"Sixth sense" .... the future is here?

Cricket: not a critter but a religion in India :-)

This poster says it all!

If only this were a simple little one nutty poster .... a year ago, the following was in the news:

"Cricket is religion in our country and Dhoni is god of cricket," his fan club president Jitendra Singh said.
"We'll construct a huge temple of Dhoni in Ranchi and have a priest who will pray to him every day."

But, the good thing is that as much as real religions are losing their base, and the number of irreligious or casual believers is on the rise, even the religion of cricket (!) is losing its audience--even in India!  Why?  well, as all religions tend to do, well, the cricket priests also decided to extract way too much from the gods and the believers now can't afford to tithe like they used to, I guess.   Here is from one report titled "How cricket became boring" (ht):

It was unthinkable. That a day would come when the urban Indian male would admit he is bored of cricket. But the truth is that the sport is fast losing its charm among its most commercially influential devouts

 Notice here the usage of "devouts."  The author writes:

The board knows that the wealth of Indian cricket is a consequence of this nation’s complex love for the sport and that anything which affects this love would have financial repercussions.

So, yes, the high priests are concerned.  Now, if it is a religious crowd, then what happens?  Well, a new religion creeps in and tries to sweep up a few dejected believers.  That is what is happening in India, where football (ahem, soccer here in the US) is gaining a fan base so much so that the son of one of India's older and living cricket gods, Sunil Gavaskar, himself is attending services at the other religious sport:

From the equally pow­erful world of cricket, Rohan Gavaskar has en­tered the fray. He has bought a stake in the Pune FC football club.

Hmmm ..... the gods must be crazy :-)

10.2%? OMD!!! Where will it end?

Outsourced to Derek Thompson:

1) The last time unemployment crossed the 10 percent barrier was September 1982. It stayed above 10 percent for nine months. Nine months from now is the August of a mid-term election year. Bad news for Dems.

2) The broader measure of unemployment, which includes part-timers and people who have stopped looking for work, hit 17.5 percent. This broader measure of unemployment will start to converge with official unemployment before the official rate goes down.

3) It's hard to have inflation when almost one-fifth of a consumer-driven economy is out of work, under-worked or discouraged from looking for work at all.

4) Increased productivity sounds like a good thing, but for at least 17.5 percent of the population, it's not. Employees are squeezing more out of their workers, even with part-time work at an all-time high. That means they'll be morel likely to add hours than add workers as the economy picks up.

5) After dithering on jobless benefits for weeks, Congress just happened to extend unemployment benefits the day before unemployment crossed 10 percent. Sounds like somebody on Capitol Hill was tippped off about today's shocking figure, which was 0.3 percentage points higher than analysts expected. What did Congress know and when did they know it?

Remembrance of things past-7: Que sera sera

GM is guilty of "autocide" for killing Saturn

Cable TV News: quote of the day

Using [cable TV news] as a gauge of how divided we are is like using the National Hockey League to estimate the level of violence in America

Great point, Steve Chapman.
He adds:

According to a 2008 survey by the National Opinion Research Center, when you give them more options—extremely liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, conservative, or extremely conservative—you find that the largest ideological group is moderates, with 37.3 percent compared to 34.5 percent for the three conservative groups combined.
Add up the moderates and those who are only slightly liberal or slightly conservative and those who don't know—those clustered in the middle of the road—and you've got about two-thirds of the citizenry. As political scientists Morris Fiorina of Stanford's Hoover Institution and Samuel Abrams of Harvard put it, "the American electorate in 2008 is much better described as centrist than polarized."
Moreover, they note in a forthcoming paper, the public is not getting more polarized. "In terms of their ideological orientations," they note, "the American electorate looks about the same as it did when Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Republican Jerry Ford in the not very polarized 1976 election"—Carter being conservative by Democratic standards and Ford moderate by GOP standards of the day.

In advance of Veterans Day

ht

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Six months ago, I wrote in an opinion column that “how events unfold in South and West Asia this summer will have immense implications even for those of us halfway around the world.”

The two main events I referred to then were the presidential elections in Iran and Afghanistan.  But, it was beyond my wildest imagination that both the incumbent presidents and their governments would engage in massive electoral frauds in order to skew the results in their favor.  Particularly in Afghanistan with the entire world watching, and with the United Nations helping with the logistics of the elections.

Yet, that is how the story unfolded. 

In Iran, protests spontaneously erupted immediately after the rigged election results were made public.  But, the reports of arrests of dissidents since then, and their torture and even death in jails, are absolutely depressing developments.

In Afghanistan, the ineffective Hamid Karzai successfully cooked up the election books.  His main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, has withdrawn from a runoff election that was hastily scheduled for November 7^th, which has now been cancelled.

Meanwhile, neighboring Pakistan seems to be speeding down towards anarchy.

Thus, mid-autumn it is now, and I am all the more worried.

Try as I might to be cheerful about the outcomes in these three countries, I am unable to because there is now yet another electoral signpost that we are rapidly approaching—general elections in Iraq.

January 16, 2010 is the date when Iraqis will cast their votes in the parliamentary elections.  Iraq’s election commission will need at least 90 days to carry out the elections in accordance with the law.  However, the parliament is yet to approve of the electoral law that will govern these elections and the deadline for a final election plan has come and gone. 

The key disagreement is over voter registration in the oil-rich Kirkuk.  Kirkuk is in northern Iraq, which is a Kurd-dominated part of the country.  The question that remains unresolved is how to count the city’s Kurds, Arabs, and the Turkmen, who are the main ethnic groups there.

It is not as simple as a head count.  Because, when Saddam Hussein was in power, his regime unlawfully evicted Kurds and encouraged Arabs to settle there.  So, naturally, after the US removed the dictator, the Kurdish population returned home in huge numbers.

The parliament has to decide whether only the current population and their residencies count, or whether voter registration records from a few years ago are valid.  A current one would favor the Kurds, while using older registration data would, obviously, be advantageous to Arabs and Turkmen. 

It appears that the Kurds have drawn the metaphorical line in the sand.  Their demand for current data and for Kirkuk as one single constituency has no possible middle ground with the demands from the other sides that records from 2004 or 2005 be used, or that Kirkuk be split into two constituencies.

Kurdish representatives, therefore, boycotted the discussions.  If, on the other hand, the parliament approves a plan that overrules the objections raised by the Kurds, then there is a possibility that it will be vetoed by the Iraqi president—who is Kurdish!

If elections are not held as scheduled, then technically the current government has no legality to continue on past January. 

To review then: Iran’s elections were rigged.  Afghanistan’s elections were rigged.  Pakistan is in disarray.  Iraq’s elections in January are in doubt.

If there is a common thread to all these, it is simply that all these are countries that have been experiencing internal strife for decades now.  Iran is yet to recover from the disastrous coup d’etat in 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected government, and the later theocratic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini.  Afghanistan was practically in a civil war that only worsened after the Soviet tanks rumbled in back in 1979.  Pakistan has never really been stable ever since its creation in 1947.  And Iraq needs no introduction to the American audience.

Despite all these, if we expect elections to somehow magically transform these countries, well, that is worse than naïve optimism

Remembrance of things past-6

Click here for a rough translation

Scientific Predictions

From: The Scientist

Some famous (and infamous) predictions

YEAR	PREDICTION	RIGHT OR WRONG?
1869	Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table left spaces for elements that he predicted would be discovered. Three of these (gallium, scandium, and germanium) were subsequently discovered within his lifetime.	RIGHT
1964	Physicists predict the existence of the Higgs Boson. If CERN’s Large Hadron Collider finds no evidence for the existence of this massive fundamental particle, working models of the material universe might require a fundamental rethink.	PENDING
1965	Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore predicts that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every two years. The industry has so far managed to keep up (despite many predictions over the years about the law’s imminent demise).	RIGHT
1968	Entomologist Paul Ehrlich predicts that hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in the next two decades.	WRONG
2002	At the website longbets.org, astronomer Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, predicts that “By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.” Also at Long Bets, entrepreneurial engineer Ray Kurzweil bets $10,000 that by 2029 a computer will have passed the Turing Test for machine intelligence.	PENDING
2003	Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory sponsored GeneSweep, a sweepstakes on the number of human genes. While bids averaged around 60,000 genes, it was eventually won by a bid of 25,947—the lowest of the hundreds received.	WRONG
2007	The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th Assessment Report projects that global surface air temperatures will increase by between 1.1 and 6.4°C over preindustrial levels by the end of the century.	PENDING

Punditry: speculating about what to speculate :-)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2009 - Reindecision 2008 And Beyond
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Hurry up: FREE golf carts

No, it is not from the Onion.
An excerpt from the WSJ: (ht)

"The Golf Cart Man" in the Villages of Lady Lake, Florida is running a banner online ad that declares: "GET A FREE GOLF CART. Or make $2,000 doing absolutely nothing!"

Golf Cart Man is referring to his offer in which you can buy the cart for $8,000, get a $5,300 tax credit off your 2009 income tax, lease it back for $100 a month for 27 months, at which point Golf Cart Man will buy back the cart for $2,000. "This means you own a free Golf Cart or made $2,000 cash doing absolutely nothing!!!" You can't blame a guy for exploiting loopholes that Congress offers.

The IRS has also ruled that there's no limit to how many electric cars an individual can buy, so some enterprising profiteers are stocking up on multiple carts while the federal credit lasts, in order to resell them at a profit later. We should note that some states, such as Oklahoma, have caught on to the giveaway and are debating whether to cancel or limit their state credits. But in Congress they're still on the driving range.

... If this keeps up, it'll soon make more sense to retire and play golf than work for living.

Yes, true even if sounds way too bizarre to be true!

Seven months in Taliban captivity

On eating dog meat ....

No, I have not done that.
No, I have no plans to do that.
But, hold on for the observations here ....

I grew up in a vegetarian setting, and tasted animal  carcass for the first time only a couple of years after reaching the US.  Even now, my animal intake is minimal--a little bit of chicken or beef.  No fish, lamb, well, whatever.  And there are lots and lots of days when I just a plain old vegetarian. 

When I go to India, I become even less of a meat eater.  Not only because that is the food habit at my parents' place, but also because I can see, and hear, the animals being taken to be slaughtered, or being slaughtered.  This last trip, when I was walking with my sister and her family we noticed two goats by the roadside.  A few minutes later, when we were heading back the same way, there was only one goat.  And, across the street they were cleaning up the goat that obviously had been killed in those few minutes in between.

I find it difficult to make peace with such killing.  When it is directly in front of my eyes, when it seems like the animals know what is ahead for them, I can't imagine eating them.

In the US, the sterile atmosphere of the grocery stores provides me all the denial I want.  The cleaned up chicken breast or cubed beef ready for a pot of stew is presented as if no animal was ever killed in the process.  It then is almost like picking up onions or sugar.  I can conveniently forget that I hold in my hand what was once a beautiful living, breathing animal.

So, where does the dog meat come in you ask?  To cut a long story short, here is Matt Steinglass (ht):

Living about a kilometer from a row of dog meat restaurants, I take Jonathan Safran Foer’s point that if we’re not going to eat dog, we probably shouldn’t eat anything else that has feelings. But I also believe that one’s arguments are formed in an implicit dialogue with one’s audience, and Foer is clearly speaking exclusively to a Euro-American and South Asian audience when he makes this point. There’s just no way this argument is gonna fly in East Asia or Africa. The philosophical underpinnings needed for the argument don’t exist here; they’re not present in people’s brains. I think we need to start out with the “humane practices” argument, first in the developed world — stop torturing pigs in our own slaughterhouses, etc. Then we can start making the case to East Asian farmers that you shouldn’t stuff 12 dogs into a wire cage, put it on the back of a motorbike and drive down to the market to sell them off, with the wires slamming into their paws and chests at every pothole; that you shouldn’t tie two ducks together by their feet and drape them over the handle of your motorbike, then drive along as they flap to try to keep their heads out of the spokes of the wheel; that you shouldn’t splay a pig upside-down, feet trussed, across the metal carrying rack of your motorbike; and so on. (In some places you may also need to make a similar case regarding treatment of humans. And the most effective grounds on which to make these arguments, in many places, may be religious.)

The atrocious Communist past

It bothers me a lot when people at Faux News simply toss around the word Communist when they disagree with Obama's policies.  Criticize for all you want, but do not casually use that Commie word because it then absolutely minimizes the extreme atrocities that occurred in the Soviet, Chinese, Albanian, and other flavors.
As a high schooler I read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipalego and for a while I had a tough time even believing there could be horrible labor camps out there somewhere in Siberia for people who merely thought differently from what the official party line was.  It was way too outlandish for me to imagine them being real.  But they were.  As much as the Nazi concentration camps were real.
In an op-ed,  Professor Paul Hollander--who managed to flee Hungary--writes:

There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction. ...
...  Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder. People were persecuted not for what they did but for belonging to social categories that made them suspect.

Here is to hoping that Communism would never, ever, again be back in vogue. 

Do econazis use smartphones?

My cellphone is three years old.  And even when I got mine, well, it was already an old model.  Now I have one more reason for delaying upgrading my phone--the environmental impacts of tossing away an old cellphone:

The Deloitte report stated that mobile phone waste globally is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of about nine per cent between 2008 and 2012, with more than 80 per cent of the cell phone waste being hazardous.

An awesome quote of the day

"Neoconservatism has become a set of attitudes that might be summed up as, 'somewhere, shaggy kids might be having sex or smoking dope—so let’s cut interest rates and invade Iraq!'” - Daniel McCarthy, TAC. (ht)

Speaking a language with an accent

A friend (yes, I actually have a couple of 'em, left!) regularly wonders why I have a strong accent despite a good command of the language, despite learning it from the time I was in kindergarten, and despite being in the US for more than two decades.  I suppose I am not good at unlearning my old ways, and nor am I good in mimicking sounds.  There are times that I do wonder whether students make fun of my accent when they are in a safe company of like-minded people.

But, more than anything else, I told this friend that one of the advantages in coming to the US when I did--as opposed to the earlier decades--was that immigrants did not have to change their names and accents and everything else to make sure they conformed to the stereotypical "White American" way.  An Indian-American, who was (yes, he is dead now) old enough to be my dad's age had quite some nasty experiences both within and outside the country because his features and accents was unlike that of the "American".  So much so that once when he was in some European country (his wife was Danish) apparently the immigration officials held him for questioning--they were convinced that his American passport was a fake because, after all, he did not look "American."

I, on the other hand, have had no such pressure at all.  Well, other than the occasional heckler, sometimes within the family too :-)


Back in India, I remember most of us always getting thrilled if a foreigner spoke even a couple of words of Tamil.  The fact that they spent the time and effort to learn that much meant a lot.  I am willing to bet it is still the same way.  Heck, it was the case even with Indians who were from other parts of India.  I recall once two families came over for coffee--this was back in Neyveli.  These were wives/children of two contract folks who were colleagues of dad's and they were from Bengal.  It was an interesting evening, as I recall--the men folk conversing in English, the women struggling with a scattering of English and Hindi words.  We didn't know Bengali, other than saying "rasagollah" and all they could say was "idli" :-)  well, something to that effect.  And the couple of months later in life when I worked in Calcutta, I did learn a few Bengali words and expressions, and whenever I used them the locals were delighted.

But, apparently it is not not quite that way all over.  Hmmm .... I know what you are thinking--that I am stereotyping here.  Well, read this; a few excerpts:

The American attitude towards English is: everyone should get with the program, there are a million variants and accents of the language, all that really matters is that you can somehow get your meaning across.

So, what is a different attitude?

in France and Japan, the deep-down assumption is that the language is pure and difficult, that foreigners can't really learn it, and that one's attitude toward their attempts is either French hauteur or the elaborately over-polite and therefore inevitably patronizing Japanese response to even a word or two in their language. "Nihongo jouzu! Your Japanese is so good!"

or how about this one:

My mother, an Austrian, always used to watch as my dad, an American, inevitably got mocked in her homeland for his imperfect German accent, and, indeed, imperfect German (which was still pretty good). She notes this would never happen in America -- it is rare for Americans to actively mock a foreigner's accent. When they do, it's usually in a way that somehow includes the foreign speaker.

Remembrance of things past-5

USC Trojans lose ....

President Steven Sample is retiring.
Over the 19 years:

Since 1991, USC has climbed from 51st to 26th in U.S. News & World Report's rankings of U.S. research universities.

Its number of freshman applicants more than tripled, while the portion accepted dropped from 70% to an exclusive 24%. And the average SAT score of incoming freshmen rose 28%, to 2,068 this year out of a possible 2,400.

USC's endowment grew from $450 million to nearly $4 billion before the recession, then fell to about $3 billion. (The figure is still relatively low for a top-ranked research university with such a large student body.) On Sample's watch, USC received five gifts of at least $100 million; the largest, $175 million to the cinema school, was from the foundation of "Star Wars" director and USC alumnus George Lucas.

USC's international presence -- particularly in Asia -- grew as Sample helped start a consortium of Pacific Rim universities. USC became the U.S. campus with the most foreign students, a position it has retained in recent years, with about 7,000 in attendance last year.

Thanks, President Sample.
ps: Perhaps you thought this post was about the other Trojan loss :-)