What should the West do? Beats me...

As the First General Law of Travel tells us, every nation is its stereotype.
Americans are indeed fat and overbearing, Mexicans lazy and pilfering, Germans disciplined and perverted. The Turks, as everyone knows, are insane and deceitful. I say this affectionately. I live in Turkey. On good days, I love Turkey. But I have long since learned that its people are apt to go berserk on you for no reason whatsoever, and you just can’t trust a word they say. As one Turkish friend put it (a man who has spent many years in America, and thus grasps the depth of the cultural chasm), “It’s not that they’re bad. They don’t even know they’re lying.”
My friend is right, and his comment suggests a point about Turkish culture that I doubt many Westerners grasp. People here—and, I would guess, throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean, though Turkey is the only country I know well—see “truth” as something plastic, connected more to emotions than to facts or logic. If it feels true, it is true. What’s more, feelings here tend to change very quickly—and with them, the truth.
Take, for instance, my former landlord. Last year, my apartment was burgled. Under Turkish law, if your apartment is burgled, you have the right to insist that your landlord install bars on your windows. When I put this to my landlord, he objected, screaming violently, as so often people here do for no reason any American would accept as legitimate. First, my landlord screamed, there was no risk of burglary: there had never before been a burglary in our neighborhood. (Actually, our neighborhood was notorious for it.) Second, he screamed, to install bars would create a hazard: burglars would use them to climb up to the second floor. He offered both arguments in the same sentence. He was unperturbed by the obvious problem with his line of reasoning.

Later, when I discussed the matter with Turkish friends, they explained to me that I had made a critical negotiating mistake: I had insulted his honor by telling him I would have bars installed rather than asking him. The argument, they explained, had nothing to do with the real risk of burglary, and certainly nothing to do with my rights under Turkish rental law. It was about my failure to show the man the proper respect.
I’m not sure my Turkish friends were right about that, though. They are, after all, Turkish, so they pretty much say whatever sounds good to them at the time. They tend to explain these situations ex post facto with appeals to the subtleties of Turkish culture, but the story never stays the same. I’ve been in similar situations in which these same Turkish friends have explained that my mistake was asking, rather than telling. Asking, they have assured me, is a sign of weakness, so no wonder my adversaries sought to take advantage.
(read more...)

The Balls of Fire

Bookstore chain removes leftist book from shelves
Days after it began selling the political doctrine The National Left, written by playwright Shmuel Hasfari and attorney Eldad Yaniv, which was sold for NIS 1 ($0.27), Tzomet Sfarim bookstore chain on Sunday announced it will stop distributing the book.
According to information received by Ynet, right-wing elements have been pressuring the chain's management in recent days to stop distributing the book in which the authors make harsh accusations against settlers and the settlement enterprise, calling to dismantle it and "stop the occupation."
The bookstore chain's spokesperson said, "Tzomet Sfarim is a chain for all of the people of Israel and has no political affiliation. It is never responsible for the content of the books that are distributed in its stores. Because we received many complaints that the book hurts the feelings of some of our customers, we decided to stop selling it."
Last September, the authors began distributing the book, which contains ideas on how to resurrect the social-democratic dialogue, and is written in a witty language, interwoven with provocations.
The authors described the settlers as "the lords of the land, hardly pioneers. They never planted a tree or built a house. It’s the Ahmeds that did all that for them. For years the settlers have been forcing us to build the future Palestinian land – at our expense." The authors continue to slam the settlers and write, "The settlers operate on a different type of fuel, which is called messianism. Their god appeared at once and defeated their enemies. After his mishap during the Holocaust – he is back and mightier than ever. They graduated from yeshiva high schools and stormed Judea, Samaria and Gaza with unconquerable messianic passion.
"No one realized that the 'new pioneers' were possessed by demons of messianic madness. Think about the brainwashed minds, hypnotized zombies, gangs of horny teenagers forcing themselves on the country. The young generation of settlers forgot what it's like to be a Zionist."
'Settlers rule the land'
In the book, the authors also describe the differences between the Right and the Left, "A rightist is conservative. A yapper. Polemicist. Resistor. Especially in the face of change. A leftist is a revolutionist. Practical. Leads the way, dares and is victorious. The Right believes that if we continue having the upper hand, we will be saved by the heavens. The Left believes that we must redeem ourselves, by ourselves. That is the reason that Zionism is leftist."
(via YNET read more...)
(Photo by Judy Jaffie)

Tell us how you intend to run the nation-Mr Obama

For our information
Just for illustration
Tell us how you intend to run the nation

Rufus T. Firefly:
These are the laws of my administration

No one's allowed to smoke
Or tell a dirty joke
And whistling is forbidden

Chorus:
We're not allowed to tell a dirty joke

Hail, hail Freedonia

Rufus:
If chewing gum is chewed
The chewer is pursued
And in the hooscall hidden

Chorus:
If we choose to chew we'll be pursued

Rufus:
If any form of pleasure is exibited
Report to me and it will be prohibited
I'll put my foot down, so shall it be
This is the land of the free

The last man nearly ruined this place
He didn't know what to do with it
If you think this country's bad off now,
Just wait 'til I get through with it

The country's taxes must be fixed
And I know what to do with it
If you think you're paying too much now
Just wait till I get throught with it

*whistle*

I will not stand for anything that's crooked or unfair
I'm strictly on the upper knot, so everyone beware
If any man's caught taking graft, and I don't get my share
We stand'im up against the wall and pop! Goes the weasel

Chorus:
So everyone beware, you're stricken or unfair
-------unless he gets his share

Rufus:
If any man should come between a husband and his bride
We'll find out which one she prefers by letting her decide
If she prefers the other man, the husband steps outside
We stand him up against the wall and pop! Goes the weasel

Chorus:
The husband steps outside, relinquishes his bride
They stand him up against the wall and take him for white

The Next Energy Secretary

Since 2004, physicist Steven Chu has been on indefinite leave from Stanford University so that he might head Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Looks like Stanford will have to hold his slot a bit longer.Yesterday Associated Press reported that Barack Obama has selected Chu to become the next Energy Secretary. If this is formally confirmed, the next task for Chu, a Missouri native, will be finding digs for his family in the Washington, D.C. area.
The soft-spoken scientist is a heavyweight. For developing a new technique to laser cool and trap atoms, Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. However, his passion in recent years has become a search for the ever-more-parsimonious use of energy. He’s been exploring the development of not only new technologies but also novel social and economic policies that will lead businesses and the public to accomplish more while using far fewer resources.(read more..)

Skinny Kid with Funny Name

On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.

July 27, 2004 Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama introduced himself to Democrats and a national television audience Tuesday, giving the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention (read more...)

The Most Dangerous Animal in the World?

Peter Singer is perhaps the most thoroughgoing philosophical utilitarian since Jeremy Bentham. As such, he believes animals have rights because the relevant moral consideration is not whether a being can reason or talk but whether it can suffer. Jettisoning the traditional distinction between humans and nonhumans, Singer distinguishes instead between persons and non-persons. Persons are beings that feel, reason, have self-awareness, and look forward to a future. Thus, fetuses and some very impaired human beings are not persons in his view and have a lesser moral status than, say, adult gorillas and chimpanzees. (read more...and more...)

Craig's " Naughty Librarian" Vibes

During 2007, Ferguson used The Late Late Show as a forum for getting an honorary citizenship from every state in America. He received honorary citizenship from Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Governors John Hoeven, Mark Sanford, Mike Rounds, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, and Jim Gibbons sent letters to him that made him an honorary citizen of their states.[
He received similar honors from various towns and cities, including Ozark, Arkansas, Hazard, Kentucky, Greensburg, Pennsylvania as well.

Happy Assholes

Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?
Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe — not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren't we suspicious of this statistic? Aren't we further troubled by our culture's overemphasis on happiness? Don't we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?(read more...)

Jaime Lerner of Curitiba

For many city governments seeking visible improvements in their congested streets, the pace of change is measured in months and years. For Jaime Lerner, it's measured in hours. As mayor of Curitiba, he transformed a gridlocked commercial artery into a spacious pedestrian mall over a long weekend, before skeptical merchants had time to finish reading their Monday papers.
Since then he's become a hero not only to his fellow Brazilians, but also to the growing ranks of municipal planners seeking greener, more sustainable cities. His dictum that "creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget" has inspired a number of his unique solutions to urban problems, including sheltered boarding tubes to improve speed of bus transit; a garbage-for-food program allowing Curitibans to exchange bags of trash for bags of groceries; and trimming parkland grasses with herds of sheep

Dead Erection

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died July 4, 2008. He was 86.
Citing the "proliferation of immoral and offensive material throughout America's museums and schools," and waving placards emblazoned with agit-prop fotocollage reading, "diE KUnst ISt tOT, DadA ubEr aLLes" ("Art is dead, dada over all"), a coalition of leading Republican congressional conservatives and early 20th-century Dadaists declared war on art in a joint press conference Monday.
Anti-art crusaders Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Dadaist provocateur Tristan Tzara call for the dismantling of the institutions regulating public art in a joint press conference Monday.
Calling for the elimination of federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts; the banning of offensive art from museums and schools; and the destruction of the "hoax of reason" in our increasingly random, irrational and meaningless age, the Republicans and Dadaists were unified in their condemnation of the role of the artist in society today.
"Homosexuals and depraved people of every stripe are receiving federal monies at taxpayer expense for the worst kind of filth imaginable," said U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), a longtime NEA critic.
Dadaist Jean Arp agreed. "Dada is, like nature, without meaning. Dada is for nature and against art," he said.
Added nonsense-poet Hugo Ball, founder of Zurich's famed Cabaret Voltaire: "...'dada' ('Dada'). Adad Dada Dada Dada." Donning an elaborate, primitivist painted paper mask, he then engaged reporters in a tragico-absurd dance, contorting wildly while bellowing inanities.
Helms, well known for his opposition to arts funding, was adamant in his demand for the elimination of the NEA from the national budget.
"The American people will no longer stand for vulgar, nonsensical displays that masquerade as art," said Helms, who, along with U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), demanded the passage of obscenity laws granting police and government officials broader powers in the prosecution and censorship of art.
In a show of solidarity with the Republican legislators, Andre Breton, who founded the surrealist movement in 1923, fired a pistol at random into the crowd, conceptually evoking the hideous irrationality of the collective unconscious and wounding Hatch.
Urging reporters to "imagine a boot stamping on a face, eternally," Breton, along with Max Picabia, the most radical anti-art proponent within the Dadaist camp, then theatrically demonstrated Helms' vision. In a collaborative staged "manifestation," Picabia pencilled a series of drawings, which Breton erased as Picadia went along.
"So-called modern art is, at its core, an absurd and purposeless exercise," Helms said, echoing the Dadaists' illustration of the meaninglessness of art. He then announced the Gramm-Helms Decency Act, a bill that would facilitate the legal prosecution of obscenity, as well as establish stiffer penalities for the creators and exhibitors of "morally objectionable works."
Dadaist leaders were even more strident than Helms, stressing the need for the elimination of not only art, but also of dada itself. "To be a Dadaist means to be against dada," Arp said. "Dada equals anti-dada." Urging full-scale rioting, the assembled Dadaists called for their own destruction, each of them alternately running into the audience to pelt those still on stage with tomatoes.
In a gesture honoring Helms and the new bill, seminal anti-artist Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache and beard on a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Duchamp titled the resultant image "L.H.O.O.Q.," a series of initials which, when pronounced in French, forms the sentence "Helms au chaud au cul," or "Helms has hot pants."
Centered in Berlin, Paris and Zurich, the Dadaist movement was launched as a reaction of revulsion to the senseless butchery of World War I. "While the guns rumbled in the distance," Arp said, "we had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a means of deadening men's minds."
When told of Arp's comments, Helms said he was "fairly certain" that he concurred.
(from onion)

Libertarian Paternalism might seem to be an Oxymoron

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy.
"Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" shows that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society. Using colorful examples from the most important aspects of life, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful "choice architecture" can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice.
Richard H. Thaler is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics and the director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business.
(read more on einhod blog...)

The Impact of BS

Black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”Last May, Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It said, among many other things, that most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems. Bankers and economists scorned and raged at Taleb. He didn’t understand, they said. A few months later, the full global implications of the sub-prime-driven credit crunch became clear. The world banking system still teeters on the edge of meltdown. Taleb had been vindicated. “It was my greatest vindication. But to me that wasn’t a black swan; it was a white swan. I knew it would happen and I said so. It was a black swan to Ben Bernanke [the chairman of the Federal Reserve]. I wouldn’t use him to drive my car. These guys are dangerous. They’re not qualified in their own field.”(read more...)

I don't go to the funerals of people I like

With Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer gone, Gore Vidal, 82, is the last truly legendary figure from a golden age of American literature.
Like Oscar Wilde, he is celebrated for his epigrams, most famously: "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." Asked whether his first romantic encounter was homosexual or heterosexual, Vidal replied that he had been "too polite to ask". His conversation is precise and mannered to a point that you suspect this is a man who may still crook a finger when he drinks champagne. He speaks with an archaic, aesthetic tone that can be contagious: there's hardly an interview in his cuttings file where he doesn't elicit the word "exquisite".
There's an episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa holds up a book entitled Tome, with Vidal's name on the spine. "These are my only friends," she complains. "Grown-up nerds like Gore Vidal. And even he's kissed more boys than I ever will."
"Girls, Lisa, girls," her mother says, and it's probable that a majority of viewers were, like Marge, unaware both of the writer's name, and romantic reputation.
(read more...)

Reverend Wright ? Fuck You Texas

"What people don't realize is we never STOPPED selling records! Through it all there has always been a Weird Wilbur product on the market. From the 'samitch' bag album right up to 'Weird Wilbur Rides Again,' there has always been a flow of my stuff to the public. People say, 'Oh, does it bother you that you never made it?' and I look at 'em like they're crazy! I wanna say, 'Hey, Bubba, I made a record in a garage in Harker Heights that the #$%&@ Chinese heard! Show me where Travis Tritt ever did that!"(for more...)

The Democratic Race for Dummies

The Whore is Back

For centuries, the village in County Limerick, known as Doon in English, had been known in Gaelic as Dun Bleisce, or Fort of the Harlot, but the name was changed in 2003.
The village's Gaelic name was changed to An Dun, or The Fort in Gaelic, on the advice of the country's Placenames Commission, the official arbiter of names in Irish.
The unpopular move resulted in about 1,000 locals signing a petition seeking to have "harlot" added back to the name. They were backed by local politicians.
The community argued that, although the literal translation of the word is harlot, the woman who the village was named after in ancient times may not have been a harlot in the sense of the term today.
"It could have meant a powerful woman, a feminist," local councillor Mary Jackman told AFP. "Woman were very strong back then -- there is also a goddess in the history of the area."
Welcoming the return of the old name, she added: "People will be delighted. Love of their own comes first, regardless of what she was." (read more...)

My Unwritten Books

George Steiner interviewed by Alan Macfarlane

Steiner was born in Paris in 1929, delivered - according to family lore - by an American doctor who then returned to Louisiana to assassinate Huey Long. His parents, Frederick and Else Steiner, were Austrian Jews who had taken French citizenship, and the children were brought up speaking English, French and German, to which Steiner later added Italian. His father, an investment banker, was "an agnostic, a Voltairean", Steiner says. But he "had deeply the Jewish sense that there is no higher vocation than teaching" and encouraged his son's classical studies. When rumours of war came, "Mamam was indignant. She said, 'They will die on the Maginot Line if they dare attack.' My father, bless him under the name of God, saw more clearly." Tipped off by a German former colleague while visiting New York on behalf of the French government, Frederick Steiner arranged for his wife and children to join him there in 1940.(more...)

David Ilan: The PeaceDigger?

Over the past five years, UCLA archaeologist Ran Boytner and USC archaeologist Lynn Dodd have served as facilitators for a team of prominent Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists who have negotiated the first-ever framework for the disposition of the region's archaeological treasures following the future establishment of a Palestinian state. The team's recommendations, which can be implemented in the context of a two-state peace solution, were presented to Israeli archaeologists at an April 8 conference in Jerusalem

Among the document's specific recommendations:
Repatriation of artifacts excavated since 1967 in the Occupied Territories to the state in which they were originally found. Currently, the Israeli Archaeological Authority and the archaeology staff officer of the Israeli military's Civil Administration maintain control of all archaeological material excavated in Israel and some from the West Bank.
More than tripling of the footprint of that part of Jerusalem that would qualify for special protections as a UNESCO World Heritage Site to include the city's boundaries during the 10th century, or roughly the era of the Crusades. Currently, such status extends to a one-third-square-mile area that includes the Temple Mount, the Western Wall and the walls of Jerusalem's more than 2,000-year-old Old City.
Ceding control over archaeological sites and artifacts to the state in which they reside and prohibiting the destruction of archaeological sites because of their cultural or religions affiliations. Currently, archaeological authorities on both sides of the conflict have been accused of being less careful about protecting and excavating archaeological sites and artifacts from cultures that are not their own.
Consideration of archaeological sites that will straddle future international borders proposed under a peace plan to ensure that these borders do not divide or harm archaeological remains.
Support for the establishment of museums, labs and storehouses for the protection, study and care of archaeological heritage where they currently do not exist, so that repatriation of materials to territories occupied by Israel in 1967 does not stall for the lack of such facilities.

Representing the Israeli side are Rafael Greenberg of Tel Aviv University, and David Ilan, director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archeology at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem.
The Palestinian team includes Ghattas Sayes and Nazmi al-Jubeh. One member of each of the teams declined to be identified for fear of political or professional reprisal or intimidation.(read more...)

Chopping down trees is selfish and criminal

A COUNCIL has taken the extraordinary step of stacking two empty shipping containers on a clifftop to spoil water views for householders suspected of illegally cutting down trees.
Port Stephens Council put them there - with a crane, at a cost of more than $10,000 -to punish those responsible for cutting down 20 trees.
Irate locals are calling the green monolith "a monument to stupidity'' and complain they are being treated like children.
And the council agrees, according to group manager, facilities and services, Mike Trigar.
"Obviously those people who weren't involved (in chopping down the trees) and now have their views obstructed are not happy, and we appreciate that position,'' he said.
"But it's like if you can't find the perpetrator in school, so everybody is held back for detention.''
But Mr Trigar is unrepentant: ``We've told people that chopping down trees is selfish and criminal, but that hasn't worked, so we've had to go to the next level.'' (read more...)

Old Fuck Is Bad for Ya

George Carlin is still packing venues with fans who crave his legendary brand of observational, cantankerous wit.
At 70, he isn't just mailing it in, either. He performed about 80 shows across the country in 2007, and is still razor-sharp and very much on his game.
But with a record 14 live HBO stand-up comedy specials under his belt -- most recently a Saturday outing dubbed "It's Bad For Ya" -- Carlin admits to having a different take on things now.
It's not that he has exactly mellowed. Mellow isn't in Carlin's makeup. But no longer is he motivated to push the comedic envelope as a pioneer, as he did so memorably as a barrier-busting, hypocrisy-exposing rebel of the Las Vegas stage and the man who would become a Supreme Court test case via the famed "Seven Dirty Words" television furor in 1972.
"I accept it as someone looking in from the outside that the culture is destroying itself, and as someone who is no longer part of the human race, I can be fascinated by it rather than mourn it," he says.(more...)