This revealing, staccato biography of the sometimes mythic retaker of Jerusalem and uniter at times of the Eastern, Arabic and Persian worlds, Anne-Marie Eddé tackles the subject in several phases: dry history, military strategies, religious aspects, myths of both the demonizing and lionizing kind. Oblique at times, Saladin cannot be perceived as a complete narrative biography (events like the siege of Acre are only partly described, stories of places like Tyre are left unfinished) but it searches for deeper meaning with a variety of views. For a time, Saladin's realpolitik empire spanned deep Egypt to beyond Syria and Beirut, and it required an as yet unseen mastery of both diplomacy and risk. Many gestures divided enemies and allies, deftly. Aspects of duty, taxation, customs, even seasonal challenges like winter storms halting sea-trade are laced with personality and conflicts. Poetry, diaries, contracts are all cited to great effect. Several oft repeated tales drive the effects home, including the determinism to die poor: at death he had only a few dinars left. Nuances like short histories of the sultan/Seljuk title, interspersed, are amazing. At times a travelogue tragedy. An ocean of desert at night for a knife at throat bedouin raid, the march of entire cities leaving every valuable behind while others are left untouched. In between slaughter is chivalry, common good will, suicidal assasin sects, wholesale ransoming, pilgrimages, somehow proof humans achieve their sense of greatness only on a vast scale. And in human cost. Extensive quotes from William of Tyre.  The cover above is from the french original.   Translated.  Harvard-Belknap Press.

Saladin's Palace, Syria

This scant black and white masterpiece photo book, like another black and white photobook Wisconsin Death Trip, is composed of entirely found negatives, culled from historical, industrial and governmental archives (the defense industry is well in evidence). Evidence, made of some of the greatest late 20th century images of American photography, is precisely how future anthropologists will asses our near past. Specifically it will be an introductory map to our various archives of visual data which will acompany the factual data, in a time/era without very much filming/taping ability. Each image the tip of an iceberg of thousands upon thousands of negatives. Services might even rebuild motion events from a series or even a single still of an experiment, and discover what really went wrong. Documentary movies will probably be made from stills in the future, tracking algorithms can spot each speed of a street in motion's objects, render them for seven seconds. The blur has micro blurs in the negative. Evidence will come to life. First published in 1977 (the equally great Wisconsin Death Trip was published 1974). Reprinted recently.

 

The X-47B, skychief without a human master. Lands on carriers.

so who's accountable? from the L.A. Times.

"It is about avoiding a 1930s moment, in which inaction, insularity, and rigid ideology combine to cause a collapse in global demand," IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in prepared remarks before the German Council of Foreign Affairs in Berlin [AM Monday January 23]. "A moment, ultimately, leading to a downward spiral that could engulf the entire world," she said.

2000-2100 predicted sea-level rise:  13-16 cm 89% possibility, 3m 45%, 6-8m 12%.

Answer:

Long-term models are now available for our species.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/opium-brides/

U.S. criminology appears simplistic compared to this network.

"Here, he must show me. A proper execution requires planning. First, the Eyes study the target for days, usually at least a week. His schedule at home is noted, when he gets up, when he leaves for work, when he comes home, everything about his routines in his domestic life is recorded by the Eyes. Then the Mind takes over. He studies the man’s habits in the city itself: his day at work, where he lunches, where he drinks, how often he visits his mistress and where she lives and what her habits are. Between the Eyes and the Mind a portrait is possible. Now there is a meeting of the crew, which is six to eight people. There will be two police cars with officers and two other cars withsicarios. A street will be selected for the hit, one that can easily be blocked off. Timing will be carefully worked out, and the hit will take place within a half dozen blocks of a safe house—an easy matter since there are so many in the city."

-"The Sicario: A Juarez Hit-Man Speaks" by Charles Bowden

The New Year's Arsonist (resultant fear: don't stay inside)

Sunset & Vine Shooter (resultant fear: don't go outside)

France is compelled to shell Libya by an upstart celebrity-philosopher who braved combat to unite Sarkozy with the rebels and jump-started a new Libya. In New York Magazines's killer-piece European Superhero Quashes Libyan Dictator, a segment:

"This is the taping of a Saturday-night talk show called On N’est Pas Couché—which translates roughly to “We’re Still Up”—and it resembles Bill Maher’s show, if Maher had the antic energy of an activated Pez dispenser. When Lévy was young, philosophers were often on French television, but the country’s culture has evolved; one of Lévy’s co-panelists, the film director Mathieu Kassovitz, is wearing a T-shirt, and at one point a few young men in the audience are expelled for drunken heckling. The set is a purple-and-silver Art Deco explosion. When Lévy enters, perfectly composed, the audience gives only perfunctory, producer-compelled applause. They are here for the Angela Merkel jokes; they will suffer the philosophy.

Lévy is interviewed by two young, female journalists, and the first question he gets, from Natacha Polony, is pointed: “What gives you the legitimacy to act as you do?” Wasn’t it strange that a private citizen could play the role he had in Libya? Wasn’t it naïve to ignore the rising threat of Sharia in Libya? The other journalist, Audrey Pulvar, asks Lévy what gave him the right to intervene in the affairs of state. “Because you are right, you are good, you are just?”

“No, no, no, no,” Lévy says. “My country, our country, for the first time since the American Revolution, has come to a foreign country to help a revolution, to help a war of liberation, and this is good, this is beautiful, this is noble …” He launches into what might be called the full Lévy, a detour from an isolated matter of current events into a whirlpool of historical allusions and philosophical first principles. Soon there are references to Malraux, Hemingway, and Orwell, and at five separate points he invokes human rights, les droits de l’homme. Pascal Bruckner, another French philosopher and often an ally of Lévy’s, notes that this is Lévy’s natural mode. “Elections, discussions with the unions, economic problems—all these problems do not interest him,” he says. What Lévy has instead is “a will to turn politics into an epic, and to abandon everything that is prosaic.” It is an entrancing thing to watch; for an extended moment at the studio, the camera fixes on a close-up of Lévy’s expressive hands"