readnet

Take your mind out for a spin

2007-03-15T07:56:00.000-07:00

Check out these links

http://www.namingdistances.com/mutatis/intro.html

http://lespirale.blogspot.com/

The Dictionary of the History of Ideas

2007-03-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

The Dictionary of the History of Ideas:
Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener, was published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1973-74. The Dictionary of the History of Ideas also appeared in Chinese- and Japanese-language editions.

However, the DHI has been out of print for many years. Aware of the new potential offered by electronic access to texts, the Directors and Board of Editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas authorized a grant to support digitization of the DHI. Substantial support has also been provided by the University of Virginia Library through its Electronic Text Center. The project has been undertaken with the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons and of The Gale Group, of which Scribner's is a part.

Those interested can check out this link:

http://etext.virginia.edu/DicHist/dict.html

The Universe for Dummies

2007-03-15T07:42:00.000-07:00

FOR those who want to read the article in full try this link

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11dark.t.html?pagewanted=all

Out There

By Richard Panek

Only 4 percent of the universe is made of the kind of matter that makes up you and me and all the planets and stars and galaxies. The rest — 96 percent — is ... who knows?

Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, George Smoot was talking about the universe. Sitting across from him in his office at the University of California, Berkeley, was Saul Perlmutter, a fellow cosmologist and a probable future Nobelist in Physics himself. Bearded, booming, eyes pinwheeling from adrenaline and lack of sleep, Smoot leaned back in his chair. Perlmutter, onetime acolyte, longtime colleague, now heir apparent, leaned forward in his.

"Time and time again," Smoot shouted, "the universe has turned out to be really simple."
Perlmutter nodded eagerly. "It’s like, why are we able to understand the universe at our level?"
"Right. Exactly. It’s a universe for beginners! 'The Universe for Dummies'!"

But as Smoot and Perlmutter know, it is also inarguably a universe for Nobelists, and one that in the past decade has become exponentially more complicated. Since the invention of the telescope four centuries ago, astronomers have been able to figure out the workings of the universe simply by observing the heavens and applying some math, and vice versa. Take the discovery of moons, planets, stars and galaxies, apply Newton’s laws and you have a universe that runs like clockwork. Take Einstein’s modifications of Newton, apply the discovery of an expanding universe and you get the big bang. "It’s a ridiculously simple, intentionally cartoonish picture," Perlmutter said. "We’re just incredibly lucky that that first try has matched so well."
But is our luck about to run out? Smoot’s and Perlmutter’s work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be — the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest — 96 percent of the universe — is ... who knows?
"Dark," cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender.

This is not "dark" as in distant or invisible. This is "dark" as in unknown for now, and possibly forever.

they want to make medicine more costly -- the NOVARTIS case against Indian govt

2007-01-30T06:47:00.000-08:00

January 29, 2007 Quarter of a Million People Urge Novartis To Drop Case Against IndiaCompany Would Effectively be Shutting Down the "Pharmacy of the Developing World"

New Delhi/Geneva, 29 January 2007 – As pharmaceutical company Novartis proceeded with its legal challenge against the Indian government in a court hearing in Chennai, India, today, nearly a quarter of a million people from over 150 countries expressed their concern about the negative impact the company's actions could have on access to medicines in developing countries. The Indian Network for People with HIV/AIDS (INP+), the People's Health Movement, the Centre for Trade and Development (Centad), together with the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), called on the company again today to immediately cease its legal action in India.
The court hearing will continue February 15.

Many developing countries rely on affordable medicines produced in India, and such medicines constitute over half the AIDS drugs used in the developing world. India has been able to produce affordable versions of medicines patented elsewhere because until 2005 the country did not grant pharmaceutical patents.
"Novartis is trying to shut down the pharmacy of the developing world," said Dr. Unni Karunakara, medical director of MSF's Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, at a press briefing today in New Delhi. "Indian drugs account for at least a quarter of all medicines we buy, and form the backbone of our AIDS programs, in which 80,000 people in over 30 countries receive treatment. Over 80 percent of the medicines we use to treat people living with HIV/AIDS come from India. We cannot stand by and let Novartis turn off the tap," he said.

Novartis is challenging a specific provision in India's patent law that restricts patenting of medicines to innovations only. If the provision were overturned, patents would be granted far more widely in India, heavily restricting the production of affordable medicines that has become crucial to the treatment of diseases across the developing world.
"Here in India, the People's Health Movement fought hard to make sure our government implemented a law that put people's health before patents and profits," said Dr. Amit Sengupta. "But now, Novartis is trying to force a change in our patent law, which could deprive people suffering from life-threatening diseases and conditions."
Rules of the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) obliged India to begin reviewing pharmaceutical patents in 2005. The TRIPS agreement, however, includes pro-public health safeguards that countries can implement, and India has merely included some of these in its patent law. The Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health, signed by governments in 2001, reinforced the right of countries to use these safeguards.

"The TRIPS Agreement already makes it difficult for India to produce the affordable drugs that people need," said Gopakumar of Centad. "By challenging the pro-public health safeguards in the Indian law, Novartis is going even further and is trying to undo the Doha Declaration, restricting access to medicines."
One provision of the Indian law states that any interested party can oppose a patent before it is granted in a "pre-grant opposition" process. Such oppositions have been filed against numerous patent applications on essential medicines that do not warrant patents under Indian law.
"We have opposed patent applications for crucial AIDS drugs that we need to be able to access at affordable prices," said Elango Ramchandar, President of INP+. "Our survival depends greatly on winning these patent oppositions. We need everyone, everywhere to join us in our effort to get Novartis to back off here in India."
The international petition urging Novartis to drop the case is ongoing. To sign the petition and for more information, visit: http://www.msf.org/petition_india/usa.html

Ten Reasons Why Climate Change May Be More Severe than Projected*

2007-01-27T05:56:00.000-08:00

September 19
Dr. A. Barrie Pittock: Ten Reasons Why Climate Change May Be More Severe than Projected*
Uncertainties in climate change science are inevitably large, due both to inadequate scientific understanding and to uncertainties in future human behavior. Policies therefore must be based on risk management, that is, on consideration of the probability times the magnitude of any deleterious outcomes for different scenarios of human behavior. In this talk I want to focus on observations and modeling studies in the last year or two in ten areas of concern, which when taken together strongly suggest that the risk of more serious outcomes is greater than was understood previously.
1. The climate sensitivity, or global warming after a doubling of the pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration, is probably in the range of 2º–6°C rather than the 2001 IPCC estimate of 1.5º–4.5ºC. This suggests a more than 50% chance of that global warming by 2100 will be 3ºC or more, a level that many consider dangerous.
2. Global dimming is large but decreasing. Reductions of sunlight at the Earth’s surface by atmospheric pollution particles are diminishing as particulate emissions are brought more under control, thus decreasing their cooling effect and making the warming effect of greenhouse gases more evident.
3. Permafrost melting is widespread. Observations show rapid melting of permafrost (i.e., frozen ground). This tends to reduce the reflectivity of the surface to sunlight and, as vegetable matter in the soil starts to decay, leads to emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. These changes will enhance global warming.
4. Biomass feedbacks are kicking in. Observations of soil and vegetation acting as sources rather than sinks of greenhouse gases suggest an earlier than expected positive feedback, or speeding up of climate change, via the terrestrial carbon cycle. This is partly due to increasing summer droughts and wild fires.
5. Arctic sea ice is retreating rapidly. Rapid recession of Arctic sea ice has been observed, again leading to a speeding up of global warming as reduced reflection of sunlight increases surface heating.
6. Changes in air and sea circulations in middle and high latitudes. Different rates of warming at low and high latitudes in both hemispheres have led to increasing sea level pressure in the middle latitudes and a movement poleward of the middle latitude westerlies. This has strengthened the major surface ocean circulations, including the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. These changes will significantly affect surface climate, including sea surface temperatures and storminess, and may already have accelerated melting in Antarctica.
7. Rapid changes in Antarctica. Rapid disintegration of ice shelves around the Antarctic Peninsula and subsequent acceleration of outlet glaciers point to the role of ice shelves in retarding glacier outflow, and of surface meltwater in accelerating ice shelf disintegration and outlet glacier flow rates. Strengthening and warming of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (point 6) may add to Antarctic ice sheet disintegration by enhancing local warming, preventing sea ice formation, and undercutting ice shelves. Some indirect observations suggest that Antarctic sea ice is already decreasing, while satellite radar observations and gravity surveys show Antarctica is already losing ice and adding to sea-level rise.
8. Rapid melting and faster outlet glaciers in Greenland. Large increases in surface melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet have been observed, and acceleration of outlet glaciers, probably caused by meltwater lubrication of flow, is evident.
9. Tropical cyclones may be more intense. Some observational analyses point to a rapid intensification of tropical cyclones. However, modeling of tropical cyclone behavior under enhanced global warming conditions suggests only a slow increase in intensity. While the observations have their limitations, as pointed out by some skeptics, it is also clear that the modeling to date of tropical cyclones has not been in sufficient detail to capture the finer points of tropical cyclone behavior, nor perhaps the effects of subsurface warming of the ocean that supplies the energy for cyclone formation.
Changes are occurring in the North Atlantic Ocean. A significant slowing of the North Atlantic circulation that is in part powered by the sinking of dense, high salinity surface water has been reported. This slowdown could be related to an observed freshening of the surface waters due to increased rainfall, increased river inflow, and increased ice melting in the Arctic and North Atlantic region.
The above lines of evidence (supported by well over 100 recent scientific papers), while not definitive and in some cases controversial, suggest that the balance of evidence may be swinging toward a more extreme outcome. While some of the observations may be due merely to natural fluctuations, their conjunction and, in several cases, amplifying effects are causes for concern. They suggest that critical levels of global warming may occur at even lower greenhouse gas concentrations and emissions than was considered justified in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report issued in 2001. More rapid rise in sea level may be imminent (an acceleration has already been observed), and more rapid regional impacts may be expected. Taken together, the new observational evidence increases the urgency of further improving climate models, and of the importance of early actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we are to lower the risk of unacceptable levels of climate change.

Global Warming Warnings

2007-01-27T05:49:00.000-08:00

Couple of posts I picked up on the issue: The threat is real, the threat is not just imminent, it is here...

Global Warming Warning
Earthside Comments: One of the predictions of global warming is that there will be more extreme weather ... that can range from unexpected and severe droughts to surprising snow storms. So, the newest eight inches of snow falling in Colorado today and the record snowfall in Anchorage -- after several years now of 'dry' winters. Note also that from New York to Tennessee, the temperatures have been so warm that the trees are leafing. All these unusual weather phenomena are confirmation of global warming effects.
The first link here supports the notion that we have here at Earthside: global warming is happening much faster than almost anyone wants to believe. The second link is yet another indication that more extreme weather is yet to come.
Link: Ten Reasons Why Climate Change May Be More Severe than Projected Joseph Romm/Climate Progress
Australian climate scientist Barry Pittock gave a terrific and terrifying talk at the 20th Anniversary of the Climate Insitute last week. He made the case that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the key international process for determining the “consensus” view on climate, is systematically underestimating the future impacts of climate change. Since Pittock was a major contributor to the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001) and since their Fourth Assessment is due out next year, we should pay attention to what he says.
You can see all of Pittock’s 10 reasons online in the abstract for his talk. Let me pull out four of the underestimations:
1. “The climate sensitivity, or global warming after a doubling of the pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration, is probably in the range of 2º–6°C rather than the 2001 IPCC estimate of 1.5º–4.5ºC. This suggests a more than 50% chance of that global warming by 2100 will be 3ºC or more, a level that many consider dangerous.”
3. “Permafrost melting is widespread,” which “leads to emissions of carbon dioxide and methane,” a dangerous vicious climate cycle that CP has written about.
7. & 8. “Rapid changes in Antarctica” and “Rapid melting and faster outlet glaciers in Greenland,” which combine to threaten far faster and greater sea level rise than climate models have been predicting.
I found his talk very compelling as it matched what I’ve been hearing from a number of climate scientists I interviewed for my book, including James Hansen. Pittock concludes:
The above lines of evidence (supported by well over 100 recent scientific papers), while not definitive and in some cases controversial, suggest that the balance of evidence may be swinging toward a more extreme outcome. While some of the observations may be due merely to natural fluctuations, their conjunction and, in several cases, amplifying effects are causes for concern. They suggest that critical levels of global warming may occur at even lower greenhouse gas concentrations and emissions than was considered justified in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report issued in 2001.In short, the time for inaction has run out.
For those interested in Pittock’s analysis, he published a version in EOS, but you need a subscription. You can, however, get all the scientific references here. The article ends with a key point that he reiterated in his talk, which defines the nature of scientific responsibility in a world of accelerating global warming:
The above recent developments simply might mean that the science is progressing, but it also may suggest that up until now many scientists may have consciously or unconsciously downplayed the more extreme possibilities at the high end of the uncertainty range, in an attempt to appear moderate and ‘responsible’ (that is, to avoid scaring people). However, true responsibility is to provide evidence of what must be avoided: to define, quantify, and warn against possible dangerous or unacceptable outcomes.
Link: 2007 to be 'Warmest on Record' BBC
The world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007, the UK's Met Office says.
An extended warming period, resulting from an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean, will probably push up global temperatures, experts forecast.
They say there is a 60% chance that the average surface temperature will match or exceed the current record from 1998.
The scientists also revealed that 2006 saw the highest average temperature in the UK since records began in 1914.

for writers .....

2007-01-24T05:19:00.000-08:00

Fail better
What makes a good writer? Is writing an expression of self, or, as TS Eliot argued, 'an escape from personality'? Do novelists have a duty? Do readers? Why are there so few truly great novels? Zadie Smith on literature's legacy of honourable failure

Zadie Smith
Saturday January 13 2007
The Guardian

1. The tale of Clive
I want you to think of a young man called Clive. Clive is on a familiar literary mission: he wants to write the perfect novel. Clive has a lot going for him: he's intelligent and well read; he's made a study of contemporary fiction and can see clearly where his peers have gone wrong; he has read a good deal of rigorous literary theory - those elegant blueprints for novels not yet built - and is now ready to build his own unparalleled house of words. Maybe Clive even teaches novels, takes them apart and puts them back together. If writing is a craft, he has all the skills, every tool. Clive is ready. He clears out the spare room in his flat, invests in an ergonomic chair, and sits down in front of the blank possibility of the Microsoft Word program. Hovering above his desktop he sees the perfect outline of his platonic novel - all he need do is drag it from the ether into the real. He's excited. He begins.

Fast-forward three years. Somehow, despite all Clive's best efforts, the novel he has pulled into existence is not the perfect novel that floated so tantalisingly above his computer. It is, rather, a poor simulacrum, a shadow of a shadow. In the transition from the dream to the real it has shed its aura of perfection; its shape is warped, unrecognisable. Something got in the way, something almost impossible to articulate. For example, when it came to fashioning the character of the corrupt Hispanic government economist, Maria Gomez, who is so vital to Clive's central theme of corruption within American identity politics, he found he needed something more than simply "the right words" or "knowledge about economists". Maria Gomez effectively proves his point about the deflated American dream, but in other, ineffable, ways she seems not quite to convince as he'd hoped. He found it hard to get into her silk blouse, her pencil skirt - even harder to get under her skin. And then, later, trying to describe her marriage, he discovered that he wanted to write cleverly and aphoristically about "Marriage" with a capital M far more than he wanted to describe Maria's particular marriage, which, thinking of his own marriage, seemed suddenly a monumentally complex task, particularly if his own wife, Karina, was going to read it. And there are a million other little examples ... flaws that are not simply flaws of language or design, but rather flaws of ... what? Him? This thought bothers him for a moment. And then another, far darker thought comes. Is it possible that if he were only the reader, and not the writer, of this novel, he would think it a failure?

Clive doesn't wallow in such thoughts for long. His book gets an agent, his agent gets a publisher, his novel goes out into the world. It is well received. It turns out that Clive's book smells like literature and looks like literature and maybe even, intermittently, feels like literature, and after a while Clive himself has almost forgotten that strange feeling of untruth, of self-betrayal, that his novel first roused in him. He becomes not only a fan of his own novel, but its great defender. If a critic points out an overindulgence here, a purple passage there, well, then Clive explains this is simply what he intended. It was all to achieve a certain effect. In fact, Clive doesn't mind such criticism: nit-picking of this kind feels superficial compared to the bleak sense he first had that his novel was not only not good, but not true. No one is accusing him of so large a crime. The critics, when they criticise, speak of the paintwork and brickwork of the novel, a bad metaph or, a tedious denouement, and are confident he will fix these little mistakes next time round. As for Maria Gomez, everybody agrees that she is just as you'd imagine a corrupt Hispanic government economist in a pencil skirt to be. Clive is satisfied and vindicated. He begins work on a sequel.

2. The craft that defies craftsmanship
That is the end of the tale of Clive. Its purpose was to suggest that somewhere between a critic's necessary superficiality and a writer's natural dishonesty, the truth of how we judge literary success or failure is lost. It is very hard to get writers to speak frankly about their own work, particularly in a literary market where they are required to be not only writers, but also hucksters selling product. It is always easier to depersonalise the question. In preparation for this essay I emailed many writers (under the promise of anonymity) to ask how they judge their own work. One writer, of a naturally analytical and philosophical bent, replied by refining my simple question into a series of more interesting ones:

I've often thought it would be fascinating to ask living writers: "Never mind critics, what do you yourself think is wrong with your writing? How did you dream of your book before it was created? What were your best hopes? How have you let yourself down?" A map of disappointments - that would be a revelation.
Map of disappointments - Nabokov would call that a good title for a bad novel. It strikes me as a suitable guide to the land where writers live, a country I imagine as mostly beach, with hopeful writers standing on the shoreline while their perfect novels pile up, over on the opposite coast, out of reach. Thrusting out of the shoreline are hundreds of piers, or "disappointed bridges", as Joyce called them. Most writers, most of the time, get wet. Why they get wet is of little interest to critics or readers, who can only judge the soggy novel in front of them. But for the people who write novels, what it takes to walk the pier and get to the other side is, to say the least, a matter of some importance. To writers, writing well is not simply a matter of skill, but a question of character. What does it take, after all, to write well? What personal qualities does it require? What personal resources does a bad writer lack? In most areas of human endeavour we are not shy of making these connections between personality and capacity. Why do we never talk about these things when we talk about books?

It's my experience that when a writer meets other writers and the conversation turns to the fault lines of their various prose styles, then you hear a slightly different language than the critic's language. Writers do not say, "My research wasn't sufficiently thorough" or "I thought Casablanca was in Tunisia" or "I seem to reify the idea of femininity" - at least, they don't consider problems like these to be central. They are concerned with the ways in which what they have written reveals or betrays their best or worst selves. Writers feel, for example, that what appear to be bad aesthetic choices very often have an ethical dimension. Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self - vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised. That's why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great. This is hard for young writers, like Clive, to grasp at first. A skilled cabinet -maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There is a rogue element somewhere - for convenience's sake we'll call it the self, although, in less metaphysically challenged times, the "soul" would have done just as well. In our public literary conversations we are squeamish about the connection between selves and novels. We are repelled by the idea that writing fiction might be, among other things, a question of character. We like to think of fiction as the playground of language, independent of its originator. That's why, in the public imagination, the confession "I did not tell the truth" signifies failure when James Frey says it, and means nothing at all if John Updike says it. I think that fiction writers know different. Though we rarely say it publicly, we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine and we like to pretend. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true.

3. What writers know
First things first: writers do not have perfect or even superior knowledge about the quality or otherwise of their own work - God knows, most writers are quite deluded about the nature of their own talent. But writers do have a different kind of knowledge than either professors or critics. Occasionally it's worth listening to. The insight of the practitioner is, for better or worse, unique. It's what you find in the criticism of Virginia Woolf, of Iris Murdoch, of Roland Barthes. What unites those very different critics is the confidence with which they made the connection between personality and prose. To be clear: theirs was neither strictly biographical criticism nor prescriptively moral criticism, and nothing they wrote was reducible to the childish formulations "only good men write good books" or "one must know a man's life to understand his work". But neither did they think of a writer's personality as an irrelevance. They understood style precisely as an expression of personality, in its widest sense. A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don't think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.

4. Tradition versus the individual talent
But before we go any further along that track we find TS Eliot, that most distinguished of critic-practitioners, standing in our way. In his famous essay of 1919, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot decimated the very idea of individual consciousness, of personality, in writing. There was hardly any such thing, he claimed, and what there was, was not interesting. For Eliot the most individual and successful aspects of a writer's work were precisely those places where his literary ancestors asserted their immortality most vigorously. The poet and his personality were irrelevant, the poetry was everything; and the poetry could only be understood through the glass of literary history. That essay is written in so high church a style, with such imperious authority, that even if all your affective experience as a writer is to the contrary, you are intimidated into believing it. "Poetry," says Eliot, "is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." "The progress of an artist," says Eliot, "is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." These credos seem so impersonal themselves, so disinterested, that it is easy to forget that young critic-practitioners make the beds they wish to lie in, and it was in Eliot's interest - given the complexity and scandals of his private life and his distaste for intrusion - ruthlessly to separate the personal from the poetry. He was so concerned with privacy that it influences his terminology: everywhere in that essay there is the assumption that personality amounts to simply the biographical facts of one's life - but that is a narrow vision. Personality is much more than autobiographical detail, it's our way of processing the world, our way of being, and it cannot be artificially removed from our activities; it is our way of being active.

Eliot may have been ruthlessly impersonal in his writing in the superficial sense (if by that we mean he did not reveal personal details, such as the tricky fact that he had committed his wife to an asylum), but never was a man's work more inflected with his character, with his beliefs about the nature of the world. As for that element of his work that he puts forward as a model of his impersonality - a devotion to tradition - such devotion is the very definition of personality in writing. The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

There is no doubt that Eliot's essay, with its promise to "halt at the frontiers of metaphysics or mysticism", is a brilliant demarcation of what is properly within the remit of, as he puts it, "the responsible person interested in poetry". It lays out an entirely reasonable boundary between what we can and cannot say about a piece of writing without embarrassing ourselves. Eliot was honest about wanting both writing and criticism to approach the condition of a science; he famously compared a writer to a piece of finely filiated platinum introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. This analogy has proved a useful aspiration for critics. It has allowed them to believe in the writer as catalyst, entering into a tradition, performing an act of meaningful recombination, and yet leaving no trace of himself, or at least none the critic need worry himself with. Eliot's analogy freed critics to do the independent, radically creative, non- biographical criticism of which they had long dreamt, and to which they have every right. For writers, however, Eliot's analogy just won't do. Fiction writing is not an objective science and writers have selves as well as traditions to understand and assimilate. It is certainly very important, as Eliot argues, that writers should foster an understanding of the cultures and the books of the past, but they also unavoidably exist within the garden of the self and this, too, requires nurture and development. The self is not like platinum - it leaves traces all over the place. Just because Eliot didn't want to talk about it, doesn't mean it isn't there.

5. Writing as self-betrayal
Back to my simple point, which is that writers are in possession of "selfhood", and that the development or otherwise of self has some part to play in literary success or failure. This shameful fact needn't trouble the professor or the critic, but it is naturally of no little significance to writers themselves. Here is the poet Adam Zagajewski, speaking of The Self, in a poem of the same title:

It is small and no more visible than a cricket in August. It likes to dress up, to masquerade, as all dwarves do. It lodges between granite blocks, between serviceable truths. It even fits under a bandage, under adhesive. Neither custom officers nor their beautiful dogs will find it. Between hymns, between alliances, it hides itself. To me, writing is always the attempted revelation of this elusive, multifaceted self, and yet its total revelation - as Zagajewski suggests - is a chimerical impossibility. It is impossible to convey all of the truth of all our experience. Actually, it's impossible to even know what that would mean, although we stubbornly continue to have an idea of it, just as Plato had an idea of the forms. When we write, similarly, we have the idea of a total revelation of truth, but cannot realise it. And so, instead, each writer asks himself which serviceable truths he can live with, which alliances are strong enough to hold. The answers to those questions separate experimentalists from so-called "realists", comics from tragedians, even poets from novelists. In what form, asks the writer, can I most truthfully describe the world as it is experienced by this particular self? And it is from that starting point that each writer goes on to make their individual compromise with the self, which is always a compromise with truth as far as the self can know it. That is why the most common feeling, upon re-reading one's own work, is Prufrock's: "That is not it at all ... that is not what I meant, at all ..." Writing feels like self-betrayal, like failure.

6. Writing as inauthenticity
Here is another novelist, in another email, answering the question: "How would you define literary failure?"
I was once asked by a high-school student in an audience in Chennai: "Why, sir, are you so eager to please?" That's how I tend to define failure - work done for what Heidegger called "Das Mann", the indeterminate "They" who hang over your shoulder, warping your sense of judgment; what he (not me) would call your authenticity. That novelist, like me, I suppose like all of us who came of age under postmodernity, is naturally sceptical of the concept of authenticity, especially what is called "cultural authenticity" - after all, how can any of us be more or less authentic than we are? We were taught that authenticity was meaningless. How, then, to deal with the fact that when we account for our failings, as writers, the feeling that is strongest is a betrayal of one's deepest, authentic self?

That sounds very grand: maybe it's better to start at the simplest denomination of literary betrayal, the critic's favourite, the cliche. What is a cliche except language passed down by Das Mann, used and shop-soiled by so many before you, and in no way the correct jumble of language for the intimate part of your vision you meant to express? With a cliche you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange. It is an aesthetic and an ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth. When writers admit to failures they like to admit to the smallest ones - for example, in each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence - a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same. To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. But it is easy to admit that a sentence makes you wince; less easy to confront the fact that for many writers there will be paragraphs, whole characters, whole books through which one sleepwalks and for which "inauthentic" is truly the correct term.

7. Do writers have duties?
All this talk of authenticity, of betrayal, presupposes a duty - an obligation that the writers and readers of literature are under. It is deeply unfashionable to conceive of such a thing as a literary duty; what that might be, how we might fail to fulfil it. Duty is not a very literary term. These days, when we do speak of literary duties, we mean it from the reader's perspective, as a consumer of literature. We are really speaking of consumer rights. By this measure the duty of writers is to please readers and to be eager to do so, and this duty has various subsets: the duty to be clear; to be interesting and intelligent but never wilfully obscure; to write with the average reader in mind; to be in good taste. Above all, the modern writer has a duty to entertain. Writers who stray from these obligations risk tiny readerships and critical ridicule. Novels that submit to a shared vision of entertainment, with characters that speak the recognisable dialogue of the sitcom, with plots that take us down familiar roads and back home again, will always be welcomed. This is not a good time, in literature, to be a curio. Readers seem to wish to be "represented", as they are at the ballot box, and to do this, fiction needs to be general, not particular. In the contemporary fiction market a writer must entertain and be recognisable - anything less is seen as a failure and a rejection of readers.

Personally, I have no objection to books that entertain and please, that are clear and interesting and intelligent, that are in good taste and are not wilfully obscure - but neither do these qualities seem to me in any way essential to the central experience of fiction, and if they should be missing, this in no way rules out the possibility that the novel I am reading will yet fulfil the only literary duty I care about. For writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. If that sounds woolly and imprecise, I apologise. Writing is not a science, and I am speaking to you in the only terms I have to describe what it is I persistently aim for (yet fail to achieve) when I sit in front of my computer.
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person's truth as far as it can be rendered through language. This single duty, properly pursued, produces complicated, various results. It's certainly not a call to arms for the autobiographer, although some writers will always mistake the readerly desire for personal truth as their cue to write a treatise or a speech or a thinly disguised memoir in which they themselves are the hero. Fictional truth is a question of perspective, not autobiography. It is what you can't help tell if you write well; it is the watermark of self that runs through everything you do. It is language as the revelation of a consciousness.
8. We refuse to be each other
A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own. And I don't care if that consciousness chooses to spend its time in drawing rooms or in internet networks; I don't care if it uses a corner of a Dorito as its hero, or the charming eldest daughter of a bourgeois family; I don't care if it refuses to use the letter e or crosses five continents and two thousand pages. What unites great novels is the individual manner in which they articulate experience and force us to be attentive, waking us from the sleepwalk of our lives. And the great joy of fiction is the variety of this process: Austen's prose will make you attentive in a different way and to different things than Wharton's; the dream Philip Roth wishes to wake us from still counts as sleep if Pynchon is the dream-catcher.

A great piece of fiction can demand that you acknowledge the reality of its wildest proposition, no matter how alien it may be to you. It can also force you to concede the radical otherness lurking within things that appear most familiar. This is why the talented reader understands George Saunders to be as much a realist as Tolstoy, Henry James as much an experimentalist as George Perec. Great styles represent the interface of "world" and "I", and the very notion of such an interface being different in kind and quality from your own is where the power of fiction resides. Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.

9. The dream of a perfect novel drives writers crazy
There is a dream that haunts writers: the dream of the perfect novel. It is a dream that causes only chaos and misery. The dream of this perfect novel is really the dream of a perfect revelation of the self. In America, where the self is so neatly wedded to the social, their dream of the perfect novel is called "The Great American Novel" and requires the revelation of the soul of a nation, not just of a man ... Still I think the principle is the same: on both sides of the Atlantic we dream of a novel that tells the truth of experience perfectly. Such a revelation is impossible - it will always be a partial vision, and even a partial vision is incredibly hard to achieve. The reason it is so hard to think of more than a handful of great novels is because the duty I've been talking about - the duty to convey accurately the truth of one's own conception - is a duty of the most demanding kind. If, every 30 years, people complain that there were only a few first-rate novels published, that's because there were only a few. Genius in fiction has always been and always will be extremely rare. Fact is, to tell the truth of your own conception - given the nature of our mediated world, given the shared and ambivalent nature of language, given the elusive, deceitful, deluded nature of the self - truly takes a genius, truly demands of its creator a breed of aesthetic and ethical integrity that makes one's eyes water just thinking about it.

But there's no reason to cry. If it's true that first-rate novels are rare, it's also true that what we call the literary canon is really the history of the second-rate, the legacy of honourable failures. Any writer should be proud to join that list just as any reader should count themselves lucky to read them. The literature we love amounts to the fractured shards of an attempt, not the monument of fulfilment. The art is in the attempt, and this matter of understanding-that-which-is-outside-of-ourselves using only what we have inside ourselves amounts to some of the hardest intellectual and emotional work you'll ever do. It is a writer's duty. It is also a reader's duty. Did I mention that yet?

10. Note to readers: a novel is a two-way street
A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her. This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason. The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park.
What I'm saying is, a reader must have talent. Quite a lot of talent, actually, because even the most talented reader will find much of the land of literature tricky terrain. For how many of us feel the world to be as Kafka felt it, too impossibly foreshortened to ride from one village to the next? Or can imagine a world without nouns, as Borges did? How many are willing to be as emotionally generous as Dickens, or to take religious faith as seriously as did Graham Greene? Who among us have Zora Neale Hurston's capacity for joy or Douglas Coupland's strong stomach for the future? Who has the delicacy to tease out Flaubert's faintest nuance, or the patience and the will to follow David Foster Wallace down his intricate recursive spirals of thought? The skills that it takes to write it are required to read it. Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers. Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it's a conjurer's trick within a far deeper magic. To become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more.

The fourth Post -- The Energy War

2006-10-12T05:14:00.000-07:00

Lock, stock and barrels

With a growing number of players, the war over who will control the world’s energy supply is warming up. The theatre of this war is now shifting from West Asia to the Caspian region Now, the US wants all energy supplies meant for the West to bypass Russian and Iranian territory

S TEPHEN GAGHAN’S fast-paced film Syriana is about several plots and sub-plots all told in two hours.
It is about the struggle for the control of oil, about dubious business mergers worked out by two Texan oil companies for oil rights in Kazakhstan; about a ‘bad nationalist’ Arab prince who gives his country’s drilling rights to the Chinese but angry Americans ensure a violent regime change; and it is about the ‘good’ Arab brother is rewarded for his willingness to help some American companies sell their military hardware. There is torture and one could say, predictably and inevitably, the suicide terrorist is a Pakistani. There is intrigue, treachery and ruthlessness in the pursuit of wealth and power. Clearly, a case of reel life imitating real life.
Outside the cinema, the real world looks pretty much similar. The United States has been in this region for over 60 years, ever since Roosevelt promised American protection to the Saudis, in exchange for uninterrupted supply of cheap oil. From then on, there has been a steady accretion of US power and today, the US Centcom’s area of responsibility coincides with the entire energy-rich Gulf and Caspian region.
America’s neo-cons have consistently professed that America had a global mission, that military power was the indispensable foundation of American foreign policy. They have stressed upon the importance of using military superiority to help introduce democracy. The debate in the last two decades of the 20th century provided the real foundation of the Bush doctrine of ‘pre-emptive action’. This means an America driven forward by unrivaled military power and growing profits for the world’s largest multinational corporations. Iraq may have been an unmitigated disaster ac cording to most, but for US oil corporations, it has been a glorious war. Between them, Exxon, Chevron and ConocoPhilips earned $ 64 billion in 2005.
The US may, today, have a Bureau of Deconstruction in the Department of Defence that would deconstruct 26 regimes and a Bureau of Reconstruction in the State Department that would reconstruct these countries into democratic American clones. Others, like Seymour Hersh, have talked of ten countries that are up for facelifts while Ralph Peters has redesigned maps of the region.
The Global War on Terror is not about defeating terrorism, but it is a handy means to re-order the world and retaining US pre-eminence.
It is, however, becoming increasingly costly and difficult to retain this position. It is axiomatic that without access to assured cheap and abundant energy supplies, the US cannot maintain its way of life and full spectrum global dominance. A Russia that was supposed to have been finally defeated after the Afghan jehad and the fall of the Berlin Wall is resurgent under President Putin. The rise of China, as a global power, is another phenomenon that Washington must deal with. There is competition for resources and markets; energy as a weapon of influence has been used by Putin. Neither threatens the US militarily but its economic interests and those of its allies, as well as its political influence, are being challenged. Equally, without access to similar energy resources China will not be able sustain its scorching rate of growth required to keep its economy growing and prevent an internal political upheaval.
Having won the Cold War, the US continued to needle the Russians, in areas the Russians have long considered their own backyard, confirming earlier prognosis that the US and Russia would always be adversaries even had there been no communism to defeat or defend. Now, the US wants all energy supplies meant for the West to bypass Russian and Iran ian territory as these provide both with the leverage that the Americans do not want them to enjoy. American troops today guard pipelines that flow from the Caspian to the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, avoiding Russian territory.
As a vital supplier of gas and oil to Europe and Japan, Russia exhibited its new-found strength at the start of the year when it shut off gas supplies to Ukraine as part of the bargain for a higher price. Possibly, the Russian President had learnt these tactics of using energy reserves for geo-strategic advantage at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute where he did a dissertation on “Toward a Russian Transnational Energy Com pany” soon after making a career change post-KGB. Russia-China relations have been on the upswing with mutually beneficial military and technology deals. They are also working on deals with Saudi Arabia. Russia may have lost the Cold War but it is not going to lose the Energy War.
Elsewhere, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation comprising China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan has enrolled Iran into its membership. This could be early signs of moving towards a Central Asian version of the Opec or Nato. The prospects of a triangular relationship — with Russia, China and Iran as the three sides and the energy-rich Central Asia boxed in — is fast becoming America’s geo-strategic nightmare, especially after its colossal failures in West Asia. Iran has 11 per cent of the world’s oil and 16 per cent the world’s gas.
Although Saudi Arabia has more oil and Russia has more gas, no other country has more of both these resources combined. Iran is geo-strategically located as the only country that has borders with the vital Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. This, rather than the nuclear issue, is the real reason for US anxiety about the way Iran will turn. Iran is the only country that has gained from the failed US campaign in Iraq. No wonder, less than spontaneous anti-Tehran demonstrations seem to be taking place in Iran’s Azerbaijan province and in Khuzestan, bordering Iraq.
American attempts to snub the visiting Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, last April when they ‘mistakenly’ played the Taiwanese anthem left the Chinese leader unfazed. He took off for his Saudi Arabian visit, struck a deal ensuring access to Saudi oil in exchange for sophisticated weapons and new technologies. China has ventured into the American backyard by recently hosting Hugo Chavez, the defiant Venezuelan leader. Nor did China take American advice to cancel its $ 100 billion deal with Iran. China has worked out several pipeline and exploration deals globally and also hopes to use the Gwadar port for overland energy routes in preference to sea lanes that are subject to American control. A ChinaVenezuela-Iran deal is also a worry for the US, especially its international political significance.
Experts predict that global oil production is peaking and the era of cheap and abundant oil is gone forever. Apart from traditional guzzlers, other claimants like China and India and major Western oil companies will now compete increasingly for the diminishing resource. But India is still on the reserve bench in this Big Boys League.
Meanwhile, the US naval armada is gathering in strength in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean Sea. The wraps are off in Afghanistan and the Nato is now up front. Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya of Global Research has given a carefully documented review of the nature and extent of this naval build-up and the deployment of coalition forces surrounding Iran, which includes a possible request to India to deploy in Afghanistan.
Planned air attacks have been worked out since early 2004. The world watches. Is this merely high drama? Does it all depend on who blinks first — Ahmadinejad or Bush? If this is for real, then the world will go up in smoke — maybe nuclear — as the US Presidential Directive (NSPD 35) of May 2004 is widely presumed to include deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in West Asia.

Vikram Sood is former Secretary, Research & Analyis Wing

The Third

2006-10-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know, salon.com is favourite, ennit!

You have no right to vote
The Constitution doesn't guarantee it, the Republicans know it, and real democratic values in our country are under assault.
By Garrett Epps
Sept. 21, 2006 Last week, a Missouri judge reminded the state Legislature that citizens of the state have a right to vote. And because it is a right, not a privilege granted by the powerful, Missourians can cast their ballots this November without having to meet identification requirements that seemed designed to make it harder for certain people -- the poor, the elderly, minorities and women -- to exercise that right.
That's the good news. The bad news is that this right comes from the Missouri state Constitution. The U.S. Constitution does not explicitly guarantee a right to vote, and our federal courts currently read the document not to include it.
The Missouri case should spark some national discussion about why it is that our country, almost alone among advanced democratic nations, does not find this right worth including in its Constitution. It should also inspire closer scrutiny of a kind of a electoral gamesmanship that is going on around the country, as Republicans seek to exploit this gap in our democratic guarantees.
The Republican majority of the Missouri Legislature has been haunted by a fear that is widespread in red America: a fear that the wrong kinds of people are voting. As a result, they passed a "Voter Protection Act," which required a state-issued photo ID for any voter who shows up at the polls. A state driver's license would do. But those who didn't already have a license -- even if they had been voting at the same address for the past half-century -- would be required to get a state-issued ID. To get one of those IDs, they would need to produce proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or a passport, as well as documents showing that they were lawfully present at their current addresses. If they had ever changed their names -- if, for example, they were women voting under their married names -- they would be required to produce documents legitimizing the name change as well.
At first glance, this might seem like a minor thing. The bill's sponsor, Republican state Sen. Delbert Scott, noted that "you have to use [photo ID] to get on an airplane, to buy cigarettes." And, after all, the requirement would impact a small group of citizens -- a mere 170,000. That's only about 4 percent of the electorate, hardly a significant number. It is only, for example, eight times the margin of victory by which Sen. Jim Talent (coincidentally running for re-election this fall) defeated Democratic incumbent Jean Carnahan in 2002.
Most people don't really have to show ID to buy cigarettes. Beyond that, to state the obvious, neither air travel nor cigarette smoking is a fundamental component of democratic self-government. Voting is. A law that increases the cost and difficulty of voting will predictably reduce the number of people who vote, and a democracy that excludes large numbers of its citizens from the franchise isn't worthy of the name.
Many middle-class whites don't realize that for the poor and minorities, voting can be a difficult and even scary proposition. I first learned this as a poll-watcher in 1976, when I saw a white registrar in Virginia solicitously asking a black voter whether he was sure his registration form had been properly filled out. "You know fraudulent voting is a federal crime, don't you?" she purred, smiling sweetly. Southern Republicans often blanket poor black neighborhoods warning would-be voters that they might be arrested at the polls if they have unpaid traffic tickets.
Intriguingly, the Republican sponsors of the Missouri bill weren't really able to argue that it was needed to prevent fraud as such. Despite their best efforts, they couldn't find much evidence of fraudulent voting. So they argued instead that the law was needed because without it, solid Missouri citizens -- the kind of people who vote Republican, for example -- might be tempted to think there was fraud at the polls. Gov. Matt Blunt explained that the bill would "restore Missourians' confidence in state elections." (Blunt's margin of victory in 2004 -- certified by himself as secretary of state -- was 3 percent of the vote.) The Springfield News Leader, which supported the bill, said it would provide "peace of mind for voters who want to know that cheaters aren't improperly influencing an election."
But on Sept. 14, Cole County Circuit Judge Richard Callahan blocked the law from taking effect. Callahan pointed out that Article VII of Missouri's Constitution says that "All citizens of the United States ... who are residents of this state ... are entitled to vote at all elections by the people." The ID rule, he reasoned, would allow the Legislature to add an onerous qualification to those spelled out in the Constitution.
The judge's decision squares with common sense, as well as with the text. And it highlights the lack of a similar provision in the U.S. Constitution. As a result of this lack, other states -- mostly those in which Republicans currently run the legislature -- are adding such requirements. Former Bush campaign officials last year launched a new conservative advocacy group, the oxymoronically titled American Center for Voting Rights, designed to push such legislation at both the state and federal levels. So far, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Florida and Ohio have passed or tightened photo ID laws. Democratic governors in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania vetoed such laws earlier this year, and state and federal courts have both blocked the Georgia law.
Throughout our history, Americans have been profoundly ambivalent about the vote. The Constitution of 1787 left the issue of federal voting rights entirely to the states, which could disenfranchise their voters more or less as they chose. Today, even though "the right to vote" is by now mentioned five times in the amended Constitution, the federal courts continue to insist that voting is mostly a state matter. The Supreme Court restated the point in 2000, in Bush v. Gore. "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States," said the Court, rather breezily, "unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College."
Meanwhile, virtually every other advanced democracy already has an explicit guarantee of the right to vote. Ironically, whenever the United States imposes a constitution on another (conquered) nation, we tend to insist that they include in those documents a right we do not ourselves possess. Afghans have "the right to elect and be elected," Iraqis have "the right ... to vote, to elect, and to nominate," and the Japanese enjoy "universal adult suffrage."
Since the fiasco in Florida, a number of scholars and activists have been working to generate a constitutional fix for this problem. American University law professor Jamie Raskin (who was elected last week to the Maryland state Senate) in 2001 proposed an amendment that would say, in part, "Citizens of the United States have the right to vote in primary and general elections ... and such right shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State." At the time, Raskin noted that "only Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Pakistan, Singapore, and, of course, the United Kingdom ... still leave voting rights out of their constitutions." Raskin's call has been echoed by other scholars. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., has championed such an amendment, and FairVote.org, an advocacy group, is fighting for national and local reforms that would make clear that it is the government's responsibility to ensure that all eligible voters have a chance to cast a ballot.
But with Republicans in charge in many state capitals and Washington, the momentum in practical terms is moving the other way. On Sept. 14, the U.S. House Administration Committee approved by a straight party vote a proposed bill that would require all voters nationwide to obtain IDs by producing a birth certificate or passport.
This argument is too crucial to democracy, and too easy to win, for progressives to let it slide. Voting is not a privilege for which citizens must qualify by showing their ability to dodge bureaucratic hurdles. If fraud really is a concern, state elections officials could be authorized to update voter lists and follow up on changes of address. That's what happens in most other democratic countries.
Real democratic values in this country are currently under assault. Day after day, we must justify concepts that were once accepted as givens. We are forced to discuss whether a free country really needs the rule of law, or freedom of speech, or an executive subject to legislative oversight. It would be nice to begin campaigning for measures that would do more than just get democracy out of its defensive crouch -- that would actually make democracy stronger. A right to vote might be one of them. When the argument is truly joined, who can be against it?

The second

2006-10-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

This one from Salon.com/Guardian Newspapers Limited

Back to the Dark Ages
Pope Benedict's animosity toward other faiths reveals a deep arrogance rooted in a blinkered Catholicism utterly out of place in the 21st century.
By Madeleine Bunting
Sept. 20, 2006 Only 18 months into his papacy and already Pope Benedict XVI has stirred up unprecedented controversy. As the explanations and apologies pour out of the Vatican -- and thousands of Catholic churches around the world -- the questions about what exactly this man intended by quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor's insult of the Prophet Mohammed have only multiplied.
Some say this was a case of naiveté, of a scholarly theologian stumbling into the glare of a global media storm, blinking with surprise at the outrage he had inadvertently triggered. The learned man's thoughtful reasoning, say some, has been misconstrued and distorted by troublemakers, and the context ignored.
But such explanations are unconvincing. This is a man who has been at the heart of one of the world's multinational institutions for a very long time. He has been privy to how pontifical messages get distorted and magnified by a global media. Shy he may be, but no one has ever before accused this pope of being a remote theologian sitting in an ivory tower. On the contrary, he is a determined, shrewd operator whose track record indicates a man who is not remotely afraid of controversy. He has long been famous for his bruising, ruthless condemnation of those he disagrees with. Senior Catholic theologians such as the German Hans Kung are well familiar with the sharpness of his judgments.
But in the 18 months since Benedict was elected, the wary critics who have always feared this man were lulled into believing that office might have softened his abrasive edges. His encyclical on love won widespread acclaim and the pronouncement on homosexuality being incompatible with the priesthood (and its inference that homosexuals were to blame for the child sex abuse problems in the church) were explained away as an inheritance from Pope John Paul II's reign.
But while the pope has tried to build a more appealing public image, what has become increasingly clear is that this is a man with little sympathy or imagination for other religious faiths. Famously, the then Cardinal Ratzinger once referred to Buddhism as a form of masturbation for the mind -- a remark still repeated among deeply offended Buddhists more than a decade after he said it. Even his apology at the weekend managed to bring Jews into the row.
In fact, Pope Benedict XVI's short papacy has marked a significant departure from the previous pope's stance on interreligious dialogue. John Paul II made some dramatic gestures to rally world religious leaders, the most famous being a gathering in Assisi, Italy, of every world faith, even African animists, to pray for world peace. He felt keenly the terrible history of Catholic-Jewish relations, and having fought with the Polish resistance to save Jews in the Second World War, John Paul II made unprecedented efforts to begin to heal centuries of hostility and indifference on the part of the Catholic Church to Europe's Jews. John Paul II also addressed himself to the ancient enmity between Muslims and Catholics; he apologized for the Crusades and was the first pope to visit a mosque during a visit to Syria in 2001.
In contrast, Pope Benedict has managed to antagonize two major world faiths within a few months. The current anger of Muslims is comparable to the anger and disappointment felt by Jews after his visit to Auschwitz in May. He gave a long address at the site of the former concentration camp and failed to mention anti-Semitism, and offered no apology -- whether on behalf of his own country, Germany, or on behalf of the Catholic Church. He acknowledged he was a "son of the German people ... but not guilty on that account"; he then launched into a highly controversial claim that a "ring of criminals" were responsible for Nazism and that the German people were as much their victims as anyone else. This is an argument that has long been discredited in Germany as utterly inadequate in explaining how millions supported the Nazis. Given his own involvement in the Hitler Youth movement as a boy, and his refusal to make a clean breast of the Vatican's acquiescence in the horrors of Nazism by opening its archives to historians, this was a shabby moment in Catholic history. Not for this pope those dramatic, epoch-defining gestures that made the last pope such a significant global figure.
Even worse, in his Auschwitz address, he managed to argue in a long theological exposition that the real victims of the Holocaust were God and Christianity. As one commentator put it, he managed to claim that Jews were "themselves bit players -- bystanders at their own extermination. The true victim was a metaphysical one." This theological treatise bears the same characteristics as last week's Regensburg lecture; put at its most charitable, they are too clever by half. More plainly speaking, they indicate a deep arrogance rooted in a blinkered Catholic triumphalism that is utterly out of place in the 21st century.
But if his visit to Auschwitz disappointed many and failed to resolve outstanding resentments about the murky role of German Catholicism, this latest incident seems even worse. Quoting Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologos, he said: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." It was a gratuitous reawakening of the most entrenched and self-serving of Western prejudices -- that Muslims have a unique proclivity to violence, a claim that has no basis in history or in current world events (a fact that still eludes too many Westerners).
Even more bewildering is the fact that his choice of quotation from Manuel II Paleologos, the 14th century Byzantine emperor, was so insulting of the Prophet. Even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Islam teaches -- and as a Vatican cardinal, Pope Benedict XVI would have learned this long ago -- that reverence for the Prophet is non-negotiable. What unites all Muslims is a passionate devotion and commitment to protecting the honor of Mohammed. Given the scale of the offense, the carefully worded apology, actually, gives little ground; he recognizes that Muslims have been offended and that he was only quoting, but there is no regret at using such an inappropriate comment or the deep historic resonances it stirs up.
By an uncanny coincidence the legendary Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci died last week. No one connected the two events, but the pope had already run into controversy in Italy by inviting the rabid Islamophobe to a private audience just months ago. This is the journalist who published a bestseller in 2001 that amounted to a diatribe of invective against Islam. This is the woman who was only too happy to fling out comments such as "Muslims breed like rats" and "the increasing presence of Muslims in Italy and Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom." At the time of her papal audience, Fallaci's ranting against Islam had landed her in court and there was outrage at the pope's insensitive invitation. The pope refused to backtrack and insisted the meeting was purely "pastoral."
Put last week's lecture in Bavaria and the Fallaci audience alongside his vocal opposition to Turkish membership in the E.U., and the picture isn't pretty. On one of the biggest and most volatile issues of our day -- the perceived clash between the West and the Muslim world -- the pope seems to have abdicated his papal role of arbitrator, and taken up arms in a rerun of a medieval fantasy.
An elderly Catholic nun has already been killed in Somalia, perhaps in retaliation for the pope's remarks; churches have been attacked in the West Bank. How is this papal stupidity going to play out in countries such as Nigeria, where the tensions between Catholics and Muslims frequently flare into riots and death? Or other countries such as Pakistan, where tiny Catholic communities are already beleaguered? Or the Muslim minorities in Catholic countries such as the Philippines -- how comfortable do they feel this week?
Two lines of thought emerge from this mess. The first is that the pope's personal authority has been irrevocably damaged; how now could he ever present himself as a figure of global moral authority and a peacemaker after this? At the weekend, a message was read out from Cardinal Murphy O'Connor at all masses in Catholic churches in England; he spoke of the regret at any offense caused and urged good relations between Catholics and Muslims. For a church that prides itself on taking centuries to respond, this was unprecedented crisis management. It cannot but damage the pope's authority with the faithful that such emergency measures were necessary, and it compromises not just this pope but the papal office itself. (This is a job, after all, that is supposed to be divinely guided and at all times beyond reproach: a claim that looks a bit threadbare after the past few days.)
The second is a more disturbing possibility: namely, that the Catholic Church could be failing -- yet again -- to deal with the challenge of modernity. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it struggled to adapt to an increasingly educated and questioning faithful; now, in the 21st century, it is in danger of failing the great challenge of how we forge new ways of accommodating difference in a crowded, mobile world. The Catholic Church has to make a dramatic break with its triumphalist, bigoted past if it is to contribute in any constructive way to chart this new course. John Paul II made some dramatic steps in this direction; but the fear now is that Pope Benedict XVI has no intention of following suit, and that he has another direction altogether in mind.
Madeleine Bunting, © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006.

First Post

2006-10-10T07:20:00.000-07:00

Something I found in Salon.com

On Google's social networking service, Orkut, Indians are organizing themselves by caste. (Thanks to DesiPundit for the tip.) There are hundreds, maybe thousands of groups devoted to every caste, subcaste and sub-sub-caste that exists in India's phenomenally splintered and complex caste system. If, like a typical liberal, you are made uncomfortable by the implicit inequities of caste divisions, then scrolling through the Orkut groups can be a discouraging experience.
"We Agarwals are the people who rule the Business in India, very soon we shall rule over the world too," reads the introduction to one such group. "The whole & soul purpose of this community is to gather all the Brahmins scattered along the Globe & to provide them a common platform to make them re-emerge again as the Leaders of India. This community will help Brahmins to empower them by regaining their lost glory by providing whatever help possible," reads another.
At the same time, distressing as it may be to some, there is nothing surprising about this. It's just yet more proof that cyberspace is hardly a transformative medium. What it's really good at is duplicating, in bits and bytes and packets, exactly the divisions that cut through the offline world.
Which means, naturally, that for every Brahmin group devoted to recovering lost glory, there's a Dalit group aimed at smashing the oppressive system that keeps "untouchables" down. And scores of additional "communities" --"Against the caste system," "I hate caste," "I hate caste and religion" -- that provide gathering places for anti-caste system sentiment.
(But don't dwell too long pondering the twisted irony of a moderator of a Dalit group declaring "I will ban U" to any members of another caste that might try to join her group. Exclusion up and down the hierarchy!)
What to think of it all, besides just the sheer fascination? I'll content myself with a shout out to my favorite discovery, the community "Caste my ass," which illustrates itself with a picture of a donkey, and where one discussion thread begins with a link to a self-congratulatory Brahmin thread and adds the pithy commentary: "The intellectual elite ... my ass."
There you go: that's my caste: "The intellectual elite ... my ass." And you're all welcome to join.
-- Andrew Leonard

The reason

2006-10-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

There have been times when I have come across a great read -- a poem, an article, a report, a blog, a story and felt compelled to share it with others...

I could have read it aloud but they might not like the sound of my voice
I could have made printouts and handed them out but my purse did not like the sound of that
I could have emailed them but then I might be jamming up somebody's in box

so this seemed to be the sanest way out...

You could read or not. You could comment or not. You could discuss or not. I may respond or not.