I've been convinced to turn anonymous comments back on. Adam, who thinks I am simply to dumb to understand Joyce, couldn't work out how to register. Victor, who disputes the date of Hamas' last suicide bombing, can't remember his password. In the face of such determined ineptitude, what am I to do. Comment away, anonymice.

Persian Dispersion

New high resolution images from the Japanese K12BLiP satellite demonstrate conclusively that Iran does not exist. Rather, the Persian Gulf stretches from Iraq to Afghanistan, contiguous with the Caspian Sea above and the Gulf of Oman below.

President Ahmadinejad, currently chairing a session of the United Nations Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, was defiant when asked about the allegations.

"Allah be praised, the Western infidel cartographers must face extreme consequences for wiping Iran off the map."

Secretary General of the European Union, Javier Solana, was unphased by the threats, saying that anybody nevertheless claiming Iranian citizenship was very welcome to settle in Europe, perhaps "in Germany, Austria or other countries".

The Onion returns to form with this article...

Hamas Wins

I'm not sure this is worse than having Hamas lurking on the sidelines, controlling PA policy through threats of resuming bombings. Power without responsibility is a particularly malignant form of leadership and at least this era may come to an end. Some points:

1. If Palestinians want to shape their society in the image of the Koran, well, that's their perogative.
2. In practical terms, Hamas has not sponsored suicide attacks since the truce a year ago. They may be in a better position to silence Islamic Jihad than Fatah was.
3. Sharon attacted the support of middle Israel through a strategy that does not rely on a reliable partner on the Palestinian side. This should strengthen Kadima's position.
4. Even The Guardian accepts that Hamas is a terrorist organization:

Fatah, the party of Yasser Arafat and Mr Abbas - supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the founding charter of Hamas commits it to the destruction of the Jewish state.

Of course, Fatah's commitment to peace was always suspect.

Ulysses schmulysses

While the wifeling spent Sunday in New York picking out a wedding gown, I settled down to the grim task of inching painfully through Ulysses. Frankly, I am baffled why this book tops the Modern Library's Editors' choice for top 100 fiction. It's truely a tomb. Here are my impressions 200 pages in.

Admittedly, I've read only as much commentary as I think essential to follow the narrative, so perhaps I shouldn't complain that it's difficult. Yes, difficult to read, and even more difficult to understand. Still, Joyce succeeds in using stream of consciousness to illustrate the protagonists' inner lives. Apart from the sense of intimacy it engenders, at times I was swept up in a sense of time unfolding.

However using a similar style for the narrative scaffolding is unforgiveable. It allows Joyce to punctuate the text with half-baked and glibly poetic ideas. It feels like standup comedy for literature professors. Indeed Joyce claims he intended that Ulysses read like a puzzle so as to guarantee him exposure in the pages of learned journals for centuries to come.

His obscurantism is therefore in part deliberate. However, Ulysses is notoriously full of errors, and at least two major overhauls of the text have been prepared since its initial publication. But I suspect that its also difficult because some of the ideas are simply sloppy.

Example - Bloom keeps in his pocket a brochure from 'Agendath Netaim'. Surely it should be 'Agudath Netaim'? What's the reader supposed to think? That Bloom, the half-jew is being hoodwinked by a phoney Zionist organization? That its a pathetic pun on the 'agenda' of the tree-planters association? Or that its just a mistake Joyce made in the first draft and left in the text through lack of better knowledge, or for better bamboozling the reader?

Perhaps as I read on, enlightenment will dawn. Perhaps I'll read a commentary that reveals a cunning insight into irish-jewish identity politics. But for now, I feel that the emperor is half-naked and trying to get the rest of us to undress.

Turn Cheeks Not Digits

Very surprised to read in an interview with one of the leaders of the Ijaw self-determination groups that he is a muslim. On Wikipedia, the Ijaw are described as mostly Christian. Apparently Alaji Dokubo converted to Islam, and his reasons for doing so are most interesting.

Many readers may believe that your becoming Muslim has to do with the cause of the Niger Delta. To what extent is that true?

I will not say it has to do with the cause of the Niger Delta. As an individual, I wanted to serve God and to know him but there was a contradiction. I was not ready to turn the other cheek and I became a Muslim. I was not ready to believe that all authority is from God and we must be submissive to that authority. The only religion I saw that is suitable to my nature is Islam. It is only Islam that says we must resist evil wherever we find it. The prophet Mohammed said and I quote: 'When you see evil in the land, you must resist it with your hand, you must speak against it with your tongue or you must hate it with your heart.' That is the weakest of it. Mohammed also said: 'The best thing to do to a tyrant ruler is to speak the words of truth.' So that is it. Islam has helped me in my agitation because Islam accepts my role as somebody who should correct the ills of society and the fight against oppression even with my life.

I agree that turning the other cheek is a poor idea when confronted with brutal oppression. An emerging branch of theory describing how individuals co-exist in cooperative societies suggests likewise. In a computer tournament of cooperation between individuals with differing strategies, held in 1981, a 'tit-for-tat' strategy stabilized societies against selfish individuals. Later it was shown that 'tit-for-tat' provides the groundwork for more generous strategies (for example 'tit-for-two-tats') to prosper. In contast, 'turn the other cheek' is a recipe for social disaster.

Still, a casuist might hold that Jesus specified the cheeks as they are but two in number. Had he commanded his followers to 'let them slap you on the same cheek repeatedly', or even 'let them sever your ten digits' it would be clear that he recommended a passive response to every insult. The very fact that he specified the two cheeks hints that he was an early advocate of the 'tit-for-two-tats' strategy.

So, though I am not myself a Christian and aren't really invested in his religious affiliations, I do feel compelled to urge Mr Dokubo - on the off chance that he is an avid reader of blogs to consider carefully his reasoning. Jesus may not have been as timorous as he thinks.

Solana Says Put Your Head in the Sand

And now for the official European Union response to yesterday's suicide attack in Tel Aviv...

European Union diplomat Javier Solana called on both sides to 'forget terrorist acts and to give political life a chance.'

Understandable really - the Europeans certainly are good at forgetting mass murder of Jews, and no doubt can't see why anybody else should spend time fretting about it. But wait until Iran drops a medium sized A-bomb on Rome. Then we'll see how good the Europeans are at forgetting.

The Barnacle Bay Light

Filing old articles after moving, I came across photocopies that looked worth re-reading. I just pondered over a few pages from a book by the great neuroanatomist CJ Herrick and couldn't help but be taken with his sweeping (and in the 1920's very modern) analogy of the cortex to an amplifier. I'm interested in spontaneous movement (ie seemingly non-directed behaviour) and think this is as reasonable a hypothesis as any other:

The way the cortex actually works as an amplifier of very feeble sensory stimulation may be seen in the case of a man who is drifting at sea in a catboat after dark in a fog. He has no compass and is "all at sea" about his position and course. He knows he is drifting but whether landward or seaward he has no means of finding out. While straining eyes and ears for the faintest directive sign, the fog breaks momentarily and he glimpses a point of faint red light on the port bow. The Barnacle Bay light! He notes its direction with reference to wind and tipe-rip and takes his couse down the wind in serene confidence that it will take him directly to his haven.

A twinkle of light, the smallest stimulus to which his retina is sensitive, instantly transforms the slump of dejection into hilarious elation; with a shout of joy he leaps to halyard and tiller and that flash of perception may guide his course for hours to come.

Prediction

I'm about one hundred pages into Zadie Smith's new book, 'On Beauty'. I'm underwhelmed. Flashes of elegant writing are crowded out by a cast of cliched characters. An aloof Professor and his sassy African American wife. A saintly Christian family with a son who, provoked, reveals the machismo of their Trinidadian origins. My guess is that 350 pages down the line, his seemingly devout father will sleep with a college student (subtly illuminating the hypocrasy of pious religious folk). In consequence the two wives, both betrayed by their husbands, will strike up a friendship and explore the meaning of being a black woman in the lilly white world of academe. I am not unnerved. Part of the joy of reading for a bookclub meeting is the gleeful anticipation of being able to trash the book with wild abandon...

Just a Thought...

The real test of a community, is not whether it harbours extremists, nor how many extremists it harbours. There are always selfish and narrow-minded people who will seek to promote their own interests with disregard for others. The real test of a community is how diligent the majority is in containing and neutralizing the fundamentalists among them. How scrupulous it is to denounce offensive viewpoints declared in its name. How methodical it is in isolating fringe groups and excluding them from positions of authority.

Spiritual laziness is therefore the death knell for any group as it will quickly be over-run by a lunatic fringe intent on using communal resources for its own agenda.

More than a dozen current and former employees of the NYT say that everything the paper has printed since 1906 is useless. The journalists, many of them senior editors, spoke on condition of anonymity partly due to post-employment restrictions that could jeopardize their coveted memberships in the Pen and Ink club, but mostly from fear of being snubbed by the Upper West side intelligentsia.

"Not a single accurate story has been published in more than a century", said one journalist. "More than once I found editors cribbing from World Weekly News magazines they picked up waiting in the Deli line."

Cant Stop Wont Stop Keep On Moving

Moves are afoot to oust Michael Palin as president of an environmental organiation. Apparently Palin (whose travel documentaries don't appeal to me half as much as his Monty Python roles) has clocked up quarter of a million air miles over the last two decades.

Palin made a new year resolution last year to confine his travels to Europe. But within six weeks he flew to San Francisco.

Is this so terrible? It amounts to less than one round the world trip per year. I imagine many heads of environmental organizations accumulate comparable air mileage. And of course, he could always mitigate his carbon emissions.

Peter Beaumont of The Guardian writes about clan warfare in Gaza.

Sudan to Monitor Own Genocide

Chinese oil interests, Arab pride, European laziness and the power-lust of UN diplomats, have steered the UN away from declaring that Sudanese government sponsored militia are committing genocide in Darfur. Consequently rather than compel UN members into action, peacekeeping is left to a few thousand African Union troops. Bizarrely, it now appears that Sudan is about to assume the presidency of the African Union and will therefore supervise the peacekeeping force against itself.

Your Great Grandmother Within

A new genetic study on the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry finds that 40% of Ashkenazi jews alive today, are the descendants of just 4 women! It's relatively easy to look at maternal lineages. In the same way that the Y chromosome is only inherited from fathers, a small loop of 'mitochrondrial DNA' is inherited only from fathers. Which means that in the absence of mutation, you share the same mitochondrial DNA as your great grandmothers great grandmother.

Ashkenazi jews are already known to fall into a number of distinct genetic groups, two of which represent 42% of the population. When the authors looked at the DNA sequence of those two groups, they found evidence for just four types of original mitochrondrial DNA, meaning that just four women gave rise to almost half of the Ashkenazi jewish population. Amazingly, one of the four DNA types is present in 1,700,000 living Ashkenazi jews - 10% of jews today can trace their origins to the same woman.

One of the authors on the study was Karl Skorecki from Tel Aviv University, who published an even more astonishing paper several years ago demonstrating that about 90% of self-identified Cohanim share a Y chromosome type. This would be expected if indeed todays Cohanim are descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses.

Olmert - Another Dove with Talons?

Haaretz has an excellent mini-bio of Ehud Olmert that provides nourishing fodder for optimists like myself.

'In his period as the mayor of Jerusalem, he understood that as the person setting policy in a city in which one-third of the residents are Arabs, he had to alter the policy toward them,' says Amirav. 'Olmert is a rational person, and the encounter with the reality he saw as mayor changed his views. He began to demand budgets from the treasury to improve the infrastructure of the Arab residents of Jerusalem. In the course of five years, he allocated more development budget to them than Teddy Kollek did in 20 years.'

...

A few of Olmert's acquaintances believe that the leftist opinions of members of his family have also influenced the shift in his political positions: His wife, Aliza, supported Peace Now, and his son Saul refused to serve in the territories, and identified with the Yesh Gvul movement.

Love Letters Half Price

Years ago at a Barnes and Noble fire sale, I bought a wan looking, jacketless copy of a book, simply titled "World's Great Letters". I was drawn to it because the author was none other than M. Lincoln Schuster, co-founder of the publishing company Simon and Schuster and I was pleased that the founder of a famous publishing house was a lover of letters.

It's a wonderful book overflowing with letters romantic, ruminative, vitriolic, gossipy, patriotic, poetic, sarcastic, brash and even mundane. My favorite is an imperious note from Wagner to an admirer, Baron Hornstein:

... I require an immediate loan of ten thousand francs. With this I can again put my life in order, and again do productive work. It will be rather hard for you to provide me with the sum; but it will be possible if you WISH it, and do not shrink from a sacrifice.

Reading the introduction tonight, I came across a curious claim by Schuster: "...in Venezuala the post office permits love letters to go through the mails at half rate, provided they are sent in bright red envelopes."

I looked a little on the web, and indeed this pdf file from a 1939 edition of a Canadian newspaper, "The Ubyssey" confirms it. What a great idea! You may not have heard, but the post office just raised the price of regular mail to 39 cents - they certainly weren't making a big fuss about it and I for one have apparently consigned a bunch of epistles to oblivion as a result. But while they're at it, why not levy rates according to the type of letter!?

Twice the regular rate should be charged for communications from insurance companies, credit card firms or banks. A special surcharge should be added to cellphone and utility bills. Solicitations from political parties should be prohibitively expensive to send.

But love letters... love letters should go at half price.

Kofi - More Talking Necessary

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Iran's top nuclear negotiator told him Thursday that Tehran was interested in 'serious and constructive negotiations' with Britain, France and Germany over its atomic program.
BREITBART.COM - Annan Says Iran Wants to Discuss Nukes

Yeah, because the last set of discussions were just for fun.

Floral Flatulence

Nature is reporting the astonishing finding that plants... ahem... break wind. Apparently, in the 250 years since Joseph Priestley noticed that plants produce oxygen, nobody bothered to check whether they were be giving off anything else. Now, a group from Germany - perhaps noticing strange odours in the Greenhouse - has found that plants also produce methane. And not just a smidgeon of it. Altogether, plants may be responsible for up to 30% of global methane emissions.

Hoisted on his Own Petard

The encryption of DVDs according to international 'region' is a major inconvenience for people like me, who find themselves living in a new, and apparently digitally incompatible region ever few years. I have DVDs from region 2 and region 4 that are useless on an American player.

Apparently encoding is intended to protect copyright - yes, the panacea to Hollywood's decling profits is not to make good films, its to make people buy new copies of their favorites with their sesonal migrations.

I can't even imagine how this stupid practice is supposed to protect against piracy. Does Hollywood think that asian pirate outfits would innocently mass copy a local DVD and be embaressed when it failed to play on US machines? Or are they trying to ensure that DVDs released in Europe while American distributors cool their heels remain out of reach of consumers here?

So I can't say I'm devastated to learn that Steven Spielberg is going to miss being nominated for a British Film award because:

Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe.

Spotting Hidden Cows

Life is about to become a whole lot easier for vegetarians. Scrutinizing ingredient lists for esoteric animal-derived products is painfully difficult at times - it's often astonishing just how many things go into a loaf of bread. But new guidelines for food labelling mean that allergens including milk and eggs with have to be listed on the nutritional information.

The new labeling guidelines will also require companies to clearly state the presence of ingredients containing protein from milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, or soybeans, eight potential food allergens.
The National Academies - New Food Labels Show Trans Fat and Allergens

Carry Me Banana

Breaking news from ScrappleFace

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, decried Mr. Belafonte’s “ignorant remarks” and invited him to visit Baghdad or Ramadi “to see who’s the greatest terrorist in the world.”

“I can assure Mr. Belafonte,” said Mr. Zarqawi, “that his visit here will be a short one. Daylight come and he want to go home.”

Murderous Japanese Whaling Fleet Attacks Greenpeace

Japanese whalers have started attacking the Greenpeace vessels that are attempting to interfere with the on-going murder of whales in Antarctic waters and are now threatening to send 'police' to the assistance of their whalers. If Australia has any gumption, it will respond by sending its own 'police' to protect the Greenpeace vessels.

This quote from the director-general of the phoney "Institute of Cetacean Research" is particularly contemptible:

"We certainly don't want to see anyone hurt. These people must understand that when we conduct our lethal research, the area is very dangerous,"

Yep, lethal research is bound to be dangerous. The disgrace is that they justify the 'research' as being necessary to extract DNA samples in order to estimate whale populations. Given that adequate DNA for hundreds of genetic profile analyses can be obtained from the tip of a mouse tail, its absurd to suggest a whole whale needs to be killed for DNA extraction. What are they doing with all that DNA? Eating it...?

Islam, Suicide Bombers and the Hope for Peace

Mere Rhetoric writes a moving personal tribute to the Israeli officer, Uri Binamo, recently killed at a checkpoint by a suicide bomber en route to a hanukkah party. He brings home the tangible richness of the life that was cruelly taken. And he describes why Israeli society does not retaliate fiercely against the Palestinians or protect itself with more extreme measures.

This last point is not trivial. In spite of everything, the Palestinians are at the mercy of Israel. Fortunately Israel treats them with kid gloves. I'm reading 'The Wahhabi Myth' by Haneef James Oliver at the moment. It's an explanation of the Salafist system of beliefs and an attempt to distance Saudi Wahabism from Bin Laden's sect.

Arguing that Wahhabism prohibits terrorist attacks against non-Muslims, he cites Muhammad Ibn Sallih Al-Uthaymeen, who exhorted muslims:

...Likewise I invite you to have respect for those people who have the right that they should be respected, from those between you and whom there is an agreement. For the land in which you are living is such that there is an agreement between you and them. If this were not the case, they would have killed you or expelled you. So preserve this agreement, and do not prove treacherous to it, since treachery is a sign of the Hypocrites, and it is not from the way of the Believers.

From a strictly Salafist perspective then, Palestinian suicide bombers are in breach of an implicit agreement with Israeli society and contravene the teachings of the Prophet of Islam.

Theory of course is one thing ; there are many streams within Islam that don't subscribe to this idea. Moreover, Saudis themselves enthusiastically support Palestinian jihadi groups. But in light of the ongoing debate in Western circles about whether accomodation with Islam is ultimately possible, I think its important to note that at least some elements of the intellectual infrastructure necessary for mutual co-existence exist.

Pulsa Denura Misfires, Hits Saul Bellow?

Apparently crazies from the religious right are celebrating the effectiveness of a hex they put on Ariel Sharon back in July.

Far-right activists took credit Thursday for the severe deterioration in Ariel Sharon's health, claiming that a pulsa denura - Aramaic for 'lashes of fire' - death curse they instigated against the prime minister in July was the real catalyst behind his current state of health.

According to the Death Clock, a 5'7", 260 pound man born in 1928 should have died on December 9, 2001. If anything, the pulsa denura helped extend Sharon's life these last 6 months. I think there's a real concern that they misfired and hit Saul Bellow who died less than two months after the spell was cast. One really can't be too careful in distinguishing cantankerous old jewish men.

Philadelphia Loses Weight? I think not.

A survey reported in the Washington Post indicates that Philadelphia has dropped from second fattest city, to 23rd. Utter nonsense ; Philadelphians have been eating heartily this last year, taking in calories like nobody's business. Admittedly a few people might have lost their appetite after the Eagle's poor performance this year, but its inconceivable that the Philadelphia should linger behind such no-name villages as Mesa, Arizona. Apparently the rules have been changed to take into account variables like "amount of public park space". How absurd ; that the noble girth of the burgers of Philadelphia should be overlooked just because there's an enormous parched lawn spreadeagled across the city? It's not fair and I can only hope that sanity will prevail in next year's rankings.

Holding Back on the Papal Prayers...

From the Jerusalem Post.

Pope Benedict XVI said Thursday he was praying for peace in the Holy Land, according to news reports.

Benedict's comment was in response to a question about the situation in the Middle East, after Sharon suffered a massive stroke Wednesday evening that made his return to power unlikely and prompted widespread anxiety about the future of the peace process in the region.

'We pray for peace in the Holy Land, so that the Lord will grant them durable peace,' Benedict was quoted as saying by the Apcom and ANSA news agencies. However, Benedict did not refer directly to Sharon.

No doubt Benedict is saving those potent papal prayers in case the situation deteriorates.