Blood

Because it’s now so deeply ingrained that owning guns is a form of radical subversive politics, the people who still engage in real politics have the pick of the litter. That first became really clear in the depths of the 2008-9 collapse, when a lot of people who thought of themselves as radicals and anarchists made a lot of feckless noise about how they were arming and preparing for the collapse and revolution. They could’ve gone out and organized something and maybe built a politics of people power or even a politics of what they call revolution, a politics that actually changed things. But instead, they locked themselves in their homes and apartments with their guns and fancied themselves political revolutionaries just waiting to be swept up. But no one came. No one bothered or cared. And really, why would any plutocrat or evil government agency bother with the suckers, all harmlessly atomized and isolated and thoroughly neutralized by the false sense of political empowerment that their guns gave them, while you do the real work of plundering budgets, bribing politicians and writing laws even more in your favor?

So while everyone was hiding out in their homes armed and ready for Hollywood finales that never came, in the real world political power was concentrating at warp-speed with zero resistance.

From the oligarchy’s perspective, the people were thoroughly neutralized by the false sense of political empowerment that guns gave them. Guns don’t work in this country — they didn’t work for the Black Panthers or the Whiskey Rebellion, and they won’t work for you or me either.

- Mark Ames at NSFWCorp.

The reason human plasma was so lucrative for Stephen Feinberg’s Cerberus Capital is that supply is limited: most countries around the world ban the farming and marketing of human plasma for profit. Not in free-market America, however. Cerberus wound up cornering the human plasma market, jacking up prices to the point where human plasma was worth more than twice its weight in gold.

Pumping human plasma is much trickier — and more painful — than human blood. It takes a good hour to pump a human plasma cow of her plasma before she starts to drop off, and she can’t come back for another milking until her plasma grows back. Cerberus Plasma overcame that supply problem by setting up rows of human plasma farms along the US-Mexico border, splashing impoverished Mexican border towns with ads about getting paid for donating blood, then arranged human plasma busses to bus in poor Mexicans across the border to US-based pumping stations, sucking out their plasma, then dumping the donors back across the other side of the border with 30 dollars in their pockets (plus a ten dollar bonus for Mexicans who roped other Mexican plasma cows into joining them). It’s worth reiterating this point: human plasma farming for profit is illegal in Mexico, so Cerberus Plasma bussed Mexicans to the US for milking.

But while it was sucking the blood from Mexicans at thirty bucks a pop, Cerberus jacked the price of their human plasma treatment so high that patients whose lives depended on it — hemophiliacs, severe burn victims, others suffering from autoimmune deficiencies — were priced out of the only treatment that kept them alive, as insurance companies refused coverage. All this sparked an FTC lawsuit and charges of price gouging.

So it’s not much of a leap to go from sucking impoverished Mexicans’ blood for profit to Cerberus’ investment in a firearms manufacturer, Bushmaster in 2005.

- Mark Ames at NSFWCorp, again.

You really should sling them some cash.

Ablative Absolute

The Latinate framers of the US constitution employed an ablative absolute in the Second Amendment: ‘A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.’ An interpreter who favoured regimen would argue that the ablative clause determines the sense of the main clause; hence, the state has the right to maintain an army. Those who favour the absolute, as American courts have done, bracket the militia clause and take the main clause to mean that citizens may own as many firearms as they choose. The difference between constructions amounts to roughly 12,000 murders a year.

This, recently quoted at the LRB Blog, appears in the comments thread to this:

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

It is yet to appear in the comments thread to this:

[A]bsolute constructions remain part of the grammar of standard written English. Some particular instances remain common enough to be considered cliches: "this being the case", "other things being equal", "all things considered", "that said". It's New-Yorker normal that Jeffrey Toobin is ignorant of elementary grammatical analysis, but it's surprising that his ear for ordinary English usage is so bad, and that he's apparently unaware of the standard legal discussion of the constitutional issue on which he's providing an allegedly expert opinion.

Careful, chaps, this might get heated. Oh, wait... no, it won't.

Abandoned

Context here, and here in the related comments thread.

Posted in the hope of days for our American friends when the things to be sad about are not as awful as they are today.

Secular

Let's give thanks for the ignorance of American jurists about basic ethnography! It has been decided that while a nativity is a religious thing, the Xmas tree is not. These most sacred trees can stand alone on public property because of this misunderstanding of their nature. If you want a nativity in the town park, you have to let the Menorah stand next to it (and some anti-Semite will probably deface it.) Heaven knows what will happen if the Muslims want to be acknowledged too. So most public spaces just go with the tree under the illusion that it is secular. Thus a great pagan image can be found throughout the land every winter.

- McKenzie Wark at the Verso Books blog.

Attribution

The idea of natural selection itself began as a just-so story, more than two millennia before Darwin. Darwin belatedly learned this when, a few years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859, a town clerk in Surrey sent him some lines of Aristotle, reporting an apparently crazy tale from Empedocles. According to Empedocles, most of the parts of animals had originally been thrown together at random: “Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders ... and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads.” Yet whenever a set of parts turned out to be useful the creatures that were lucky enough to have them “survived, being organised spontaneously in a fitting way, whereas those which grew otherwise perished.” In later editions of “Origin,” Darwin added a footnote about the tale, remarking, “We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth.”

From Just So Stories.

The solution to the paradox* (why is the night sky dark?) could be due to several different possibilities:

1.The universe is finite, that is, it ends at some point.
2.The stars run out at large distances.
3.There hasn't been enough time for the light to reach us from the most distant stars.

We will find out shortly that we can actually estimate the age of our universe. Because the universe is not infinitely old, the answer is number 3 listed above. Since light takes time to reach us, we can see only those objects that are near enough to us that their light has reached us. Curiously enough, the first published solution to Olbers' Paradox is attributed to Edgar Allan Poe. In his essay Eureka, Poe says:

Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy - since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.

*That'd be Olber’s paradox.

Vibrant

Consider Akron, Ohio, which was recently the subject of a conference bearing the thrilling name “Greater Akron: This Is What Vibrant Looks Like.” Or Boise, Idaho, whose citizens, according to the city’s Department of Arts and History, are “fortunate to live in a vibrant community in which creativity flourishes in every season.” Or Cincinnati, which is the home of a nonprofit called “Go Vibrant” as well as the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, which hands out “Cultural Vibrancy” grants, guided by the knowledge that “Cultural Vibrancy is vital to a thriving community.”

Is Rockford, Illinois, vibrant? Oh my god yes: according to a local news outlet, the city’s “Mayor’s Arts Award nominees make Rockford vibrant.” The Quad Cities? Check: As their tourism website explains, the four hamlets are “a vibrant community of cities sharing the Mississippi River in both Iowa and Illinois.” Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Need you even ask? Pittsburgh is a sort of Athens of the vibrant; a city where dance parties and rock concerts enjoy the vigorous boosting of an outfit called “Vibrant Pittsburgh”; a place that draws young people from across the nation to frolic in its “numerous hip and vibrant neighborhoods,” according to a blog maintained by a consortium of Pittsburgh business organizations.

...

The federal programs of the thirties produced “art for the millions” and aimed to improve both cities and rural settlements, to make them more livable for everyone. Today, however, we have a different audience in mind. Vibrancy is a sort of performance that artists or musicians are expected to put on, either directly or indirectly, for the corporate class. These are the ones we aim to reassure of our city’s vibrancy, so that they never choose to move their millions (of dollars) to some more vibrant burg. An artist who keeps to herself, who works in her room all day, who wears unremarkable clothes and goes without tattoos— by definition she brings almost nothing to this project, adds little to the economic prospects of a given area. She inspires no one. She offers no lessons in creativity. She is not vibrant, not remunerative, not investment-grade.

Vibrancy theory reveres the artist, but it also insults those who would take artistic production seriously. Think of the purblind art that this philosophy would guarantee us, were we to take it to heart and follow its directions to the letter. The public art of the thirties was often heavy-handed, close to propaganda even, but it was also critical of capitalist institutions and intensely concerned with the lives of ordinary people. The vibrant, on the other hand, would separate the artist from such boring souls. The creative ones are to be ghettoized in a “scene” which it is their job to make “vibrant,” thereby pumping up real estate prices and inspiring creative-class onlookers. But what of the people no one is interested in attracting and retaining? Millions of Americans go through their lives in places that aren’t vibrant, in areas that don’t have a “scene,” in jobs that aren’t rewarding, in industries that aren’t creative; and their experiences are, almost by definition, off limits for artistic contemplation.

Thomas Frank in The Baffler.

Abilities

The disadvantages of autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and depression are very real, and are what lead them to be considered disorders. But what those clamoring for cures often neglect, and what the term “neurodiversity” seeks to recognize, is that these disorders often also bring unusual abilities. For example, people with Asperger’s syndrome (AS), a high-functioning type of autism, have an uncanny capacity to see details. They score higher than non-autistics on block-design tests, in which children are asked to use colored blocks to match a pattern given to them. They have better abilities to identify shapes, and are more likely to have prodigious talents, such as perfect pitch and highly accurate memories.

...

ADHD has potential benefits similar to those of autism. ...

[I]n addition to the roving style of attention that often makes people with ADHD seem inattentive and restless, they also often possess an ability to focus for hours on specific activities or tasks that greatly stimulate or interest them. This “homing attention,” ... is evident in “rock climbers negotiating steep mountain cliffs” and “surgeons engaged in twelve-hour sessions in the operating room.” Certain professions actually demand characteristics that are much more prevalent in people with ADHD.

People with dyslexia also have certain impressive skills generally lacking in non-dyslexics. They can easily recognize patterns and anomalies in patterns. They sometimes also possess greater visual-spatial abilities, including ease with visualizing objects and systems in three dimensions. Similar to the abilities of autistics like Temple Grandin, they can sometimes visualize machines in their mind, and can tinker with these images — changing, adding to, and subtracting from them. ...

Aaron Rothstein's article on neurodiversity in the New Atlantis can get a little overly "on the one hand, but on the other" at times, but is still very rewarding.

While the detriments of neurological disorders may disguise potential benefits, I myself wonder if those detriments might be situationally beneficial in themselves. After all, innate human mentality seems to have drawbacks, often along the lines of "if the brain is good at doing something it has a tendency to do it when not appropriate". Thus humanity's capacity for pattern recognition provides the potential for pareidolia and apophenia (worse, presumably, in those with exceptional talent for discerning patterns: are dyslexics more likely than average to be conspiracy theorists?) A neurological incapacity reduces the likelihood of misapplication of the lacking talent. Trivially, of course, anyone unable to recognise faces is unlikely to see Jesus Christ peering out of their cornflakes. But would even a merely diminished ability to detect patterns reduce the risk that one would see patterns that aren't actually there? Or, turning to another feature of the "healthy" mind, I wonder if the (theoretical) difficulties people with autism have at building a model of other minds diminishes their human tendency for anthropomorphism? Is this partly what helped Temple Grandin understand the behaviour of cows: that she didn't have to fight through the pathetic fallacy to realise they don't think like people? And, I wonder, and it's not entirely a troll, are people with the neurodiversity formerly known as Asperger's syndrome less likely to be religious - which is to say, less likely to anthropomorphise the universe, to model a mind where there is not one to model?

Dissimilarity

How can someone be gay without having seen “Mildred Pierce” or “The Wizard of Oz”? To answer that, you first have to know what such movies have to do with being gay. Halperin observes, as others have before him, that gay boys often display stereotypical tastes long before sex enters the picture. As he points out, sexuality is the area where gay men differ least from straight men: the male in heat is a uniform animal. Gay taste is something more singular, probably linked to incipient feelings of dissimilarity from one’s peers. This alienation can happen in class, or in the locker room, or at a friend’s house when straight porn is unveiled. However these experiences unfold, they have a lasting impact, equivalent to a trauma with no visible cause. One common response is preëmptive withdrawal. The boy buries himself in some obscure aesthetic pursuit. One self-help book calls it “velvet rage.” My ignorance of “The Wizard of Oz” didn’t save me from becoming a typical case: at the age of ten, I developed a peculiar predilection for Austro-German symphonies.

Of course, a love for Golden Age movies or interior design is not necessarily a telltale sign. Plenty of straight kids flee from the locker room to the Drama Club, and plenty of gay kids thrive at sports. Yet the anecdotal evidence for the early onset of gay taste is vast. In retrospect, my mania for Beethoven may have been a way of forestalling a reckoning with my sexuality: rather than commit myself, I disappeared into a fleshless realm. Halperin sees another dimension to this kind of engagement — a willful resistance to the male-adolescent herd, a form of quasi-political dissidence. It’s a heady idea to attribute political motives to gay children, but Halperin is on to something. The fanatical twelve-year-old aesthete displays something like cultural disobedience.

- Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

Refresh

... the Kubler Ross stages of grief ... the Kubler Ross stages of grief ... the Kubler Ross stages of grief ...

I tend to get the same dispiriting impression every time I check out one of those sites daily compiling editorial cartoons.

Totally crazy

And he died a happy death. It can be done. ... If you’re William Blake and totally crazy.

If you haven't read this interview with Maurice Sendak yet - and I'm a little late to it myself - then you should do so immediately.

Viral

Embedded below is what accounts for the world's current view of Australia, apparently:



Perhaps someone should try for a mash-up. [Update December 2016: The first video was, of course, the xenophobic Caulfield to Highett bus rage incident, which the creator has stealthed because... well, he explains.]

Meeyow

"Facing starvation, the Puritans sought help from the Indians, who showed them how to plant crops and brought them food, and together they sat down to a celebratory feast and gave thanks."

"Then the Puritans killed the Indians, took their land, and spent the rest of the winter accusing each other of witchcraft."

"American history in a nutshell."

Scare quotes for plausible deniability of unconscionable troll-snark*. Happy Black Friday!

*Or is that a boojum?

Cease-fire

As to Ahmed Jabari, the Hamas military commander Israel assassinated, perhaps the best article on him was one of the first. Aluf Benn at Ha’aretz noted that Jabari was Israel’s ‘subcontractor’. Benn, unlike many Westerners, understood that Hamas has been upholding Israel’s security for years.

The other important commentary was by Gershon Baskin, who has helped to negotiate between Israel and Hamas before. Never mind that Israel’s official position is that it doesn’t negotiate with Hamas because they’re terrorists who don’t recognise Israel’s right to exist. Baskin noted that ‘when he was convinced that Israel was ready to stand down as well, Jaabari was always ready to take the orders to force the ceasefire on all of the other factions and on Hamas.’ Baskin drafted a proposal for a long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Hours after it was presented to Jaabari, he was murdered by Israel. According to Baskin, the ‘draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.’ Jabari, too, said he ‘saw the need for a new strategy and was prepared to agree to a long-term cease-fire.’ This ‘proposal was at least worth testing … Instead, Mr. Jabari is dead — and with him died the possibility of a long-term cease-fire.’

So Israel has successfully defended itself from the man who probably did more than anyone to protect it from rockets, and who appeared willing to support and perhaps enforce a long-tem ceasefire. Well, that’s a kind of success, for those who prefer Israelis be unsafe, and exposed to rocket fire.

- Michael Brull at Overland. See also.

Profile

Then it hit me – it was an interesting book, after all! Because if you read All In carefully, the book's tone will remind you of pretty much any other authorized bio of any major figure in business or politics (particularly in business), and it will most particularly remind you of almost any Time or Newsweek famous-statesperson profile.

Which means: it's impossible to tell the difference between the tone of a reporter who we now know was literally sucking the dick of her subject and the tone of just about any other modern American reporter who is given access to a powerful person for a biography or feature-length profile.

Matt Taibbi, of course.

Papier-mâché

I was working ... with some children who were dedicated Dr Who fans, a show that was then beginning its current revival. They asked me if they could watch an episode of the David Tennant incarnation that one of the children had on DVD. The Tennant episodes were slick, hour-long, predictable wound-up narratives of hysteria with expensive FX, bloodthirsty aliens and a pounding Hollywood-style soundtrack. Anyway a large group of children sat together and watched an entire episode placidly and without comment.

I suggested that they might want to watch a much older Dr Who episode with an earlier incarnation of the Doctor, and gave them a DVD of Tom Baker’s late 70s Doctor who battles people dressed in papier-mache monster costumes on cardboard sets. Things jump out of cupboards, every 25-minute episode ends with a cliffhanger and the soundtrack is reducible to a few dramatic chords on a Casio keyboard. The children watched one episode in increasing states of terror, and begged me never to show it to them again.

From a rather curmudgeonly (if appropriate) rant about 3D movies, not without its charms, at Overland.

Empathy

Maria Konnikova, also at Aeon.

Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Oxford and famous for his work on autism, distinguishes between two elements of empathy. There is affective empathy, the emotional part. And there is cognitive empathy, or the ability to think oneself into another person’s mind. Based on having an effective theory of mind, this cognitive empathy provides an important counterbalance to the emotional. But must the two always go together? Can we imagine an emotionless, purely cognitive, empathy?

The question is not a new one. In their 1963 study of empathy and birth order, the psychologists Ezra Stotland and Robert Dunn distinguished the ‘logical’ and the ‘emotional’ part of empathising with similar and dissimilar others. They understood the first as an exercise in cognitive perspective-taking, and the latter as an instance of non-rational emotional contagion. More recently, Baron-Cohen has described how individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder might not be able to understand or mentalise, yet some are fully capable of empathising (in the emotional sense) once someone’s affective state is made apparent to them — a sign, it seems, that the two elements are somewhat independent.

Physiological studies seem to support this, too. In 2009, a team of psychologists from the University of Haifa found that patients with ventromedial prefrontal damage showed consistent selective deficits in cognitive empathy and theory of mind — that is the cognitive aspects of empathy — while their emotional empathy and emotional recognition ability remained intact. Conversely, patients with lesions in the inferior frontal gyrus of the brain demonstrated remarkable deficits in emotional empathy and the recognition of emotion — but their cognitive empathy remained on a par with healthy controls. Are both of these groups, then, empathetic in their own way — the one emotionally, and the other, cognitively so?

Surely the capacity for manipulation depends on cognitive empathy; a better cognitive empath would be better at thinking themselves into the minds of those they wish to manipulate, to see the motivations, the buttons and levers. Psychopaths are famously manipulative: so is it really both types of empathy their brains are deficient in?

Update 27/01/13: I was unsurprised to discover Kevin Dutton argues precisely this in Chapter 4 of The Wisdom of Psychopaths.

Taxonomic Inflation

We sometimes describe this as the tensions between ‘splitting’– the tendency to focus on the differences between specimens and argue there are many species – and its opposite, ‘lumping’. These may seem to be capricious practices of shuffling the relevant fossils into lots of small piles or into a few big piles. And woebetide the ‘splitter’ whose book is reviewed by a ‘lumper’! But this isn’t capricious at all. It is strategic. After all, more species means more key specimens, which makes a greater number of museums important and more scientists important too. Cladistic analysis, the most basic analyses of human fossils, assumes that similarities are generally inherited over time from a shared ancestor, rather than transmitted horizontally by admixture between groups – and the best way to make that assumption ring true is to see fossils as species, rather than as subspecies, which could mix. On top of this, there are nationalistic rivalries for claiming the most important hominin fossils. Whose fossils hold the key to understanding our origins – the species from Kenya (Homo rudolfensis), South Africa (Australopithecus sediba), Georgia (Homo georgicus), or Spain (Homo antecessor)? Or is it ‘all of the above’?

What is more, there is such pressure on scientists to name new species – whether justified or not – that many biological areas are experiencing ‘taxonomic inflation’ – the formal recognition of way more species than are really there. This is particularly rampant in our closest relatives, the primates, where the number of recognized species has more than doubled in the last twenty years. It is not as if a great many new species have been hiding from view in the interior of Madagascar or the Amazon rainforest, and have only recently been encountered. Nor is it true that primates are experiencing extraordinarily rapid rates of speciation. The reason that there are twice as many primate species as there used to be is that many of them are endangered, and conservation legislation is often written to protect species. The legal status and protection of primates in the wild is consequently helped by making them species (rather than, say, making them subspecies or local populations). Here the decision is that the conservation needs of the primates are the most important factor. And who would presume to disagree, aside from a heartless pedant?

- Jonathan Marks at Aeon.

Surge

[T]he warning signs about Petraeus’ core dishonesty have been around for years...

There’s his war record in Iraq, starting when he headed up the Iraqi security force training program in 2004. He’s more or less skated on that, including all the weapons he lost, the insane corruption, and the fact that he essentially armed and trained what later became known as “Iraqi death squads.” On his final Iraq tour, during the so-called "surge," he pulled off what is perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history. He convinced the entire Washington establishment that we won the war.

He did it by papering over what the surge actually was: We took the Shiites' side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we’d help them out too. It was a brutal enterprise — over 800 Americans died during the surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus’ policies fueled. Then he popped smoke and left the members of the Sunni Awakening to fend for themselves. A journalist friend told me a story of an Awakening member, exiled in Amman, whom Petraeus personally assured he would never abandon. The former insurgent had a picture of Petraeus on his wall, but was a little hurt that the general no longer returned his calls.

- The Sins Of General David Petraeus, Michael Hastings.

Hashima Island

The abandoned mining town on Hashima Island apparently features as a villain's lair in the most recent Bond flick, which seems as good a reason as any for a bit of UE.



See also info at Abandoned Places and Hey, I abandoned that!

Retaliation

Apparently they're about to have another election in Israel.

Here's just yer basic blindingly obvious summary:

First, they find a pretext.

In this case, that was an anti-tank rocket fired from the Palestinian resistance at an Israeli jeep on November 10, which Israel and its apologists in the US media described as the initial provocation in the latest round of hostilities.

We know, for three reasons, that this is a lie.

The first is because we read the news. We know that the occupying forces encircling the Gaza Strip murdered a mentally unfit man approaching the border fence on November 4... And we know that on November 8 Israeli forces shot at Ahmed Younis Khader Abu Daqqa, who was playing soccer with his friends 1500 meters from an Israeli military post when a gunman put a bullet through his abdomen. He died soon after. Ahmed was 13.

The second reason we know that this is a lie is because the assault occurred after a 24 hour lull in the violence, induced by an Egyptian-brokered truce. ... Israel... shatter[ed] the truce with the November 14 assassination of senior Hamas military leader Ahmed Jubari, continuing a long-standing Israeli pattern of deploying targeted killings ... to break cease-fires and ramp up the cycle of violence at strategically opportune junctures.

The third reason any explanation involving the word “retaliation” is a lie is because the category of Israeli “retaliation” does not exist. The occupation is constant terror, and it is what breeds the Palestinian violence Israeli leaders can adduce as a retroactive justification for the policies they pursue in purported pursuit of the chimera of “security.”

Max Ajl at Jacobin. I might, to get technical, prefer the term siege to occupation in relation to Gaza, but the point still holds. Media dissemblers might wish to explain how the Israelis can "retaliate" against anything, as by definition a military siege remains the opening act of aggression between combatants until such time as it is lifted.

I Could Be Happy

Just to prove I can be glass half full, I'm happy to acknowledge there is some good news from the most recent democratic carnival in the hub of the empire: anti prohibition votes in two states, anti marriage-discrimination votes in four, Puerto Rico voted for statehood, California approved the notion of people actually paying for what government does, Michigan voted down some cashed-up tosser's attempt to preserve his international bridge monopoly, a number of crusadis and likudniks got kicked out or severely kicked, and there were wins for Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin and Orc Assassination Rogue Santiaga to name but a few. As for enjoying ultra-rightists losing their shit, so far it has been absolutely delightful, it truly has.

Glisser

Via Laughing Squid via Colossal via The Curious Brain.

Moderation

Obama’s no right-winger. You might have serious issues with his Supreme Court justices or his moves on immigration or the Bush tax cuts. But you probably would have had similar issues with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford. Obama’s in the same mold as those guys. So don’t despair. Your country didn’t vote for a socialist tonight. It voted for the candidate of traditional Republican moderation. What should gall you, haunt you, and goad you to think about the future of your party is that that candidate wasn’t yours.

This month's Mr Obvious, William Saletan.

Cultural Decay

If a Democratic presidential victory* provides nothing else it at least grants you an opportunity for a double dose of schadenfreude, if that's what rubs your rhubarb. First you get to laugh as mad Republicans wax hysterical when their guy loses and civilisation, as they see it, collapses, and then some months later you get to laugh at formerly smug Democrats when they realise they've elected a Republican. Again.

Eh, who cares? Will a result that gives the popular vote to one candidate and the electoral college to the other persuade Americans to reform their stupid system? Doubt it. Will a Democratic loss clearly explicable in the lower turn-out of voters overall persuade the DPUSA that they need to stop moving right to pick up GOPer votes and instead demonstrate a reason for those non-voters who on other occasions voted Democratic to bother showing up at a polling booth? Doubt it, and they could argue a "left"-ward move would endanger their access to the support that's important: campaign finances and favourable media coverage. Will a Democratic loss spur them to work to wind back the increasingly plutocratic nature of US politics? It never did in the past. Will a Democratic loss, particularly in circumstances of bodgy counting, or, hell, the failure of a Democratic win to significantly change policies for the better, get it through various heads that voting and democracy are not synonymous? I won't be holding my breath.

There's a bunch of things I despise about this quadrennial carnival, but prominent among them is the regular arrogant hectoring from Dembots of those who see no value in tossing up between imperialist corporate whores, especially when it comes with their nonsense that the result is a matter of civilisation-saving importance. (In GOPers, on the other hand, predictions of a mule-victory ordained islamo-satanic apocalypse cum libertine-collectivist dystopia are more hilarious than annoying.) If the thanksralphers honestly believed that to be true, they'd hold off on their finger-wagging and instead get down on bended knee and beg for leftwing votes, promising anything, everything to the disaffected third party supporters and no-shows to get them to pull the Donkey lever. But apparently the impending crisis is never quite so terrifying as to compel them to drop the attitude, or to stop them lecturing about "realism" (presumably the kind of realism characterised by rewarding a party for kicking you in the teeth in the hope that it will kick you more gently next time) as opposed to actually attempting to win hearts and minds amongst the dime's-worth-of-difference types, not even in 2004, when I recall Kossacks and their ilk warned that the re-election of Dubya (the fella who did more damage to the American empire in 8 years than the Soviets managed in 80, which is another reason I oppose term limits, ho ho) would bring about some kind of fascist dictatorship. Really? Wouldn't that require a commitment to defeating this awful threat by any means necessary, regardless of the electoral outcome? Well, yeah, unless of course your partisan Cassandras are simply over-excited wankers.

But I digress. Coz it's fun.

Never mind me. Here's a proper rant, inspired by Rebecca Solnit at her drippiest:

We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act.

...

Who really is the enemy of truth and fact, a plutocrat who represents plutocrats or a fake progressive who uses radical slogans in the service of destroying everything that threatens Wall-Street profitability? If truth is what matters, isn't Obama, who campaigns on false promises and a completely bogus record, the real enemy of "truth and fact"? If cultural decay there is, is not the Republican bible thumping the negative of progressives who champion the power of vapid positive thinking while acting as Wall-Street's vote aggregators? The right has nothing to offer. And never has. Who wants to live miserably? Who wants to be poor? Who wants to be ignorant? Who wants to live in constant fear? The only real promise of the Right, its real force, the source of its ability to mobilize, has always been that it was the lesser evil. That's not a very new argument. St. Augustine makes in his 'City of God'. We're just not good enough to enjoy freedom and so we need to be oppressed to save us from ourselves. And who makes that argument better than a Left that gives up all claim to speak the truth, that cheers for someone who spent four years making hell more hellish for billions of people, in the name of opposing "cultural decay"? Is there something more toxic, more corrosive of a culture, of truth, than passing in silence the mass murder of strangers because it is convenient? Is there something more destructive for a culture of truth than shilling for a servant of the 0.0002% in the name of helping the most disadvantaged, as Solnit does?

Word. Which is why it's odd I'm hoping Obama wins, purely for the symbolism and because I'm easily amused by rightists losing their shit. Whoa, deja vu.

* Feel free to consider that a prediction.

If It's Not Close...

... we can carry on deluding ourselves our electoral system isn't a corrupt lottery.

Never mind me. Go watch A Message from The Greatest Generation(NSFW) and laugh:

While funny, this anti voter-suppression video from MoveOn isn't as funny as the related GOPer whining on the indignation-seeking clone page.

I Can Has Ennui?

Think Local

Just because it's the end of the world doesn't mean we have to acknowledge the rest of the world exists.




Spot the US covers.
h/t Caustic Cover Critic

Stockholm Syndrome

Punching Above Our Weight

I for one feel full of pride that in matters of geopolitics over the next two years people will end up thinking that "the United States and Australia" is all one word.

Amygdala

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this. - Emo Phillips

Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had.

...

Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression.

- David Eagleman in The Atlantic

If the psychopath has an amygdala which is shrunken by 18%, which is functioning more poorly when they are making moral decisions, then how just is it of us to punish psychopaths as harshly as we do in the criminal justice system, given I presume that psychopaths did not ask to have a shrunken amygdala? Or go back to cavum septum pellucidum; these individuals, these young babies did not ask to have a limbic system that was maldeveloping. To what extent should they be punished just as much as other people who lack these brain abnormalities?

And a last implication here is the extent to which we should or should not use biological data like this in order to identify children who are at risk for antisocial behaviour, and to what extent should we or should we not develop new biological interventions to try and reduce crime.

- Adrian Raine on The Science Show

As everyone agrees, the word for getting rid of a whole subspecies is not “cure”. I’m not quite sure what the right word might be, but it’s probably somewhere between extermination and genocide. (Let’s call it cultural genocide, in deference to the fact that the biological organism persists even though its identity has been eradicated.) We’re even seeing the flowering of something like civil rights advocacy, in the form of the neurodiversity movement that’s been picking up steam over the past decade or two.

From what I can see out here, though, that movement seems to be an Autistics-Only club: what’s lacking is any sort of pro-Sociopath lobby along the lines of, say, the American Vampire League from True Blood. One would think that both groups would warrant the same kind of advocacy; the arguments of cognitive subspecieshood apply equally to both, after all. You’re stepping onto a pretty slippery slope when you claim that the occupation of a distinct neurological niche warrants acceptance of one group, but this other group over here — no more responsible for its wiring than the first — should still be wiped ou— er, cured.

- Peter Watts at his blog.

Well, this all seems to be shaping up nicely. And I find myself thinking of neuroplasticity and the treatments based on it, and of the intellectual work-arounds that can help a person move from being low-functioning to high-functioning despite neurological disability, (the amusing Moffatism suggests "function" may not just be about autism and Asperger's). Would mental training help the psychopath become less of a psychopath, or, like the LSD enhanced encounter sessions described by Jon Ronson in his book, just make them better, and more dangerous, at being psychopaths? And, as I always wonder, if you can train yourself to be less mentally ill, could you train yourself to be more so, where that might prove useful? Even if it did mean losing your sense of smell? Ah, let "me" think...

Moving Still

Sacrament

Sam Harris is apparently not only a bigot, militarist, imperialist and hasbaroid, he's also a paranormalist.

Had he confined himself to discharging artillery shells at the folly of religion, his writings would have been redeemable, but Harris, though withering of the Abrahamic creeds, rejects atheistic materialism as just another religious "faith" and "sacrament" held by arrogant scientists and says, in a lunge toward mysticism, that we can survive the death of the physical body because consciousness is not generated by the brain:

"Most scientists consider themselves physicalists; this means, among other things, that they believe that our mental and spiritual lives are wholly dependent upon the workings of our brains. On this account, when the brain dies, the stream of our being must come to an end. Once the lamps of neural activity have been extinguished, there will be nothing left to survive. Indeed, many scientists purvey this conviction as though it were itself a special sacrament, conferring intellectual integrity upon any man, woman, or child who is man enough to swallow it. But the truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death. While there is much to be said against a naive conception of a soul that is independent of the brain, the place of consciousness in the natural world is very much an open question. The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present, and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove it."...

Survive death? A possibility? Out goes scientific materialism and in comes supernaturalism. If the afterlife strikes the ear as a creepy throwback to the neolithic fables of Christians, Harris assures us that it’s not the gospel’s vision of heaven that he has in mind. His brand of post-mortem rebirth bears a closer kinship to something a tad more Hindu:

"There may even be credible evidence for reincarnation"...

From an excellent and comprehensive takedown of Harris by Theodore Sayeed at Mondoweiss. It's not remotely the worst thing about them but I can't help focussing on the way the "New" atheists make atheists in general look bad. Which reminds me: at the time I deep-sixed a post on Jeff Sparrow's article about how the New Atheists are essentially defined by their politics (because I decided I was failing to make a coherent point) but here's a link to his piece if you've not yet read it. I can't say I agree with it entirely, but the history is very interesting. (Sneaky types suitably intrigued might be able to dig my discarded post out of the rss feed, where apparently nothing can be properly deleted, but bear in mind it was discarded for a reason.)

Simmering

This month's statements of the blindingly obvious, general and particular:

In 1857, Bengali soldiers (known as 'sepoys') shot their British officers and marched upon Delhi. The Great Indian Rebellion became very violent, very quickly. The rebels massacred prisoners, including women and children; the British put down the revolt with a slaughter of unprecedented proportions.

Now, that rebellion began when the troops learned that their cartridges, designed to be torn open with their teeth, would be greased with beef and pork fat, an offence to the religious sensibilities of Hindus and Muslims alike. Had Twitter been an invention of the Victorian era, London sophisticates would, no doubt, have LOLed to each other (#sepoyrage!) about the credulity of dusky savages so worked up about a little beef tallow. Certainly, that was how the mouthpieces of the East India Company spun events: in impeccably Dawkinesque terms, they blamed 'Hindoo prejudice' for the descent of otherwise perfectly contented natives into rapine and slaughter.

But no serious historian today takes such apologetics seriously. Only the most determined ignoramus would discuss 1857 in isolation from the broader context of British occupation. In form, the struggle might have been religious; in content, it embodied a long-simmering opposition to colonial rule.

That's why those who pretend the protests against The Innocence of Muslims came from nowhere merely reveal their own foolishness.

- Jeff Sparrow

CBS News reported Thursday morning that there was no anti-video protest at all at the consulate. Witnesses insist, said CBS, "that there was never an anti-American protest outside of the consulate. Instead, they say, it came under planned attack." That, noted the network, "is in direct contradiction to the administration's account of the incident." The report concluded: "What's clear is that the public won't get a detailed account of what happened until after the election."

The Obama White House's interest in spreading this falsehood is multi-fold and obvious:

For one, the claim that this attack was just about anger over an anti-Muhammad video completely absolves the US government of any responsibility or even role in provoking the anti-American rage driving it. After all, if the violence that erupted in that region is driven only by anger over some independent film about Muhammad, then no rational person would blame the US government for it, and there could be no suggestion that its actions in the region ... had any role to play.

- Glenn Greenwald

Paragraphs

Hans had developed a new voice by the time he arrived at the group, and one of the psychiatrists wanted to talk directly to it. The old voices were somewhat calmer by then. They no longer threatened to drag him off into the forest and bind, torture, and kill him. They mostly just told him that he was lazy and fat. But this new voice seemed like it might get nasty. The group had told him that he needed to talk to it. They said that he should say, “We have to live with each other and we have to make the best of it, and we can do it only if we respect each other.” He did that, and this new voice became nice. It gave him good advice. When Hans went to see the psychiatrist who wanted to talk to his voices, only the new, good voice would come out to talk. Hans could see that the old, mean voices were afraid of the psychiatrist. This stunned him. They were strong, mean voices, but they were afraid. Hans said that when he realized this, he went home very happy. Now he knew that his voices were not as strong as they pretended to be. He told me that in the same interview, the psychiatrist had explained that the old voices represented Hans’s alcoholic, depressed father. This surprised him, because the voices didn’t sound like his father. But he knew that the psychiatrist was right. And now the voices began to lose their power. Hans would go to the group and talk about the feelings he had when he heard the voices, and the voices became weaker and weaker. They came for only an hour, and then only half an hour, and then finally they simply stopped.

- Living With Voices

I think we’d make progress if we took a cue from Alan Turing and replaced the term “intelligence” with “femininity.” Obviously I’m making an embodied cognition argument here. I know this isn’t new to philosophers, and there is lively debate about it. I know that philosophers debate, and I’m all for that, but I’d like to address engineers. Explain to me, as an engineer, why it’s so important to aspire to build systems with “Artificial Intelligence,” and yet you’d scorn to build “Artificial Femininity.” What is that about?

Or, failing that, imagine a team of MIT female software engineers building “Artificial Masculinity.” Is it okay if they get Defense Department funding for that? I’ll remind you that Alan Turing himself thought it was a great idea, even though you never got around to it.

- Turing Centenary Speech (New Aesthetic)

He has often echoed Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, the canonical American speech of reconciliation. It has not occurred to him that our time may be more suited to the House Divided speech, in which Lincoln in 1858 showed why the slavery question was so important it might make the two sides irreconcilable. Obama’s many House United speeches, by contrast, are always about unity for its own sake – a curious idea. Unity for its own sake will capture neither votes nor lasting loyalty among people who crave an explanation of the elements of political right and wrong. Obama likes to say that the truth always lies somewhere ‘in between’. Fair enough at first glance. A tenable compromise between obdurate persons or opposite forces generally lies somewhere in between. But truth is different surely, truth occurs as it occurs, and often one finds it at the extremes.

- A Bad President

As a sort of peace dividend, at war’s end the U.S. military left the Australian government with not only many forklifts and cranes, but about 60,000 pallets. To handle these resources, the Australian government created the Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool, and the company eventually spawned a modern pallet powerhouse, CHEP USA, which now controls about 90 percent of the “pooled” pallet market in the United States. Pooled pallets are rented from one company that takes care of delivering and retrieving them; the alternative is a “one-way” pallet, essentially a disposable item that is scrapped, recycled or reused when its initial journey is done. You can identify pooled pallet brands by their color: If you see a blue pallet at a store like Home Depot, that’s a CHEP pallet; a red pallet comes from competitor PECO.

- The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy

The legal opportunity depended, however, upon persuading the defendants to go along with an unusual strategy. High-powered lawyers would represent Lawrence and Garner, as long as they agreed to stop saying they weren’t guilty and instead entered a “no contest” plea. By doing so, the two were promised relative personal privacy, and given a chance to become a part of gay-civil-rights history. The cause was greater than the facts themselves. Lawrence and Garner understood that they were being asked to keep the dirty secret that there was no dirty secret.

That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.

- Extreme Makeover

A prediction of the Price equation is that altruistic groups will ultimately be more successful than selfish groups under certain conditions, even though selfish individuals could outcompete altruistic individuals. Imagine the same petri dish as before but this time cells randomly congregate into a large number of mixed groups containing both altruists and cheaters. Two things will now be expected to happen. Because altruists are at a disadvantage they will reproduce more slowly than the cheaters as a result of within-group competition. However, the benefit provided by the altruists means that those groups who accidentally have more altruists will grow faster and end up having more total cells than groups composed mostly of cheaters. Because the altruistic group as a whole ends up being more successful there will be an overall increase in the number of altruistic individuals in the total population. Bring all the cells together to form random groups again and eventually you could have groups, as well as an entire population, composed only of altruists.

- The Good Fight

Gill’s arrest came when he persisted in recording the hustling convoys of lorries churning up new dirt roads. Hours in the nick. Phone calls to establish his bona fides, his connections. Thick wheels taller than a child, red hub-caps. A horrible contract this, between east-surging road monsters, hauling plant, concrete mixers, containers of standard Mediterranean blue, and the cyclists. There have been so many deaths, hell drivers up against the ticking clock and inoffensive or impatient cyclists. Sometimes, as at the junction of Middleton Road and Kingsland Road in Hackney, a young man is dragged under those red-hubbed wheels without the driver feeling a thing. Chasing another project, Gill found himself at the corner of Whiston Road, near St Leonard’s Hospital, where cellophane bouquets were being woven into the fence. He met a group, about twelve people, attaching cards and tributes. To a young man of 17, extinguished in an instant by a left-turning juggernaut with no way of registering his presence. ‘They were wailing,’ Gill said. ‘Yes, wailing.’

- The Olympics Scam

If Victorian working-class men and women didn’t live particularly well, at least they ate and felt reasonably well. Between 1850 and 1870 deaths attributed to starvation and malnutrition accounted for approximately 1.5 percent of cases in the city, a figure only slightly higher than today’s. Infectious disease, accidents, and misfortune associated with violence or intoxication rated as the most common causes of sickness and death. Come the 1870s, however, this changed. Around 1877, foreign imports of wheat, along with advances in industrial canning and preserving, caused food costs to drop some 30 percent. A few years later, cheap sugar entered the mix—literally—appearing in every kind of processed food on the market. Encouraged by middle-class social reformers, who pronounced this first wave of processed food not only healthful but hygienic (a view that gained strength from frequent food-adulteration scares), the working classes forsook their joints of mutton and bunches of watercress for American tinned fruit and New Zealand evaporated milk.

They did so to disastrous result. By the time of the Second Boer War (1899-1902) the British army found more than half of its recruits malnourished to the point of unfitness for service. The infantry deemed it necessary to lower its minimum height to five feet, down from five feet four inches, where it had stood since 1800. This apparent degeneration so alarmed the British government that it established the Committee on Physical Deterioration for the purpose of investigating the cause. It concluded that the working classes suffered from weak constitutions, which had beset them at the beginning of the previous century.

- Not by Bread-and-Marg Alone

For blacks, the ownership of guns possessed an obvious symbolic importance. An armed black man or woman was someone who rejected the passivity of the slave or the servant, someone who not only asserted their constitutional rights but showed a willingness to defend them. Conservatives understood that message, too: that’s why, in the sixties, even the NRA supported calls gun control. The wave of laws passed in the late sixties to limit gun ownership was a direct response to the new black militancy. As one critic said, the legislation was intended, ‘not to control guns but to control blacks’.

- When the Burning Moment Breaks

The British Empire bequeathed a series of partitions: Ireland, Palestine, India, Cyprus. But though colonial principles of divide and rule played a role in each, the cases were not the same. Ultimate architect of division in Ireland and Cyprus, ultimately indifferent to it in Palestine, when its time was up in the subcontinent British imperialism did not favour partition. But when London and its envoy in Delhi decided they could not prevent it, they made a human catastrophe of a setback to colonial amour-propre. The avidity of Congress for an instant division was the local motive of the disaster. But Congress could at least be sure that it would thereby gain the instruments and accoutrements of sole power in a preponderant domain. Its aim was cold-blooded, though in context rational. But it did not possess the means to realise its goal. Britain, still in command of the only army and bureaucracy across the Raj, retained those. What prompted it to inflict partition on its subjects overnight? The bauble of a title to save its face: for ‘empire’, now read ‘dominion’. The spirit of the transaction was perfectly expressed in its finale. There would be no British responsibility for the consequences. Having lit the fuse, Mountbatten handed over the buildings to their new owners hours before they blew up, in what has a good claim to be the most contemptible single act in the annals of the empire.

- Why Partition?

Deserve

Australians have apparently gone insane.

Liberty Flows

Via Laughing Squid.

Gore Vidal 1925-2012

The last conservative intellectual in America worthy of either description is dead.

Carnival

Niiiiice rant.

Surely it is time the international community abandoned this Olympic nonsense, and not just because of the massive cost and inconvenience of protecting the games, although that is bad enough. London’s preparations have plainly elevated Olympic security to new and dangerous levels of lethality. ...

The fact is that every Olympic Games is a massively state-subsidised carnival staged primarily for the economic benefit of global fizzy drink companies and television networks. ...

Olympic contests also encourage the descent of countries into nationalistic primitivism and conflict, with the medal count seen as evidence of national superiority...

...Australian Olympic officials brazenly demand increased Commonwealth funding for the elite Australian Institute of Sport in order to maximise the chance of big medal hauls...[,] already warning that Australians might win fewer medals in London than they have won at other recent Olympic contests. Australians are taught to believe that Olympic loss is a cause for national shame and victory is a cause for national ecstasy. ... A more mature nation would reject such simplistic nonsense.

This month's statement of the blindingly obvious from Geoffrey Barker at Inside Story.

The Fall

A surprising fact about the Neolithic revolution is that, according to most evidence, agriculture brought about a steep decline in the standard of living. Studies of Kalahari Bushmen and other nomadic groups show that hunter-gatherers, even in the most inhospitable landscapes, typically spend less than twenty hours a week obtaining food. By contrast, farmers toil from sunup to sundown. Because agriculture relies on the mass cultivation of a handful of starchy crops, a community’s whole livelihood can be wiped out overnight by bad weather or pests. Paleontological evidence shows that, compared with hunter-gatherers, early farmers had more anemia and vitamin deficiencies, died younger, had worse teeth, were more prone to spinal deformity, and caught more infectious diseases, as a result of living close to other humans and to livestock. A study of skeletons in Greece and Turkey found that the average height of humans dropped six inches between the end of the ice age and 3000 B.C.; modern Greeks and Turks still haven’t regained the height of their hunter-gatherer ancestors...

Why would anyone stick with such a miserable way of life? Jared Diamond... describes the situation as a classic bait-and-switch. Hunter-gatherers were "seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production." By then they were locked in - they had to farm more and more land just to keep everyone alive. Deriving strength from their large, poorly nourished numbers, the farmers gradually killed off most of the hunter-gatherers and drove the rest from their land. Diamond considers agriculture to be not just a setback but "the worst mistake in the history of the human race," the origin of "the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence."

Was the Neolithic revolution really a "curse" on our existence? The high emotional and political stakes of this question were manifested in a cover article in Der Spiegel in 2006, which proposed Göbekli Tepe as the historical site of the Garden of Eden... Evidence for the identification with Eden included Göbekli Tepe’s position between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the copious snake imagery, and Schmidt’s characterization of the region as "a paradise for hunter-gatherers." But the theory really draws its power from a reading of the Fall as an allegory for the shift from hunting-and-gathering to farming. In Eden, man and woman lived as companions, unashamed of their nakedness, surrounded by friendly animals and by "trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food." The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, like the first fruits of cultivation, brought on an immediate, irrevocable curse. Man now had to work the earth, to eat of it all the days of his life. According to Maimonides, there are legends in which Adam, after the Fall, went on to write "several works about agriculture."

God’s terrible words to Eve - "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; in pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you" - may refer to a decline in women’s health and status produced, in early agricultural societies, by the economic need to have children who would till and inherit the land. Women, having access to goat’s milk and cereal, may have weaned their children earlier, resulting in more frequent, more debilitating pregnancies. The institution of private property, meanwhile, made paternal certainty a vital concern, and monogamy, particularly for women, was strictly enforced.

To continue the interpretation, the story of Cain and Abel may be taken as an illustration of the zero-sum game of primogeniture, as well as an allegory for the slaughter of nomadic pasturage by urban agriculture. Having killed his brother, Cain goes on to found the world’s first city and name it after his son Enoch. Read in this spirit, large chunks of the Old Testament - the territorial feuds, the constant threat of exile or extinction, the sexual jealousy and sibling rivalry - begin to resemble the handbook for a grim new scarcity economy of land and love.

From Elif Batuman in the New Yorker, on Göbekli Tepe, which I went looking for after watching How to Grow a Planet.

Animated

rrrrrrrroll

stellar

via this is colossal

Militant Consensus

You can't help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues. The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker.

Embodiment

Cory Doctorow at the boings on self-serving anonymity as flack industrial standard practice:

PR people, both in-house and outside contractors, have adopted a gospel that holds that they themselves should never appear in an article. When I asked around about this practice, PR people defended it, saying that their success would be judged by the extent to which they were absent from the story. It's as though the odd doctrine that companies are people means that companies can't admit that they are made up of people. When a PR person says something innocuous, he is speaking ex cathedra, voice of the company embodied, which has possessed him and speaks through him, without interpretation or engagement by the person himself. He is the company's living embodiment, without name or identity.

Previously here, here, here and here.

Contoured

...posters that are torn away to reveal startling pairings of images, and the photographic imagery wheat-pasted over contoured surfaces, transforming what are supposed to be stately, assuring images of politicians into ghoulish, comical, or Pinnochio-esque caricatures.

Eyeteeth on the photography of Pascal Fellonneau.

Storytime

Featuring Don the Cockroach and the Life of Albert Einstein. (The Christmas card animation is also tacked on at the end.) Gosh. I haven't seen this since my family went to the local cinema to watch Life of Brian, and it was played as one of the shorts (so it was that long ago they still played shorts before the main feature), along with Away From It All, a John Cleese narrated send-up of travelogue flicks, and Spike Milligan's The Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn. Oh, wait - those two are on Youtube too. The internet really is like an emptied-out attic.

Named

Matt Groening Reveals the Location of the Real Springfield

Pfft. Stop burying the lede.

In my novel, Bart was the son of Homer Simpson. I took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West.

Hah! Every time I'd tell people about the child-killing* social-phobic lovelorn rube, played by Donald Sutherland in the movie, they'd say, "No, the cartoon dad is named after Groening's father". Hah!!!

I feel so validated.

*Err - warning... ... spoiler.

Easter Isn't Just About Zombies

Via Laughing Squid.

The Extended Mind Hypothesis

Not sure I entirely agree with this, being the introspective fellow I am, but it is most interesting:

I actually came to the conclusion that thinking is not something done by a single person. We have a false model of what thinking is. Because you can't really think by yourself, can you? You have to create someone else in your mind to explain things to, and to have an imaginary conversation with. This idea was inspired in part by the philosopher of cybernetics, Andy Clark, who proposed something he calls the extended mind hypothesis. Basically, the argument goes like this: Say you're doing long division on a piece of paper instead of doing it in your head. Clark asks why the piece of paper is not just as much a part of your mind while you're doing that calculation as the part of your brain that's doing the math. He says there's no reason at all.There are a million similar examples that philosophers like to trundle out — you have a bad memory so you write everything down. Is that piece of paper then part of your mind?

"Mind" isn't "brain" — the brain is just an organ; your mind is the dynamic interaction of various moving elements that culminates in thought. Philosophers like Clark are willing to take that argument this far, but the question that never seems to occur to them is this: when you're having a conversation with someone else, is their mind part of your mind? Nowadays, many philosophers of consciousness like to note just how razor-thin this thing we call "consciousness", that self-aware part of our mental operations, really is. The average person can rarely hold a thought for more than three or four seconds, eight at the most, before the mind wanders. It's very unusual to be fully conscious for more than a tiny window of time. That is, unless you're having a conversation with someone else, in which case you can often do it for long periods of time, especially if the conversation is with someone you find particularly interesting. In other words, most of the time we're conscious is when we're talking to someone else, or otherwise interacting intensely; during moments in which when we're not clear whose mind is whose. So consciousness is interactive, it's dyadic or triadic. It's a fallacy to imagine that thinking is something you largely do alone. On some level, of course, we already know that. But I don't think we've even begun to explore the full implications.

From an interview with David Graeber. Yeah, I know, I'm such a fanboy.

Loyalty

Once again it falls to Mr Rundle to state the blindingly obvious.

But above all, what is most significant is that absolute refusal to question either the wisdom, politics or necessity of the asset sales, one of the single most politically destructive moves in the history of Australian politics. Labor had a more solid relationship with sections of its electorate in Queensland than anywhere else  —  a relationship grounded in its ancient history but forged above all by the decades-long fixed electoral dictatorship of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

The sense that Labor, the majority choice, was excluded from power by a fix, gave Queensland Labor an extra dimension of solidarity with its base, just as that was withering away elsewhere, under the impact of the wholesale reconstruction of economic and social life in the 1990s. The asset sales move, which treated Labor’s own supporters with utter contempt, and communicated to them that the party’s loyalty was to a technocratic elite, could not have been more precisely designed to f-ck up that relationship if it had been designed in the LNP skunk-works room.

Significance

Investor confidence is the key to understanding the unprecedented Gagosian show of Hirst's spot paintings. Hirst's atelier has been turning these out at every scale since 1986, and by the artist's own estimate there are around 1,400 in existence, of which Gagosian was showing 300 under the faux-definitive title The Complete Spot Paintings. They are made by Hirst's assistants to a simple aesthetic rule – the colour sequences of the dots must be "random". ... Many of them are technically difficult to execute, such as the piece completed for the Gagosian show that comprises 25,781 one millimetre spots that the poor bloody assistants had to paint without repeating any single colour. Examples have sold at recent auctions for between $800,000 and $3m. This is to say that they are valued like unique, individual works of art, yet are made in quantities – and using methods – that seem to deny this fiction. ...

If I were Larry Gagosian ... and I wanted to help my top client shore up the value of a body of work ... what would I do?

Long-term value in the art world depends in a certain raw way on scarcity, but is largely produced through a delicate process by which aesthetic value (determined by curators and critics) intersects with market value, determined ultimately by auction prices. One point at which these two types of value intersect is in provenance. The story behind an object – its past owners, where it has been shown, its place in the story of the artist's career, and so on – confers both types of value. A landmark show, geographically dispersed in an unprecedented way, is bound to be remembered as a significant moment in Hirst's career as a global art star. When that show is accompanied by a critical apparatus, chiefly a catalogue raisonnée (a meticulously documented list of works shown, accompanied by scholarly essays), those works become part of a canon and a magical walled garden of significance is erected around them.

As Francis Outred, Christie's European head of contemporary art, told the Economist, this catalogue "could bring reassuring clarity to the question of volume". The pharmaceutical paintings are frankly too financially valuable to too many people for their actual status (banal, mass-produced, decorative) to intrude on the consensus fiction that they are scarce and important. The owners of the 1,100 paintings not in the Gagosian show should be nervous, though. They just lost their AAA rating.

Hari Kunzru in the Guardian.

Time Capsule

Go immediately and see Timothy Allen's extraordinary photographs of the Buzludha monument, a decaying communist-era modernist edifice stranded on a mountaintop in Bulgaria's Balkan Range:

Buzludha is Bulgaria’s largest ideological monument to Communism. Designed by architect Guéorguy Stoilov, more than 6000 workers were involved in its 7 year construction including 20 leading Bulgarian artists who worked for 18 months on the interior decoration...

Buried in the monument’s concrete structure, is a time capsule containing a message for future generations explaining the significance of the building.

...

In 1989, Bulgaria’s bloodless revolution ended with the disbandment of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Ownership of the monument was ceded to the state and consequently it was left to ruin.

Via a Ben Goldacre tviit.

Jean Giraud 1938-2012

Amusingly Grisly

Stability Maintenance

Maintaining stability, we’re told, is more important than anything else. Our government likes to stress the rule of law, but when stability needs to be maintained, the law goes out the window. Now that human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng and his family have been confined to house arrest in their home village, many people have attempted to visit them and express their support. But as soon as they get anywhere near his home, they are waylaid by toughs who beat them up and steal their wallets...

Sometimes stability maintenance reaches truly comic levels. When the Jasmine Revolution roiled North Africa this spring, the traditional ballad "Jasmine Flower" was banned in China. A friend of mine who had used the song in a just-completed TV program was told to remove it, and a substitute song about peonies got the thumbs down, too. In the end, he learned that no song involving flowers of any description would be permitted.

- The Arab Spring and the Chinese Autumn

Underdesigned

Building 20 became a strange, chaotic domain, full of groups who had been thrown together by chance and who knew little about one another’s work. And yet, by the time it was finally demolished, in 1998, Building 20 had become a legend of innovation, widely regarded as one of the most creative spaces in the world. In the postwar decades, scientists working there pioneered a stunning list of breakthroughs, from advances in high-speed photography to the development of the physics behind microwaves... Stewart Brand, in his study "How Buildings Learn," cites Building 20 as an example of a "Low Road" structure, a type of space that is unusually creative because it is so unwanted and underdesigned... As a result, scientists in Building 20 felt free to remake their rooms, customizing the structure to fit their needs. Walls were torn down without permission; equipment was stored in the courtyards and bolted to the roof...

The space also forced solitary scientists to mix and mingle. Although the rushed wartime architects weren’t thinking about ... the importance of physical proximity when they designed the structure, they conjured up a space that maximized ... these features, allowing researchers to take advantage of Building 20’s intellectual diversity.

Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker.

Kitty, kitty

Yes, your cat can drive you crazy. But probably not this crazy. Probably.

Excitable

[Michael] Weisend, who is working on a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency programme to accelerate learning, has been using ... transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to cut the time it takes to train snipers...

The mild electrical shock [to the brain] is meant to depolarise the neuronal membranes in the region, making the cells more excitable and responsive to inputs. Like many other neuroscientists working with tDCS, Weisend thinks this accelerates formation of new neural pathways during the time that someone practises a skill. ...

[Sidebar:]
Zapping your brain with a small current seems to improve everything from mathematical skills to marksmanship, but for now your best chance of experiencing this boost is to sign up for a lab experiment. Machines that provide transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) cost £5000 a pop, and their makers often sell them only to researchers.

That hasn't stopped a vibrant community of DIY tDCS enthusiasts from springing up. Their online forums are full of accounts of their home-made experiments, including hair-curling descriptions of blunders that, in one case, left someone temporarily blind.

The New Scientist on research into "flow".

Stand-in

I think Iran needs the equivalent of an Elvis impersonator.

Build Only Half

As is clear from Pruitt-Igoe's genesis, wagering on what a built environment is meant to accomplish is a fairly permanent proposition. Even a design optimized for a particular moment in time may become obsolete as old needs recede and are supplanted by new ones. The unpredictability of the city is such that one can never anticipate what those needs might be... So, how might we introduce this kind of thinking into design and architecture? That is, how do you build something in a way that allows you to change your mind later on?

The Elemental project’s solution was this: the project would plan for the “medium” size houses, but build only half the house. They would plan (and build) in such a way that more units could fit in, and that the families could easily expand into the “missing” half when they were able to do so. Elemental built a system of row houses in which half of every unit is missing. But because they have built the part that requires the most expertise and investment – the load bearing structure, the roof and so on – the inhabitants could expand into the missing voids at a later stage – in any way they liked. This also dealt with the pervading problem of social housing – the uniformity and lack of individuality.

Thus, Aravena’s group understood and worked with the limitations – budgetary and otherwise – that were being imposed on their design. In fact, they turned these limitations into points of strength: few architects have the courage or insight to allow their tenants to become co-designers ... the consultations with the future residents of the Iquique settlement revealed much the same misgivings about living in a highrise as Pruitt-Igoe’s architect expressed almost 40 years earlier. If nothing else, this is illustrative of both the constancy of the human condition, as well as the persistence of design problems. However, the real progress in this case is that neither the architect nor the residents were passive players before more dominant institutional forces, such as the role played by St Louis Housing Authority in the 1950s.

Even the larger urban environment could stand to benefit from such agile thinking. During the design competition to rebuild the World Trade Center, a group of designers led by Rafael Viñoly came together to propose a daring design: a lattice-work evocation of the twin towers that would be mostly hollow. Part of the purpose behind the latticework was to create ample space for future designers and stakeholders to create new constructions that would be appropriate for the needs arising at that time. I honestly don't believe the proposal had a chance of being chosen, but it is a striking riposte to the idea that skyscrapers, which might be considered the leading indicators of our built civilization, are not necessarily required to be subject to the same kinds of centralized planning that constituted one of Pruitt-Igoe's most serious weaknesses. That this design was proposed on the ruins of Yamasaki’s greatest buildings is an irony that should not be lost on us.

Misha Lepetic at 3QD

Those Nazi Kunst

I've wanted to own the accompanying book to the 1991 exhibition of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Art Institute of Chicago on the Nazis' "Entartete Kunst" collection for some time, but was held at bay by the hefty price tag of even second hand copies. For some reason, I had failed until now to discover this extraordinary resource: the whole thing online, complete with essays, reproductions of the various works, artist biographies and a translated facsimile of the vile catalogue to the original exhibition. Gear!

Sight-seeing

The next week was spent in trains and cars. The car would often stop in the middle of nowhere. We would get out and I would be shown a site where ‘GBL Comrade Kim Il-sung gave on-the-spot guidance to peasants on the wheat harvest.’ At one point, in the middle of nowhere, I asked them to stop. My bladder was full. As I got out of the car I said: ‘I’m just going to give on-the-spot guidance to that tree.’ The interpreter and minder convulsed with laughter. It was the most reassuring sight of my trip. Nothing was said when I returned to the car, but we never stopped again.

From Tariq Ali's LRB Diary on visiting North Korea in the 60s. "GBL" stands for "great and beloved leader" in case you were wondering and haven't read the whole thing. And, yes, this is a slightly matured cite.