Pakistan. What, me worry?

In a casual conversation about Pakistan, when I was heading back from the beach with my sister, she said that the US helps Pakistan too much--despite it being a haven for terrorists, and despite Pakistan's single-minded obsession with India.

I replied that at least it is better now compared to a decade ago, and definitely compared to when the Cold War was at its peak. That is the best I could do as a Polyanna!

At some point, the US will have to change its approach because, as I have blogged many times, Pakistan is one hell of a disaster.

So, how about this NY Times report:

The United States has accused Pakistan of illegally modifying American-made missiles to expand its capability to strike land targets, a potential threat to India, according to senior administration and Congressional officials.

This news item will play in India how?: as more ammo to anti-Pakistan emotions, more ammo to fight any peace-making with Pakistan, and as bargaining chip with the US in order to extract concessions somewhere. Oh well, when will we ever learn? Are we that much a slave to that darned military-industrial-complex?

If there is not enough to worry about, the same NY Times report adds:

[The] subtext of the argument is growing concern about the speed with which Pakistan is developing new generations of both conventional and nuclear weapons.

“There’s a concerted effort to get these guys to slow down,” one senior administration official said. “Their energies are misdirected.”

At issue is the detection by American intelligence agencies of a suspicious missile test on April 23 — a test never announced by the Pakistanis — that appeared to give the country a new offensive weapon.

Oh, finally:

The country’s nuclear arsenal is expanding faster than any other nation’s. In May, Pakistan conducted a test firing of its Babur medium-range cruise missile, a weapon that military experts say could potentially be tipped with a nuclear warhead. The test was conducted on May 6, during a visit to Washington by President Asif Ali Zardari, but was not made public by Pakistani officials until three days after the meetings had ended to avoid upsetting the talks.

If all these don't worry you enough, how about this news item:

A Pakistani court has lifted restrictions on A.Q. Khan -- a Pakistani scientist who admitted to spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya -- Khan and his lawyer told CNN Friday.

Party on!!!

The end of Facebook?

Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique.

Thus concludes Virginia Heffernan in the Sunday magazine of the NY Times.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of Facebook is greatly exaggerated by commentators. But, I do wonder though what the next cool thing will be because, let us "face" it, Facebook is not cool anymore to the young crowds when even grandma and grandpa are out there. I don't know how Twitter will morph into anything other than how it currently is--I hate the idea of geocoding the twitterer's location.

I just can't wait for that next (r)evolution :)

SAT scores related to bathrooms in the house?

Greg Mankiw:

The NY Times Economix blog offers us the above graph, showing that kids from higher income families get higher average SAT scores.

Of course! But so what? This fact tells us nothing about the causal impact of income on test scores. (Economix does not advance a causal interpretation, but nor does it warn readers against it.)

This graph is a good example of omitted variable bias, a statistical issue discussed in Chapter 2 of my favorite textbook. The key omitted variable here is parents' IQ. Smart parents make more money and pass those good genes on to their offspring.

Suppose we were to graph average SAT scores by the number of bathrooms a student has in his or her family home. That curve would also likely slope upward. (After all, people with more money buy larger homes with more bathrooms.) But it would be a mistake to conclude that installing an extra toilet raises yours kids' SAT scores.

It would be interesting to see the above graph reproduced for adopted children only. I bet that the curve would be a lot flatter.

Hmmm..... IQ and genes. Controversial, right? Of course. Because this is an unsettled issue in science. Conor Clarke remarks that "the vaguely deterministic suggestion that smart parents "make more money and pass those good genes on to their offspring" is a laughably crude description of how real life works" and cites a study by Richard Nisbett and notes that:

children born to wealthy parents and raised by downscale families have almost exactly the same IQ range as children born to downscale parents and raised by wealthy families. Nisbett uses this to make what I thought would have been an entirely uncontroversial point -- namely, that "both genes and class-related environmental effects are powerful contributors to intelligence"

Shall watch out for the next round of this discussion :-)

Climate change, not healthcare is Obama's Waterloo?

[As] the health care debate has shown, public support matters little, and facts matter even less. And even if health care reform does pass, it's unclear that Blue Dogs will be eager to lie down for the administration a second time. In which case, perhaps climate change—not health care—could be Obama's Waterloo.

I agree with Christopher Beam's analysis that it will be one tricky challenge when climate change-related legislation comes up after healthcare reform is sorted out--wait, that is if healthcare reform is sorted out! It is going to be one hell of a fall session for the Congress and the President.

Beam points out that:

[Already] some senators—Democratic senators, no less—have been hedging. This month, four Democrats said they think the energy provisions, like mandating renewable sources, should be separated from the climate provisions, like cap and trade. Combined, the bill is "too big a lift," said Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas.
...
Sen. Mary Landrieu, who represents oil and gas hub Louisiana, has declined to rule out the filibuster on climate-change legislation. Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska is likely to speak for farm interests as a member of the agriculture committee—as in, less wind energy, more ethanol. Nelson and the two Democratic senators from North Dakota, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, joined Lincoln in calling for Reid to strip the legislation of its climate-change provisions. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio recently said, "I want to support this bill, but it's got to protect manufacturing." And in May, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana was the only Democrat to vote against a renewable-electricity standard during a committee markup. Add in Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin (both of Michigan), Mark Pryor (Arkansas), John Rockefeller (West Virginia), Jim Webb (Virginia), and Claire McCaskill (Missouri), all of whom did not vote for the Climate Security Act of 2008, and you've got a good dozen Democrats likely to be skittish about climate legislation as envisioned by the House.

Meanwhile, imagine what the chaos will be if the recession that seems to have bottomed-out suddenly takes a dive because of acute geopolitical crises in the AfPak-Iran-Iraq corridor! Wake me up in 2010!!!

Islamophobia, and Eurabia

A British Minister walks out of a Muslim constituent’s wedding protesting against segregation of male and female guests; a prominent moderate Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, is hounded out of not one but two separate jobs for hosting a show on an Iranian television channel; aggressive right-wing campaigners in Switzerland demand removal of minarets from all mosques; and French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls for a ban on wearing burqa in public.

These incidents, occurring within days of each other in recent weeks in different parts of Europe, have coincided with a rash of new books portraying European Muslims in the darkest possible colour. Their alarmist tone has reminded many of the sort of things once written about European Jews.

Are these simply isolated events? Or is Europe in the grip of a new wave of Islamophobia?

A well-thought out essay by Hasan Suroor, who alerts readers about the growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe, and in North America. It is not looking good.
Suroor concludes that:

It would be foolish to conflate incidents which may be no more than just local difficulties and blow them up into an anti-Muslim conspiracy. Yet to dismiss them as an aberration would be to deny the prejudice that Muslims face across Europe.

More trouble ahead in Afghanistan

Given the current political and military issues in Afghanistan, I am reminded more about this among all my posts related to that country. In that op-ed way back in May, I wrote that the results of India's elections will not have any significant impact, but that the elections in Iran and Afghanistan are the ones that we ought to follow. I wrote there:

Afghanistan will hold its presidential elections in August. The current president, Hamid Karzai, has been heading the country since the Taliban-led government was driven out of power by the U.S. and NATO military forces. Karzai has been increasingly criticized for not being effective in the fight against the Taliban, who have been rapidly gaining ground both in Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is dealing with a possibility that democracy might get suspended there by a military coup, thanks to the democratically elected government getting more and more unstable. Unfortunately, neither a weak government nor a military coup is new to Pakistan.

Thus, whether it is the UPA or the NDA that gets elected to power in India, there will not be as many repercussions as from the political developments over the next couple of months in Afghanistan, Iran and, of course, Pakistan. How events unfold in South and West Asia this summer will have immense implications even for those of us halfway around the world.

We know how that Iranian election went and, unfortunately, we do not know how the dissidents are being treated.

The elections in Afghanistan? Things could take an ugly turn. For one, Hamid Karzai's main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah has already set the stage for what might happen if he loses:

Dr Abdullah told the Daily Telegraph: "I think if the process doesn't survive, then Afghanistan doesn't survive.

"Because what does that mean? The same sort of regime that crafted this massive, massive rigging will be imposed upon Afghanistan for another five years.

"On top of whatever problems this government, this administration had, there will be its illegitimacy.

"We will exhaust all legal avenues. But finally, if it worked, all well, if it didn't we will not accept the legitimacy of the process and then this regime will be illegitimate."

Apparently, even Obama's and Clinton's main man there, Richard Holbrooke, has had some heated exchange of words with Karzai:

Dr Abdullah spoke out as reports emerged of a heated row over the election between Richard Holbrooke, Barack Obama's super envoy to the region, and Hamid Karzai over the election.

The two are said to have had "sharp exchanges" after Mr Holbrooke complained about ballot box stuffing from the Karzai campaign.

This will be more than anything that we saw in Iran when Ahmedinajad and Khamenei cooked up the election results. Why? Here is Fred Kaplan:

[If] the election turns out to be as close—and contested—as the early returns suggest, the new president will probably also have to offer a very high position to the runner-up, perhaps even form a unity government with him. If Karzai wins, the runner-up is likely to be the former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah. There is another way to express this: If Karzai the Pashtun wins, the runner-up is likely to be Abdullah the Tajik. (Abdullah is half-Tajik but is considered the Tajik candidate.) In other words, if Karzai doesn't give Abdullah something big (or, should Abdullah win, if he doesn't give Karzai something big), the election could trigger an ethno-geographic conflict (Pashtuns live mainly in the south, Tajiks in the north), on top of the many layers of conflict that already keep Afghanistan from functioning as a coherent nation-state. This is one danger of holding a national election in a state that lacks a national consciousness or a civil society: The vote tends merely to politicize, and thus harden, longstanding social divisions. This is what happened in Iraq's first post-Saddam election.

Have a good day!

Women in the Kennedy clan

This one was too good that I decided to copy and paste the entire piece:

One thing we have lost with the passing of Edward Kennedy is a certain generational model of the proper role for the family women in public life—the mother, wife, mistress, and daughter. It’s not a model I will miss.

It starts, of course, with Rose Kennedy, described thus in a review of a book about the Kennedy women:

Rose changed from an ambitious, lively, curious girl to a wife and mother whose emotions were rigidly controlled and whose mechanisms of denial so highly refined that she could accept her husband's lovers—notably Gloria Swanson—into her home. She passed much of that legacy on to her daughters Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Jean.

In the Kennedy family, the women preened and posed, suffered mistresses, got divorced. That iconic video of Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House, recently replayed on Mad Men, is disturbing to watch today. She honestly seems as if she’s being directed by a remote control.

If they were lucky, like Eunice Kennedy Shriver, they managed to install themselves at the head of virtuous nonprofits—“charities,” we used to call them. When it came to the family’s sense of its own mission, the women were not in the picture. Here is Joe Kennedy’s line of succession, which seems medieval today:

It was understood among the children that Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the oldest boy, would someday run for Congress and, his father hoped, the White House. When Joseph Jr. was killed in World War II, it fell to the next oldest son, John, to run. As John said at one point in 1959 while serving in the Senate: “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him.”

Now, thank god (and feminism) we have Maria Shriver and Caroline Kennedy, who are contained by their husbands and children, but still exist as independent women in some recognizable form.

Save Earth, by eating at the new Taco Bell :-)

Taco Bell's New Green Menu Takes No Ingredients From Nature

Do colleges teach writing at all?

Stanley Fish writes:

As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.

If Fish could not succeed in his attempts on convincing academic colleagues about the urgency to reform the way we teach writing, what chances do lesser mortals like me have, eh!
At our campus we have "writing intensive" courses that do a poor, poor, job of improving students' skills in writing, primarily because they come to these content courses without getting anything much from the writing and composition courses. I served on the "Writing Intensive Committee" on campus, and three years ago I wrote to the chair of the committee:

[I] have been particularly concerned about the need to emphasize writing skills. For two reasons: one, because of my own personal experiences when I switched to the social sciences after an undergrad in engineering; second, Orwell said it best for me that thinking and writing are related--bad thinkers are bad writers too--and, therefore, students' inability to write well is not in itself a problem as much as it being a symptom of less developed thinking skills.

It will be neat to get into some serious discussions on WI itself--whether it is working, what else can be done, ....

It was quickly obvious that such a framework would not be welcomed by academic colleagues and I ditched the idea. And now I am out of the commiittee too!

Healthcare reform: tweedledum and tweedledee

David Leonhardt has always been fantastic with his economic reports in the NY Times. This latest one is no exception, and he clearly and quickly gets to the issue:

You might think, then, that a central goal of health reform would be to offer people more choice. But it isn’t.

Real choice is not part of the bills moving through the Democratic-led Congress; even if the much-debated government-run insurance plan was created, it would not be available to most people who already have coverage. Republicans, meanwhile, have shown no interest in making insurance choice part of a compromise they could accept. Both parties are protecting the insurers.

Leonhardt's comment that "both parties are protecting the insurers" worries me. A great deal. This "bispartisan" behavior is what Nader has often criticized as tweedledum and tweedledee :-(
He then writes that:

The best-known proposal for giving people more choice is the Wyden-Bennett bill, named for Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican, who introduced it in the Senate in 2007.

Yea to Oregon and Wyden!

Meanwhile, news reports are flashing that Senator Ted Kennedy died.

Healthcare, then higher education?

Niraj Choksi notes that "For 27 of the past 30 years, the price of education has grown at a faster rate than that of medical care. Education also grew faster than inflation for 29 of the past 30 years, while medical care beat inflation 27 of those years. Could education be our next health care crisis?"

Too bad it is not already considered a crisis!

Why do I say that? Because I have already blogged enough about it :-)