by Gautam Pemmaraju
In 2003 this matter had come before the state High Court and the civic body had then been instructed to take action against illegal structures. Members of the Catholic community had then submitted documentation to the civic body regarding individual structures in support of their historical value and legality. Now community members are accusing the municipality of disregarding this documentation and acting illegally.
Was he happy about the attack? Probably. Did he want WMDs. Undoubtedly. But did he have direct connections to 9-11 or caches of nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons? It seemed very unlikely, and of course we now know better.
Yet those who lined up behind the war believed. Some of them believed the 9-11 connection, which was dubious even back then. And most of them believed that there were WMDs buried in the dessert, waiting to be exposed once the mighty wind of American military might blew away the sand that covered them.
I was vocal in my opposition, but I also was honest. Once it was clear we were going to war regardless, I said I would admit I was wrong if the WMDs were found. After all, if Hussein really did have an advanced nuclear weapons program despite all the inspections and embargoes, then it would probably be a wise move to take him out. If I am wrong, I will admit it.
Scroll
From woodpile to the house
a scroll of arabesques in snow
ends maybe twenty feet
from an empty pile of pallets
and the steel stake against which
the first log had been set
The trail ends just there at that
cupped crater which marks the spot
a squirrel beneath a starlit sky
had stopped and sat
Between the crater and the house
untroubled snow lies pristine as the
road less traveled —untroubled as
the road untraveled— unused, sinless,
innocent, untrod. Unknown
as the road ahead of anyone who
as if startled from a stupor says, No
then turns and leaves a tale undone
marked only by a sinuous
signature in snow
by Jim Culleny
winter, 2009
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas talks about the face-to-face encounter with the Other that induces empathy and morality. Well, I feel like my little face is going face-to-face with the gnarly butt of big business. And there's about as much empathy to be gotten from that butt as a mouse gets from a snake.
Bizarrely, I hear everyone walking around saying America and its states are broke, while Wall Street is coining billions and criminally under-paying their taxes. I hear the GOP saying we don't have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem. I see Obama extending the Bush tax cuts, which created no new jobs in eight years. And I'm thinking, I have so little hair left, what's the use of tearing out the last few?
Then it occurs to me that Americans must be one of four things, or a combination of all four:
b) stupid victims of learned helplessness.
c) stupidly apathetic to the point of cowardice.
d) stupid masochists.
d) plain stupid.
That includes you and me, dear reader.
by Tauriq Moosa
Considering the purely descriptive side, there has been some interesting but controversial research into our moral psychology and intuitions.
Jonathan Haidt famously provided the following example in a study.
Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are travelling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it ok for them to make love?
Haidt, in an interview, explained the responses of subjects reaching ‘moral dumbfounding’:
People almost always start out by saying it’s wrong. Then they start to give reasons. The most common reasons involve genetic abnormalities or that it will somehow damage their relationship. But we say in the story that they use two forms of birth control, and we say in the story that they keep that night as a special secret and that it makes them even closer. So people seem to want to disregard certain facts about the story. When the experimenter points out these facts and says “Oh, well, sure, if they were going to have kids, that would cause problems, but they are using birth control, so would you say that it’s OK?” And people never say “Ooooh, right, I forgot about the birth control. So then it is OK.” Instead, they say, “Oh, yeah. Huh. Well, OK, let me think.”
by Sarah Firisen
Glancing through news pieces I’ve collected over the last month or two, I've noticed an interesting thread: Watson, the IBM supercomputer beats Jeopardy champions and ushers in a new era of artificial intelligence; according to the New York Times, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software”; a piece reporting that, “American students no longer perform particularly well in global math tests. But Americans are among the world leaders when it comes to thinking that we are really good at math.”; and finally, ending with the recent denouncement from the political right of teachers as overpaid, part-time workers.
So, computers are becoming increasingly “intelligent” and automation is quickly encroaching on traditional white collar jobs. Meanwhile, Americans pat themselves on the backs, believing that we are the smartest best educated people in the world, all evidence to the contrary. In fact, we are so smart already that we don't even think teachers matters, which is why, as a McKinsey Quarterly report points out, American top students don’t want to teach. Contrast this with the world’s top-performing education systems, Finland, Singapore and South Korea which, “recruit 100 percent of their teaching corps from students in the top third of their classes.” They do this, not only by giving them good training and working conditions, but by cultivating an atmosphere where teaching is considered a prestigious, valued profession. McKinsey reports that, in the US, by contrast, “only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent of new teachers who come from the top third work in high-poverty schools, where attracting and retaining talented people is particularly difficult.” And this was before Republicans mounted a national campaign to “mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents”.
Basically, we’re stupider than ever, increasingly badly educated, but think that we’re the smartest.
by Joy Icayan
And as in every calamity, there was the usual phenomenon in social networking sites—the exchange of information, call for prayers, the expressions of worry, and then there were the more worrying status updates and messages—fairly decent people starting to justify the earthquake as an act of God, or much more worryingly, as something the people over there deserved, although in very very subtle tones.
PZ Myers, better known in the science blogging world as Pharyngula has compiled several Facebook messages of people saying that the Japan earthquake was due revenge for Pearl Harbor.
Psychologist Melvin Lerner first discussed the just world phenomenon in 1980 in “The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion”. The just world phenomenon explains the need to see the world as orderly, predictable and just, that people get what they deserve. It is the belief that good things happen to good people, and bad things to bad people. It is why we can afford to think that the poor are lazy, because really if they were not lazy, they wouldn’t be poor, or why we think rape victims are somehow deserving because they dress up rather provocatively. It’s why we feel pity for children with terminal cancers—those poor things, and yet scoff at gay men who get HIV, if you hadn’t been so slutty… if you hadn’t been gay…
by Kevin S. Baldwin
The second shift began any like other: The usual checklist of procedures and some brief drive-bys of high value sites. Then, he could pretty much relax until just before the end of the shift. The long blocks of time were what made this such a great job for a college student. When he was diligent, he was effectively getting paid to study. When he wasn't so diligent, he was getting paid for doing very little. Not a bad gig, but lately his time at work had drifted more and more into the latter category. He had gradually begun working more and studying less. How many semesters had it been since he took a full load? He had forgotten why he was in school and wasn't really sure about anything anymore. He hoped he could get past whatever was holding him back, but he wasn't sure what that was exactly. Why for example, had he suddenly begun avoiding his academic advisor as though he had leprosy?
He was unscrewing the top of his thermos of coffee when the phone rang. This in itself was startling because that phone hardly ever rang. Surely the ringer was muted by cobwebs. It was his boss: A tenant in the upscale apartments near the beach had not been heard from in several days. Family members were concerned and could he meet the city police at the apartment and open the front door so they could have a look? So much for that problem set.
He drove the company pickup to the apartment complex where he met a squad car. The officers introduced themselves and they all went up to the apartment. They knocked several times. No answer. He reached for the pass key and waited expectantly for a signal from the officer in charge who paused a few more seconds and then nodded. He could practically feel the key flipping the tumblers in the lock as he opened the door to let them in. The stench of decaying flesh billowed out of the entrance and held them in place for a second. All three of them uttered their preferred expletives at the same time as they exhaled. The death of a total stranger was still a bit unnerving, and the prospect of a lot of paperwork was suddenly inescapable.
by S. Abbas Raza
The Egetmann pageant and parade took place in the South Tyrolean wine-making town of Tramin this past Tuesday, on the day before Ash Wednesday, as it has every odd-numbered year since 1591. I was there and can report that it completely lived up to its reputation for spectacular Alpine zaniness. The parade comprises horsedrawn carriages and many huge floats pulled by tractors depicting or representing medieval trades (cobbler, fishmonger, blacksmith, etc.) and they somehow manage to make each one into a debauched frolic of some sort with lots of schnapps being drunk by those on board as well as being passed out to the crowd lining the town streets to watch. There are participants whose only job, it seems, is to annoy the spectators by smearing them (and their clothes) in black grease, rotten fish, flour, hay, water, wine, corn, and other messy stuff. This, plus the fact that only the men of Tramin, who conveniently have a reputation for macho drunken fighting even among the rougher mountain peasants in these parts, take part in the parade (about half dressed in drag), gives the event a slightly scary, dark edge, especially for children and, at least this time, a slightly confused and nervous Pakistani.
Here's a description of some of the main elements of the parade from the official website:
The parade is opened by the trumpeter, followed by farmers on horseback and their labourers and by farmers brandishing long whips (‘Ausschnöller’). These are then followed by the stewards whose job it is to keep the route of the pageant clean and free of obstruction. Behind them come all the rest of the farmers with their ancient implements for working the land, accompanying a cart containing seed-corn (symbolically depicted by wood-shavings, hay and dust). In turn these are followed by the central character, the Egetmannhansl, a dummy in a black jacket, top hat and white gloves travelling in an open carriage, accompanied by his servant. In front, next to the driver sits the bride, transforming the parade into a marriage procession. As in Shakespeare’s time, female characters can only be played by men dressed up as women!
It is strictly forbidden for the bride to quench her thirst by drinking wine; instead she is allowed to drink as much schnapps as she wants!
Behind the nuptial carriage come the councillors, the local dignitaries, each with a symbolic object: the Book of Protocol, a ladder, an umbrella, and two candlesticks (each composed of a wooden stick with a corn-cob as a candle). This group of dignitaries, dressed in black with top hats, is preceded by the town-crier.
The parade passes through the streets of Tramin, stopping at every fountain, where the ladder is erected and the councillor with the umbrella climbs up and opens it. The town-crier climbs half-way up the ladder and reads the Egetmann’s offer of marriage from the Protocol. The other two councillors remain at either side of the ladder with their candlesticks. Each sentence of the Protocol is cheered by the people present.
by Michael Blim
“…When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.”
–Newton Minow, Former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, May 9, 1961
I am using the Kennedy rhetorical ploy here with less reverence and more irony than currently in play. After all, how can one prattle on about the moral lesson of Vietnam without acknowledging that nothing was learned, and instead that Vietnam marked the moment in the postwar world when America took empire seriously on the road? Or that Kennedy’s sixties marked the high point of generalized American prosperity — not its beginning, but its last great act before the end?
Still Newton Minow’s Kennedy Administration condemnation of America’s television programming still possesses the ring of truth, even if by now we are so inured to the medium’s fearsome banality. Though a lifetime corporate lawyer and well-connected politico, as FCC Chair in 1961, Minow had something else important to say, and that he actually said it then shows us how far the profession of law has declined over the past 50 years:
“…the people own the air. And they own it as much in prime evening time as they do at six o'clock Sunday morning. For every hour that the people give you — you owe them something. And I intend to see that your debt is paid with service.”
Fancy that: “the people own the air.” Doubtless Rupert Murdoch believes, in addition to thinking that it is okay for Fox News to be a political party, that he owns the cognitive and auditory spaces in our brains. Reformers like Minnow not only insisted on regulating private broadcasters but also sponsored the growth of National Education Television and its transformation into the Public Broadcasting Service (1970).
by Tom Jacobs
…our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.
–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)
DIALECTICAL THINGS
The fourth floor of the New-York Historical Society houses the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, a collection encompassing over 40,000 objects spanning from prehistorical to 21st century New York. By adopting an “open storage” policy, the NYHS has opened what would otherwise be a warehouse to the public, so that the miles of shelved artifacts that would normally be languishing unseen in a storage area on the fourth-floor can now be observed (albeit, without placards or captions). Unless one consults the computer databases, one is left pretty much on one’s own to make sense of what one is seeing. This can be a productive scene of fascination, recognition, and misrecognition.
To the Members of the Royal Society:
'Tis with much Relish Regret that we announce the final and utmost Demise, yea, the certain and irreversible Decline, which the Latins call corruptio and which, being English'd, is the Corruption or Passing-Away of the corporeall Substance; the throwing off of the Mortal Coil, the giving up of the so-call'd Ghost, the final separation of the immaterial Soule, leaving, where it had once been, naught but a stinking and rotten Corpse; the Departure, the Egress, the Going: yea, I say, the DEATH of Dr. Jus. Smith, FRS, this Tues-Day last at his Home in Dulwich, having succumb'd to the Gout.
He is surviv'd by his Wife, Mary, and a Dozen of Children, not counting three Bastards, a Half-Wit, and one that is evidently a Changeling. His first Wife, Anne, died many years hence under suspicious Circumstances, when she, so 'tis said, slipt upon the Rind of a Fruit of the Mousa Tree, lately call'd by the Hottentotical name of Banana (Dr. Smith had been raising up this Fruit of the Torrid Zone right here in grey England, by means of an oven capable of regulating its own Heat, by the Light of Phosphorus channel'd thro' a powerfull Lamp, and othersuch alchemick Machinations), and she landed, poor Anne did, squarely upon her Skull. The servants present reported a strange comick Effect of this sad Event: tho' distraught to see their Mistress so suddenly despatch'd, they could not help but snicker at the very Improbabilitie of Slipping upon the Rind of this foreign Fruit. Experiments were subsequently perform'd within the Scientifickall Society to determine the precise Cause of the Banana's comœdickall Virtù, tho' we confess it remains to this day a great Mysterium.
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
Our post began with a statement of fact. Reasonable Atheism is not yet available, yet we have been charged with accommodationism. What we failed to note is that shortly after Prometheus Books distributed a catalog announcing the publication of Reasonable Atheism, we received a handful of emails decrying our forthcoming book as accommodationist drivel. The author of one email characterized accommodationism as consisting in the very thought that religious believers are owed respect. In the first paragraph of our original post, we encapsulated the charge of accommodationism as it was brought in these emails. These provided the occasion for thinking about the charge of accommodationism.
We have been criticized for not citing our sources. For the record, most of the emails we received came from people who did not include surnames. Who are these people? We have no idea. And we’d like not to encourage them. Yet some critics have assumed that if we have been charged with accommodationism, and then have sought to respond to that particular way of wielding the charge, it must be that we believe that New Atheists are in some sense guilty of… well… something.
by Edward B. Rackley
So ended 2010 in Haiti, surely the country’s worst year since independence in 1804. The massive quake in January, then Hurricane Tomas, followed by a crippling epidemic of cholera. The year ended with a rocky electoral contest, still unresolved. These unwelcome malheurs conspired to attract the gaze of international media, holding it momentarily. Other spectacles now crow for our attention. Eclipsed by Libya and her neighbors, Haiti’s grip remains tenuous, its silence ominous. Jokes about the depths to which it has sunk—now a platform for foreign dignitaries so low even Sarah Palin can step up—would be funny if they weren’t true.
Leveled to rubble in January 2010, Port-au-Prince is gradually reconstituting itself, but progress will be painfully slow. The city was already mired in failed urban policies long before the catastrophic shudder; the flight of human capital among the political class only advanced as Haiti’s crisis deepened. Today’s void means easy access for anyone of means seeking political office, including pop singers at home and abroad (Michel Martelly and Wyclef). Haiti’s exhausted political class requires new blood, but where are the viable candidates? Popular elections rarely mean the collective interest is served; instead, a leader’s wish becomes his followers’ command. State-sponsored thuggery is a Haitian specialty.
To a new arrival, as I recently was, the obstacles confronting the average Haitian appear to stack up, layer by layer, to a point of monolithic immobility.
By Liam Heneghan
For Patricia Monaghan, poet and friend
“I am cold and alone on my tree root, sitting as still as stone.” I recited this forlornly, lost in E. J. Scovell’s poem. I was ten years old and competitively reciting at the Father Matthew Feis, an annual all-Ireland poetry festival. The year was 1974. “The fish come to my net,” I continued, “I scorned the 
This was my father’s experiment: on an overcast afternoon, beneath the dreep of autumn hedges, dress your sons in plastic rubbish sacks, fashion hats out of blue shopping bags and set them loose on the banks. No bites that day for me; perhaps the fish were fooled or perhaps in their own piscine way they shared the bemusement of the mirthful onlookers who strolled over to examine the young boys that were disguised as the sky. I scorned them, I scorned them all and slumped humiliated beneath the hedge and gazed damply into the waters; I endured my own thoughts; I waited. Though I failed at being the sky, and failed as a fisherman, I was, however, remarkably good at memorizing poems. An achievement made more remarkable maybe, by the fact that, at the time, I remained functionally illiterate.
by Sue Hubbard
![300_0650[1]](/wp-content/legacy/6a00d8341c562c53ef0147e2fb9e22970b-320wi "300_0650[1]")
Conceived as a ‘a dynamic shape-shifting exhibition that would renew itself as it travelled’ through four cities, 11 venues and more than 12 months of national touring there is no dominant house style. Boundaries are blurred between fine art and found object, between anarchy and formalism, between irony and a striving towards a more authentic aesthetic grammar. There are a lot of videos; some very long, and that makes it a difficult show to get round unless one has several days to spend. Anja Kirschner and David Panos’s new feature-length film The Empty Plan – made in German – juxtaposes Bertolt Brecht’s writings in exile with preparations for different productions of his play The Mother, staged in a variety of contrasting locations. In another arena this may have proved rewarding, but ,here, it is simply hard work. In contrast Duncan Campbell’s archive footage highlighting the 1970s Irish political campaigner Bernadette Devilin’s rocky relationship with the press, for whom she was at first a saint thena sinner, is highly evocative of those unsettled times.
by Misha Lepetic
By now the scrappiness of the emerging economies’ entrepreneurial class has become a recognized trope of the folklore of globalization. Starting with Muhammad Yunus’s initial investments in the microfinance concept, to Tata Motors’ Nano, Western observers are being treated to an ever-increasing flow of news celebrating how doughty innovators are operationalizing elegant solutions to sticky problems that developed nations have, for many decades now, attempted to solve with boatloads of aid money, much of which was eventually misspent, misappropriated or outright stolen by its recipients, their governments and/or various inexperienced or misguided middlemen.
Now, augmented by the newly formulated war-cries of sustainability and climate change, these kinds of innovations and the drive behind them seem to be taking on even greater importance. In these neo-liberal, post-regulation end-times, the narrative tells us: Let a thousand flowers bloom. But what is it that we really see, and will we get what we expect?
Before we can understand what our expectations might be, we should ask about measurement, since what and how we choose to measure ultimately reflects back to us the criteria for its success. In the language of business and the capital markets, there are narrowly defined criteria that determine success factors, such as return on investment, cost of goods sold, and depreciation and amortization of tangible and intangible assets. Some of these criteria are little more than fictions spurred on by tax considerations, but each plays a crucial role in whether a firm decides to make an investment in new product development, how it may choose to commercialize this development, and most importantly, at what point it will consider the product a success, or withdraw it from the marketplace.
There are, of course, serious lacunae here. Currently accepted practices do not compel firms to take into account factors such as waste stream management, or greenhouse gas production, or carbon footprint. Nor do relevant regulatory bodies consistently provide incentives, such as tax write-offs or R&D subsidies, that would serve to introduce these exogenous costs into mainstream financial decisionmaking.
by Quinn O'Neill
Science and technology play increasingly important roles in our lives. Advances in medicine, transportation, and communications have made life a lot easier but at the same time contribute to new problems like pollution, habitat loss, and dwindling resources. Our best chances for overcoming these problems may also lie in science and in an improved understanding of our natural world. 
Most people probably realize that understanding science is important – at least for scientists – but scientists as well as members of the public may not fully appreciate the importance of understanding the Nature of Science (NOS) – that is, the nature of scientific knowledge and the processes that generate it. We’re so accustomed to science being part of our lives that we take for granted that everyone knows what it is. But they don’t. Studies have shown that NOS misconceptions are prevalent among high school and college students and even among teachers (Lederman, 2007).
Many people view science as a body of rigid, unchangeable facts and it’s hard to blame them – after all, most of us learned science as if this were the case. We were given text books and lectured to as if to say “here’s what we know, it’s all true, just memorize it”. Of course, much of the content of text books, at least at high school and undergraduate levels, is fairly basic and well-established, but learning it from a book or a lecture doesn’t teach us much about the scientific process.
So what is science then? Nova Education recently asked Dr. William McComas, a prominent researcher in science education, and he provided a very nice answer. Here are some of the key points:
I have nothing to add to McComas's explanation, except that I think it's really important for people to understand. Why? Because NOS misconceptions may underlie rejection of science and because the nature of science is also essentially the nature of progress.
by Rishidev Chaudhuri
These are unusual arguments. Most of our moral intuitions and behavior is founded on relationships to other moral subjects. And there is a very strong and compelling moral reason to address global warming that does involve humans. A changing climate will affect and is affecting the livelihood of millions of people and these people are disproportionately poor and vulnerable. Our moral obligation to mitigate the effects of warming on the environment can be seen to stem from our obligation to other human beings.
This argument makes no reference to the natural or to preservation as an intrinsic good. It also involves a complex mix of factors to be weighed against each other. We are obligated to help preserve the environment because of our obligation to help give people a decent quality of life, but there are many other ways this can be carried out. For example, making people richer and giving them lifestyles closer to those in the developed West would also have the same effect, but this might act against the preservation of the environment. Given that we rarely see these sorts of debates in the environmental movement, it seems that the impact on people is not the primary motivation.
So what about moral arguments that are not centered on humans? Do we have more than practical and aesthetic motivations to preserve the climate as it is now?
by Robert P. Baird
Mamdani is one of the most acute observers of African events working today, and he has a deep and complicated personal relationship to Uganda’s recent political history. Born in Kampala to Indian Muslim parents, he was exiled (along with the rest of the country’s Asian population) by Idi Amin in 1972. He earned a Ph.D from Harvard in 1974 and has taught at universities in Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, and the U.S. Currently he is a professor of anthropology and government at Columbia University and the director of the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) in Uganda. He and his wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair, split their time between Kampala and New York.
Mamdani graciously agreed to an interview, but by the time we met in his purple-walled office at the MISR, the uprising in Egypt had become all-engrossing. I decided to take the opportunity to get his early thoughts about the revolutions in North Africa. (As it happened, the Feb. 18 presidential elections in Uganda saw Yoweri Museveni extend his twenty-five-year rule over Uganda with 68% of the vote, despite widespread and credible allegations of bribery and vote-rigging.)
