’s comments on holy war.

Any comments by a Christian leader that touch upon this wound are bound to be interpreted from every possible angle. The Pope must have known this. If millions of Muslims were offended by the scribblings of a few unknown Danish cartoonists, it’s pretty obvious the enormous potential for harm that might flow from a few ill-timed comments by the vicar of Rome.

Furthermore, the Pope has form on all of this. Just a few months before he was elected, he spoke out against Muslim Turkey joining the European Union. Christian Europe must be defended, he argued. It didn’t go down well at the time with Muslim leaders.

But what makes his comments from Bavaria doubly insensitive is that Munich and its surrounding towns are home to thousands of Gastarbeiter, many from Turkey, who are often badly treated by local Germans and frequently subjected to racism. It won’t be lost on them that Manuel II ran his Christian empire from what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul. And reference to that time, in circumstances such as these, has the unmistakable whiff of Christian triumphalism.

For the most part, the Pope’s address was a scholarly exercise that sought to challenge the idea that rationality is intrinsically and necessarily secular. We must “overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable”, he insisted. Most Christians would agree. But even here there was a sharp criticism of Islam buried beneath the scholarly rhetoric.

US moves to press Sudan on Darfur stall

Guy Dinmore at MSNBC:

Moves in Congress to put financial pressure on Sudan to stop the killings in Darfur have been stymied by a combination of big business interests and the Bush administration, according to supporters of legislation blocked in the Senate that would have endorsed decisions by US states to divest from companies involved in Sudan.

Tens of billions of dollars in equity are at stake, mostly of non-US companies and including two listed Chinese energy giants involved in Sudan’s rapidly growing oil industry which fuels the military with arms and other supplies.

While giving rhetorical backing to anti-genocide protests staged around the world on Sunday, Democrats and Republicans admitted that a new watered down draft of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act was further evidence of US unwillingness as well as inability to take decisive action.

More here.

Theater of War

From The New York Times:

Cover190 THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina. By Frank Rich.

The author, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, has his liberal views, which are not strikingly original. I happen to agree with him that Karl Rove and George Bush manipulated public fear and wartime patriotism to win elections, and that Dick Cheney and his neocon cheerleaders favored a war in Iraq long before 9/11 “to jump-start a realignment of the Middle East.” Whether Rich is right to say that this has “little or nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda is debatable. The neocons may well have believed that an American remake of the Middle East was the best way to tackle terrorism.

They were almost certainly mistaken. But the point of Rich’s fine polemic is that the Bush administration has consistently lied about the reasons for going to war, about the way it was conducted and about the terrible consequences. Whatever the merits of removing a dictator, waging war under false pretenses is highly damaging to a democracy, especially when one of the ostensible aims is to spread democracy to others. If Rich is correct, which I think he is, the Bush administration has given hypocrisy a bad name.

More here.