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Amor Mundi Newsletter 3/9/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Anthony Grafton calls David Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism "one of the saddest stories, and one of the most learned, I have ever read." Grafton knows that Anti-Judaism "is certainly not the first effort to survey the long grim history of the charges that have been brought against the Jews by their long gray line of self-appointed prosecutors." What makes this account of the long history of Jewish hatred so compelling is that Nirenberg asks the big question: Why the Jews? "[Nirenberg] wants to know why: why have so many cultures and so many intellectuals had so much to say about the Jews? More particularly, he wants to know why so many of them generated their descriptions and explanations of Jewishness not out of personal knowledge or scholarly research, but out of thin air—and from assumptions, some inherited and others newly minted, that the Jews could be wholly known even to those who knew no Jews." The question recalls the famous joke told during the Holocaust, especially amongst Jews in concentration camps. Here is one formulation of the joke from Antisemitism, the first book in the trilogy that comprises Hannah Arendt's magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism: "An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? Asks the one? Why the Jews? asks the other." Read more on the Arendt Center blog.
The SAT is Part Hoax, Part Fraud
News that the SAT is about to undergo a makeover leaves Bard College President Leon Botstein unimpressed: "The changes recently announced by the College Board to its SAT college entrance exam bring to mind the familiar phrase "too little, too late." The alleged improvements are motivated not by any serious soul searching about the SAT but by the competition the College Board has experienced from its arch rival, the ACT, the other major purveyor of standardized college entrance exams. But the problems that plague the SAT also plague the ACT. The SAT needs to be abandoned and replaced. The SAT has a status as a reliable measure of college readiness it does not deserve. The College Board has successfully marketed its exams to parents, students, colleges and universities as arbiters of educational standards. The nation actually needs fewer such exam schemes; they damage the high school curriculum and terrify both students and parents. The blunt fact is that the SAT has never been a good predictor of academic achievement in college. High school grades adjusted to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates are. The essential mechanism of the SAT, the multiple choice test question, is a bizarre relic of long outdated twentieth century social scientific assumptions and strategies. As every adult recognizes, knowing something or how to do something in real life is never defined by being able to choose a "right" answer from a set of possible answers (some of them intentionally misleading) put forward by faceless test designers who are rarely eminent experts. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician— and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member—pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity."
What Does the West Have to Prove?
Foreign policy types are up in arms—not over Russia's pending annexation of Crimea, but over the response in the West. By yelling loudly but doing nothing in Syria and now in the Ukraine, America and Europe are losing all credibility. The insinuation is clear. If we don't draw the line at Crimea, we will embolden Putin in Poland. Much as in the 1930s, the current NATO alliance seems unwilling to stand up for anything on principle if the costs are more than a few photo opportunities and some angry tweets. According to The American Interest, "Putin believes the West is decadent, weak, and divided. The West needs to prove him wrong." And in Politico, Ben Judah writes: "Russia's rulers have been buying up Europe for years. They have mansions and luxury flats from London's West End to France's Cote d'Azure. Their children are safe at British boarding and Swiss finishing schools. And their money is squirrelled away in Austrian banks and British tax havens.Putin's inner circle no longer fear the European establishment. They once imagined them all in MI6. Now they know better. They have seen firsthand how obsequious Western aristocrats and corporate tycoons suddenly turn when their billions come into play. They now view them as hypocrites—the same European elites who help them hide their fortunes."
In The New York Times Magazine, Siddhartha Deb profiles Arundhati Roy, the Indian writer best known in the West for her 1997 novel The God of Small Things. Though the book made Roy into a national icon, her political essays – in which she has addressed, among other issues, India's occupation of Kashmir, the "lunacy" of India's nuclear programme, and the paramilitary operations in central India against the ultraleft guerillas and indigenous populations – have angered many nationalist and upper-class Indians for their fierce critiques. Roy's most recent work, The Doctor and the Saint, is an introduction to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar's famous 1936 essay "The Annihilation of Caste" that is likely to spark controversy over her rebuke of Ghandi, who wanted to abolish untouchability but not caste. How does Roy see her fiction in relation to her politics? "I'm not a person who likes to use fiction as a means," she says. "I think it's an irreducible thing, fiction. It's itself. It's not a movie, it's not a political tract, it's not a slogan. The ways in which I have thought politically, the proteins of that have to be broken down and forgotten about, until it comes out as the sweat on your skin." You can read Deb's profile of Roy here, and an excerpt from The Doctor and the Saint here.
Comparing the MOOC and the GED, Michael Guerreiro wonders whether participants approach both programs with the same sense of purpose. The answer, he suspects, is no: "The data tells us that very few of the students who enroll in a MOOC will ever reach its end. In the ivy, brick, and mortar world from which MOOCs were spun, that would be damning enough. Sticking around is important there; credentials and connections reign, starting with the high-school transcript and continuing through graduate degrees. But students may go into an online course knowing that a completion certificate, even offered under the imprimatur of Harvard or UPenn, doesn't have the same worth. A recent study by a team of researchers from Coursera found that, for many MOOC students, the credential isn't the goal at all. Students may treat the MOOC as a resource or a text rather than as a course, jumping in to learn new code or view an enticing lecture and back out whenever they want, just as they would while skimming the wider Web. For many, MOOCs may be just one more Internet tool or diversion; in the Coursera study, the retention rate among committed students for a typical class was shown to be roughly on par with that of a mobile app. And the London Times reported last week that, when given the option to get course credit for their MOOC (for a fee), none of the thousand, or so students who enrolled in a British online class did." A potent reminder that while MOOCs may indeed succeed and may even replace university education for many people, they are not so much about education as a combination of entertainment, credential, and manual. These are important activities each, but they are not what liberal arts colleges should be about. The hope in the rise of MOOCs, as we've written before, is that they help return college to its mission: to teach critical thinking and expose students to the life of the mind.
The Afterlife of the American University
Noam Chomsky, speaking to the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers, takes issue with the idea that the American university was once living and is now undead, and seeks a way forward: "First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a "golden age." Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory. These are not radical ideas."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog Anna Metcalfe examines the multi-dimensional idea of action which Arendt discusses in The Human Condition. And in the Weekend Read, entitled 'Why the Jews?', Roger Berkowitz delves into anti-Judaism and its deeply seated roots in Western civilization.
Featuring Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.
Bard College partners with five local libraries for six weeks of activities, performances, and discussions scheduled throughout the Hudson Valley.
Learn more here.
'What Europe? Ideals to Fight for Today'
The HAC co-sponsors the second annual conference with Bard College in Berlin
March 27-28, 2014
ICI Berlin
Learn more here.
Why the Jews?
Anthony Grafton calls David Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism "one of the saddest stories, and one of the most learned, I have ever read." Grafton knows that Anti-Judaism "is certainly not the first effort to survey the long grim history of the charges that have been brought against the Jews by their long gray line of self-appointed prosecutors." What makes this account of the long history of Jewish hatred so compelling is that Nirenberg asks the big question: Why the Jews?
[Nirenberg] wants to know why: why have so many cultures and so many intellectuals had so much to say about the Jews? More particularly, he wants to know why so many of them generated their descriptions and explanations of Jewishness not out of personal knowledge or scholarly research, but out of thin air—and from assumptions, some inherited and others newly minted, that the Jews could be wholly known even to those who knew no Jews.
The question recalls the famous joke told during the Holocaust, especially amongst Jews in concentration camps. Here is one formulation of the joke from Antisemitism, the first book in the trilogy that comprises Hannah Arendt's magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism: "An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? Asks the one? Why the Jews? asks the other."
The point of the joke is clear: Anti-Judaism is as senseless and irrational as anti-bicyclists would be. "The theory that the Jews are always the scapegoat," Arendt writes, "implies that the scapegoat might have been anyone else as well"—even bicyclists. The question, then, is why the Jews? Grafton gives a clue to Nirenberg's subtle answer:
Nirenberg's answer—and to summarize it, as to summarize so much of this impassioned book, is to flatten it—is that ideas about the Jews can do, and have done, many different and important jobs. True, they are anything but stable: this is not a paper chase after some original idea of the Jew that crops up everywhere from early Christianity to early Nazism. Visions of the Jews change emphasis and content as the larger societies that entertain them change shape and texture. Ideas have multiple contexts, and Nirenberg shows dazzling skill and a daunting command of the sources as he observes the changes and draws connections between them and his authors' larger worlds.
Nirenberg's point is that anti-Judaism has nothing to do with Jews themselves. The negative ideas about Jews are held throughout history by a motley group of Christians, philosophers, tyrants, and martyrs. Shakespeare's account of Shylock is only one of many examples in which an intellectual employs anti-Jewish stereotypes—the Jew as greedy moneylender—to make a wider social critique, this time of the dangers of capitalism. London is becoming a city of commerce. There are no Jews in London. Yet Shakespeare turns to Jews in order to find a way to criticize the emergent commercial culture.
The use of negative sentiments about Jews to bash capitalism was common, Nirenberg writes, and carries through history from Jerome to Marx. Marx couches his critique of capitalism through the lens of a critique of Jews. Shakespeare does the same with commercial society. Jews stand in for the oppressed in the world, so that oppressing Christians could be seen as making them Jewish. Jews at the same time were seen as powerful bankers and powerful agents of world domination, so that any group of conspirators from Bolsheviks in Russia to media moguls in Hollywood were tarred with the pungent scent of Judaism.
Jews have been characterized by non-Jews for their obstinacy—their refusal, for example, to recognize the known truth that the Messiah had come, which enabled them to become the villains of both early Christian and early Muslim narratives. They have been characterized by non-Jews for their viciousness—their desire to desecrate the sacrament and murder Christian children, which allowed them to be used both by rebels against royal authority, and by kings, in the Middle Ages, as each side could claim, when the wind blew from the right quarter, that Jews were polluting society through their materialism and greed. . . . Nirenberg's parade of imagined and imaginary Jews—the most hideous procession since that of the flagellants in The Seventh Seal—stretches from the Arabian peninsula to London, and from the seventh century BCE to the twentieth CE. Working always from the original sources in their original languages, he observes the multiple ways in which imaginary Jews served the purposes of real writers and thinkers—everyone from Muhammad, founding a new religion, to Shakespeare, observing a new commercial society. God, here, is partly in the details: in the careful, tenderly observant way in which Nirenberg dissects everything from fierce political rhetoric to resonant Shakespearean drama. In works of the imagination, profound treatises, and acts of political radicalism, as he analyses them, imaginary Jews are wielded to powerful effect. He shows us the philosophes of the Enlightenment, those friends of humanity and enemies of tyrannical "infamy," as they develop a viciously negative vision of Jewish sterility and error to attack Christianity at its origins or to characterize the authorities whom they defied.
The only reservation Grafton voices concerns the univocality of Nirenberg's account. As exceptional as the account of anti-Jewish opinion is, Nirenberg largely ignores other perspectives and examples where real and imaginary Jews were accepted, embraced, and even praised.
As a social historian of conflict and an intellectual historian of the uncanny imagination, Nirenberg is unbeatable. But Jews and non-Jews lived other histories together as well. As Josephus recalled, when the thousands of diaspora Jews settled in the cities of the Roman world, across Asia Minor and Italy as well as Egypt, many of their pagan neighbors found their ways attractive. Pagans admired the Jews' pursuit of a coherent code for living and their worship of a single, unseen god. Some became "god-fearers," who accepted the Jewish god but did not hold full membership in the Jewish community. Some converted. Jews, meanwhile, pursued their own visions of high culture—whether these involved learning to write Greek tragedies about the Jewish past or rebuilding one's foreskin to make possible appearances at the gymnasium.
Grafton largely stops there and minimizes his "very small complaints….Anti-Judaism is that rare thing, a great book, as much in its ability to provoke disagreement as in its power to shape future writing on the vast territory that its author has so brilliantly mapped." But Grafton's small complaints deserve a wider hearing, especially as concerns the leading question he and Nirenberg pose, "Why the Jews?"
The overarching argument of Anti-Judaism is one of eternal antisemitism: Anti-Judaism had nothing to do with the Jews themselves. It is an attitude that sees the Jews to be to blame and is concerned with imaginary Jews as opposed to real Jews. Anti-Judaism is powerful and impactful, but it has no rational connection to reality. Here is how Michael Walzer aptly sums up Nirenberg's argument:
His argument is that a certain view of Judaism lies deep in the structure of Western civilization and has helped its intellectuals and polemicists explain Christian heresies, political tyrannies, medieval plagues, capitalist crises, and revolutionary movements. Anti-Judaism is and has long been one of the most powerful theoretical systems "for making sense of the world." No doubt, Jews sometimes act out the roles that anti-Judaism assigns them—but so do the members of all the other national and religious groups, and in much greater numbers. The theory does not depend on the behavior of "real" Jews.
As Walzer notes in his own review of Anti-Judaism in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Nirenberg includes an epilogue that takes on the most famous opponent of his view of eternal antisemitism, Hannah Arendt. As Arendt understands Nirenberg's view, "Jew-hatred is a normal and natural reaction to which history gives only more or less opportunity. Outbursts need no special explanation because they are natural consequences of an eternal problem." Since anti-Judaism is eternal and unending, it has been normalized. If thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument."
The point is that Grafton's minor complaint—that Nirenberg offers a magisterial account of Jew-hatred and ignores philo-semitism—is not so minor after all. By claiming that anti-Judaism is omnipresent and omnipotent—by focusing only on anti-Judaism and leaving aside those who embrace or praise Jews—Nirenberg risks normalizing antisemitism. Everyone traffics in Jew-hatred, even Jews. Such a move means, however, that we lose the ability to distinguish those who are antisemites from those who are not. Which is why Arendt argues that the eternal antisemitism thesis is one way to "escape the seriousness of antisemitism and the significance of the fact that the Jews were driven into the storm center of events."
Walzer and Nirenberg condemn Arendt for seriously asking the question "Why the Jews?" She insists that there are reasons for antisemitism, reasons that the Nazis sought to exterminate the Jews and not the bicyclists. There are such reasons, and anti-Judaism is not simply mysterious and irrational accident. She does not think those are good reasons. She of course never says that the Jews are to blame or that the Jews were responsible for the holocaust as Nirenberg and Walzer wrongly argue. But she does insist we confront the fact that Jews have proven such convenient targets for anti-Judaism, that we seek to understand why it is that over and over it is the Jews who are targeted. There is not one simple answer to that question, Why the Jews? But Arendt asks it seriously and courageously and seeks to come up with a series of potential answers, none of which have to do with her claiming that the Jews are to blame.
If you have The Origins of Totalitarianism on your shelf, take it out and read Chapter One on "Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense." Then read Grafton and Walzer on Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism. It will be a sad but thrilling weekend.
Stalin, Hitler, and Cromwell and the Politics of Memory
Peter Singer writes of the suddenly divergent attitudes toward the two greatest mass murderers of the 20th Century, Hitler and Stalin: "Hitler and Stalin were ruthless dictators who committed murder on a vast scale. But, while it is impossible to imagine a Hitler statue in Berlin, or anywhere else in Germany, statues of Stalin have been restored in towns across Georgia (his birthplace), and another is to be erected in Moscow as part of a commemoration of all Soviet leaders." When Putin was asked recently about his plan to erect statues of Stalin, he justified it by comparing Stalin to Oliver Cromwell: "Asked about Moscow's plans for a statue of Stalin, he pointed to Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Parliamentarian side in the seventeenth-century English Civil War, and asked: "What's the real difference between Cromwell and Stalin?" He then answered his own question: "None whatsoever," and went on to describe Cromwell as a "cunning fellow" who "played a very ambiguous role in Britain's history." (A statue of Cromwell stands outside the House of Commons in London.)"
The idea behind Putin's analogy seems to be that great leaders often need to commit crimes or atrocities. Cromwell was undoubtedly brutal to the Irish. Similarly, Stonewall Jackson was brutal to the South, but he is still honored by many. Of course, Stalin killed people as well, but he also won WWII against Hitler and elevated the Soviet Union to superpower status. The moral seems to be that great leaders often must dare to act in morally questionable ways, which does not disqualify them as great leaders worthy of commemoration: To make an omelet, goes the saying, you must break a few eggs.
Singer wants to argue, rightly, that there is a difference between leaders like Cromwell and someone like Stalin. His answer, however, is simply that Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Cromwell:
"Unlike Cromwell, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of very large numbers of civilians, outside any war or military campaign. According to Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands, 2-3 million people died in the forced labor camps of the Gulag and perhaps a million were shot during the Great Terror of the late 1930's. Another five million starved in the famine of 1930-1933, of whom 3.3 million were Ukrainians who died as a result of a deliberate policy related to their nationality or status as relatively prosperous peasants known as kulaks."
It is insufficient, however, to say that Stalin differs from Cromwell only in the number of people he killed. For one thing, the Irish population Cromwell had to suppress was significantly smaller than the European Jews or the Russian peasants. By one estimate, Cromwell killed nearly one-third of the million-and-a-half Catholics living in Ireland, all within a nine-month siege. While most of those fatalities were soldiers, many also were priests and civilians. Singer's retreat to a numerical distinction is simply too easy and does not take seriously enough the question: What, if anything, distinguishes Cromwell from Stalin?
Cromwell's conquest and pacification of Ireland was truly brutal. In a mere nine months, he and his Ironsides killed over 500,000 people. Further, Cromwell characterized and justified his killing as God's work. In one letter justifying his particularly bloody victory in Drogheda, he wrote: "This is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.... it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise work remorse and regret." A crusader for England, Cromwell can be seen both as an unprincipled warrior and as one of the great defenders and proponents of a uniquely English brand of political virtue. It is that ambiguity that allows him to be both reviled and also memorialized in England.
For all his incomparable evil, Stalin led the Soviet Union through its war with Germany. The Soviet resistance in the Battle of Leningrad is legendary. And Stalin ultimately led his country to a victory over the Nazis and elevated it to become one of the world's two 20th century superpower. He is a hero for many Russians. Sure, many also hate him; but so do many Irish and Scottish citizens of the United Kingdom disdain and hate Cromwell. Cromwell is memorialized in spite of these hatreds. Should Stalin not be memorialized for this contribution to Russian and Soviet history?
To answer that question, it is important to realize also how Stalin differs from Cromwell. What Stalin brought to politics was a totalitarian ideology, a politics that, as Hannah Arendt argues in "Image of Hell," "invariably appears in the clothes of an inevitable logical conclusion made on the basis of some ideology or theory." Stalin's mass killings were "justified" by his scientific theories of history, and the murdered were assigned to the "dying classes" whose deaths were justified because they stood on the wrong side of the march of historical progress. That only Stalin could know the "true interests of the proletariat" was simply one component of the general Stalinist program that imagined entire populations to be representatives of a "hostile class."
The technical method that Stalin, like Hitler, hit upon to support their ideologies was terror. For Arendt, Stalinism and Nazism are united in their reliance upon scientific ideologies held in place by apparatuses of terror. They differ in that the Nazi ideology calls upon nature and race to mark its enemies, while the Stalinist ideology turns to history. Racial ideologies are "more thorough and more horrible than the Marxist or pseudo-Marxists" or Stalinist varieties, but both are devastating insofar as the reliance on "science" sweeps away all opposition and all limiting factors. By adding to the reality of political power a "superstitious belief in the eternity of that power," scientific totalitarianisms magnify their self-justifications and thus enable the most extreme and unlimited doing of evil.
The difference between someone like Cromwell versus figures like Stalin and Hitler is that the latter employed unlimited terror in pursuit of the impossible victory of supposedly scientific absolute idea—be it the idea of a master race or a socialist utopia. Cromwell may have thought his was a divine task, but he did not arbitrarily decide that innocent people were suddenly enemies of the people, to be eliminated either on account of their religion, race, or supposed class interest. In short, Cromwell may have been a rabid and morally compromised political leader, but he was still engaged in a politics of interest, not a crusade of terror that dehumanized people according to quasi-scientific theories.
Stalin's crime was not simply to kill masses of people, for Cromwell and many other heroes have done that as well. What Stalin did is institute an entire totalitarian edifice in which the entire Soviet people were ruled by terror and fear. Stalin's totalitarian government was not morally ambiguous in the sense of Cromwell's, it was an amoral and immoral system in which anything could be justified in the name of power and control. To memorialize Stalin is—in spite of his undeniable importance for modern day Russia—is to look the other way not simply at mass murder, but at a totalitarian system of government that eviscerates freedoms for everyone. It is that horrific message that President Putin seems not to understand—or maybe he just doesn't find it so horrific.
Here is Peter Singer's attempt to distinguish Stalin from Cromwell. It is your weekend read.
Performing thinking: Arendt's Richard III
"It is better for you to suffer than to do wrong because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even a murderer. What kind of dialogue could you lead with him? Precisely the dialogue which Shakespeare let Richard III lead with himself after a great number of crimes had been committed:
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.
Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What from myself?"
-Hannah Arendt, 'Thinking and Moral Considerations'
'Thinking and Moral Considerations' is one of the most perfect examples of Arendt's late writing. A distillation of her career-long thinking on thinking, the essay performs what it so elegantly urges: it is an essay on thinking that thinks.
For Arendt, the moral considerations that follow from thinking and, more grievously, from not thinking are profound. Adolf Eichmann's "quite authentic inability to think" demonstrated to Arendt the arrival of new kind of evil in the world when she attended his trial in 1961. The airy emptiness of his speech was not the stupidity of a loathsome toad: his jabbering of cliché falling upon cliché sounded totalitarianism's evil in a chorus of thoughtlessness. Shallowness as exemplified by Eichmann cannot be fixed or given depth by reason; no doctrine will argue the thoughtless into righteousness. Only through the experience of thinking, Arendt insisted, of being in dialogue with oneself, can conscience again be breathed into life. Thinking may be useless in itself; it may be a solitary activity that can often feel a little bit mad. Yet thinking is the precondition for the return of judgment, of knowing and saying: "this is not right." By 1971, Arendt saw no evidence of a resurgence of thinking in the wake of atrocity.
Writing an essay on thinking that thinks and thus performing the experience of thinking is itself an act of defiance. Performing is the right verb here: Arendt knows she is staging her argument as a public spectacle. Her hero is Socrates: gadfly, midwife, stingray, provoker, deliverer and galvaniser of thinking in others. Socrates democratises perplexity. And when he has finished chatting with others, he carries on talking at home, with his quizzical, critical companion, that 'obnoxious fellow' with whom we are forever in dialogue -- the two with whom we make a thinking one. Arendt is fully aware that she is making a character out of Socrates. His inveterate dialogism is a model. Just as Dante's characters conserve as much historical reality as the poet needs to make them representative, so too, she says, with her Socrates. Against the vacant image of Eichmann inanely mouthing his own eulogy in front of the hangman's noose which opens the essay, we have Socrates: thoughtlessness versus thoughtfulness.
But what of the third character in Arendt's essay—Shakespeare's Richard III? The murderer who nobody wants to befriend? The villain who despite his best efforts cannot stop talking to himself?
Richard plays an odd, yet pivotal, role in Arendt's performance of thinking. On the one hand, he is Socrates' evil twin. Richard rejects conscience. 'Every man that means to live well endeavours … to live without it', he says. This is easy enough to do, says Arendt, because 'all he has to do is never go home and examine things.' Except, in Richard's case, this proves difficult. He may try to avoid going home, but eventually he runs into himself at midnight; and in solitude, like Socrates, Richard cannot help but have intercourse with himself. Alone he speaks with himself in soliliquoys (from the Latin solus – alone and loqui –to speak; Arendt's beloved Augustine is believed to have first conceived the compound). And this is what makes this villain—one who many have wanted to claim for the calculating murderousness of the twentieth century—much more like Socrates than Eichmann.
Both Socrates and Richard have the capacity to think. True, Richard thinks himself into villainy—he 'proves himself a villain'—but this is precisely his pathos in Arendt's drama. If it is better to suffer than to do harm, it is also better to have suffered at the hands of Richard who at least thought about what he was doing, than suffered as a number in one of Eichmann's filing cards, the pathetic loner who joins a murderous movement not because he's frightened of who might await him at home, but because he doesn't even suspect anyone might be there in the first place. For all the ham-fisted productions that want him to be, Richard is not a Nazi villain in early modern disguise. Better that he could have been, of course, because then we wouldn't have to contemplate the particular thoughtlessness of contemporary evil.
Richard is no Osama Bin Laden, Colonel Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein either, despite comparable violent last stands (and the corpse lust that attended them). This is well understood by Mark Rylance's recent performance of Richard in the Globe Theater production that played in London last year and that is rumoured to open on Broadway soon. Rylance's performance of Richard is like no other. It is also a performance that makes Arendt's thinking more relevant than ever.
Rylance understands that since the War on Terror, post 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, after Guantanamo, rendition and drone wars, it would be a travesty to play Richard's villainy as safely and exotically other (by contrast, in 1995 it was entirely possible to set the play in a 1930s Nazi context, and have Ian McKellen play the role for its cruel humour with a knowing nod to Brecht). Rylance's Richard is plausible, pathetic even; he is compelling not in his all-too-evident evil but in his clumsy vulnerability. His creepy teeth sucking, and ever-twisting body mark a silent but persistent cogitation; he is a restless, needy, villain. Like a child, Rylance's Richard grabs at his conscience— he thinks—and then chucks it away as one more 'obstacle', just as he spits in his mother's face at the very moment he most desires she recognise him. In a neat echo of Arendt's analysis of how the loneliness of totalitarianism feeds thoughtless evil, the loveless hunchback fights solitude in an effort to avoid the midnight hour; orchestrating collective murder is his defence against being alone with his thoughts. (This was observed by my theater companion who, being ten years old—and a British schoolboy—understands the connection between feeling left out and group violence well). Richard's tragedy is that circumstances turned him into a serial killer, to this extent he is a conventional villain; his pathos, however, as this production shows, is to be poised between thinking and thoughtlessness, between Socrates and Eichmann.
'No. Yes, I am/Then fly. What from myself?' When Rylance speaks this soliloquy he stutters slightly, giggles and looks—as Arendt might have anticipated—a little perplexed. This is not a knowing perplexity; Richard does not master his conscience, nothing is done with the solitary dialogue, but the thinking is there even if Richard himself seems unsettled by its presence. In refusing to play Richard simply as one of the 'negative heroes in literature' who, Arendt argues, are often played as such 'out of envy and resentment', Rylance brilliantly captures the last moment before evil becomes banal.
To play Richard's cruelty alongside his vulnerability is not to fail to recognise his villainy, as some have complained; rather, it is to dramatize the experience of thinking in the process of being painfully and violently lost. With pathos, we might think, is the only way to play Richard III today. The Globe's production is a late, but utterly timely, companion to Arendt's essay.
-Lyndsey Stonebridge
Amor Mundi 4/21/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
That Time Dickens Didn't Meet Dostoevsky
Russianist Eric Naiman considers the career of the British historian A.D. Harvey, whom he believes is responsible for propagating the claim that Dostoevsky met Dickens during an 1862 visit to London. Naiman believes that, under various pseudonyms and over the course of several decades, Harvey has written a number of articles that occasionally criticize, but usually praise, his own work. Those of you thinking about grad school beware; Naiman suggests that Harvey-who, despite having written more than a dozen books of various kinds, has no academic affiliation-may have been driven to this by the scholarly life: "Even for holders of tenured university positions, scholarship can make for a lonely life. One spends years on a monograph and then waits a few more years for someone to write about it. How much lonelier the life of an independent scholar, who does not have regular contact, aggravating as that can sometimes be, with colleagues. Attacking one's own book can be seen as an understandable response to an at times intolerable isolation. How comforting to construct a community of scholars who can analyse, supplement and occasionally even ruthlessly criticize each other's work. I've traced the connections between A. D. Harvey, Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra, but they may be part of a much wider circle of friends."
Ria Chhabra decided to check out the hype around the health benefits of organic food. She tracked the health and vitality of two groups of fruit flies, one swarming around conventional bananas and potatoes and the other given pricier organic fare. There has been great skepticism recently about the benefits of organic food. But Chhabra's results-recently published in PLOS ONE, an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication-show increased fertility, lower stress, and longer lives for the flies fed organic produce. What makes this study especially fascinating, is that Chhabra is only 16. Read the story of how her high school science project is making waves throughout the world of science.
Christina Davis ponders the meaning of the space in the title of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." She suggests that his use of "waste" as an adjective gives it a temporal quality, one that suggests an impermanent state: "In this phrase, he was likely echoing St. Augustine's concern about the ossification of certain written words into an orthodoxy: "I should write so that my words echo rather than to set down one true opinion that should exclude all other possibilities.""
Terence Malick offers a cinema inspired by grand conceptual oppositions and profound experience. In Tree of Life, Malick meditates on the tension between grace and will. In his new film, To the Wonder, Malick offers archetypes of the artist, the rationalist, the personal experience, and passion. In The New Yorker, Richard Brody rightly revels in the magic of the film: "What Malick is after-by way of his archetypes and through his images-is religious experience as such, and he defines it in a scene set in the priest's church. There, an elderly, gray-bearded black man who is cleaning the stained glass speaks and tells the priest what he's missing-"You've got to have a little more excitement"-and, a moment later, shows him what he means, exclaiming, "The power hits you!" and speaking, excitedly, in tongues, then putting his hand on the stained glass and saying that he feels the warmth of the light."
Nick Murray interviews landscape architect Diana Balmori about the changing role of her profession. Balmori, for her part, emphasizes that it is not enough to simply return a landscape to nature, nor to conquer it somehow. Instead, she says that she tries to build in a way that strengthens relationships between an environment and its inhabitants.
Music in the Holocaust: Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism
Part Three: Kurt Weill and the Modernist Migration: Music of Weill and Other Emigres
Learn more here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Roger Berkowitz considers drone warfare through an Arendtian lens and looks at the misuse and abuse of Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil."
Surreal Library
Nihilism and Globalization
What a week it has been in the world of corporate criminality and governmental spinelessness!
On Monday, the British Bank HSBC agreed to pay a fine for $1.92 billion for repeated and systematic violations of two U.S. laws to prevent money laundering. The bank transferred hundreds of billions of dollars for its clients, likely enabling crimes ranging from tax evasion to terrorism. Once again, no one will be indicted, let alone found guilty. The reason: concern that criminal charges would hurt the bank's business and, because it is so big, destabilize the financial system. The story is too familiar: A bank that is too big to fail gets away with criminal activity with simply a fine. While $2 billions sounds big, it is less than one quarter's profit for HSBC. Oh, and the banks said it was sorry, sort of: "We accept responsibility for our past mistakes,'' HSBC's chief executive said in the statement. Mistakes are not crimes.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday in London, British authorities did make some arrests, something U.S. authorities still seem unwilling or unable to do.
In a predawn raid, police took three men into custody at their homes on the outskirts of London. One of the men is Thomas Hayes, 33, a former trader at UBS and Citigroup, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. The other two men arrested worked for the British brokerage firm R P Martin, said another person briefed on the matter.
These arrests come in the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal, one of the biggest financial scandals ever uncovered. By colluding to fix interest rates that banks use to lend to other banks, banks ensured that they would make more money on their own student loans, mortgages, and municipal financings and consumer loans. The suits by injured parties will be keeping lawyers well paid for a decade.
On Wednesday, Bill Hwang, a high-flying hedge fund Director, pled guilty of wire fraud on behalf of his now defunct hedge fund Tiger Asia and admitted to improper trading by the firm. But Hwang himself walked out of court an innocent man, as the NY Times reports:
Federal prosecutors did not bring charges against Mr. Hwang himself. But he and his head trader, Ray Park, settled a parallel lawsuit brought against them by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Hwang and his fund will pay $44 million in fines, and he agreed to a five-year ban from the securities industry.
Once again, no one in the United States is being indicted or going to jail. And yet the federal prosecutor claimed victory for the investing public, seemingly unworried about the law-abiding public:
This criminal activity by a hedge fund operator, one of the biggest in the world, is unacceptable," Paul J. Fishman, the United States attorney in New Jersey, said in a statement. "The investing public must be reassured that they are investing in markets that are operated fairly.
Also on Wednesday Deutsche Bank, the largest German banking behemoth, announced that its offices were raided by German investigators as part of an investigation into tax evasion by two of its top executives. Deutsche Bank has many problems, including a continued investigation to its role in the LIBOR rate fixing scandal that has already claimed settlements from Barclays in England and UBS in Switzerland (see Tuesday and Thursday).
On Thursday, the Swiss financial giant UBS announced that it was close to agreeing upon a $1 billion settlement with regulators in the U.S., Britain, Switzerland and Canada around the LIBOR rate fixing scandal (see Tuesday above).
While some minor players are being charged, once again there seems to be no interest in holding any major players at the bank responsible. As the NY Times writes,
The Swiss bank has reached a conditional immunity deal with the antitrust arm of the Justice Department, which may protect the bank from criminal prosecution under certain conditions The Justice Department's criminal division, however, could still take action against the bank. UBS also has said it is working with Canadian antitrust authorities by handing over e-mails and other documents implicating other banks.
Over the weekend, hundreds of demonstrators around England protested against Starbucks for its tax minimization strategy. Starbucks capitulated, in part, agreeing to pay a one-time voluntary tax payment to England, something that sets the dangerous precedent of tax blackmail and does nothing to address the underlying problem. Let's be clear. Starbucks broke no laws. But it did use creative accounting to minimize its taxes. For example, the profitable Starbucks franchises in England paid large fees to Starbucks' subsidiary firms in low-tax countries for use of Starbucks branding, logos, and for the use of the firms' coffee recipes. In effect, Starbucks laundered its corporate profits in high-tax England by transferring its profits to lower-cost jurisdictions. This is legal. The business community mysteriously finds it ethical. The protesters are rightly incensed. The real question is why, after hearing about such shenanigans for years, do legislatures continue to refuse to pass basic legislation making such tax minimization standards illegal.
The big story of the week remains the ever-growing insider-trading scandal that has been revolving around the Greenwich hedge fund SAC Capital run by Steven Cohen. Now 12 employees and alumni of Cohen's firm have been indicted for insider trading (six while working for SAC and six for misdeeds after they left to start their own firms). Cohen himself has not been accused of wrongdoing, but the latest of his allegedly criminal underlings, Matthew Martoma, was Cohen's right hand man for two years. And the prosecutors know that SAC sold its large positions in two drug-development companies and then shorted the stocks in those companies based on inside information from a trial of those drugs. And they know that Martoma and Cohen had a 20 minute phone conversation discussing their investment in those companies over the weekend before they sold their shares the following week. There is no clear evidence that Martoma told Cohen about his illegally obtained information. While both men remain innocent until proven guilty, Cohen's firm SAC Capital is clearly a place that intentionally or not encourages illegal activities. Cohen points to his large compliance office of 30 legal and support officers, but one has to wonder about the priorities at the fund.
Actually, not much wonder is necessary. As Jesse Eisinger writes in an excellent essay in Thursday's New York Times, few of SAC's investors seem to care about the apparent ethical culture of laxity that surrounds his firm.
Astonishingly, investors don't seem to mind terribly. They added as much as $1.6 billion in new capital to SAC's flagship fund from 2010 to the end of 2011, when the insider trading investigation was in full bloom, according to Absolute Return, an industry trade publication.
At least some big institutions have begun to contemplate thinking about perhaps withdrawing money from Mr. Cohen. Congratulations. What took them so long? Citigroup's private bank has told its clients not to put in new money, according to Bloomberg. What about getting their clients out? Why hasn't bank given that advice before this?
The biggest, most sophisticated investors certainly put an enormous amount of pressure on hedge funds. But almost none of it is about ethics and clean culture. It's about performance. A fund that runs a few ticks lower than its peers for several months running can get put out of business.
Many institutional investors have so perfected the art of looking the other way that they make bystanders on a New York City subway platform look like models of social responsibility.
The operating standard is to allow fund managers — or affiliated businesses or employees — to go as far as they can until the moment they are caught doing something wrong. Through their actions, Citigroup, Blackstone and the others are sending a message that they will forgive rotten ethics for great returns.
Eisinger asks the right question: At what point does "willful blindness turn to complicity"? It is hard to resist that basic conclusion.
While all these scandals were unfolding, I led a discussion on Monday evening about The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis at the last great bookstore in New York City, Book Culture, up near Columbia University. We had a standing room only crowd and ran out of chairs (thank you all). The discussion featured excellent panelists, all of whom are contributors to the new book of the same name published by Fordham University Press and edited by myself and my colleague Taun Toay. The other panelists were Robyn Marasco, Paul Levy, and Vincent Mai.
One of the main issues raised was the sea change in values. In his contribution to the volume, Vincent Mai, former Chairman of AEA Investors and now of Cranemere LLC, writes:
The first thing is just a complete change in the values of the people who are in the financial community in Wall Street, and in the culture. And, as I said, it's not to say that the people in my era were all angels and that they're all devils today. But, having said that, there has been a huge cultural shift.
Mai tells that when he began
there was a set of ground rules that governed the way you did business that imposed a discipline that was central to the way Wall Street worked. It was the same in all the firms. And I've watched with a combination of fascination and horror at the way the world has changed, turned upside down.
Paul Levy, Managing Director of JLL Partners, reminds us that good people work in business but he laments that these people are increasingly trained in narrow specialties and without the broad interests nurtured by excellent liberal arts educations. Levy writes,
I am no saint, but I can tell you that when I started my working careers as a corporate lawyer I wanted to be financially successful, although I did not have a firm view on how to get there.
Nowadays, Levy laments, college graduates make $150,000 per annum and quickly expect to make $300-$400,000 and soon more than $1 million. He writes: "Getting money has become the goal, instead of building the person."
Robyn Marasco resisted the notion that greed is behind our current problems. Greed, she writes, is often good.
Moralizing against greed is no match for the realist recognition that what is often called greed—greed for life, greed for love, and greed for knowledge—is constitutive of human striving, what Spinoza called conatus, what Schopenhauer names the will to life, what Nietzsche terms the will to power. Greed is, indeed, good, if by it we mean a dynamic and energizing force that resists satisfaction in any particular object.
Our conversation touched on the moral hazard created by the lack of criminal sanctions on any of the main players in the financial crisis, something that the news summary from this week highlights. Above all, we spoke about the upending of values and the question of how to change or restore earlier values that have been lost. And, of course, we talked about Hannah Arendt.
Few thinkers saw more clearly than Arendt the connection between what Nietzsche called the devaluing of the highest values and what we today call global capitalism. Ethics requires setting limits to behavior and the political bodies that set such limits are the trustees of firms, city councils, state governments, and national legislatures. Whether these ethical limits are legal or moral, they establish common sense criteria about what is right and what is wrong.
Arendt sees that globalization—what she at the time understood as imperialism—is actually a political corollary of nihilism, the illegitimacy of all moral and political limits. If we as a people no longer feel sure that certain behavior is simply wrong, we will be willing increasingly to lower our ethical standards in order to compete with firms and nations that operate according to lower or different standards. There seems to be no ethical limits to the depths to which our companies will sink in the pursuit of profit; and profit becomes the only meaningful and objective criteria to judge success in a world in which all other values are relative and questionable.
Arendt's insight into the intellectual origins of the rise of capitalist rationality is the impulse behind The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis. The book grew out of the 2009 Hannah Arendt Center conference and its recent publication is as timely as ever. On this week of seemingly endless examples of corporate malfeasance, our new book is your weekend read.
Getting Lost in a Maze of Books
Brazilian artists Marcos Saboya and Gualter Pupo have constructed an enormous
maze in London, covering more than 5,000 square feet, made from 250,000 books.
Hannah Arendt Falls in Love?
Hannah Arendt falls in love with the creator of the modern Olympics? That is the premise of a new fllm, Who is Community? by artists Bob and Roberta Smith and film director Tim Newton.
In the film Who is Community? Arendt and Pierre de Coubertin meet at Loughton station on the Central line, and fall in love.
Painted cut-out figures of Arendt and Coubertin will also appear at various venues around Stratford.


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Typical Behavioral Health Directors report a focused set of job skills. Most notably, facility with Operations Management, Program Development, and Clinical Supervision are correlated to pay that is significantly above average, leading to increases of 30 percent, 13 percent, and 6 percent, respectively. Experience with Clinical Supervision is often linked with knowledge of Program Management.
Median of all compensation (including tips, bonus, and overtime) by years of experience.
For Behavioral Health Directors, experience does not seem to be a major factor in determining pay. Relatively untried employees who have less than five years' experience make $62K, but folks with five to 10 years under their belts enjoy an appreciably larger median of $72K. For Behavioral Health Directors, 10 to 20 years of experience on the job amounts to an average salary of $76K. In the end, more experience does seem to mean larger paychecks; seasoned Behavioral Health Directors with more than 20 years of experience earn a predictably higher median salary of $86K.
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text: SHRM/U.S. Travel Association: Vacation's Impact on the Workplace 11/12/2013 Permissions SHRM, in collaboration with U.S. Travel Association, conducted a survey to examine HR professionals' opinions about the importance of vacation. A large majority of HR professionals believe that when employees take vacation, it makes a positive impact on performance, morale, wellness, culture, productivity and retention. This study also looks at the amount of vacation offered to employees, rollover policies, and the number of unused vacation days. Vacation's Impact on the Workplace To download a copy of this survey click here. Permissions Links Related Content The Limits of Unlimited Vacation President Obama's 2015 Agenda to Focus on Key HR Issues Unlimited Paid Time Off: A Good or Bad Idea? Top Employer-Offered Holidays in 2015: Findings from New SHRM Survey 2015 Holiday Schedules ADVERTISING LINKS


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Why Is Target Refusing To Sell Beyonce's Album?
Bruce Jenner Rocks Red Nail Polish, Smokes Cig on His Birthday
Kanye West Just Killed a Kardashian Family Tradition
This Star Pretty Much Hates Living Next Door to Taylor Swift
Watch Miley Cyrus Fall Down on Stage Wearing a Fake Butt
Selena's Scandalous Selfie Sparks Drama
Mismatched Celebrity Couples That Weirded Us Out
Kim Kardashian's New Eye Color Will Creep You Out
Watch Miley Cyrus Fall Down on Stage While Wearing a Fake Butt
What Does Kylie Jenner Look Like Without Makeup?
Gisele: I Knew Tom Brady Was 'The One' On Our First Date
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Sizzle Factor: 20 of Adriana Lima's Sexiest, Sultriest Editorials to Date
There's no question in our minds that Adriana Lima is on the short list of sexiest supermodels ever. Today, the Brazilian bombshell celebrates her 31st birthday, and we have to say, since her earliest days as a Victoria's Secret Angel in 2000, she's had the sultry look down to a refined art. And we're not just talking about her racy GQ covers and appearances in swimsuit catalogs — she's amped up the sizzle factor with her smoldering blue-eyed gaze alone in the likes of Elle, Vogue Paris, and V Magazine. One of our favorite Adriana moments? Her seductive turn as a retro siren à la Sophia Loren in the February 2011 issue of Vogue Italia. Needless to say, we can't wait to see what the stunning supermodel has in store for us next. In the meantime, click on for 20 of her sexiest editorials to date.
Photos courtesy of Fashion Gone Rogue
- This model's been missing from Fashion Week! — Style.com
- Marc Jacobs said what about young designers?! — The Cut
- Why, yes, we want a Chanel bag made out of Rice Krispies — HuffPost Style
- Miley Cyrus forgot an article of clothing again, but blame it on Tom Ford — InStyle
- It's OK to be preppy and still love leather — Racked
- We're looking forward to the tour costumes from this stylish duo — SheFinds
- Clémence Poésy shows us what it's like to be a Chloé girl — Who What Wear
- Read this before you nix your tights in the cold — Lucky
- What happens when a pair of very chic women wear Crocs . . . — Man Repeller


text: 1500 pts Collectables Survey <KSIS VIP Club Take our survey and tell us what types of items you enjoy collecting. Sign in to Participate Category: Q & A Tags: Auction, Survey Share on Facebook Share on Twitter More Leave a comment Send to a friend! Print this page Pin it! Reddit This! Share on Tumblr! More Ways To Get and Use Points Enquiring Minds: Questions You GetEnquiring Minds: Work Interrupting LifeYes or BS: John CandyEnquiring Minds: Your Side of the Bed5:20 Word of the Day March 201512:20 Word Of the Day March 2015


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Lennox Road
Almost all errands require a car.
Score Details
Lennox Road has a Walk Score of 17 out of 100. This location is a Car-Dependent neighborhood so almost all errands require a car.
Nearby schools include Eastminster School, Edwards Middle School and Victory Christian School.
The closest grocery stores are Natural Path Health Foods, ALDI Conyers, GA and ATM (Flash Foods).
Nearby coffee shops include Tropical Smoothie Cafe, Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts. Nearby restaurants include Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q, Cielo Mexican Grill and Panda Express.
Explore how far you can travel by car, bus, bike and foot from Lennox Road.


text:
- --- In email@example.com, "jonas4321" <jonas4321@j...> wrote:
> I don't care if I can fit the DAM in between the layers, I will be
Jonas, I just re-read the above... I don't think you will need the
> putting CCF pads in there (I am going for 0*F and lower). I envision
> the DAM being in the hammock with me. I am certain (at this point,
> anyway) that I don't want an underquilt, as weight is not my primary
> concern.
ccf pads. Purchase or make an SPE. Because the hammock will tend to
"wall" you in (Think the letter "U"), your knees/elbows get cold
against the sides when you toss & turn or side-sleep. If you are not
familiar with the SPE, take a look at Mr. Speer's site. BTW, the SPE
is designed to hold the *** 20" **** wide pads. Wider than that will
be problematic in the hammock causing you to be way too high.
> I hear they are both a bit clumsy to inflate, but would like some
The FIRST time, it took 15 or more bags-of-air. Since then, I have it
> feedback on that.
"firm" in 5 or 6 puffs.
> In either case, I believe I will be getting the 26" wide model.
See above. I think you will have some problems with the wider 26"
version. What kind of hammock are you using...? Try putting a rigid
piece of cardboard in there that is 26" wide and I think you will see
what I am saying.
Happy Trails,
J.D. - Thank you all for your advice, opinions and experience. I just
overnighted a check to Warmlite for the 70" DAM (the largest one),
I'll let you know what happens. I hope to field test it in the
Adirondacks the weekend of the 20th (they are pretty sure they can
have it to me by then). I have a cabin right next to me for a bail-out
if needed.
I'm experimenting with a Coleman air mattress now to see if I need to
adjust the "raise" of the sides in my Speer-type hammock, given that I
know I'll be riding higher. Gotta love those double sheet bend ends-
piece of cake to undo and redo! Thanks again to whoever suggested that.


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If you were able to listen in on Friday's Childhood Obesity Summit at the White House, you already know, then, what a treat we had! It was superb to see professionals from all walks of life, in the same rooms, brainstorming together for 3 1/2 hours to see how all could come together to improve kids' health specifically in regards to the childhood obesity epidemic; these included representatives from the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, local private practice pediatricians, soda company executives, schools and Parent-Teacher Associations, Sesame Street, Eating Disorder specialists, the media and advertising executives, economists, and many more. Dr. Angela Fals, Childhood Obesity National Examiner, sat in on the session entitled "Empowering Parents and Caregivers". Following are some of the major points mentioned, in no particular order:
** This last point was very important is key for anyone working with parents and primary caregivers to understand -- It was stated that providing parents and caregivers with information or education alone has been shown to not be very effective for changing lifestyles over the long term -- what did seem to make a lasting difference, however, was connecting emotionally (not analytically) , getting real with them, learning their particular lifestyles, their particular struggles, etc. and providing them with relevant better options.
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Researchers identify a human DNA element that spurs neurogenesis and brain growth when placed in mice.
Researchers identify a human DNA element that spurs neurogenesis and brain growth when placed in mice.
Long-term marijuana smokers have less gray matter in their orbitofrontal cortex than nonsmokers, but other brain circuits may compensate by increasing connectivity.
Study finds abnormal cellular layering within the brains of children with autism, pointing to inappropriate development prenatally.
Neuroscientist and pediatric neurologist Peter Huttenlocher, who discovered that synapse growth peaks in early childhood, has passed away at age 82.
The epigenetic modification of brain cells undergoes great shifts over the course of mouse and human development.
Investment in brain research should aim at protecting the brains of the future from harmful environmental pollutants.
Premature infants show brain activity patterns in response to language similar to those of adults.
Using Bluetooth devices in classrooms reverses dyslexia and improves reading ability.
Adolescent rats exposed to stress grow into pathologically aggressive adults, behaviors that may be explained by accompanying epigenetic changes and altered brain activity.
The remarkable ability of the star-nosed mole to interpret its surroundings through touch is yielding clues about mammalian sensory processing in general.


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