Saturday, August 28, 2010

Quote of the Day


There are times when it is hard to believe in the future, when we are temporarily just not brave enough. When this concentrate on the present. Cultivate le petit bonheur - the little happiness - until courage returns. Look forward to the beauty of the next moment, the next hour, the promise of a good meal, sleep, a book, a movie, the likelihood that tonight the stars will shine and tomorrow the sun will rise. Sink roots into the present until the strength grows to think about tomorrow. - Ardis Whitman, American Author

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Quote of the Day


Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? - Marianne Williamson

The Icarus Syndrome

Icarus by Keith Newstead

In The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart tells a tale as old as the Greeks - a story about the seductions of success. Beinart describes Washington on the eve of three wars - World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq - three moments when American leaders decided they could remake the world in their image. Each time, leading intellectuals declared that history was over, and the spread of democracy was inevitable. Each time, a president held the nation in the palm of his hand. And each time, a war conceived in arrogance brought untold tragedy.

In dazzling color, Beinart portrays three extraordinary generations: the progressives who took America into World War I, led by Woodrow Wilson, the lonely preacher's son who became the closest thing to a political messiah the world had ever seen. The Camelot intellectuals who took America into Vietnam, led by Lyndon Johnson, who lay awake at night after night shaking with fear that his countrymen considered him weak. And George W. Bush and the post-Cold War neoconservatives, the romantic bullies who believed they could bludgeon the Middle East and liberate it at the same time. Like Icarus, each of these generations crafted "wings" - a theory about America's relationship to the world. They flapped carefully at first, but gradually lost their inhibitions until, giddy with success, they flew into the sun.

But every era also brought new leaders and thinkers who found wisdom in pain. They reconciled American optimism - our belief that anything is possible - with the realities of a world that will never fully bend to our will. In their struggles lie the seeds of American renewal today. Based on years of research, The Icarus Syndrome is a provocative and strikingly original account of hubris in the American century - and how we learn from the tragedies that result.

About the book author:

Peter Beinart is associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the senior political writer for The Daily Beast and a contributor to Time. Beinart is a former fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and is the author of The Good Fight. He lives with his family in Washington, DC.



Article source here
Image source here

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Everyday Heroes


There are no headlines
for everyday heroes
there is no tickertape
no standing ovation

sometimes it's all they can do
to set their feet on the floor
in the morning

they go through their days
the best they know how

no rainbow need arch
through the sky
to inspire them
they have a special courage
shining deep inside

they go through their days
the best they know how

Written by Ted Hibbard


Image credit here


Saturday, August 21, 2010

Free Cities

 
Phantom Landscape by Yang Yongliang

"Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man’s well-being is not their goal." - Ayn Rand
There are other examples of such successful "experiment". In the late 1970s the Chinese government created so called Special Economic Zones following the vision of Deng Xiaoping. The most successful is without doubt Shenzhen in the Guangdong Province. 

To attract foreign investment, the designated areas were given economic freedom unknown anywhere else in China. This resulted in unprecedented growth and prosperity. 

Deng was often quoted saying that "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white for as long as it catches mice." 

When Hong Kong - the former British colony, was returned to China in 1997, the Chinese continued their "experiment". The world was pessimistic, but the Chinese chose "one country, two systems" and allowed the territory to function economically just as it did before the transfer of sovereignty from the British.

Gradually, as the political climate inn China evolved, the rest of the country relaxed its regulations and permitted the "experiment" to expand to other areas. In 2001 China won the bid for 2008 Olympic Games. The New York Times wrote in July 2001: "The (Olympic) committee's delegates expressed widespread hope that a seven-year buildup to the 2008 Games would accelerate openness in China and facilitate improvement in its record on human rights." What definitely happened during this time was accelerated growth of economy. 

Only few days ago on August 16, we learned that the Chinese economy (GDP) surpassed Japan and is now the second largest economy in the world following the United States. Although the critics claim that this was due to the decline of Japanese economy, the Chinese have to be given the credit. After three decades of spectacular economic growth, China is now the second economic center of gravity in the world. 

All these become possible because of the decision made by the visionary Deng Xiaoping. His ideas could be applied in other countries as well. Newt Gingrich has his own vision for the underprivileged of this world. He believes that such special economic zones could not only deliver prosperity to the people, but also peace to the regions afflicted by war and terrorism. 

By Dominique Allmon ©2010
 
"Free Cities"

By Newt Gingrich and Ken Hagerty

State-to-state foreign aid can’t stop terrorism. But a new private-sector program could subvert it by creating enclaves of freedom and prosperity.
“Those attacks showed emphatically that ways of doing business rooted in a different era are just not good enough. Americans should not settle for incremental, ad hoc adjustments to a system designed generations ago for a world that no longer exists.”  - The 9/11 Commission Report
Far from defeating terrorism, today’s government-to-government foreign-aid system can actually incite it by propping up corrupt and repressive one-party states. Fortunately, there is a strategy that could subvert global terror by providing hope and opportunity in the Third World - at the expense of corruption and despair.

Free Cities is a new private-sector development paradigm that would allow the United States to offer millions of people in developing countries the same freedom and non-corrupt prosperity that Hong Kong enjoys - without the baggage of colonialism.

Hong Kong was always different from other colonies. It began as a minor trading post, surrounded by empty territory. Over time, more and more people moved there, attracted by opportunity and freedom - just as they were drawn to the United States. In 1984 Hong Kong became a free city under a 50-year agreement between Britain and China. The Chinese government let Hong Kong retain its self-government, all its existing laws, and its free-market economy. Post-colonial Hong Kong has been a spectacular success, energizing and accelerating the transformation of Communist China itself.

China calls this remarkable arrangement “One Country, Two Systems.” It provides a model the U.S. can use to seed new outposts of freedom and prosperity around the world.

The U.S. should negotiate a series of bilateral treaties with receptive governments, carving out undeveloped sites the size of Hong Kong. Then a joint venture between the host government and the U.S. would launch brand new Free Cities in these places, with a complete set of American-style freedoms and responsibilities, guaranteed by treaty for 50 years.

Treaty-based Free Cities would entice and attract enterprising people and capital from around the world by offering: self-government; the rule of law; low taxes; reliable prosecution of corruption; freedom of faith, speech, and press; public registration of real property; a merit-based civil service; multi-ethnic meritocracy; zero tariffs; and an American university.

Free Cities would exemplify free-market globalization, rather than the economic exploitation of protectionist colonialism. They would generate millions of jobs where there are none today. And rather than opening another bottomless pit of statist foreign aid, these cities would be self-funding. A Free Cities development strategy would pay its own way by attracting funds from the private sector.

A Free Cities program would also offer a transformational solution to illegal immigration. It is economic desperation that drives millions of illegals into the U.S. and Europe today. Free Cities would offer these people hope and opportunity back home. They would empower enterprising people around the world to self-select and congregate in safety to pursue their dreams of freedom and non-corrupt prosperity.

The Free Cities concept is simple, inexpensive, and revolutionary. It would shift the focus of foreign aid away from the state and toward the private sector. And it would put America on offense in the global war of ideas.

A Free Cities program would appeal directly to the idealism and generosity of the American people. It could stimulate a profound new American engagement with the poor of the world. Rather than just talking about helping poor people, or pouring more aid dollars down the drain, Free Cities would give millions of Americans a long menu of things they could do personally - either philanthropically or for profit - to help admirable and motivated entrepreneurial people build new free societies in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

It is an undeniable truth that way too much state-to-state foreign aid is stolen. Today’s aid system was designed for a different time. It survives primarily because it has been the only game in town. The emergence of a viable alternative development paradigm would enable Congress to institute fundamental reforms.

Free Cities would create a global network of vibrant new free-market economies, allied with the United States and populated by citizens who have concrete stakes in preserving their freedoms and the open global trading system.

And this proposal can generate more than enough political support to be enacted. It will attract:

• People who want to subvert terrorism.
• Companies looking for non-corrupt markets in developing countries.
• Faith communities that need freedom of faith for their overseas missions.
• Expatriate entrepreneurs who would love to make an honest living back home.
• People offended by the waste and corruption of today’s foreign-aid system.
• Friends of freedom everywhere who dream of building free societies.

Free Cities offers a path to purpose for Americans who are looking for inspiring goals they can pursue to make a genuine contribution to a better world.

Article source here 
Image Source here

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Jazz Photographer Herman Leonard Dies at 87

Frank Sinatra, NYC, 1956.  
Silver gelatin print by Herman Leonard

Herman Leonard, an internationally renowned photographer whose haunting, noirish images of postwar jazz life became widely known only in the late 1980s, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 87. 

“He was a master of jazz, except his instrument was a camera,” said K. Heather Pinson, the author of "The Jazz Image" - a study of Mr. Leonard’s sublime work.

Spare and stylized, Mr. Leonard’s work captured a world of shadow, silver and smoke: dark interiors, gleaming microphones and, threading through it all, cigarette smoke that leaped and twined as if it were an incarnation of the music itself. 

His visual style was born out of necessity. Where most photographers would illuminate a club’s confines with half a dozen lights, Mr. Leonard could afford only two. The result, with backlighting piercing inky blackness, lends his work the quality of moonlight. 

Herman Leonard's background in photography included a year long apprenticeship in 1947 with the famed portraitist Yousuf Karsh, with whom he gained invaluable experience photographing the likes of Albert Einstein, President Harry S. Truman, and Clark Gable. In 1948, Leonard opened a studio in New York City's Greenwich Village, where he did commercial work for Life, Look, Esquire, Playboy, and Cosmopolitan, and made portraits of movie and theater stars. At night, he haunted the jazz nightclubs using a Speed Graphic press camera to produce portraits of the most famous names of jazz as well as those beloved by jazz insiders. 

Dexter Gordon by Herman Leonard
Royal Roost, New York City, 1947

These extraordinary photographs document an explosive time in the history of jazz. Musicians were traveling not only with the Big Bands throughout the United States but also through Europe. Charlie "Bird" Parker and Dizzy Gillespie - both subjects of Leonard's photographs - were just beginning to collaborate and meld their "modernist" jazz styles together, creating what would become Bop. Leonard photographed them all: Charlie Parker in the midst of one of his madcap performances on the saxophone, taken a few years before his untimely death; a radiant Lena Horne; Stan Getz at Birdland; Ella Fitzgerald, the First Lady of Song, at the Downbeat Club; Dinah Washington, at the mike at the Newport Jazz Festival; Louis Armstrong and his horn; and many others.

Leonard's reputation is well established. In 1988, his jazz photographs were first shown in London with great success. Since then, Leonard has had over 85 exhibitions worldwide. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington has honored him by requesting his entire collection for their permanent archives of musical history. In 1996, President Bill Clinton requested a collection of Herman's work to present to the King of Thailand, an avid jazz musician, as an official gift from the United States government. In addition, Leonard has produced two books: "The Eye of Jazz" and "Jazz Memories", a personal photographic diary of his early career.
 


Article source here & here


Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Desiring Peace - A Meditation on Dag Hammarskjöld

 Dag Hammarskjöld

By Roger Lipsey

When Dag Hammarskjöld, second secretary-general of the United Nations (1953-61), reached New York City from his native Sweden to take up his duties, he was an object of discreet curiosity. Little known beyond elite diplomatic circles, a passably handsome bachelor in his late forties, now called to the world’s most prominent diplomatic post, he experimented in the early months with communications large and small. Among the smallest: while furnishing his apartment on the Upper East Side, he agreed to a house call by a journalist who specialized in interior decoration. The decor was spare, in the best Scandinavian taste. The journalist must have searched high and low for something juicy to write and, failing that, recorded a comment by Hammarskjöld that has a long echo: “Monastic, isn’t it?”

This can be said of his life. There must be ground rules, though I have no idea where to find them written down, governing how to interpret the force of desire in a highly dedicated life - how to understand it as an evolving, contributing energy rather than a fixed Caliban growling from the forest floor of oneself. The first rule must be not to put too much emphasis on erotic desire. While it is surely true that no one, including Mr. Hammarskjöld, skips untouched past the need for sexual intimacy, monastic temperaments struggle to “place” it in their inner economy rather than let it run loose. Another rule must be to recognize desire at different levels, so different that a separate word is needed at each level: monastic temperaments, when true to their calling, are striving temperaments that instinctively need to move on, to refine, to purify and focus. And the best of them know that one can’t leave desire behind: it comes right along and asks to be part of things. Because Hammarskjöld was a religious man with the custom in later years of recording poetically conceived prayers in his private journal, we should expect to encounter the desire best called wish - wish for the good, wish for guidance and willing obedience, wish for depth of contact with the One whom he addressed in prayer. Because he was relentlessly aware of his inner life, we can expect to find him struggling like all others to live by his ideals despite counter-currents. And because in his life’s work he was a peacemaker, often negotiating with the world’s most driven and self-assured leaders, his deep desire for peace met many immoveable or scarcely moveable objects.

The desire that faces complex, resistant structures such as the UN itself or the nations of the world - structures requiring insight, method, and management - isn’t sensual. It’s cool, even if heated in expression when heat is needed. It is searching, perspicacious, exploratory; it probes and pokes; it questions; it stacks realities together in novel ways through creative imagination and takes them apart again to check their fit. It looks for lines of connection between what is and what could be - what could be better, more just and fruitful. And it engages directly when the time comes: “Every hour eye to eye,” Hammarskjöld once wrote in his journal. Is this desire at work? There can be no doubt of that. It is desire channeled and focused, desire serving well beyond itself and its own flickers of need. Work toward peace is risky and difficult, and in Hammarskjöld’s practice a rigorous discipline. During a crisis he faced as secretary-general, he reported this to a friend:

One of the lasting experiences from the last months and weeks is that, with our so-called rising civilization, we do in no way see a decline in the art of lying. The modern media of communication, the modern entanglement of interests all over the world, have opened the door to a paradise for those who fight with words representing mala fide assumptions, false presentations, invidious comments, outright slander - and so on. If I were Hieronymus Bosch, I could paint a beautiful triptych in the colors of Hell and in celebration of this new great Harlot. But why be bitter.

The outer form of Dag Hammarskjöld’s immensely accomplished life was visible to all: within little more than a year after taking office, he was recognized by world leaders and diplomatic colleagues as a perfectly remarkable champion of the UN agenda and values. Owing to his practical wisdom, resourcefulness, and discretion, adversaries trusted him to hear their unedited views and uncover what­ever common ground could be found between them. Through personal negotiation with the leaders of the People’s Republic of China at a time when that country had not yet been admitted to UN membership, he demonstrated a capacity to solve completely puzzling problems. “Let Dag do it,” became the solution of last resort, reliable when enough of the Great Powers (permanent members of the Security Council) lined up behind him. His diplomatic improvisations - for example, shuttle diplomacy in the Near East, and UN-flagged peacekeeping forces - became norms that continue in use today. He anticipated the rapid decolonization of Africa and the needs of its new nations, and died in an air crash while attempting to stop an outbreak of war in the newly independent Congo. His person, his voice were the United Nations in that era; his thinking, though muted now, still echoes in the corridors of what he called with some intimacy “this house,” the perennially beautiful riverside home of the UN in midtown Manhattan. At a gathering in the fall of 1953, he said, “Our purpose is peace, nothing but peace.” This too sends a long echo.

Had he accomplished all this and no more, Hammarskjöld would be an illustrious figure in the history of the Cold War and of the UN. But he was much more, and it is this that makes him important for our time.

There is a new question working its way through American thought and attitudes, not prominently at the national level but unmistakably at the level of communities, institutes, projects, and broadly recognized needs. The question is effectively expressed by the opening lines of the mission statement of Garrison Institute, a cultural center on the lower Hudson River:

Garrison Institute applies the transformative power of contemplation to today's pressing social and environmental concerns, helping build a more compassionate, resilient future. We envision and work to build a future in which contemplative ideas and methods are increasingly mainstream, and are applied at scale to create the conditions for positive, systemic social and environmental change.

This is programmatic language, in­tended to inform rather than move, but it publicly summarizes values and intentions that privately guided Hammarskjöld’s approach to himself and to public service a half-century ago. And because he found his way brilliantly, he is one to whom we can look both for large ideas and for sand - for the grit of working things through. “Blood, grime, sweat, earth,” he once asked in his journal, “where are these in your world of will? Everywhere - the ground from which the flame ascends straight upwards.” By his Schopenhauer-like phrase, “world of will,” he must have meant the world one tries to shape, the world desired and sought.

Dag Hammarskjöld lived two lives. The first was what he called “this enormously exposed and published life” as secretary-general of the United Nations. The second was intensely private, nonetheless surmised by a very few friends who understood that they could speak with him about certain things - for example, an Indian couple, close students of Vedanta, could count on him to join their conversation as one who belonged in it. Only after his death, with the publication in 1964 of his journal, under the title Markings, did it become clear in the English-speaking world (and a year earlier in Scandinavia) that Hammarskjöld had been a religious seeker for whom certain source texts - the Gospels, Psalms, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis, the early Chinese classics - provided steady inspiration and guidance. It is true that on rare occasions during the UN years he would say or do things that were self-evidently rooted in an otherwise undisclosed point of view. For example, in a public talk in the fall of 1953, enlarging on a thought from the Tao Te Ching, he said, “We cannot mould the world as masters of a material thing. Columbus did not reach the East Indies. But we can influence the development of the world from within as a spiritual thing.” But those occasions were infrequent and scarcely anyone, so to speak, took him up on it.

Had religion been merely words for him, there would be little need to take notice; but it was more. It was a Way, fully developed, just what we mean today when we speak of spiritual paths. It imposed a personal discipline, exacted a price, opened inner landscapes of mind, heart, and body, commanded a certain quality of relationship with others - and provided resources to go on. That he walked his Way alone had certain advantages, notably self-reliance. A sangha or spiritual community is, among other things, cozy; he had none, though in his work at the UN his immediate associates were men and women of great merit whom he greatly appreciated, and he had friends - few of them close, many of them distinguished - among writers, artists, and theater people. His inner life was, as he once wrote, strictly “a negotiation between himself and God.” This had certain disadvantages. Above all it contributed to recurrent, consuming loneliness that he struggled to accept as a destined feature of his individual Way. True, his sense of spiritual companionship extended with immediacy far into the past and into other cultures; he knew how to read; the thoughts and language even of authors remote in time lived fully in him, as if spoken just today. For example, reading in Arthur Waley’s classic book, The Way and Its Power, Hammarskjöld picked out and brought into a public talk a passage about a band of peacemakers in ancient China, which reflected his own weary perseverance at the time:

Constantly rebuffed but never discouraged, they went round from state to state helping people to settle their differences, arguing against wanton attack and pleading for the suppression of arms, that the age in which they lived might be saved from its state of continual war. To this end they interviewed princes and lectured the common people, nowhere meeting with any great success, but obstinately persisting in their task, till kings and commoners alike grew weary of listening to them. Yet undeterred they continued to force themselves on people’s attention.

This was his activity; his commitment to peacemaking and global welfare was of just this kind. But what inner vision, what discipline, what solace sustained him? What did he know of the “transformative power of contemplation” and how did he apply it to “today’s … pressing concerns?”

A reporter from the internal newsletter of the United Nations Secretariat rather diffidently approached Hammarskjöld in January 1958 to interview him. As published in Secretariat News for February 14th of that year, their exchange was wide-ranging. Just at the end, a question so compelled Hammarskjöld’s interest that he returned to it a few days later in a personal letter to a Swedish friend:

Reporter: One last question, Mr. Hammarskjöld: What, in your opinion, are the main qualities that an international official should possess?

DH: Well, that is a difficult question to answer straight away. You should give me a little while to think about it. First off, however, I would say that a heightened awareness combined with an inner quiet are among these qualities. Also, a certain humility, which helps you to see things through the other person’s eye, to reconstruct his case, without losing yourself, without being a chameleon.

A little later, Hammarskjöld wrote as follows to his friend:

The other day I was forced by a journalist to try to formulate my views on the main requirements of somebody who wishes to contribute to the development of peace and reason. I found no better formulation than this: “He must push his awareness to the utmost limit without losing his inner quiet, he must be able to see with the eyes of the others from within their personality without losing his own.”

There are five invisible realities here: inner quiet, awareness pushed to the limit, a certain humility, permitting one to see from the other’s point of view, without losing oneself. To speak of this integrated movement of awareness and kinship as “mindfulness” - a term Hammarskjöld may have encountered but to my knowledge didn’t use - is to miss its singularity. Better to think of it as something Hammarskjöld advised, something he had mastered or very nearly, something very good. The two passages make clear that Hammarskjöld approached the diplomatic day, the day of the peace­maker, as an exercise in awareness and contact, and did so without calling attention to his approach.

“The international civil servant,” he once said, “must keep himself under the strictest observation.” By the time he became secretary-general, he had been following this practice for many years, and if it had professional benefits - clarity about one’s motives, words, and perspectives - those benefits have to be viewed as secondary to the central need served by what he called “conscious self-scrutiny.” Within the many cross-currents, desires, and hesitations of his own person, he had long ago gone in search of himself. He was one who could not live, perhaps literally, without self-knowledge. Among the resources and methods he collected as a young man and progressively refined in later years, self-observation was key. It opened him to himself, and therefore to others; he learned to interpret himself, and therefore others; he learned to be dreadfully honest with himself - and therefore to forgive others. The sound of his self-observation, as recorded in Markings, is sometimes nearly unbearable: dry, severe, accurate. We can take just one from the UN years as typifying many others:

Do you still need to evoke memories of a self-imposed humiliation in order to extinguish a smoldering self-admiration?

To be pure in heart means, among other things, to have freed yourself from all such half-measures: from a tone of voice which places you in the limelight, a furtive acceptance of some desire of the flesh which ignores the desire of the spirit, a self-righteous reaction to others in their moments of weakness.
Look at yourself in that mirror when you wish to be praised - or to judge.  Do so without despairing.

That mirror was one resource; there were others. He had discovered the value - and sheer existence - of stillness and silence through two unlike sources: the northern Swedish wilderness (he was a skilled mountaineer) and close reading of Meister Eckhart, the medieval preacher and mystic “from whom God hid nothing.” The beauty and silence of remote Lapland stunned him into a sense of reality here and now; it was a lesson he never forgot. The grandeur, mystery, and precision of Meister Eckhart’s explorations of inner experience at the far reaches of perception stunned him no less. Writing in 1956 about an Eckhart sermon he had been rereading, Hammarskjöld concluded:

“Of the Eternal Birth” - to me, this now says everything there is to be said about what I have learned and have still to learn.

“The soul that would experience this birth must detach herself from all outward things: within herself completely at one with herself. . . . You must have an exalted mind and a burning heart in which, nevertheless, reign silence and stillness.”

And he knew how to pray. Lutheran, raised in the Church of Sweden among active and even activist Christians, personally introduced as an adolescent to Albert Schweitzer and a member of the audience that first heard Schweitzer develop his principle of “Reverence for Life,” he drew away from the formal church during his university studies but in time found his way back, not to the church as such but to the substance of Christian faith. To know how to pray is not a small thing; that opening upward, its willingness to be nothing, yet to speak, in relation to the One whom he invariably addressed as “Thou,” endowed Hammarskjöld with breadth of understanding and inner poise. He did not live only in relation to Nations, Powers, Dominions. Insofar as any modern person can, he lived also in relation to what he described late in life as “Someone or Something” that had called him, and to whose call he had answered, “Yes.” We can only allude here to the core of inner peace conferred on him by his religious life. Soon after accepting the post of secretary-general, he wrote in his journal:

Maturity: among other things, a new lack of self-consciousness - the kind you can only attain when you have become entirely indifferent to yourself through an absolute assent to your fate.

He who has placed himself in God’s hand stands free vis-à-vis men: he is entirely at his ease with them, because he has granted them the right to judge.

If he was one of the chosen in his suffering, in the life of self-sacrifice and utterly dedicated service he led, he was also one of the chosen in the solace he received. Markings records what can only be called mystical experiences of great depth and beauty, often as glimpses of what he named “the unheard-of,” more rarely as exquisite dreams noted down sometime later. There must have been some relation between the nearly relentless pace and tension of his life as secretary-general and the tranquility that entered him in private times. On some weekends, free of urgencies, he would host dinners with companions who could equal him in conversation, listen to recorded music, hike in the woods of Putnam and Dutchess  counties, think about things—and turn to the intimacy of his journal, where he elaborated prayers and recorded clarities and questions. We would know nothing of his mystical experience, had he not chosen to tell us.

- a contact with reality, light and intense like the touch of a loved hand: a union in self-surrender without self-destruction, where the heart is lucid and the mind loving. In sun and wind, how near and how remote. How different from what the knowing ones call mysticism.

This article offers only a taste of a most complex life and achievement. Does Dag Hammarskjöld foreshadow a new statesmanship - the very thing needed, or something much like it, to perceive and manage the almost absurdly difficult issues of our time? If so, may it occur in his manner: understated, discreet, modest, relying on the intrinsic charisma of truth and decency rather than personal enchantment, resourceful in exploring alternatives, firm in action. He was the first person Western by birth, education, and basic conviction to discover within hard political processes the need for what we are likely today to call enlightened mind; the first to convert high teachings into daily practice at the level of world affairs; and the first, through his posthumously published journal, to lay bare his own struggles as a sample of what might, after all, be possible.

He was surprisingly relaxed about the future - at least sometimes. At a journalists’ luncheon in the spring of 1958, celebrating his election to a second term as secretary-general, he made some extended remarks, including the following:

I cannot belong to or join those who believe in our movement toward catastrophe. I believe in growth, a growth to which we have a responsibility to add our few fractions of an inch. [This] is not the facile faith of generations before us, who thought that everything was arranged for the best in the best of worlds…. It is in a sense a much harder belief—the belief and faith that the future will be all right because there will always be enough people to fight for a decent future.

Speaking in this way, he was the Hammarskjöld the public knew: clear-minded, realistic yet forward-looking, inspiring without showiness. In his journal, where we can know something of his inner life, he recognized the price that he himself paid, and that others might need to pay who desire effective roles in achieving that decent future. He wrote there:

Each day the first day: each day a life.

Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back. It must be held out empty - for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity.



Article source here
Image source here


www.dag-hammarskjold.com - Roger Lipsey’s web site exploring Hammarskjöld’s political wisdom, with links to other online resources.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Astral Bodies - Packing for Mars

 Astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride, and Jim Lovell
star in Louis Vuitton's Icare travel bag ad campaign.
Photograph by Annie Leibowitz

By M. G. Lord

"Anyone who thinks astronauts ply a glamorous trade would do well to read Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars. The book is an often hilarious, sometimes queasy-making catalog of the strange stuff devised to permit people to survive in an environment for which their bodies are stupendously unsuited. Roach eases us into the story, with an anecdote that reveals the cultural differences among spacefaring nations. In Japan, psychologists evaluate astronaut candidates by, among other things, their ability to fold origami cranes swiftly under stress. 

Soon, however, Roach has left all decorum behind. With an unflinching eye for repellent details, she launches readers into the thick of spaceflight’s grossest engineering challenges: disposing of human waste, controlling body odor without washing, and containing nausea — or, if containment fails, surviving a spacewalk with a helmet full of perilously acidic ­upchuck. 

In a wry account, Roach herself braves motion sickness on NASA’s “Vomit Comet,” a C-9 transport plane modified to fly in parabolas - the only means of experiencing weightlessness outside of orbit. Its cabin is padded, and on its upward path, passengers are pressed against the floor with a force of roughly twice their body weight. But over the parabola’s crest and during the half-minute journey downward, fliers “rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave.” Having taken Scop-Dex, NASA’s anti-motion-sickness drug, Roach is euphoric. Other passengers - NASA regulars call them “kills” - are not so fortunate. Violently ill, they have had to be belted into their seats. “It’s like the Rapture in here every 30 seconds,” Roach declares. “Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be.” 

The heroin imagery, I suspect, has as much to do with the motion-sickness meds as with the microgravity. They are a potent combination of scopolamine (an anti-emetic sedative) and dextroamphetamine (a stimulant). 

Quoting the astronaut Jim Lovell, Roach exposes NASA’s untold sanitation woes. The Gemini 7 mission, he says, was “like spending two weeks in a latrine.” Roach appears to have combed every mission transcript from the 1960s and ’70s for scatological references. The astronauts in Packing for Mars don’t say prim things like “Houston, we have a problem.” While on the moon, sitting inside the Apollo 16 lunar module with the astronaut Charlie Duke, John Young blurts: “I got the farts again. I got ’em again, Charlie. I don’t know what the hell gives them to me.” Roach devotes careful attention to the design of Apollo’s “fecal bag,” a clumsy receptacle into which germicide had to be manually massaged. In contrast, she portrays the space shuttle’s suction toilet as a technological triumph, although docking with its tiny aperture can be a challenge - requiring ground-based practice on a “Positional Trainer.”

Admirers of Stiff Roach’s droll report on the ways that science has used cadavers, will be pleased that “Packing for Mars” also contains post-mortem high jinks. The engineering team for the Orion spacecraft (a project scaled back by President Obama) couldn’t gather adequate collision data from mere crash dummies, so the team used dead people. In a wonderfully slapstick scene, Roach describes the engineers’ efforts to insert a freshly thawed cadaver into a spacecraft mock-up: “Think of wrestling a comatose drunk into a taxicab.” 

Likewise, fans of Bonk her look at the science of sex, will enjoy her relentless inquiry into off-planet mating. When it comes to graphic details, Roach elicits amazing confidences. NASA, she learns, doesn’t expect a celibate Mars crew, but one that will “mix and match or what­ever.” Roach persuades a Russian astronaut to explain ground control’s reason for nixing his request for a blowup sex doll: “We would need to put it in your schedule for the day.” And a bone-loss-study participant, forced to lie in bed for three months to simulate the effect of weightlessness on his skeleton, divulges where and how study participants conduct their auto­erotic lives. 

Just when I thought there was no question Roach wouldn’t ask, and no subject she wouldn’t broach, one appeared: emotion. Or, more specifically, grief. While camping on Devon Island, a remote outpost in the High Arctic of Canada, Roach interviews Jon Clark, a flight surgeon who helped investigate the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster. He details for Roach how bodies break apart at high speeds. Then she realizes: he is the widower of the astronaut Laurel Clark, who died on Columbia. Roach — and the reader — want desperately to know how he coped with the loss, and how he continued to do this grisly work. But she refuses to find out: “It seemed insensitive to ask.” 

Happily, Roach does not dwell on Lisa Nowak, the astronaut who drove from Texas to Florida, allegedly in diapers, to confront her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. She does, however, point out that male astronauts have a diaper alternative that fits directly onto their anatomy. In the way of Starbucks, where a small is termed a “tall,” the men’s devices come only in L, XL and XXL. 

On a long-duration Mars trip, urine would have to be recycled, which is not as vile as it sounds. “I will tell you sincerely and without exaggeration that the best part of lunch today at the NASA Ames cafeteria is the urine,” Roach writes, adding that after purification and desalination, it tastes like Karo syrup. Her husband, however, doesn’t share her keenness and protests when she stores her urine in their refrigerator. 

The strongest parts of Packing for Mars chart the American space effort during the cold war. Roach deals less knowingly with the situation today, when space is, as the private entrepreneurs say, a place, not a program. While investigating zero-gravity sex, she mentions that Robert Bigelow, the founder of Budget Suites America, plans to build an orbiting hotel. But she doesn’t convey that NASA itself has begun spurning Big Aerospace boondoggles (like Orion) in favor of shoestring alternatives (a contract with tiny, upstart SpaceX for cargo flights to the International Space Station).  

Just as Roach refuses to grapple with grief, she also plays down spaceflight’s greatest danger: radiation, for which no cost-efficient shielding has yet been engineered. Linked to brain damage and rapid-onset leukemia, it could quickly devastate a Mars crew. In contrast to excrement and sex, which have dedicated chapters, radiation surfaces in a scattershot, piecemeal fashion. Roach states that astronauts are classified as “radiation workers” because they receive such high doses. She tells us that cosmic rays - high-energy heavy ions from outside our solar system - can be damaging to cells, and that hydrogen compounds (not metal spacecraft hulls) are required for shielding. But she never directly addresses the radiation from solar flares, and makes a joke about a brilliant idea that, in my view, deserves a chapter of its own: on a Mars mission, the astronauts’ solid waste (rich in hydrocarbons) could be wrapped around the crew quarters to protect against cosmic rays. 

At the book’s end, after more than 300 pages of debunking the romance of spaceflight, Roach herself buys into that idea, making a misguided, emotional pitch for a $500 billion human Mars mission - at the expense of cheap, reliable, robotic missions. I am not impervious to sentimentality. I felt a surge of tenderness when Roach described the “unlikely heroics” of a patch of moss on Devon Island: “something so delicate surviving in a place so stingy and hard.” 

Yet compared with the irradiated void of space, a frozen rock in the High Arctic is as cozy as a baby’s crib. Packing for Mars, Roach has shown, can be entertaining here on Earth. But no way are humans ready to make the actual trip.

M. G. Lord is the author of Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science

Article source here

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The World According to Anna


Another man disappeared from her life... Not that he was gone anywhere. Oh, no. He lived with her in this large, beautiful house they inherited recently from her mother. 

She sipped her martini and watched the dogs play in the garden. She looked around and thought that maybe she should get busy. The plants definitely needed some trimming. 

She was mixing her third martini. "My name is James" he said. Not exactly James Bond, but he was handsome and had more charm than anyone she met in a long time. She knew right away that she would not be able to resist the temptation. Things looked so gloomy at home.

She went back to the terrace and saw the dogs disappear behind a large azalea bush. How carefree they were. How easy their lives. She was getting drunk. Closing her eyes she tried to imagine what her life would have been like if she did not meet James. No. It did not really matter. Frank became invisible a long time ago. Their marriage failed and James had nothing to do with it.

When she first met Frank eight years ago, she felt that this was a beginning of an exciting journey. She fell in love with him right away. They had so much in common. They traveled a lot, enjoyed music, collected art. He was such a passionate lover, but something changed and she wasn't even sure when did this happen. Life with Frank lost its sparkle. She felt stuck. She still loved Frank, in a way. They say it isn't love, but a habit. She suspected that it was pity mixed with regret, or maybe an obligation of some kind, but preferred to be believe that she still felt something for him. Otherwise, why would it be so difficult to leave him... 

And of course, there was James. He was only two years younger than Frank, but had so much more life within. He almost reminded her of her first husband, Don. They were too young when they met and did not have a clue what life was all about. One day he disappeared. He took off with another woman taking their entire savings as well as her Tiffany engagement ring with him. 

The dogs were at her feet now wagging their tails like mad. Carefree life. She was in a prison of her own making and felt she needed to break out. But how? Or when? She believed that the world was like a immense hall with many doors. You could have everything. Your perfect life was lurking behind one of these doors. You just had to chose and open one. But which one was the right one? Every time you got stuck in the life of your choice you ended up in the huge hall and had to chose again. Some of us seem to never find the right door. We wander through the corridors of life avoiding the stares of others who, like us, just entered through the wrong door.

No matter what she decided to do, someone would get hurt. If she left Frank, he would not make it without her. His business was falling apart and she kept him motivated to go on. They grew apart as lovers and could never be friends. If she left, he would fall apart like his business. But if she stayed with him, she would suffocate. 

Taking another sip of her martini she lost herself in the beauty of this ancient garden. For a while at least. What if she broke off with James? She wouldn't really break his heart. In no time he would find another woman. Or would he? For the first time in months she was uncertain about him. But if she left him, she would deprive herself of love and passion. This wasn't just another side-step. Nothing you get over with a drink or two. This was her life. Things were still possible. She was only fifty two and did not want to get buried alive with Frank. But she was afraid to go away with James. What if he left her for another woman? What if things became a routine as soon as they begun to share the same bathroom?

She could keep the things just the way they were. The desperately boring, but safe life with Frank and the exciting affair with James. She would miss him at lunch and pretend to attend another yoga class, or something just to get away from Frank in the evening. She would miss James as soon as he kissed her good-bye. He would insist she stayed, she would get anxious to get back home. They would make plans for weekend knowing that they would never be able to wake up together on Sunday morning. How long would that last? 

But James confronted her. She was forced to make a decision. She had to choose. Soon. She could not think clearly. Why did he insist? Things were just fine the way they were. She wanted to get up, but gave up. James was out of town and Frank wouldn't be back until late this evening. 

Why was it so difficult to make a decision? Where was she in the whole scenario? It occurred to her that leaving Frank might not solve her problems at all. She felt as if her life was almost over. Her best friend decided to have a plastic surgery when she felt stuck like that. Something had to change and she chose to change her looks. And did anything change at all? She is on antidepressants now. Poor Tara. 

Lying there with her eyes closed she was trying to remember the time when life with Frank was still full of excitement. They had money, they had visions, they wanted to experience something spectacular. But somehow they grew apart. The magic was gone. At some point they became strangers who had nothing more to say to each other and their conversation was reduced to party gossip and small talk. They still could talk passionately about the stock market, but this made things even more tragic for her. She knew that she was too dominant and too demanding. Just like her mother. It was her fault that Frank gave up on them and become invisible. Disappeared. If he were at home right now, she wouldn't even notice. A quiet shadow of a man who ceased to be. Or was it the other way around? She never really gave a thought to it. What if she was the one who disappeared? Maybe Frank wanted to leave her long ago, but simply couldn't and felt stuck in his life with her? What if he too was trying to figure out which door to open? She never considered that.

Telephone rang in the living room. She was too drunk to get up and just listened to the the message that was being recorded on the answering machine. It was Jacqueline from the doctor's office. She was supposed to contact Dr. Andrews as soon as possible. They had the results of her mammogram. 

By Dominique Teng


Creative Commons License
The World According to Anna by Dominique Teng is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

65 Years Later - August 10, 1945

 Genbaku Dome -Hiroshima Peace Memorial

A day in history:

After the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan announced willingness to negotiate its surrender to the Allies under the condition that the status of the Emperor Hirohito remained unchanged. 

"Following the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the Japanese government met to consider what to do next. The emperor had been urging since June that Japan find some way to end the war, but the Japanese Minister of War and the heads of both the Army and the Navy held to their position that Japan should wait and see if arbitration via the Soviet Union might still produce something less than a surrender. Military leaders also hoped that if they could hold out until the ground invasion of Japan began, they would be able to inflict so many casualties on the Allies that Japan still might win some sort of negotiated settlement. Next came the virtually simultaneous arrival of news of the Soviet declaration of war on Japan of August 8, 1945, and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki the following day. Another Imperial Council was held the night of 9th August and this time the vote on surrender was a tie, 3-to-3. For the first time in a generation, the emperor stepped forward from his normally ceremonial-only role and personally broke the tie, ordering Japan to surrender.  On August 10, 1945, Japan offered to surrender to the Allies, the only condition being that the emperor be allowed to remain the nominal head of state.

On 12th August, the United States announced that it would accept the Japanese surrender, making clear in its statement that the emperor could remain in a purely ceremonial capacity only. Debate raged within the Japanese government over whether to accept the American terms or fight on. 

Meanwhile, American leaders were growing impatient, and on 13th August conventional air raids resumed on Japan. Thousands more Japanese civilians died while their leaders delayed. The Japanese people learned of the surrender negotiations for the first time when, on  August 14, B-29s showered Tokyo with thousands of leaflets containing translated copies of the American reply of 12th August. Later that day, the emperor Hirohito called another meeting of his cabinet and instructed its members to accept the Allied terms immediately, explaining that he could not endure the thought of letting his people suffer any longer. If the war did not end the whole nation would otherwise be reduced to ashes.

On August 15, 1945, the emperor's broadcast announcing Japan's surrender was heard via radio all over Japan. For most of his subjects it was the first time that they had ever heard his voice. The emperor explained that the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, and that the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb. Over the next few weeks, Japan and the United States worked out the details of the surrender, and on September 2, 1945, the formal surrender ceremony took place on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri."

Article source here 

Monday, August 9, 2010

Change...

 "Leap into the Void"- Photomontage by Harry Shunk of a performance
by Yves Klein at Rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 1960.

Most people can look back over the years and identify a time and place at which their lives changed significantly. Whether by accident or design, these are the moments when, because of a readiness within us and a collaboration with events occurring around us, we are forced to seriously reappraise ourselves and the conditions under which we live and to make certain choices that will affect the rest of our lives. - Frederick F. Flack

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Kryptos

Kryptos by Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
in Langley, Virginia

Unbreakable codes. International intrigue. Even the CIA’s artwork has secrets. Popularized by Dan Brown in the bestseller "Lost Symbol", a sculpture at Agency headquarters, has baffled code crackers around the world with its secret message. The copperplate and granite sculpture symbolizes both the history of cryptography and the significance of intelligence gathering. Mystery continues to surround this work of art – no one has ever fully deciphered Kryptos’ coded message.

The Story of Kryptos

Before the New Headquarters Building (NHB) was finished in 1991, thought was given to enhancing the new structure with artwork that was not only pleasing to the eye, but indicative of the Central Intelligence Agency’s work. Under Federal construction guidelines, a small portion of the cost of the new building was set aside to commission original art for the structure.

To achieve the goal of acquiring fitting artwork for NHB, the CIA Fine Arts Commission recommended that the Agency utilize the services of the Art-in-Architecture program of the General Services Administration (GSA). This is a Federal program which has managed the creation of contemporary art for Government buildings for more than 25 years and which has resulted in highly acclaimed works. GSA formed a team composed of experts led by the National Endowment for the Arts and members of the CIA Fine Arts Commission and other Agency employees.

Before starting the task, the Agency side of the joint team developed a Statement of Principles:

“People are the principal resource of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is their intellectual and physical energies that ultimately provide the national policymakers with superior information and analyzes - the basis to formulate policies necessary to maintain this country’s position in the world. An esthetically pleasing work environment at its Headquarters is an important stimulus to the efforts of those officers assigned here.”

They also listed these key thoughts:
  • Art at the CIA should reflect life in all its positive aspects.
  • It should engender feelings of well-being, hope.
  • It should be forceful in style and manner.
  • It should be worldly yet have identifiable American roots in concept, materials, representation, and so forth.
These principles were the guidelines that artists followed as they competed for the $250,000 commission to design artwork for the New Headquarters Building. The combined NEA and CIA panel evaluated each entry and, in November 1988, chose local artist James Sanborn’s conception of “Kryptos” (Greek for “hidden”), a two-part sculpture located at the main entrance to NHB and in the courtyard between NHB and the Original Headquarters Building (OHB) cafeteria.

The Artist

James Sanborn is a Washington, D.C.-born artist with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Randolph-Macon College and a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute. Mr. Sanborn is noted for his work with American stone and related materials that evoke a sense of mystery and the forces of nature.

To give shape to “Kryptos,” Sanborn chose polished red granite, quartz, copperplate, lodestone, and petrified wood. After reading extensively on the subject of intelligence and cryptography, Mr. Sanborn decided to interpret the subject in terms of how information is accrued throughout the ages. In the case of the two-part sculpture, information is symbolized in the chemical and physical effects that produced the materials and in other more literal ways.

To produce the code for “Kryptos,” Mr. Sanborn worked for four months with a retired CIA cryptographer to devise the codes used in the sculpture. Mr. Sanborn wrote the text to be coded in collaboration with a prominent fiction writer.

"People call me an agent of Satan because I won't tell my secret."- James Sanborn 

The Mystery of Kryptos

At the entrance to the New Headquarters building, the sculpture begins with two red granite and copperplate constructions which flank the walkway from the parking deck. These stones appear as pages jutting from the earth with copperplate ‘between the pages’ on which there are International Morse code and ancient ciphers. There is also a lodestone (a naturally magnetized rock) co-located with a navigational compass rose.

In the courtyard, a calm, reflective pool of water lies between two layered slabs of granite and tall grasses. Directly across from this is the centerpiece of “Kryptos,” a piece of petrified wood supporting an S-shaped copper screen surrounding a bubbling pool of water.
  • The petrified tree symbolizes the trees that once stood on the site of the sculpture and that were the source of materials on which written language has been recorded.
  • The bubbling pool symbolizes information being disseminated with the destination being unknown.
  • The copperplate screen has exactly 1,735 alphabetic letters cut into it. 
In addition to its purely aesthetic qualities, Kryptos contains codes that are important to the history of cryptography. When we stand in the CIA courtyard and look at Kryptos from the front, the petrified tree is to the left of the copper screen. From this vantage point the left half of the copper screen is the encoded text and the right half of the copper screen is a series of alphabets, one above the other and is a "chart" called Vigeneries Tableaux developed by 16th century French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenere. In Kryptos this chart has been intentionally flipped so it can only be read from the back of the sculpture. The artist used this "chart" system, in combination with matrix coding systems, to encipher the first three encoded texts on the left side of the screen. The artist designed the fourth section (now referred to as K4) to be very difficult to crack and as of yet, it has not been broken.

The sculpture has been a source of mystery and challenge for Agency employees, other government employees, and interested people outside of government. In early 1998, a CIA physicist announced to the Agency that he had cracked the code for three of the four sections. This was followed a year later by a public announcement from a California computer scientist that he had done the same. As varied as the codes in the sculpture are, so were the methods to crack them. The Agency employee used pencil and paper, and the computer scientist used his computer. No one has yet to break the code for the remaining 97-character message which utilizes a more difficult cryptographic code.

James Sanborn once said “They will be able to read what I wrote, but what I wrote is a mystery itself.” Only time will tell if the final message to this multi-layered puzzle is ever revealed.

The Code 

The first section, K1, uses a modified Vigenère cipher. It's encrypted through substitution - each letter corresponds to another - and can be solved only with the alphabetic rows of letters on the right. The keywords, which help determine the substitutions, are KRYPTOS and PALIMPSEST. A misspelling - in this case IQLUSION - may be a clue to cracking K4.

K2, like the first section, was also encrypted using the alphabets on the right. One new trick Sanborn used, though, was to insert an X between some sentences, making it harder to crack the code by tabulating letter frequency. The keywords here are KRYPTOS and ABSCISSA. And there's another intriguing misspelling: UNDERGRUUND.

A different cryptographic technique was used for K3: transposition. All the letters are jumbled and can be deciphered only by uncovering the complex matrices and mathematics that determined their misplacement. Of course, there is a misspelling (DESPARATLY), and the last sentence (CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING?) is strangely bracketed by an X and a Q.

Sanborn intentionally made K4 much harder to crack, hinting that the plaintext itself is not standard English and would require a second level of cryptanalysis. Misspellings and other anomalies in previous sections may help. Some suspect that clues are present in other parts of the installation: the Morse code, the compass rose, or perhaps the adjacent fountain.

Article and image source here & here