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3. Günter Grass, Israel, and that Poem

Apr-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: “Poetry makes nothing happen” wrote Auden. Günter Grass (who’s he?) seems to have disproved that theory, as his poem criticizing Israel resulted not only in heated debate but got him banished from Israel. Below, the poem itself (we report; you decide) and two Jewish perspectives. Rabbi Rosen’s link is devastating accurate.

* Günter Grass: ‘What Must Be Said’ The Guardian

But why have I kept silent till now?

Because I thought my own origins,

tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,

meant I could not expect Israel, a land

to which I am, and always will be, attached,

to accept this open declaration of the truth.

* Günter the Terrible Uri Avnery Counterpunch

Grass has done the unthinkable: he has openly criticized the State of Israel! And he a German!!!

The reaction was automatic. He was at once branded as an anti-Semite. Not just a run-of-the-mill anti-Semite, but as a crypto-Nazi, who could easily have served as a henchman of Adolf Eichmann! This was shown by the fact that at age 17, near the end of World War II, he was recruited to the Waffen-SS like tens of thousands of others and then – oddly enough – kept the fact hidden for many years. So there you are.

Israeli and German politicians and commentators vied with each other in cursing the writer, with the Germans easily trumping the Israelis. Though our Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, may have garnered the individual championship by declaring Grass persona non grata and banning him from entering Israel for all eternity (at least)….

So what did Grass actually say?

* What Must Be Said: We All Profit from Occupations Rabbi Brant Rosen

There’s been a great deal of analysis written about German writer Gunther Grass’ now-infamous new poem, “What Must Be Said” (in which Grass criticized Israel’s nuclear program as endangering an “already fragile world peace.”) For me, the most astute response by far comes from Mideast historian Mark LeVine, writing in Al-Jazeera.

…These facts are that Israel, however egregious its crimes – and anyone who denies them is either completely ignorant or a moral idiot – is but one cog in a much larger global machine, one that includes too many other cases of occupation, exploitation, and wanton violence to list comprehensively here (we can name a few – Syria, China, Russia, India, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, the Congo, and of course, NATO and the United States – whose oppression, exploitation, and murder of their own or other peoples is a far more concrete “fact” than the potential for mass destruction caused by Israel’s nuclear programme)…

The larger fact is that the global economy is addicted to war, to militarism, oil and the rape of the planet for the minerals and resources that fuel the now globalised culture of hyperconsumption that will doom our descendants to a fate we dare not contemplate. Israel’s gluttony for Palestinian territory, and its willingness to encourage a regional nuclear arms race to keep it, is ultimately no different than the the gluttony for the 60-inch TV, the iPhone/Pad, the cavernous homes and cars, the ability to live at levels of consumption that are only sustainable if most of the world lives in poverty that increasingly defines all our cultures.

5. The Many Worlds of US Politics

Apr-07-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The New York Times Quantum theory is a brilliant piece of political humour; Walt nails the core problem in the the US body politic being the length of the campaign. (The longer it goes on, the less camp and the more pain. rimshot) And George Monbiot looks at Ayn Rand, and shellacs her lackies lacking.

* A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney New York Times

Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician….The basic concepts behind this model are:

Complementarity. In much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, Mitt Romney is both a moderate and a conservative, depending on the situation. It is not that he is one or the other; it is not that he is one and then the other. He is both at the same time.

Probability. Mitt Romney’s political viewpoints can be expressed only in terms of likelihood, not certainty. While some views are obviously far less likely than others, no view can be thought of as absolutely impossible. Thus, for instance, there is at any given moment a nonzero chance that Mitt Romney supports child slavery.

Uncertainty. Frustrating as it may be, the rules of quantum campaigning dictate that no human being can ever simultaneously know both what Mitt Romney’s current position is and where that position will be at some future date. This is known as the “principle uncertainty principle.”

Entanglement. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a proton, neutron or Mormon: the act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation. By asking Mitt Romney how he feels about an issue, you unavoidably affect how he feels about it. More precisely, Mitt Romney will feel every possible way about an issue until the moment he is asked about it, at which point the many feelings decohere into the single answer most likely to please the asker.

* How Our Election Cycle Screws Up Our Foreign Policy Stephen M. Walt

The problem, of course, is that the United States has the unappealing combination of a relatively short presidential term and an unusually long election process. We elect the president every four years (unlike France, where the term used to be seven and is now five), and we now devote a year to the primary process. It’s actually more like two years, if you count the exploratory phase of campaigning and fundraising. So in a sense the U.S. spends at least a quarter of each presidential term actively discussing and debating who the next president will be. (It’s even worse for members of the House of Representatives, who have to start running for re-election even before they’ve unpacked their offices).

Other countries are not nearly so foolish. Parliamentary systems like Great Britain specify that general elections have to be held on regular intervals (i.e., every five years or so) though snap elections aren’t unusual. But I can’t think of any country that spends a year or more actually running the campaign. In Canada, for example, the Elections Act mandates that the minimum length of a campaign be 36 days, and the longest campaign ever recorded (in 1926), was only seventy-four days. In Australia, elections generally last about two months. Apart from the United States, the longest election period I could find in a brief search was Germany, at about 114 days for unscheduled elections. Needless to say, this period is still far shorter than the U.S. norm.

Our stupefyingly long election process is good for political journalists, I guess, and one could argue that it helps us weed out candidates who are obviously unqualified (not a proposition I’d be eager to defend, by the way). But overall, it seems to me that the combination of a short presidential term and a long electoral campaign creates all sorts of potential difficulties, including a number of foreign policy problems.

* How Ayn Rand Became The New Right’s Version Of Marx George Monbiot The Guardian

It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.

…Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.

Ignoring Rand’s evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading “Who is John Galt?” and “Rand was right”. Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has “distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose”. She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.

6. Media Roundup

Mar-30-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Analysis of movie trailers, satire of movies, examples of bad writing, a factlet on emerging tech, and a hilarious film on piracy and its costs: there probably is a more catchy title for all that than “media roundup”, and if you think of it pass it on and we’ll use it next time. The movie trailers, all 13 of them, are a fascinating and insightful example of the sort of writing that wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago.

* The Movie Trailer Revolution Michael Barthel Salon

It can be hard to notice how much has changed since 1997 just by watching a contemporary blockbuster like “Transformers” or “Twilight.” But the shifts have been massive, and significant. The emergence of digital technology has given audiences more entertainment options than ever, while simultaneously opening up new ways for fans to find each other and discuss pieces of pop culture. As the Web provides ever-more information at an ever-quicker pace, new tools for making movies have allowed filmmakers to cut up and recombine images and sound at the furious pace our entertainment consumption now seems to require. And all of these changes are visible in a single piece of film marketing: the movie trailer.

* Modern Hunger Games Tom the Dancing Bug Toon BoingBoing

* The 2011 Lyttle Lytton Contest

The red hot sun rose in the cold blue sky.(Judy Dean)

To me this was the top of the heap… Intentionally writing a sentence that seems unintentionally bad is hard; writing one that suggests an author going for hyperbole and accidentally winding up with woeful understatement is masterful. Thus, we have our winner.

Runners-up: ‘Pfft’ — he knew the silent but deadly whisper of a silenced SIG SG 550 rifle with a 650mm barrel and a 254mm rifling twisting rate. (Chloe W.)

* What’s the Fastest-Adopted Gadget of the Last 50 Years? The Atlantic

When we think about the great consumer electronics technologies of our time, the cellular phone probably springs to mind. If we go farther back, perhaps we’d pick the color television or the digital camera. But none of those products were adopted as fast by the American people as the boom box. (<=select text to see the gadget–after you’ve thought about it!)

* Copyright Math TED talk via Boing Boing

Rob Reid examines the math behind the claims made by the copyright lobby and explains the mindbending awesomeness of the sums used to justify SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and the like.

8. Books

Mar-23-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Books everywhere… pouring down the side of a building, in a desk, available pre-selected from Needless Markups, or for free online. Get reading….

* 5,000 Books Pour Out of a Building in Spain My Modern Metropolis (Thanks Gord)

* Repurposing Gives Literal Meaning To Library Information Desk (Thanks Diana)

Information, repurposed. Stacked with irony and precision, dusty old books leave their lonely shelf to serve a new purpose as the ‘library information desk.’

* Hideous “Bespoke Library” With Pre-Selected Books: $125,000 Boing Boing

For people who have more money than time, taste, or intelligence: The $125,000 “bespoke library” from the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book….As the Minnesotastan of Tai-wiki-widbee says, “Deck chairs in a library? A font on the floor? That couch? Could any decor be less appealing?”

* Kindle Free Book Finding Guide

Here are your best options to find NEW kindle free books -

The Free Kindle Books section of this blog has new posts almost every day covering the latest new kindle free books. We pick out the best new kindle free books and include information on genre, page length, rating, and more.
You can sign up for our Free Kindle Books newsletter to get kindle free book updates via email.
Amazon has a Top 100 Kindle Free Books List. The right side of the screen shows the bestselling kindle free books. A good way to see what’s popular.
Newest Free Kindle Books (unfiltered) that are rated 4 stars and above. These are the books authors are making free for short durations.
Limited Time Kindle Free Books – This is Amazon’s listing of currently available new kindle free books. Think of this as Amazon’s ‘favorite kindle free book list’.
At the official Kindle forum, Happy Reader Joyce starts a post every day about free kindle books for that day. People share the good kindle free books they find each day in that day’s thread.

Feb. 17th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 7

Feb-17-2012 | Comments (0)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: We start with two more perspectives on Syria. Robert Fisk begs to differ with the prevailing view that Assad is on the verge of falling, and has some powerful backing for his perspectives, as always. Meanwhile Stephen Zunes puts the Russian and Chinese vetoes of the anti-Assad UN resolution into a much-needed historical context. We have a list of the 100 best SFF novels, and a look at green energy in the third world, and the roles it can fill there.

* From Washington This Looks Like Syria’s ‘Benghazi Moment’. But Not From Here Robert Fisk The Independent

But look east, and what does Bashar see? Loyal Iran standing with him. Loyal Iraq – Iran’s new best friend in the Arab world – refusing to impose sanctions. And to the west, loyal little Lebanon refusing to impose sanctions. Thus from the border of Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, Assad has a straight line of alliances which should prevent, at least, his economic collapse.

The trouble is that the West has been so deluged with stories and lectures and think-tank nonsense about the ghastly Iran and the unfaithful Iraq and the vicious Syria and the frightened Lebanon that it is almost impossible to snap off these delusional pictures and realise that Assad is not alone. That is not to praise Assad or to support his continuation. But it’s real.

* Putting the UN Veto in Perspective NationofChange

What is striking is the response from US officials and pundits so roundly condemning the use of the veto by these two permanent members of the Security Council to protect the Syrian regime from accountability for its savage repression against its own citizens.

A little perspective is required here: Since 1970, China has used its veto power eight times, and Russia (and the former Soviet Union) has used its veto power 13 times. However, the United States has used its veto power 83 times, primarily in defense of allies accused of violating international humanitarian law. Forty-two of these US vetoes were to protect Israel from criticism for illegal activities, including suspected war crimes. To this day, Israel occupies and colonizes a large swath of southwestern Syria in violation of a series of UN Security Council resolutions, which the United States has successfully blocked from enforcing. Yet, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insists that it is the Russians and Chinese who have “neutered” the Security Council in its ability to defend basic human rights.

* The 100 Greatest Science Fiction or Fantasy Novels of All Time This Recording

A good list, though the fun of such things is always where one differs. Your editor’s score: 51/100

* World’s 1.6 Billion Poor Going GreenJuan Cole Informed Comment

Renewable energy is often thought of as an initiative of advanced, sane countries such as Portugal and Germany. But there is another arena where green energy is making an impact– on the lives of the world’s poorest populations, in the global South. For them, it is not a luxury or prudent planning for the future or a dutiful attempt to save the planet from the looming catastrophe of climate change fueled by humans pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Rather, it is a way of solving their present, low-tech energy crisis.

Kevin Bullis explains that many villagers use expensive kerosene for cooking and heating, and to fuel lamps for light. Cell phones have spread rapidly in Africa and Asia (where often there is no grid of copper wires or underground fiber optic cables and so mobile phone towers allow them to leapfrog to a newer technology). But given that many villagers do not have electricity, they have to take their phones to private charging centers and pay an arm and a leg for the recharging.

Both kerosene and the private charging stands can be replaced right now, in the present, with cheaper solar batteries. For light, solar-powered light-emitting diode (LED) panels are much cheaper than light bulbs powered by burning kerosene.

8. Valentine’s Day

Feb-17-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Sure it’s late…but the photos didn’t arrive on time. We open with a powerful and deeply moving comic by Tikkunista favourite, Winston Rowntree. Then a In Focus set of photos, from the ones you’d expect to some you surely don’t. And to round it all off, the history behind the merchandising.

* Secret Admirer Subnormality (poignant toon)

* Valentine’s Day 2012 In Focus (photos)

* Valentine’s Day History.com

While some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death or burial–which probably occurred around A.D. 270–others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St. Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to “Christianize” the pagan celebration of Lupercalia. Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.
To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then strip the goat’s hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city’s bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage.

3. Islam, and Muslims

Feb-10-2012 | Comments (2)

Bird’s Eye: Yes, this is a somewhat mixed set of posts. General statements about a billion people can be. We start with a surprisingly insightful piece from Cracked magazine, looking at misperceptions. Then we look at Islamophobia in Canada, as an example of the absurd demonization Harper is promulgating. Then an interesting pair: Rushdie is blocked from reading in India, as a result of The Satanic Verses imbroglio. Malik’s article quotes the Bradford Council of Mosques’ Shabbir Akhtar who said, at the height of the Rushdie affair, that self-censorship “is a meaningful demand in a world of varied and passionately held convictions. What Rushdie publishes about Islam is not just his business. It is everyone’s – not least every Muslim’s – business.” Akhtar has changed… read his current views on questioning faith from the T.E.S.

* 5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam Cracked (Thanks, Kofi!)

#5. If You’re a Muslim Woman, You Have to Wear the Veil

So for instance, in France they have about 3 million Muslim women. French police decided to figure out how many of them wore burqas and/or niqabs and found the number to be … 367. Not 367,000, but 367, a number so small that from a statistical point of view, it’s barely enough to register as a margin of error. As for the rest of Europe, the numbers are even more disastrous for the burqa business (for instance, Belgium has 500,000 Muslims, a couple dozen wear the burqa).

Yes, there are Middle Eastern countries where the veils are required by law (namely Iran and Saudi Arabia) and combined those countries have less than 5 percent of the world’s Muslims. There are actually more Muslim countries that outright ban the wearing of the veils than there are that require them

* Pep Talk Led To Terrorism SuspicionsCBC News

A Muslim man alleges he’s become a terror suspect simply because of a workplace quip – he says all he did was tell his sales staff to “blow away” the competition at a trade show. Now Saad Allami is seeking $100,000 from the Quebec provincial police force, one of its sergeants and the provincial Justice Department.

Allami says in a Quebec Superior Court filing that he was arrested in January 2011 and accused of being a terrorist because of a pep talk he gave fellow employees. Allami was a sales manager for a telecommunications firm when he sent out a text message to staff urging them to “blow away” the competition at a New York City convention.

* To Name The Unnameable Kenan Malik.

Salman Rushdie had to back out of attending the 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival because of an assassination threat against him. The lack of support for Rushdie shows that the defence of free speech is no longer seen as an irrevocable duty, writes Kenan Malik.

…Rushdie was due to have attended the festival – which is quickly becoming one of the most important global literary events – to give a talk on Midnight’s Children, the film of which is released later this year, and to take part in a discussion on the history of English in India. Rushdie has visited India many times over the past decade and has attended the festival before. This time Muslim activists issued threats. Instead of standing up the bullies, both local and state governments caved in, both exerting pressure on the festival organizers to keep Rushdie away. “I am sure the organizers will respect the sentiments of the local people”, said Ashok Gehlot, the chief minister of Rajasthan, whose capital is Jaipur.

In the end Rushdie cancelled his trip having, he said, received information about a plot to assassinate him, a plot that now appears may have been invented by the Rajasthan police to “persuade” Rushdie not to come. In response, the novelist Hari Kunzru and the writer and poet Amitava Kumar, both speakers at the festival, publicly read passages from The Satanic Verses. Later, two other speakers, Jeet Thayil and Rushir Joshi, did so too. The novel is still banned in India, having been placed on a proscribed list in 1988 by the then-premier Rajiv Gandhi, who, facing a crucial election, crumbled under Islamist pressure. The festival organizers distanced themselves from what they called Kunzru and Kumar’s “unnecessary provocation”, and put pressure on other speakers not to follow suit.

* Ex-Defender Of The Faith Shabbir Akhtar Times Higher Education -

I lived in Malaysia for three years in the kind of uncertainty westerners face only in times of war. The five daily calls to prayer are the only predictable events in the capital city, Kuala Lumpur. The power cuts are frequent, the traffic jams continuous. Islam is the official religion, but materialism is the ruling creed.

Living in a state where Islam was empowered deepened and darkened my idealistic view of my faith and my people. Though born and raised partly in Pakistan, I had a second childhood in northern industrial England. Here I belonged to a powerless minority and a despised religion. Upon arrival at the International Islamic University, I joined the ruling Muslim majority. Before, when I was in the minority, it was easy to play the moral card.

New lecturers must meet the Saudi-Kurdish rector in his opulent rooms on campus. He invites us to settle down into the comfort and security of dogma. It is us against the world; and the world, especially the western hemisphere, is very wicked. Believers, he tells us, having nothing new to learn. Western-style free inquiry is aimless. Besides, what is the point of free inquiry if God has already revealed to us the whole truth?

7. Book Stor(i)es

Feb-10-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Book stores, and stories about books. 21 lovely photos, and a great graphic novel to read. This section will cheer you up!

* The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World Flavorwire

With Amazon slowly taking over the publishing world and bookstores closing left and right, things can sometimes seem a little grim for the brick and mortar booksellers of the world. After all, why would anyone leave the comfort of their couch to buy a book when with just a click of a button, they could have it delivered to their door? Well, here’s why: bookstores so beautiful they’re worth getting out of the house (or the country) to visit whether you need a new hardcover or not. We can’t overestimate the importance of bookstores — they’re community centers, places to browse and discover, and monuments to literature all at once — so we’ve put together a list of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, from Belgium to Japan to Slovakia.

* All The Books In The World… Except One

A wonderful short story by Croatian author/illustrator Darko Macan and Tihomir Celanovic. Wistful and bittersweet.

* Kosovo Public Library Imgur

click to embigify

9. Extreme Sports

Jan-06-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The bird’s eye is closed, as it can’t bear to watch Rollerman. But the urban skiing (edited from a longer film) is well worth looking at, and the Peking Circus is simply unbelievable. Tennis isn’t considered an extreme sport, but the Wallace piece is one of the finest sports pieces I’ve read, and the way Federer plays is pretty extreme. (Comes with many footnotes, for all you Infinite Jest fans who are going through withdrawal.)

* JP Auclair Urban Skiing Video

* Downhill Extreme: Rollerman

Extreme sports at its best: amazing “Rollerman” Jean Yves Blondeau blasting high speed on mountain roads!

* Peking Circus – Juggling On A Unicycle via The Presurfer

Go on, try this at home. Be sure to send us the videos….

* Roger Federer as Religious Experience David Foster Wallace New York Times (2006)

There are three kinds of valid explanation for Federer’s ascendancy. One kind involves mystery and metaphysics and is, I think, closest to the real truth. The others are more technical and make for better journalism.

The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. Good analogues here include Michael Jordan,who could not only jump inhumanly high but actually hang there a beat or two longer than gravity allows, and Muhammad Ali, who really could “float” across the canvas and land two or three jabs in the clock-time required for one. There are probably a half-dozen other examples since 1960. And Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

Dec.23rd, 2011 :: Year 8, Issue 39

Dec-23-2011 | Comments (0)

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No Tikkunista published next week, but we’ll be back in 2012!

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1. Joy to the World, (or at Least to You)

Bird’s Eye: As a gift to all readers, we’ll start with fun this week: a marvellous neo-Victorian card from the erstwhile Python, a gloriously performed neo-acapella song (accompanied by margarine containers), a wonderfully powerful story about looking for art in post-Taliban Afghanistan, and a music maker for you, because creativity has to be participatory. Enjoy!

* The Christmas Card Terry Gilliam YouTube

* Call Your Girlfriend Erato YouTube

* A Time of Hope Andrew Solomon15 minute audio

A writer travels to Afghanistan in search of art.

* Play: Hours Of Music Making

Click, then click again. etc.

6. How Things Work

Dec-16-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: We’ve often cited Chomsky for his political insights, but never for his linguistic ones. We redress that in a fascinating and wide-ranging interview he recently did with Discover magazine. Steven Pinker looks at euphemism, and finds out why “Do you want to come up and see my etchings?” is useful. David Foster Wallace muses about the meaning of life, and the Calgary Philharmonic sings tweeted hints on how to stay warm.

* Interview: The Radical Linguist Noam Chomsky Discover Magazine

Every parent has marveled at the way children develop language. It seems incredible that we still know so little about the process.

We now know that an infant, at birth, has some information about its mother’s language; it can distinguish its mother’s language from some other language when both are spoken by a bilingual woman. There are all kinds of things going on in the environment, what William James called a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Somehow the infant reflexively selects out of that complex environment the data that are language-related. No other organism can do that; a chimpanzee can’t do that. And then very quickly and reflexively the infant proceeds to gain an internal system, which ultimately yields the capacities that we are now using. What’s going on in the [infant’s] brain? What elements of the human genome are contributing to this process? How did these things evolve?

What about meaning at a higher level? The classic stories that people retell from generation to generation have a number of recurring themes. Could this repetition indicate something about innate human language?

In one of the standard fairy tales, the handsome prince is turned into a frog by the wicked witch, and finally the beautiful princess comes around and kisses the frog, and he’s the prince again. Well, every child knows that the frog is actually the prince, but how do they know it? He’s a frog by every physical characteristic. What makes him the prince? It turns out there is a principle: We identify persons and animals and other living creatures by a property that’s called psychic continuity. We interpret them as having some kind of a mind or a soul or something internal that persists independent of their physical properties. Scientists don’t believe that, but every child does, and every human knows how to interpret the world that way.

* Language as a Window into Human Nature Steven Pinker RSA Animate -YouTube

Editor’s summary: All relationships (dominance, mutuality, reciprocal) are maintained by individual knowledge and threatened by mutual knowledge. Euphemisms by ambiguity are non-threatening to relationship type. Lovely ‘toons, too

* David Foster Wallace on Life and Work Wall Street Journal (Thanks Puneet)

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

* Tweeted Tips for Staying Warm as Sung by the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra [Video]

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