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GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS
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Imaging Life

Book Review | "Inside of a Dog" by Alexandra Horowitz
What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - The Dogs Have Eyes -- And the Nose Knows.
Washington Post - By Michael Schaffer - October 18, 2009
- LINK ^

"Inside of a Dog" offers a thoughtful take on the interior life of the dog, a topic often left to poets and philosophers and "Marley & Me." A Barnard psychologist, Horowitz doesn't deliver an academic monograph based on, say, freshly unearthed details about the wild dogs of the Siberian steppe. Rather, she mixes observations of her own dog with a breezy survey of animal-science literature as she ponders more basic questions about the pet dogs of the American living room: What's with the sniffing? Why do they bark? Oh, and do they actually like us?

More interesting is Horowitz's description of what dogs take in through their other senses. Dogs, she writes, "are the anthropologists among us," making up in close observation what they couldn't otherwise know. For instance, time: They can't read clocks, of course, but these "consummate eavesdroppers and peeping Toms" watch us closely enough to be able to tell, from something as obscure as the speed with which we get up from our desks, whether it's afternoon-walk time. Human observers would find such watching endlessly boring. The fact that pet dogs do not, she says, helps explains our affection for them. The result is a work long on insight and short on jargon. An early chapter on smell nicely explains how dogs' supercharged noses -- they can detect a spoonful of sugar dissolved in two Olympic pools' worth of water -- make smell their most important sense. One real-world implication: Many of the things humans do in the name of sanitation make a dog's world significantly less interesting. "We deprive dogs of an important part of their identity, temporarily, to bathe them in coconut-lavender shampoo," she writes.

"Inside of a Dog" offers a thoughtful take on the interior life of the dog, a topic often left to poets and philosophers and "Marley & Me." A Barnard psychologist, Horowitz doesn't deliver an academic monograph based on, say, freshly unearthed details about the wild dogs of the Siberian steppe. Rather, she mixes observations of her own dog with a breezy survey of animal-science literature as she ponders more basic questions about the pet dogs of the American living room: What's with the sniffing? Why do they bark? Oh, and do they actually like us?

The result is a work long on insight and short on jargon. An early chapter on smell nicely explains how dogs' supercharged noses -- they can detect a spoonful of sugar dissolved in two Olympic pools' worth of water -- make smell their most important sense. One real-world implication: Many of the things humans do in the name of sanitation make a dog's world significantly less interesting. "We deprive dogs of an important part of their identity, temporarily, to bathe them in coconut-lavender shampoo," she writes.

More interesting is Horowitz's description of what dogs take in through their other senses. Dogs, she writes, "are the anthropologists among us," making up in close observation what they couldn't otherwise know. For instance, time: They can't read clocks, of course, but these "consummate eavesdroppers and peeping Toms" watch us closely enough to be able to tell, from something as obscure as the speed with which we get up from our desks, whether it's afternoon-walk time. Human observers would find such watching endlessly boring. The fact that pet dogs do not, she says, helps explains our affection for them.

***** Recommended | E. D. Hirsch?s Educational Curriculum for Democracy
A content-rich pedagogy makes better citizens and smarter kids.
- LINK ^

At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration?s approach to education reform: ?We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn?t work.? Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal ?Race to the Top? initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it.

The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

The ?Massachusetts miracle,? in which Bay State students? soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature?s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch?s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch?s ideas and urge other states to do the same.

US | Opinion - How Schools Fail Democracy
The Chroncle Review - By E.D. Hirsch Jr. - September 28, 2009
- LINK ^

Recent town-hall meetings on health care were contentious and none too civil. Yet there was a bright spot beneath the rancor. Some participants managed to communicate effectively in grammatical sentences, using standard pronunciation, vocabulary, and common allusions like "the bully pulpit." They showed themselves proficient in the language conventions of the American public sphere, and so were able to participate actively in political life.

But what of the mute, unseen people off-screen who cannot wield the conventions of knowledge and language needed to participate in the American public sphere? Brecht described them memorably: "But you see only those in the light/Those in the darkness you don't see."

Too many Americans are in the linguistic shadows now?possibly close to a majority. Despite intense efforts driven by the No Child Left Behind Act, the language abilities of our 17-year-olds have remained stuck at the steeply declined levels of the 1970s, while the language gap between white students on one side and black and Hispanic students on the other remains distressingly and immovably large.

US | Interview with Gore Vidal: ?We?ll have a dictatorship soon in the US?
The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ?rotting away? ? and don?t expect Barack Obama to save it. ?Americans? The worst-educated people in the First World. They don?t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which advertisers know how to provoke.?
Times Onine - Excerpts from interview by Tim Teeman - September 30, 2009
- LINK ^

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (?Of course I can?) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London?s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How?s Obama doing? ?Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we?ve had in that position for a long time. But he?s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He?s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.?

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. ?We?ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.? The ?War on Terror? was ?made up?, Vidal says. ?The whole thing was PR, just like ?weapons of mass destruction?. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He?d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you?re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.?

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How?s Obama doing? ?Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we?ve had in that position for a long time. But he?s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He?s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.?

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. ?We?ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.? The ?War on Terror? was ?made up?, Vidal says. ?The whole thing was PR, just like ?weapons of mass destruction?. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He?d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you?re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.?

His voice strengthens. ?One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don?t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don?t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.? The media is too supine? ?Would that it was. They?re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.? He retains some optimism about Obama ?because he doesn?t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.?

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in ?a black city? (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama?s intelligence. ?But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it?s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred ? religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ?conservative? you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They?re not, they?re fascists.?

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. ?He f***ed it up. I don?t know how because the country wanted it. We?ll never see it happen.? As for his wider vision: ?Maybe he doesn?t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there?s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ?I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it?. That?s what Obama needs ? a bit of Lincoln?s chill.? Has he met Obama? ?No,? he says quietly, ?I?ve had my time with presidents.? Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: ?Bang bang.? He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. ?Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,? he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. ?Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they?d say ?They live well but they?re all alcoholics?. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.? Instead, America has ?no intellectual class? and is ?rotting away at a funereal pace. We?ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn?t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.

HS Editor - There is much that Vidal says here that I can agree with.

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International

***** Insightful | Europe | Essay - Continental Drift
Pondering how a culture unmoored from its past copes with an influx of newcomers
Wall Street Journal - By Paul Marshall - Septemer 17, 2009
- LINK ^

Europe has intractable problems with many immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants, and, of course, many immigrants have intractable problems with Europe. In "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe," Christopher Caldwell ponders the current state of a continent where the aging indigenous population is gradually being supplanted by young newcomers. Today's immigrants might be considered hostile to European values, except that Europe itself increasingly has only a foggy sense of what those values might be.

"When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines," Mr. Caldwell writes, "it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter." The book is not a polemic; it is at once nuanced and blunt, serious and witty, while also avoiding what Mr. Caldwell calls "the preemptive groveling that characterizes most writing about matters touching on ethnicity." He does not advocate positions but instead offers reflections on a mix of trends, misunderstandings and self-delusions.

He also ruminates on far more than the increasing radicalization of generations of Muslim immigrants. Just as Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790) predicted a dire fate for the mass insurrection then aborning, Mr. Caldwell looks with alarm at Europe's continuing rejection of itself. Without a rejection of the religion and culture that sustained Europe for centuries, he says, the immigration troubles might never have occurred, or at least would not have been so severe: His verdict is suicide rather than murder.

The author notes that even the prominent German philosopher J?rgen Habermas, who is an atheist, has acknowledged that "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Yet much of Europe has discarded its historic religious underpinnings as irrelevant at best, harmful at worst. Even the memory of what a religiously ordered society was like has seemed to disappear, Mr. Caldwell observes. "A good definition of religion" for most modern Europeans, he says, might be "an irrational opinion, strongly held."

Essay | France | Vive la diff?rence
Financial Times - By Donald Morrison - Octoer 2, 2009
- LINK ^

The Anglo-Saxons, as we English-speakers are somewhat inaccurately known by the French, have long regarded their Gallic neighbours with a mix of amusement and horror. The intensity of that regard, however, has rarely faltered.

France is the country we love to hate, hate to love, and cannot get enough of. We vacation and migrate there in prodigious numbers (dimmed briefly by recession), turn French foibles into jokes and television series, and write books about why the French are so exasperatingly different.

Lots of books. Though the French begin at Calais, only a few miles away from England, they tend to be depicted in English prose as an especially exotic species of fauna with customs and folkways that require elaborate explanation. Shakespeare, Dickens, Orwell, Waugh, Wodehouse and countless other observers have given the French a going-over that the Italians and Belgians, for instance, rarely enjoy, despite being every bit as foreign.

Britain?s awed incomprehension of the French is embodied in Instructions for British Servicemen in France, a 1944 manual reprinted three years ago to wide amusement. ?If you should happen to imagine that the first pretty French girl who smiles at you intends to dance the can-can or take you to bed,? goes one of the manual?s warnings, ?you will risk stirring up a lot of trouble for yourself ? and for our relations with the French.? Relations remain stirred; we Anglo-Saxons remain fascinated.

One explanation for our seemingly endless need to decode France is . . . ^

Yemen | At heart of Yemen's conflicts: water crisisA recent report shows that 70 to 80 percent of rural conflicts are over water shortages in Yemen, already on the brink of becoming a failed state.
The Christian Science Monitor - By Laura Kasinof, Correspondent - November 5, 2009
- LINK ^

Sanaa, Yemen - While domestic insurgencies chip away at the control of Yemen's central government and an Al Qaeda branch gains strength in regions beyond the government's reach, another crisis ? one that affects Yemen's entire population ? has the potential to contribute to the country's instability and potential trajectory toward failure.

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?

The Citizens / Civil Organizations / Activism

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

Topical Sections

Art and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
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A Defining Moment - Samuel Johnson's Dictionary.
The Smart Set - By Morgan Meis
- LINK ^

Samuel Johnson is a god now. That's a fitting accomplishment for a man celebrating his 300th this September. It is ironic, though. Johnson was big in every way. He had a penchant for looming. His shadow left most of his contemporaries with little access to the sun. But he was human. His bigness was terrestrial, not divine. He loudly and with gusto proclaimed the vices and virtues of humankind, of which the former generally outnumbered the latter. He always kept in mind that what we see, we see through a glass, darkly.

The contrast between the finitude of the man and the infinitude of his reputation is preserved in his longest-lasting and most peculiar work, the Dictionary. Dictionaries were relatively new inventions in Johnson's time. They were the necessary product of an increasingly literate society with ever more access to books. The slow deluge unleashed by Gutenberg 300 years earlier was gathering its force. The chaos demanded ordering. Johnson was just large enough to try, to rein in the entire language and subject it to rule. He worried that, "the English language, which, while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, has itself been hitherto neglected, suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation."

It is with some wonder, then, that we open Johnson's Dictionary to find a barrage of exuberance and caprice. We are used to the dry and objective language of the modern dictionary. We get no such thing from Dr. Johnson. Here, for instance, is the Merriam-Webster online dictionary's entry for "butterfly."

any of numerous slender-bodied diurnal lepidopteran insects including one superfamily (Papilionoidea) with broad often brightly colored wings and usually another superfamily comprising the skippers

Here is Johnson's entry:

A beautiful insect, so named because it first appears at the beginning of the season for butter.

The obvious difference being that Johnson makes judgments (calling the butterfly "beautiful") and is happy to let his own personal wit shine through. Partly, of course, this freedom comes of a wide-open field. Johnson is making up the rules of what a dictionary should do more than following anything pre-established. By setting out to codify the English language, Johnson ends up with a document bursting through with opinion and whimsy at every turn.

Corporate Crime and Government - The Linkage without the Citizenry

"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

Economy and Finance

Bloomberg Economic News
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Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
- LINK ^

Environment and Sustinability

Pollution | US - Chicken Litter: The Aerial Hunt for Poultry Manure
The Wall Street Journal - By Lauren Ritter - November 3 2009
- LINK ^

Livestock and poultry operations generate about 500 million tons of manure each year, or about three times the amount of human waste in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Much of that waste goes untreated and sometimes can make its way into public waterways. Among other contaminants, manure contains nitrogen and phosphorus that in large quantities can cause algae blooms -- green, gooey splotches on the water surface that can deplete the water's oxygen, killing fish and other organisms. And in some cases, the runoff, which can contain E. coli and other bacteria, can threaten human health.

Livestock and poultry operations generate about 500 million tons of manure each year, or about three times the amount of human waste in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

HS Editor - If this doesn't trouble you, wait untii the human population doubles and potentialy produces one billion tons of chicken poo on the landscape that drains into our rivers, lakes and oceans.

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
- LINK ^

Health and Fitness

Doctors start to include vitamin D in fight against cancer
With new studies showing the sun vitamin may slow come cancers, some physicians are eager to add it to treatment programs.
Globe and Mail - By Martin Mittelstaedt, Environment Reporter - Thursday, November 5, 2009
- LINK ^

Responding to research indicating that vitamin D may slow the progression of breast, colon and other common cancers, some doctors have begun adding the supplement to their tool kit of cancer therapies alongside more conventional treatments such as radiation, surgery and chemotherapy. While not all physicians are convinced the evidence is strong enough to warrant taking an extra dollop of the sunshine vitamin, those recommending the course say popping the pills is a simple health strategy that has few, if any, risks and has the added benefit of also improving bone health in those with cancer.

Legal and Constitutional Issues

Bloomberg Index of Current Legal News
- LINK ^

center>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
- LINK ^

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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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

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