Excerpts:

Braveheart: dancing peasants, gleaming teeth and a cameo from Fabio | Film | guardian.co.uk

Edward I expresses a desire to enforce high taxes on the rich. Apparently, in Gibson’s world, this makes him evil. In case you need even more evidence, on a whim he reinstates ius primae noctis, allowing English nobles to interrupt Scottish weddings and shag the bride. Not only fictional, but profoundly ridiculous.

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After his lady love is murdered by the English, Wallace pretends to surrender. At the last minute, he whips out a concealed nunchaku. Wait, what? Glossing over its implication that medieval Scotland imported arms from China, Wallace’s rebellion gathers pace at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, which the film has inexplicably set in a field. Rather than, you know, on a bridge. For pity’s sake. The clue’s in the name.

I wish to write of three deaths (among a few million) that have occurred thus far, this year.

One was the “just folks”, “son of the soil” celebrity journalist Tim Russert, who made a mockery of aggressive interviewing while peddling provincial platitudes and gossip on CIA operatives, or providing a forum for dissemination of lies in aid of waging wars (Cathie Martin, aide to Cheney: “I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used. It’s our best format.”). His departure went down as a “national tragedy”.

The second is University of Virginia professor Randy Pausch who died of pancreatic cancer three days ago. Prof. Pausch became a celebrity after his “Last Lecture” speech at Carnegie Mellon University, in which he offered various inspirational words and acts, in the face of his imminent death.

Both these men were listed by Time (in different years) as one of the World’s Top-100 Most Influential People. Pausch appeared on Oprah, had scholarships and bridges named after him, and even had his “childhood dream” fulfilled through an invitation from the Pittsburgh Steelers to practice with them.

My friend and comrade, Carl Remick, died about six months ago. I have made three attempts to write something about it, but stopped on each occasion. Anything I write about such a masterful wordsmith as he was, would be an embarrassment to his memory. It would have been best if Carl had supplied us his own eulogy before departure, but his irreverent and iconoclastic nature would have yielded anything but the endearing and saccharine prose that is expected on such occasions.

Carl wasn’t on any Influential People list, as no “man of the left” (as he called himself on his Amazon Profile) has a chance to influence events in a rhetorical world that has reached its zenith in the person of Barack Obama. Nor did his simple last wish (or rather dream) of making it to Italy in his lifetime come to fruition. Carl did not spend the last few months of his life making money on pulp biography/non-fiction or the Oprah Winfrey show basking in the adulation of cheering fans. As a man of the left, he instead spent those months fighting the insurance companies when not beset by anxiety regarding his finances and future.

WikiQuote offers a few maxims from Randy Pausch (no disprespect to whom is intended in this post) that, to some extent, account for his accidental celebrity:

• Remember brick walls let us show our dedication. They are there to separate us from the people who don’t really want to acheive their childhood dreams.
• Show gratitude.
• Don’t complain; just work harder.
• Be good at something. It makes you valuable.
• Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say. “Wow, you got tenure early; what’s your secret?” I said, “It’s pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at 10 o’clock and I’ll tell you.

An almost perfect cocktail of Christian and capitalistic values! Carl had something to say on this matter too as in this post from the Marxmail list, with an introductory comment by Louis Proyect who runs the list:

(This afternoon I forwarded an item that Carl Remick had posted to lbo-talk. After doing some googling, I found a more exemplary item–a letter written to the Guardian on March 24, 2003 in response to a Madeleine Bunting article on balancing work and non-work lives. It is Carl at his best.)

Dear Ms Bunting,

Having a (rare!) idle moment, I would like to commend you on your continuing concern with the importance of achieving a work-life balance.

I believe the cult-like devotion to work that swallows whole lives these days is yet another nasty idea of US origin - and I say that as an American.

I am 53 and have spent my most of my working life, as a corporate writer, noting a steady decline in the quality of working conditions. Any number of things have combined to make the workplace the hellish place it is now.

a) The shift from a manufacturing to a service economy

b) The leveraged buy-outs of the 1980s and “outsourcing” of the 1990s that created “lean, mean” companies, permanently wiping out tiers of middle management and corporate staff

c) The globalisation of commerce and advent of the PC/internet/cell phone that cleared the way for 24/7 feats of Stakhanovite excess

d) Above all, the rise of the “winner-take-all” society, where CEOs and suchlike are seen as entitled to live large at everyone else’s expense.

What amazes and depresses me is how readily over the years my colleagues have acceded to their exploitation. [...] Yet, I will admit that - as seems to be the point of your investigations - it is impossible to escape the gravitational pull of today’s work-maddened society, even for someone as inclined toward dolce far niente as I am:

a) Working for a PR firm in New York during the 1990s, I never for a moment imagined I was participating in the creation of a “New Economy”; even at the time the decade seemed no more than a steady succession of harebrained schemes. Nevertheless, I was up at all hours with everyone else, attending to urgent-urgent-urgent (but always nonsensical) document revisions. Of course, a PR firm, like a law firm, imposes its own special tyranny: billable hours. Billing by
the hour - around as much of the clock as inhumanely possible - makes coffee machines as key to office productivity as computer printers.

b) That, however, was the 90s. Now I’m my own boss - meaning: I got chucked out of my job. I foolishly assumed that staying with one employer for 12 years would give me some protection from the inevitable major downturn, but quite the contrary. I was one of the first laid off at my firm, right at the start of the US recession in April 2001. Ever since, what with endless futile chases after a fulltime job combined with fitful periods of freelance work - again, often at crazy hours - I find have less control over my time than ever.

But enough lamentation about the woeful state of the States. May I end simply by wishing you the best with your project. I regret to say that the UK - via the awful example set by Margaret Thatcher in everything - made its own contribution to the decayed condition of American society today; nevertheless, the UK has something the US entirely lacks - a leftist political tradition that amounts to something - that, just possibly, could prove inspirational to the US
in the correct way. I earnestly hope you do find ways to turn Workcamp UK into a more gemutlich place. Here in the US there’s a lot riding on your success.

I write above that Carl was my friend and comrade. I like to believe that Carl was my friend, even though I have never met him in person and our correspondence has not been significant. But my comrade he certainly was in his instinctive support for and understanding of the rightful underdog, an attitude I only aspire to: on mailing lists we have both been members of, we found ourselves arguing on the same side, such as against the majority, and in support of a steadfast critic of US-based criticism of Iran. He was also my comrade in that we stood jointly accused (an honour for me!) on that very list of being against “the great”:

This is a basic conflict of value and I don’t think there is a rational resolution of it. Carl, Ravi, many leftists, really do hate, distrust, despise talent, and if they weren’t nice people they’d urge on use the advice of the counselor in the proverb who showed his prince how to handle the menace of the great by taking him to a wheat field and cutting down to the common level any stalk that rose above the average height.

(The person who wrote this is an intelligent and committed leftist and it would be unfair on the reader’s part to generalise about his overall attitude from this snippet from a heated dialogue.)

This accusation is not new to me and is frequently hurled at me by Randian right-wingers who delusionally identify themselves among the winners! Well, so be it! Carl was my comrade in that neither of us are winners, and now he is gone. But it is only a confusion of talent with success that would blind anyone to Carl’s value — he was great without needing to be above average.

I wrote to him privately, in response to his post detailing his struggle with cancer (and his fear that his post would be found to be “whining”):

I responded on list, but also wanted to write to you off-list to say: your post was anything but “whining” — I abhor that right-wing term, designed to make us not engage in a collective manner to discuss, share and perhaps even solve our difficulties. Your posts to LBO are witty, intelligent and full of knowledge that defies the modern obsession with specialisation.

To which he responded:

Many thanks, Ravi. Well, since having cancer seems to be all the rage right now, I didn’t want to come across as still another cancer “survivor” inflicting his/her tale of heroic woe on the defenseless public. I was particularly reluctant to divulge my backstory, if you will, on a political listserv, since I’d like my postings to be judged on their own merits, without giving readers any possible cause to think, “Uh-oh, this is that cancer guy — better go easy on him even if he is a horse’s ass.”

BTW, I decided years ago that I would finesse the modern obsession with specialization by specializing in generalization. This, too, proved to be a poor decision :)

Carl was indeed a splendid generalist, a man of letters if you will permit the term, and his poor decisions left us richer!

The New York Times, the paper of record, is shocked, just shocked. They just discovered that the US military has been censoring war photography and un”embedding” journalists who do not follow their guidelines.

Picturing Casualties - The New York Times

Chris Hondros of Getty Images was with an army unit in Tal Afar on January 18, 2005, when its soldiers killed the parents of this blood-spattered girl at a checkpoint

It is, to them, a “complex matter”:

It is a complex issue, with competing claims often difficult to weigh in an age of instant communication around the globe via the Internet, in which such images can add to the immediate grief of families and the anger of comrades still in the field.

You might find that confusing, but that’s only because you did not know that newspapers are in the business of “weigh[ing] competing claims”, not reporting facts.

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We are used to rot on this side of the pond, where the choice is between an outright organ of a political party or celebrity claptrap that passes for journalism. But the updated version of “on the Internet nobody knows you are a dog“, it seems, is that on a blog nobody knows you are a doggone fool. Here is some commentary on Obama’s visit to the UK from the mighty BBC’s website:

BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Justin Webb

He shook hands with the policemen outside 10 Downing Street!
This is presidential? No way Ronald Reagan would have done it. Was it a nicely Democratic touch or a nervy moment for a man so exhausted that he would have shaken hands with anyone who presented him or herself?

Marvellous! Splendid commentary!

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St. Louis Journal - Anger and Dismay at the Sale of a City Treasure - NYTimes.com

InBev has pledged not to shut down any of Anheuser-Busch’s 12 breweries in the United States. But many here still feel here as if a treasure is endangered.

As Opal Henderson, a 78-year-old auto salvage yard owner, put it, “Why can’t those foreigners just stay at home and leave us what we have?”

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Seed: Noam Chomsky + Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers: So you’re talking about self-deception in at least two contexts. One is intellectuals who, in a sense, go through a process of education which results in a self-deceived organism who is really working to serve the interests of the privileged few without necessarily being conscious of it at all.
The other thing is these massive industries of persuasion and deception, which, one can conceptualize, are also inducing a form of either ignorance or self-deception in listeners, where they come to believe that they know the truth when in fact they’re just being manipulated.

Click link for video and full conversation.

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Some recent majordomos like Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago) have used language akin to George W. Bush’s “aiding and comforting the enemy” to shut down or criticise any criticism of the orthodox position (The New Synthesis) in Evolutionary Biology. To them, everything from Jerry Fodor’s controversial essay, “Why pigs don’t have wings” to the “Altenberg 16” and their meditations on an “extended evolutionary synthesis”, do nothing more than arm the creationists and ID theorists. While it is true that this line of thought is easily misused by the creationist gang (search for the Altenberg 16 in Google and the first two links are one titled “The Evolution Industry” and another that of an ID proponent), that is no more a reason to avoid it than the sort of criticisms that Bush wants to silence. But the more nuanced and less religious approach to understanding evolution is not new, as Lewontin shows in the previously mentioned review of books on and by Stephen Gould:

Free Expression: The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould, By Richard C. Lewontin

Gould’s interest in form and function led him to revive interest in what was for some time a neglected aspect of evolution, the change in relative size of different body parts. It was well known in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that during the course of evolution different parts of similar organisms changed their relative size. So, for land vertebrates, as bodies grow larger in evolution, limbs get relatively thicker, but cranial size grows larger more slowly than the rest of the body so that heads get relatively smaller.

A major change in this relation of head size to body size occurred, however, in the immediate ancestors of humans. In the human line, cranial size has grown larger more rapidly than body size so we have, compared to apes, heads too big for our bodies. On the other hand our teeth have become much smaller. In recent years this regularity of differential growth, or allometry, of body parts is sometimes neglected because of a fashion for adaptive explanations of evolutionary change. A famous example is the Irish elk, a very large deer with grotesquely enlarged antlers. It was common to explain these huge appendages as the result of natural selection favoring males with the largest antlers, who would then win out in head-on struggles with other males in the competition for females. It was further imagined that the Irish elk as a species went extinct because it was too much of a strain to carry all that weight around on their heads.

Steve Gould neatly deflated this just-so story by showing that the antlers of the very large Irish elk were exactly the size that one would expect from the general differential growth rate of body and antlers in deer. As for the Irish elk’s extinction, their more modestly antlered ancestral species also became extinct, so it is not clear why we should pick out their extravagant headgear as the cause. The important point is that it is easy to make up adaptive stories out of one’s imagination for any feature of any organism, but that there are concrete realities of growth and physiology that need to be taken account of before lapsing into unchecked fictions. A chapter in The Richness of Life, coauthored with David Pilbeam, develops this theme for human evolution.

The phenomenon of allometry is only one of a number of possible factors that need to be considered in explaining particular evolutionary changes. It is a vulgar error to reduce the explanation of all evolutionary changes to the action of natural selection. It is not only in everyday language, however, that evolution is made synonymous with the effect of the higher reproductive fitness of some forms. Within the profession of evolutionary biology during the last thirty years there has developed an overwhelming fashion for adaptive explanations of every feature of organisms. This has been encouraged by the development of theories of kin selection and group selection in which it can be shown formally that a trait may spread in a population even though it is a disadvantage to its carrier, provided that close relatives or the population as a whole may have an increased reproductive rate. This form of reasoning, easy to do in theory but extremely difficult to demonstrate convincingly in nature, has swept through evolutionary biology.

One essay, “The Spandrels of San Marco,” reprinted in The Richness of Life, has itself become the subject of a very considerable literature. It argues that there are multiple possible explanations for evolutionary change besides direct natural selection for a trait.[4] Steve Gould was enamored of early Italian church architecture and familiar with spandrels—the triangular spaces between a series of arches and the straight cornices running above them. He suggested the spandrel as a metaphor for anatomical features of organisms that were not themselves adaptive, but were the architectural consequences of building another feature, just as the spandrels filling in the space surrounding a church dome are a necessary outcome of placing a circular object on a square base. As the church spandrels may then incidentally become the locus for decorations such as portraits of the four evangelists, so anatomical spandrels may be co-opted for uses that were not selected for in the first place.

Gould’s favorite example is the human chin, whose presence is an incidental consequence of the differential growth rate of two bones in the lower jaw. The dentary bone which carries the teeth elongates more slowly than the jawbone itself, so the chin juts out. In our ape-like ancestors the jawbone grows more slowly so no chin develops. Of course one can always try to invent a story about why having a chin confers more reproductive potential, but that is a parlor game, not science.

More on the Fodor affair and related matters later!

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In a predictably excellent essay reviewing The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Ed: Steve Rose) and Punctuated Equilibrium by Gould, Lewontin offers two valuable reminders. One is the essential and important difference between a “public intellectual” like Gould who works to disseminate knowledge of his field to the general public and someone like Dawkins who (my words) is after slick overarching ideas that can be turned into bestsellers or service personal aggrandisement. The second, perhaps more important (and quoted below) is a reminder of the nature of scientific activity:

Free Expression: The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould, By Richard C. Lewontin

There is hardly a chapter in the main body of The Richness of Life that does not repay a careful reading. Of all the essays in it the one that is most important to the public understanding of science is “Measuring Heads: Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology,” for it deals with an issue that is so discomfiting for scientists that they avoid it when they can. Despite the myth of detached objectivity that scientists propagate, their motivations are as messy as everyone else’s. In particular, they have political, social, and personal concerns that may influence what they do, how they do it, and what they say about it. Putting aside deliberate fraud, of which we have an embarrassment of examples, the gathering of data, their statistical representation, and their interpretation offer many opportunities for unconscious bias toward conclusions that we already “knew” to be true.

In particular, scientists have repeatedly reported that whites have larger brains than blacks. Gould shows that when the preserved brain is measured before the race of its former owner is revealed, this difference disappears completely. Similarly, claims of larger heads of professionals as compared to laborers are not statistically significant because of very large variation from individual to individual. What is important about this essay is not that it reveals what we already know to be true about the existence of racism and sexism, but that it shows how any claim that something is “scientifically demonstrated” should be treated with the same skepticism that we invoke when there is any reason to think that the investigator has something to gain, either ideologically or professionally, as we do when financial gain is involved.

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It turns out that much of what we think we know about one of the most studied episodes in modern history is either inaccurate or incomplete. Even more alarming, much of what Kennedy thought he knew about Soviet actions and motivations rested on flawed intelligence reports.

Far from being an example of “matchlessly calibrated” diplomacy - a term used by Camelot historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr - the missile crisis is better understood as a prime illustration of the ever-present “screwup factor” in world affairs.

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BBC NEWS | Malnutrition getting worse in India

Every lunchtime the children of Chitori Khurda gather at the Anganwadi centre in the village. It is where nutrition and health services are provided at village level.

On the day we visited, each child was given two puris (small bread puffs fried in oil) along with some sweet porridge. The allocation is 80g of food a day per child.

The children ate it, then sat hoping for more, but there was none.

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