Tonight's music pick: Haunting

Chag Sameach Halloween

Apparently, a Jewish employee of National Jewish Health in Denver, Stephanie Franszczak, has this thing for tonight's holiday.

Shabbat shalom

The farmer who said no

The Nazi sheriff needed a horse and carriage to take the remaining Jews of a small Hungarian village to the train that would take them to their concentration camp. He came to the house of a peasant farmer, a non-Jew, and demanded that the man give up his horse and carriage immediately. The problem for the sheriff, though, is that the peasant loved Jews-- many of his friends were Jews.

So he lied.

He told the sheriff that his horse was injured. The sheriff paused for a minute, and then went on his way, saying he'd be back. The man instructed his children to put bandages on one of the horse's legs just in case the sheriff came back. He never did. The Jews who were left, the ones for whom no horse could be found, were saved. Apparently, the Nazis were in a special rush that day.

I heard this story this afternoon from my friend Eva Brown, above, a holocaust survivor who has survived two bouts of cancer in the past three years. I've known Eva for many years; I've seen her at her strongest and at her weakest. The one constant has been her ability to talk. She could be gasping for air and debilitated by the effects of medication, but she could always talk and tell a story.

She loves hearing stories, as well. She heard this story during one of her many medical appointments, from one of the lab technicians who had come to know her. The lab technician was the daughter of the peasant farmer.

The peasant farmer who saved a few Jews just by saying no.

In praise of deficits

Progressive commentator William Greider makes an argument in The Nation that the need to take on rising and record unemployment justifies the pain of more deficits. I say, maybe so, but how do we make sure that more deficit spending will actually fix the problem of unemployment-- considering it failed to do so the last time?

The deficit hawks are flapping their wings and making a terrible squawk about the government's gusher of red ink. Good grief, a federal deficit of $1.4 trillion! What will become of us?

The gloom chorus includes GOP heavies and right-wing frothers, the editors of the Washington Post and other pinch-penny establishment journals, Blue Dog Democrats and even some of Barack Obama's own advisers. Never mind the bloody mess we're in, they insist. People should hunker down and accept their pain. Suffering is good for the soul.

This nonsense, grounded in ignorance and discredited nineteenth-century bromides, is a recipe for continuing the economy's downward spiral and could prove poisonous for the country. The hawks claim self-righteous rectitude in their warnings, but their real intent is to stymie the very spending programs that can deliver economic recovery and relief to battered citizens. Whining about deficits is a way to halt promising talk about another substantial stimulus package, one that should be focused more concretely on job creation. That will require more deficit financing, for sure; but at a time when unemployment hovers near 10 percent and foreclosures are in hemorrhage, more is needed.

The tyranny of e-mail

A woman complains about how communication between people has become so quick and intrusive: “There is no standard nowadays of elegant letter writing, as there used to be in our time. It is a sort of go as you please development, and the result is atrocious.” What technology is she complaining about? Postcards. Yes, that revolutionary advance at the turn of the 20th century.
In this review of a new book by John Freeman, "The Tyranny of Email", Ben Yagoda, in The New York Times, reminds us how every generation gets its share of technology worth complaining about; but that in all the sophisticated kvetching about the brutalizing effects of email, we shouldn't forget that it has also been a "cleansing agent for prose, inhibiting dull, abstract wordiness."

Books about social problems are often strong in describing the problem but fairly lame when it comes to suggesting solutions. The opposite is true of “The Tyranny of E-Mail.”While the diagnosis feels overblown, the prescription generally makes excellent sense. Among other things, Freeman advises us to limit how many e-mail messages we send and how often we check our in-box, to keep a written to-do list, to be careful reading and composing e-mail, and not to “debate complex or sensitive matters by e-mail.” A big 10-4 on that one.
Ultimately, e-mail is a social, cultural and literary phenomenon that demands a more nuanced approach than Freeman’s high dudgeon provides. Characteristically, he gives lip service to the medium’s convenience but says nothing about its capacity for creativity and expression. “Each correspondent we have, and each interaction with that correspondent, demands a slightly different register,” he correctly writes, and then complains that the requirement is “exhausting.” But in truth it has meant good things for the cause of writing. Every day, I get a half-dozen or more fine e-mail messages: short, (often) witty, (usually) pointed, (sometimes) thoughtful and always written in that correspondent’s particular register.

Debunking Goldhagen

For many years, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has been celebrated, especially in the Jewish world, for his bestseller, "Hitler's Willing Executioner", which argued for the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust. Now, in a review of Goldhagen's new book, David Rieff takes him to task as a self-promoter who posed as a trailblazer, but who actually contributed little new research to the field.

This pattern began with Hitler’s Willing Executioners, where, when he wasn’t busy laying down the moral law, Goldhagen was largely arguing against the historiographical consensus about the Holocaust (the great Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, drew his particular scorn). If he had an essentialist view of German history from the early nineteenth century to the fall of Berlin in 1945 (that essence, broadly speaking, being what he calls eliminationist anti-Semitism), Goldhagen felt equally confident in his ability to discern and lavishly praise the moral regeneration of the post-Nazi German state and society.
The problem, whether when he was doling out praise or blame, as the historian of Nazism Christopher Browning (Goldhagen’s bête noire in Hitler’s Willing Executioners) pointed out more than a decade ago, is that Goldhagen has shown a tendency in his work to claim to be blazing new trails in understanding when, in reality, his own views are not so far as he imagines from the conventional wisdom he so excoriates and about which he claims to be writing to correct and reform.
Despite what Goldhagen claimed, few historians before him had denied that “ordinary Germans” participated willingly in the murder of European Jewry. Nor did the scholars who came before him believe that those ordinary Germans killed out of fear of reprisal. In other words, the concept of Hitler’s willing executioners was the consensus view of historians long before Goldhagen turned his Harvard dissertation into a global best seller.

Last words

How often do we knowingly say last words to someone? A great conversation with a cab driver and then...good bye forever. A stranger we connect with and then...good bye forever. It could be a boss or a colleague on a last day. Or someone we don't care for and never want to see again. Or someone we love but know we can't see again. The other day, a gardener who worked at my old house said two words to me. In three years, we never said a word to each other, just friendly waves. Knowing he'd never see me again because we were moving, he looked at me from far and just said, "thank you." There was nothing else to say. I waved back, knowing I'd probably never see him again.

Who's afraid of the avant garde?

Why do people find it so much easier to "get" modern art than they do experimental music? Philip Ball in Prospect reviews a book on the subject by David Stubbs, "Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Not Stockhausen".

The writer Joe Queenan caused a minor rumpus in the austere world of contemporary classical music last year by complaining about how painful much of it is. He called Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) “35 minutes of non-stop torture,” Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) like “a cat running up and down the piano” and Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur “funereal caterwauling.” “A hundred years after Schoenberg,” he wrote, “the public still doesn’t like anything after Transfigured Night, and even that is a stretch.” Music, like any art, must be constantly rejuvenated by experiment. But “experimental” music surely only qualifies as such if it includes the possibility of failure. Often the only thing that stands in the way of comprehension is a refusal to adapt on the part of audiences—to realise that it is no good trying to hear all music the way we hear Mozart. We need to find other “listening strategies.” Yet it could benefit all concerned if some experimental music, like much of Stockhausen’s oeuvre and the ambient noises of John Cage’s silent 4’33”, were viewed as “sound art,” a term coined by composer Dan Lander and anticipated by the futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises.” That way, one is not led to expect from these compositions what we expect of actual music. For if music is not acknowledged as a mental process, sound is all that remains.

Tonight's song: For Yarden Fanta, child of Moses

IDF under attack

It's tough enough to fight a war. It's even tougher when you're up against cowardly soldiers not in uniform who hide behind civilians. And things get absurd when after the war, you fear going to certain countries because you might get arrested for war crimes. The IDF has met a new enemy: the foreign courts, emboldened by the Goldstone report. In this article in Haaretz, Shahar Ilan explains how this new development can demoralize the troops and hurt Israel's ability to defend itself.

Operation Cast Lead was a resounding military success. It put a stop to the Qassam rocket fire in the south and we sustained few casualties. Yet even this success does not relieve the commanders of the need to go into battle with a lawyer in tow.

There is no way to wage combat in Gaza without harming the civilian population, and it is obvious that the IDF did much to avoid this. We are essentially telling our commanders: Your war is never over, and even if your life was saved, your career is in danger. No deed geared toward Israel's defense will go unpunished.

IDF officers and their charges are not the only ones whose faces we are spitting in by entertaining the very idea of establishing a commission of inquiry. What message are we sending to the residents of the south? That we accept the claim that firing thousands of Qassam rockets on their heads is not a war crime, but our operation is?

One needs to be blind not to recognize the fact that the world is judging us by a double standard. It does not change the fact that the world is stronger, and sometimes we need to put our heads down and play their game.

But there also comes a time when we need to say "enough is enough." If the officers who led Operation Cast Lead end up paying for it with their careers, or even if they do not pay but their appearances before a commission of inquiry become nightmarish, this will be the real crime.

Don’t call me an anti-semite, I'm a comedian!

Insult the Jews, incite Jew-hatred and then, bingo, just say you were joking! The French courts didn't find this French comic too funny, but you can check out this news report from Haaretz and decide for yourself.

A French court on Tuesday fined a right-wing comedian 10,000 euros for "public anti-Semitic insults" after he invited Robert Faurisson, an academic and Holocaust denier, on stage during a comedy show to receive an "award" from an actor dressed as a Jewish deportee.
The Paris court told Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, a 43-year-old French stand-up comic, to pay a further 10,000 in damages and legal fees to organizations that sued him, French news agency AFP reported.
Dieudonne told the court that the show had been intended as a "comedy bomb attack" but defended his right to free expression. Anti-racism and Jewish groups welcomed the verdict, AFP reported.

Before we push the button

Yeah, the shooting this morning at the North Hollywood synagogue was terrible news. It looks like a hate crime. I wish it hadn't happened. I wish those hate crimes would never happen. Ever.
But before we get all hysterical and try to turn this into a "disturbing new trend", let's keep a few biases in mind.
First, the media. Reporters love trends. It makes their work look more important. Not all, but many of them like to cobble together similar events to convey the impression of a "trend". Sometimes they're accurate; more often than not, it's hype.
Then there are the fundraisers. They live for the crisis. You can bet that the professional letter writers at the ADL and other similar organizations are now cranking out the "We can't be silent any longer!" appeals. It gets our juices flowing. It plays to our fears. It raises a lot of money.
So yes, let's hate this terrible hate crime. Let's be vigilant. Let's try to prevent it from happening again.
But let's also remember that every day, there are millions of hate crime opportunities in this country that never happen. And that despite any alarmist talk you may hear, America in 2009 is not Berlin in 1936 or even Casablanca in 1967.
That's why I was happy to see Federation president John Fishel's statement this morning: "There's a fine line between being alert and prepared, but not giving in to excessive anxiety and panic."  
Alarmism is a sign of weakness, and in this country, thank God, Jews are anything but weak.

Where's Obama's 13 million?

All organizations love to have great email lists. On his way to winning the presidency, Barack Obama corralled 13 million names on his list. The idea was that these supporters were supposed to continue mobilizing to help the President once he got into the White House. Alas, as this piece in The New Republic reports, they have been unusually quiet. It seems that the thrill and drama of conquest was more seductive than the drudgery of governing.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The reason was Organizing for America. Last year, after winning the presidency, Obama decided to keep intact the backbone of his stunningly efficient, innovative campaign. Previous presidents had outsourced their activism to interest groups; Obama was going to create his own. OFA was supposed to be a new kind of permanent campaign: a grassroots network wielding some 13 million email addresses to mobilize former volunteers on behalf of the administration's agenda (and keep them engaged for 2012). "We've never had a political leader who has continued their organizing while in office like this at this scale," Tom Matzzie, former Washington director of MoveOn, told NPR in January.As right-wing protesters dominated the news this summer, it would have seemed the perfect opportunity for Obama's much-touted organizers to drown out the conservatives with some coordinated agitation of their own. But they barely made a ripple. Where were they? And how could such a formidable grassroots operation--having just put Obama in office--fall quiet so quickly?

Shooting at synagogue

A gunman approached a North Hollywood synagogue this morning and shot two people before fleeing, according to police, who are investigating the attack as a hate crime.
The shooting occurred at 6:20 a.m. at the Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic synagogue in the 12000 block of Sylvan Street.
Two men about 30 years old were each shot in the lower torso and were taken to a nearby hospital in stable condition, according to an LAPD spokesperson. The LAPD described them as Jewish.

Read the full story in the Los Angeles Times.

Child of Moses

After 2,000 years of being promised the Promised Land, in the early 1980s Ethiopian Jews finally began their holy journey. Yarden Fanta was an 11-year-old girl at the time. Now a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, she was in LA last week and told me her story, which I wrote about in my column this week in The Jewish Journal.

A thousand Jews were gathered for the Passover seder. There were no tables or chairs or haggadot. The matzot were handmade. No one had gone shopping at the local markets, since they had grown all the food themselves. The plates were brand new; each family had broken their old ones in a wild ceremony and made new ones by hand, as they did every year.
The village had one rabbi, whose name was Kess Edene. Before the seder, he led all the Jews of the village, who were dressed in white for the occasion, up a small hill to make special prayers in their language of Amharic.
When everyone sat down for their seder meal, the rabbi got up and told the people the same story he told them every year, based on this idea: Our father Moses didn’t make it all the way to Jerusalem, but one day, we will.
In fact, for 20 centuries, the ancestors of these Ethiopian Jews heard the same message: Moses didn’t make it, but we will.

Art by iphone

Tonight's video pick

A commercial for what?

Ideological street fight

In this analysis in Forbes, Dan Gerstein calls Harry Reid's decision to opt for a public option in the Senate health care bill the beginning of a "clean ideological street fight over the role of government." Well, at least one thing is now clear.

Monday's big news that Harry Reid was opting for the public option in the Senate health care bill provided one of those rare clarifying moments in American politics that actually exceeded the hype it generated. In one fell (and potentially felling) swoop, the soft-spoken Senate Majority Leader gave Democrats sole ownership over the riskiest experiment in social policy since the New Deal, gave the kiss of death to Obama's still-born hope of a new post-partisan era and, most significantly, cemented the reactionary battle lines that will likely shape our national elections for years to come.

"Tell me your premises"

I wish Ayn Rand were alive today, if only so we can see how her act and philosophy would fare under the brutal glare of the blogosphere. Would the queen of self-absorption and the "Evil Knievel of leaping to conclusions" have the same-- or more-- appeal? Love her or hate her, this woman knew how to make her presence, and ideas, felt. In this piece in New York magazine, Sam Anderson examines the woman who "never got into an argument she couldn't win, except, perhaps, with herself."

Whenever Ayn Rand met someone new—an acolyte who’d traveled cross-country to study at her feet, an editor hoping to publish her next novel—she would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers: “Tell me your premises.” Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is A, and so forth—the whole Objectivist catechism. And once you conceded any part of that basic platform, the game was pretty much over. She’d start piecing together her rationalist Tinkertoys until the mighty Randian edifice towered over you: a rigidly logical Art Deco skyscraper, 30 or 40 feet tall, with little plastic industrialists peeking out the windows—a shining monument to the glories of individualism, the virtues of selfishness, and the deep morality of laissez-faire capitalism. Grant Ayn Rand a premise and you’d leave with a lifestyle.

I did it. I got a dog. Kids wore me down.

Now why is he not eating? What is he supposed to do all day until the kids get home? Anyhow, he's a rescue dog. Name's Hank. He's a mutt. Woman who got him for us calls it a "schnoodle"-- mix between schnauzer and poodle. Don't ask me more-- this is the first dog I've ever had. Pets were not a big thing in Morocco. If he does anything interesting, I'll let you know.

A wing and a prayer

Where's OUR bonus?

Goldman Sachs, the infamous finance house that our tax dollars bailed out, has put aside $16 billion... for executive bonuses. Jo Nocera, business analyst at The New York Times, tries to explain why we won't be getting any of that bonus money.

But of course those weren’t the numbers the media and the public had focused on in the wake of Goldman’s earnings. Instead, people were fixated on the $5.3 billion the firm had set aside for its executives’ year-end bonuses. Added to first and second quarter set-asides of $4.6 billion and $6.6 billion, the firm had put aside $16 billion so far this year for employee bonuses. Nearly 50 percent of the firm’s revenue was going toward compensation. And there was still one more quarter to go!

Was it fair, commentators kept asking, that barely a year after the taxpayers had essentially saved the financial system, this firm that took government capital should now be paying multimillion-dollar bonuses? Was it right? Which, not surprisingly, is what Fortune’s managing editor, Andrew Serwer, asked Mr. Blankfein within minutes of taking the stage.

In private, Goldman executives are scornful of the sentiment behind this question. Their view, in essence, is that they should be applauded for being able to pay such big bonuses, because it means their business is successful. People who want them to pay less, they believe, want them to fail.

Tonight's video pick

Who are the funniest Jews?

We all love lists, maybe because we can so easily argue about them. Well, here's a list of the 15 Top Living Jewish Comedians, compiled by Jeremy Elias for Beliefnet.com. Top of the list is Mel Brooks ("Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when I fall into an open sewer and die.") and last is Jeffrey Ross (original name, Lifschulz). Most of the usual suspects are there (but not Jacky Mason!). On my list, I would have included Gad Elmaleh from Paris and, of course, Marc Shiff from Pico-Robertson.

Eggs in wrong basket?

When people look back on the Obama presidency, I think one thing that will be glaring is that he spent his first year putting his domestic eggs in the wrong basket. Here, even liberal icon Robert Reich takes Obama to task for getting his priorities wrong.

Obama's focus on health care when the economy is still so fragile and unemployment moving toward double digits could make it appear that the administration has its priorities confused. While affordable health care is important to Americans, making a living is more immediately urgent. Yet the administration's efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent. It's hard for most people to understand that unemployment would be worse were it not for the stimulus package; the much-flaunted new "green jobs" have not appeared yet, nor are they likely to for years. The White House has had equal difficulty explaining to Main Street why it would be far worse off today had Wall Street's biggest banks not been bailed out. Almost nothing has trickled down. Small businesses still can't get loans.

When justice fails

Sloppiness and neglect by supposedly interested parties led to thousands of sentencing errors in the Maryland justice system. In this piece in Slate, the writer explains how the scandal was uncovered by an academic doing research for a Ph.D in economics.

With the stakes so high—months and years of freedom gained or lost—how could Maryland's Sentencing Policy Commission have been so sloppy? For academic research—a matter trivial by comparison—it's common to have data entered independently by at least two typists, whose output is then cross-checked for accuracy. Yet it turns out that complacent bureaucrats weren't to blame for the sentencing mistakes. The work sheet had to be filled out by the state attorney prosecuting the case, with the final form signed and approved by the defense attorney (who, if he was doing his job properly, would have done the work sheet calculations independently). The commission had, by design, handed off the task of work sheet completion to parties that it assumed would have every incentive to get the numbers right, but it apparently never accounted for widespread incompetence in Maryland's legal profession.

The Torah and illicit sex

Jay Michaelson muses in Jewcy on sexuality and religion, primarily Judaism, and is upset that a sex scandal took down one of his favorite liberals, Elliot Spitzer. He's wise enough not to offer too many answers, but he does lay down some markers for a juicy debate.

The fact is that prostitution is a Christian, not a Jewish, sin. Look for the prohibition in the Torah and you won't find it. On the contrary, you'll learn of Judah visiting a prostitute -- without condemnation -- as well as of concubines and polygamy. (Cultic harlotry is banned by Deuteronomy 23:18-19, but not secular prostitution.) Even the Talmud is ambiguous; sometimes it appears to condemn prostitution and illicit sex of all kinds, and other times it tells of lusty rabbis visiting prostitutes and otherwise circumventing our expectation of chaste monogamy.

In fact, it was expected that men would have sex outside of marriage. It wasn't exactly celebrated, but it wasn't condemned either. In short, within the gendered context of Jewish law, it's a peccadillo.

Of course, Jewish law is very concerned about adultery. But "adultery" meant sex with another man's wife. As in the ancient British law from which the English term is derived, it was "adultery" in the sense of "adulterating" a man's bloodline -- and the offense was against the other man: abusing his property, confusing his lineage. The concern is about patriarchy, not sex. As usual, sex is problematic not in itself (indeed, you won't find any clear condemnation of heterosexual sex, by itself, in Jewish law) but because of its context.

"Don't bring a knife to a gun fight"

Mark Steyn explains in this piece why the Obama administration isn't tough where toughness counts.

So the troika of Dunn, Emanuel and Axelrod were dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to lay down the law. We all know the lines from "The Untouchables" – "the Chicago way," don't bring a knife to a gunfight – and, given the pay czar's instant contract-gutting of executive compensation and the demonization of the health insurers and much else, it's easy to look on the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can't take the Chicago out of the community organizer.

The trouble is it isn't tough, not where toughness counts. Who are the real "Untouchables" here? In Moscow, it's Putin and his gang, contemptuously mocking U.S. officials even when (as with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) they're still on Russian soil. In Tehran, it's Ahmadinejad and the mullahs openly nuclearizing as ever feebler warnings and woozier deadlines from the Great Powers come and go. Even Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from the Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle.

The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander in chief look like a weenie – like "President Pantywaist," as Britain's Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.

The Chicago way? Don't bring a knife to a gunfight? In Iran, this administration won't bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won't bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won't bring a knife to a machete fight.

Tonight's video pick

Field of Dreams

Imagine. You are the poorest country in South America, and one day, you realize you are in control of 50% to 70% of the world's supply of a mineral that will triple in demand in the next 15 years: lithium, the mineral used in lightweight batteries that power all our digital gizmos and hybrid cars. It's the story of Bolivia and its spectacular Uyuni salt flats, shown below, which Joshua Keating writes about in Foreign Policy.

The power of branding

In praise of condemnation

Sarah Honig, in the Jerusalem Post, writes about an odd correlation: whenever the world condemns Israel, it usually means Israel did something to defend itself; and when the world goes easy on Israel, it usually means Israel is getting attacked.

When rockets were rained on Sderot and environs for nearly a decade, Israelis were obviously faring badly. Yet so long as Israelis were victimized by Arabs, the rest of the world said nothing. Our weakness and our pain seemed to excite no reaction, indeed draw no notice, as if they occurred in a sealed vacuum.

However, as soon as the victims defended themselves, albeit belatedly, a tempest was stirred. The entire world's attention was suddenly riveted on little old us and the condemnations - familiar, strident and ever-hectoring - came, fast and furious as they had during all the decades of Israel's existence and even prior to Jewish independence. Only a show of Israeli deterrence brought Goldstone here. His very interest in us must indicate that we had done something worthy in our self-interest.

Genome reading saves boy's life

A story in the BBC reports on a critically ill Turkish boy whose life was saved when a quick reading of his genome led to a more accurate diagnosis.

The scientists writing in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say they completed the analysis of his blood in just 10 days.

They were able to see that he had a mutation on a gene that coded for a gut disease and tell his doctors.

Clinical tests proved that the boy had the disease and he is now recovering.

Bernstein fires back

Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch and chair for 20 years, wrote a highly publicized op-ed last week that criticized HRW for its unfair obsession with Israel and its neglect of human rights abuses the world over. In their response in The New York Times, the current and past leader of HRW tried to put words in his mouth to confuse him, but he fired right back, as follows:

Jane Olson, current chair of Human Rights Watch and Jonathan Fanton, past chair wrote that they “were saddened to see Robert L. Bernstein argue that Israel should be judged by a different human rights standard than the rest of the world.” This is not what I believe or what I wrote in my op-ed piece.

I believe that Israel should be judged by the highest possible standard and I have never argued anything else. What is more important than what I believe, or what Human Rights Watch believes, is that Israelis themselves believe they should be held to the highest standard.

That is why they have 80 Human Rights organizations challenging their government daily. Does any other country in the Middle East have anything remotely near that? That is why they have a vibrant free press. Does any other country in the Middle East have anything remotely near that? That is why they have a democratically elected government. That is why they have a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political societies, etc etc etc.

I have argued that open societies , while far from perfect, have ways to correct themselves and that is particularly true in the case of Israel. Millions of Arabs, on the other hand, live in societies where there is little respect for or protection of human rights.

Letter from Jerusalem

Tonight's video pick

Is music simply "auditory cheesecake"?

Critic Terry Teachout muses on the mystery of music.

It is possible for trained musicians to talk in fairly specific terms about what makes a piece of music beautiful—to them. I know what it is that I like about, say, Gabriel Fauré's bass lines, or the harmonies in the songs of Jimmy Van Heusen. Alas, I can't tell you why these things tickle my fancy. I can only apply Eddie Condon's empirical test of musical quality: "As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?" And Condon's Law is as circular as Langer's definition of music: It sounds terrific, but in the end it gets you nowhere.

Enter the guys in the white coats, and it turns out that they don't agree, either. Daniel J. Levitin, a rock musician and record producer turned neuroscientist, has argued in "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" (Dutton) that current research into the psychology of musical perception and cognition proves that the human brain is biologically hardwired to find meaning in music. But many evolutionary psychologists believe no less firmly that music is nothing more than a fundamentally meaningless form of what Steven Pinker, writing in "How the Mind Works" (Norton) calls "auditory cheesecake."

I do have a sneaking suspicion that part of the charm of music lies in the fact that we don't know what it means, any more than we can explain the equally mysterious charm of a plotless ballet by George Balanchine or an abstract painting by Piet Mondrian. "We dare to go into the world where there are no names for anything," Balanchine once said to Jerome Robbins.

That's why it is so refreshing to enter into the presence of great art, and why the greatest works of art always contain an element of ambiguity. A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means—and change it as often as you like.

The Gladwell phenomenon

Ian Sample writes about Malcom Gladwell's new book, What the Dog Saw, and explains the secret to his success: the fact that he makes us think.

Gladwell owes his success to the trademark brand of social psychology he honed over a decade at the magazine. His confident, optimistic pieces on the essence of genius, the flaws of multinational corporations and the quirks of human behaviour have been devoured by businessmen in search of a new guru. His skill lies in turning dry academic hunches into compelling tales of everyday life: why we buy this or that; why we place trust in flakey ideas; why we are hopeless at joining the dots between cause and effect. He is the master of pointing out the truths under our noses (even if they aren't always the whole truth).

America's Obama obsession

Historian Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review:

For 30 months the nation has been in the grip of a certain Obama obsession, immune to countervailing facts, unwilling to face reality, and loath to break the spell. But like all trances, the fit is passing, and we the patient are beginning to appreciate how the stupor came upon us, why it lifted, and what its consequences have been.

What's an Andy Warhol?

Richard Dorment, in The New York Review of Books, reviews several new books on Andy Warhol, and explains why Warhol wasn't just an artist, but, in Arthur Danto's words, "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the world of art has produced."

In his entertaining memoir Younger Brother, Younger Son (1997), Colin Clark, a son of the art historian Kenneth Clark, recounts a story from his time working as a production assistant on the film The Prince and the Showgirl. To explain why Marilyn Monroe came across far more vividly on screen than her classically trained costar Laurence Olivier, Clark observed that, in front of the cameras, she knew how to speak a language an actor trained for the stage simply could not understand. To Olivier's fury and frustration, the less the Hollywood goddess appeared to act, the more she lit up the screen. "Some years later," Clark continues,
I experienced a similar situation when I took my father to the studio of the Pop artist Andy Warhol in New York. My father was an art historian of the old school, used to the canvasses of Rembrandt and Titian. He simply could not conceive that Andy's silk-screened Brillo boxes were serious art.
Just as Monroe understood that you don't have to act for the camera in the way the stage-trained Olivier defined acting, so Warhol realized that you don't need to make art for an audience brought up on film and television in the way Kenneth Clark defined art. Actress and artist grasped that in the modern world, presentation counts for more than substance. The less you do, the greater may be the impact.

What defeated Kenneth Clark about Warhol's paintings was not only their banal subject matter but also the means he used to make them. Before it is anything else, Warhol's portrait of Marilyn Monroe is a silk screen, a simple reproductive technique in which the artist or craftsman stencils a design onto an acetate plate and then fits the plate into a meshed screen.

Tom Cruise can eat planets

More Saturday night video: Remix from new TV show Community

Saturday night video: Suissa's Pick

Justice, Forgiveness and Games

Chief Rabbi of England Jonathan Sacks connects the parasha of this week, Noach, to the always interesting question of whether there is an objective basis for morality. The elegance of his answer is in how he introduces mathematics and game theory into his brand of spirituality.

Is there such a thing as an objective basis of morality? For some time, in secular circles, the idea has seemed absurd. Morality is what we choose it to be. We are free to do what we like so long as we don't harm others. Moral judgments are not truths but choices. There is no way of getting from "is" to "ought", from description to prescription, from facts to values, from science to ethics. This was the received wisdom in philosophy for a century after Nietzsche had argued for the abandonment of morality - which he saw as the product of Judaism - in favour of the "will to power".
Recently, however, an entirely new scientific basis has been given to morality from two surprising directions: neo-Darwinism and the branch of mathematics known as Games Theory. As we will see, the discovery is intimately related to the story of Noah and the covenant made between G-d and humanity after the Flood.
Games theory was invented by one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, John von Neumann (1903-1957). He realised that the mathematical models used in economics were unrealistic and did not mirror the way decisions are made in the real world. Rational choice is not simply a matter of weighing alternatives and deciding between them. The reason is that the outcome of our decision often depends on how other people react to it, and usually we cannot know this in advance. Games theory, von Neumann's invention in 1944, was an attempt to produce a mathematical representation of choice under conditions of uncertainty. Six years later, it yielded its most famous paradox, known as the Prisoner's Dilemma.

Shabbat Shalom!

The price of a scoop: two dead

 Tunku Varadarajan writes on Forbes.com:

What should one make of the tale of Stephen Farrell--the seemingly reckless New York Times reporter who was rescued by British soldiers on Sept. 9 after spending four days as a captive of the Taliban? A soldier died in the course of his rescue, leading sections of British public opinion to go ballistic, accusing Farrell not merely of selfishness, but of moral responsibility for the soldier's death. Is this reaction fair and justified?

Stephen Farrell was a British citizen reporting from Afghanistan. He'd received very strong advice from British troops to stay out of a Taliban-controlled sector into which he was planning to venture in search of a story. Ignoring that advice, Farrell entered the sector with his Afghan interpreter. Both men were seized by the Taliban within hours, and held captive in conditions that led the British to fear for the life of one of their citizens--hence the rescue mission, in which a British soldier was killed. (The hapless interpreter died, too.)

Let me begin by inverting the moral question and asking not whether Farrell--whose action in defiance of advice had generated an entirely avoidable need for rescue--bears moral responsibility for the soldier's death, but whether the Brits were entitled not to seek to rescue him. The rational answer has to be "yes." After all, the disregard of specific advice has to have some consequence. And did not Farrell assume the risk of some harm befalling him? So why not allow him to suffer the effects of his own recklessness?

It's his rubble, now

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:

At a certain point, a president must own a presidency. For George W. Bush that point came eight months in, when 9/11 happened. From that point on, the presidency—all his decisions, all the credit and blame for them—was his. The American people didn't hold him responsible for what led up to 9/11, but they held him responsible for everything after it. This is part of the reason the image of him standing on the rubble of the twin towers, bullhorn in hand, on Sept.14, 2001, became an iconic one. It said: I'm owning it.

Mr. Bush surely knew from the moment he put the bullhorn down that he would be judged on everything that followed. And he has been. Early on, the American people rallied to his support, but Americans are practical people. They will support a leader when there is trouble, but there's an unspoken demand, or rather bargain: We're behind you, now fix this, it's yours.

President Obama, in office a month longer than Bush was when 9/11 hit, now owns his presidency. Does he know it? He too stands on rubble, figuratively speaking—a collapsed economy, high and growing unemployment, two wars. Everyone knows what he's standing on. You can almost see the smoke rising around him. He's got a bullhorn in his hand every day.

It's his now. He gets the credit and the blame. How do we know this? The American people are telling him. You can see it in the polls. That's what his falling poll numbers are about. "It's been almost a year, you own this. Fix it."

The White House war against Fox

 Charles Krauthammer writes:

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox "not really a news station." And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to "be led (by) and following Fox."

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration -- from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 "truther" to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health care legislation -- the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry -- finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.

Thinking with our bodies

What would life be like without metaphors? How would businessmen talk if they couldn't use phrases like "slam dunk" or "war game"? Are these metaphors just verbal ornaments, or do they suggest something deeper about how humans think? Drake Bennett, in the Boston Globe, explores the new research, and, it turns out, metaphors carry a lot more weight than previously thought.

WHEN WE SAY someone is a warm person, we do not mean that they are running a fever. When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat it.

These phrases are metaphorical--they use concrete objects and qualities to describe abstractions like kindness or importance or difficulty--and we use them and their like so often that we hardly notice them.

Now, researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.

What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. Deep down, we are all Amelia Bedelia.

Entitlement Junkies

We hate the idea of "entitlement junkies" when it has to do with raising kids. But what happens when it becomes the crux of an economic model? And when we have to borrow like a desperate gambler just to maintain these entitlements? James Capreta, in the inaugural issue of National Affairs, gives us his view, and it's not pretty.

The severe economic contraction of the past year has left many Americans wondering if we are witnessing the end of this age of affluence. Far more than other recent recessions, the present crisis appears to have exposed underlying weaknesses in our economic foundations, and has involved failures of institutions long taken for granted. These failures were not simply the result of the burst housing bubble and credit meltdown; the financial crisis was the straw that broke the backs of ­long-teetering giants. Americans have now been left to ask if our entire economic system might be similarly vulnerable. If General Motors can collapse into a heap, what other pillars of our post-war order may yet fall?

The paradox of our entitlement system is that although it is designed to mitigate risk at the individual level, it is now creating a massive ­economy-wide risk. For years, economists across the political spectrum have been warning that unconstrained federal borrowing will ultimately leave the country unable to issue debt at favorable and affordable rates of interest. When that point is reached, there will be little choice but to embark on a long period of painful fiscal contraction and austerity, with deep and immediate cuts in benefits and steep rises in taxes.

Like any large political undertaking in our democracy, our entitlement system depends on the loyalty and support of the broad middle class. It is, after all, fundamentally an arrangement with middle-class voters. Its benefits accrue largely to them (with the exception of Medicaid, which nonetheless exists only because of their backing). And the consequences of the system's fiscal decline — especially the tax burden required to contend with it — will affect the middle class above all, and through them the larger economic engine they make possible.

"Grape foam injected with walnut milk and covered in powdered Maytag blue cheese"

In case you missed it, there's an American food revolution going on. Professor Jerry Weinberger (pronounced wine burger!), in the City Journal, tells us more.

For the everyman, there was steak (well done) and mashed potatoes and canned peas, fried chicken and mashed potatoes and canned peas, and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and canned peas. Or the newfangled but repulsive TV dinner.
Sure, there were a few notable exceptions, like the Four Seasons in New York and Le Trianon in San Francisco. Opened by JFK’s former chef, René Verdon, Le Trianon offered traditional French haute cuisine (escargot in garlic butter, sautéed sweetbreads, sole meunière, and so on), along with a mostly French wine list that few diners understood. And there was some good regional cooking in the South. But for the most part, food didn’t matter in America, and being a chef was like being a plumber—a perfectly respectable vocation but no road to stardom. American food was pretty simple, on par with Britain’s in its blandness.
These days, American food is far more complicated and infinitely better. The U.S. has revolutionized its culinary culture over the last 40-odd years. No longer is it the developed world’s worst food nation; in fact, it’s perhaps the best. And it’s largely thanks to the (currently disputed) genius of America’s entrepreneurial capitalism.

This is your brain on Kafka

Can weird stuff be good for you? Tom Jacobs, from the research publication Miller-McCune, summarizes a new study that tries to get at this phenomenon-- how absurdity stimulates certain reactions in our brains. Rabbis will be happy to hear that humans come with "meaning frameworks", which, when threatened, jump into action to activate "meaning maintenance."

Absurdist literature stimulates our brains. That's the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What's more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.

To Proulx and Heine, these finds suggest we have an innate tendency to impose order upon our experiences and create what they call "meaning frameworks." Any threat to this process will "activate a meaning-maintenance motivation that may call upon any other available associations to restore a sense of meaning," they write.

So it appears Viktor Frankl was right: Man is perpetually in search of meaning, and if a Kafkaesque work of literature seems strange on the surface, our brains amp up to dig deeper and discover its underlying design. Which, all things considered, is a hell of a lot better than waking up and discovering you've turned into a giant cockroach.

Sending uranium to Russia is a good thing?

The conventional wisdom is that all this news about Iran possibly sending low-enriched uranium to Russia is a sign of "progress". The irascible Christopher Hitchens, in an article this week in Slate that quotes the Washington Post, sees it differently. Iran has a backward economy with little respect for science, he says, and may simply not have the technology to deal with the "impurities" in its low-enriched uranium. Hence the need for partners like Russia. Hitchens smells weakness in Iran, and suggests that now would be the perfect time for the West to get aggressive.

So, much kudos to David Ignatius of the Washington Post for his column last Friday, in which he restates the findings of a little-known trade publication with the arcane name of Nucleonics Week. To quote directly, the article reports that there might be some reason to think that:
Iran's supply of low-enriched uranium—the potential feed-stock for nuclear bombs—appears to have certain "impurities" that "could cause centrifuges to fail" if the Iranians try to boost it to weapons grade.
Remember that Iran acquired a good deal of its original materiel on the black market, buying through proxies and using other means of deception, before anyone knew what was going on. This in turn means that it would be very much harder to acquire replacement supplies, in the face of continuing invigilation from the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and several intelligence services. Logically, then, even a minor disruption or dislocation of one of the existing key Iranian sites could have the effect of retarding the whole tenuous program for quite a while. And in the meanwhile, the internal clock of Iranian society is running against the continuation of outright dictatorship. So who should be scared of whom?

"Why I love Al Jazeera"

Robert Kaplan writes in the Atlantic:

"Has anyone watched Al Jazeera lately? The Qatar-based Arab TV channel’s eclectic internationalism—a feast of vivid, pathbreaking coverage from all continents—is a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it. Indeed, if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously..."
"Of course, Al Jazeera has some overt prejudices. In covering the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, for example, it is clearly on the Palestinian side. Tear-jerking features about the sufferings of the Palestinians are not matched with equal coverage of the Israeli human terrain. What you get from Al Jazeera is the developing-world point of view, or, more specifically, that of the emerging developing-world bourgeoisie; and that outlook is inherently pro-Palestinian, as well as deeply hostile to American military power. You can actually measure President Barack Obama’s partial success in already changing America’s image abroad by the positive coverage he has been getting lately from Al Jazeera.
"Overlying Al Jazeera’s pro-Palestinian and anti-Bush sentiment is a breezy, pacifist-trending internationalism. In too many of its reports, the subliminal message appears to be that compromise should be the order of the day. According to Al Jazeera, the politically weak, merely by being so, are automatically in the right. A certain kind of moral equivalency is Al Jazeera’s lifeblood. The history of human suffering seemingly begins and ends with that of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation and that of the Iraqis under erstwhile American occupation.
"Yet Al Jazeera is forgivable for its biases in a way that the BBC or CNN is not. In the case of Al Jazeera, news isn’t so much biased as honestly representative of a middle-of-the-road developing-world viewpoint. Where you stand depends upon where you sit. And if you sit in Doha or Mumbai or Nairobi, the world is going to look starkly different than if you sat in Washington or London, or St. Louis for that matter. By contrast, in the case of the BBC and CNN, you are explicitly aware that rather than presenting the world as they find it, those channels are taking a distinct side—the left-liberal internationalist side—in an honest and fundamental debate over foreign policy."

"It's important for human beings to do stupid things"

There are three kinds of fools: real fools, professional fools and unsuspecting fools. As Michael Dirda explains in his essay in the magazine In Character, the professional fool, a staple of Shakespeare's plays, is in reality nobody's fool. His wisdom is there, but it's cleverly concealed. Too much wisdom is deadening, and comes at the expense of experiencing true romance. In life, Dirda says, "it's important for human beings to make mistakes, to do stupid things."

This is living? Wisdom plays it safe, avoids occasions of sin, sits home on Saturday night with an improving book. Elvis used to croon that “Wise men say, ‘Only fools rush in.’” But like the king he was, he knew that a brokenhearted clown understood more about the heart than any cautious Polonius. What would love be without impetuousness? Who can love and then be wise? “The heart has reasons that the reason doesn’t know.” No proverb says that love should be the end product of careful calculation, that it’s the smart move. This is why computerized dating seems repulsive to so many people; you just know the machine would be happier working on a spreadsheet. Besides, who would trust his emotional life to a program written by some Caltech brainiac who’s spent his entire geeky existence playing Halo and Warcraft? To quote Mr. T, “I pity the fool.”

As every truly wise man or woman knows, love is just one of those crazy things, and there’s no logic to what attracts us to one person and not another. You can tot up the pluses and minuses of a relationship all you want, meditate on the possible outcomes of commitment, consult past experience, but you’d do just as well, or better, to listen to a lot of country and western music. You want an explanation for falling in love? “Maybe it was Memphis.” Montaigne, whose Socratic motto was “What do I know?” accounted for his love for his friend Etienne de la Boetie perfectly: “Because he was he and I was I.”

In other words, when it comes to falling in love, who can explain it? Who can tell me why? Well, the goddess Folly can. In Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly she proclaims that she oversees love, that folly embodies the intuitive and passionate side of life and is far more fundamental to our human well-being than propriety or reason.

White House official extols mass murderer

According to Jonathan Fendy's book, Greater China, "Chairman Mao Tse-Tung's responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 million to 70 million lives brands him as a mass murderer greater than Hitler or Stalin".

Yet there was President Obama's Communications Director, Anita Dunn, in front of a high school audience, extolling the virtues of one of her "favorite political philosophers"-- that's right, Chairman Mao. Here's some of what she said:

“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa. Not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is: You’re going to make choices. . . . But here’s the deal: These are your choices; they are no one else’s."

In his article in National Review this week, "A Tale of Two Soundbites", right-wing commentator Mark Steyn compares Dunn's clunker to an unsubstantiated accusation of a racist comment by controversial talk show host Rush Limbaugh, and concludes:

So if I understand correctly:

Rush Limbaugh is so “divisive” that to get him fired leftie agitators have to invent racist soundbites to put in his mouth.

But the White House communications director is so un-divisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America’s young.

The White House now says that Anita Dunn was “joking.” Anyone tempted to buy that spin should look at the tape: If this is her Friars Club routine, she needs to work on her delivery. 

Going Local

Ah, the pleasures of living in a cozy neighborhood. Local merchants who know you by name. Bumping into people you know. Easy play dates for the kids. Ok, and nosy neighbors who want to know who's that guy with the dreadlocks you had over for Shabbat. Anyway, John Kotkin of Newsweek reports on a surprising trend of the new millennium, what he calls "the new localism". After a couple of decades of increasing mobility, more and more Americans are deciding to simply stay put.

Thriving neighborhood restaurants are one small data point in a larger trend I call the new localism. The basic premise: the longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with those places, and the greater their commitment to helping local businesses and institutions thrive, even in a downturn. Several factors are driving this process, including an aging population, suburbanization, the Internet, and an increased focus on family life. And even as the recession has begun to yield to recovery, our commitment to our local roots is only going to grow more profound. Evident before the recession, the new localism will shape how we live and work in the coming decades, and may even influence the course of our future politics.

Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that "spatial mobility" would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie. This vision of social disintegration was perhaps best epitomized in Vance Packard's 1972 bestseller A Nation of Strangers, with its vision of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams." In 2000, Harvard's Robert Putnam made a similar point, albeit less hyperbolically, in Bowling Alone, in which he wrote about the "civic malaise" he saw gripping the country. In Putnam's view, society was being undermined, largely due to suburbanization and what he called "the growth of mobility."

I tried not to cry after this, and I failed

One Nation Under Dog

What's with the sniffing? Why do they bark? Oh, and do they actually like us? Those are some of the questions Barnard psychologist Alexandra Horowitz explores in her new book, "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know." In a review of the book in The Washington Post, you'll find some interesting tidbits, like the fact that 56% of Americans now report buying Christmas gifts for their animals-- and why dogs hate it when you bathe them in coconut-lavender shampoo.

Americans this year will spend $45 billion on veterinary antidepressants, canine hip replacements and doggie spa days. Pet spending has nearly tripled in 15 years, with dogs taking up the lion's share. As the animals have made the physical move from backyard doghouses to ergonomic indoor puppy beds, they've undergone an even more significant philosophical evolution: Man's best friend has become what marketing types now call America's "fur baby."

[Horowitz's book] is a work long on insight and short on jargon. An early chapter on smell nicely explains how dogs' supercharged noses -- they can detect a spoonful of sugar dissolved in two Olympic pools' worth of water -- make smell their most important sense. One real-world implication: Many of the things humans do in the name of sanitation make a dog's world significantly less interesting. "We deprive dogs of an important part of their identity, temporarily, to bathe them in coconut-lavender shampoo," she writes.

More interesting is Horowitz's description of what dogs take in through their other senses. Dogs, she writes, "are the anthropologists among us," making up in close observation what they couldn't otherwise know. For instance, time: They can't read clocks, of course, but these "consummate eavesdroppers and peeping Toms" watch us closely enough to be able to tell, from something as obscure as the speed with which we get up from our desks, whether it's afternoon-walk time. Human observers would find such watching endlessly boring. The fact that pet dogs do not, she says, helps explains our affection for them.

Obama Sings!

Greatest Year in European History

The year is 1989. Timothy Garton Ash, in The New York Review of Books, reviews what many historians consider to be the last great year in European history, and draws from nine different books. My favorite insight from his essay was how, in retrospect, history has a way of looking so inevitable, but in reality is anything but.

Every writer on 1989 wrestles with an almost unavoidable human proclivity that psychologists have christened "hindsight bias"—the tendency, that is, to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time (for example, a Tiananmen-style crackdown in Central Europe).What actually happened looks as if it somehow had to happen. Henri Bergson talked of "the illusions of retrospective determinism." Explanations are then offered for what happened. As one scholar commented a few years after 1989: no one foresaw this, but everyone could explain it afterward. Reading these books, I was again reminded of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski's "law of the infinite cornucopia," which states that an infinite number of explanations can be found for any given event.

So, does God exist, or not?

No one can prove, categorically, the existence or non-existence of God. That's why it's called faith. People tend to believe what works for them. But this won't stop humans from continuing a debate that will surely last until eternity. In his new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth", celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins tries, once again, to amass the case against Divine existence; while Karen Armstrong and Robert Wright make their own pitch on the other side. Until someone finds a way to show how something can be created "out of nothing"-- a tiny living cell or an all-powerful deity-- I don't see either side declaring victory-- or conceding defeat.

"I must do something that I never anticipated"

In an editorial in today's New York Times, Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch and its chairman for 20 years, announces that after seeing how the group has mistreated, abused and discriminated against Israel, he now has no choice but to join the group's critics. The group's official mission? "To pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters."

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.
Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields.