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GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS
- View film on evolution and sustainability of gaia and homosapiens

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Imaging Life

UK | The First Counter-revolutionary
The Nation - By Corey Robin - September 30, 2009
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Revolution sent Thomas Hobbes into exile; reaction sent him back. In 1640 parliamentary opponents of Charles I such as John Pym were denouncing anyone "preaching for absolute monarchy that the king may do what he list." Hobbes had recently finished writing The Elements of Law, which did just that. After the king's top adviser and a theologian of unlimited royal power were both arrested, Hobbes decided it was time to go. Not waiting for his bags to be packed, he fled England for France.

Eleven years and a civil war later, Hobbes fled France for England. This time, he was running from the royalists. As before, Hobbes had just finished a book. Leviathan, he would later explain, "fights on behalf of all kings and all those who under whatever name bear the rights of kings." It was this seeming indifference about the identity of the sovereign that was now getting him into trouble. Leviathan justified, no, demanded, that men submit to any person or persons capable of protecting them from foreign attack and civil unrest. With the monarchy abolished and Oliver Cromwell's forces in control of England and providing for the people's safety, Leviathan seemed to recommend that everyone, including the defeated royalists, profess their allegiance to the Commonwealth. Versions of that argument had already gotten Anthony Ascham, ambassador for the Commonwealth, assassinated by royalist exiles in Spain. So when Hobbes learned that clergymen in France were trying to arrest him -- Leviathan was also vehemently anti-Catholic, which offended the Queen Mother -- he slipped out of Paris and made his way back to London.

Islam?s Darwin problem - In the Muslim world, creationism is on the rise
The Boston Globe - By Drake Bennett - October 25, 2009
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Three weeks ago, with much fanfare, a team of scientists unveiled the fossil skeleton of Ardi, a 4-foot-tall female primate who lived and died 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. According to her discoverers, Ardi - short for Ardipithecus ramidus, her species - is our oldest known ancestor. She predated Lucy, the fossilized Australopithecus afarensis that previously had claimed the title, by 1.2 million years.

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International

Hungary | Book - Enemies of the People - Behind the Iron Curtain
Washington Post - By Kati Marton - October 18, 2009
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The family about which Kati Marton writes is her own. A moderately well-known and exceedingly well-connected print and broadcast journalist in New York, she is a native Hungarian who lived the first eight years of her life in a country under the repressive communist rule of the dictator Matyas Rakosi. She was born in 1949, the daughter of a prominent Hungarian journalist, the Associated Press correspondent Endre Marton, and his wife, Ilona, also a journalist. They were brave people who paid for their courage by being sent to prison, leaving their two young daughters to live with a family "willing to take us in for a certain monthly sum."

Marton's story, then, is one of bravery, suffering, survival and vindication. She tells it in straightforward, lucid prose -- no small accomplishment, considering that English is not her native language -- and with her emotions well under control. This is not a woe-is-me memoir of the sort so much in fashion these days, but a carefully reported, almost clinical account of what it is like to live in a totalitarian state and how hard it is to escape from it. It is much less a memoir of Marton's childhood than a joint biography of her remarkable parents.

Japan | Book - Exporting Japan: Politics of Emigration to Latin America by Toake Endoh
Foreign Affairs, Council of Foreign Relations - Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan - November/December 2009
a href ="http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65652/toake-endoh/exporting-japan-politics-of-emigration-to-latin-america" target="new"> - LINK ^

The career of the Peruvian strongman Alberto Fujimori reminded the world that Latin America, especially Brazil and Peru, is home to a sizable Japanese diaspora. It is lesser known that the influx of Japanese to the region, which took place both before and after World War II, was in large part organized and financed by the Japanese state. Its triple purpose was to get rid of undesirables, build a base outside the Japanese islands to secure commodities and food for the homeland, and create a channel for political influence abroad. Having cast out people it did not want, the government then sent teachers to instill loyalty to the home country and to encourage them to keep speaking Japanese. This previously untold story bespeaks both the profound insecurity of Japan's geostrategic position and the inventiveness of its elites in looking for solutions.

Romania | Empire Falls: The Revolutions of 1989
The Nation - By Ronald Grigor Suny - November 16, 2009 Edition
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The end of the story was gruesome--a spray of bullets and a splattering of blood on a wall in central Romania. On Christmas Day 1989, after a hastily arranged trial before a kangaroo court, the deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed by a firing squad. The assembled soldiers, eager to eliminate the despised dictator, were ordered not to aim higher than his chest. The faces of the condemned had to be recognizable after the fact. The country had to see that the communist era was over.

United States Government

Reflections
Let me get this straight.

Congress is going to pass a health care plan
written by a committee whose head says he doesn't understand it,
passed by a Congress that hasn't read it, but exempts themselves from it,
signed by a President that also hasn't read it (and who smokes),
with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes,
overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and
financed by a country that's broke.

What could possibly go wrong?

Citizens / Civil Organizations / Activism

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online by Guobin Yang
Yang believes that net activism is part of a "long revolution" that is making Chinese society more open, egalitarian, and participatory.
Foreign Affairs, Council of Foreign Relations - Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan - November/December 2009
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Despite formidable state control, Chinese netizens have used humor, music, videos, games, and nimble wordplay to create new forms of expression and association that are intrinsically democratic. Human rights activists can connect across borders, and communities that are formed online can become actors in the real world, especially when they concern themselves with areas in which the government has been more tolerant of citizen activism, such as public health and the environment. Whether these developments will lead to changes in the regime, provide a safety valve for the pressures besetting authoritarianism, or just create another channel for official propaganda remains up for debate. But Yang believes that they are part of a "long revolution" that is making Chinese society more open, egalitarian, and participatory.

Cracking Books and Mags in the Coffee House

Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?
The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute - By Jason Richwine - Wednesday, October 21, 2009
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Who are smarter, liberals or conservatives? This is the kind of question that could spark fierce and endless debates between political opponents, but what if we could know, scientifically, that one side has the edge in brainpower? Should that change how we think about political issues?

Book Review | In the Long Run
The New York Times - By Justin Foz - October 30, 2009
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We have just lived through an age in which economists were our most influential moral philosophers. The results haven?t been great. ?The main moral compass we now have is a thin and degraded notion of economic welfare, measured in terms of quantity of goods,? Robert Skidelsky writes. Lately we?ve been failing even by that impoverished measure. The time certainly seems ripe for an overthrow of the economists.

Or perhaps it?s simply time for a return to an approach to economics that had largely faded from sight in the past quarter-century, that of John Maynard Keynes. Bringing about such a comeback is Skidelsky?s stated intent in ?Keynes: The Return of the Master.? And while Peter Clarke is less explicit in ?Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th Century?s Most Influential Economist,? the basic message is the same: Keynes is back, and deservedly so.

Is This Literary History? - Mark Bauerlein and Priscilla Wald assess Harvard's new anthology
From the Salem witch trials to W.E.B. Du Bois to Linda Lovelace, A New Literary History of America covers a lot of ground.
The Chronicle Review - November 1, 2009
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Harvard University Press's major new tome, A New Literary History of America, is getting significant publicity?both praise and controversy. Edited by the Harvard scholars Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, with its own Web site and a kickoff party in Cambridge featuring symposia on aspects of the book, it's a 1,122-page collection of essays that unpack cultural topics broadly defined?not just literature, high and low, but the Salem witch trials, W.E.B. Du Bois and his relation to Booker T. Washington, J.F.K.'s inaugural, Linda Lovelace's Ordeal, the screenplay as genre, Alcoholics Anonymous. It is history, literature, art criticism, and more, all rolled into one. The Chronicle Review asked Mark Bauerlein and Priscilla Wald to discuss the project via e-mail. Sollors then comments on the dialogue.

Topical Sections

Art and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
- LINK ^

Corporate Crime

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.?
--- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-Nov-21, in a letter to Colonel E. Mandell House

Communities and Species

Book Review | Metropolitan Glory
From Paris to Timbuktu, the urban places that have played illustrious roles in the world's story
The Wall Street Journal - By Tunku Varadarajan - October 24, 2009
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John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it's not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is "braced for objections" over his selections for "The Great Cities in History," a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included and not Toronto, why Meroe (an ancient Nubian city) is included and not Melbourne. It's a dull question, and Norwich answers it dully, by pointing to the "in history" part of the book's title. The better answer would have been that there's not a shred of romance in Toronto and Melbourne.

In any case, Norwich need not worry about objections, for there will be few. His choices are almost entirely uncontroversial, and his is a careful historian's vision of man's metropolitan history. There are 68 cities here included (if we count ancient Constantinople and modern Istanbul as separate cities). Each is accorded a short chapter, written by contributors whose number includes Simon Schama (on Amsterdam and Washington), A.N. Wilson (on London) and Jan Morris (on New York). The cities under discussion range from the primordial Uruk to modern monsters like Sao Paulo, taking in, along the way, a host of conurbations from the ancient, the medieval and the early modern periods.

Economy and Finance

Bloomberg Economic News
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Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
- LINK ^

Food and Nutrition

Book | Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
This is no half-baked theory of evolution.
The Telegraph - Review by Simon Ings - October 4, 2009
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Just over two and a half million years ago, our brains swelled. Less than a million years later, they swelled again, our posture and our gait changed, our jaws shrank, and we grew taller. These two evolutionary changes define our species, distinguishing us from our fellow primates.

Richard Wrangham has new ideas about why these changes occurred. He has no argument with the generally accepted wisdom that our first transformation ? from nimble tree-climbing australopithecines to sociable, tool-wielding habilines ? was the consequence of a meat diet. But the character of the second change ? from Homo habilis to the protohuman Homo erectus ? has never been adequately explained, and Wrangham believes he has the answer: 1.8 million years ago, we learned to cook. Cooking improves the caloric value of food, and widens the range of what is edible. It literally powered our evolution.

Legal and Constitutional Issues

Bloomberg Index of Current Legal News
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Religion and Philosophies

Book | "After the Prophet"
The Fateful Schism - Review by Eric Ormsby - Tracing the history of a religious divide that still haunts the world.
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When the Prophet Muhammad died unexpectedly after a brief illness in Medina, in present-day Saudi Arabia, on June 8, 632, his followers were stunned. A contemporary called it "the greatest of calamities." Their grief was not only for the loss of an irreplaceable leader. Muhammad was "the seal of the prophets," the last in a line that stretched back to Adam. He had received revelations as "God's emissary" for some 20 years?revelations that he had communicated to the embattled community of his followers, first in Mecca and then, after the hijra, or emigration, in 622, in Medina?but now they came to an end. It was as though God, who revealed Himself through the Prophet, had suddenly fallen silent.In fact, the calamity was greater than Muhammad's mourners could have foreseen. Muhammad had not unambiguously named his successor. The question of succession would haunt Islam for centuries to come. The wrangling began within hours of Muhammad's death; it would quickly lead to a momentous rift between two implacable factions, Shia and Sunni. It is a divide that continues to this day, often with horrific consequences.

In "After the Prophet," veteran Middle East journalist Lesley Hazleton tells with great flair this "epic story of the Shia-Sunni split in Islam," as she rightly calls it.

Rights and Freedom

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians."
--- Angelica Grimke - (1805-1879) Source: Anti-Slavery Examiner, September 1836

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."
--- Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826), Source: in a letter to John Adams as quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964)

Science & Technology

Bloomberg Index of Current Science News
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Securing the Informtion Hghway
How to Enhance The United States Electronic Defenses
Foreign Affairs, Councl on Foreign Relations - Wesley K. Clark and Peter L. Levin
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Cyberwarfare is not an abstract future threat. The United States? electronic defenses are vulnerable and Washington must act quickly to secure computer networks, software, and hardware before it is too late.

Violence - Civil and Governmental

The Suicide of the East? - 1989 and the Fall of Communism
Fore ign Affairs, Councl f foreigns A ffairs - By Philip D. Zelikow - November/December 2009
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Once upon a time, the "ten days that shook the world," in Russia's 1917 revolution, had a comparable grip on the public's historical imagination. Once upon a time, the future of the world seemed to belong to the states descended from that older bolt of revolutionary lightning.

These were total states. They encompassed the unprecedented forces of creation and destruction that humanity had so recently discovered, and they were driven by Nietzschean supermen with a will to power. Or so it seemed to the disillusioned Trotskyite James Burnham by the end of the 1930s. In his influential 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that ideologies such as socialism or fascism were just masks worn by new kinds of "managerial states," their resources mobilized and industries led by a technocratic elite. The states that would triumph were those that could carry their principles to their logical limits and use power ruthlessly. Capitalism, he predicted, was "not going to continue much longer." Shortly after World War II, Burnham returned to his theme of governing power elites, "the Machiavellians," who might adopt democratic forms to perpetuate their rule. If U.S. leaders hoped to survive, they would have to acquire their own will to power and use their fleeting nuclear advantage, in a preventive war if necessary.

Sound and Fury

Photography - US | Photos from the Book, Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America
- Slide Show / Audio

Hip Hop | Maestro Fresh Wes - Drop The Needle
- Video

Bouncing barefoot on the sidewalk
- Video

A Song for the Times - Bing Crosby (1932) ?Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
- Audio

The History of A Great Depression-Era Anthem For Our Time
- Audio/Text

Yip Harburg (1970)
- Audio

The Internet Press Room

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Music Video | Leonard Cohen | "Democracy Is Coming to the USA"
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