Month: May 2011

The NYT's Public Editor once again grapples with the paper's slowly collapsing refusal to use English when dealing with claims by the Bush administration:

The Times should use the term “torture” more directly, using it on first reference when the discussion is about — and there’s no other word for it — torture. The debate was never whether Bin Laden was found because of brutal interrogations: it was whether he was found because of torture. More narrowly, the word is appropriate when describing techniques traditionally considered torture, waterboarding being the obvious example. Reasonable fairness can be achieved by adding caveats that acknowledge the Bush camp’s view of its narrow legal definition.

This approach avoids the appearance of mincing words and is well grounded in Americans’ understanding of torture in the historical and moral sense.

But this sentence refutes itself:

Times policy on this appears to be in a state of equipoise — holding steady right in the middle. In fact, it may have migrated some since Mr. Hoyt wrote about it — “harsh” and “brutal” are still in evidence but the use of “torture” is sprinkled throughout, as well.

I suspect the reason the NYT is now returning to using the word "torture" is because they are not sucking up to the Bush administration any more. The entire episode, in historical context, will, I believe, be evidence of the Gray Lady's deep deference to American power.

A revolt along three borders puts Jerusalem in the company of other Middle Eastern states with large, restive Arab populations:

Sunday’s unrest — which came after activists used Facebook and other websites to mobilize Palestinians and their supporters in neighboring countries to march on the border with Israel— marked the first time the protest tactics that have swept the Arab world in recent months have been directed at Israel.

Deadly clashes also took place along Israel’s nearby northern border with Lebanon, as well as in the Gaza Strip, near Israel’s southern border. The Israeli military said 13 soldiers were lightly wounded in the Lebanon and Syria clashes.

In addition, hundreds of Palestinian threw stones at Israeli police and burned tires at a checkpoint outside Jerusalem before they were dispersed.

Will Jerusalem follow Cairo's lead and allow true democracy for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, allowing them to forge their own destiny? And how will Washington cope with an important Middle Eastern ally bent on repressing the people whose land it occupies?

The logic of the Arab Spring – self-determination and democracy as a fundamental right – cannot but involve Israel's occupation and continued settlement of the West Bank at some point. Israel is, after all, no longer the only democracy in the Middle East. It is just the only democracy forcibly occupying a foreign land and refusing to give the occupants full civil or political rights.

(Photo: Israeli soldiers take position during clashes with Palestinian protesters May 15, 2011 at Qalandiya checkpoint near Ramallah, West Bank. Today marks the 'Nakba' or 'catastrophe' which befell Palestinians following Israel's establishment in 1948. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

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This is interesting. Gingrich has now gone on record against Paul Ryan's proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher system designed not to keep pace with inflation, on the grounds that it is too radical a change, and reiterates his support for an individual mandate. That's two kicks to the balls of the movement right, as the splutters from NRO and Hot Air illustrate. May I just point out that vast parts of the Obama health reform were once conservative orthodoxy (healthcare exchanges, for example, and building on the private industry), just as cap and trade was once conservative orthodoxy.

Nonetheless, it's a sign that Newt may surprise this campaign season, either because he fears that the current GOP strategy reminds him a little scarily of what he once went through or because he's trying to win elderly primary voters, or because he just thinks Ryan's plan for Medicare really is too extreme a measure, given where America now is.

For the record, I'm ending up in a similar position. I fervently believe we need to cut entitlement spending, but asking, say, an 80 year old to figure out which insurance plan she wants with her voucher does not seem practicable or humane to me. I also think there is something unconservative about up-ending what is, pace George Will, a settled part of American life. (By the way, that is now the conservative case for retaining Roe vs Wade, however awful its constitutional over-reach.)

I guess Ryan helped me look into the abyss of simply cutting grandma off when her voucher reaches its limit, and I want a more humane, moderate and measured way to cut costs.

Adam Frank praises "Thor" for blending of classical myth and real science:

As an astronomer, I couldn't miss the variegated interstellar clouds in hues of cobalt and magenta that make up much of the film's cosmic background. They are taken right out from images captured by telescopes like Hubble, Spitzer and Herschel.

Visualizing star-forming clouds in this way is more than just entertainment. It's a process by which the fruits of scientific cosmos building move from the rarified realm of theory into the imaginative resources of the culture as a whole. Now everyone who sees Thor kick some frost-giant butt also knows what star-forming clouds look like, even if they never have to explicitly recognize it. That is the new power of myth.

(Image of the Lagoon Nebula, "a star forming region about 5,000 light-years distant in the constellation Sagittarius," via NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Space Telescope.)

Paul Ford contemplates his past emails:

[I]t kept happening: I'd have an idea, search through my archive, and find that I'd already had that idea, some variation on it, six years ago. I was, without a doubt, repeating myself. Spinning the wheels of my hobbyhorses.

He abandons searching for specific words and examines a few random days' emails:

There was, without the acute knife-edge of a search query slicing my life, a wealth of goofiness, a catalog of wasted flirtations and dumb thoughts and mistakes made, all displayed without consciousness of the future.  … Unlike the portrait of self that emerged from my tightly constrained searching, this fellow was hard to classify. He was alive in his own moment, not mine.

"BREATHE" from Paul Schneider on Vimeo.

Ellen Prager explains the camouflage methods of cephalopods (squids, octopuses, cuttlefishes, etc) in Sex, Drugs, And Sea Slime:

An intricate nervous system runs throughout a cephalopod’s epidermis, connecting its colored pigment organs and reflector cells to its relatively large brain and complex eyes. They are, in fact, the brainiest of all invertebrates, having the largest of the group along with especially well developed eyes. Hanlon’s research team has discovered that cephalopods use their exceptional vision as their primary means of detecting the brightness and patterns within their surroundings, which they then quickly replicate for camouflage. But, ironically, Hanlon’s team also found that most, if not all, cephalopods are color-blind. How then do they perfectly match the color of their surroundings? He suspects that the cephalopods’ skin has some sort of color-sensing capability, but what it is and how it works remain unknown.

(Video of a camouflaged octopus from oceanographer David Gallo's TED talk)

Carolyn Y. Johnson interviewed psychologist David DeSteno, one of the authors of Out of Character: Surprising Truths about the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us, on the question:

I think, ultimately, we’re all going to be judged by our behaviors….[But] the question itself presumes an inherent trait, and we are arguing there isn’t one. The question of, “Am I a good person?” is an evolving question or an iterative question….To some extent that’s going to be dependent on what I am doing and the weight of those acts I have committed, which is changing. The question is, “Am I a good person now?” not “Am I a good person?”

The UK's Education minister, David Willets, has proposed offering places at top-tier schools to students who didn't get in, if they pay substantially higher fees. Josh Rothman compares universities to the Church:

Admissions officers, in their own ways, stand as guardians over the principles of fairness and openness, and the university derives prestige from its store of moral credibility. Making deals to sell that credibility can be dangerous. In the Middle Ages, Catholic clergy conceived of themselves as selling beneficence from an infinite "treasury" of holiness; they used the money from the indulgences they sold to build hospitals, churches, and leper colonies. But the system got out of control (as one sixteenth-century preacher famously put it, "As soon as money in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory's fire springs"), and had to be Reformed.