February 01, 2011
John Kerry: Allying Ourselves With the Next Egypt
John Kerry in the New York Times:
Even if the protests shaking Egypt subside in the coming days, the chaos of the last week has forever changed the relationship between the Egyptian people and their government. The anger and aspirations propelling a diverse range of citizens into the streets will not disappear without sweeping changes in the social compact between the people and the government — and these events also call for changes in the relationship between the United States and a stalwart Arab ally.
President Hosni Mubarak must accept that the stability of his country hinges on his willingness to step aside gracefully to make way for a new political structure. One of the toughest jobs that a leader under siege can perform is to engineer a peaceful transition. But Egyptians have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities.
Ushering in such a transformation offers President Mubarak — a great nationalist ever since his generation of young officers helped their country escape the last vestiges of British colonialism — the chance to end the violence and lawlessness, to begin improving the dire economic and social conditions in his country and to change his place in history.
It is not enough for President Mubarak to pledge “fair” elections, as he did on Saturday. The most important step that he can take is to address his nation and declare that neither he nor the son he has been positioning as his successor will run in the presidential election this year. Egyptians have moved beyond his regime, and the best way to avoid unrest turning into upheaval is for President Mubarak to take himself and his family out of the equation.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 06:49 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Exhilarated by the Hope in Cairo
Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:
...our messaging isn’t working, and many Egyptian pro-democracy advocates said they feel betrayed that Americans are obsessing on what might go wrong for the price of oil, for Israel, for the Suez Canal — instead of focusing on the prospect of freedom and democracy for the Egyptian people.
Maybe I’m too caught up in the giddiness of Tahrir Square, but I think the protesters have a point. Our equivocation isn’t working. It’s increasingly clear that stability will come to Egypt only after Mr. Mubarak steps down. It’s in our interest, as well as Egypt’s, that he resign and leave the country. And we also owe it to the brave men and women of Tahrir Square — and to our own history and values — to make one thing very clear: We stand with the peaceful throngs pleading for democracy, not with those who menace them.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Mohamed ElBaradei: "If he [Mubarak] wants to save his skin, he better leave."
Robert Fisk meets with ElBaradei in Cairo and writes in The Independent:
ElBaradei is surprisingly mild when he speaks of Mubarak the man. He last saw him two years ago. "I would go to see him when I returned from a UN mission or a holiday. I always received a friendly reception. It was a very cordial relationship. It was one-to-one, just us, and there was no formality. I would tell him what I thought of this or that problem, what might be done. He doesn't really have advisers who have the guts to tell him the truth."
Much good did ElBaradei's advice do. He is outraged by the arson and looting. When I ask if state security policemen were behind the arson – which is used by Mubarak, Obama and Clinton to "tag" those who demand Mubarak's departure with violence – the mouse shows its teeth. "They [the police] were, we are now hearing about documents which show that some of these uniformed officers have taken off their uniforms and gone about looting. And everybody says that they have been ordered to do this by the regime or the ministry of interior or whatever. And if this is true, then this is the most sinister of criminal acts. We have to verify this. But for sure, many of these bands of thugs and looters are from part of the secret police."
And then suddenly, in that high voice, eyes glittering behind pebbling spectacles, the mouse becomes a tiger. "When a regime withdraws the police entirely from the streets of Cairo, when thugs are part of the secret police, trying to give the impression that without Mubarak the country will go into chaos, this is a criminal act. Somebody has to be accountable. And now, as you can hear in the streets, people are not saying Mubarak should go, they are now saying he should be put on trial. If he wants to save his skin, he better leave."
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 06:36 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Out of Camelot, Knights in White Coats Lose Way
Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times:
When I look at my career at midlife, I realize that in many ways I’ve become the kind of doctor I never thought I’d be: often impatient, at times indifferent or paternalistic. Of course, the loss of one’s ideals is a crucial component of the midlife phase, often leading to depression, nostalgia and regret: the proverbial midlife crisis. And it occurs to me that my profession is in a sort of midlife crisis of its own. The modern era of medicine began a little less than 40 years ago, with the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, which ushered in the age of managed care. Managed care was supposed to save American medicine by stemming the rise in spending initiated by Medicare. It failed to do that. Instead, it did away with the kind of medicine that made people want to be doctors in the first place.
In the last four decades, doctors have lost the special status they used to enjoy.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:24 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Sojourner Truth 1797-1883: Ain't I a Woman?
At least one post every day will be devoted to honor Black History Month:
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree. The lady was a tall African American who spoke Dutch and English. She was born a slave in Ulster County, New York, around the year 1797. Sojourner's parents were James Baumfree and Elizabeth Baumfree. Sojourner had 12 siblings. In 1826, Sojourner Truth lived with a Dutch couple, and hence, her legal name became Isabella Van Wenger or Isabella Van Wagener. Something like that. In 1843, and discovering her religious side, Isabella renamed herself Sojourner Truth. The word sojourner means temporary resident or visitor. And on her feet she was, traveling and preaching. Sojourner found her niche market and stood up for the rights of African Americans and the rights of women. She could not write but knew how to fight for human rights. Case in point was her Ain't I a Woman speech which she delivered in 1851 at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
[Sojourner Truth spoke in a southern dialect that might be difficult for modern readers. Here is the speech in modern English:]
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about? That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ar'n't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ar'n't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them. Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:15 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Who's Behind Egypt's Revolt?
Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation:
It’s spontaneous, yes, triggered by the explosion in Tunisia. But contrary to some media reports, which have portrayed the upsurge in Egypt as a leaderless rebellion, a fairly well organized movement is emerging to take charge, comprising students, labor activists, lawyers, a network of intellectuals, Egypt’s Islamists, a handful of political parties and miscellaneous advocates for “change.” And it’s possible, but not at all certain, that the nominal leadership of the revolution could fall to Mohammad ElBaradei, the former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who returned to Egypt last year to challenge President Mubarak and who founded the National Association for Change.
Let’s look at the emerging coalition, in its parts.
First, by all accounts, is the April 6 Youth Movement. Leftists, socialists and pro-labor people know that the movement takes its name from April 6, 2008, when a series of strikes and labor actions by textile workers in Mahalla led to a growing general strike by workers and residents and then, on April 6, faced a brutal crackdown by security forces. A second, allied movement of young Egyptians developed in response to the killing by police of Khaled Said, a university graduate, in Alexandria. Both the April 6 group and another group, called We Are All Khaled Said, built networks through Facebook, and according to one account the April 6 group has more than 80,000 members on Facebook. The two groups, which work together, are nearly entirely secular, pro-labor and support the overthrow of Mubarak and the creation of a democratic republic.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:30 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Interview with anti-government protester at Tahir Square
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:29 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Interview with a man planning to attend the huge planned protest today in Cairo
Parvez Sharma in Al Bab:
Me: I hope you all are ok. Just describe your day—I know tomorrow is very important so I will try not to interrupt.
O: Today was a continuation of other days—We went to Midan Tahrir—It was much larger today—and there were way more women today, amazing—the military followed the same procedure—checked our ID’s and very cordial but I think that there was way more people today---people from all different groups of society from Zamalek to Masriyat Naser, from Mohandessin to Giza…Today for the first time it felt like the people had secured their homes well and could confidently come out—other days many other family members especially housewives had stayed back to guard—but today they were all there—everyone spoke about how the looting was a design by Mubarak to keep us in our homes…Parvez, there were also so many much older people today, you know 60 and above, who had stayed away because of the violence. But today any fear seemed to have disappeared. Really it felt like we knew exactly what we want…
Me: So tomorrow is huge—you must sleep tonight—both of you—all of you—who knows what will happen?
O: We are meeting at Tahrir at 9 am and marching to Helioplos—this is very important Parvez—After 7 days this government comfortable with us spending time in Tahrir and they are even spinning it and saying: See we are allowing protesters in Tahrir, so we are so democratic—It was so clear today that we needed to go tomorrow to Heliopolis, to the presidential palace where Mubarak is hiding…All of the organizing I have seen since Friday really has been through fliers, through pamphlets…today they said—we are marching to Heliopolis tomorrow—if you cant come to Tahrir in the morning then join us on the way…this I a huge turning point in this revolution … huge …. It is also very important Parvez to know that people are saying they request the fall of the regime, not government—its an important distinction…
Me: Have you been watching Al Jazeera?
O: Are you kidding me? I can either be there or stay at home and watch the damn TV and try and get on the fucking internet which is not working and try and do these damn tweets you keep on telling me about…I mean yes, some people watch it when they go home at night and today the word on the street was that the Egyptian media finally caught up with the international media—people were saying that for the first time now they are starting to report—they are showing that there are people, looting, violence—Even State TV…Nile TV is reporting…and you know we also have this state public radio channel…its at 88.7 fm and even they are being more balanced than before, people were saying…. You know till yesterday the assholes were showing streets of Cairo are calm.
More here. [Thanks to John Ballard.]
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:28 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Insane action scene from Endhiran
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:25 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Seven Places in My Heart
Journalist and award-winning author Mohammed Hanif travels back in time to tell the story of the places he’s called ‘home’ in Karachi. He recounts a journey from the backwaters to the bright lights of the big city – and how the literary seed was sown…
Here is the story of seven places that are part of his story.
Mohammed Hanif in Newsline:
Aagay Samundar Hai
Your first home in Karachi is a little room in a big, empty house near Sea View. The owners live in Norway, the servants live in the house and you live in a little extension that was probably meant to accommodate those servants. You have one bag of clothes and books, a cassette player and three tapes. You drive a Suzuki 100 that you bought from a milkman. This is the first time in your life that you are living close to the beach. Judging by the stench, in the evenings it seems half of Karachi’s population has pissed in the sea. At night you wake up to the roar of the waves. For a few moments you are scared; is this a giant bellowing? Is it a tornado approaching? Is this what grown-up life is like?
A pair of Bengali servants – you’ll never discover their exact relationship – take care of the house. To your lonely heart it seems they have been hired to canoodle in every corner of the house. They seem so much in love with each other, it frightens you. You wonder if you should have rented the premises in Baloch Colony, where the owner promised that the water pump was situated only one street away and it would be okay if you wanted to keep goats.
Your sustenance comes from a one litre bottle of Fanta and a large fruit bun. You take a bite, you take a sip, you kick-start your bike and roar into the city. One day you pick up the bun and see fungus growing on it. You start spending your nights in Sabzi Mandi.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 03:51 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
January 31, 2011
The use and misuse of Srinivasa Ramanujan
by Hartosh Singh Bal
Over the past month there have been two separate reasons to return to the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan. The first was the result of an astounding piece of mathematics by Ken Ono and his colleagues on the theory of partitions, bringing to a conclusion some of Ramanujan’s most interesting work in number theory. The second was thanks to Patrick French’s recent book – India, a portrait – which ends with a short two page biography of Ramanujan. The first Ramanujan is of course the Ramanujan who should matter, the mathematician, the second is unfortunately the Ramanujan who has come to occupy public memory, the metaphor.
It is not clear what French’s Ramanujan stands for in a chapter that seeks to explain the specifics of individual, social and organizational behavior on the basis of particular Indian traits such as religion or caste, but given the title of the chapter – Only in India – it does seem that French believes there was something particularly Indian about Ramanujan’s story.
This belief is not unique to French and has only been compounded by Ramanujan’s own description of the Goddess of Namagiri as the source of his inspiration. The result is that Ramanujan has come to embody certain romantic notion of eastern or more specifically Indian thought. Even those who want to allude to Ramanujan the mathematician do so in such terms. Paul Hoffman, in an otherwise entertaining book on the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos – The Man who Loved Only Numbers – writes, "While Hardy and Ramanujan’s partnership lasted, the two men stood the world of pure mathematics on its head. It was East meets West, mysticism meets formality, and the combination was unstoppable."
Ramanujan’s otherwise excellent biographer Robert Kanigel devotes the entire first chapter of the book – The Man who Knew Infinity – to Ramanujan’s religious and social upbringing. However important this may have been to Ramanujan the man, the claim that it is central to Ramanujan the mathematician does not stand up to scrutiny. Ramanujan did not learn his mathematics in a temple. By the time he went to school only a few of the traditional Vedic schools still functioned. They had been largely replaced by schools teaching a curriculum based on European science.
Continue reading "The use and misuse of Srinivasa Ramanujan"
Posted by Hartosh Singh Bal at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (11)
Quaeries #6: Doctor Smith His Demise
Justin E. H. Smith
O Isaac? Isaac! Come forthwith! The clamp 'round my gouty ankle must needs be tighten'd. That's right, Isaac. The left ankle. Yes, my loyal Clampsman. Just like that.
Do you know what I've been doing, Isaac? I've been reading about comic sections. Do you know what those are? They are the Curves produced by the Intersection of a Conus by a Plane. Now look here, Isaac. There are not only Circles and Ellipses so form'd, but e'en edifying Parabolae and whimsical Hyperbolae. Some are most comical indeed!
What's that, Isaac? You say it's 'conic' sections about which the immortal Euclid held forth, and not 'comic' sections?
Now, Isaac, did you see a Signe hanging o'er the Door of my den, warning "Let no one enter here who is ignorant of Mathematics?" You didn't? Well that's why you're allowed in, you Orang-Outang! You are here to tighten my ankle-Clamp, not to out-do the great Roberval.
Now, to our Quaeries.
Firstly, for some period, o'er a decade of Years ago now, we repeatedly heard that jubilant Declaration: Whoomp, there it is! What was discover'd at that time, precisely? A great Treasure of Portuguese Bullion? El Dorado? Verulam's Fountain of Youth? In what barbaric Tongue, furthermore, does whoomp translate the wise Archimede's elegant exclamation, εὕρηκα? Wherefore, finally, did the Jubilation cease so suddenly? Was this Discovery at length only a Fata Morgana?
Whence, moreover, all this talk of 'Wikileaks'? Wiki, we suppose, is of the same Lingua Hottentotica as whoomp, but what is leaking 'round here besides my woe-ridden joints? Information, you say? First of all, Isaac, you know not to interrupt me once I've begun. But more importantly how could 'Information' be a-leaking and a-flowing when we are unable to receive so much as a single sensible Reply to our Quaeries?
Continue reading "Quaeries #6: Doctor Smith His Demise"
Posted by Justin E. H. Smith at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)
Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda?
Historians are generally quick and correct to insist that we jump to easy political analogies at our peril. One of the first lessons of historiography is that grand generalizations are more apt to flatter an author’s own sympathies than to capture a disinterested abstraction of events. Did Tunisia, Wikileaks, Facebook, or Twitter contribute to the Egyptian uprising? Possibly, but who would have the hubris to argue that any of these mattered more than local conditions: the rigged elections in December that gave the ruling National Democratic Party 93 percent of parliamentary seats, the bombings in Alexandria that left twenty-one Coptic Christians dead, the thirty years of daily personalized humiliation at the hands of a brutal police state.
And yet it seems possible to respect the importance of historical specificity while also acknowledging that popular energies can, and do, spread. Not for nothing is the rhetoric of revolution and counter-revolution shot through with the metaphors of fever, contagion, and conflagration. When yesterday’s unthinkable prospect becomes today’s historical fact, we are reminded that possibility can be more than a speculative concept. The events in Tunisia or Egypt make us feel political possibility, they make us experience it as an emotion, a passion no less infectious than anger or joy.
That feeling of possibility has already raised new questions for Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, who celebrated 25 years of continuous rule last Wednesday and is widely expected to claim victory in the presidential elections scheduled for February 18. When the question of Tunisia’s relevance for Uganda was put to him directly, Museveni shocked no one by arguing that Uganda’s situation is entirely different than the one that led to the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali: “I would not want you to confuse longevity with performance...social conditions in Tunisia are different to those in Uganda which are improving.”
Continue reading "Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda?"
Posted by Robert P. Baird at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
perceptions
"Latenightcabdriving". Protests in Cairo. Jan 29, 2011.
Those who frequent cyberspace have likely seen this photo a dozen times by now but for us who don't :), this is the most powerful image I have found over the last 6 days of revolution in Egypt.
Abbas, I also like the version you have on Facebook, with the title "Walk Like an Egyptian".
More here for details.
Posted by Sughra Raza at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
Going to the Shire
On Sundays, Sylvia and I go to the Shire. As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Tolkien’s world will tell you, the Shire is a happy place. It is a place of beginnings, homecomings, nostalgia and merrymaking. I loved the Shire, and I loved going there with Sylvia. There was a train station very close to our boarding school in South Wales, conveniently located for our Shire excursions. Every Sunday at noon we met at the train station to go to the Shire.
Now that I think about it, I met Sylvia because she introduced me to the Shire. At first, I thought it was a stupid euphemism but we grew into it. Gradually, it became a habit. I was new to the boarding school and she was a senior, two years older than me. Sixteen and Eighteen, we were struck with an underdeveloped pessimism unique to growing up. Sylvia was a girl of decadent tastes: cheap white wine, unfiltered cigarettes and fishing. The only times she tried to avoid these topics was when she was in the mood to impress boys with her feminine side but these little efforts were always doomed to fail. She could not stop talking about wine, cigarettes and fishing. How a Catalan girl had developed the habits of a truant Scot, I never found out. She never talked about herself. How I ended up being friends with her was something I knew even less about: something to do with Dostoevsky, the atman, salvia and short hair. It happened in a serenely fast rush like a tide coming in to cover my feet.
One Sunday, I was early. I recognized her coming from a distance. As she approached, she planted a noisy kiss on my cheek and flashed a wide smile. The two of us, foreigners in this vast countryside of Wales, trudged along the empty tracks and made our way to a forgotten bench, around fifteen minutes away from the station, hidden in unkempt bushes and facing the tracks. There she took out the ticket to the Shire from the front pocket of her fur coat. After warming it with her red lighter she sparked the tip and, hypnotized, watched it catch fire. We each took two puffs and kept passing. It wasn’t long before we were smiling stupidly as the cannabis set in. We were in the Shire and it was a very happy place.
Continue reading "Going to the Shire"
Posted by Haider Shahbaz at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (4)
Pakistan predictions 2009 and now...
In 2009, I took a road trip across the Northeastern United States and asked friends at every stop for their opinion on what was likely to happen next in Pakistan. The predictions I heard were gathered into the following article, which was published on Wichaar.com in April 2009. I am reproducing that article below, followed by a few words about how things look to me now, two years later.
I recently went on a road trip across the North-Eastern United States and at every stop, the Pakistanis I met were talking about the situation in Pakistan. As is usually the case, everyone seemed to have their own pet theory, but for a change ALL theories shared at least two characteristics: they were all pessimistic in the short term and none of them believed the “official version” of events. Since there seems to be no consensus about the matter, a friend suggested that I should summarize the main theories I heard and circulate that document, asking for comments. I hope your comments will clarify things even if this document does not. So here, in no particular order, are the theories.
1. Things fall apart: This theory holds that all the various chickens have finally come home to roost. The elite has robbed the country blind and provided neither governance nor sustenance and now the revolution is upon us: the jihadis have a plan and the will to enforce it and the government has neither. The jihadis have already captured FATA and most of Malakand (a good 20% of NWFP) and are inevitably going to march onwards to Punjab and Sindh. The army is incapable of fighting these people (and parts of it are actively in cahoots with the jihadis) and no other armed force can match these people. The public has been mentally prepared for Islamic rule by 62 years of Pakistani education and those who do resist will be labeled heretics and apostates and ruthlessly killed. The majority will go along in the interest of peace and security. America will throw more good money after bad, but in the end the Viceroy and her staff will be climbing rope ladders onto helicopters and those members of the elite who are not smart enough to get out in time will be hanging from the end of the ladder as the last chopper pulls away from the embassy. Those left behind will brush up their kalimas and shorten their shalwars and life will go on. The Taliban will run the country and all institutions will be cleansed and remodeled in their image.
2. Jihadi Army: The army is the army of Pakistan. Pakistan is an Islamic state. They know what to do. They will collect what they can from the Americans because we need some infidel technologies that we don’t have in our own hands yet, but one glorious day, we will purge the apostate officers and switch to full jihadi colors. The country will be ruled with an iron hand by some jihadi general, not by some mullah from FATA. All corrupt people will be shot. Many non-corrupt people will also be shot. Allah’s law will prevail in Allah’s land. And then we will deal with Afghanistan (large scale massacre of all apostates to be held in the stadium), India, Iran and the rest of the world in that order.
3. Controlled burn: This theory holds that there is no chance of any collapse or jihadi takeover. What we are seeing are the advanced stages of a Jedi negotiation (or maybe a Sith negotiation would be a better term). The army wants more money and this is a controlled burn. They let the Taliban shoot up some schools and courts (all bloody useless civilian institutions anyway). Panic spreads across the land. People like John Kerry come to Islamabad and almost shit in their pants at the thought of Taliban “60 miles away from the capital”. Just as Zia played the drunken Charlie Wilson and the whole Reagan team for fools, the current high command is playing on.
Continue reading "Pakistan predictions 2009 and now..."
Posted by omar at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (10)
Could Student Loan Debt Spark Insurrection?
The spark that lit the tinder was a series of what began as peaceful protests followed by disproportionate – and uneven – countermeasures by the Tunisian government. Protests began after the public self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor left destitute after harassment by local authorities. Early media coverage was stifled and word of the protests leaked out through social networks and satellite television. Tunisian authorities reacted violently, then backpedaled and granted elaborate concessions (for example Pres. Ben Ali visited Bouazizi in his hospital bed shortly before the latter died and former fled.) The government seemed weak, arbitrary and cruel. People quickly lost confidence.
The United States might seem immune to the miseries roiling Egypt and Tunisia, yet the lack of opportunities and bleak outlook among Arabian youth is hardly unique, particularly to a young American. Unemployment as measured by the number of Americans out of work for over 15 weeks and still looking is at a historically high 9.1 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yet that number belies deeper pools of unemployment and underemployment among segments of the population. Last month’s tally of job seekers and those “marginally attached and working part-time for economic reasons” was 16.7 percent. Among recent college graduates and minorities the numbers are higher still.
Repression in the United States is not just economic but systematic, according to N+1’s “Intellectual Situation.” By challenging the peculiar American phenomenon of the pejorative use of the word “elite” being directed against “cultural” as opposed to “power” elites (i.e. readers of N+1 as opposed to readers of The Wall Street Journal), N+1’s editors reveal a menacing strain of anti-intellectualism that the “resentful right, under the banner—hoisted by the likes of Beck, Huckabee, and Palin—of common sense, flatters deprivation as wisdom by implying to the uneducated that an education isn’t worth having;” doing “incalculable, unforgivable” violence to the talents and capacities of millions of people.”
The root of this astringent claim is that the Right “not only brands higher education as an instrument of class domination, but… ensures the educational system increasingly functioned in such a way as to make the accusation stick.” The Right achieved this by appropriating (perhaps unwittingly) sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that educated taste is a marker of “cultural capital,” and that taste functions as an index of social status, thereby enforcing class distinctions. N+1 argues that a “truly Democratic America” would instead hew closer to Ortega y Gasset’s argument that there are two classes of creature, “those who demand much of themselves and assume a burden of tasks and difficulties, and those who require nothing special of themselves, but rather for whom to live is to be every instant only what they already are.” Thus empowered the unwashed masses would admire rather than sneer at the achievements of cultural elites, and aspire for greater achievement.
A laudable goal, certainly, and one shared by both sides of the political equation, at least their more sensible members. Crudely put the Left would prefer to marshal the resources of the state to nudge people along in their self-improvement, while the Right would rather let them do it on their own, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and presumably succeeding in a more business-like fashion. Perhaps the “cultural elite” gives themselves too much credit. Suspicion toward cultural elitism might not stem from culture itself, but rather its self-appointed stewards, the bastions of power and wealth sitting on the boards of elite universities and august cultural institutions.
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Posted by James McGirk at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Monday Poem
I have trouble with old pics
their sweet bitterness
their cutting edge
their tricks
—a daughter’s mittens
hung from cuffs
laid out in kodachrome
a taunt of time. Enough.
I’d rather mine old nuggets
upturn what’s scattered
in my skull —the gold
stick with what
my head will hold
I do not take nostalgic risks
The photobox stays
beneath the bed
with jewel cases of bygones
in code on disks
When my memory goes
it will not matter
I may not even know the aliens
who peer from three by fours
or are splashed on screens
in pixel splatters
Love is best as it occurs
life too;
Now is breath’s agency
Love and life are only inside time
not frozen
not shot with poignancy
not both a blur
Jan 29, 2011
Posted by Jim Culleny at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
Epiphany at the Waterhole, Part Two
(Wherein we dump the obsolete Adam and Eve tale of the Advent of Consciousness for a more radical and contemporary one based on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience)
by Fred Zackel
“Something fell out of the mirror.”
"Did you hold it upside down?"
"Yes."
"Did you shake it?"
"Yes."
"After I told you not to?"
"I got curious.”
We must congratulate ourselves. Name another animal capable of creating its own meaning for its existence and then imposing it on the universe. We might even be the ones who most delay their own extinction.
We may not be alone on this evolutionary journey. The journey itself may not be exclusive to any one species but open to any species that ruminates over its reflection in the waterhole. Other species may be in the process of following in our footsteps. (Don’t look back. They might be closing in.) Other species have seen themselves in the mirror. Well, individuals within those species have. Have they told the others yet? Have they brought them to the mirror? As they tell the others of their Herd … could they too have their epiphany? Even more ominously to some of us, once they see themselves in the mirror, can reading (and writing) be far behind?
We human beings saw our reflections, had that epiphany, and got aimed in a different evolutionary trajectory. We survive the Crucible of the Veldt. The Crucible of the Savannah. We went looking for greener grasses elsewhere and we went everywhere on this planet. Being desperate to survive, we adapted ourselves to almost every geography and climate. Over the multitudinous millennia, we have been tempered like swords or plowshares. We survived and thrived.
Mirrors and reading – now we are capable of symbolic thought and we can pass that information on to anyone in Our Herd. We can pass the Good News onto the Next Generation. And the one after. And the one …
(That’s why libraries are so very dangerous to the religious, by the way. As the pulpit bullies always say, Quick, let’s burn the books. All we need is my Holy Scriptures. No, not yours but my Holy Scriptures. Yours are alternatives to mine, options to my agenda, and therefore these “choices” must be heresies. You and your ideas, your visions and priorities, must be destroyed and eradicated.)
I do not know how many epiphanies we as a species have had and learned from. But a dangerous few knocked us for a loop. They have threatened us as few others have done since the inaugural Epiphany at the waterhole.
Let’s start with Galileo’s telescope. Let’s go back 400 years almost to the month. In 1610, Galileo published his “Sidereus Nuncius” (aka “The Starry Messenger”), describing the surprising observations that he had made with the new telescope. That epiphany changed how we looked at our place in the Cosmos, our position in the Great Scheme of Things.
Continue reading "Epiphany at the Waterhole, Part Two"
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Ships in the night
The proper basis for a marriage is mutual misunderstanding. —Oscar Wilde
People necessarily make use of assumptions in speaking to one another, choosing their words to convey necessary information succinctly and effectively. The assumption process creates a theory of mind regarding the audience, including their culture, motivations, previous experiences, etc. While communicating with a stranger or an unfamiliar audience, the speaker will seek to include extra detail or background to be certain that the message is understood. But old acquaintances share more history and might require less information to understand the speaker’s intent (and may regard excessive detail as condescension). This habit promotes quick and effortless communication. Reciprocal theories of mind between long-time friends will grow into a shared ecosystem, with experiences, inside jokes and deep comprehension.
Or not. In the case of long-married couples, spouses sometimes communicate ambiguous information no better than strangers would. Two psychologists, Boaz Keysar and Kenneth Savitzky, have been studying how people interpret and misinterpret ambiguous communications. They devised an experiment in which participants sat in a circle with their backs to one other and tried to discern the meaning of spoken ambiguous phrases chosen from everyday conversations. The “speaker” was given a list of ambiguous phrases, and instructed to read each one aloud to communicate which of four meanings was intended. For example, “it’s getting hot in here” might be a flirtatious overture, a comment about tempers rising, a warning that the cops are closing in, or a hint to open the window. The listeners in the experiment chose from among the four possible meanings based on the speaker’s verbal delivery, and the speaker would rate the likelihood that each listener got the correct message.
Even with a lot of contextual information stripped away, all listeners were able to guess the speaker’s intent at well above chance levels, which is a testament to the utility of the social assumptions the researchers are investigating. However, the speakers in this experiment consistently overestimated their own ability to communicate the appropriate meaning, and they overestimated their ability more so toward their partners than toward the strangers. They thought their spouses “got it” for 6 out of 10 phrases, when in fact the spouses averaged the same as strangers, at around 4 out of 10.
The scientists who designed this study chose the conditions to illustrate the flip side of a developed intimacy. The habits of ellipsis and allusion can become counterproductive when the topic falls outside of the shared sphere, or, as in this experiment, context is removed to the point of real ambiguity (in real life, think of emails or text messages; or, speaking near a running faucet). Speakers presume that they’re being clear; and a listener, may use their own take on the shared relationship to mistakenly believe they don’t need clarification. Preventing this sort of miscue is the basis for an entire cottage industry of counselors and marriage therapists.
Reference:The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers. Kenneth Savitsky, Boaz Keysar, Nicholas Epley, Travis Carter, and Ashley Swanson. J. Exp. Soc. Psychology 47:269-273, 2011.
Cartoon © Randy Glasbergen from www.glasbergen.com <http://www.glasbergen.com>, used with permission.
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The Secret Life of Cancer
by Jenny White
I’m a faithful reader of the New York Times Science Section, cover to cover, because I want to know about things, not be caught flatfooted. Somehow it seems necessary for survival to know about quarks and bosons, the social structure of ants, scientific explanations of the smile, and the sexual life of grapes. I had a fling with books explaining how to endure being stranded in snow (make an igloo) and identify edible weeds in the park. What does this say about me? I never kept any extra food in the house beyond what was fresh in the fridge until after 9/11 when I laid in some canned beets and tomato sauce and a gallon jug of water. The tomato sauce exploded and the water leaked, so clearly I am batting zero as a survivalist. Perhaps knowing things about the world lets me feel that nothing can surprise me, jump out of the dark corners beyond my peripheral vision. Illness is like that. Two months ago I saw spots and flashes in my right eye and was told I had a partially detached retina. Why? No reason. Out of the blue. Once I was allowed to read again after the repair, I read a lot about retinas. But what do we really learn about how illnesses and the body work from reading popular science? Recently, I had a long conversation with a prominent scientist at Harvard, the molecular biologist Michael R. Freeman, who explained to me what cancer was. It wasn’t anything I expected, even after years of reading science stories. It was as if he had opened a door into an alternate universe. Below is a transcript of part of our conversation.
Jenny White: Tell me what we should know about cancer?
Michael Freeman: Cancer is an uncontrolled proliferation of cells, so a tumor is actually is a swelling or a cyst, something that isn’t necessarily life-threatening, but a malignancy is something that has the potential to grow and spread in the body and its the spreading in the body as well as the growth that is lethal. We’re still trying to understand fundamental processes that are part of cancer. A recently recognized process involved in cancer, for instance, is autophagy, which means “self-eating.” This is a normal way that cells use to conserve energy and nutrients, and it’s a process that can be used by cancer cells to progress to malignant states. Tumor cells generally are in a very stressful environment, so there’s a Darwinian pressure to select for variants that can overcome various stresses. So if you’re a tumor cell and your descendants have the ability to take in nutrients from this process of autophagy, then you have a selective advantage over other cells that might be killed in the stressful environment.
JW: So basically the Pac-Man cells survive because they eat the cells surrounding them.
MF: They actually eat themselves.
JW: Are there any other cool concepts that are out there? Autophagy, self-eating Pac-Man cells. What else is going on?
MF: There’s another concept that was very new when I was a postdoctoral fellow, but is now very much understood to be a fundamental process in tumor biology, which is apoptosis or programmed cell death. This is a program that cells initiate that causes them to die. It’s basically cell-suicide. There are signaling molecules that can initiate the suicide program that’s built into the cell. This is a normal process that takes place during development. The fingers on your hand were created in part through an apoptopic mechanism, where the webbing between the digits was formed by cells killing themselves. In development, in the formation of the body plan, there’s growth as well as loss of structure. It even happens during normal life as an adult. It’s like what a sculptor does, right? A sculptor creates form by removing things.
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Tigers Tigers Everywhere
On December 26, 2004 there was a magnitude 9.3 earthquake in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Sumatra. It caused a powerful tsunami that devastated the coastal regions of several countries and killed 240,000 people. News of the tsunami's destructive powers quickly made the rounds in the news media. We watched in horror and dismay the extent of the devastation. The earthquake registered 9.3, stronger than the one in Maule, Chili in February 2010, which was registered at 8.8. The 8.8 Chili quake was so strong that it shifted the Earth's crust, redistributing mass on such a scale that, according to NASA, it caused a shift in the Earth’s axis! The shift has been estimated at 8 centimeters, which affected the rate of the Earth's rotation and shortened the length of our day by some 1.26 microseconds.
As tremendous as the Chili quake was, the 2004 quake was stronger. But far stranger and much less reported—forty-four hours after the quake, NASA's newly launched Swift satellite, the Very Large Array, and other observatories picked up the arrival of a powerful gamma ray burst. A hundred times stronger than any gamma burst previously recorded, this one was as bright as a full moon, but radiated most of its energy in gamma wavelengths. This gamma burst temporarily altered the shape of our ionosphere and distorted radio transmissions. We tracked this gamma burst to activity in the neutron star SGR 1806-20, a soft gamma ray repeater, in the constellation Sagittarius, approximately 10 degrees northeast of the Galactic Center or about 45,000 light years from us.
Less than forty-eight hours after the biggest earthquake in twenty five years, a very intense gamma ray burst hit our planet! This gamma burst was 100 times brighter than anything we had seen in the twenty-five year history of gamma ray observation. Were these two highly unusual events related? We don't know how or why they would be, though it has been postulated that gravitational waves might have been a factor that set the earthquake into motion. Perhaps the gamma rays, that we monitored, were slowed down by scattering off dust particles, cosmic rays and such, making them proportionately slower than unimpeded gravitational waves that they might have been traveling with. Or perhaps the gravitational waves were going at superluminal speed—also a possibility—hitting the earth and setting off the quake and tsunami before the gamma rays could catch up. At this point who knows?
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January 30, 2011
Brian Green Explains Theorizing a Multiverse ... on Colbert
The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Brian Greene
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive
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A New Vision of the Public University
Michael Burawoy over at the SSRC blog:
The university is in crisis everywhere. In the broadest terms, the university’s position as simultaneously inside and outside society, simultaneously participant in and observer of society, – always precarious – is being eroded. With the exception of a few antiquated hold outs the idea of the ivory tower has gone. We no longer can hold on to a position of splendid isolation. We may think of the era gone by as the Golden Age of the University, but in reality it was a Fool’s Paradise that simply couldn’t last. Today, the academy has no option but to engage with the wider society, the question is how.
We face enormous pressures of instrumentalization, turning the university into a means for someone’s else’s end. These pressures come in two forms – commodification and regulation. I teach at the University of California, which, with its seven plus campuses, is (or was) surely one of the shining examples of public education in the world. This last year it was hit with a 25% cut in public funding. This is a sizeable chunk of money. The university has never faced such a financial crisis and it has taken correspondingly drastic steps – laying off unknown numbers of non-academic staff, putting pressure on already outsourced low paid service workers, furloughing academics that include world renown figures. Most significantly it involved a 30% increase in student fees, so that they now rise to over $10,000 a year, but still this is only a quarter of the price of the best private universities. These are drastic measures indeed, and a violation of California’s Master Plan for higher education, a vision of free higher education for all who desired it, orchestrated through a system that integrated two year community colleges, the state system of higher education and then, at the pinnacle, the University of California. All this is now turning to ruins.
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Is it Morally Irresponsible to Theorize About a Multiverse?
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A Niche for a Prophet
Eric Hobsbawm in the LRB:
San Nicandro Garganico is a modest agrarian township of some 16,000 inhabitants on the edge of the spur of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula. It has been somewhat bypassed by Italy’s postwar development and has never been on the tourist circuit, or indeed had anything about it that might attract outsiders. The railway didn’t even reach it until 1931. To judge by the photo in the current Italian Wikipedia entry, it looks pretty much the same as it did in 1957, when I visited it, curious about the subject on which John Davis has now given us a first-rate, concise and attractively written book. San Nicandro has made only two entrances onto the historical stage. It was an early centre of Italian socialism and agrarian struggle in the grain-fields of northern Apulia, whose local political head, Domenico Fioritto, became its deputy and subsequently leader of the Italian Socialist Party. The former Communist Party (now the Democratic Party) continues to supply its mayor. The second appearance of the town in the wider world was less relevant to Italian politics, but globally more prominent, though the postwar headlines would soon be forgotten. It linked the town to a group of local peasants who decided in the 1930s to convert to Judaism and eventually emigrated to Israel. John Davis has not only rescued the ‘Jews of San Nicandro’ from more than a half-century of oblivion, but used them to illuminate 20th-century Europe’s extraordinary history.
In purely quantitative terms the phenomenon was negligible: the Fascist police, ever on the watch, reported them as nine families, or 40 people. Some 30 migrated to Israel in 1949. If this group of friends and kinsmen had not chosen to be Jews, but had joined one of those evangelical sects – Seventh-Day Adventists, Pentecostalists – brought into southern Italy by emigrants returned from the US, nobody would have paid any attention to them. They would have been regarded as just another kind of Protestant, as indeed they were by the authorities on their first contact with the sect in 1936, when their prophet, Donato Manduzio, was fined 250 lire as ‘a Protestant pastor’ for conducting an unauthorised religious service. It was in that world of postwar grassroots religiosity that they belonged, though dissident village conventicles were much smaller than Catholic miracle cults such as the one that developed around Padre Pio of San Giovanni Rotonda in the same region at the same time. Though the Vatican was then, understandably, sceptical about the holy man’s claim to bear the mark of Christ’s stigmata, he was to be promoted to sainthood by Pope Wojtyla.
Where else, except from a neighbouring Pentecostalist, would Manduzio have acquired a copy of the Bible in Italian, his study of which converted him to Judaism?
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Collateral unpleasantness that Washington would rather not discuss
Tony Karon in The National:
On Saturday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked a guest on his show how al Qa'eda fitted into events in Egypt. The question itself was reminiscent of Larry King a few years back asking Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, to explain yoga.
Mr Blitzer's vigilance against Qa'eda bogeymen lurking in Egypt's democracy protests epitomises the US habit of seeing Egypt only through the prism of Washington's regional agenda.
US officials forced to explain their support for Hosni Mubarak's repressive autocracy over the past week have stressed Mr Mubarak's cooperation with Israel and support for a US regional strategy highly unpopular with the citizenry of the Arab world. As the State Department spokesman, PJ Crowley, told Al Jazeera: "Egypt is an anchor of stability in the Middle East ... It's made its own peace with Israel and is pursuing normal relations with Israel. We think that's ... a model that the region should adopt."
The fact that Mr Mubarak has been kept in power for three decades by a police state that tortures opponents and runs sham elections is collateral unpleasantness that Washington would rather not discuss. In fact, it has been happy to outsource the torture of terror suspects to Mr Mubarak's security services under the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme. Fearing that democracy in Egypt would empower the Muslim Brotherhood, the US has lobbied for Mubarak-initiated reforms.
But paranoia over Islamist participation restrains US support for Arab democracy, which in most countries would include Islamist parties.
More here.
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Umm Kulthūm
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road to Cairo
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old cairo
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The consolations of understanding
From The Economist:
THE unexamined life is not worth living, or so Socrates famously told the jury at his trial. He neglected to mention that the examined life is sometimes not all that wonderful either. In 11 biographical sketches of thinkers who tried to tread in Socrates’s footsteps, plus one on Socrates himself, James Miller explores what it means to follow the philosophical calling. Much trouble and uncertainty seems to be the answer, and some of the most famous philosophers turn out not to be all that admirable or convincing, he finds. So can philosophy inspire a way of life? That is one question raised by Mr Miller, who teaches politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Fortunately, Mr Miller does not press that question too hard. Any attempt to draw an all-encompassing moral from the lives he examines would have distorted the stories he has to tell. What we get instead is a vivid set of philosophical tales that are notable for their judicious use of sources, including rare early works. The result is a fresh treatment of subjects who are often served up stale. Even Immanuel Kant, whose writings were justly described by Heinrich Heine, a poet, as having “the grey dry style of a paper bag”, emerges as human.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
Babylon Revisited: When the money runs out
From The Telegraph:
Today, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald may be one of America’s most celebrated novelists, but during his lifetime, he was best known as a writer of short stories. At the end of the Twenties, he was the highest-paid writer in America earning fees of $4,000 per story (about $50,000 today) and published in mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post. Over 20 years, he wrote almost 200 stories in addition to his four novels, publishing 164 of them in magazines. When Ernest Hemingway first met Fitzgerald, in Paris in 1925, it was within weeks of the publication of The Great Gatsby; Hemingway later wrote that before reading Gatsby, he thought that Fitzgerald “wrote Saturday Evening Post stories that had been readable three years before but I never thought of him as a serious writer”. Gatsby would change all that, of course, so thoroughly that now we may be in danger of forgetting Fitzgerald’s stories. The haste in which he wrote them, in order to pay for the luxurious lifestyle he enjoyed with his wife, Zelda, means that the stories are uneven in quality, but at their best they are among the finest stories in English. And “Babylon Revisited”, a Saturday Evening Post story first published exactly 80 years ago next month – and free inside next Saturday’s edition of the Telegraph – is probably the greatest. A tale of boom and bust, about the debts one has to pay when the party comes to an end, it is a story with particular relevance for the way we live now.
Fitzgerald’s fortunes uncannily mirrored the fortunes of the nation he wrote about: his first novel, This Side of Paradise, became a runaway bestseller in early 1921, just as America entered the boom period that Fitzgerald himself would name the Jazz Age. He and Zelda became celebrities and began living the high life. They were the golden couple of the Twenties, “beautiful and damned”, as the prophetic title of Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel suggested, treated like royalty in America’s burgeoning celebrity culture. Glamorous, reckless and profligate, the Fitzgeralds were spendthrift in every sense. Much later, Fitzgerald would have to take account of all they had squandered – not only wealth, but beauty, youth, health, and even his genius.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)
Robert Fisk joins protesters atop a Cairo tank: "It is over."
Robert Fisk in The Independent:
The Egyptian tanks, the delirious protesters sitting atop them, the flags, the 40,000 protesters weeping and crying and cheering in Freedom Square and praying around them, the Muslim Brotherhood official sitting amid the tank passengers. Should this be compared to the liberation of Bucharest? Climbing on to an American-made battle tank myself, I could only remember those wonderful films of the liberation of Paris. A few hundred metres away, Hosni Mubarak's black-uniformed security police were still firing at demonstrators near the interior ministry. It was a wild, historical victory celebration, Mubarak's own tanks freeing his capital from his own dictatorship.
In the pantomime world of Mubarak himself – and of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Washington – the man who still claims to be president of Egypt swore in the most preposterous choice of vice-president in an attempt to soften the fury of the protesters – Omar Suleiman, Egypt's chief negotiator with Israel and his senior intelligence officer, a 75-year-old with years of visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and four heart attacks to his credit. How this elderly apparatchik might be expected to deal with the anger and joy of liberation of 80 million Egyptians is beyond imagination. When I told the demonstrators on the tank around me the news of Suleiman's appointment, they burst into laughter.
Their crews, in battledress and smiling and in some cases clapping their hands, made no attempt to wipe off the graffiti that the crowds had spray-painted on their tanks. "Mubarak Out – Get Out", and "Your regime is over, Mubarak" have now been plastered on almost every Egyptian tank on the streets of Cairo. On one of the tanks circling Freedom Square was a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Beltagi. Earlier, I had walked beside a convoy of tanks near the suburb of Garden City as crowds scrambled on to the machines to hand oranges to the crews, applauding them as Egyptian patriots. However crazed Mubarak's choice of vice-president and his gradual appointment of a powerless new government of cronies, the streets of Cairo proved what the United States and EU leaders have simply failed to grasp. It is over.
More here.
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January 29, 2011
Alexandrian Kings
by Constantin P. Cavafy (who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863)
The Alexandrians turned out in force
to see Cleopatra’s children,
Kaisarion and his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first time
had been taken out to the Gymnasium,
to be proclaimed kings there
before a brilliant array of soldiers.
Alexander: they declared him
king of Armenia, Media, and the Parthians.
Ptolemy: they declared him
king of Cilicia, Syria, and Phoenicia.
Kaisarion was standing in front of the others,
dressed in pink silk,
on his chest a bunch of hyacinths,
his belt a double row of amethysts and sapphires,
his shoes tied with white ribbons
prinked with rose-colored pearls.
They declared him greater than his little brothers,
they declared him King of Kings.
The Alexandrians knew of course
that this was all mere words, all theatre.
But the day was warm and poetic,
the sky a pale blue,
the Alexandrian Gymnasium
a complete artistic triumph,
the courtiers wonderfully sumptuous,
Kaisarion all grace and beauty
(Cleopatra’s son, blood of the Lagids);
and the Alexandrians thronged to the festival
full of enthusiasm, and shouted acclamations
in Greek, and Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
charmed by the lovely spectacle—
though they knew of course what all this was worth,
what empty words they really were, these kingships.
Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard
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Will Egypt's Military Officers Free the Revolution?
Michael Wahid Hanna in The Atlantic:
When armored personnel carriers filled with soldiers began making their way into the heart of Cairo and other cities in Egypt on Friday January 28th, they were greeted with receptivity by protestors, who saw in the much-respected military a potential ally in their uprising against the regime. No doubt, the recent experience in Tunisia, where the military stepped in resoundingly on the side of the demonstrations and hastened the fall of the repressive regime of President Ben Ali, was fresh in their mind. The Tunisian military had intervened against the police forces, burnishing their image as popular heroes who shared the patriotic concerns of the brave Tunisians who defied the regime. The scenes that unfolded in Egypt made clear that the protestors there hoped to force a similar split between the security forces, run by the Ministry of the Interior, and the military.
While Egypt's military is no longer an active fighting force, it still retains more credibility as a public entity than Egypt's civilian institutions, crippled after years of neglect and one-man rule. In recent years, even some democracy activists, despondent from years of state repression and ineffectual organizing, have seen the military as the last hope for Egyptians against Mubarak's efforts to orchestrate his son, Gamal, as successor to the presidency. Now that demonstrators have overwhelmed the police forces and built popular momentum, the military, were it to shift its allegiance from Mubarak to the protesters, could effectively end the regime.
More here.
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Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
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Mubarak’s Last Breath
Frustration, shame, humiliation: it does not take much for Egyptians to call up these feelings. It’s still often said that ‘what happens in Egypt affects the entire Arab world,’ but nothing much has happened there in years. Egypt has fallen behind Saudi Arabia – not to mention non-Arab countries like Turkey and Iran – in regional leadership. Even tiny Qatar has a more independent foreign policy. Egypt is by far the largest Arab country, with 80 million inhabitants, yet it’s seen by most Arabs – and by the Egyptians themselves – as a client state of the United States and Israel, who depend on Mubarak to ensure regional ‘stability’ in the struggle with the ‘resistance front’ led by Iran. The liberalisation of Egypt’s economy – launched by Sadat’s Infitah (Open Door) policy in 1974 – has earned Mubarak praise from the World Bank. The 2007 constitution, purged of references to socialism, says that ‘the economy of the Arab Republic of Egypt is founded on the development of the spirit of enterprise.’ Yet Egypt’s market is anything but free: businesses tend to have very close, and mutually profitable, relationships with the state, in which the Mubarak family often participates and takes its cut. Hussein Salem, a hotel magnate, arms dealer and co-owner of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Company – an Egyptian-Israeli consortium that recently secured a $2.5 billion contract to sell Egypt’s natural gas to Israel – is thought to be one of Mubarak’s frontmen; the gas began flowing in early 2008, just as Israel was tightening the siege of Gaza.more from Adam Shatz at the LRB here.
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Caught in the web
The internet has come a long way since Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, turned on the first web server in Geneva on Christmas day 1990. Today, 2bn people are online; 800m of them are on Facebook. Every minute, 24 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube. Google, a company founded only 15 years ago, has a market capitalisation just short of $200bn and a mission statement that it intends “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” – something no one thinks unlikely or even remarkable. We now bank, shop, communicate, work and date through the internet. The internet has come of age. It is as defining an achievement for humanity as the Enlightenment or the industrial revolution. But as the web’s youthful potential and teenage brashness give way to a more grown-up, complicated and multifaceted personality, our reaction to it has also changed. Our enthusiasm is tempered by a realisation that it is not simply an exciting force for good, as it was first seen. This year’s opening salvo of books about the internet does not laud web entrepreneurs or predict jetpacks and digital utopia. Instead, Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion and John Brockman’s collection of essays all soberly assess the current state of the internet and ask: are the changes the internet brings to our society and our human nature actually beneficial?more from Ben Hammersley at the FT here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)
Arundhati Roy: India's bold and brilliant daughter
From The Guardian:
Arundhati Roy will turn 50 this year. I hope to be excused of sexism (would one write this of a man?) when I say that she looks no more than 35 at most. Her vitality has always been striking. I remember her from one of her early visits to London as a slight, supple woman with an Indian cotton bag slung over her shoulder, and gleaming skin and hair that suggested yoga and aerobics, yoghurt and juice made from fresh limes. My wife had baked scones in her honour. Roy looked at the scones as though they might be deep-fried Mars bars, but eventually and daintily conceded to try one. In her bag was the manuscript of a first novel that was to make her famous and (by the standards of writers) rich, and though some of that future could have been predicted (the manuscript had caused a stir among publishers), no one could have foreseen the Booker prize and editions in 40 languages. What has happened since the success of The God of Small Things is even more surprising. Among Indian public intellectuals, a bright category that includes the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Roy is probably now her country's most globally famous polemicist, as both a writer and speaker. Her essays are published across the world – the Guardian published a recent one in five parts – and she can pack out a big venue in New York and still have a few thousand listening outside.
In India she draws even bigger crowds, and switches from English to Hindi. She tours extensively, and often to the kind of country towns and small cities that rarely see anyone so celebrated. Recently, she told me, 5,000 tribal people from 34 districts had gathered to hear her at Bhubaneswar in Orissa. Some had walked for days to get there; 40 had been arrested and charged with waging war against the state; two, she believed, had died in jail. "So it isn't like Jaipur," she said, referring to India's first and largest literary festival, just ended, where well-fed writers are flown in from London and New York and put up in reupholstered palaces.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)
A Lion in the Undergrowth
From The New York Times:
The men of old, reported Socrates, saw madness as a gift that provides knowledge or inspiration. “It was when they were mad that the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona achieved so much; . . . when sane they did little or nothing.” Today, insanity can still bring the gift of knowledge, but in a different manner. Much of what we know about the brain comes from seeing what happens when it is damaged, or affected in unusual ways. If the Delphic seer were to turn up tomorrow, neuroscientists would whisk her straight off into a brain scanner.
V. S. Ramachandran, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, San Diego, has done as much as anyone to reveal the workings of the mind through the malfunctions of the brain. We meet some mighty strange malfunctions in his new book, “The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human.” There is a man who, after a head injury, cannot recognize or respond to people when he sees them, but can happily chat on the phone. We meet a woman who laughs when she should be yelping in pain. There are patients with Capgras syndrome, who come to believe that people who are close to them (or, in one case, the patient’s poodle) are imposters. We meet unfortunates with an intense desire to have their own healthy limbs amputated, others who are paralyzed on one side but insist against all evidence that they are not, and, in Cotard’s syndrome, people who sincerely believe they are dead. Ramachandran weaves such tales together to build a picture of the specialized areas of the brain and the pathways between them, drawing his map by relating particular types of damage to their corresponding mental deficits.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Mubarak's Defiance Makes Life Harder for Obama
Tony Karon in Time:
Mubarak's interests don't necessarily match America's. He's largely ignored years of pressure from the Obama Administration and its predecessors to introduce reforms aimed at avoiding the sort of scenario he now faces, and in a televised address finally delivered at midnight, local time, Mubarak came out swinging, firing his government and promising to name a new one on Saturday, proclaiming himself an agent of reform and human rights, and declaring that "We will continue our political, economic and social reforms for a free and democratic Egyptian society." In other words, he wasn't going anywhere. Indeed, Mubarak defended his crackdown, vowing that he would "protect" Egypt from the "anarchy" of the protestors.
The speech was widely derided on the streets, and analysts warned that it was likely to intensify protests. And lest anybody doubt that the White House recognized Mubarak's position as a statement of defiance toward Washington, President Obama announced an hour later that he'd spoken to his Egyptian counterpart after the speech, and had made "very clear" that Mubarak had an obligation to refrain from violence against peaceful protests, to turn the SMS and Internet platforms blocked by his regime back on, and to take "concrete steps" toward real reform. "Ultimately the future of Egypt will be determined by the Egyptian people," Obama said. "Governments have an obligation to respond to their citizens." Press Secretary Gibbs put a price tag on further Mubarak misbehavior, warning that the annual $1.3 billion aid package the U.S. sends to Egypt's security forces would be placed under review on the basis of Egypt's handling of the protests.
The Administration is caught in a bind, but it's more strategic than just moral: Supporting tyrants loathed by their own people but willing to do Washington's bidding in international matters is a decades-old U.S. tradition in the Middle East, as well as in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The problem with Mubarak is not simply that his methods are at odds with professed U.S. values; it's that his brittle autocracy appears to have entered a period of terminal decline, with the U.S. potentially on the wrong side of history.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:47 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
What to wear in Egypt
This is from an "Egyptian Activist's Action Plan" brochure that was printed and distributed before Friday's protests. The Atlantic has much more about it here. [Thanks to Tony Karon.]
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:40 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Egypt’s Military Is Seen as Pivotal in Next Step
Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times:
Even as armored military vehicles deployed around important Egyptian government institutions on Friday for the first time in decades, it remained difficult to predict what role the armed forces might play in either quelling the disturbances or easing President Hosni Mubarak from power.
“Are they on the side of the nation or are they on the side of the regime?” a former senior Western diplomat with long service in Cairo asked. “That distinction had been blurred. We are now seeing a modern test of whether there is a separation between the two.”
The Egyptian military, the world’s 10th largest, is powerful, popular and largely opaque.
The military carried out the 1952 coup that overthrew the monarchy and has considered itself the shepherd of the revolution ever since; all four presidents in the ensuing years have been military generals.
But Mr. Mubarak, who led the Air Force before rising to prominence when President Anwar el-Sadat appointed him vice president in 1975, worked hard to keep the army out of overt politics and under his control.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:31 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Al Jazeera Analysis: Upheaval in Egypt
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Egypt's military secures famed antiquities museum
From Salon:
The Egyptian army secured Cairo's famed antiquities museum early Saturday, protecting treasures including the famed gold mask of King Tutankhamun from looters.
The greatest threat to the Egyptian Museum first appeared to come from the fire enguling the ruling party headquarters next door on Friday night as anti-government protests roiled the country.
Then dozens of would-be thieves started entering the grounds surrounding the museum.
Suddenly other young men -- some armed with truncheons taken from the police -- formed a human chain outside the main gates on Tahrir Square in an attempt to protect the collection inside.
"I'm standing here to defend and to protect our national treasure," said one of the men, Farid Saad, a 40-year-old engineer.
Another man, 26-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim, said it was important to guard the museum because it "has 5,000 years of our history. If they steal it, we'll never find it again."
Finally, four armored vehicles took up posts outside the massive coral-colored building in downtown Cairo. Soldiers surrounded the building and moved inside to protect mummies, monumental stone statues, ornate royal jewelry and other pharaonic artifacts.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:42 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
January 28, 2011
Uprisings: From Tunis to Cairo
Dictators do not usually die in bed. Successful retirement is always a problem for them, and not all solve it. It is a problem for everybody else when they leave. What’s to be done afterward? The popular uprising that overturned the dictatorial Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali regime in Tunisia in mid-January sent a thrill of hope through Arab populations. Aside from the exceptional and complex case of Lebanon, Arab nations have since the demise of the Ottoman Empire mostly suffered from European quasi empire, their own exploitative military and party dictatorships, and recently, hereditary family dictatorships, a reversion to absolute monarchy in secular guise. The dream of a united independent Arab nation to replace the Ottomans was destroyed by World War I peace settlements, which left the major Arab peoples in European empires as mandated states under the League of Nations. Following World War II and the Suez fiasco, in the cold war setting of the American alliance with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel, the region found itself dominated by Israeli arms and American support for existing regimes. The rise and subsequent failure of Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser’s Arab Socialism in Egypt and Yemen did not interrupt most of the region’s political passivity, and Egypt itself, after the Camp David accords in 1978, became an American client state. This calm was disturbed only by the Iranian popular overthrow of the Shah, communal turbulence in Lebanon, and then the Gulf War and American invasion of Iraq.more from William Pfaff at the NYRB here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
Egypt!
Posted by Abbas Raza at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (19)
on egypt
The size and strength of the protests caught everyone by surprise, but a few proximate causes can be suggested, if only to provide some context amidst the onslaught of tweets and updates. The uprising in Tunisia is obviously a significant part of that context. It is true that Tunisia is a small country that plays a minor role on the international stage, while Egypt is a linchpin of regional governance and one of the US’s closest allies. But both regimes are reviled by much of their citizenry as corrupt and brutal gerontocracies. While it still seems unlikely that Mubarak will be toppled, Egyptian protestors can take heart from the fact that six weeks ago no one was predicting a rout of Ben Ali, either. Another remote cause, however limited and difficult to assess, is the release of WikiLeaks documents. A cache of diplomatic cables relating to the Middle East was published in early December by the independent newspaper al-Akhbar, and the leaks have been intensively discussed by Arab bloggers and political activists. Few subjects anger Egyptians more than their regime’s cooperation with Israel, and several leaked documents suggest just how closely the two countries’ diplomats and security forces work together. The cable sent in June 2009 from the US embassy in Tel Aviv, which reveals that Egyptian officials were consulted about Israeli air and land assaults on Gaza the previous winter, must have been especially galling.more from Robyn Creswell at n+1 here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
is 2011 the next 1989?
I'm guessing that by now most readers of politics related blogs will have had their fill of State of the Union analysis. So I wanted to take this opportunity to shift the conversation to what I think has the opportunity to be the most important political development in 2011, the events that have transpired in Tunisia over the past month. While undoubtedly important for the Tunisian people, the larger question is whether Tunisia could turn out to be the Poland of the Arab world: the first transition away from a regime long thought to be immutable that sets in motion a path of regime change throughout the region. At first glance, this would seem to be extremely unlikely. Prior to Tunisia, it is difficult to remember the last Middle Eastern regime to fall outside of an external invasion (Iran in 1979?). And yet, a quick glance at a Google News search for Tunisia reveals articles linking protests in Tunisia to events in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan and even Gabon and Indonesia. As I have previously noted, I know next to nothing about Tunisian politics. I have, however, studied the collapse of Communism in East-Central Europe in 1989 in some detail, and so would like to offer the following observations about what lessons 1989 might have to offer those prognosticating about 2011.more from Joshua Tucker at The Monkey Cage here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
My Rayannes
From The Independent:
All teenage girls are at least half-lesbian, always admiring their friends’ still-shifting bodies, their superior wardrobes, their make-up application expertise, their better luck with the opposite sex. Teenage girls curl up together like newborn puppies, painting one another’s toes as if they were licking one another’s ears. If you sit long enough in any Starbucks, or loiter outside any high school, you will see girls climbing onto one another’s laps, kissing on the lips. They aren’t hitting on each other, not precisely, though they are in a constant state of arousal that borders on the insane. No other love is like the love of a teenage girl, all passion and fire and endless devotion—at least for a week.
There are many painful, moving stories about female friendship out there—Amy Hempel’s In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried, Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty, Thelma and Louise—but even the most beautiful stories about teenage girls fail to capture the obsessive, all-encompassing infatuations I remember. That is, all except one: My So-Called Life. It began on the air in August 1994, the summer before my freshman year of high school, and it was as if someone had placed a mirror inside my bedroom and broadcast it on television. I was Angela Chase, more so than everyone else who was sure that they were Angela Chase. I was a freshman in high school and deeply in love with every doe-eyed boy at my school. I parted my hair in the middle and wore a choker made of string. I got pimples, cried for no reason, and (once Angela introduced them to me, I will admit) danced around my room to the Violent Femmes. And like Angela, I had my Rayannes. Because, of course, Jordan Catalano was not the most intoxicating character to roam the halls of Liberty High, no matter how prettily formed his mouth and eyebrows. That distinct honor belonged squarely to Rayanne Graff, Angela’s new best friend and erstwhile corrupter.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:23 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
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