President Bush's plan has no chance of actually working. At this late stage, 21,500 additional troops cannot make a difference. US troops are ill prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure Baghdad. They lack police training, knowledge of the city, and requisite Arabic skills. The Iraqi troops meant to assist the effort are primarily Kurdish peshmerga from two brigades nominally part of the Iraqi army. These troops will have the same problems as the Americans, including an inability to communicate in Arabic.

Bush's strategy assumes that Iraq's Shiite-led government can become a force for national unity and that Iraqi security forces can, once trained, be neutral guarantors of public safety. There is no convincing basis for either proposition. The Bush administration's inability to grasp the realities of Iraq is, in no small measure, owing to its unwillingness to acknowledge that Iraq is in the middle of a civil war.   more »

This is a follow up to the review of the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins published recently to SCIY

Daniel Dennett's main complaint about my review is that I held Dawkins's book to too high a standard. The God Delusion was, he says, a popular work and, as such, one can't expect it to grapple seriously with religious thought. There are two things wrong with this objection. The first is that the mere fact that a book is intended for a broad audience doesn't mean its author can ignore the best thinking on a subject.    more »

This is one of the most poignant accounts of the experience of imminent death and the paradox of the alterity of ones own self which I have ever read . What follows is an account of Francisco's Varela's experience of his surrender of the body.

In his final paper of sole authorship, Varela (2001) explored the phenomenology of his own struggle with a shattered sense of self that accompanied his severe medical condition of a liver transplant and subsequent failure. The paper is entirely self-referential. Varela used his deteriorating physical condition to explore in himself the moving boundaries of an identity that paradoxically sometimes rejected the self as alien and embraced the alien as self. He implicitly highlighted the paradoxical aspect of his condition with the contradictory title, Intimate Distances: Fragments for a Phenomenology of Organ Transplantation. The paper emanates a paradoxical flavor of the presence of alterity, the alien or otherness, in the self. (Tarlow, Robertson, Combs)

Thus the foreignness of the grafted liver is less and less focused. The body itself has become a constant, ongoing source of foreignness altering itself as in echo, touching every sphere of my waking life… Transplantation is never in the past, ..it produces an inflexion in life that keeps an open reminder from the trace of the scar altering my settledness, bringing up death's trace. It is my horizon, an existential space where I adapt slowly, this time as the guest of that which I did not arrange, like a guest of nobody's creation (p. 270-271).(Varela 2001)   more »

Milton Friedman played three roles in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. There was Friedman the economist's economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism—finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine.

Did the same man play all these roles? Yes and no. All three roles were informed by Friedman's faith in the classical verities of free-market economics. Moreover, Friedman's effectiveness as a popularizer and propagandist rested in part on his well-deserved reputation as a profound economic theorist. But there's an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman's theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there's much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public.   more »

Abstract
We take a close look at the laws of contemporary physics with a view to determining whether they can possibly be the laws governing a self-sufficient material reality. We find that they cannot. They reveal in so many ways that this apparently free-standing, objective reality exists within a larger Reality. It is created and sustained by an omnipotent Force. It is the manifestation of a single ineffable Being or Spirit. ...   more »

Separation Perfected"
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity    more »

This book just won the National Book Award, I just finished it and its a great read. Across these chapters the boarders of what self is rapidly recede after brain injuries are introduced which could have been described in the works of Oliver Sacks or V.S. Ramachandran. Where is the self when a brain injury leaves one to believe their loved ones to be alien imposters? Or when ones memory only extends to the last fifteen seconds? What happens to consciousness when someone becomes blind yet still thinks they can see? Or when one can no longer feel? During the course of this compelling story Powers who is one of America's great novelist explores these unusual mutations of consciousness and then delves deeper into the the experience of self whose boundaries he show to be under constant erasure. Margaret Atwood (who is a contender for the Nobel herself) favorably reviews this novel


from the review: On another level: What do we mean by "his true self?" Dr. Weber can (and does) provide some thinking on that subject—none of it very reassuring, because who wants to be reduced to a set of electrochemical connections in a lump of corrugated gray tissue? In the face of his bombardment of expertise, you do feel a little like Dr. Johnson, who claimed he could refute Berkeley's arguments about the nonexistence of phenomena by kicking a stone. It doesn't perk us up to be told, as a gloss on the phantom limb phenomenon, "Even the intact body was itself a phantom, rigged up by neurons as a ready scaffold. The body was the only home we had, and even it was more a postcard than a place."............

Perhaps because birds have always represented the human soul, to our imaginations: the epigraph of The Echo Maker is "To find the soul it is necessary to lose it." This is a book about lost souls, but it is also about souls that are found again.    more »

George Van Vrekhem from Auroville recently published a book about Hitler in which he follows a line of thought which argues for the causal factor of cosmic evil to explain the Hitler phenomena. It is the second book which I am aware of which explains Hitler's evil as occult in origin, the other book was published in the 70s or early 80s and is called Hitler the Occult Messiah. These books treat evil as essentially charismatic and cosmic. This is a contrasting point of view than the routinization or the banality of evil which resulted from a study of on of the Third Reich's top death camp administers Adolph Eichman made by Hannah Arendt The latter perspective is much more in vogue among academics to explain the phenomena of evil in human beings. Among these reasons for this I believe is that it does not invoke a metaphysical explanations to account for evil, evil is just as much a matter of the everyday lifeworld of technocrats as it is the work of Mephisto. Well now Norman Mailer weighs in on the subject on the side of cosmic evil to explain the phenomena of Hitler, here is a review by Nobel Prize winner J.M Coetzee   more »