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  • Food of good intentions

    H2OM - a blessed beverage, Intentional Chocolate – a snack that is "imbued" with a monk's meditation, Creo Mundi - a protein mix that has been praised loudly.  How much will you pay for these "good feeling" (not just feel good) foods? An article in the latest issue of Time magazine reports that some are shelling out generously for foods which are embedded / infused / imbued with good intentions, on the assumption that nourishing powers of edibles are enhanced by good thoughts.  

    Embedded food Move over, organic, fair trade and free range–the latest in enlightened edibles is here: food with "embedded" positive intentions. While the idea isn't new–cultures like the Navajo have been doing it for centuries–for-profit companies in the U.S. and Canada are catching on, infusing products with good vibes through meditation, prayer and even music. Since 2006, California company H2Om has sold water infused with wishes for "love," "joy" and "perfect health" via the words, symbols and colors on the label (which "create a specific vibratory frequency," according to co-founder Sandy Fox) and the restorative music played at their bottling warehouse. At Creo Mundi, a Canadian maker of protein powder, employees gather around each shipment and state aloud the benefits they hope to imbue it with for their consumers–increased performance, balance and vitality. Intentional Chocolate, founded in 2007 by chocolatier Jim Walsh, uses a special recording device to capture the electromagnetic brain waves of meditating Tibetan monks; Walsh then exposes his confections to the recording for five days per batch.

    We hear your eyes rolling. But some claim there's actually something to the idea that humans can alter the physical world with their minds, and they offer research to prove it. Dean Radin, a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, Calif., conducted a test in which, he says, subjects who ate Intentional Chocolate improved their mood 67% compared with people who ate regular chocolate. "If the Pope blessed water, everyone wants that water. But does it actually do something?" Radin asks. "The answer is yes, to a small extent."

    James Fallon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, is skeptical. "So I take a rutabaga and put it close to my head, and it somehow changes the food and improves the mood of the person who ate it?" he asks. "Nah."

    Gimmick or not, in this economy any product that promises a spiritual pick-me-up could be in high demand. Since the recession, says Phil Lempert, editor of health-food site Supermarketguru.com "everyone is ready to jump off a bridge." With the right marketing, he says, embedded foods "could be huge."

    Still, not everyone is keen on the idea of packaging spirituality. Once the profit motive comes into play, "it's difficult to keep things pure," says George Churinoff, a monk at Deer Park Buddhist Center in Oregon, Wis., who was involved with Intentional Chocolate in its early stages. "Then [the product] may not be blessed in any way with motivation except maybe to make money."

    Like the Navajos, I too grew up in a culture where food is routinely imbued with spirituality and blessings, not so much by humans but by gods. (see prasad) I have therefore consumed large quantities of "embedded" foods, mostly from the household shrines of my mother and other relatives. The divine fare was always delicious and I don't know if the goodies imparted any special benefits because of the worthy intentions infused in them. I however remember my mildly observant but  supremely hygienic mother's cautionary words regarding the consumption of blessed foods outside the home : "Eat only the whole fruits, not the sliced ones;  take very small amounts of cooked food and only if it is still warm; stick mostly to dry items; avoid all cold liquids, milk based products and especially the holy water; do not consume anything in a large communal place of worship." I may have ignored her advice a couple of times – once for a delectable helping of suji halwa in a large, crowded Gurudwara and on another occasion, when I ate some pre-sliced coconut in a South Indian temple. Given the frequent cases of food poisoning, hepatitis and other nasty outcomes of eating in public holy places, it was amply clear to me that the blessings of the gods didn't always protect against earthly maladies.

    The foods described in the Time magazine article of course pose few such disease causing threats. What is suspect is their ability to transmit the good intentions and peaceful vibes via the gastrointestinal pathway. If a controlled study can be done to prove their efficacy, perhaps such fare can be of greater use than just soothing the nerves of antsy individuals. How about India and Pakistan sharing "laddus" of peace?  Israelis and Palestinians feasting on falafel of harmony? The whole world exchanging grains of accord and amity? The placebo effect alone may be worth the trouble.

  • Unraveling The “Webb” of Injustice

    Prison-hands In just the past week, I wrote about the overcrowded and sometimes cruel prison system in the US and Joe took President Obama to task for not providing a serious answer to the question of  legalization of marijuana. It is important to note that one of the principal reasons for the high rate of incarceration in our country is that a large number of inmates occupying prison cells happen to be non-violent  offenders who go to jail for drug related offenses.

    Most American politicians like to run on a tough electoral platform of "law and order."  Being "soft on crime" is an epithet a politician dreads. So hardly any elected official loses sleep over the plight of prisoners and the violation of their civil and human rights. One US senator though has worked hard to shine the light on the grossly flawed penal system in the most powerful (and free) country in the world.  Sen Jim Webb (D-VA) whom I have lauded more than once for his honesty and courage before,  has introduced a bill to create a commission that will focus on the many shortcomings of our criminal justice system. The bill has garnered the support of senators of both political parties – a rare achievement in itself. In the introduction to the bill, Senator Webb explains the need for the commission:

    The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 that I introduced in the Senate on March 26, 2009 will create a blue-ribbon commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom. I believe that it is time to bring together the best minds in America to confer, report, and make concrete recommendations about how we can reform the process.

    Why We Urgently Need this Legislation:

    • With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses 25% of the world's reported prisoners.

    • Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980.

    • Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.

    • Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country.

    • Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society.

    America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.

    We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration.

    In an article in Parade magazine, titled Why We Must Fix Our Prisons Webb explains in more detail what he considers wrong with our prison system and our drug laws. I am impressed by the senator – his tireless advocacy and initiative on behalf of the most neglected segment of our society and for confronting unpopular issues like the wrong headed drug laws which operate under significant racial and economic biases.  And to think that the unlikely electoral victory of Webb, a former Republican, came  about because of the careless arrogance of his popular and powerful GOP opponent. We can thank the macaca for giving us a politician with the courage of his conviction. 

    (more…)

  • Obama on Pot (Joe)

    Over at Hullabaloo, Dday posts a video of President Obama' s recent town hall, in which the President "responds" to a question about the economic consequences of marijuana legalization.  (I would embed the video here, but I'm not internet-savvy enough to pull that off.)  Basically, Obama says that he's answering a bunch of questions based on the online votes the questions received — he's apologizing for even taking this question.  But because 3.5 million people voted, and this was one of the most popular questions, well, he's got to address the question of whether legalization would improve the economy or create jobs — but not before smirking and making the smart-aleck remark, "I don't know what this says about the online audience."  After the audience laughs, he again notes how popular the question was, then asserts, "The answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."  Obama and the audience then share another laugh, the audience applauds, and he presumably moves on to important, serious, non-hippie questions.  Dday remarks:

    There are two issues here. First, legalization actually does deserve a serious response. You don't have to agree with it – I'm not certain that I do – but you ought to engage with it. The war on drugs has utterly failed, so it's not like the status quo is any less silly. But the second issue is even more damaging. Obama's Administration wants to bypass the media filter and open the tools of communication to a much larger community. And then a non-Village approved question gets asked and he snickers about it? For a real community interaction to work there has to be a certain level of respect, and that was apparently sorely lacking.

    In a subsequent post Digby adds:

    But I think this speaks to the deeper problem of our government's approach to dealing with drugs everywhere. When Obama and his very enthusiastic audience laughed and applauded his condescension, it was sadly obvious that administration is as irrational and anti-intellectual on that issue as the Bush administration was on science during its eight years. It's a dangerous attitude considering what's happening south of the border right now. We need rationality more than ever right now.

    I agree, of course.  This is extremely disappointing behavior.  First, Is it really necessary to insult liberals?  It would have been better to simply not address the question at all.  He's "our" President and he's taking shots at us, making us out to be the lunatic fringe?

    Second, the question deserves a serious answer.  I'm a realist enough not to have ever expected the 2009 U.S. President to support legalization.  But isn't Obama supposed to be an intellectual, rational leader, the likes of whom we haven't seen in this country in many years?  And given the utter failure of the war on drugs, the recent and ongoing major problems that Mexican drug cartels have posed for the U.S., the relative harmlessness of marijuana's effects on users, and the high as opposed to a condescending, out-of-hand dismissal — is clearly called for.  economic and social costs of prosecution and incarceration, a rational conversation — (And last I checked, there is a real push in California for legalization legislation, backed up by real popularly elected legislators and everything, not just us wacko activist bloggers on the internet.)

    Look, a real discussion doesn't have to result in the conclusion that marijuana should be legalized, or even that it should be quasi-legalized only as a prescription medication.  Data are inconclusive, albeit mainly because the federal government has consistently made performing scientific research in this country close to impossible.  There would have been plausible arguments for Obama to make which indicate that legalization wouldn't be a good move — perhaps even on purely economic grounds.  Sadly, that's not how Obama approached this.  Instead he sounded exactly like President Bush and administration officials sounded countless times during the W. years, when mocking science, or opposition to torture.

    Update:

    http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1155201977

  • Shameless Ploy to Show Off My Son (Dean)

    So Slashdot has this post about a recent study of the cognitive development of toddlers that concludes that kids don’t learn by planning for the future. The comments are, as always, provocative, opinionated, droll, and in ways more informative than the underlying article and study [sub. req’d].

    Sebastian
    The study is of course far more elaborate and sophisticated (read: beyond me) than the article represents, so I’ll take exception to the latter. For one thing–and this may be critical–I don’t understand the experiment. How does identifying whether or not a cartoon character Blue is happy or sad about the emergence of either watermelon or Sponge Bob measure proactive or reactive thinking at all? If the older kids “can anticipate the answer before the object [the watermelon] appears,” I’d say they’re better at guessing, not remembering.

    That aside, the truly laughable notion of this study is the hypothesis that one “might expect the child to plan for the future.” Even more ridiculous is the prospect that this fairly describes how the minds of adults work. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be scrambling right now to figure out how I’m going to make good by April 15 on the employment taxes I have known for a full year I would soon owe the federal government. On the other hand, I have been planning to arrange for a babysitter this coming Saturday to allow my wife and me to attend a beer festival in Berkeley. So maybe one’s “capacity to anticipate and prepare for future events” is a function of the appeal of those events. Or maybe it’s just the case that beer : watermelon :: taxes : Sponge Bob Squarepants.

  • Music in Desperate Times (Then and Now?)

    Today I came across two stories from different eras separated by nearly seven decades, which struck a common chord in my mind.

    The first report is about a group of American musicians who have organized a concert named Music In Desparate Times as a tribute to women musicians who used their artistic skills in order to survive in the death camp of Birkenau during WWII.

    ArsChoralisMusicInDesperateTimes When Gustav Mahler's niece greeted new arrivals at a Nazi death camp, she knew that any woman who stepped off the train with a musical instrument had a chance to live. Women in Alma Rose's orchestra were forced to entertain SS officers at the Birkenau concentration camp. All the women survived — except Rose.

    Now, an American chorus and orchestra is paying tribute to those musicians with concerts in the U.S.and Germany titled "Music in Desperate Times: Remembering The Women's Orchestra of Birkenau."

    During the 18 months the Birkenau orchestra existed, its musicians played pieces the German officers loved — Beethoven symphonies, Puccini arias, Chopin and Strauss waltzes. The women also had to play marches for emaciated, often sick prisoners as they struggled to walk to their forced labor jobs.

    All around was death — people perishing outdoors, or in filthy barracks and gas chambers. More than 1 million disappeared in this place of horror.

    When the Vienna-born Rose (pronounced roh-ZAY') was sent to the camp, the SS guards realized she was Mahler's relative and had conducted an all-women's orchestra. She was asked to form one at Birkenau, for the pleasure of the Nazis.

    "As the women came off transport trains, if they had a guitar, a violin, a recorder or a mandolin, they were put aside," said Alice Radosh, who helped organize the Ars Choralis concerts. "People would hear classical music — and think, 'How bad could this be?'"

    The truth was, "we played with tears in our eyes and guns at our backs," Radosh quoted accordion player Esther Bejarano as saying after the war.

    They were still expected to play well — or face possible death.

    "At Birkenau, music was indeed the best and worst of things," wrote the late Fania Fenelon, a cabaret singer from Paris who wrote the book "Playing for Time," which was turned into a television movie starring Vanessa Redgrave.

    "The best because it filled in time and brought us oblivion, like a drug; we emerged from it deadened, exhausted," Fenelon said, "and the worst because our public consisted of the assassins and the victims, and in the hand of the assassins, it was almost as though we too were made executioners."

    With the orchestra, Rose saved more than 50 women, including Fenelon, who died in 1983; three are still alive.

    The second story, which evokes a sense of tragic symmetry is also about musicians - Palestinian children from a refugee camp in Jenin in the West Bank singing and playing music for Israeli Holocaust survivors.

    (more…)

  • The NPRization of Newspapers (Andrew)

    238734
    Amid all of the print-is-dead triumphalism, Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland has taken the very encouraging step of introducing legislation that would allow newspapers to operate as not-for-profits.  This would mean that advertising and subscription revenue would be tax-exempt, and one could make tax-deductible donations to newspaper as educational entities.  I'm pretty sure this would also mean that any profits that the newspapers might make would need to be re-invested in the newspaper, rather than paid out to shareholders.

    As someone who  got his his start in media in public radio, I am enthusiastic that this can work.  The traditional cash cow of classified advertising, which sustained large newsrooms for so many years is gone.  But we still need large newsrooms, and this looks like a realistic way to fund them — and newspapers have NPR and public radio stations as models for how one can fundraise for high-quality reporting as a non-profit entity. 

    I asked one of my friends, an editor at a large (for-profit) magazine for his thoughts on the issue.  He argues persuasively that a non-profit model will actually provide better quality news than for-profit newspapers that are driven ultimately by the bottom line:


    I’ve
    always believed that news media as a for-profit venture was a flawed
    business model. It’s the fiduciary duty of an executive to make the
    most money possible for his company’s shareholders. Call it a
    Machiavellian instinct, but successful CEOs run a business with
    dispassion. They’re swayed by concerns outside profit margins only to
    the extent that customers or clients might find fault in their
    perceived callousness. That’s why a company will donate $10,000 to a
    worthy cause and spend several million trumpeting its good deed.

    I’m
    not trying to judge them, just provide some context when I say that the
    for-profit business model is an anathema to anything requiring the
    public trust. Their true objective is not good journalism, per se. It’s
    simply the product of customer demand. That’s not to say that
    journalists are tainted—many believe they’re doing the public’s
    work—but the product will change to meet customer demands. Great
    journalism is the result of a commitment to the truth, whether or not
    the intended audience wants it.

    A not-for-profit business model shows that a news entity is not
    restrained by profit motives. It can run stories that companies, that
    might have been advertisers under the for-profit model, may not like.
    For example, Consumer Reports regularly runs critical stories about
    vehicle safety to the chagrin of Detroit’s Big Three. There’s always
    risk of a lawsuit, but the editors at CR don’t have to worry about
    offending advertisers. Ditto for the Associated Press and the St.
    Petersburg Times.

    I like the St. Petersburg Times model because it’s run by a university,
    where ideas are encouraged to flourish. I see the paper as one giant
    academic experiment. Now, more than ever, with the proliferation of bad
    information floating on the web, the public needs news sources it can
    trust.

  • The Torment of Solitude

    The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. One recent report puts the number of people behind bars at slightly higher than 2 million (including local jails). That translates to nearly one out of one hundred American adults. Of these, many are in Supermax penitentiaries where prisoners are kept under lock-down 23 hours a day . Inmates who are deemed especially dangerous are kept in solitary confinement where there is no interaction whatsoever with another human being.  The living conditions in the SHU (Security Housing Units), the prison cells designed to create complete isolation, have raised the concern of human rights groups. A UN task force investigating torture argued that the punishment meted out in the SHU is "inhumane and degrading."  Dr. Atul Gawande, the excellent writer of medical matters in the popular media, agrees. In an article in the New Yorker he calls such prison cells "hellholes" and argues that prolonged and forced solitude may be tantamount to torture.

    Solitary Confinement Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

    Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys. …..

    We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn’t have anything like a child’s dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don’t have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.

    Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the “soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.

    The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon……

    ……On December 4, 1991, Terry Anderson was released from captivity. He had been the last and the longest-held American hostage in Lebanon. I spoke to Keron Fletcher, a former British military psychiatrist who had been on the receiving team for Anderson and many other hostages, and followed them for years afterward. Initially, Fletcher said, everyone experiences the pure elation of being able to see and talk to people again, especially family and friends. They can’t get enough of other people, and talk almost non-stop for hours. They are optimistic and hopeful. But, afterward, normal sleeping and eating patterns prove difficult to reëstablish. Some have lost their sense of time. For weeks, they have trouble managing the sensations and emotional complexities of their freedom.

    For the first few months after his release, Anderson said when I reached him by phone recently, “it was just kind of a fog.” He had done many television interviews at the time. “And if you look at me in the pictures? Look at my eyes. You can tell. I look drugged.”

    Most hostages survived their ordeal, Fletcher said, although relationships, marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as anything less than torture. This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

    The long article is worth reading.

  • India – Israel: “Armsdog Millionaire” or A Lethal Love Affair?

    Ever since the Indian government established full diplomatic relations with the state of Israel in 1992, a couple of ideas, one historic and the other rooted in the present, have drawn the two countries into developing close, friendly ties. The first, the peaceful and harmonious history of Indian Jews is indeed a cause of pride and celebration for both countries. But the second reason that has strengthened Indian-Israeli relations is not so benign. Targets of radical Islamist terrorism, the two nations find common cause in increased militarization to counter that threat. However in my opinion, if India is not careful, it may feed off Israel's acute existential paranoia. Rather than solve its own problems of religious strife and human rights violations within and around its own borders with diplomacy, fairness and a cool head, India may be tempted into flexing its military muscles unnecessarily, with disastrous results.

    Israeli arms manufacturers see a huge market for cashing in on India's security fears. But instead of making an old fashioned sales pitch at arms fairs or in covert meetings, the Israeli armaments company, Rafael is promoting its lethal wares through a Bollywood style song & dance video. The kitschy lyrics evoke historic ties and current anxieties. Examples of the horrendously hilarious and gratingly juvenile dialog between what appears to be the Indian military establishment (the female) and Rafael (the male):  

    Rafael: We have been together for so long, trusting friends and partners. What more can I pledge?

    Indian Military: I need to feel safe and sheltered. Security and protection. Commitment and perfection. Defense and dedication.

    Rafael: I promise to defend you. Fulfill your expectations. Shield and support you [and] meet my obligations.

    The song continues with more such mindless and crappy exchanges punctuated by a very annoying  refrain of "Dinga Dinga Dee!"  I am not sure if the actors are a mix of Israelis of varied ethnic origins  who took a crash course in Indian film style dancing and felt confident enough to come up with this amazingly tacky video - some in the cast don't look very Indian. But I suspect that the sales video was probably inspired by the huge success of the movie Slumdog Millionaire.  Don't miss the heavy handed shot of the missile (a phallic symbol?) that floats in the foreground and other weapons in the background around which the dancers cavort.

    My co-blogger Sujatha said when she sent me the link, "Don't know whether to be appalled at this attempt to woo the Indian military establishment or double over with laughter." Appalling it definitely is. It could also have been funny if it weren't for the implied deadly message.

    Update: The New York Times reports:

    Wired’s Noah Shachtman notes via Twitter that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz got in touch with the company that made this video and reports that “The actors are Israelis of Georgian and Indian origin.” Haaretz adds that “A Rafael spokesperson said that the video had been received with much acclaim in India.”

  • Hope and Change in the Middle East?

    Not a chance.

  • Dick Cheney’s Assassination Inc.

    If this report turns out to be accurate, I don't see how even the faint hearted Obama administration can avoid seeking prosecution for war crimes … or at least a thorough investigation. (Unless the Obamaites too are using the same killing outfit?)

    Journalist Seymour Hersh speaking at the University of Minnesota:

    At a “Great Conversations” event (MP3) at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

    Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

    At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

    Replied Hersh:

    “Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

    "Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

    "Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

    "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

    "It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

    "In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

    "I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

    "But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

  • Carnival of the Liberals # 86

    The new CotL # 86 is up at The Greenbelt. With the economy on spindly legs, many of the posts are about money, naturally.

  • The Many Faces of the Bard (Sujatha)

    This picture on the right was the first picture of Shakespeare that I ever saw, on the cover of the Sfolio
    Merchant of Venice, which we had as part of our 10th grade English literature course.He seemed a dour-looking gentleman, but we nevertheless paid our respects at his altar, memorizing and declaiming his prose in all seriousness.

    Yesterday, a new picture was unveiled to the world, a far more vivid, aristocratic- looking character, who would give Joseph Fiennes fair competition in any screen test. See below (original link ) :
     Newsh

    "A detail of the newly discovered portrait of William Shakespeare, presented by the Shakespeare Birthplace trust, is seen in central London, Monday March 9, 2009. The portrait, believed to be almost the only authentic image of the writer made from life, has belonged to one family for centuries but was not recognized as a portrait of Shakespeare until recently. There are very few likenesses of Shakespeare, who died in 1616."
    This is being called the Cobbes portrait and has all (or at least a goodly proportion) of the Shakespearian scholars in a rare tizzy.
    From the Yahoo article:

    "Experts say it is the only portrait of William Shakespeare painted during his lifetime — in effect, the sole source of our knowledge of what the great man looked like.

    But
    they can't be certain. In the shifting sands of Shakespeare
    scholarship, where even the authorship of the plays is sometimes
    disputed, nothing is written in stone.

    "We're 90 percent sure that it's Shakespeare," said Paul Edmondson,
    director of learning at the Shakespeare Learning Trust, which plans to
    exhibit the portrait in Stratford-on-Avon. "You'll never be entirely
    certain. There will always be voices of dissent."

    Cp
    Consider that the earlier 'authoritative' version of the Bard's image was this one,called the Chandos portrait . 

    Which of these is the true face of the Bard, I wonder. Inspite of the lavish felicity of the newly-discovered portrait, I think I rather prefer the Chandos portrait. It seems more in line with what I imagine Shakespeare might have looked like, rather than the faintly stylized nobleman look of the Cobbes version.

    What do you think?