The Ash Twins Blog

I hadn’t heard of this until today:

The Tulsa race riot, also known as the 1921 race riot, The night that Tulsa died, the Tulsa Race War, or the Greenwood riot, was a massacre during a large-scale civil disorder confined mainly to the racially segregated Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA on May 31, 1921. During the 16 hours of rioting, over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, an estimated 10,000 were left homeless, 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences were destroyed by fire, and $1.8 million (nearly $21 million in 2007 dollars) in property damage. Officially, thirty-nine people were reported killed in the riot, of whom ten were white. The actual number of black citizens killed by white local militiamen and volunteers as a result of the riot was estimated in the Red Cross report at around 300; making the Tulsa race riot the worst in US history (footnotes and hyperlinks omitted).

I ran across this rather shocking essay on the American intellectual community by Noam Chomsky:

There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants… [I]t was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it… Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there’s no moral issue, because they’re just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country… Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He’s a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked… He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn’t even bother responding… Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn’t make appointments with him, they wouldn’t read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.

I didn’t take much time to fact-check, but the Wikipedia entry for Norman Finkelstein seems to verify the essentials. I found this section fascinating:

In early 2007 the DePaul University Political Science department voted nine to three, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Personnel Committee five to zero, in favor of giving Finkelstein tenure. The three opposing faculty members subsequently filed a minority report opposing tenure, supported by the Dean of the College, Chuck Suchar… In June 2007 a 4-3 vote by DePaul University’s Board on Promotion and Tenure (a faculty board), affirmed by the university’s president, the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, denied Finkelstein tenure… At the same time, the university denied tenure to international studies lecturer Mehrene Larudee, a strong supporter of Finkelstein, despite unanimous support from her department, the Personnel Committee and the Dean… In a statement issued upon Finkelstein’s resignation, DePaul called him “a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher” (footnotes and hyperlinks omitted).

At today’s PICS journal club, Spiro presented “The spatiotemporal dynamics of autobiographical memory: neural correlates of recall, emotional intensity, and reliving,” a study demonstrating the components of episodic memory retrieval.

Here’s the abstract:

We sought to map the time course of autobiographical memory retrieval, including brain regions that mediate phenomenological experiences of reliving and emotional intensity. Participants recalled personal memories to auditory word cues during event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants pressed a button when a memory was accessed, maintained and elaborated the memory, and then gave subjective ratings of emotion and reliving. A novel fMRI approach based on timing differences capitalized on the protracted reconstructive process of autobiographical memory to segregate brain areas contributing to initial access and later elaboration and maintenance of episodic memories. The initial period engaged hippocampal, retrosplenial, and medial and right prefrontal activity, whereas the later period recruited visual, precuneus, and left prefrontal activity. Emotional intensity ratings were correlated with activity in several regions, including the amygdala and the hippocampus during the initial period. Reliving ratings were correlated with activity in visual cortex and ventromedial and inferior prefrontal regions during the later period. Frontopolar cortex was the only brain region sensitive to emotional intensity across both periods. Results were confirmed by time-locked averages of the fMRI signal. The findings indicate dynamic recruitment of emotion-, memory-, and sensory-related brain regions during remembering and their dissociable contributions to phenomenological features of the memories.

Eben Moglen on why free software matters:

Free software is, in fact, far more secure than proprietary software, for the same reason that it has fewer defects of other, non-security kinds. First, the entire user community is able to read the code and locate problems through static analysis; problems are unearthed as people learn about the programs for their own purposes. And when problems are recognized, through any means, they can be fixed by the first person who discovers them. So fixes are quicker to attain, and can be vetted, in turn, by thousands of users around the world immediately.

News from last week is relevant to the previous post: The Senate passed the 2009 war spending bill:

The measure would permit $612.5 billion in spending for military programs in 2009, including $70 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why is the $700 billion wall-street bailout a national scandal while an astonishing $612 billion passes unnoticed into the abyss of the military-industrial complex?

James Cypher writes about the present-day iron triangle:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Militarization_America/Iron_Triangle.html

Excerpt:

Looking ahead, the RMA’s fantastic weaponry-and its enormous costs-are only just beginning to emerge. Northrup Grumman, General Atomics, and Boeing are speeding robot airplanes into production. Other contractors are developing thermal imaging sensors to “see” targets through night, distance, fog, and even rock formations. The Navy is promoting a new destroyer-class warship, the DD-21, loaded with cruise missiles and guns capable of hitting targets 100 miles inland. Known as the “stealth bomber for the ocean,” the DD-21 is estimated to cost $24 billion. Cost overruns of 300% are common, however, so there’s no telling what taxpayers will ultimately pay.

Paul Rosberg discusses authoritarian psychology:  http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/3/1/10446/24377.

An excerpt:

Altemeyer explains that “right-wing’” means a “psychological sense of submitting to perceived authorities in one’s life,” and is not identified with a specific political ideology.  In the Soviet Union, “right-wing” meant a sense of submitting to communist authorities, and Altemeyer presented research showing this was so.  This is what his RWA (right-wing authoritarianism) scale measured. It is obviously related to the perpetuation of hierarchy, and the use of force to impose “order.”