Thirteen dudes named Orlando are skinning fresh halibut right now, each representing his own pushpin on a map of Earth. Some of the Orlandos live in towns and villages and hamlets but most live in cities, residing in studio apartments others find sad and shrinking but the Orlandos consider palatial. They uniformly believe dusk to be the cruelest time of day, the way it drowns the sun in the black waters of the horizon.

IX.
Belgian rapper Lil’ Orlando has grown tired of the “thug” label that has prefaced much of his career, so today he is participating in a cooking demonstration with model Ingrid Parewijck on Geraardsbergen Public Access Television, in an attempt to soften his image and increase his marketability to Females Aged Thirty-Five to Fifty. Proving that you can take a man out of the streets but not vice-versa, Lil’ Orlando becomes enraged after he catches Ms. Parewijck adding too much fennel to the bouillabaisse, threatening to toss her sorry ass into the Hoëgne River in front of a live studio audience.
XIII.
James “Orlando” McAfee is a native Floridian, now living on Raspberry Island, Alaska. Today he is in nearby Kodiak, getting his picture taken with Kodiak Fish and Game Advisory Committee Chairman Oliver Holm. A staff photographer from The Kodiak Daily Mirror is snapping shot after shot of the duo working a two-man crosscut saw across the great belly of The Largest Halibut Caught in Kodiak, Alaska in Nearly Forty-Five Years. Two days later, when one of the photos graces the front page of The Mirror, Mr. McAfee will deny his wife’s allegation that he was fighting tears and instead blame seasonal allergies for the picture’s wistful, glassy eyes.

Thirteen Dudes Named Orlando by Thomas Mundt

By three a.m., people were easily pleased. “Zombies and fake breasts. What else could a guy want?” thought Lloyd, Star Magician and sometimes One-Man Escort Service, trying to convince himself that he had never applied for a sex change operation. He was happiness incarnate—with large magic breasts, that was true.

Six was a period of loneliness, as it is sometimes the case with the rich and famous. He was neither and somehow that made it worse, especially with a day job like magazine subscription sales.

“Pussy!” Lloyd shouted alone in the street. The word had always helped him.

Just Like Magic by Arlene Ang and Meg Pokrass

Chad Hagen

1. Mars - Helen Fordsdale

The Red Corridor, the central swathe of India, crosses 12 states, from Bihar in the north and West Bengal in the east, to Andhra Pradesh in the south and the edges of Maharashtra in the west. It covers some of the most rural, underdeveloped and poverty-stricken areas of the country, areas in which there is only occasional and passing sign of the state. This region is increasingly under the control of armed revolutionaries, members of various factions consolidated in 2004 as the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The Maoists threaten moneylenders, burn debt papers, organise jailbreaks, redistribute land and steal weapons. They organise and arm local dalams (militias) to fight against the state and its usurpation of indigenous peoples’ land. They create sanghams, communities of village support for the guerrillas. They extract “permissions” from forest contractors, traders and big businesses for access to land under their control. They set landmines, kidnap bureaucrats, kill landlords and torture informers.

Chakravarti spends much of his time documenting the hardships faced by the Red Corridor’s residents. Inroads made there by large mining and metal corporations have displaced thousands of tribal people in Orissa and Chattisgarh; in Jharkand and Bihar, illiterate farmers have been told they contractually own just six inches of their land. Farmer indebtedness, increased seed costs and low crop prices have led to tens of thousands of farmer suicides. Caste violence, perpetrated both by individuals and upper-caste militias like the Ranvir Sena in Bihar, continues with a regularity and ferocity that challenges even the most dedicated documenters.

Within the Red Corridor, Chakravarti spends the majority of his time in Chattisgarh, the state which has spawned the controversial Salwa Judum, a state-sponsored paramilitary organisation that recruits and arms citizens in an attempt break down the Maoist web of support. Well-equipped and fantastically violent, Salwa Judum “resettles” people after burning down their villages, destroying food sources and killing suspected Maoist sympathisers. In 2005, Salwa Judum members gouged the eyes of a Maoist sympathiser and dismembered him in front of his children; there are many such atrocities on both sides of this conflict.

In Raipur, the head of an anti-Naxal police cell tells Chakravarti: “If you spend some time in that area, you begin to empathise with the Naxals. You should see what happens – the levels of exploitation are so high.”

The Hungry Tide

It was an age when men honored the noble virtue of
frivolity, when life was not such a harsh struggle as it
is today. It was a leisurely age, an age when professional wits could make an excellent livelihood by keeping rich or wellborn young gentlemen in a cloudless good humor and seeing to it that the laughter of Court ladies and geisha was never stilled.

………………………

Even to insert a single drop of color was no easy task.
At every thrust of his needle Seikichi gave a heavy sigh
and felt as if he had stabbed his own heart. Little by little
the tattoo marks began to take on the form of a huge
black-widow spider; and by the time the night sky was
paling into dawn this weird, malevolent creature had
stretched its eight legs to embrace the whole of the girl’s
back.
In the full light of the spring dawn boats were being
rowed up and down the river, their oars creaking in
the morning quiet; roof tiles glistened in the sun, and the
haze began to thin out over white sails swelling in the
early breeze. Finally Seikichi put down his brush and
looked at the tattooed spider. This work of art had been
the supreme effort of his life. Now that he had finished
it his heart was drained of emotion.
The two figures remained still for some time. Then
Seikichi’s low, hoarse voice echoed quaveringly from the
walls of the room:
“To make you truly beautiful I have poured m soul
into this tattoo. Today there is not woman in Japan to
compare with you. Your old fears are gone. All men
will be your victims.”
As if in response to these words a faint moan came
from the girl’s lips. Slowly she began to recover her
senses. With each shuddering breath, the spider’s legs
stirred as if they were alive.”
“You must be suffering. The spider has you in its
clutches.”
At this she opened her eyes slightly, in a dull stare.
Her gaze steadily brightened, as the moon brightens in
the evening, until it shone dazzlingly into his face.
“Let me see the tattoo,” she said, speaking as if in a
dream but with an edge of authority to her voice. “Giv-
ing me your soul must have made me very beautiful.”
“First you must bathe to bring out the colors,”
whispered Seikichi compassionately. “I am afraid it will
hurt, but be brave a little longer.”
“I can bear anything for the sake of beauty.” Despite
the pain that was coursing through her body, she smiled.

The Tattooer by Jun’ichir? Tanizaki

What Harris, his fellow researcher Jonas Kaplan, and the other authors of the study want to address is the idea, which has been floating around in both scientific and religious circles, that our brains are doing something special when we believe in God—that religious belief is, neurologically speaking, an entirely different process from believing in things that are empirically and verifiably true (things that Harris endearingly refers to as “tables and chairs”). He says his results “cut against the quite prevalent notion that there’s something else entirely going on in the case of religious belief.” Our believing brains make no qualitative distinctions between the kinds of things you learn in a math textbook and the kinds of things you learn in Sunday school. Though the existence of God will never be proved—or disproved—by an fMRI scan, science can study a thing or two about the neurological mechanisms of belief. What Harris’s study shows is that when a conservative Christian says he believes in the Second Coming as an undeniable fact, he isn’t lying or exaggerating or employing any other rhetorical maneuver. If a believer’s brain regards the Second Coming the way it does every other fact, then debates about the veracity of faith would seem—to the committed believer, at least—to be rather pointless.

If Harris is saying that Christians and atheists regard their beliefs the same way they regard uncontested facts, it’s no wonder that few conceptual bridges are ever built or crossed. (He even noted, with asterisks as to its significance, what he called the “blasphemy reaction”: that when atheists disagreed with a Christian belief, or when Christians affirmed one, their pleasure centers lit up—proof that the combatants in the faith-versus-reason wars really do enjoy the fight, equally.)

The more we know, through science, about how people live—and how they think, and what makes them happy—the more real information we’ll have about how best to live together on this planet. The fMRI experiments do not pertain to these largest questions, of course. But they do show (again) what neuroscientists already know. “Intuition” and “reason” are not two separate activities. They’re interconnected. From the brain’s point of view, religious belief and empirical data are the same.

The Brain Processes Facts and Beliefs the Same Way

The core of Ronfeldt’s research involves the concept of the “nexus-state,” a new networked state entity enabled primarily by technology and networks. While many tech boosters see technology as a primarily liberating force that empowers individuals and groups, Ronfeldt argues convincingly that there is an equal potential for centralization of power. Centralized control of information can lead to the construction of a systematic apparatus of control that uses information collected on the populace to keep them in check. In a more decentralized system, the state becomes the arbiter that sets the protocol that defines a complicated set of networks, actors, and relationships.

If we are to take Ronfeldt’s speculative idea on its own terms, we must go beyond the simplistic web 2.0 slogan that “information is power.” Rather, the problem lies in transforming certain kinds of information into power. There is a large disparity between the “soft power” represented by the global networks, social media groups, and non-governmental organizations and the critical and overwhelming mass needed to contest political power, especially when faced with a force that holds an overwhelming military advantage. All of the hype about the Iranian “twitter revolution” placed a naïve faith in the ability of technology to overcome the loyal security forces of an authoritarian state. Twitter, in the end, could not overcome the truncheon, gun, and bayonet.

The interplay of what Thucydides called ”fear, honor, and interest” has been a feature of conflict since the beginning of organized human civilization. The problem is that theorists have only focused on “interest” while brushing aside “fear and honor.”

Security in the network state

I plunge my spear into your body many times

You are not from here.
You are different.
I will hunt you like a wild pig.
I plunge my spear into your body many times.
It will not break.
Down you will go.
You will never leave.
You are quick like a monkey, running through the tree-tops, But now you will die.
I have no fear.
My enemies hunt for me.
Their spears may come tonight, or the next night.
They will pierce my body again and again.
When I die I will make no sound.
I am like the jaguar.
I have no fear.

Huaorani Spearing Chant

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

Studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

In the months since then, top officials in Mugabe’s ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union–Popular Front), who once enjoyed absolute power, have been forced into awkward proximity with their former enemies—talking with them at cabinet meetings, having meals with them, even sharing suites in cabinet retreats in the Zim-babwean bush. Still, as Human Rights Watch recently reported, Mugabe retains much control, even if ministries are officially under the authority of the MDC.

In a huge series of concessions by the MDC that many within Tsvangirai’s own circle opposed, the ZANU-PF still has control over the army, the police, the courts, the jails, and the Ministry of Information, which regulates the press. Thus Mugabe’s henchmen have kept their hands on levers of coercive power, including the ability to harass and detain their enemies. “Mugabe was beaten in an election, he came back through violence, and…I think he is having the last laugh.”

Biti and Tsvangirai were hoping to emerge from their trips with pledges that would allow Zimbabwe to pay off its loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. “I think the donors are being selfish,” Biti told me. “They are sulking. They are unhappy that Mugabe is a part of this inclusive government. They wanted proper and pure regime change. But when you are fighting a dictatorship, using nonviolent means, whatever you do is gradual.” Already, he said, “People can put on MDC T-shirts right now without violence, people can get on with their lives without any reprisals.” I asked Biti about Mugabe cronies who had benefited from ZANU-PF hegemony, and who were desperate to avoid the possibility of judgment in The Hague or some other court. “They are not powerful enough to derail this process,” he insisted. Like the Western donors, he said, “They can sulk and sulk, but we are going to do what we have to do to give our people a chance.”

Dictator Mugabe Makes a Comeback

To cast the U.S. as a passive, benign giant that must assume its rightful role on the world stage by vanquishing evil—this is most flattering to American amour propre and consonant with attitudes in Washington, even if it doesn’t map onto reality. A country doesn’t acquire a vast network of military bases in dozens of sovereign nations across the world by standing on the sidelines, and for the past hundred years the U.S. has, by any standard, been a hyperactive world presence.

For Samantha Power, the United States can by its very nature only be a force for virtue abroad. In this sense, the outlook of Obama’s human-rights advocate is no different from Donald Rumsfeld’s.

As a human-rights entrepreneur who is also a tireless advocate of war, Samantha Power is not aberrant. Elite factions of the human-rights industry were long ago normalized within the tightly corseted spectrum of American foreign policy. Sarah Sewell, the recent head of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, has written a slavering introduction to the new Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: human-rights tools can help the U.S. armed forces run better pacification campaigns in conquered territory. The Save Darfur campaign, more organized than any bloc of the peace movement in the U.S., continues to call for some inchoate military strike against Sudan (with Power’s vocal support) even though this disaster’s genocide status is doubtful and despite an expert consensus that bombing Khartoum would do less than nothing for the suffering refugees. Meanwhile, the influential liberal think tank the Center for American Progress also appeals to human rights in its call for troop escalations in Afghanistan—the better to “engage” the enemy.

Human-rights organizations can do a splendid job of exposing and criticizing abuses, but they are constitutionally incapable of taking stands on larger political issues. No major human-rights NGO opposed the invasion of Iraq. With their legitimacy and funding dependent on a carefully cultivated perception of neutrality, human-rights nonprofits will never be any substitute for an explicitly anti-imperialist political force. In the meantime, America’s best and brightest will continue to explore innovative ways for human rights to serve a thoroughly militarized foreign policy.

Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Andreas Banderas

1. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks - Red Alert

A small white cat runs in front of the car.

The car hits a bump.

Silence.

Veronica starts crying.

I think of things to tell her, like it isn’t her fault. That the cat committed suicide. That she should deal with it. That she doesn’t like cats anyway. But then I can’t remember if she likes cats.

The radio isn’t playing.

It is silent.

I don’t smoke.

I don’t want to bother her.

She continues to cry.

Goodbye Tom by Noah Cicero

“Politesse,” like “etiquette,” migrated intact to English from French. Sartre uses the term in an essay on the life and work of Stéphane Mallarmé to describe the poet’s revolt against the world: Il ne fera pas sauter le monde: il le mettra entre parenthèses. Il choisit le terrorisme de la politesse; avec les choses, avec les hommes, avec lui-même, il conserve toujours une imperceptible distance. (He does not blow up the world: he puts it in parentheses. He chose the terrorism of politesse; with things, with men, with himself, he always maintains an imperceptible distance.) Parenthesize one’s object. Set it apart as an afterthought. De-center it. For the artist wielding “a sort of charming and destructive irony,” ostensibly polite reserve belies violence “so complete and so desperate that it turns the idea of violence into calm.” This is a social judo model of terrorism.

Increasingly acute social pressure to surreptitiously manage perceptions of one’s self and one’s relationships for presumed advantage indicates that the mastery of rules has begun to overtake the field of play itself, along with any real agency of the players.

(POLITE TERRORISM) by Angie Keefer

Harvey digs beneath the cosmopolitan doxa to a layer of Kant’s thought—his concern with geography—that has returned with a vengeance, even for those who only crib from thirdhand cribs of Kant’s corpus. For despite Friedman’s hectic urgings to the contrary, the world is not, as it happens, flat.

Indeed, its roundness and finitude are conditions for Kant’s own cosmopolitanism, because, he writes, human beings “cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other.” Kant lectured on geography for decades, regarding it as the fundamental science needed to “create that unity of knowledge without which all learning remains only piece-work.”

On the neoliberal globe, any local particularity (of landscape, climate, culture, etc.) exists primarily as a potential contributor or impediment to investment and accumulation. To oppose this reductive view of the lives of communities, something more is needed than dithyrambs to the indigenous.

Capital is not all that crosses borders and establishes new relationships, contractual and otherwise. So does labor. A few years ago, American investment firms would shore up their claims to being “global” by opening branches in distant countries, then not bothering to staff them. At the same time, their offices on Wall Street were cleaned by people whose map of the world included New York as the northernmost part of Latin America. Harvey’s book reflects the full range of this paradox—and thus serves as a reminder that there must be forged, somehow, a cosmopolitanism from below.

Changing Places

The year 2008 also brought major crop failures, from Bangladesh to the grain exporting regions of Australia, where wheat and rice crops were devastated by drought. Scientists agree that such widespread disruptions in food production will only increase with the increasing destabilization of the earth’s climate (see discussion below). In addition, speculation at the local level (usually called hoarding) and unprecedented financial speculation in world commodity markets — an increasingly popular way to gamble as global stock markets plummeted — forced prices to much higher levels than they would have reached otherwise. With global food stocks at very low levels after several years in which consumption exceeded supply, crop failures in a few countries, and the new large-scale diversions of food into fuel production — combined with the longer-term trends — a “perfect storm” was created in which many people suffered greatly, and continue to suffer.

Although food prices have come down from their extraordinary heights of the summer of 2008, they are still considerably higher than just a few years ago. And food supplies, although ample to feed everyone if distributed equally, are still in relatively short supply. Today, approximately a billion people — close to one-sixth of humanity — suffer from continual and severe hunger. There are many more, possibly another two billion, who live in perpetual food insecurity — missing some meals and often not knowing where their next meal will come from. This means that close to half of all humans are either perpetually hungry and malnourished or suffering from varying degrees of food insecurity.

Agriculture and Food in Crisis

What is striking about these two approaches is how much they have in common. It is true that there is little love lost between multiculturalists and proponents of the clash of civilisations thesis. The former accuse the latter of pandering to racism and Islamophobia, while the latter talk of the former as appeasing Islamism. Beneath the hostility, however, the two sides share basic assumptions about the nature of culture, identity and difference. For at the heart of both arguments is a confusion between peoples and values. Multiculturalists claim that the presence in a society of a diversity of peoples limits the possibility of common values. Clash of civilisations warriors insist that such values are impossible within an ethnically diverse society. Neither is right.

Once the Enlightenment becomes a weapon in the clash of civilisations rather than in the battle to define the values and attitudes necessary to advance political rights and social justice, once it becomes a measure as much of tribal attachment as of progressive politics, then everything from torture to collective punishment becomes permissible, and the pursuit of Enlightenment itself becomes a source of de-Enlightenment. Multiculturalists and clash of civilisations warriors both start with the question: “Can Europe be the same with different people in it?” They give different answers. But the question itself is the problem. It assumes that minority communities are homogenous wholes whose members will forever be attached to the cultures, faiths, beliefs and values of their forebears. Being born to European parents is not a passport to Enlightenment beliefs. So why should we imagine that having Bangladeshi or Moroccan ancestry makes one automatically believe in Sharia? In confusing peoples and values both sides betray a lack of faith in their own abilities to win people of different backgrounds to a common set of Enlightened values.

Shadow Boxing by Kenan Malik

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1907ygcFSI

Février 1936 : la victoire du Front Populaire dans la toute jeune république d’Espagne, proclamée depuis moins de 5 ans, provoque des craintes pour les riches propriétaires terriens, soutenus par les militaires et l’église. Profitant de l’assassina du député monarchiste (et fasciste) José Calvo Soltelo, en juillet 1936, les militaires se soulèvent et déclenchent une sanglante guerre civile qui va durer trois ans et faire plus d’un million de morts.

download with english subtitles

Tim Simmons

1. Roi - Plums

There are books around my desk written by people with impressive sounding names and the insides of these books are filled with substantial words like Cataclysmic and Calamitous, words that sound like they could get up off the couch and kick my ass should I come in and interrupt their cartoon watching time after work. I think the words in these books could actually drink me under the table if given the chance, and maybe kick my ass in pool too. But these words are still boring because the cartoons they watch are perverse and shocking in that over-the-top, grossly violent and overtly sexual kind of way. Sometimes I think I’d like to see Cataclysmic and Calamitous watch a pornographic cartoon in front of the kids as they are enjoying a satisfying after-school snack of Oreo cookies and a glass of 2% milk. I’d like to see the porno staged in one of those George W. Bush, No-Child-Left-Behind inspired “charter” elementary schools where the “older” and dumb yet street-wise fifth grader who can already grow a beard becomes enamored with the newly graduated, idealistic teacher who is both “youngish” and nimble and wants to save the street-wise fifth grader from the harsh streets of some heathen place like New York City, or Durham, North Carolina.

Synchronized Swimming by Maize Louise Montgomery