Month: November 2011

By mining our memories:

If you stop and think about it, the ability to construct future scenarios in our minds is really quite remarkable. As far as we know, all other species, including our closest primate relatives, react to events as they occur. They can learn from these events and apply that learning in the future (think of chimpanzees learning how to catch ants by poking a stick into the mound and doing the same thing for every new ant mound they find), but they do not assemble complex pieces of information into a coherent whole of the future. 

Mike Dash finds many reasons to be skeptical of stigmata reports. He examines why stigmatics started to materialize in 13th-century Italy:

Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St. Francis’s day had begun to place much greater stress on the humanity of Christ, and would soon introduce a new feast day, Corpus Christi, into the calendar to encourage contemplation of his physical sufferings. Religious painters responded by depicting the crucifixion explicitly for the first time, portraying a Jesus who was plainly in agony from wounds that dripped blood.

(Image: Crucifixion by Guido da Siena via Wikimedia Commons)

Madness, a Python sketch … or actual, rare, sanity? Werner Herzog, where are you?

My (pay-walled) column scatches its head but faces what now seems even more plausible after the New Hampshire Union-Leader's endorsement:

Of course, Gingrich could fall again, like the other not-Mitts. In last week's debate, he cited a concern for being "humane" with respect to illegal immigrants who have lived in the US for decades. That glimpse of compassion may doom him with the base. But his timing is pretty good: better to be on the rise a month before the voting begins rather than two months before. And the hardcore base doesn't have many other places to seek refuge. Former Utah governor, Jon Huntsman, is ruled out of bounds because he worked for Obama as ambassador to China. Ron Paul, the libertarian who really should be the leader of this party given its current economic incarnation, cannot get past 10 percent because of his foreign policy isolationism and opposition to torture. And Newt, because he is, after all, a former Speaker of the House, carries some credibility where one-hit wonders, like Herman Cain, don't.

I have to say I still cannot see Newt winning the nomination. He doesn't have good ground organization, and remains toxic in the public at large. The polling currently suggests that Obama would beat Gingrich by 7 points. 47 percent of Americans, moreover, say they dislike Gingrich, compared with only 32 percent who like him. Independents cannot stand him. But this is a Republican party nauseated by its likeliest standard-bearer, Romney, and desperate for something else. Right now, that something else looks like defeat. But as Newt can tell you, this campaign keeps surprising.

Frum sees no such pleasant surprise for Newt or the GOP:

Back in the 1990s, Gingrich made himself one of the most disliked figures in the recent history of American politics. As American political commentator Jay Cost reminds us, within 24 months of becoming Speaker, Gingrich had forced a shutdown of the federal government and sunk to an approve/disapprove rating of negative 25. There Gingrich languished through ethics challenges, impeachment and the revelation that he’d been carrying on an extra-marital affair while attacking Bill Clinton’s own sexual misconduct.

A Gingrich presidency, if such a thing can even be imagined, would be a chaotic catastrophe. A Gingrich nomination would yield an Obama landslide.

The silver lining is surely that a Gingrich candidacy would put out there in clear and uncompromising terms the reality of today's Jacobin GOP. If a Gingrich candidacy were to give us an Obama landslide re-election, it would underline the death-throes of a "conservatism" reeling since the collapse of the Rove project under Bush and Cheney. It would kill off conservatism as it has been and allow for some kind of reformist brand to put down roots. It would give us Huntsman in 2016, or some variant thereof.

James Joyner gapes at the sudden, unexpected death of his young wife, who leaves two very young daughters behind. It is always impossible to say anything appropriate at such a brutal, sudden rending of the fabric of many lives. But our hearts go out to Jim and his family and friends.

Israeli novelist David Grossman assesses the danger Netanyahu presents for Israel:

[Netanyahu] is so trapped within his paranoid way of seeing reality. Don’t get me wrong: there are dangers to Israel. We are surrounded by countries who are hostile to us, and until today most countries—not most, all Arab countries I can say—have not accepted our right to be here and they absolutely do not understand the deep affinity and belonging that we feel toward this country. So some of our fears are true and concrete. But Netanyahu is unable to distinguish between the real dangers and the echoes of his fears and the echoes of past traumas. This is not a leader who can change reality, who can generate a new reality. If he continues to act like this and to think like this, he can only doom us to repeat our tragedies and bring to life our worst fears.

(Photo: Israeli soldiers from the army's Home Front Command and rescue teams take part in defence drill simulating a missile attack at a school in Holon, near Tel Aviv, on November 03, 2011. Israel began a major civil defence drill in the Tel Aviv region aimed at simulating the response to conventional and non-convention missile attacks, the Israeli military said. By Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images)

Zuckerberg's company is testing an old theory:

Facebook researchers pored through the records of all 721 million active users, who collectively have designated 69 billion "friendships" among them. … To test the six degrees theory, the Facebook researchers systematically tested how many friend connections they needed to link any two users. Globally, they found a sharp peak at five hops, meaning that most pairs of Facebook users could be connected through four intermediate people also on Facebook (92 per cent). 

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

Marisa Meltzer has a multi-faceted, fascinating piece on ayahuasca:

There are two main ways of taking ayahuasca: with a shaman or as part of a religious service. In a shamanic ceremony, you sit on a mat and go within, not interacting with anyone else. The religious use is far different. The Santo Daime ("holy give me" in Portuguese) sect, which combines Christianity with Kardecist Spiritism, believes that the tea is a sacrament, a manifestation of Jesus Christ that brings practitioners closer to God. A Santo Daime service lasts four or five hours, sometimes as long as 14. Men and women sit on opposite sides of the room, and there are candles and a table in the center of the room like an altar.

Meltzer retells her own vision quest guided by a shaman in a Manhattan yoga studio:

I saw vignettes from my childhood, almost like watching a movie about my relationship with my parents. At first, each episode highlighted my strength and perseverance during an unhappy childhood. I could feel the drug congratulating me for surviving and thriving. And then, as if I were in A Christmas Carol, I was taken through more views of my childhood, this time illustrating ways in which I was hard on my family. I had a newfound sympathy for my parents. I opened my eyes and stared at the moon through a large skylight in the ceiling of the yoga studio and felt myself crying. But the rapid-fire insights didn’t feel violent or overwhelming; instead, they were gentle and healing, as if these answers had always been within me.

Continued here.

From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair–
(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!")
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin–
(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

Continued here.

(Photo by Denis Jacquerye)