Poem for the day: "Eat More"

Eat More
by Joe Corrie

’Eat more fruit!’ the slogans say,
’ More fish, more beef, more bread!’
But I’m on Unemployment pay
My third year now, and wed.

And so I wonder when I’ll see
The slogan when I pass,
The only one that would suit me, -
’ Eat More Bloody Grass!’

Note: It was in the high school in the village in Tanzania--Pommern--where I was for ten days that I came across this poem.  Well, it was the poem that the English teacher, Mr. Phillip, discussed with his class that day.  It is an awesome poem, despite the obvious revolutionary/socialist message in it.

I suppose I should quit reading/blogging for a while and prepare for classes that start, OMD, day after tomorrow :-)

Photo of the day

So, death threats because of .... this?

Remember these cartoons from a couple of years ago?  The police nabbed a Somali who broke into the house of the Danish cartoonist. 
The Somali group, al Shahab, thinks that this Somali did something awesome; according to the BBC:

Al-Shabab spokesman Sheikh Ali Muhamud Rage told AFP news agency: "We appreciate the incident in which a Muslim Somali boy attacked the devil who abused our prophet Mohammed and we call upon all Muslims around the world to target the people like" him.

(ht)

BTW, the New Yorker has an excellent piece on Mogadishu and Somalia

Of course, even academic analysis is subject to this same treatment.  As I blogged earlier,

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

NASA and NASCAR to merge

What happened at Copenhagen .... is no surprise

I was off in Tanzania, without internet and phone access, during the climate change conference at Copenhagen.  One of the high school students in that village asked me, "Sorry sir, what is the purpose of the international conference in Denmark?"
(A clarification: almost always the students there used "sorry" to preface their questions.)

I was so tempted to give him the bottom line that I gave students in my classes last term: that the Copenhagen conference won't achieve a damn thing because:

• the US is way too weak to shape the global agenda, particularly thanks to the US owing China a huge chunk of change
• China will be a tough negotiator and won't yield an inch, and will not care for emission reductions
• India will cry poverty and seek sympathy, and will not be interested in any emission reductions
• the rest of the world will merely watch these unfold

Of course, I spun a different story for this curious Tanzanian student.
But then it has taken me this long to kind of get caught up with what happened when I was gone.  The piece in the Guardian sounds exactly like the script that I had offered up my students--I suppose I was correct for once!  Here is how the piece starts:

China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

I am not sure what to make of such a report.  Way too cinematic a report.  It almost makes me want to discount it entirely.  But, dammit, the description there is so much like what I told my students would happen!

China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.
China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered. A 2020 peaking year in global emissions, essential to restrain temperatures to 2C, was removed and replaced by woolly language suggesting that emissions should peak "as soon as possible". The long-term target, of global 50% cuts by 2050, was also excised. No one else, perhaps with the exceptions of India and Saudi Arabia, wanted this to happen. I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world.

I am not going to deny the possibility of China doing what it reportedly did.  But, this narrative does conveniently overlook how the US did not want to do anything all these years.  It overlooks how the US was often the lone dissenter among the industrialized countries.  Oh well.  Back to the Guardian:

Obama needed to be able to demonstrate to the Senate that he could deliver China in any global climate regulation framework, so conservative senators could not argue that US carbon cuts would further advantage Chinese industry. With midterm elections looming, Obama and his staff also knew that Copenhagen would be probably their only opportunity to go to climate change talks with a strong mandate. This further strengthened China's negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India. Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity ("equal rights to the atmosphere") in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard.

Let it be the last time that you were fooled into thinking that China would play nice on global issues--it would only China were to gain relatively more than the rest of the countries.

A long time ago, when I was in grad school, in a serious academic conversation a classmate of mine--who was from China--gave me the bottom line: China is the center of the world.  And this was just about when Deng Xiaoping had barely uttered that "to get rich is glorious" ....

Welcome to the 21st century, folks. 

Forty years of war in Kabul

This is one of the most telling images ever:

The person who took the photo on the right writes:

I took the photo of the bombed out Paghman Gardens in the spring of 2007. I had been in Kabul for several months and had searched for pics about what the old Afghanistan was like. A week or so later I took a day trip to Paghman and I seemed to recognize the area. I got home later that day and looked back through the photos online and finally came across the old photo with the two women in it. I drove back there the next weekend and tried to retake the exact same photo.

Worst political decade. ever. you think?

For me, it was between 16 and 21 years

As a reader of this blog, you are sharp enough to spot the humor when I say, "thank god for YouTube" ::-)

The must-have gadget for the new year!

A quiet revolution: Women gradually taking over

In an earlier post, I commented that we need to acknowledge the changes and progress we have achieved when it comes to the rights and responsibilities for women.


The Economist has the same idea as well, which simply delights me :-)  The magazine calls this the greatest social change of our time, and notes that 

within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce. Women already make up the majority of university graduates in the OECD countries and the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the United States. Women run many of the world’s great companies, from PepsiCo in America to Areva in France.

Yes, indeed.  As a kid, my formative years were when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister of India.  And then there was Golda Meir, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike.  So, I did not know anything better than the reality that there was no difference between men and women.  I think it also helped that I had a sister who was five years older and she and her fellow girls were as good as the boys at school.  Many of my own girl classmates were good and competitive students as well.  And, of course, I had a big time crush on one of those girls :-)

As I grew older, my experiences did not provide me with anything to change my mind and, to some extent, I was always puzzled that there were lots of people who had a tough time understanding Annie Oakley's line of "anything you can do, I can do better"

Now, the daughter is training to be a brain surgeon. I have females in my extended family working away as well as, or even better than, their male counterparts at leading multinational firms.  Female colleagues and friends who are even better than some of the male colleagues I have had.  I mean, if at all, I can only imagine that the female power will be way more than the male power as we reach equal rights throughout the world.

As the Economist notes though,

If the empowerment of women was one of the great changes of the past 50 years, dealing with its social consequences will be one of the great challenges of the next 50.

Population growth is undoubtedly the domain where we will see the most of the consequences.  After all, biology restricts reproduction--and I am thankful for that! Bringing up children then will dramatically change as well.  So will taking care of the elederly--most of these were traditionally the responsibilities for women.

The magazine further notes that:

The trend towards more women working is almost certain to continue. In the European Union women have filled 6m of the 8m new jobs created since 2000. In America three out of four people thrown out of work since the recession began are men; the female unemployment rate is 8.6%, against 11.2% for men. The Bureau of Labour Statistics calculates that women make up more than two-thirds of employees in ten of the 15 job categories likely to grow fastest in the next few years. By 2011 there will be 2.6m more women than men studying in American universities.

Women will also be the beneficiaries of the growing “war for talent”. The combination of an ageing workforce and a more skill-dependent economy means that countries will have to make better use of their female populations. 

Good for them, and good for all of us.

I hope that this quiet revolution will soon spread to the many parts of the world where women are considered a level or two lower than men ..... I suppose the ignorant have no clue that the times are changing, and changing rapidly.

Scrotal terrorism versus automobile fatalities

Our preoccupation with screening passengers in the airports of the world, and the costs associated with it, has public policy implications that are not being debated enough. 

(BTW, the problem with the recent terrorist from Nigeria was more a failure to act on the intel reports than of the TSA itself.  After all, this was a guy who should not have been allowed to have a US visa in the first place!)

Heather Mac Donald writes:

In 2000, commercial jets carried 1.09 billion people on 18 million flights, according to a no-longer-linkable Boeing document.   Assuming that the number of flyers has not increased since then, that makes for one would-be underwear bomber out of about 10 billion travelers over the last decade.  Does that record represent success or failure?  Are we jacking up physical security measures on planes and in airports because we think that the risk of another underwear bomber has risen since Dec. 25, or because we think that our record of prevention over the last decade was inadequate?   The notion that we should be able to protect against every terrorist incident is understandable, and announcing that we are not going to try to stop every such incident is unthinkable, though former DHS Secretary Chertoff did make tentative noises in that direction regarding cargo screening.  But it’s still intriguing to me why dying in a terrorist-induced airplane crash has a greater hold on the public imagination than driving on the highway, where there are about 40,000 fatalities in the U.S. a year, much higher on a per-mile basis than the number of deaths from non-terror-induced airline crashes, of which there are many more than terror incidents.

And here is Bill Maher (ht):

Real Working Wives

The university where I teach is quite the norm when it comes to one statistic: female students outnumber male students.  So, it did not surprise me at all when I read that:

In more than a third of American households, women are now the chief breadwinners. This reversal of traditional roles was accelerated by a brutal two-year recession, in which 75 percent of all jobs lost were held by men.
Even in homes where both spouses work, one in four wives now earns more than her husband. That’s partly because of rising education levels among women, falling salaries in manufacturing and blue-collar jobs and the growing need for both spouses to bring home a paycheck. Wives’ earnings, said Kristin Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, have become “critical to keeping families afloat.”

Now, I don't mean to suggest that there is a direct and sole causal relationship between college education and this role-reversal.  But, it is yet another piece of data that point to dramatic changes in gender-related issues in society.

There is one related pet-peeve I have, from an academic perspective: while many universities, including mine, offer "gender studies", they do not seem to make efforts to point out such trends in American society.  Of course, gender discrimination exists, and many other aspects of society make it clear that we are not quite at equal rights yet.  But, shouldn't we at the same time acknowledge the changes and progress we have achieved?


ps: during the years that I was married, I was one of those one-in-four-husbands whose earnings were exceeded by the wives'

From engineering to terrorism ....

I present you this excerpt from an interesting piece in Slate!

A paper (PDF) released this summer by two sociologists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, adds empirical evidence to this observation. The pair looked at more than 400 radical Islamic terrorists from more than 30 nations in the Middle East and Africa born mostly between the 1950s and 1970s. Earlier studies had shown that terrorists tend to be wealthier and better-educated than their countrymen, but Gambetta and Hertog found that engineers, in particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. The next most radicalizing graduate degree, in a distant second, was Islamic Studies.

And here is the best part:

Is there some set of traits that makes engineers more likely to participate in acts of terrorism? To answer this question, Gambetta and Hertog updated a study that was first published in 1972, when a pair of researchers named Seymour Lipset and Carl Ladd surveyed the ideological bent of their fellow American academics. According to the original paper, engineers described themselves as "strongly conservative" and "deeply religious" more often than professors in any other field. Gambetta and Hertog repeated this analysis for data gathered in 1984, so it might better match up with their terrorist sample. They found similar results, with 46 percent of the (male American) engineers describing themselves as both conservative and religious, compared with 22 percent of scientists.

Gambetta and Hertog write about a particular mind-set among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise. They might be more passionate about bringing order to their society and see the rigid, religious law put forward in radical Islam as the best way of achieving those goals. In online postings, Abdulmutallab expressed concern over the conflict between his secular lifestyle and more extreme religious views. "How should one put the balance right?" he wrote.

Terrorist organizations seem to have recognized this proclivity—in Abdulmutallab, obviously, but also among engineers in general. A 2005 report from British intelligence noted that Islamic extremists were frequenting college campuses, looking for "inquisitive" students who might be susceptible to their message. In particular, the report noted, they targeted engineers.

I used to be an engineer. How about that for full disclosure!!!! hey, hey, don't you call up the FBI on me :-)

Why the recession, you ask?

Never a Year Like '09

We do too little for the place we all should call home: Africa

Register Guard, Dec 27, 2009

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — When students asked me about my winter break plans, my favorite reply was a simple one-liner: “I am going home.”

Their typical response was something along the lines of, “Oh, how long will you be in India?” That is all the opening I needed to engage them in a discussion of how Africa is the “home” for all humans. The “roots” of Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte are connected to our own collective narrative as well.

Tanzania offers a compelling argument for why it is home to humans — going back to hominids, who were human-like precursors to our kind. The evidence, in this case, includes the well-preserved footprints of hominids in northern Tanzania, estimated to be 3.75 million years old.

Further, with coffee having originated in Ethiopia, the stretch of Africa that includes Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia is an important ancestral home to this avid coffee drinking human.

Tanzania is merely one country in the African continent, and at almost a million square kilometers, Tanzania has about four times the area of Oregon. Yes, four times — that is how large the country is. Dar es Salaam, the capital city, and its neighboring region has a population roughly equal to that of the entire state of Oregon. One can, therefore, easily imagine the challenge at the very early stages of planning the trip — how choose the parts of Tanzania to visit over the three weeks I will spend here. Of course, I am here to focus on a research question, but more on this later.

As I continued to work on my going-home travel plans, I brought in Africa and Tanzania as examples at the appropriate moments in my classroom during the recently concluded fall term. For instance, during a discussion on global climate change, I used maps to point out that the electricity consumption in New York City alone was equal to the consumption in all of sub- Saharan Africa, with the exception of South Africa. Yes, it caught the students’ attention.

Students’ response has been the same over the years: They are excited to learn about the continent of Africa when provided with the chance, and utterly disappointed if there is nothing presented despite their genuine interest in learning more. I remember one African-American student in particular who was visibly disappointed that there was nothing about Africa in the schedule of social science classes.

Even if the rest of us are not like that student, who was innately driven to understand Africa, the post-Sept. 11 world in which we live requires us to give Africa the attention it deserves. I hope that we have not forgotten the significant pre-Sept. 11 incidents in Africa. First, in 1998, came the near- simultaneous bombings at the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Kenya, the work of al-Qaeda. Responding to these incidents, President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes on precise locations in Sudan in an attempt to neutralize Osama bin Laden. Ten years later, al-Qaeda sympathizers have yet another safe haven in Somalia. Its capital, Mogadishu, has earned notoriety as the world’s most dangerous place.

From an economic perspective, Tanzania and most of Africa seem to be falling behind the rest of the world. Globalization, which columnist Thomas Friedman popularly refers to as the world getting flatter, has delivered a double whammy to Africa. On the one hand, the trend of globalization has further pushed the heavily populated nations of China and India closer to the United States and Europe. On the other hand, most African countries rarely register a blip in our academic and journalistic radars. The economic playing field does not seem to have been leveled for Tanzania and most of the rest of Africa.

Yet we continue to marginalize Africa, even though doing so serves neither our academic interests nor the geopolitical interests that govern our realpolitik. I suppose the election of Barack Obama as president has given us a wonderful opportunity: Instead of arguing over where he was born, why not channel all that energy into understanding Africa?

Wouldn’t we want to know more about our roots? 

I saw lions in Africa, no "Tiger"

Thanks to the web, I can catch up on at least a few things I missed .... like this one about Tiger Woods :-)

Taarab: I love it :-)

I have no clue about the lyrics, but I love the taarab music.  It seems to have the best of everything--Arabic/Indian/African/life ....
The Lonely Planet book (thanks to my daughter!) mentioned taarab, which was the first time I had ever come across that word.  But, it is one thing to read about it, and another to actually listen to it and in its "natural" environs.  It was simply awesome to listen to taarab especially on the long drive from Dar to Iringa.  The driver, Mohammed, was, I think, excited about my interest in taarab.  After listening to taarab for a while, he then switched to another station that played Arab music.
I tell you; I am humbled everyday when I encounter stuff that I did not even know existed.  How little I know!!!
I wish I could understand the lyrics in this youtube clip that I found:

The US is "a Ponzi scheme that works"

Coming back to the US is always wonderful for one reason in particular: I am so glad that this is my home. 
The Economist does a fantastic job of explaining why the US is a fantastic home to immigrants.  Read it before it disappears from freeloaders like me :-)
Excerpt, which is also the concluding paragraph:

The stakes are high. Immigration keeps America young, strong and growing. “The populations of Europe, Russia and Japan are declining, and those of China and India are levelling off. The United States alone among great powers will be increasing its share of world population over time,” predicts Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, a think-tank. By 2050, there could be 500m Americans; by 2100, a billion. That means America could remain the pre-eminent nation for longer than many people expect. “Relying on the import of money, workers, and brains,” writes Mr Lind, America is “a Ponzi scheme that works.”

As Dubai goes, so goes the recession

For The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Monday, Dec 14, 2009

DUBAI — I am in Dubai, as I write this, on my way to Tanzania.

My last and only other visit to this city was in the summer of 2004, to spend a couple of days with my brother and his family. And boy, is it a different Dubai since I was here five years ago!

Those were the good times across the planet, and the signs were obvious everywhere in Dubai.

Construction cranes were active despite the intense desert heat and stifling humidity from the Persian Gulf, and flashy cars were competing with each other on the roadways. Shoppers casually were juggling bags full of expensive goods at Dubai’s ritzy shopping malls, compared to which Eugene’s Valley River Center was practically a convenience store.

As one commentator put it back then, “Dubai is like Singapore on steroids.”

I remember feeling awfully poor while in Dubai — a strangely new feeling that, since gaining American citizenship, I was not used to while traveling in Asia. It was terribly humbling that my dollars were, well, not worth all that much.

My brother drove us to the gates of the Burj al Arab hotel—the only self-­proclaimed “seven star” hotel in the world. There, a couple of months earlier and for a $1 million appearance fee, Tiger Woods famously cracked a tee shot from the helipad on the roof.

That day, however, no visitors were allowed past the gates due to some special event, which meant that I did not get to see the fabled architectural luxuries, including gold-plated columns.

It is a different Dubai now. Even the airport is much larger, thanks to the massive new terminal, which was constructed recently for the exclusive use of Emirates Airlines at a cost of more than $4.5 billion.

I am reminded of the taxi driver in Singapore, a few years ago when I was there on my way to India, who was worried that Singapore’s government was not acting fast enough in order to compete with Dubai.

“Even our airport will soon be smaller,” was his complaint. Almost!

But there is a feeling of emptiness even at Dubai’s very spacious airport — as if the steroids are no longer working. It simply does not feel like the fastest growing airport that it has been for a few years now — this despite the fact that according to Dubai Airports, international passenger traffic registered a “growth of 11.7 per cent in October, marking the fifth consecutive month of double-digit growth.”

Perhaps it is reflective of the very reason Dubai is in the news now; it appears that the economic excitement of Dubai was yet another bubble that started deflating along with the global recession, and that finally has burst.

When the world learned that Dubai World — the premier investment vehicle of the ruling al-Maktoum family — would delay payments on the more than $60 billion in debts owed, it was a financial earthquake felt across the global bourses.

Even New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has expressed his concern that we might be at the verge of sliding back into another recession — just as we were beginning to feel confident that the United States and the world were on the path to recovery.

The economic downturn will have immediate implications for the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers and their families. After all, “natives” account for barely a fifth of Dubai’s population; the overwhelming majority are expatriates from all over the world, and the Indian Subcontinent in particular.

Thus, by extension, Dubai’s misfortunes could affect significantly foreign exchange remittances sent to the respective “home” countries. India, for example, gets nearly a quarter of its total remittances from the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a major component.

Personally, the huge difference between now and five years ago is a rather simple one; my brother and his family do not live in Dubai anymore. In hindsight, their decision to immigrate to Australia three years ago, even as Dubai continued on with its go-go-growth, seems immensely prescient. They timed the market well, indeed.

The curious academic in me wishes that I had more than the half a day that I spent in Dubai in order to try to understand the economic craziness. But to paraphrase Robert Frost, I have miles to go — about 2,500 miles more to Tanzania.