John Hawks has a post about a portion of a hominid skull found in Mongolia. The site is named Salkhit. He also reminds us of the Neandertal site found at the same latitude to the west in Siberia, although the bone fragments discovered do not seem to have been identified as Neandertal (yet.)
This will be interesting as it unfolds.
Yesterday i dropped by to beg some more copies of White Witch from Damien. For some freaky reason, my copies keep mysteriously disappearing, even though it’s obvious that no one could possibly snag them. “You’re the One” popped up on my iPod and i missed the rest of the material. When i helped set up the White Witch website many years ago, i used to mock Damien’s sincere love of the band, but now i’m hooked. After transcribing several interviews and editing Damien’s gushing love, I became all too fond of them as well. It wasn’t just about the music, but their mad dream of being space rockers in southern Florida in the ’70s.
It couldn’t just be White Witch though. I wound up hassling him into tracking down songs that was on a beloved compilation that he made in the early ’90s. There is something impure and insane about that particular collection of songs. It’s the mixtape on which i discovered the Television Personalities and Magazine, but i have all of that stuff. It’s name was Meatshed incidentally. In our circle of friends, it developed a such a reputation that it became a yardstick to compare all other mixtapes to, a milestone in compilations. As with any other great mixtape, it wasn’t just about song choice, but the order in which it flowed.
I have no idea how most of it came together anymore though. I doubt whether Damien remembers either, aside from a long lost evangelical preacher segueing seamlessly into the strangled gasp that starts the Creepers’ “Old Man’s Treat.”
Now Diamanda Galas’ “You Must Be Certain of the Devil” is rattling around in my head. …which wasn’t on Meatshed. “Malediction” was on Side A, but the “You Must Be Certain of the Devil” holds up better in its absurdity.
Yeah… lemme think some more. This nostalgia is a good thing.
It turns out that Sinbad supports Obama. Oops again for Hillary.
He remembers that trip to Bosnia that he made with her and Sheryl Crow. He has a somewhat different recollection on the trip.
Clinton, during a late December campaign appearance in Iowa, described a hair-raising corkscrew landing in war-torn Bosnia, a trip she took with her then-teenage daughter, Chelsea. “They said there might be sniper fire,” Clinton said.
Threat of bullets? Sinbad doesn’t remember that, either.
“I never felt that I was in a dangerous position. I never felt being in a sense of peril, or ‘Oh, God, I hope I’m going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of his tank.’”
In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said, “We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady.”
Say what? As Sinbad put it: “What kind of president would say, ‘Hey, man, I can’t go ’cause I might get shot so I’m going to send my wife…oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.’”
A Clinton surrogate replied that even Sinbad has been to Bosnia, and Obama has not. Whatever, man. The fact remains that Clinton is exaggerating her accomplishments.
And to continue that little tangent we have been on… Obama’s former advisor Samantha Power has reported from Bosnia. Clinton’s advisor Andrew Shapiro probably has not.
There is a bit of a controversy surrounding the discovery and announcement of those skeletons found on Palau. The locals were completely cut out of the discovery, and when the National Geographic Society came into the picture, it seems that the movie documentary was a higher priority than a scholarly paper describing the bones.
Memories of the shenanigans of Teuku Jacob definitely play a factor in this, as much as any eagerness to land sponsorship.
ReadySteadyBook doesn’t care for James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Knowing Wood’s prejudices, i doubt if i would either (although i plan to read it sooner or later.) The post nails something about this book that describes the problem with Wood in its entirety:
It seems to me that asking how fiction works is a very dull question indeed next to the existential one that really matters: why fiction is.
He’s damned right it is.
So why did Wood write about how instead?
… if not utterly meaningless. Why not just draw the titles from slips of paper out of a hat?
I would have missed that bullshit decision on the so-called 2008 Tournament of Books on The Morning News if Three Percent had not mentioned how baffled it is at the decision. I’m not surprised. Not one bit.
A couple of years ago, i learned that certain high profile litbloggers and self-proclaimed critics have no business writing about other people’s books. When i trudged away from being primarily a music blogger to doing whatever the hell this blog is now, i eagerly read all of the “greats.” After awhile, i caught on that most of these litbloggers were not blogging for the love of reading at all. Quite a few of them were just a bunch of writers who found a cheap promotional tool to leverage their way into the inner circle of publishing and paying writing gigs.
So Vendela Vida, the co-editor of The Believer and wife of Dave Eggers, with a book that the judge admits that she will never read again, wins over a book that most people who have been reading a large amount of contemporary fiction in translation agree is an exceptional work by an exceptional writer.
I’m not surprised at all.
Hopefully this “very discriminating reader” who served as a judge in this round will not sully her beautiful mind on Nazi Literature in the Americas. The National Book Critics Circle is bound to keep her engaged with their wonderful, unique and scrupulous selections.By the way, unlike Bill, i definitely don’t hate McSweeney’s and used to subscribe to The Believer. (I still would if i could afford it.) Vida is probably a damned fine author. I just have the suspicion that this particular book by Bolano is better.
Samantha Power: former Obama advisor, victim of Senator Clinton’s puffed-up umbrage-mongering, Pulitzer winner, and Genocide Apologist?
Badger’s earlier post raised my eyebrows. His question, “[Power]‘s essentially an apologist for American involvement in genocides?”, was in my mouth almost immediately, and I resolved to look more deeply into the issue. I’m no huge Power partisan…part of my interest involves her book, skimmed and unmarked, and matters related to money- and time-waste. But fair is fair…
SO I read Herman’s essays, then printed them and read them again. They read like hit-pieces, plain and simple, and I was fully expecting to craft a scornful and flippant response, but on my third and fourth readthroughs, I’ve moderated that assessment. They are misleading, sloppily/insufficiently footnoted, question-begging, and cheaply rhetorical, but, no, Herman’s essays are not hit-pieces. They are the works of a (no doubt well-intentioned) True Believer.
The pieces in question were written in 2004 and 2007. The latter is longer, and deals with Richard Holbrooke, Sarah Sewell, and Samantha Power. It repeats, often word-for-word, the bulk of the 2004 piece, and the thrust of the argument as it relates to Power is the same. Herman’s position is that the United States, as violent imperialist power par excellance, has “carried out or supported” more genocides than any other state “over the past half century”, and that the establishment–the government, media, intellectuals, and “allies” of those groups–is engaged in a systematic, propagandic process of diversion and misdirection. The charge, to simplify slightly, is one of hypocrisy.
Herman uses the terms “worthy” and “unworthy” to distinguish between…well, worthy and unworthy genocides:
“Worthy genocides are those mass killings carried out by bad people, notably U.S. enemies and targets, and they receive great attention and elicit much passion; the unworthy ones are carried out by the United States or one of its client states, and they receive little attention or indignation and are not labelled genocides, even when the scale of killings greatly exceeds those so designated, obviously based on political utility.”
Herman has rigged the game here, subtly ignoring the distinction in law between mass killings, war, and genocide to make the larger (and valid) point that the U.S.’s responsibility, whether direct or indirect, for violence all over the world is not addressed in the “mainstream” with any honesty or intellectual seriousness. It is in this elision, though, that his case against Power crumbles. On Herman’s playing field, he merely has to show that Power doesn’t call American violence genocide to “prove” that these instances of violence are considered “unworthy” genocides: “In short, Samantha Power can identify with Holbrooke because they both follow the U.S. party line on worhty and unworthy genocides. As the United Sates was directly involved in the great Vietnam genocide, as its leaders were part of the ‘joint criminal enterprise’ with Indonesia in East Timor, and as they were mainly responsible for the ‘sanctions of mass destruction’ and those 500,000 dead children whose deaths were ‘worth it’ for Albright, Samantha Power evades these cases.”
See? It is that simple. Call something a genocide, show that person x does not call it a genocide, and assert that person x is in the apologia business. WHETHER things like Vietnam, Cambodia 1969-75, Iraq 1991-2003, Indonesia, West Papua, East Timor, Guatemala, Israel, Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa are genocides as Power (and the international community) uses the term doesn’t matter. The elision has occured, and the argument construction phase is over.
So, what is Power’s book about? How DOES she use the term? What was her scope?
Power’s book, A Problem From Hell, is a study of America’s responses to selected genocides and is broadly critical of the U.S. throughout. She details the genocides she will cover: In addition to “…Bosnian serbs’ eradication of non-serbs, I examined the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians, the Nazi Holocaust, Pol Pot’s terror in Cambodia, Saddam Hussein’s destruction of Kurds in northern Iraq, and the Rwandan Hutus’ systematic extermination of the Tutsi minority (preface, xv).” Herman would argue that this list betrays her bias, that it can be judged according to what it does not include. This is certainly a valid concern, but it is a tricky one. The book is the book, after all. It makes no claim that it is exhaustive. One may well accuse Herman, in this vein, of downplaying the Holocaust since he doesn’t discuss it, just as one may well accuse me of ignoring any number of American atrocities in this post… Are we all apologists?
Power devotes a significant portion of her book to describing the origin of the concept (and the word) genocide itself. She discusses the 1948 genocide convention and, on pg. 57, gives its definition of the term:
“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
For a party to be found guilty of perpetrating…genocide, it had to (1) carry out one of the aforementioned acts, (2) with the intent to destroy all or part of (3) on of the groups protected…If the perpetrator did not target a national, ethnic, or religious group as such, then killings would constitute mass homicide, not genocide.”
That last sentence marks the ghoulish distinction that concerns us. Power’s book operates under a constraint, a constraint that Herman is demonstrably not interested in. There is nothing wrong with this prima facie, but the two positions, Herman’s and Power’s, are incommensurable.
And Power is quite critical of the U.S., laying bare the often shameful, craven, and enervated waffling of our government officials (pgs. 65-70). She writes, “Again, the Senate subcommittee had sought to soothe the senators’ fears by attaching an explicit, legal ‘understanding’ that shielded the southern states by stating clearly, ‘Genocide does not apply tp lynchings, race riots, or any form of segregation.’ The critics did not heed this (embarrassing) recommendation (pg. 68).” Where Power writes “embarrassing”, I would write “inhuman, hypocritical, and morally bankrupt”, but I would not accuse her of racism. I could only accuse her of lack of zeal, and this, in the end, is what Herman does as well (whether he knows it or not).
This paragraph from Power’s conclusion may help to illustrate the point:
“Indeed, on occasion the United States directly or indirectly aided those committing genocide. It orchestrated the vote in the UN Credentials Committee to favor the Khmer Rouge. It sided with and supplied U.S. agricultural and manufacturing credits to Iraq while Saddam Hussein was attempting to wipe out the country’s Kurds. Along with its European allies, it maintained an arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims even after it was clear that the arms ban prevented the Muslims from defending themselves. It used its clout on the UN Security Council to mandate the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Rwanda and block efforts to redeploy there. To the people of Bosnia and Rwanda, the United States and its Security Council allies held out the promise of protection–a promise that they were not prepared to keep (pg. 504).”
The words of an apologist? Herman accuses the U.S. of aiding genocidal regimes. Power accuses the U.S. of aiding genocidal regimes. Herman notes the shameful 40 year lag between the genocide convention’s treaty and our (provisional) ratification of the same. Power details the 40 year lag between the genocide convention’s treaty and our (porvisional) ratification of the same. Herman accuses the U.S. of perpetrating genocide. Power does not. There is the difference. Lack of zeal.
There are a few minor things I’ll note in closing: He cites her infrequently and does not cite her where a citation would be appropriate (cf. his reference to her article in the New Republic). The very first footnote is misleading. He places the “[1]” after this phrase: “…for their denunciations of some genocides and ‘problems from hell’ while actually facilitating, ignoring, or apologizing for others.” I thought I had hit the jackpot, but the footnote merely noted that Power had indeed won the Pulitzer. This is not merely a stylistic/editorial tic, because other footnotes, for example number 4, are placed after the part of the sentence that they actually refer to…
Much of the 2007 essay proceeds by way of innuendo. He has beefs with Holbrooke and Sewell (which I will not examine), and sort of lumps Power in with them with no explanation and (presumably) no proof.
He uses unattributed quotes, most notably toward the end of the 13th paragraph of his 2007 essay, in which he disputes a portion of Power’s analysis of the violence in Kosovo.
He makes large assumptions and draws tenuous equivalences throughout both pieces, but this gripe can be explained, at least in part, by the central elision detailed above.
I encourage anyone interested to read the pieces in question and to read Power’s book. The question of whether or not Sen. Obama, a potential President of this country, has a genocide apologist close to him is a (to say the least) germane one. I’ve put my own fears to rest by digging in the sources. So can you.
It seems that there have been small human fossils described originating on the island of Palau that have some characteristics of both Homo sapiens and Homo floresiensis. The skeletons date between 1440 and 2890 years old at one site, and 940 to 1080 at another. The article:
Reporting in this week’s PLoS ONE in a study funded by the National Geographic Society Mission Programs, Lee Berger and colleagues from the University of the Witwatersrand, Rutgers University and Duke University, describe the fossils of small-bodied humans from the Micronesian island of Palau. These people inhabited the island between 1400 and 3000 years ago and share some – although not all – features with the H. floresiensis specimens.
Palau is situated in the Western Caroline Islands and consists of a main island of Babeldaob, with hundreds of smaller rock islands to the south west, colloquially known as the ‘‘rock islands.” These rock islands contain caves and rock shelters, in many of which, fossilized and subfossilized human remains have been found. The specimens described by Berger and colleagues came from two such caves, Ucheliungs and Omedokel, which appear to have been used as burial sites.
In both caves, they found skeletons of individuals who would have been small even relative to other such populations and are approximately the size of H. floresiensis or small members of the genus Australopithecus. These fossils were radiocarbon dated to between 1410 and 2890 years ago. The entrance to Omedokel cave also contained the remains of larger individuals dated to between 940 and 1080 years ago.
These two caves have provided and will continue to provide a wealth of specimens, which will need more intensive study. However, preliminary analysis of more than a dozen individuals including a male who would have weighed around 43 kg and a female of 29 kg, show that these small-bodied people had many craniofacial features considered unique to H. sapiens. These include: a distinct maxillary canine fossa, a clearly delimited mandibular mental trigone (in most specimens), moderate bossing of the frontal and parietal squama, a lateral prominence on the temporal mastoid process, reduced temporal juxtamastoid eminences and an en maison cranial vault profile with the greatest interparietal breadth high on the vault. Thus, these individuals are likely to be from a human population who acquired reduced stature, for some reason.
It is well established that populations living on isolated islands often consist of individuals of smaller stature than their mainland cousins – a phenomenon known as island dwarfism. This is true not just for humans but for many animals including extinct mammoths and elephants from islands off Siberia, California and even in the Mediterranean. Alternatively, the island may have been colonized by a few small individuals, between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago who, through extensive inbreeding, and other environmental drivers, produced a small-bodied population, which continued to inhabit Palau until at least 1400 years ago.
As well as having characteristics of H. sapiens, the Palau fossils also have features seen in H. floresiensis, such as their small bodies and faces, pronounced supraorbital tori, non-projecting chins, relative megadontia, expansion of the occlusal surface of the premolars, rotation of teeth within the maxilla and mandible, and dental agenesis. Berger and colleagues do not infer from these features any direct relationship between the peoples of Palau and Flores; however, these observations do suggest that at least some of the features which have been taken as evidence that the Flores individuals are members of a separate species, may be a common adaptation in humans of reduced stature.
Detailed analysis of the Palau specimens is unlikely to settle arguments over the status of H. floresiensis as there are features of Flores man, such as small brain size, not found in the people of Palau. Nevertheless, they do suggest that at least some of the unusual features seen in Flores are a result of environment rather than ancestral heritage. Above all, the skeletons from Palau should greatly increase our understanding of the process of island dwarfism in human populations and of the ancient colonizations of Oceania.
So this study is proposing there might not be a species of Homo floresiensis at all, but the characteristic features are born of the usual island dwarfism phenomenon.
Might i suggest something very irresponsible though? Could Homo floresiensis have interbred with Homo sapiens ?
I reckon that it makes sense that Spitzer should resign, being a law and order reformer who likes to pay to put his penis in other people, which is illegal. It’s embarrassing to have our elected officials breaking the law at personal whims.
So why is the whorehopping, nappy-wearing, Family Values David Vitter still in office?
Just asking…
According to the WSJ, when the NSA suspects that a terrorist is in a city, the Terrorist Surveillance Program cranks up monitoring and recording every communication coming in and out of that city:
Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city — for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans — the government’s spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.
The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.
TPM Muckerraker explains this so much better, but contemplate those two paragraphs. One person is suspected of connections with something defined as a terrorist group, and millions of people have their communications recorded and stored as a result.
Is there any great leap in logic to admit that the government is recording everything by everyone all of the time? We’ve already seen how ridiculous and vindictive the No Fly lists are for the TSA. What should make us believe that their “suspected terrorists” are any better defined with a net as big as they are casting? The only reason why i can think of why they wouldn’t is because it is cost prohibitive.
Warrants are essentially obsolete for the federal government. With these parameters, they can monitor every action of every person at any time at any whim.