I would think that people of faith, in particular, should be wary of politicians holding ceremonial observances of National Prayer Day. For one thing, one's communications with God are intensely personal. If you think of God as a person, and not as a political weapon, the idea of having a ceremony of this kind would be like observing National Have A Serious Talk With Your Spouse Day by having such a talk in front of TV cameras.
Question: You have always been a member of an industrial research lab. What is the difference between an industrial research lab and a university department?Leslie Lamport: Jean Renoir wrote in his autobiography that someone once asked his father, the painter Auguste, why he painted from nature. Renoir père answered that if he were to try painting a tree in the studio, he would be able to draw four or five different kinds of leaves, and the rest would all look like them. But nature creates millions [his count] of different kinds of trees. I like working in industry for the same reason Renoir liked to paint from nature.
Less than 18 months ago, Sasha Lessin and Janet Kira Lessin gathered before their friends near their home in Maui, and proclaimed their love for one another. Nothing unusual about that—Sasha, 68, and Janet, 55—were legally married in 2000. Rather, this public commitment ceremony was designed to also bind them to Shivaya, their new 60-something "husband."... Unlike open marriages and the swinger days of the 1960s and 1970s, these unions are not about sex with multiple outside partners. Nor are they relationships where one person is involved with two others, who are not involved with each other. That's closer to bigamy. Instead, triads—"triangular triads," to use precise polyamorous jargon—demand that all three parties have full relationships, including sexual, with each other.
The party's ideas — about economic issues, social issues and just about everything else — are not popular ideas. They are extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to its extremely conservative base. A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority agenda. The party's new, Hooverish focus on austerity on the brink of another depression does not seem to fit the national mood, and it's shamelessly hypocritical, given the party's recent history of massive deficit spending on pork, war and prescription drugs in good times, not to mention its continuing support for deficit-exploding tax cuts in bad times.
"There's a certain charm to status updates of 'I'm making soup.' These things have a beauty to them because they're little domestic details of our lives, once upon a time we lived in villages and everybody knew that someone was making soup. Now we live in isolation. If you look at it positively, you say, 'These are ways to alleviate the loneliness and return to a more communal time.' In certain ways you could say that these are anti-narcissistic gestures, they're gestures of community that bring us together."
It is a story of an old empire passing the torch to the new, Britain handing over one of its furthest-flung territories to the United States and expelling the native inhabitants to make way for the construction of a military base that has since become central to US control of the Indian Ocean and domination of the Persian Gulf. It is the tale of how a remote island idyll was simply emptied of its people, allowing for the creation of a place so secret that no journalist has been allowed to visit, a key staging post in George W. Bush's war on terror, both the launch pad for the B-1s, B-2 "stealth" bombers, and B-52s that pounded Afghanistan and Iraq and a crucial node in the CIA's rendition system, a "black site" through which at least two high-value suspected terrorists were spirited, far from the prying eyes of international law. ...He argues that there are at least sixteen such cases, where "often in isolated locations, often on islands, and often affecting indigenous populations, the US military has displaced local peoples" to make way for bases or similar activity. They range from the Bikini Atoll, picked for a nuclear test, to Koho'olawe, Hawaii, taken after Pearl Harbor; from Guam, of which the US military controls around one third, to the Philippines, where "Clark Air Base and other US bases were built on land previously reserved for the indigenous Aetas people." The Navy pushed aside Aleutian islanders in Alaska, Puerto Ricans from the small island of Vieques, and Inughuit people from Danish Greenland—to say nothing of the 250,000 people displaced by the US base in Okinawa, fully half of the island's population.
The winter moth caterpillar is partial to the leaves of apple and cherry trees, but any deciduous tree will do. Around Arnhem, in the Netherlands, it feeds on oak leaves. But the caterpillar has a delicate timing problem: it must hatch just when the new leaf buds burst open, revealing the young leaves. If it hatches too early, or too late, it may starve. Too early, and there are no leaves to eat; too late, and increased tannin concentrations make the leaves less digestible. Either circumstance leads to a lower weight at pupation or to a longer larval period, resulting in a higher probability of the caterpillar’s being eaten. The date of the oak bud burst is cued largely by spring temperatures and can vary considerably from year to year. There is strong selection pressure on the winter moth to synchronize its egg hatching to the oak bud burst. But the moth’s timing mechanism is determined by the relationship between frost-days (below 0°C, or 32° F) and those days with a temperature above 3.9°C (39° F), rather than mean temperature alone.... Those organisms that succeed will be the ones with the flexibility to change and adapt to the new temporal regime faster than the speed of the changes in seasonal timing. Some species may migrate poleward. Others may move to higher altitudes. But complete communities will not simply move north or south in synchrony with changing temperatures. Instead, the blend of plants and animals will change. Climate change could create ecosystems that are unknown today. We do not know what plants and animals they will contain. We do not know what will result when the temporal webs that connect plants and animals are broken. It may be that generations to come will see nature’s wonders. But it is more likely that much of the awe and wonder that obtain from the diversity of life on earth that we know at present will be lost.
Among the inside crowd, the Webby Awards were always a joke, a masquerade where Internet fanboys and fangirls played dress-up and feigned the red-carpet rituals of Hollywood's real ceremonies. But somewhere along the way, the organizers figured out that this goofy charade could be milked for profit. And now that mainstream entertainers like Jimmy Fallon and Seth McFarlane are sweeping this year's awards, the parodic circle is complete.
If you wanted to picture how a typical genius might develop, you’d take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability. It wouldn’t have to be a big talent, just enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction. Then you would want her to meet, say, a novelist, who coincidentally shared some similar biographical traits. Maybe the writer was from the same town, had the same ethnic background, or, shared the same birthday — anything to create a sense of affinity. This contact would give the girl a vision of her future self. It would give her a glimpse of an enchanted circle she might someday join. It would also help if one of her parents died when she was 12, infusing her with a profound sense of insecurity and fueling a desperate need for success. Armed with this ambition, she would read novels and literary biographies without end. This would give her a core knowledge of her field. She’d be able to chunk Victorian novelists into one group, Magical Realists in another group and Renaissance poets into another. This ability to place information into patterns, or chunks, vastly improves memory skills. She’d be able to see new writing in deeper ways and quickly perceive its inner workings. Then she would practice writing. Her practice would be slow, painstaking and error-focused. ...Then our young writer would find a mentor who would provide a constant stream of feedback, viewing her performance from the outside, correcting the smallest errors, pushing her to take on tougher challenges. By now she is redoing problems — how do I get characters into a room — dozens and dozens of times. She is ingraining habits of thought she can call upon in order to understand or solve future problems. The primary trait she possesses is not some mysterious genius. It’s the ability to develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine.
In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him". "The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus, we hunt them down, get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business." The footage, shot about a year ago by Brian Hughes, a documentary maker and former member of the US military who spent several days in Bagram, was obtained by Al Jazeera's James Bays, who has covered Afghanistan extensively.
I don't want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it's wrong. People don't understand the dictionary—it's called queer. Queer means strange and unusual. It's not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that. You know, God is pretty explicit in what we're supposed to do—what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we're supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins. I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children.
The boars were as big and as furry as bears. Each had its own pen—but in the last stall, in place of a pig, was what looked like a blue plastic saddle standing a few feet off the ground. Watje opened this gate and led a white boar into the corral.“I’ve been training this one,” Watje said. “We’ll see how he does.”The boar walked straight to the dummy and mounted without hesitation. Now, to be fair, this is a position few mammals are able to maintain with grace. But this boar, no doubt due to his lack of experience, made the pose look particularly awkward. One foreleg bent under his body. His back arched and his head lolled on the saddle.Watje reached under the pig’s belly with one latex-gloved hand and squeezed a stream of clear liquid onto the ground.“You want to get all the urine out of there,” he said. “Then you just hold on to the penis, which can be difficult because it’s slimy.”He saw the look on my face and laughed. “Sometimes it’s so slippery I have to take the glove off to hold on.”The tip of a boar’s penis is shaped like a corkscrew, which gives the semen harvester something to grip. The hog doesn’t need friction, just pressure.The boar, meanwhile, was shifting, working his way around the dummy. Perhaps he had realized that things were not quite going according to plan and had hit on the idea that he had picked the wrong side. Watje rolled his eyes and hung on. When the moment came, he signaled me and I handed him the cup—an insulated coffee mug lined with a plastic bag and covered in cheesecloth. Watje pulled the penis—two feet long and pencil-thin—to the cup’s mouth and held it for three long minutes as the boar ejaculated. Then Watje took the cup inside. It held about half a pint.“Usually I’d dilute it, but I’m out of distilled water,” he said, breaking what had become an uncomfortable silence.“Do you ever stop in the middle of that and think, ‘I’m holding a boar’s penis’?” I blurted.Watje laughed. “Sometimes my friends give me a hard time about it. But no, I’ve been doing this since I was a kid.”He poured some of the liquid into a squeeze bottle and affixed the bottle to a long straw with a sponge on the end. The remaining semen went in a refrigerator—he sends it overnight to buyers at fifty dollars a dose. Depending on the boar, each ejaculate contains enough sperm to fertilize between ten and forty sows.The sow was easy. Housed close to the boars, she needed no foreplay, none of the haunch and belly rubbing that Becky had described. Watje just sat on her back, facing her tail, and slid the semen straw inside. The sow leaned her heavy head against my shin while he slowly squeezed the bottle empty. Then it was over.
One striking implication of Africa’s population growth is that there will be a great religious revolution, as Africa becomes the home of monotheism. By midcentury, sub-Saharan Africa is likely to be the demographic center of Islam, home to as many Muslims as Asia and to far more than inhabit the Middle East. The non- Arab Muslim countries of Africa— Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal—constitute the one region of the Islamic world where birthrates remain high. In several of these countries, the average woman will have upward of five children in her lifetime.Christianity will also feel the effects of Africa’s growth. By 2025, there will be as many Christians in sub- Saharan Africa— some 640 million— as in South America. By 2050, it is almost certain that most of the world’s Christians will live in Africa. As Kenyan scholar John Mbiti writes, “The centers of the church’s universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, and Manila.”...By 2050, the national populations are expected to more than double in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, reaching 147 million and 91 million, respectively. Smaller countries— such as Liberia, Niger, Mali, Chad, and Burundi—are expected to experience growth of 100 to 200 percent. These are the countries with the weakest state institutions, the least infrastructure, the feeblest economies, and thus the poorest health and education systems. They also face daunting problems of environmental degradation—and the lesson from Darfur and the Rwanda genocide is that disaster can follow when population growth strains local environments so badly that people cannot feed themselves.... There is another development that could affect future Indian and Chinese birthrates: the use of sonograms to ascertain the sex of a fetus. Wider availability of this technology has permitted an increase in gender- specific abortions. The official Chinese figures suggest that 118 boys are now being born in China for every 100 girls. As a result, millions of Chinese males may never find a mate with whom to raise a conventional family. The Chinese call such lonely males “bare branches.”
From here: Even if lenders do agree to modify loans, many Americans will still be in trouble. That’s because nearly 14 million homeowners are “under water” — they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. In a bankruptcy, such homeowners would likely have their loan principal reduced, lowering their payments and helping them to rebuild equity. In a typical voluntary loan modification, however, the monthly payment is reduced, but not the principal. That puts under-water borrowers at high risk of redefault, because there is no equity to fall back on if a financial setback leaves them unable to make mortgage payments. The negative feedback loop — foreclosures beget falling home prices, which beget foreclosures, further weakening the banks — is well under way.
As more of us live more of our lives in digital contexts, it seems plausible that immaterialism will become more common. Consuming things made of bits might sound weird, but actually it offers a lot of the same attractions that make people consume things made of atoms. Facebook’s digital gifting is one relatively mainstream example. Consider the Fort Worth, Tex., company Alamofire. Its best-known creation is a Facebook application called Pack Rat. While nominally a game, it’s really premised on a virtual version of the urge to collect things: in this case, the things are “cards” that are basically little pixel-pictures. The company calls its wares “digital collectibles.”Josh Williams, a founder of Alamofire, figured out the appeal of collecting pixelated stuff by accident. Originally he was in the business of designing digital icons, and he and his partners decided to make some of their creations available for others to use, free. There were thousands of takers, and he got curious about what they were doing with the icons. The most prominent answer turned out to be: Nothing much, just collecting them, trading them, using them as means of fun social connection with other collectors. “A light bulb went off,” Williams says. “We were in the wrong business.” Alamofire’s new project is called Gowalla. This time, the product is more tied to mobile devices like the iPhone and involves “collecting” digital icons by (nondigitally) visiting certain spots in various cities. Really, he figures, it’s not so different from what inspired earlier generations to collect postcards or other gewgaws. But, Williams adds, without “all the physical crap.”
Photo from the exhibition 'Collage Geomancy' by Michael Anderson at the Marlborough Chelsea
From here: Google’s entire business model is the commoditization of other people’s content. See Google News, Gmail, AdSense/Adwords, etc. Book Search puts Google in the driver’s seat of determining how online books are monetized, at what rates, what share Google, authors and publishers get, how the metrics are determined. Books are reduced to data. Competitors are cut out. Other players remain unable to use the orphan works. Google leverages the audience. Newspapers will die because they have been commoditized out of existence (with some fatal mistakes of their own along the way.) Do we really want books to go the same way?
Those of us who were in law enforcement in New York City in the late '80s and early '90s remember how drug dealers pioneered the use of 9-mm guns. We heard over and over from our friends in the police department that they were outgunned, that their service revolvers were no match for semi-automatics in a shootout. So what did the police do? The New York City Police Department finally bought 9-mms, too. It was a classic arms race, with the gun manufacturers in the economically enviable position of selling bigger and better guns to both sides. This prompts a simple question: Why do we buy guns from companies that permit their products to be sold to bad guys?
ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era; M-W-F: 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Instructor: Robert LanhamPrerequisites: Students must have completed at least two of the following.ENG: 232WR — Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of DrollLIT: 223 — Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or LessENG: 102 — Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are TalkingENG: 301 — Advanced Blog and Book SkimmingENG: 231WR — Facebook Wall Alliteration and AssonanceLIT: 202 — The Literary Merits of LolcatsLIT: 209 — Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption
The border between the United States and the Federated States (“Confederate” being a word that remains a little too provocative) might not be as trouble-free as that between the United States and Canada, but, compared to the border with Mexico, it would probably require somewhat fewer armed citizen militias and fences topped with concertina wire to thwart illegal aliens desperate for a better life. On balance, trade relations between the U.S. and the F.S. would be advantageous to both. Cultural exchanges, tourism, and even a degree of military cooperation would be far from unthinkable.For the old country, the benefits would be obvious. A more intimately sized Congress would briskly enact sensible gun control, universal health insurance, and ample support for the arts, the humanities, and the sciences. Although Texas itself has been a net contributor to the Treasury—it gets back ninety-four cents for each dollar it sends to Washington—nearly all the other potential F.S. states, especially the ones whose politicians complain most loudly about the federal jackboot, are on the dole. (South Carolina, for example, receives $1.35 on the dollar, as compared with Illinois’s seventy-five cents.) Republicans would have a hard time winning elections for a generation or two, but eventually a responsible opposition party would emerge, along the lines of Britain’s Conservatives, and a normal alternation in power could return. The Federated States, meanwhile, could get on with the business of protecting the sanctity of marriage, mandating organized prayer sessions and the teaching of creationism in schools, and giving the theory that eliminating taxes increases government revenues a fair test. Although Texas and the other likely F.S. states already conduct some eighty-six per cent of executions, their death rows remain clogged with thousands of prisoners kept alive by meddling judges. These would be rapidly cleared out, providing more prison space for abortion providers. Although there might be some economic dislocation at first, the F.S. could remedy this by taking advantage of its eligibility for OPEC membership and arranging a new “oil shock.” Failing that, foreign aid could be solicited from Washington. But the greatest benefit would be psychological: freed from the condescension of metropolitan elites and Hollywood degenerates, the new country could tap its dormant creativity and develop a truly distinctive Way of Life.
From here: The broader symbolism here is that it’s another sign that Barack Obama’s first two years may not look like Bill Clinton’s. In 1993-94, Clinton’s approval ratings sagged, his party lost special elections everywhere, and conservative Democrats were switching to the GOP. Obama’s approval ratings are high and holding steady, Democrats remain far more popular than Republicans, Democrats held the first special election, and now they’ve picked up a party switch. It’s still early, but Obama is starting to build a self-sustaining psychology of success.
Rekha Kalindi, a 12-year-old girl living in Bararola, India,refused to get married when her parents tried to arrange one she wanted to stay in school. Her revolt, and those of two other girls in the region, have halted new child marriages in their rural region of West Bengal, India. The legal age for marriage in India is 18 for girls and 21 for boys. But arecent study published in the Lancet found 44.5 percent of Indian women in their early 20s had been wed by the time they were 18. Of those, 22.6 percent had been married before age 16, 2.6 percent before age 13.
Gone are the new rich — the Russian oligarchs and oil-rich Middle Easterners, as well as the American hedge fund magnates — who in flush times were willing to pay any price. Gone too are the Europeans who were active when the weak dollar made their purchases seem cheap. Today’s buyers tend to be older collectors who bowed out of the market when prices began escalating several years ago. These patrons have far more conservative tastes, preferring works by tried-and-true names like Alexander Calder or Robert Ryman rather than those by younger artists like Takashi Murakami or Damien Hirst who were snapped up by speculators and have now lost some 50 percent of their value.What is selling, said Brett Gorvy, a co-head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary-art department, is “the right artist and the right work.”
We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.
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Roughly 1.2 million Armenians would either be slaughtered by Turkish killing squads or would die of exposure or starve to death in camps in the deserts at the southeastern edges of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian genocide was the culmination of a decades long process of persecution of the Armenians in the Ottoman empire. That persecution was punctuated in the last two decades of the 19th century during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamit, the so-called Red Sultan.
From the interview: Islam played a major role both in the period of the Abdul Hamit massacres [1894-1896] and the 1909 Adana massacres and the World War I genocide. During the Abdul Hamit era, Islam was the main impetus, the direct impetus of the massacres, because 90 percent of the massacres took place on Fridays, which is the religious holiday. Immediately at the end of the religious ceremonies in the mosques, the mobs, harangued by Muslim clerics, were incited and as a result the motivation was reinforced to attack and massacre the Armenian population of the respective regions. In other words, Islam as an institution, and champions of Islam, the Muslim clerics, played a major role in the organization and execution of the series of massacres. In World War I, Islam also was exploited by way of formally declaring jihad, the main target of which became the Christian Armenians. Holy War can only be proclaimed by the sultan who is also the Khalif, the supreme religious authority, and the Sheikh ul Islam, the religious head of Islam. One of the greatest incentives of jihad for motivating people to kill is the promise of celestial bliss, and other kinds of rewards in heaven. This played a major role in mobilizing the masses, the naïve masses. In Archbishop Balakian's book, the Armenian Golgotha, there are scenes in which, after every massacre, the head of the gendarmes units, spread his prayer rug and thanked god for serving him through jihad-borne massacres massacres.
Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime. The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them."There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity...."The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there." It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003.
Relatives mourned in Dhuluiya, north of Baghdad at the funeral of an Iraqi who was among the 80 killed across the country yesterday. Photo from the Associated Press
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From here: Juan Montoya created a piece of “art” by hanging a canvas he painted with Benjamin Moore’s Big Country Blue over an ample sofa. One visitor to the room asked if the painting was by Barnett Newman,” he said. Nobody knows it didn’t come from a gallery.” Mr. Montoya used a 6 by 12 foot canvas; a 24 by 48 inch canvas, sized to fit a less cavernous room, is about $36 at dickblick.com.
The Emmy-winning scientist [Bill Nye] angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: "God made two great lights - the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars." He pointed out that the sun, the "greater light," is but one of countless stars and that the "lesser light" is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light. A number of audience members left the room at that point, visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence. "We believe in a God!" exclaimed one woman as she left the room with three young children.
