greater or smaller

40% of foreign students in US come from three Asian countries

2009-12-28T13:23:00.003-05:00

[Economist]

Updates on the Iranian uprising

2009-12-28T13:10:00.004-05:00

Here, here and here.

Engineers in jihad

2009-12-28T12:27:00.001-05:00

Read here.

Korean drama a hit in Iran

2009-12-24T09:21:00.003-05:00

In the Global Post:

Visiting family members as often as possible is a well-established tradition in Iranian society. Usually nights are spent sipping freshly brewed tea and eating fresh fruits and salted nuts. This goes on for long hours into the night, especially in summertime when children and college students are free from school schedules.

Things have changed, however, since state TV started broadcasting a Korean TV drama called “Jumong.”

Now, in many homes after dinner, whole families race to huddle around the TV. Photos of the main characters grace everything from stationary to serving trays. Fans have set up blogs and forums to exchange news and discuss episodes.

"Jumong" is produced by MBC Korea. The series follows the life of the hero Jumong from childhood, when king Gumua takes on his guardianship, after thinking that his father He Mu So had been killed by the Han Dynasty. The series ends with Jumong’s biggest achievement: building a nation called Goguryeo and marrying his second wife, Susano.

Story here.

Sarah Palin's missing appetite for betterment

2009-12-24T09:13:00.003-05:00

Sam Tanenhaus in the New Yorker:

To an extent unmatched by any recent major political figure, she offers the erasure of any distinction—in skill, experience, intellect—between the governing and the governed. As one supporter told Conroy and Walshe, “If she can run a home, she can run the government.” Palin agrees: “There’s no better training ground for politics than motherhood.” Describing the responsibilities of managing Alaska’s budget, she makes the same argument in fancier language: “Lessons learned on the micro level still apply to the macro. Just as my family couldn’t fund every item on our wish list, and had to live within our means as well as save for the future, I felt we needed to do that for the state.” Her insistent ordinariness is an expression not of humility but of egotism, the certitude that simply being herself, in whatever unfinished condition, will always be good enough.
In her speech at the Republican Convention, Palin cited the example of Harry Truman, “a young farmer and haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the Vice-Presidency.” But Truman’s early years were spent in preparation for some future exemplary role, and for the historical destiny that he hoped, against all odds, he might someday fulfill. He regarded his ordinariness as something to be overcome, not celebrated. Though often derided in his day as a “little man,” he closely studied the lives of the greats, with special emphasis on antiquity—Hannibal, Cincinnatus, Scipio, Cyrus the Great—and consciously patterned himself after them. “Reading history, to me, was far more than a romantic adventure,” he said. “It was solid instruction and wise teaching which I somehow felt that I wanted and needed.” As President, he formed a strong bond with his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, a product of Yale and Harvard, and a bugbear of Joseph McCarthy and his congressional allies, whom Acheson described as “political primitives.”
The appetite for betterment that drove Truman is strangely absent in Palin. Though she says that she was a voracious reader in childhood, she nowhere indicates what she learned about politics or governance from books, from the college courses she took, or even from more experienced officeholders in Alaska. She (or her collaborator) sprinkles nuggets from Plato and Pascal, but is more convincing when she cites a motivational maxim from “author and former football coach Lou Holtz.” When the call came from John McCain to discuss her possible place on the ticket, Palin, in her favored idiom, didn’t blink. It was confirmation of her self-assessment. “I certainly didn’t think, Well, of course this would happen. But neither did I think, What an astonishing idea. It seemed more comfortable than that, like a natural progression.” It may have seemed less natural to advisers who, prepping her for interviews and debates, were startled by the gaping holes in her knowledge. When Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard editor and writer, asked Palin who her favorite thinker was, she replied, “You.” Barnes has observed that Palin’s “Republican heroes, besides McCain, come to a grand total of two, Reagan and Lincoln.”

The rest here.

Asserting Congress's war powers

2009-12-23T02:30:00.002-05:00

Bruce Ackerman and Oona A. Hathaway in Slate:

President Obama's Afghan initiative represents a new kind of American war, one that shatters the existing constitutional framework. Our tradition divides America's wars into two categories: unlimited wars (World War II) and momentary interventions (Grenada). But Afghanistan fits into neither of these neat boxes. It is of limited duration and purpose, but far from momentary—we will call it a limited war. As such, it challenges the conventional way in which the president and Congress have shared power during the modern era. And so the war in Afghanistan is a reason for Congress to change the way it handles war and peace. While it should approve Obama's 18-month surge, Congress should take steps to guarantee that it will have an equal say when the time comes to make the fateful decision about what happens next as the
Since World War II, the notion of a truly unlimited war has increasingly come under pressure. While Korea, Vietnam, or the two Gulf Wars were clearly different from Grenada, they weren't total wars like the struggle against Nazism. Nonetheless, the War Powers Resolution, passed in the wake of Vietnam, continued to suppose that wars came in only two sizes. It distinguished between very short-term interventions and the rest. The resolution authorized the president to make brief interventions abroad unilaterally—giving him 60 days to use military force without legislative approval. But the president had to go to Congress for explicit authorization during this period if he wanted to sustain his offensive for any battle that lasted longer.
[...]
Under the reform we envision, the House and Senate would change their rules for authorizing and funding wars. The new rules should state that any authorization of military force will specify the term during which it may lawfully continue before triggering further congressional review. The choice of the expiration date is entirely up to the House and Senate—it could be a year, or two, or 10. Or Congress could explicitly authorize an unlimited engagement. But if Congress's authorization is silent on the matter, a two-year period would be presumed. After that, the war-making authorization would expire unless Congress extended it. The president could ask to continue the limited war, but Congress would have to expressly agree. The House and Senate should back up the time limit by passing procedural rules that prohibit all future war appropriations after the deadline, except for money needed to wind down the mission over one year.

The rest here.

Audio: Bookstore Night in Buenos Aires

2009-12-23T02:20:00.002-05:00

From the NPR Transcript:

Some of the busiest streets in Buenos Aires, Argentina were recently closed to traffic, but for a party. The city hosts the biggest book fair in the Spanish-speaking world every April, and when summer comes to the Southern Hemisphere, as it does in December, Buenos Aires blocks off some of its biggest thoroughfares for a special evening devoted to the city's many book lovers. Brian Byrnes has this story from a big bash in honor of books.

Listen to the story here.

Laredo, Texas: The largest US city without a bookstore

2009-12-22T13:26:00.002-05:00

AP:

The final chapter has been written for the lone bookstore on the streets of Laredo.
With a population of nearly a quarter-million people, this city could soon be the largest in the nation without a single bookseller.

The situation is so grim that schoolchildren have pleaded for a reprieve from next month's planned shutdown of the B. Dalton bookstore. After that, the nearest store will be 150 miles away in San Antonio.

The B. Dalton store was never a community destination with comfy couches and an espresso bar, but its closing will create a literary void in a city with a high illiteracy rate. Industry analysts and book associations could not name a larger American city without a single bookseller.

"Corporate America considers Laredo kind of the backwater," said the city's most prolific author, Jerry Thompson, a professor at Texas A&M University International who has written more than 20 books.

The rest of the story here [via].

The daily routines of artists, intellectuals, etc.

2009-12-22T13:16:00.003-05:00

Here. Charles Darwin:

7 a.m. Rose and took a short walk.

7:45 a.m. Breakfast alone

8–9:30 a.m. Worked in his study; he considered this his best working time.

9:30–10:30 a.m. Went to drawing-room and read his letters, followed by reading aloud of family letters.

10:30 a.m.–
12 or 12:15 p.m. Returned to study, which period he considered the end of his working day.

12 noon Walk, starting with visit to greenhouse, then round the sandwalk, the number of times depending on his health, usually alone or with a dog.

12:45 p.m. Lunch with whole family, which was his main meal of the day. After lunch read The Times and answered his letters.

3 p.m. Rested in his bedroom on the sofa and smoked a cigarette, listened to a novel or other light literature read by ED [Emma Darwin, his wife].

4 p.m. Walked, usually round sandwalk, sometimes farther afield and sometimes in company.

4:30–5:30 p.m. Worked in study, clearing up matters of the day.

6 p.m. Rested again in bedroom with ED reading aloud.

7.30 p.m. Light high tea while the family dined. In late years never stayed in the dining room with the men, but retired to the drawing-room with the ladies. If no guests were present, he played two games of backgammon with ED, usually followed by reading to himself, then ED played the piano, followed by reading aloud.

10 p.m. Left the drawing-room and usually in bed by 10:30, but slept badly.

Video: Snoop Dogg on Martha Stewart

2009-12-21T17:58:00.001-05:00

Video: Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany

2009-12-21T15:43:00.003-05:00

Krautrock: The Rebirth Of Germany, Part: II, III, IV, V, VI

[via]

A profile of the leading Conservative Christian intellectual, Robert George

2009-12-21T15:31:00.004-05:00

David D. Kirkpatrick in the NYT:

In the American culture wars, George wants to redraw the lines. It is the liberals, he argues, who are slaves to a faith-based “secularist orthodoxy” of “feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism and lifestyle liberalism.” Conservatives, in contrast, speak from the high ground of nonsectarian public reason. George is the leading voice for a group of Catholic scholars known as the new natural lawyers. He argues for the enforcement of a moral code as strictly traditional as that of a religious fundamentalist. What makes his natural law “new” is that it disavows dependence on divine revelation or biblical Scripture — or even history and anthropology. Instead, George rests his ethics on a foundation of “practical reason”: “invoking no authority beyond the authority of reason itself,” as he put it in one essay.
George’s admirers say he is revitalizing a strain of Catholic natural-law thinking that goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas. His scholarship has earned him accolades from religious and secular institutions alike. In one notable week two years ago, he received invitations to deliver prestigious lectures at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Harvard Law School. His critics, including many of his fellow Catholic scholars, argue that he is turning the church into a tool of Republican Party. They say he is too focused on the mechanics of sex and morality, neglecting the other sides of the Christian message: the corruption of human reason through original sin, the need for forgiveness and charity and the chance for redemption. Citing George’s comparison of Catholic scholars who support abortion rights to defenders of chattel slavery, Cathleen Kaveny of the Notre Dame Law School, another scholar of law and theology in the Thomistic tradition, has called George and his allies “Rambo Catholics” and “ecclesiastical bullies.”

The rest here.

An interview with translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

2009-12-21T15:08:00.002-05:00

At Millions:

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: Quite simply because these later stories are among Tolstoy’s greatest works. In fact, the short novel Hadji Murat is perhaps the finest thing he wrote, and he seems to have known it. After all his storming against the notion of beauty, he could not help himself, being a born artist, and “in secret from himself” (as he put it) wrote his most perfectly beautiful work – “beautiful” in the way that The Iliad is beautiful. “Master and Man” is also a perfect work of a very different sort, vividly told and deeply moving. But even the opening story of the collection, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” which he wrote for a children’s reading book in the simplest style possible, is gripping and unforgettable. How could we not want to translate them?

TM: Having also translated War and Peace and Anna Karenina, what have you found to be unique about how Leo Tolstoy worked in short fiction, compared to his novels?

RP and LV: Tolstoy’s two big novels, like almost all of his work before 1880, portrayed people of his own class, the landed aristocracy, and their social milieu. Most often his heroes were self-conscious men, seekers of the meaning of life – in other words, self-portraits to one degree or another. In his later stories, there is much more variety: one hero is a narrow-minded bureaucrat, another is a well-to-do peasant, still another is a sort of holy fool, and finally there is the Chechen chief Hadji Murat. “The Forged Coupon” portrays people from all levels of Russian society, from the tsar to the lowest criminal. And there is a corresponding variety of “worlds.” That’s one thing. Another is the effort Tolstoy made to rid his art of what he considered the “superfluous detail” of the novels. His compositions became tighter, more formal, without losing any of the sensual immediacy that was the essence of his art.

The rest here.

Just war conditions for continuing a war

2009-12-20T12:51:00.003-05:00

Avishai Margalit at NYRblog:

For a war to be just, there must be moral grounds for going to war and moral conduct in the war. Thus, going to war requires having a just cause, whereas correct behavior in the war requires discriminating between combatants and civilians. Obama mentioned both conditions as well as some others. But then there are also conditions that must be met for continuing a war, among them having a reasonable prospect of success. Yet in his Nobel speech, Obama omitted this important condition for continuing the war in Afghanistan. It is not only stupid, but it is also immoral, to go to war, or to continue a war, when there is no prospect of victory. Having the right cause on your side is not enough; your chances of winning are just as important.

As an admirer of President Obama I have listened attentively to his recent speeches on Afghanistan. But at no point has he made a plausible case for how he will win the war. He counts on our taking a leap of faith to support his strategy, but leaps should be reserved for frogs, whereas we should subject our faith to critical thinking.

The main declared objective of the war—defeating al-Qaeda—is not a matter for helmeted marines but for bespectacled bank accountants, computer whiz-kids, and people who can speak the relevant languages. The war in Afghanistan, by now, has very little to do with defeating al-Qaeda. Vice President Joe Biden got it right when he argued that fighting al-Qaeda is not the same thing as fighting in Afghanistan. Moreover, the conflict in Afghanistan bears little relevance to the problem of keeping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of the hands of radical Islamists; the Pakistani army is as much of a problem as the Taliban.

The rest here.

Anxiety's effect on penalty kicks

2009-12-20T12:39:00.002-05:00

At EurekAlert:

A new study may explain why the England soccer team keeps losing in penalty shootouts – and could help the team address the problem in time for the World Cup 2010. Research by the University of Exeter shows for the first time the effect of anxiety on a footballer's eye movements while taking a penalty.

The study shows that when penalty takers are anxious they are more likely to look at and focus on the centrally positioned goalkeeper. Due to the tight coordination between gaze control and motor control, shots also tend to centralise, making them easier to save. The research is now published in the December 2009 edition of the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.
The researchers attribute this change in eye movements and focus to anxiety. Author Greg Wood of the University of Exeter's School of Sport and Health Sciences said: "During a highly stressful situation, we are more likely to be distracted by any threatening stimuli and focus on them, rather than the task in hand. Therefore, in a stressful penalty shootout, a footballer's attention is likely to be directed towards the goalkeeper as opposed to the optimal scoring zones (just inside the post). This disrupts the aiming of the shot and increases the likelihood of subsequently hitting the shot towards the goalkeeper, making it easier to save."

The rest here.

Myths about independent voters

2009-12-17T21:00:00.002-05:00

John Sides at The Monkey Cage:

A prefatory apology: some of the material in here is in previous posts (e.g., here), and all of this material will be very familiar and therefore unexciting to many political scientist readers. But elsewhere, people don’t get it, and so attention must be paid.

The three myths are:

1) Independents are the largest partisan group.

2) Independents are actually independent.

3) Change in the opinions of independents is always consequential.

See the evidence against the myths here.

A collection of links to political philosophy articles

2009-12-16T18:33:00.001-05:00

At Bookforum.

President Obama's mother's dissertation to be published by Duke UP

2009-12-16T17:17:00.003-05:00

Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle:

The scholarly book getting the most buzz at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference this week is likely to be a doctoral dissertation published 15 years after its author's death. Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia is by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, a connection noted on the book's front cover. The publisher, Duke University Press, will unveil the book on December 3 at the conference, to be followed by a special session devoted to Dunham and her life and work.
[...]

The book runs about 300 pages and focuses on a blacksmithing village called Kajar, in the province of Yogyakarta on the island of Java. The work has been whittled down significantly from its original form, which ran more than a thousand pages and investigated the socioeconomics of several village-based handicrafts, including batik, pottery, and the making of puppets used in shadow theater.

The rest here.

Krugman remembers Samuelson

2009-12-16T17:14:00.001-05:00

In the NYT:

Which brings me, finally, to Samuelson’s great contribution to economic policymaking: the Keynesian synthesis. Samuelson was, intellectually, a Depression baby: he came of intellectual age in an environment of mass unemployment. His textbook brought Keynesian thinking to a broad audience. And he never forgot that markets can malfunction terribly. How, then, could economic theory on the virtues of markets be of any real-world use?

Samuelson’s answer was that good macro policies come first. Monetary and fiscal policy had to be employed to assure more or less full employment (and as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Samuelson appreciated the limits of monetary policy in a way that seems incredibly prescient today). Exchange rates had to be adjusted to assure competitiveness. Only then could the virtues of markets come into play.

It was a lesson that too many economists forgot, as they immersed themselves in the lovely math of perfect markets. But Samuelson’s realism – his understanding that markets are great things, but need to be supported by government activism — has never seemed more relevant than it does now.

So let us praise Paul Anthony Samuelson, the incomparable economist. There has never been, and will never be, anyone to match him.

Scholars study the virtues of the Old South

2009-12-16T17:02:00.004-05:00

Ben Terris in the Chronicle:

In 1991, Donald W. Livingston threw a party—well, a conference—and nobody showed up.

It was during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Mr. Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and raised in South Carolina, decided there should be more thoughtful discourse on the topic of secession.

A political philosopher who specializes in David Hume, he searched philosophy papers published since 1940 and turned up only seven on the matter of secession from federal unions: five reviews of a book and two articles about Quebec. Thinking he had the market to himself, he held a conference on secession at the 1991 meeting of the American Philosophical Association.

He was right about his share of the market. Nobody came.
Today Mr. Livingston is drawing slightly larger crowds. In 2003 he started the Abbeville Institute, named after the South Carolina birthplace of John C. Calhoun, seventh vice president of the United States and a forceful advocate of slavery and states' rights. The institute now has 64 associated scholars from various colleges and disciplines. They gather to discuss topics about the South that they feel are misrepresented in today's classrooms. Feeling a chilly reception to its ideas—officials of the Southern Poverty Law Center say its work borders on white supremacy—the group has kept a low profile. Mr. Livingston's own department chair, as well as a number of Emory history professors, say they have never heard of it.
[...]
Heidi Beirich, research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, stops short of calling Abbeville a hate group, but pointed to a passage in its mission statement that troubles her greatly. It quotes Eugene D. Genovese, a Marxist-turned-conservative historian: "Rarely these days, even on Southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of white people in the South."

That line speaks volumes about the goals of organization, says Ms. Beirich, who adds that the idea that white people are America's underappreciated stepchildren is ludicrous. "At the end of the day, they are just trying to revise the history of the South in favor of whites," she says.

The rest here.

Thomas Friedman calls for 'civil war' in Islam

2009-12-16T16:53:00.001-05:00

In the NYT:

Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.

Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.

The rest here.

Video: George Lucas asked David Lynch to direct 'Return of the Jedi'

2009-12-12T21:01:00.001-05:00

Video: An interview with Nobelist John Nash

2009-12-10T22:50:00.004-05:00

[via 3 Quarks]

"We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man"

2009-12-10T22:37:00.001-05:00

Text of U.S. leaflets dropped over Japan during WWII:

TO THE JAPANESE PEOPLE:

America asks that you take immediate heed of what we say on this leaflet.

We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what two thousand of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder, and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate.

We have just begun to use this weapon against your homeland. If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima when just one atomic bomb fell on that city.

Before using this bomb to destroy every resource of the military by which they are prolonging this useless war, we ask that you now petition the emperor to end the war. Our president has outlined for you the thirteen consequences of an honorable surrender. We urge that you accept these consequences and begin the work of building a new, better, and peace-loving Japan.

You should take steps now to cease military resistance. Otherwise, we shall resolutely employ this bomb and all our other superior weapons to promptly and forcefully end the war.

EVACUATE YOUR CITIES

Non-negotiable Christian principles

2009-12-10T21:12:00.001-05:00

An interview with Robert George:

Right before Thankgiving, a group of Christians held a press conference in Washington announcing that “because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.”

Their Manhattan Declaration concluded: “We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.”

One of the declaration’s co-authors, Princeton professor Robert P. George, talked to National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez over the holiday about the statement and the future.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What is the Manhattan Declaration?

ROBERT P. GEORGE: Beginning at a meeting in New York in late September, Christian leaders came together across the historic lines of ecclesial difference — Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox Christians — to bear witness to three foundational principles of justice and the common good: (1) the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions; (2) the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife; and (3) religious liberty and freedom of conscience. The Declaration’s signatories understand that each of these principles is under threat from powerful forces in our culture and politics. They seek to make clear that, as Christians, they regard these principles as non-negotiable, and will therefore be unceasing in their defense of them and tireless in their efforts on their behalf. Moreover, the signatories pledge that neither they nor their institutions will participate in actions, practices, or policies that they, in conscience, judge to be gravely wrong.

LOPEZ: Why now?

GEORGE: With respect to each of the foundational principles of justice and the common good addressed in the Manhattan Declaration, important decisions are now being made or soon will be made. These decisions will either uphold or undermine what is just and good. There is no avoiding the issues or evading the decisions. Both sides in the great moral struggle understand this. Forces favoring abortion, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide, the redefinition of marriage, and the like see this as a critical moment for advancing their causes. The Obama administration is explicitly with them on some issues and is at least broadly sympathetic on others. Moreover, in the aftermath of the 2006 and 2008 elections, their causes have unprecedented strength in both houses of Congress as well as in many state legislatures. Obviously, they also have great support in the mainstream media and the elite sector of the culture more generally.

The rest here.

7 a.m.	Rose and took a short walk.
7:45 a.m.	Breakfast alone
8–9:30 a.m.	Worked in his study; he considered this his best working time.
9:30–10:30 a.m.	Went to drawing-room and read his letters, followed by reading aloud of family letters.
10:30 a.m.– 12 or 12:15 p.m.	Returned to study, which period he considered the end of his working day.
12 noon	Walk, starting with visit to greenhouse, then round the sandwalk, the number of times depending on his health, usually alone or with a dog.
12:45 p.m.	Lunch with whole family, which was his main meal of the day. After lunch read The Times and answered his letters.
3 p.m.	Rested in his bedroom on the sofa and smoked a cigarette, listened to a novel or other light literature read by ED [Emma Darwin, his wife].
4 p.m.	Walked, usually round sandwalk, sometimes farther afield and sometimes in company.
4:30–5:30 p.m.	Worked in study, clearing up matters of the day.
6 p.m.	Rested again in bedroom with ED reading aloud.
7.30 p.m.	Light high tea while the family dined. In late years never stayed in the dining room with the men, but retired to the drawing-room with the ladies. If no guests were present, he played two games of backgammon with ED, usually followed by reading to himself, then ED played the piano, followed by reading aloud.
10 p.m.	Left the drawing-room and usually in bed by 10:30, but slept badly.