This is amazing! A blind guy who can see but not be aware that he’s seeing!

TN’s rare condition is known as blindsight. Because his stroke damaged only his visual cortex, his eyes remain functional and as a result can still gather information from his environment. He simply lacks the visual cortex to process and interpret it. Sight has changed for TN from a conscious to a largely subconscious experience. He no longer has a definitive picture of his surroundings, but he has retained an innate awareness of his position in the world. He is, to some degree, able to see without being aware that he is seeing.

A turn-about in Iran?  I honestly think it’s coming.  Look, say what you like about certain crazy Iranian leaders of the past 40 years.  The Iranian people have been through a lot, and I think they’ve made as many encouraging democractic choices as disheartening ones.  Not to mention that there is widespread support for democracy smack dab in the Middle East.  Sure, it’s a complicated democracy that might not win a lot of medals.  But it’s actually more democracy than we’ve been historically accustomed to encourage.  A great article that’s the second of two at the Christian Science Monitor:

While Iran boasts the most pro-American population in the region, any substantive talks with the US are a big step for a regime that still chants “Death to America” at rallies.

“Some people think this is the time to solve the problem with the US in a balanced way,” says Mr. Mohebian. “But others think the hostility against the US after 30 years is a main element of our identity, and if we solve it we will dissolve ourselves.”

This is some amazing stuff here.  A series of photos and essays in Scientific American of the gross sorts of worms that live in your body, including, say, your eye (and holy smokes, there’s one picture here that you’re not sure what it is and you really don’t want to find out until, well, you do).  And then in National Geographic, the. biggest. snake. ever.

Here’s the thing.  It’s not just that I’m not a huge fan of the hard-right.  Or that I’d like for Palestinians, and particularly Arab Israelis, to have full rights (just as, let’s be clear, I’d like to be the case for Syrian Jews–or Saudi Shias, etc.  I don’t have a double-standard here for minority rights).   It’s that  a hard-right Israel is just really, really bad for Israel on its own terms.  A good analysis here:

Israel has always had its harsh critics in the U.N. and E.U. But, even at its worst, that criticism has been contained within well-defined limits. In Europe and the United States, calls to sanction, boycott, or prosecute Israeli leaders as war criminals have been almost the exclusive province of the extreme left. That won’t hold if Israel crosses an anti-democratic tipping point. If Israel ever actually began enforcing a loyalty oath or stripping Arab citizens of their citizenship or property rights, the road to real international isolation of the sort experienced by South Africa in the 1980s or Serbia in the 1990s could be shockingly short. And an Israel isolated from the international community would be deeply vulnerable.

To be sure, Lieberman is not about to become prime minister. A government even under the right-wing Likud Party is highly unlikely to implement the most extreme of Lieberman’s proposals. Moreover, Israel’s Supreme Court stands as a last line of defense against blatantly discriminatory policies. Indeed, the court has already acted to prevent an Yisrael Beiteinu-led effort to ban two Israeli-Arab parties from running in the current elections. But, if Yisrael Beiteinu performs as well as the polls suggest it will, then it stands a good chance of sitting in the next government. And, with 15 or 16 seats, it would have a relatively strong voice there. Lieberman would hold a prominent ministerial post, along with at least two or three of his colleagues. As a bloc, they would be able to influence the direction of policymaking for the coming years. At a minimum, this would further alienate Israel’s Arab citizens and complicate any peace efforts. It would certainly provide endless fodder to Israel’s harshest critics around the world.

To the Bishops he says this.  Not to us.  I mean, he probably says that to us too, but not in public.  An official demand for an official retraction:

The Pope has ordered an ultra-conservative bishop from Britain to recant his denial that Jews died in gas chambers during the Holocaust.

In a move designed to head off condemnation, Pope Benedict XVI ordered Bishop Richard Williamson to unequivocally and publicly renounce his claims that there were no gas chambers and that fewer than 300,000 Jews died in the Nazi death camps instead of the accepted figure of six million.

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many politicians, prelates and faith leaders have rounded on the Pope after his decision to lift excommunications on Bishop Williamson, an Old Wykehamist and Cambridge graduate, and three other traditionalist bishops.

The Vatican said: “Bishop Williamson, in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the Church, will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted.”

This is exciting work, dripping with irony, using political propaganda to show its own emptiness:

Soon after his arrival in 2001 he enrolled at Hongik, a leading arts college in Seoul, where his socialist realist technique put him at odds with prevailing notions of what constituted art. One of his professors called his political imagery “cheap, fit for old barbershops” - a reference to the Cold War years when South Korean barbershops often were decorated with crude propaganda posters with slogans like “Let’s exterminate Communists!”

Now that imagery, with its subverted content, addresses issues central to Korean identity.

“His work touches the national trauma of the divided Korea,” said Kim Dong Il, a visual arts critic and lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul. “His style is North Korean, but when he brought it to South Korea, it became something completely different. The children’s smile in his paintings becomes too idealized to be real. A smile is not always an expression of happiness and can even mean the opposite.”

It’s an interesting question I think about a lot.  Here’s the trick, which is joked about in this recent funny essay on quitting Facebook: you could be doing a lot of other things than being online.  But are those things necessarily better?  After all, isn’t it good to be social?  Isn’t it good to educate yourself?  And to do what you will with your leisure?

It’s an interesting question.  Of course, by the metric of past social-living and intellectual exchange, the internet loses, but that’s because it doesn’t fit earlier forms.  This is a stupid test, like saying a TV show is a bad book.  Well of course it’s a bad book, idiot.  It’s not a book.  What most people who talk about the internet have to figure out–whether it’s being social or learning or creating art–is the degree to which their commitments can be met in new ways that might accomplish more (or less) than they had with earlier means.  So you’re social in a different way on facebook. But is that better or worse or just different?  And you learn different on google, but (in this article on Seed) that different way of learning might actually be better.  Like anything, I think it all depends on where you’re looking from.  Socrates was right that reading ruined the way people thought, and nobody really thinks like Socrates anymore. And so he would say we think badly.  But I’m not sure that’s true.

I’ve always had my suspicions of the cult of personality over at the Legionnaires of Christ. But I should be clear: one of my best friends from college joined up, and I’ve visited him a few times at his novitiate only a few miles from my apartment in New Haven. I went to his vows Mass, and I would go, every once in a while, to a Legion-sponsored religious society in undergrad. I think the Legionaries have added much more than they’ve taken away from the Church–even if I wish they would talk more about justice and be a little more welcoming to women in the Church, I’m deeply grateful for the way they’ve encouraged piety and radical commitment to the faith. And so it’s a sad day to learn about some pretty devestating evidence of their founder’s misdeeds (a good roundup in the NYTimes and an embarassingly poorly-edited version in NCR by the-man-wh0-knows-the-Legion Jason Berry, who’s also the husband of one of my profs back at Loyola New Orleans, and then the Legion’s own paper)

I do think this says something about the order he founded (other major orders were founded by saints who, even if full of past sins, did repent and lead new lives). But I also think that you can tell a tree by its fruits. So give the Legionaries time–I think good fruit will come.

This is a long but excellent article, and it’s wonderful to read someone who puts the true founder of conservatives not with Buckley (a fine man, make no mistake) but with Burke.  Read more here:

The story of postwar American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America’s pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare.

This, in fact, is one of the Pope’s problems.  It’s a point well made by Michael Sean Winters at America’s blog in a rather long post:

One of the consequences of Benedict’s background in theology and philosophy is that his concern for intellectual precision sometimes blinds him to the consequences of his statements. In the case of lifting the excommunication of the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X, he understood clearly that this was a first step, not a last one, that the bishops would need to accept the decrees of Vatican II and that such acceptance would include Nostra Aetate, and that the greater his own influence over the group, the more likely they are to be rid of some of their crazier beliefs. Pope Benedict did not, alas, foresee the consequences of his decision, or if he foresaw them, he decided to let the chips fall where they may. The decision itself was correct. Why worry about the consequences?

Here’s the thing.  The Pope is totally unaware, I think, that not only do ideas have consequences, but that the expression of these ideas have certian consequences as performances that are understood not as subtle points of strategy or rigor, but, instead, as plays within a game of cosmic morality, a game in which many might say the Church is not doing well.  Again, this is a game of appearances, a game which is explicitly superficial and possibly wrong to engage in.  However, be ye wise like serpents…