Homeland (In)Security at Airports

Jeffrey Goldberg has a fantastic piece in The Atlantic on the many, many, holes in airport security crap that we go through. What are the different things that he carried with him and was not stopped or pulled aside? Plenty that you think any fifth grader will know how to stop. And, of course, the fake boarding passes that pretty much the entire world knows about. It is all Bullshit as Professor Harry Frankfurt might say :-)

An excerpt:

And because I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary
screening four times—out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.
During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a
neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube.

Axis of Diesel: Falling oil prices good?

After reaching a high of $147 a barrel, oil prices have plunged in recent days in response to worsening economic indicators all over the world. And more so in the largest oil consuming economy--the US. It has fallen through the $70 level. The good thing is if this continues, Venezuela will be bankrupted and Hugo Chavez will be in huge trouble :-)

Ok, seriously, could this plunge resemble the kind of price drops that followed the peaks reached in the early 1980s? OPEC is worried about this and has called an emergency meeting to stablize prices in the 70-90 dollars price range. The Times has aptly referred to all this as the Axis of Diesel--the Brits are funny with their headlines :-)

Writing in the NY Times Magazine, Roger Lowenstein argues that we ought not be too thrilled with falling oil prices because it might just about take away the incentive to explore alternatives to oil. He notes there:

You can argue that last July’s $147 peak was irrational, but Aubrey McClendon, the chief executive of the Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy, says it was merely the answer to a real-world economics quiz: at what price would the world consume less oil? Americans began to cut back on their driving at $50 oil, and at something like $120 oil they garaged their S.U.V.’s en masse. People in many emerging nations were slower to react, because their governments subsidize local gasoline prices. But as the price rose, such a subsidy became costly, and beginning in May, China, India, Indonesia and others cut their subsidies. The upper bound had been reached.

Lowenstein concludes his essay with a forceful argument that if the price falls below $70, which it has, then we ought to have a comparable tax on oil. Good luck on that, Lowenstein--we lost that opportunity back in 2001 soon after the 9/11 attack--Americans would have gladly put up with that tax as a patriotic duty. The president lost that opportunity. In fact, he beckoned us to continue on with our shopping! Not now when the economy is tanking, when people are losing homes and jobs.

What the country doesn’t want is to remain dependent only on oil — to lose the urgency to develop alternatives. It happened once before. After the gas lines of the ’70s, Jimmy Carter declared that solving our energy problems was the moral equivalent of war. Then, in the 1980s, Americans forgot.
The way to avoid a repeat is to dust off an idea that Gerald Ford once proposed: a tax on oil. Ideally, it would kick in only if the price fell back to, say, $70 a barrel. The beauty of this tax is that, very likely, no one would have to pay it. The tax would merely serve as a floor — a new lower bound. Auto companies would never have to worry that cheap gas would tempt consumers away from efficient cars; investors could finance development of batteries and fuel cells, because cheap oil could never undercut them. Oil itself would be used more sparingly and last longer. The oil market did its part when it sent the price to almost $150. The government should make sure there is no going back.

Presidential debates on HBO and Cinemax?

Was There Too Much Sex And Profanity In The HBO Presidential Debate?

"Greed is good"

In "The United States of Gordon Gekkos" I wrote about greed--not just on Wall Street, but on the metaphorical Main Street too. Without greed, for all purposes, we can't have the economic system we have. Can't live with it, and can't live without it!
Warren Buffett says that now is the right time to be greedy again:

Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.

Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine

Anybody better than Stephen Colbert to talk with any author?

We are all postmodernists now

The mainstreaming of pomo thinking has been largely a stealth project,
something Americans do without committing overt acts of academia. We thought we
were trying to clear away the cobwebs of shoddy analysis and elite hypocrisy,
but all along we were bringing the tools of critical thinking to the masses. Go
into any bar in the country, and you'll find somebody unpacking the assumptions
in someone else's text.

Tim Cavanaugh has a great point out at Reason. The postmodernist thinking of truth is subjective has taken over society so much that it is difficult anymore to convince people that facts themselves are different from how we interpret them. And, of course, some go one extra step and question the facts themselves. Which is what we find in the creationism issue, and how the media report the controversy--the media think it is their duty to report on the two sides of the evolution controversy, as if everybody is right on this and truth is subjective.

Stiglitz on The Colbert Report

In an earlier post, I dreamt about Krugman, Stiglitz, and Sen drafting an economic manifesto for the next administration. Maybe Stephen Colbert can get them together and devote an entire show to joshing with them. Step 1: Stiglitz. I am sure Krugman will be there one of these days ....

Academe's Ax Murderers

In addition to dealing with academic bullies, according to this author we need to watch out for academic "ax murderers" also. Hey, I survived some ax murderers, who are still practicing their craft!

"Remember that every department has at least one ax murderer, but you won't know in advance who it is so you'd better be on your guard."
... what has become a lamentable fact of faculty life: Many academics regularly engage in a kind of "gotcha" politics.

Abortion, presidential candidates, and Goldwater

I am immensely glad that Michael Kinsley and Bill Gates launched Slate.com--because, at very few other outlets can I ever run across something as interesting as this

More on the Booker Prize winner

The winner is a global citizen ... The Guardian notes that:

Adiga was born in Chennai in 1974 and was raised partly in Australia.
Having studied at Columbia and Oxford universities, he became a journalist, and
has written for Time magazine and many British newspapers. He lives in
Mumbai.

And, hey, I am from Chennai. My brother lives in Australia. A bunch of relatives live in Mumbai. .... We are all global citizens, and the world will be a better place if we adopted that framework.

But then, Rudyard Kipling reminded us that despite all the exposure, we choose to affiliate ourselves with a much smaller part of the world. He wrote:

Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!

Booker Prize goes to an Indian

In a previous post, I noted the Indian authors in the Booker Prize shortlist. Well, one, Aravind Adiga, is the winner. Interestingly enough, this is his first novel too. The BBC notes that
"Adiga is the third first-time novelist to win the prize. Previous debut winners were Arundhati Roy in 1997 for God of Small Things and DBC Pierre in 2003 for Vernon God Little.
Adiga is a former correspondent for Time magazine and has written for the Independent, and the Sunday Times."

Roy has gone from being a story-teller to an activist/essayist. Let us see what path Adiga takes, given that he is a journalist to begin with.

Camille Paglia's thoughts on Sarah Palin

Paglia is one complex person who defies stereotypical images that we walk around with--stereotypes of feminists, liberals, professors, Italians, atheists, gays. I suppose she drives almost everybody bonkers with her clear thinking and fearless writings. It is always a pleasure to read her words, and the one occasion that I watched her on TV, she is a good speaker too--not as fantastic as the writer that she is.

All this because I read her comments on Sarah Palin. Too good to excerpt just a few lines. So, here is Paglia responding to a reader's observation that:

As I see it, the Palin Effect is a double-headed hydra. On one side you have Todd Palin, who is clearly a vibrant, macho force in his family’s life. Just as clearly, he has effectively embraced the role as a primary caregiver. What does it say that he and Sarah have a mutually aggrandizing partnership/marriage? A successful professional woman who embraces a masculine male rather than castrate him? Heaven forfend! Personally I see it as the benign (and noble) conclusion of the feminist movement. I guess fish don’t need bicycles, but some of them want one. And they’d rather it come with some cojones.
Discussing the Sarah Palin effect is quickly becoming a national psychosis, to which I doubt I could add much. The only thing I haven’t seen discussed is a comparison between her popularity and what Rush Limbaugh hilariously and intuitively called Bill Clinton’s “Arousal Gap." I think we’re seeing that Todd Palin isn’t the only man’s man out there who has a healthy appreciation for a strong member of the opposite sex. Here is another benign and admirable consequence of the feminist movement.

Camille Paglia is awesome in her response here:

Yes, both Todd and Sarah Palin, whom most people in the U.S. and abroad had never even heard of until six weeks ago, have emerged as powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism. That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism.

Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin's performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin's digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn't -- judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.

And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don't think sex -- I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry -- including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.

Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment. In 1990, in a highly controversial New York Times op-ed that attacked old-guard feminist ideology, I declared that "Madonna is the future of feminism" -- a prophecy that was ridiculed at the time but that turned out to be quite true. Madonna put pro-sex feminism on the international map.

But it is now 18 years later -- the span of an entire generation. The instabilities and diminishments for young women raised in an increasingly shallow media environment have become all too obvious. I had grown up in a vibrant pop culture with glorious women stars of voluptuous sensuality -- above all Elizabeth Taylor, sewn into that silky white slip as the vixen Manhattan call girl of "Butterfield 8." In college, I feasted on foreign films starring sexual sophisticates like Jeanne Moreau, Anouk Aimée and Catherine Deneuve. Sex today, however, has become brittle and superficial. Except for the occasional diverting flash of Lindsay Lohan's borrowed bosom, I see nothing whatever that is worth a second glance. Pro-sex feminism has worked itself out and, like all movements, has degenerated into clichés. And even Madonna, with her skeletal megalomania, looks like a refugee from a horror movie.

The next phase of feminism must circle back and reappropriate the ancient persona of the mother -- without losing career ambition or power of assertion. Betty Friedan, who had first attacked the cult of postwar domesticity, had long warned second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem about the damaging exclusion of homemakers from their value system. The animus of liberal feminists toward religion must also end (I am speaking as an atheist). Feminism must reexamine all of its assumptions, including its death grip on abortion, if it wishes to survive.

The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin's bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition -- without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She's no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she's pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite -- which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey's witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin's cadences and charm, she can't capture the
energy, which is a force of nature.

I talked about some of these in an earlier blog entry on how I expect more students like Sarah Palin, based on my experience with a student who was one confident feminist ....

Donald Trump buys Iceland

Harley-Davidson worth more than GM!!!

It shows how far GM's market value has tanked over the years, and in the past few weeks in particular. I can't help wonder whether it can survive on its own.
BBC:
GM's stock price has fallen to below $30, its lowest level in a decade, which means that on paper the company is now worth less than the motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson.

The end of the Reagan/Thatcher revolution?

Thanks to the economic crisis, I hope we won't have to worry about the Reagan/Thatcher philosophy of political economy that resulted in the likes of Grover Nyquist and Tom DeLay. What a national nightmare that DeLay caused! Everything from closing access to Democratic representatives in the House, to personally overseeing mid-Census redistricting in Texas. Simply awful. Whatever intellectual merits the conservatives (not Republicans!) might have had, all we need is a poster of Nyquist and DeLay to make anybody run the other way.

Krugman's Nobel might well be the proverbial final nail. Reading some of the commentaries from the market-fundamentalist economists, including Mankiw himself, it appears that they are hopping mad that Krugman received the prize. My own suspicion is that they know that it will be years before they can regain the influence to shape intellectual fashions in economics. Or in social science, for that matter.

No, I have no false notions that this will lead to some big time leftist political policies. No Hugo Chavez, thank you very much. But, we might make some much needed corrections to the ultra-right approaches that preferred subsidies for the rich and cried against subsidies for the poor.

BTW, a reminder again that this is not a prize that is one of the original Nobel Prizes. In economics, it is an award in Nobel's memory, and the money for it comes not from Nobel's TNT wealth. The official name for the award is: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

Borrowing to consume: is it always bad?

Fareed Zakaria sees a silver lining in the dark economic clouds. I think he is being a tad optimistic that we will change our ways and not consume more than what we can afford--the we as in individuals, businesses, and governments at every level. In fact, we have pretty much exported this way of life to other countries too.
Furthermore, I don't think that debt itself is the real issue. A former chancellor of the OUS once remarked over coffee that we need to make sure that students have financial literacy because being (economically) successful in the modern world depends a lot on how well we juggle our debts and revenue streams. The crisis was triggered by extreme leveraging--by homeowners, and by financial institutions.
Anyway, here is an excerpt from Zakaria:

This crisis has—dramatically, vengefully—forced the United States to confront the bad habits it has developed over the past few decades. If we can kick those habits, today's pain will translate into gains in the long run.
Since the 1980s, Americans have consumed more than they produced—and they have made up the difference by borrowing.
Two decades of easy money and innovative financial products meant that virtually anyone could borrow any amount of money for any purpose. If we wanted a bigger house, a better TV or a faster car, and we didn't actually have the money to pay for it, no problem. We put it on a credit card, took out a massive mortgage and financed our fantasies. As the fantasies grew, so did household debt, from $680 billion in 1974 to $14 trillion today. The total has doubled in just the past seven years. The average household owns 13 credit cards, and 40 percent of them carry a balance, up from 6 percent in 1970.
But the average American's behavior was virtue itself compared with the government's. Every city, every county and every state has wanted to preserve its many and proliferating operations and yet not raise taxes. How to square this circle? By borrowing, using ever more elaborate financial instruments. Revenue bonds were backed up by the prospect of future income from taxes or lotteries. "A growing trend is to securitize future federal funding for highways, housing and other items," says Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute. The effect on the projects, he points out, is to make them more expensive, since they incur interest payments. Because they "insulate the taxpayer from the cost"—all that needs to be paid now is the interest—they also tend to produce cost overruns.
Local pols aren't the only problem. Under Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve obstinately refused to inflict any pain. Russian default? Cut interest rates. Worried about Y2K? Cut rates. NASDAQ crash? Cut rates. The economy slows after 9/11? Cut rates. Whatever the problem, the solution was to keep the money flowing and goose the economy. Eventually, by putting the housing market on steroids, the strategy created problems too large to untangle.

What we call the news!

Students in my Global Issues class remarked that news on every channel seemed to be the same format, and that they talk a lot about the weather. It reminded me of this fantastic satire from jibjab.

What We Call the News Funny Jokes at JibJab

Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize

This is exciting--particularly because he barely registered a blip in the pool that Greg Mankiw blogged about.
Am excited even more because most of the courses I teach are either directly or indirectly about economic geography .... and Krugman was one of the first neoclassical economists to systematically talk about a "new economic geography"
In his book Geography and Trade, which is a collection of his lectures, Krugman writes,

About a year ago I more or less suddenly realized that I have spent my whole professional life as an international economist thinking and writing about economic geography, without being aware of it

It will be neat if neoclassical economics alters its course thanks to Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman. but, maybe that is asking for too much, eh!
BTW, both Sen and Krugman were solo winners .... I think that these were also political statements by the committee--Sen's came after the collapse of LTCM, for which the previous year winner provided the brains! It was the committee's way of apologizing .... Krugman's selection reflects the need to change course from the maniacal approach to freer trade and less regulations.

Hey, this is my blog, and I am entitled to my opinions!
The video here is thanks to Google--it makes available on YouTube the talk and Q/A with authors who are invited to its SF headquarters

Professors, study thine own teaching

After many years, I am convinced that I am a reflective practitioner, and blogging is yet another way in which I can be that kind of an academic. Of course, the seed for such a behavior came a long time ago when I read Donald Schon's book, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action

It is, therefore, logical that I should value the scholarship of teaching and learning--after all, in a teaching university my primary responsibility is to teach, and reflecting on that is nothing but the idea of scholarship of teaching and learning. I now have one more person to quote on this topic: Derek Bok, who was once the president of Harvard, for quite a few years actually.
In the Chronicle, Bok is quoted as saying:

Faculty members deeply believe in experimentation, learning through trial and error, and gathering evidence, "but they do not apply these methods of inquiry to their own teaching," Mr. Bok, who remains a professor of law at Harvard, said in an interview.
"They are genuinely concerned with the development and intellectual progress of students," he said, "but they are not willing to apply themselves to determining how much learning and engagement is going on."
If liberal education is to improve, Mr. Bok said, administrators and faculty members must work together to design, and then use, measures of how well students are acquiring key skills such as the ability to think critically and analytically and to write well.

All right, Dr. Bok, please spread this word :-) And he doesn't stop there ....

Mr. Bok blamed much of the failure of faculty members to teach effectively on their graduate-school education.
Graduate education, he said, focuses almost entirely on the knowledge and research techniques of specific disciplines and devotes little attention to teaching students how to teach. Having earned their doctorates without the benefit of solid pedagogical training, many college faculty members end up simply emulating the professors who taught them best, which leaves them repeating the instructional methods of the past rather than adopting effective new approaches.

Mapmaker, mapmaker, make me a map :-)

Yes, the title is a take-off on the wonderful song and dance number from "The Fiddler on the Roof". But, this blog entry itself has nothing to do with that musical. It is, instead, about how easy it has become to create maps--so much so that bad maps with bad data and analysis probably are driving out good maps with good data and analysis. At least that is one worry. I think that even if that were the case, well, there is nothing we can do!
Here is an excerpt from an article in the Globe and Mail:

Much of the story of map-making over the past five years centres on the rise of amateurs such as Mr. Ajmani. Using powerful online mapping tools, they are redefining the millenniums-old field of cartography, earning both critics and admirers in the process.
Their products are not maps in the traditional sense, but mash-ups, which combine traditional charts - hosted by mammoth tech companies such as Google and Microsoft - with some unusual spatial data: UFO sightings, public toilet locations or the whereabouts of England's worst potholes, to name a few.
"We call it the democratization of spatial data," said Sally Hermansen, senior instructor in the University of British Columbia's department of geography. "They are redefining how we think about the world, how we organize the world." ....
Several years ago, such map-making powers were limited to relatively few
cartographers and geographers with years of training.
"Map-making used to be a real top-down process," said Jeremy Crampton, associate professor in the department of geosciences at Georgia State University. "Now, anybody in their spare time can contemplate making a simple map."

More power to the people, eh!

A woman saint in India, and it is not Indira Gandhi!

Of course, I am kidding around. But not without reason. During the 1971 war with Pakistan, Indira Gandhi was compared with Kali. Senior leaders often said, "India is Indira and Indira is India" that reminded people of the French king noting that "I am the State".

Given that it is a land of a zillion gods and gazillion saints, hey there is one more to add here. But, it is not in Hinduism. Over to BBC:

A Catholic nun, Sister Alphonsa, has been made India's first female saint, at an event presided over by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican.
The canonisation was greeted with delight by Christians in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where Sister Alphonsa lived until her death in 1946.