Benazir Bhutto Mourned

From the New York Times:

The Rippling Effect of Bhutto’s Death

Syed Tasnim Raza in The New York Times:

It is a sad day for Pakistan. With the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, it is clear that the government of President Pervez Musharraf is incompetent and also irrelevant to the needs of the people of Pakistan.

If a government cannot even provide security to its prominent citizens, then it has no right to govern.

I hope and pray that President Musharraf will hand over power to a civilian government, whose first priority should be to form a unity government with the express objective of fighting the terrorists and restoring law and order.

Ms. Bhutto gave her life for the cause of building a modern state and ridding the country of extreme elements. It will be a fitting tribute to achieve these objectives.

More here.

Benazir Bhutto

From Time:

Benazir Bhutto excelled at asserting her right to rule. In a male-dominated, Islamic society, she rose to become her slain father's political successor, twice getting elected as Prime Minister of Pakistan. She would also be exiled twice. In the end, Bhutto was better at rallying people to the idea of her power than at keeping them inspired by her use of it.

More here.

The Departure of Benazir Bhutto

From Himal Southasian:

The 'daughter of the East' is dead. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi is a tragedy that puts Pakistani politics in a tailspin, forestalling a return to democracy and heralding ever more violence in the public arena. The killing sends a tremor across the political landscape of Southasia. The former prime minister was one of the best-known faces among the region's politicians, a modern and urbane woman who dared to join the hurly burly of grimy politics. Nearly continuous military rule over the decades has left the Pakistani polity fragile and brittle. With the elections slated for 8 January 2008, the hope was that Pakistan would, once again, attempt the transition to sustained democracy. There were critics who questioned Benazir's willingness to end her days in exile to join an imperfect electoral terrain as defined by President Pervez Musharraf. But there was no question that even flawed polls would nudge Pakistan away from military rule and towards democratic functioning. If the people of Pakistan would prosper in peace under a democracy, Benazir held out the hope for its ushering.

More here.

Moderniser, moderate, martyr

The death of Benazir Bhutto is not just a tragedy for her family but threatens to plunge Pakistan deeper into political turmoil, at a time when it was desperately seeking to regain some semblance of stability.

Already her supporters are describing Bhutto, her life cut short at 54, as a martyr, and leaders of her Pakistan People's party (PPP) will have to struggle to keep feelings of revenge in check.

For the west, Bhutto's death is just about the worst outcome, as the US and Britain had been banking on her pro-western and moderate leanings to keep Pakistan onside and help stem the rising tide of militancy in the country.

It is easy to see why the west liked Bhutto and why it put pressure on the president, Pervez Musharraf, to ally himself to the former prime minister to make the country more stable in the fight against Islamist militants.

more from The Guardian here.

in the eye of the pakistan storm

A woman of grand ambitions with a taste for complex political maneuvering, Ms. Bhutto was first elected prime minister in 1988 at the age of 35. The daughter of one of Pakistan’s most flamboyant and democratically inclined prime ministers, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, she inherited from him the mantle of the populist People’s Party, which she came to personify.

Even from exile, her leadership was virtually unchallenged. She staged a high-profile return to her home city of Karachi, drawing hundreds of thousands of supporters to an 11-hour rally and leading a series of political demonstrations in opposition to the country’s military leader, President Pervez Musharraf.

But in a foreshadowing of the attack that killed her, the triumphal return parade was bombed, killing at least 134 of her supporters and wounded more than 400. Ms. Bhutto herself narrowly escaped harm.

more from the NY Times here.

gm trees

IF EVER THERE was a tree that has inspired devotion, it's the American chestnut, once one of the most common trees in East Coast forests. Thoreau considered it among the "noblest" trees he encountered in his walks through the Lincoln woods, while settlers in the southern Appalachians found the nuts and timber such valuable allies in their struggle to survive that the tree became a regional icon. When an imported plague, the chestnut blight, all but eradicated the tree in the early 20th century, people mourned from Georgia to Maine.

Since that time, ardent fans have struggled to pull the chestnut back from the brink. Most of their efforts have relied on old-fashioned breeding techniques - investing the tree with blight-resistance genes from other species of chestnut through the laborious and lengthy process of hand-fertilizing flowers, planting the resulting seeds, cultivating trees, and culling inferior specimens. And then doing it all over again. But a pair of forestry scientists at the State University of New York in Syracuse are now exploring a different idea: that genes from other plants, and even from animals, might provide the chestnut with completely new weapons to thrive again in the Eastern forests.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

For once, I have no words...

Obituary: Benazir Bhutto

From BBC:

Her two brothers also suffered violent deaths.

Like the Nehru-Gandhi family in India, the Bhuttos of Pakistan are one of the world's most famous political dynasties. Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was prime minister of Pakistan in the early 1970s. His government was one of the few in the 30 years following independence that was not run by the army. Born in 1953 in the province of Sindh and educated at Harvard and Oxford, Ms Bhutto gained credibility from her father's high profile, even though she was a reluctant convert to politics. She was twice prime minister of Pakistan, from 1988 to 1990, and from 1993 to 1996.

More here.

Benazir Bhutto assassinated

From CNN:

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in the wake of a suicide bombing that killed at least 14 of her supporters, doctors, a spokesman for her party and other officials said. Bhutto suffered bullet wounds in the aftermath of the bomb attack, TV networks were reporting.

Police warned citizens to stay home as they expected rioting to break out in city streets as a shocked Pakistan absorbed the news of Bhutto's assassination. Video of the scene just moments before the explosion showed Bhutto stepping into a heavily-guarded vehicle to leave the rally. Bhutto was rushed to Rawalpindi General Hospital -- less than two miles from the bombing scene -- where doctors pronounced her dead.

More here.

The New Wars of Religion: Believers Write Back

John Habgood in the TLS:

Hans Küng, the eminent Roman Catholic theologian, has written what he describes as “a short book on the meaning of the universe”, and much of what he writes echoes the views just described, albeit from a somewhat different perspective. He also draws an interesting parallel between cosmology and Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorem. The latter is a mathematical proof that no system of axioms can prove itself as being free from contradiction. Nor, says Küng, can a theory of the universe. The point was originally made by Stephen Hawking, who admitted that he had given up his quest for a “grand unified theory of everything” on the grounds that we are part of it. Any explanation which tries to include the observer doing the explaining must necessarily be incomplete. Add to this Popper’s dictum about the tentativeness of all scientific statements as being falsifiable but not ultimately provable, and the limitations of our knowledge become all too apparent. Both scientists and theologians, in other words, and even popes, need to accept their fallibility.

Apart from a passing reference, this is a Richard Dawkins-free book. It also provides a useful reminder that there was a scientifically and theologically based tradition of atheism in European culture long before Darwin. Küng comments, “Beyond question, the critique of religion offered by these ‘new materialists’ has not remotely reached the depth of their classical predecessors”. Feuerbach, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, where are you now?

“Science”, Küng continues, “does not have to ‘prove’ the existence or superfluity of God. Rather, it has to advance the explicability of our universe by physics as far as possible and at the same time leave room for what in principle cannot be explained by physics.”

I am not sure this is a wise way of putting things, being all too redolent of the “God of the gaps”. Nevertheless, like all of Küng’s work, this is a learned book, full of interesting insights, drawing heavily on European philosophy and theology, and frequently critical of his own Church.

The Putnam-Rorty Debate and the Revival of American Pragmatism

2007 saw the passing of Richard Rorty.  In memorium a video on the debate that helped revive American pragmatism.

The Impending Land Grab on the Ocean Floor

Maywa Montenegro over at Seed:

On August 2, 2007, Russia dropped a titanium capsule bearing its flag onto the Arctic floor, highlighting its bid for a chunk of seabed property thought to contain billions of dollars in untapped energy. The move snagged media headlines as other nations—including the US, Canada, Denmark, and Norway—sped north to make competing claims. Weeks later, hearings began in the US Senate, in which presidents from America's largest oil, shipping, and telecommunications companies, representatives from the armed forces, and senior Bush administration officials urged the Foreign Relations Committee to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). "In the year ahead we could see a historic dividing up of many millions of square kilometers of offshore territory with management rights to all its living and non-living resources on or under the seabed," said Paul Kelly, president of the Gulf of Mexico Foundation. "An adviser to developing states preparing their own submissions said recently, 'This will probably be the last big shift in ownership of territory in the history of the Earth. Many countries don't realize how serious it is.'"

Never before has the world's attention been so fixed on the deep ocean. Inflated oil, mineral, and gas prices, coupled with collapsing global fisheries, are pushing industries into remote seas once too expensive to tap. Pressing concerns about global warming are bringing scientists to explore uncharted depths—both to understand how they influence climate and to take the pulse of abyssal life before human impact irrevocably transforms it. At a time when still so little is known about the ocean's very nature, it has suddenly become a place of extraordinary geopolitical, economic, and scientific value.

The Best and Worst of Intellectual Blogs 2007

Joseph Kugelmass over at The Valve:

[E]very year a new crop of bloggers arrives, and they invariably have a lot of energy to devote to the uncertain work of posting entries and writing comments. They’ll take on any subject, inhabit any metaphor, consider any claim on its own merits and immanent grounds. In part because of wonderful conversations taking place via N. Pepperell’s Rough Theory, 2007 was the year of Now-Times, Perverse Egalitarianism, and Wildly Parenthetical. At least one of these blogs began earlier, I seem to recall, but nonetheless this was their debut, as far as we here at the Grammy Awards are concerned.

The power of the image. This was the year when intellectual bloggers (with the exception of me) figured out that HTML is a medium that loves graphics and graphic design. N. Pepperell, having already given Rough Theory a terrific makeover, punctuated a return to considering Hegel with marvelous and evocative stills from The Wizard of Oz. Who can ever forget Antigram’s grainy, witty picture of the dominatrix, which he posted right above an attack on Zizek (and Zizek’s supporters) entitled “We Want Discipline”? (Both sides in the debate over Slavoj Zizek came up with astonishing pictures of the man: in the course of a single day, he can look like an inspired prophet and a debauched vampire.) Over at Acephalous, Scott Kaufman made a group of political blogger malcontents continue to discuss Swift Boat under the imposing aegis of Hello Kitty. Of course, speaking of Full Frontal Feminism, petitpoussin gave one side of the debate its rallying flag by taking a single trenchant and satiric photo.

Africa Says No

Ignacio Ramonet in Le Monde Diplomatique:

The unimaginable has happened, to the displeasure of arrogant Europe. Africa, thought to be so poor that it would agree to anything, has said no in rebellious pride. No to the straitjacket of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), no to the complete liberalisation of trade, no to the latest manifestations of the colonial pact.

It happened in December at the second EU-Africa summit in Lisbon, where the main objective was to force the African countries to sign new trade agreements by 31 December 2007 in accordance with the Cotonou Convention of 2000 winding up the 1975 Lomé accords. Under these, goods from former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific are imported into the European Union more or less duty-free, except for products such as sugar, meat and bananas that are a problem for European producers. The World Trade Organisation has insisted that these preferential arrangements be dismantled or replaced by trade agreements based on reciprocity, claiming that this is the only way African countries can continue to enjoy different treatment. The EU opted for completely free trade in the guise of EPAs. So the 27 were asking African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to allow EU goods and services to enter their markets duty-free.

Remembering Molly Ivins

Anthony Romero in The Nation:

Molly Ivins was more than one of the stars of the progressive media in her lifetime. She was the one of these stars who reached so many people with her down-home explanations and serial horse-laughs that in exchange for the money she earned for the mainstream media, they permitted her to penetrate the soul of the nation with reverberating effects.

After her education at Smith and Columbia and in Paris, her three years' work on the Minneapolis daily marked her as one of the best reporters in the country. But she chose then to join The Texas Observer and regale its discriminating readers with the absurdities of her home state's legislature. Hired back to the responsible big time by the New York Times, she did herself in with her boss there with her story describing a local chicken-plucking contest as a "gang pluck." With her high intelligence, she had perceived that the way to the people's sense of justice detours through their sense of humor. Brave, sagacious and dedicated, she then simply set forth on her own and became the only always-funny and the most widely read liberal, progressive and populist columnist in the country. Her syndication in 350 to 400 newspapers was without a parallel for a leftist columnist in the nation's newspapers. 60 Minutes even gave her a tumble.

On the Implications of Venter's Synthetic DNA

Rob Carlson over at Synthesis (via Carl Zimmer):

The philosophical implications of constructing an artificial genome are overblown, in my humble opinion.  It is interesting to see that it works, to be sure.  But the notion that this demonstrates a blow against vitalism, or against other religious conceptions of life is, for me, just overexcitement.  Venter and crew have managed to chemically synthesize a long polymer, a polymer biologically indistinguishable from naturally occurring DNA; so what?  If that polymer runs a cell the same way natural DNA does, as we already knew that it would, so what?  Over the last several millennia religious doctrine has shown itself to be an extremely flexible meme, accommodating dramatic changes in human understanding of natural phenomena.  The earth is flat!  Oh, wait, no problem.  The earth is at the center of the universe!  No?  Okay, we can deal with that.  Evolution is just another Theory!  Bacteria evolve to escape antibiotics?  Okay, God's will.  No problem. I can't imagine it will be any different this time around.

Persian Girls: A Memoir

Review of Nahid Rachlin's book from Powell's Books:

Praised by V. S. Naipaul, Anne Tyler, and other writers, Nahid Rachlin has spent her career writing novels about hidden Iran-the combustible political passions underlying everyday life and the family dramas of ordinary Iranians. With her long-awaited memoir, Persian Girls, she turns her sharp novelist's eye on her own remarkable life.

When Rachlin was an infant, her mother gave her to Maryam, Rachlin's barren and widowed aunt. For the next nine years, the little girl lived a blissful Iranian childhood. Then one day, Rachlin's father kidnapped his daughter from her schoolyard, and from the only mother she'd ever known, and returned her to her birth family-strangers to the young girl.

In a story of ambition, oppression, hope, heartache, and sisterhood, Persian Girls traces Rachlin's coming of age in Iran under the late Shah — and her domineering father — her tangled family life, and her relationship with her older sister, and unexpected soul mate, Pari. Both girls refused to accept traditional roles prescribed for them under Muslim cultural laws. They devoured forbidden books. They had secret romances.

But then things quickly changed. Pari was forced by her parents to marry a wealthy suitor, a cruel man who kept her a prisoner in her own home. After narrowly avoiding an unhappy match herself with a man her parents chose for her, Nahid came to America, where she found literary success. Back in Iran, however, Pari's dreams fell to pieces.

When news came to Nahid that her sister had died, she traveled back to the country where she had grown up, now under the Islamic regime the West has been keeping a wary eye on for the last few years, to say good-bye to her only friend. It is there she confronts her past, and the women of her family. A story of promises kept and promises broken, of dreams and secrets, and, most important, of sisters, Persian Girls is a gripping saga that will change the way anyone looks at Iran and the women who populate it.

More here.  Bonus video:

Also see Rachlin's website here for much more information, including speaking dates and locations, complete short stories, etc.

A Heart-Rending Remembrance, Delivered Posthumously

David L. Ulin in The Los Angeles Times:

Jan de Hartog's A View of the Ocean is very much in keeping with a sub-tradition in modern European literature: the small, spare memoir of a parent's death. "During the thirty years of their married life, she had been a silent, accommodating, self-effacing woman," De Hartog writes, who suddenly revealed "a core of drop-forged steel." Caught in the Dutch East Indies when World War II broke out, she spent three years in a Japanese prison camp, where, it is said, she functioned as a "mischievous saint." She gave "Bible classes to Chinese children, [ran] a hospital for the aged, taught classes in philosophy, medieval mysticism, astrology, and the history of English gardens to women on the brink of breakdown." More important, she subtly influenced the camp commandant, arranging for a convoy of sick prisoners to be taken to a Red Cross post. After the war, she gave comfort to an "unending stream of women, girls, men, young students, children, grandchildren" who visited her in Amsterdam; De Hartog admits having been astonished by just how many lives she had touched.

Knowing all this about De Hartog's mother only makes it harder to watch her decline. Diagnosed with stomach cancer, she grows diminished, until her humanity is nearly stripped away. Here, De Hartog is at his finest as a writer -- sharply detailed, tender but not sentimental, even clinical at times. In the end, De Hartog stares down his "childish grief and horror...not by thinking of other things...but by focusing on and identifying with her....I could help her only as long as I completely forgot about myself." Here we have the key to this profoundly moving memoir -- the author's unflinching directness in the face of his mother's dying, his refusal to look away from the thing itself.

More here.

Gould plays Mozart

2007: The year in biology and medicine

From The New Scientist:

Big issue

It was a big year for obesity research. Being heavily overweight was linked to everything from cancer to gum disease. Researchers also suggested a number of new causes of obesity. Could a common cold virus be making us flabby? Was it mostly down to our genes? Or can we blame mum – for having gone through puberty too early? There were new targets for obesity treatments too. For instance, researchers studied how a hormone, PYY, affected the brain circuitry responsible for hunger. Another study looked at ways our bodies decide to burn off energy rather than just storing it as fat. Yet another found that the increasingly popular treatment of stomach stapling really does save lives. Best of all, although being obese puts you at greater risk of heart failure, once you're suffering from it, the fatter you are, the greater your chances of surviving it. On the other hand, fat people were blamed for being a major contributor to global warning.

There was bad news for parents who rely on the TV to keep their kids entertained. It turns out that TV is bad for children of all ages. New evidence suggested that the Baby Einstein videos and their ilk not only don't make your infant smarter, they may actually impede learning. The researchers found that for every hour an infant watches this stuff, he knows six to eight fewer words. And the damage done by too much TV in childhood may be hard to overcome. A large study of five- to 11-year-olds found that kids who watched more than two hours of television a day were much more likely to have attention problems in adolescence, regardless of whether they continued to be heavy TV watchers.

More here.

Shot In Bombay

Those in London may want to catch "Shot in Bombay", Liz Mermin's latest documentary on Bollywood and the Bombay underworld.  From the press release over at EthnicNow:

SHOT IN BOMBAY is directed by acclaimed American documentary film maker Liz Mermin. Filmed over six months in Mumbai, Shot in Bombay is a unique look at a Bollywood film from production to release and captures all the chaos and behind the scenes drama of Bollywood film, Shootout at Lokhandwala. Starring screen legend Sanjay Dutt, the documentary contains a frank interview with the star – his last before being handed a six-year prison sentence earlier this year.

An exclusive screening will take place at the prestigious Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Pall Mall on Wednesday 19th December at 6.15pm followed by a Q and A with Director Liz Mermin and Producer Nahrein Mirza conducted by BBC Asian Network Presenter Jas Rao.
This will be followed by a two week theatrical run at the ICA from the 18th January 2008 and then a regional tour of the UK.

During the filming an intense drama unfolded around Sanjay Dutt, whilst being followed by the filmmakers, the case against him for illegal arms possession from 14 years earlier finally came to court for sentencing.

An Interview with the Directors of Persepolis

In Indie Wire, an interview with Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud (you can watch the trailer here):

Set in Teheran in 1978, "Persepolis" is a cinematic memoir, a coming-of-ager about a clever, fearless girl growing up during the period leading to the Shah's downfall, and then the repressive Islamic regime. For a time Marjane outsmarts the "social guardians," discovering punk and Iron Maiden, but her boldness causes her parents to fear for her safety. At age 14, she's sent to school in Vienna, where she finds herself tarred with the fundamentalism she fled her country to escape. Marjane returns home to her close-knit family ---and the tyranny of Iran -- but leaves after a few years to settle in France.

How to explain to date the success of this black-and-white toon? Its characters grab you, for one, starting with Marjane herself (Mastroianni), an elfin, irreverent figure who converses with God and Marx, and struggles to make sense of a repressive regime; then later in Vienna, wrestles with adolescent angst compounded by her exile status. Add to the cast her uncle Anoush, her mentor and a political prisoner; and her outrageous grandma (voiced by Danielle Darrieux), offering unconventional views on life and love (a character, Satrapi told me, she had to tone down from the reality). And like a good novel, the film is packed with concrete details that render the texture of a life. Satrapi has devised a pungent mix of the personal and the political, engaging viewer sympathy for her protagonist, while opening a window on a complex culture.

indieWIRE caught up with Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud during a recent press junket in New York. You're immediately struck by how Satrapi in person resembles the Marjane of the graphic novel and film: same dark flashing eyes, mole on the nose, mischievous curl to her lip. Paronnaud speaks little English -- but Satrapi, though suffering from a killer cold, talked with gusto about the genesis and creation of "Persepolis," vehemently insisting on its "non-political" stance, until her voice literally gave out.

Is a Global Civic Religion Possible?

Robert Bellah asks over at The Immanent Frame:

In my essay “Civil Religion in America,” first published in Daedalus in 1967, exactly forty years ago—which, unfortunately, quite a few people think is the only thing I ever wrote—I discussed toward the end the possibility of what I called a “world civil religion.” Naïve though it may sound today, the idea of a world civil religion as expressing “the attainment of some kind of viable and coherent world order” was the imagined resolution of what I then called America’s third time of trial, an idea later developed in my book The Broken Covenant.

The first time of trial was concerned with the question of independence and the second with the issue of slavery, but the third, as I then put it, was concerned with America’s place in the world, and indeed what kind of world it would have a place in. That “viable and coherent world order” for which I hoped, would, I believed, require “a major new set of symbolic forms.” So far, I argued, “the flickering flame of the United Nations burns too low to be the focus of a cult, but the emergence of a genuine transnational sovereignty would certainly change this.” A genuinely transnational sovereignty? This utopian idea is something we will have to think about later. But I did hold that, though the idea of a world civil religion would be in one sense the fulfillment of “the eschatological hope of American civil religion,” nonetheless “it obviously would draw on religious traditions beyond the sphere of biblical religion alone.”

But Do We Use Only 10% of Our Hearts? A Look at 7 Other Medical Myths

Alok Jha in the Guardian:

The seven myths, published today in the British Medical Journal, were based on ideas and conversations the authors had heard endorsed on several occasions - and which many physicians thought were true.

"Whenever we talk about this work, doctors at first express disbelief that these things are not true. But after we carefully lay out medical evidence, they are very willing to accept that these beliefs are actually false," said Vreeman.

Everyone must drink at least eight glasses of water a day

This advice is thought to have originated in 1945 from the Nutrition Council in the US, which suggested people needed to consume 2.5 litres of water a day. But Vreeman said the water contained in food, particularly fruit and vegetables, as well as in milk, juice, coffee and soft drinks, also counts towards the total.

We only use 10% of our brains

"The myth arose as early as 1907, propagated by multiple sources advocating the power of self-improvement and tapping into each person's unrealised latent abilities," say Vreeman and Carroll. "The many functions of the brain are highly localised, with different tasks allocated to different anatomical regions. Detailed probing of the brain has failed to identify the 'non-functioning' 90%."