Good morning. Here’s this week’s left-overs.
Note: Keep an eye out. I think Kev may be posting an APR placeholder in a bit.
Even more relevant than it was in August. Worth reading again. At the New York Review of Books find Iran: The Case Against War by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson.
There is no plausible reason for the United States to go to war with Iran, although the Trump administration appears to be preparing to do so. In mid-May, the Pentagon presented the White House with plans for deploying up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East to respond to Iranian attacks on US forces or the acceleration of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
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An excerpt from Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend is available at LitHub, titled On the Wars and Intrigues of the Aztec Empire: The 13th-Century Story of Princess Chimalxochitl.
The girl heard the voices of those who loved her in her head. They had petted her, sung to her, told her she was their precious, shining gem, their light, silken feather. She knew now she would never hear those voices again. They had warned her that it might come to this, that she might one day be taken in war and lose everything, that every flower was fragile. Now the worst had indeed come. For a time, terror left her mind blank. But after she slept for a few hours, she was able to remind herself what her mother and grandmother had taught her she must do.
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So it was that in the year 1299, Shield Flower looked upon her own death and found the courage to pass from this earthly life with the dignity and style that befit a royal woman. At least so her people said in the stories they told of her for many generations after. Sometimes they called her not Chimalxochitl (Chi-mal-SHO-cheet, Shield Flower), but the more valiant Chimalexochitl (Chi-mal-eh-SHO-cheet), meaning Shield-Bearer Flower. Her ancestors, going back six or more generations, had been among the last of the people to leave the desiccated, war-torn lands of the American Southwest and begin a trek across the expanse of desert in search of the rumored southern lands.
Dare we hope? At Al Jazeera, an opinion piece by professor Sultan Barakat titled Trump's opportunism could plunge the Middle East into turmoil. The lede:But it is still not too late for diplomacy to avert a major conflict in Iraq, the Gulf and beyond.
The US strike in the early hours of January 3 that killed Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani has surprised many in the Middle East and beyond. A brazen attack, carried out without permission on the soil of a sovereign nation, it was more reminiscent of the covert operations of Israel's Mossad against its pro-Iranian rivals than an act a global leader with a great stake in the region should engage in.
The assassination of Soleimani is likely to further destabilise a region already rocked by nearly a decade of upheaval.
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From UnDark, How a New Wave of Orbiting Sentinels Is Changing Climate Science by John Gertner.
The launch wasn’t much of a news story. When the mission began, there was little talk of big breakthroughs or revolutionary ideas. Indeed, even the satellite’s name (it acts as a replacement for the first ICESat, which was launched in 2003 and burned up upon reentry in 2010) could give the impression that this might be a sequel that wasn’t as exciting as the original production. Since we already know so much about the planet, and especially how ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are imperiled by a warming climate, how much could it tell us that is truly new?
Sometimes evolution can be as important as revolution, however. An unexpected surprise is that ICESat-2 seems able to peer down into shallow waters along the North American shoreline, providing a valuable new data set. And after only a short time in orbit, the satellite and its orbiting companion, another satellite called Grace-Fo that launched just a few months earlier, have enriched our observational record of Earth’s cryosphere, or frozen regions. As climate change alters the planet in ways that are both obvious and arcane, this new generation of remote-sensing satellites is compiling a granular record of what is happening in the world’s most distant and difficult-to-reach latitudes.
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And, at the Princeton University Press (not a site I usually mention) is 7 books to start the new year featuring titles from -- you guess it -- the Princeton University Press. Titles listed -- with only tiny capsule summaries --include Michelangelo, God's Architect, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal, and Protest!: A History of Social and Political Protest Graphics
While you're at the site, you might follow the small link at the bottom of the page to "Reading Lists" -- or use this link. Lots of scholarly reading lists (all PUP of course) like "Books for readers thinking deeply about our planet," "Books for feminists of all ages," "Books for history buffs" and "A Reading List for the Jewish High Holy Days."
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Thought d’jour
I thought about using this as the “thesis statement” for a poem but it outright refused to become poetic, so I guess we’re stuck with this which isn’t all that great but has the virtue of being true.
And when I became a man, I put away childish things.
It turned out to be a mistake. I put away that which sustained me for a fancied deity built of naught but hollow words.