United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

Jay-Z is one hip hop's most successful rappers.  --  He is also an extraordinary businessman (in 2010 he was estimated to have a net worth of $450 million) and a staple of celebrity journalism, having married Beyoncé in 2008.  --  This month Jay-Z is making news for his collaborative (with Kanye West) 12-track album "Watch the Throne," released a few days ago after successfully being kept under wraps for months.  --  Back in December, Kelefa Sanneh discussed in the New Yorker Jay-Z's claim, presented in his coffee-table book Decoded (2010), that his lyrics deserve to be appreciated as poetry.  --  But for Kelefa Sanneh, poetry hardly has enough "cachet," as he puts it, to be worth the effort:  "Reading rap lyrics may be useful, but it’s also tiring.  The Jay-Z of Decoded is engaging; the Jay-Z of his albums is irresistible.  The difference has something to do with his odd, perpetually adolescent-sounding voice, and a lot to do with his sophisticated sense of rhythm.  Sure, he’s a poet -- and, while we’re at it, a singer and percussionist, too.  But why should any of these titles be more impressive than 'rapper'?"[1]  --  COMMENT:  You'd think that with a degree in literature from Harvard University, Sanneh wouldn't need to have this explained to him.  --  His words speak volumes about the extent to which the cultural status of poetry has sunk.  --  Sanneh doesn't seem to realize that the ascription of lasting importance or deeper significance to hip-hop lyrics largely depends on that status....

Holy Ignorance, the 2010 translation of Olivier Roy's 2008 La sainte ignorance, proposes an original and persuasive theory of fundamentalism as "a symptom of, rather than a reaction against, the increasing secularization of society," Alain Wolfe wrote on Christmas Eve in the New York Times Book Review.[1]  --  Fundamentalism is not really about restoring religion, but is rather "a manifestation of holy ignorance, Roy’s biting term meant to characterize the worldview of those who, having lost both their theology and their roots, subscribe to ideas as incoherent as they are ultimately futile."  --  For non-fundamentalists, "[t]he most important thing to know about those urging the restoration of a lost religious authenticity is that they are sustained by the very forces they denounce."  --  COMMENT:  Think Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.  --  BACKGROUND:  You can read Olivier Roy's thoughts about the Arab spring here (if you read French)....

Read no more:  the piece on the 2012 election reproduced below from the Aug. 18 New York Review of Books isn't worth the effort.  --  Andrew Hacker does make one good point:  "I find it puzzling that Boehner, Paul Ryan, and most of their colleagues in both chambers believe that their platform has a national majority behind it.  The fact is that current House Republicans received 30,799,391 votes, compared with Obama’s 69,498,215 total."  --  But his review of four recent books is uninsightful, and, indeed, inconsistent.  --  Instead of debunking bogus GOP claims, Hacker writes:  "How might he counter the new populism of the GOP?"  --  Then he changes course again:  "While Americans may not identify along class lines, they are not unaware of which interests gain when the GOP wins."  --  What insight.  --  This is such a disappointing performance that it makes us think the over-eighty Queens College guru should pass the NYR baton to someone else....

Marshall McLuhan realized early on, according to a new book by Douglas Coupland reviewed by Pico Iyer in the New York Review of Books, "that the same textual skills that might turn him into just another literary professor in the provinces could, if applied to all the trivial, proliferating stuff of the postwar world, make him something original.  'I find most pop culture monstrous and sickening,' he would say in later years, even as he was helping to father the field of media studies and setting off generations of unfettered deconstructionists."[1]  --  "Like Thoreau before him, McLuhan sought to draw upon classical learning to show how much we have become tools of the tools we devise."  --  "If McLuhan was overrated in the Sixties, because he managed to intuit the voice of the times before the times did, he is undervalued now precisely because, as he told us, our sense of history is so truncated and our sense of logic and continuity so fractured.  We’re so tuned in to the new, we can’t see how old it is." ...

Given the new interest in the veracity of Greg Mortenson's work, critiques of his two books that were offered in March 2010 by UFPPC's book discussion group, Digging Deeper, have been posted below, with links to complete synopses of them.[1]  --  It should have been apparent to any careful reader that Three Cups of Tea was an inspirational volume offering a romanticized version of events.  --  Frankly, no costly investigative mission to Afghanistan was needed to detect that.  --  Stones into Schools, on the other hand, appears to be a much more estimable, and more interesting, work.  --  Most news accounts of this controversy seem bent on simplifying what is certainly a very complex story.[2]  --  For example, they often ignore the fact that Three Cups of Tea was written by David Oliver Relin -- a key fact, as Mortenson's long interview with Outside magazine, posted on the magazine's website on April 18, indicates.  --  For our part, we believe Mortenson when he says:  "It's really complicated."[3] ...

According to Ronald Dworkin's new magnum opus, Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), "we have a right to do only what is permitted by a government that has equal concern for each individual, the concepts of liberty and equality are fully integrated," writes A.C. Grayling in the Apr. 28 New York Review of Books.[1]  --  Dworkin argues further that "no government is truly democratic unless voters treat each other as partners rather than just as competitors.  To treat each other as partners means that political decisions must treat everyone with equal concern in the sense described earlier: that such decisions -- whether on taxes, welfare, or education -- must count the impact on each citizen as of equal importance."  --  "Dworkin acknowledges that this way of eliminating such conflicts might seem to gain him his victory too easily -- arriving at the unity of values by the redefinition of terms, thus conjuring conflict away," Grayling notes.  --  But there's no escaping this for Dworkin, because he believes "that there is no value-neutral perspective from which the accuracy of an interpretation of anything can finally be judged.  In that sense, as Dworkin puts it, interpretation is value-laden 'all the way down.'"  --  He denies the distinction between meta-ethics and substantive morality.  --  "[I]n his final chapter [Dworkin offers] a freshly formulated survey of how his thesis of the unity of values leads to, and justifies, his claim that law is a part of political morality."  --  BACKGROUND:  Articles by Ronald Dworkin, 79, a prominent legal scholar who has taught  for many years at NYU, have long been a fixture of the New York Review of Books.  --  In 2007 Dworkin's "original and highly influential legal theory grounding law in morality, characterized by a unique ability to tie together abstract philosophical ideas and arguments with concrete everyday concerns in law, morals, and politics" was cited by the University of Bergen in Norway in awarding him the Holberg International Memorial Prize for academic scholarship in the arts, humanities, social sciences, law, and theology....

Or, to a try a variation:  It's impossible to foresee the future and it always will be.  --  Not so long ago, UFPPC's book group, Digging Deeper, read with profit (thanks to a recommendation from psychologist Ron Boothe) Dan Gardner's The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't -- and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger, so it's worth noting that his new book is just out, entitled Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better (Dutton, March 2011).  --  Below is an enthusiastic review by Ronald Bailey, posted last week on the website Reason.com.[1] ...

A new book by Nicholas Shaxson "explains how and why London became the center of what he calls a ‘spider’s web’ of offshore activities (and in the process such a comfortable home for the likes of Saif Gaddafi)," David Runciman wrote in the Apr. 14 London Review of Books.[1]  --  "It is because offshore [the financial instituitons that facilitate tax avoidance for the superrich] is the offshoot of an empire in decline."  --  "As Shaxson shows, many of the world’s most successful tax havens are former or current British imperial outposts."  --  "One of the ways you can identify an offshore environment, according to Shaxson, is that local politics gets captured by financial services.  In that sense, Washington has gone offshore:  its politics has been captured by the interests of a narrow group of very wealthy individuals, many of whom work in finance.  For Hacker and Pierson [authors of Winner-Take-All Politics (2011)], this, more than anything else, explains why the rich have got so much richer over the last 30 years or so.  And by the rich they don’t mean simply the generally wealthy; they mean the super-rich.  The real beneficiaries of the explosion in income for top earners since the 1970s has been not the top 1 per cent but the top 0.1 per cent of the general population.  Since 1974, the share of national income of the top 0.1 per cent of Americans has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 per cent of the total, a truly mind-boggling level of redistribution from the have-nots to the haves."  --  "Did the majority not actually mind that they were losing out for the sake of the super-rich élite?  In the American case, one common view is that the voters allowed it to happen because they minded more about other things:  religion, culture, abortion, guns etc.  The assumption is that many ordinary Americans have signed a kind of Faustian pact with the Republican Party, in which the rich get the money and the poor get support for the cultural values they care about.  Hacker and Pierson reject this view, and not just because they don’t think the process they describe depends on there being a Republican in the White House:  they see strong evidence that the American public do still want a fairer tax system and do still see it as the job of politicians to protect their interests against the interests of high finance.  The problem is that the public simply don’t know what the politicians are up to.  They are not properly informed about how the rules have been steadily changed to their disadvantage.  ‘Americans are no less egalitarian when it comes to their vision of an ideal world,’ Hacker and Pierson write.  ‘But they are much less accurate when it comes to their vision of the real world.’" ...

Leah McGrath Goodman, author of The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked The World’s Oil Market (William Morrow, February 2011), published an Op-Ed in the London Financial Times on Wednesday that identified speculation in oil futures, options, and swaps as the main force behind the recent spike in oil prices.  --  "[W]orld energy markets have been carefully designed to profit from the slightest supply hiccup, even if there is little evidence of actual shortages," she said.[1]  --  Her proposal:  "Rather than limiting speculation outright, they should require that speculators put forward more of their own money when placing bets."  --  BACKGROUND:  Leah McGrath Goodman is a 1998 graduate of the Jandoli School of Journalism and Mass Communication at St. Bonaventure University.  The Asylum is her first book.  --  Goodman has worked as legislative staff for the New York State Assembly and has won a number of journalism awards.  --  Deron Lovaas called her new book "a fun read . . . a rollicking, fast-paced, decades-long tale of a marketplace that sprang out of -- no kidding -- a potato futures market.  The pit where most trading took place is still active in New York City, but in just the past few years much of it has moved online, and is handled by computers able to rapidly process reams of data (note that this move hasn't yielded more stable prices in fact one could argue the opposite case).  The reporter, who worked for many years as a Dow Jones reporter covering the market, has many solid relationships with the traders who built the NYMEX and this adds a lot of color to the narrative."[2] ...

Austin Kleon, an artist living in Austin, Texas, shared some of his heterodox conclusions about the creative process in a provocative slideshow recently posted on his website.[1] ...