On Corruption

First, this graphic, from America's Finest News Source, about Chicago:

Of course, that was satirical. After all, it is from The Onion.

Foreign Policy--no satire publication--has a different take on corruption.  It questions whether there is "good" corruption versus "bad" corruption:

By the end of President Suharto's 30-year rule in 1998, Indonesia ranked as one of the half-dozen most corrupt economies on the planet, according to Transparency International (TI). Yet in those three decades, the country also experienced growth in per capita income of 6 percent per year, a rate almost unparalleled in recorded human history. The past 30 years have seen comparable economic progress in China: since the 1976 death of Mao Zedong, the Chinese economy has eclipsed even Suharto-level growth rates despite also holding position 79 in TI's latest ranking, tied with Burkina Faso.
This is not to say that corruption has been good for Indonesian and Chinese incomes (though many would argue it has been) -- perhaps they'd be even richer otherwise. But it certainly suggests that not all corruption is created equal.

Cartoon of the day: Joe Biden's colorful language :)

John Dickerson notes that this is, of course, not the first time:

America has a long and honorable tradition of top elected officials using salty language. Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Bush and Clinton all used rough language. Jimmy Carter did, too. (Though his best moment may have come when he didn't mean to: Speaking in Poland, he said "I want to know the Polish people," which was translated into Polish as, "I want to have carnal knowledge of the Polish people.") It is true that our first president was against it: Gen. George Washington issued "General Orders on Profanity" to his troops in 1776.
Ronald Reagan appears to be the modern president who kept it cleanest. He didn't even write out swear words in his diary. ("I'll hail it as a great bipartisan solution," he wrote of his tax cutting plan. "H—l! It's more than I thought we could get.") But he did sometimes resort to them in private conversation.

Frum learns that "you are either with us, or you are against us"

David Frum was fired from his job by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI.) 

Most Americans, in fact even most Republicans, will respond with "David who? and "What is AEI?" So, yes, this is mostly an "inside baseball" kind of an event!

Frum was the gifted (!) speechwriter who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil" for Bush.  But, Frum was not happy with that Warholian 15-minutes of fame.  Instead, he tried to cash in on that through his connections with the (neo)conservatives.

So, towards the tail end of the healthcare reform struggle, Frum read the tea leaves and figured that it was becoming the law of the land, with or without Republican participation.  So, he finds the nutcase Republican strategy to be faulty and has the audacity to express his views.

Well, Frum forgot the other line from Bush: "you are either with us, or you are against us."  His sponsors decided that he was not with them, and declared off with his head (well, metaphorically.)

I say that this is poetic justice.  After all, Frum was the same guy who questioned the patriotism of those who refused to support the Iraq War, and now that same logic was used to question how much of a conservative he really is.  Hilarious :)

Across the pond, The Times notes that:

Mr Frum posted his column within minutes of the Democrats securing the votes to pass health reform last weekend, condemning a Republican strategy of “no negotiations, no compromise, nothing”. He accused his party of trying to repeat its humiliation of President Clinton in 1994 while forgetting that Mr Obama won office with a larger proportion of the popular vote. “We went for all the marbles, we ended with none,” he wrote.

And soon after--within a matter of a couple of days--Frum lost his AEI salary:

On Tuesday The Wall Street Journal dismissed Mr Frum as “the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans” and attacked him for “peddling bad revisionist history that would have been even worse politics”. On Thursday he was offered the chance to stay on at the think-tank on a non-salaried basis. He declined.

Yes sir.  If you are not with us, you are against us.  Apparently the US is becoming a place where differing viewpoints are not tolerated (and this more so the case in universities, unfortunately!)  Anyway, the Times also notes:

mainstream figures including the standard-bearers of the Republican Establishment are being forced to the right by purity tests on key issues and a groundswell of Tea Party activism that moderates fear could marginalise the party in the long term.

I am all for the purity tests--let us get rid of 'em all.  In both parties.  Am tired of the politicians we have!

Quote of the day: on life

the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don’t expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room. There is this complexity which seems to me to be part of the meaning of existence and everything we value.

Chinua Achebe

BTW, in the interview, reference is made to the incident at Jos.  A horrible massacre, which is, unfortunately, the latest one in a long series of violent incidents:

332 bodies were buried in a mass grave in the village of Dogo Na Hawa, the Nigerian Red Cross said Wednesday. Human rights groups and the state government say that as many as 500 people may have been killed in the early hours of Sunday morning, in three different villages.
Sunday’s killings were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in this divided nation. Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.

All the talk about a "green economy" ....

Now it all makes sense :)

Beware of Neo-Malthusians, too

Style your garage: What a neat idea!

The garage sticking out in front of the house is so awfully boring and uninviting a look across streets all along the American landscape .... and in countries like Australia too.  Here is one market innovation that addresses that: billboards that wrap over the garage door.  And not a huge hassle to install it either (well, will be one hell of a challenge for nincompoops like me!).  You see how the garage door does not look like a boring door in the following example?

Taylor Swift ... am catching up with the times :)

I was driving with my daughter and this familiar song played on the radio.  My daughter then says it is Taylor Swift.  "Oh, so this is Taylor Swift?" I remarked--I have heard this song so many times, but it didn't quite register in my head that it was by Swift.
BTW, are all her songs kind of about some teenage heartaches and thrills?

Do all professors think alike?

While commenting about Louis Menand's A Marketplace of Ideas , Thomas Benton (aka William Pannapacker) observes:

More provocatively, Menand asks "whether holding liberal views has become a tacit requirement for entry and promotion in the academic profession" in a period in which political commitment has replaced the ideal of disinterested objectivity. He asks whether there is a "code" in academe that extends to "matters of intellectual, pedagogical, and collegial decorum, [that] the entrants are required to demonstrate for admission to the profession ... including personal manner and appearance."

There is only one response I can possibly think of:

Obama, the Dems, and .... bridge

I play bridge as bad as I teach, cook, or blog!  One of my favorites in bridge is to play "no trumps" and I strategically give away tricks to opponents so that I can later sweep 'em all.

Obama and the Democrats have such an opportunity now: yes, perhaps unintentionally more than as a calculated strategy, they yielded a few tricks to the Republicans.  The MA Senate seat is a trick that they should not have lost.  But, if they get their game back together, they can sweep the rest of the tricks and win the contract--win the re-election in November.  The key here is how they play the game for the next six months.  First stop--a measure that will play well to populism, in addition to some really needed reforms: the financial overhaul

BTW, if you are wondering what the game of bridge is about ... First, all the enthusiasts are not merely low life like me.  Some of the serious players include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Omar Sharif .... Here is a place where you can learn about bridge, and get hooked on the game--just as I was when I was a teenager, which is when my parents taught us to play ... And here is a site that lets you play the game for free (and for money too!) but more importantly at various levels from novice to world class

When obesity, sex, puritanism, and the law intersect :)

Jobs, Jobs, and ... cartoon?

Steve JOBS is Apple's main man.  Apple started a trend with the iMac, and now the ubiquitous "i" for everything.
President Obama is concerned about JOBS.
So, naturally, it was only a matter of time before a cartoonist put the two together to give us this: :)

What do book geeks do during March Madness?

Over to Salon:

Bracket-mad readers are currently participating in the DABWAHA (Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hellagood Authors) tournament for romance novels, the BSCreview (BookSpot Central) competition for science fiction and fantasy books, and a match dedicated to selecting the world's favorite fictional detective.

The grandaddy of them all, however, is the Tournament of Books,mounted by the Morning News Web site and now in its sixth year. Unlike DABWAHA, ToB doesn't offer prizes to readers who make the most accurate predictions, and unlike all the other contests, it doesn't rely on polling readers to determine the winning books. Instead, a single guest judge selects the victor in each bracket, while the tournament's overseers, Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, serve up commentary garnished with the occasional dab of sportscaster lingo ("quintuple toe loop"?). There's even an official statistician who crunches such questionably significant numbers as (I think I have this right) the ratio of an entry's length to its likeliness to ascend to the next round.

:>)

Bond ... James Bond

Freida Pinto as the next Bond girl? Really? I am sure they are kidding ....

And Sam Mendes as the director? I mean, I liked his American Beauty and Revolutionary Road .... but, as a Bond director?

Hmmm .. let us see :)

Quote of the day: observation and meditation

Meditation is coming home, to relax, to rest. If that takes place and one finds that though one has withdrawn and retired from activity, the inner movement goes on, thoughts come up, memories come up, then you begin to observe them. Till now you were busy carrying out functional roles, you were either the doer or the experience. From these two roles you have set yourself free voluntarily. You are now the observer. The inner movements come up, the involuntary movement comes up though the voluntary has been discontinued. You sit there quietly, you do not prepare to see, but if thoughts appear, then they are seen by you. It is a lovely state, the state of observation.

Source

Religion .... blogging on a topic, against my better judgment?

Secular Right had three interesting posts, and I am blogging all the three here ... (BTW, Secular Right is a contrast to the "Religious Right" and one of the people at Secular Right is one heck of a sharp mind, Heather Mac Donald.  She is way too much a libertarian/conservative for my preferences, but that does not stop me from her reading her essays!)

So, the first one is about how rationalists in India seized on the opportunity when "a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers"

At first the holy man, Pandit Surender Sharma, was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to perform a series of rituals designed to kill Mr Edamaruku live on television. Millions tuned in as the channel cancelled scheduled programming to continue broadcasting the showdown, which can still be viewed on YouTube.

First, the master chanted mantras, then he sprinkled water on his intended victim. He brandished a knife, ruffled the sceptic’s hair and pressed his temples. But after several hours of similar antics, Mr Edamaruku was still very much alive — smiling for the cameras and taunting the furious holy man.

The second one is about the continuing saga of the Danish cartoons on Islam and the Prophet:

UP TO 95,000 descendants of the prophet Muhammad are planning to bring a libel action in Britain over “blasphemous” cartoons of the founder of Islam, even though they were published in the Danish press.

The defamation case is being prepared by Faisal Yamani, a Saudi lawyer acting for the descendants, who live in the Middle East, north Africa and as far afield as Australia.

Mark Stephens, a British lawyer who has seen a “pre-action” letter sent by Yamani to 10 Danish newspapers, said it “specifically says” he will launch proceedings in London.

Yamani is expected to justify the action by claiming that the cartoons, including one of Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban, were accessible in Britain on the internet.

The third one?

some American Christians are fostering religious strife abroad. They mean well, but the damage they’re doing can be seen all the way from Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims are killing each other, to Malaysia ...

The Times story is about an outreach technique that some Baptist missionaries use with Muslims. It involves stressing commonalities between the Koran and the Bible and affirming that the Allah of the Koran and the God of the Bible are one and the same.

I suppose we non-believers are all the more convinced!