Author: Mick Hartley

Prepared for the upcoming mammal vs. cephalopod war? Didn’t think so. As the ad says: the cephalopod biomass is now greater than the human biomass. We don’t know how many there are or how big they get. We are NOT ready. Play it smart.

e as a given became a fact about the world, such that linguistic competence was beyond the reach of the usual Darwinian evolutionary logic. [I tried to argue here that this switch from methodology to ontology was something to be found in his political writings as well: an appropriate methodology for an American of concentrating solely on US sins turned into a world where the only sins were American sins.]

So where are we now? Carl Zimmer has posted the first of two articles on language on his website, and it gives those of us who aren’t prepared (or equipped) to wade through the professional journals as good an overview as we’re likely to get. On one side we have Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct) and Paul Bloom (Descartes Baby) arguing for the importance of evolutionary pressures for the development of language: against them there’s the Chomsky faction who argue that language may just be some sort of evolutionary side-effect (a “spandrel” in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms), or that nearly all the elements for linguistic competence are present in other animals, and all it needed in humans was a little extra something, like recursion. The latest article from Pinker, with Ray Jackendoff, is according to Zimmer an all-out attack on Chomsky’s recent writings, which, they hint, have a creationist ring to them.

Zimmer promises some sort of resolution in his second post. Should be interesting.

/1109180047375.html?oneclick=true”>returned. As Carl Zimmer explains, this feud is about whether the hobbit is indeed a new species, as its finders claim, or whether it is, as Jacob believes, simply an individual with a birth defect called microcephaly. But this reflects a deeper conflict: whether modern humans, as most scientists now believe, are descended from a small group of Africans some 200,000 years ago, or – the multiregional hypothesis – the exodus from Africa was much earlier, and we’ve evolved in parallel since then in different regions. Jacob is a multiregionalist.

It was thus not a complete surprise to learn last week that Teuku Jacob had arranged for two multiregionalists, Alan Thorne and Maciej Henneberg to examine the Homo floresiensis bones. Publicity may have been one motivation–a 60 Minutes crew was apparently filming the proceedings–but something very significant happened along the way. Two grams of the fossil material was extracted and sent to Germany to look for DNA.

….[F]inding Hobbit DNA is the best way to test the hypothesis that these fossils belong to another species. If the Australians are right, its DNA should be only remotely similar to the DNA of all living humans. If Jacob is right, the DNA should resemble the DNA of living Southeast Asians more than other humans.

But any results that come from the DNA Jacob and company have extracted will probably be viewed with a lot of skepticism. It is very easy for fossils to become contaminated with the DNA of living humans once they are unearthed, and it very difficult to distinguish between contamination and any ancient DNA the fossils might contain. Jacob didn’t help matters when he “borrowed” the bones; apparently they were simply stuffed into a leather bag and brought to him.

the hill north of Fairbanks, in the dark of winter, and suddenly see this huge, free standing tower of white and blue ice, or whatever it might be, glowing in floodlights, unlike anything you have ever imagined, which was not there the last time you went to Fox a few months ago. You would look at your speedometer, check for any open containers, look for cops, slow down, and wonder if you were the only one in town to have seen what you just saw, or if you were the last one to find out.

to offer, but merely more of the stagnation that has made Egypt a prime breeding ground for Islamic extremists, including many of the leaders of al Qaeda.

Sebastian Faulks reviews “Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France ” by John Pemble (via AL Daily), about French resistance to Shakespeare and all things Anglo, and recalls some bizarre translations:

As late as 1904, when King Lear was staged for the first time in Paris, Kent’s lines at the height of the storm, “The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure” became “Il n’est pas possible de rester plus longtemps dehors.”

This reminded me of the hours I spent in Left-bank cinemas as a student learning French by reading the subtitles of English films. My brother claims to have seen a western in which the trail-weary cowboy’s first line on entering the saloon — “Gimme a shot of red eye” — was translated as “Un Dubonnet, s’il vous plaît”.

turned these refugees would likely end up starved or worked to death in the labor camps of Kim Jong Il. Some are murdered outright. One recent dispatch from a South Korean private aid group, the Headquarters for the Protection of North Korean Defectors, reports that according to sources inside North Korea the regime there just last month executed some 60 North Korean would-be defectors sent back by China, killing at least eight in public, in the northern city of Chongjin–to deter others from making a run for it.

Such would-be refugees have been dying faceless, nameless and scarcely even remarked upon by the world community. But these were human beings. They had faces and names. From what we know of conditions in North Korean detention centers, it’s a good bet they were freezing, famished and quite possibly tortured in the hours before they were then murdered in public due to the combined and systematic state policies of China and North Korea.

Where is the U.N. in all this? Under the U.N. Refugee Convention–which Beijing has signed and the UNHCR, with its $1.1 billion budget, is supposed to administer–these North Koreans refugees had rights. The convention promised them not a return to their deaths, but at least safe transit through China to a place of asylum.

The UNHCR keeps an office in Beijing, with a budget this year totaling $4.4 million, to which asylum seekers have no access. Four years ago, a family of North Korean refugees actually stormed the premises and gained asylum after threatening to eat rat poison from their pockets if forced back out onto the street. Since then, the UNHCR has allowed China’s security agents to better defend the compound against further visits by the people the UNHCR is supposedly in China to protect.

rable to your electorate, not to me!

Nevertheless, it is certain that Sistani, who regards the Khomeinist regime in Iran as an abomination, would not have remained so circumspect had there been any real danger of a drift towards Iranian-style mullahrchy in Iraq.

So, why did the Shiites pick Jaafari? There are at least three reasons.

The first is that Jaafari’s presence at the head of a new interim government could deprive both Shiite and Sunni fundamentalists of their main claim that the new Iraqi leadership consists of a bunch of anti-religious personalities determined to reduce the role of Islam in Iraqi society. Jaafari’s designer stubble appeals to the more religious elements while his Jermyn Street suits are reassuring to the secular middle classes. Since the main task of the next interim government is to write a new permanent constitution and submit it to a referendum, it is important that the fundamentalists be deprived of their key arguments.
The second reason why Jaafari was chosen is his good standing among Arab Sunnis who stayed away from the elections in large numbers. Jaafari appeals to the more religious elements among the Shiites, and this could help the new government to isolate the secularist Sunnis, mostly remnants of the Saddamite regime.

Jaafari also has the added advantage of having consistently opposed the policy of de-Ba’athification, so ardently advocated by his principal Shiite political rival Ahmad Chalabi. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civil servants, businessmen, and military personnel, who had carried Ba’ath Party membership cards to remain in the game or even to stay alive, regard Jaafari as the only Shiite leader capable of preventing a witch-hunt against them.

Jaafari’s choice should also be seen as a signal that the new Iraqi leadership wishes to reassure its Arab neighbours. Of the four candidates in the race for the premiership, Jaafari is the one that is regarded with the least suspicion by the Sunni-ruled Arab states.

p://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD86805″>excerpts from an interview on Iranian TV with Ahmad Mir-‘Alawii, the producer of the series. Turns out the eyes weren’t the half of it: there’s a white ship out there:

“We have presented only a small portion of the Zionists’ crimes. During our work [on the film] we received information – even from Jews sympathizing with our point of view. They themselves were anti-Zionists. These were monotheistic Jews. They gave us information that made us regret the film had been completed. I wish we had this information before we made the film.

“Oh Zionists, you have occupied the homes of innocent people. You are killing them, making them face firing squads, and gouging out their eyes in front of their parents. In this film we treated you more than fairly, when we presented you as taking out their eyes in an operating room.

“There is a white ship sailing the oceans. It doesn’t enter the territorial waters of Iran or similar countries. Our Arab brothers must look out for this ship. In it [the Zionists] hold children only one or two years old, who don’t know anything. These are children no one cared for. They are kidnapped by various means under the pretext of wanting to take care of them. These children are held on this ship, and no one knows their fate. They become teenagers, not knowing what their fate will be. They receive the best medical care and are under constant physical monitoring and supervision. Why do [the Zionists] give them such care? To use them for medical purposes. They use the heart, the kidneys, and their other organs.

In the NYT Nicolas Kristof publishes some photos from a “secret archive of thousands of photos and reports that document the genocide under way in Darfur. The materials were gathered by African Union monitors, who are just about the only people able to travel widely in that part of Sudan.” (via Secular Blasphemy):

There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.

One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls’ school in Suleia who was burned alive. It’s been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.

Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.

This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur.

The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the “execution of all directives from the president of the republic” and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.

“Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes,” the document urges. It encourages “killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur.”