Capris remind me of ...

... Audrey Hepburn

Grace Kelly and "Laura Petrie", too, yes ...

... but, it will always be Audrey Hepburn.

So, why this homage to capris and Hepburn?  Summer time means pretty much every other woman on the bike/walk path by the river is in capris :)

How about this one:



Or, this one, perhaps?

A Hiroshima survivor's experiences

How to ruin gay marriages

I think this deserves an Emmy right away :)

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But, ... Colbert has competition from Jon Stewart ... I love the ending with Reagan :)

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Russia's Katrina. Pakistan's Katrina.

And yet, the politicians don't care. Which is what happens in societies that are not quite democratic.
First, the unfolding crisis in Pakistan--massive flooding.  How massive?  About 14 million people affected.

Twelve million are affected in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces, while a further two million are affected in Sindh.
In Indian-administered Kashmir, at least 113 people died in mudslides.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that a charity connected to a group with alleged al-Qaeda links has been providing flood relief.
Flooding has submerged whole villages in the past week, killing at least 1,600 people, according to the UN.
And the worst floods to hit the region in 80 years could get worse, as it is only midway through monsoon season.

The number of affected will rise a lot more.  A couple of days ago, when this started. BBC reported that a million people were affected. Then it became three, then four, then eleven, and now up to fourteen million.
In a truly democratic society, the country's top leaders will be compelled to show up at the affected areas.  Pakistan's president, Zardari, is in the UK.  And this was after the British prime minister openly dissing Pakistan, while on a state visit to neighboring India!

Meanwhile, Russia is on fire.  At least, it seems that way, and apparently smoke from there has even drifted all the way to here in Oregon!  Over at the New Yorker, Julia Ioffe writes:

This ongoing disaster should be Putin’s Katrina, but instead the vast majority sees him as a benevolent father who can magically help them

Why does she say so?  Read on:

Villagers received no fire warnings. When the fires started approaching, some had trouble reaching the local authorities. Others begged for buses to help evacuate their villages, were told to fend for themselves. Fire trucks didn’t come, either, and then their homes, made of wood, were gone in minutes. The forestry minister, meanwhile, is on his August vacation, and has no plans to cut it short.

The government’s response has been a disaster, and the people are blaming their local officials—but not the very top. When a mob of irate women descended on Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, they weren’t mad at him; they were demanding that he, as one woman put it, “string [local officials] up by the balls.”

Boy, this Vlad "the impaler" Putin has quite a hold on Russia, it seems.  But, you think maybe it is not fair to include Putin in the list of officials who need to be strung by their cojones!  Not so fast:

In 2006, then-President Putin, in consultation with the Russian timber industry, “reformed” forestry regulations, eliminating positions for rangers, making each of the remaining ones responsible for more territory, increasing paperwork so they spent hardly any time outdoors monitoring the forests—and, on the off chance that they did spot a small fire while on patrol, making it a punishable offense (a misuse of state funds) to put it out. The organization charged with extinguishing fires was the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which responded speedily and capably to the Moscow Metro bombings in March, but a 2005 reform instituted by Putin left regional emergency outfits severely underfunded.

So, what is going for this former KGB officer?  Ioffe explains:

Except for the minority who read news in papers or online, Russians would never know that shoddy, nonsensical, industry-friendly deregulation was responsible for this natural disaster as much as the weather. Instead, the vast majority get their news from television, which has been broadcasting pictures of Putin, sleeves rolled up, touring the destruction. In a particularly fine touch, the main Russian television channel broadcast a “phone call” from Putin, ostensibly on his cell phone in the middle of a pristine birch grove, to President Dmitry Medvedev, back in his ornate Kremlin office. The message was clear: Putin was in charge, and this reassured the people who had lost homes to the fires he helped cause. “Putin said they’ll build us all new houses, so it will probably happen,” one villager told the Independent.

Well, I hope the millions in Pakistan and Russia are able to get over the rain and fire with as little damage as possible to life and property.  And, after things settle down, I hope they boot out all the dirty, rotten scoundrels.  And then we will do the same here in America!  All those people claiming cojones, better watch out ...

Christopher Hitchens: on cancer, god, and death

In this interview, which is a follow-up to Hitchens' piece in Vanity Fair, to see him so shockingly different in appearance ... Hitchens appears to convey that this a terminal case. The big C is just terrible.
Yet another reminder that we all die--sooner or later.  From cosmic dust we came, and to where we head back. 

Fanta, Stoney, and ... Hitler?

I would think that I am not the only one from India who loved Fanta when I was young.  It was a special treat to get to drink Fanta.  Of course, for a while we had no Coca-Cola products in India thanks to the government kicking the company out of India.  And the awful soft drinks that came in place--one was even called the "Double Seven", the "77" was a reference to 1977, which was the year that Indira Gandhi lost the elections and the pee-drinking Morarji Desai became the prime minister.  At least he didn't sell that bottled pee as cola, eh!  But, that is a different story by itself.

Recently, I had Fanta when I was in Tanzania--but only when the absolutely wonderful ginger beer, "Stoney Tangawizi," which is also a Coca-Cola product, was not available.
Oh, I could go on and on about the Stoney.  It was even better than what had until then been my best ginger beer--Bundaberg. I wish they would sell Stoney here in the US.

But, Fanta is rarely sold here in the US.  Today, this piece explains why the drink is not popular here.
But that itself became secondary compared to the info about how Fanta came about in the first place:

The original Fanta was a Nazi product. When Pearl Harbor ended the flow of Coca-Cola syrup to German bottlers, German Coca-Cola chief Max Keith—who sported a tiny Hitler-style mustache and celebrated the Führer's 50^th birthday at company conventions—formulated an alternative. He blended together an ever-changing combination of dregs, like leftovers from cheese production, the fibrous remains of apples that had been pressed for cider, and whatever surplus fruit he could acquire from Italy. He sweetened the soft drink with saccharin and named it Fanta, after the German word for fantasy or imagination. It sold well, especially once food became scarce and buyers began using Fanta as a soup base. When the international parent company reunited with its German branch after the war, it discontinued Fanta.

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Ten years later, Coca-Cola faced a crisis. Pepsi had started introducing different beverage flavors in the 1950s, but other than the Fanta anomaly, Coke had only ever sold one product (in either 6.5-ounce glass bottles or from the fountain). To better compete, the company revived the Fanta name in 1955 and marketed the new orange recipe across Europe. It soon expanded Fanta to Africa, Asia, and Latin America and added many new flavors to the Fanta portfolio, but it never pushed the product enthusiastically in the United States.

Nuclear bombs: never again

We remember those who died a torturous death, or endured unimaginable pain and suffering, as a result of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The description of the photo on the left, from this source:

This boy, who was burned to death with his hands placed on his chest, leaving an impression of agony, is believed to have been a mobilized student exposed to the A-bomb in Iwakana township, which is about 700 meters from the hypocenter.
In those days, students who were in the 7th or 8th grade or in middle school were mobilized to munitions factories, farms, and national defense crews. They hardly did any learning at school. In the Urakami district of Nagasaki, there were several factories, including the Mitsubishi munitions, to which many students were mobilized. The death toll of mobilized students is unknown.
Regarding the disaster in Iwakawa township where this student was burned to death, the record of the Nagasaki A-bomb War Disaster reads as follows:
The instant the A-bomb exploded, almost all of the houses collapsed. The scattered pieces of wood and other debris covered the ground, and in some places they were heaped into drifts. Those who were outdoors all died, and those who were caught under the collapsed houses were screaming for help, and those who barely escaped frantically ran around. The town got dark, and, when visibility was regained, the collapsed houses started to smolder and then took fire. While there were mixed outcries of calls and for help, the town turned into a sea of flames."

Why we continue to make nuclear bombs that can wipe out life on the planet many times over is a tragic mystery to me.  Here is to hoping for peace.

The dog days of summer

Earlier this evening, when I was walking by the river, the sight of dogs walking, running, and sometimes sitting in their owners' bicycle baskets, reminded me of Congo. 

I mean it was more than a passing reminder.  I wished that I could hold him in my hands once more.  Just a couple of minutes to feel his fur, and to smell his breath, and to annoy him enough so that he would turn as if to bite but would end up giving me a big lick ...

It is amazing how much that tiny fellow has left a huge void.

After I came home, it occurred to me that it might be more than a mere coincidence that this was about the time of the year, five years ago, when the vet explained why he suddenly collapsed on the floor one day--he had a bad case of an enlarged heart.  The fellow had a big heart, literally and figuratively speaking.  But, the literal big heart was slowly killing him.
 
Congo lived for about six months after this medical diagnosis ... Every once in a while, I imagine hearing his slow, rhythmic tap-tap walk on the hardwood floor. 

And then I read this piece in the New Yorker about Cooper!

What I notice the most is the sound, or rather the absence of sounds: I miss the click of Cooper’s nails on the wooden floor, the jingling of his tags (so exasperating at times that we considered buying those rubber jingle-stoppers), and, because he was an itchy dog, the drum-major’s thump-thump-thump as he worked his back leg up and down to scratch behind his ear. I know I will experience phantom dog noises for a while.

Oh, yes, I know this feeling all too well.  Susan Orlean adds:

If therapists didn’t charge you and were willing to chase sticks, they would be dogs. The kindly and receptive silence, the respect for secrets, the inexhaustible supply of attention—these are a dog’s, and a therapist’s, finest qualities. Dogs, though, are more fun than therapists, more tender, more dear, and certainly more admiring.

Obama opposes same-sex marriage. Awful.

Yet another instance when I wonder why Faux Noose always refers to President Obama as a liberal, when he consistently and loudly distances from what would truly be liberal.

Here we have conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents ruling in favor of gay marriage, and a Democratic President opposes gay marriage?  How twisted is this scenario?  I understand that it is all politics at a presidential level.  But, come on ...

Senior adviser David Axelrod said the president supports "equality" for gay and lesbian couples, but did not address directly Obama's position on Wednesday's court ruling, which struck down as unconstitutional California's Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage in the state.
"The president does oppose same-sex marriage, but he supports equality for gay and lesbian couples, and benefits and other issues, and that has been effectuated in federal agencies under his control," Axelrod said on MSNBC.

The last Democratic President before Obama, Bill Clinton that is, signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act, according to which the federal government recognizes marriage as only between a man and a woman.

Personally, as I have blogged earlier, I believe that a government has no authority to "recognize" marriages.  The government's job is to merely ensure that the contractual agreement that two adults enter into is faithfully carried out.  The government is not in the job of making the contract a holy sacrament--for those who need that recognition, well, we have all kinds of religious institutions that provide that.  In my world, whether it is heterosexuals or homosexuals, we all get the same "civil union" contractual registration filed with the government.  End of story.

Update (Aug 6th) David Harsanyi writes:

In the 1500s, a pestering theologian instituted something called the Marriage Ordinance in Geneva, which made "state registration and church consecration" a dual requirement of matrimony.
We have yet to get over this mistake. But isn't it about time we freed marriage from the state?
Imagine if government had no interest in the definition of marriage. Individuals could commit to each other, head to the local priest or rabbi or shaman—or no one at all—and enter into contractual agreements, call their blissful union whatever they felt it should be called, and go about the business of their lives.

And, to quote, again, Martha Nussbaum (ht):

Should the state be in the business of dignifying certain unions? The answer would be no. If we were starting over again, we'd want to go back and look at the privileges associated with marriage--tax benefits, immigration status, etc.-- and ask, Who do we want to give those benefits to? What do we want to do? That kind of thorough rethinking would be ideal, but it's also not likely to actually happen. How do we get from where we are to there? In the short run, I think the best thing is just to push on the equality issue and say, So long as marriage is offered by the state, it should be offered with an even hand.

I have said this before, and I bet I will say it many time over in the future:  the law is a ass--a idiot :)

So, didn't get the job?

 Because, three months after the announcement below, the university still has only an interim provost ...

The open forum times and locations for the two Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs candidates are listed below. The search committee hopes that as many members of the Truman community as possible will be able to attend these important events, during which Truman staff, students, and faculty may ask questions of each of the candidates. The dates, times and locations are as follows:

Dr. Stephen Scheck
3-4 p.m. and 4:30-5:30 p.m.
May 3
Violette Hall 1000

Fox News has black audience? That is news to me!

I thought it was merely Juan Williams watching himself; but, a huge 1.38 percent of their audience is black.  Really?

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If you have not been peer-reviewed, screw you :)

There isn't a single route to intellectual inquiry, particularly when it comes to social issues and social policies.  But, academics have managed to develop a format that is increasingly used only to devalue the intellectual merits of discussions that do not conform to their preferred method.  And what is that one route to revelation according to the pointy-heads?

Why, "peer review," of course!

As I have noted, even in this blog, while the pubic might be led to believe that "peer review" ensures that earth-shattering research is carefully evaluated by peers, and accepted by them, the reality is far from that.  In addition to all those earlier points, consider what Brendan O'Neill writes:

Being peer-reviewed no longer simply means that you wrote an academic report that was considered by other academics to be serious enough for publication – it means you possess the truth, Pure Knowledge, elevated insights that are not available to mere mortals who have not been PR’d. So in the debate about climate change in particular, those whose work has been peer-reviewed are now held up as oracles of wisdom in contrast to their critics, who are increasingly written off and sent to the intellectual equivalent of Connaught with three simple words: ‘Not peer reviewed.’ To be peer-reviewed is to have the right to speak publicly on important matters – to be non-peer-reviewed makes you immediately untrustworthy, a bit of an intellectual charlatan, possibly even suspect in your motives.
There is a censorious dynamic at play here, as a divide is erected between those who are PR’d and those who are not, between those who we should listen to and engage with and those we should look down our noses at - in effect between those who say mainstream, acceptable things and those who spout off-the-wall, experimental stuff. It is ironic that Pickett and Wilkinson, so very keen on the idea of equality, don’t like the idea of an equal right to speak and critique. In this area of life, their attitude is: ‘If you’ve been peer-reviewed, let’s talk. If not? Screw you.’

Of all the "peer-reviewed" colleagues of mine, I doubt whether even ten percent of them will be able to have a meaningful conversation on their subject matters with the world of intellectuals outside that "peer review" circle.  One of the wonderful aspects of the internet is how much it has liberated intellectual conversations from the narrow confines of the incestuous ivory towers.

It might come as a surprise to many of the cloistered academics that there are plenty of intellectuals in the world outside the classrooms and labs.  And most of them couldn't care less about academics and peer-review.  Megan McArdle, who has no shortage of credentials, noted that:

This is not to say that the peer review system is worthless.  But it's limited.  Peer review doesn't prove that a paper is right; it doesn't even prove that the paper is any good (and it may serve as a gatekeeper that shuts out good, correct papers that don't sit well with the field's current establishment for one reason or another).  All it proves is that the paper has passed the most basic hurdles required to get published--that it be potentially interesting, and not obviously false.

Yep, that is all there is to peer-review.  In most cases, particularly when one moves away from the first tier journals with high impact factors, a peer-reviewed publication is nothing more than work done by a hardworking student who faithfully does all the required work, and on time.  The authors of such work are, unlike what they think of themselves, no "oracles of wisdom" as O'Neill puts it.

Let me quote Frank Furedi from a previous blog-post:

Increasingly, peer review has been turned into a quasi-holy institution, which apparently signifies that a certain claim is legitimate or sacred. And from this perspective, voices which lack the authority of peer review are, by definition, illegitimate. Peer review provides a warrant to be heard – those who speak without this warrant deserve only our scorn.

Cartoon of the day: university websites

I just loved this:

Hmmm ... now, check out my university's home page :)
This piece, from where I got the cartoon, adds:

“Personally, I think an institution’s website is a reflection of the organization,” says Terry Calhoun, director of media relations at the Society for College and University Planning. “It’d be interesting to rate them and try to guess who ‘controls’ each one.”

Conservative judges are ruling pro-gay ... cool!

Factoids about the judge who overthrew California's Prop 8 (ht):

Judge Walker was first appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, at the recommendation of Attorney General Edwin Meese III (now the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation). Democratic opposition led by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-CA) prevented the nomination from coming to a vote during Reagan’s term. Walker was renominated by President George H. W. Bush in February 1989. Again the Democratic Senate refused to act on the nomination. Finally Bush renominated Walker in August, and the Senate confirmed him in December. ...
... coalitions including such groups as the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the Human Rights Campaign, the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force worked to block the nomination.In other words, this “liberal San Francisco judge” was recommended by Ed Meese, appointed by Ronald Reagan, and opposed by Alan Cranston, Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy, and the leading gay activist groups. It’s a good thing for for advocates of marriage equality that those forces were only able to block Walker twice.

How cool is that!  This was the judge whose nomination was opposed by the liberal bastion of the late Kennedy, and Pelosi, when Biden was the Senate Committee's chair ... the successful attorney in this California case is a Republican lawyer who represented Bush against Gore ... even Hollywood could not have scripted this any better :)
But, apparently that is not all:

Josh Green of the Atlantic notes a pattern: the federal judge in Boston who struck down a significant portion of the Defense of Marriage Act, ruling that it denied gay and lesbian couples the federal benefits afforded to straight couples, was appointed to the bench by President Richard Nixon. And the chief judge of the Iowa Supreme Court who wrote the unanimous decision striking down that state’s marriage ban was appointed by Republican governor Terry Branstad, who was just renominated for governor by Iowa Republican voters.

Who would have thought this would be the case!  But then Conservatism that is of the libertarian and states-rights flavor will bring such results, no?

I am not alone. Yay!!!

What percentage of Americans can't swim? Somewhere between one-third and around one-half.

Thank you, Slate.  This eases my misery a lot at being unable to swim. Shit, I can't even float :( 
Back in grad school, I thought I would achieve what had then been my lifelong goal-to be able to swim.  However, after a couple of weeks, the graduate assistant/instructor gave up.  His words I remember all too well: "I have never met someone who couldn't float."

Later in life, in Bakersfield, a friend recommended her friend who had one massive swimming pool in her backyard.  This was because she was a serious swimmer herself, and gave regular swim lessons.  She took it up as a professional challenge.  But, after the second session, this instructor breathed a big sigh of relief and confessed that she panicked when she saw me going down that rapidly.

So, despite all my passion for the rivers and the seas, all I can do is swim like a rock.  At least, it is really, really, comforting to know that I am not alone though. 

"I came, I saw, I withdrew"

... from Iraq, that is.  The British publications, like the Economist, always have "punny" headlines :)
In this case, it is the Economist, in which Lexington begins the report on the US beginning the withdrawal process with an apology:

The Economist was a strong supporter of the invasion (see here, for example), not because we thought Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with 9/11 but because we were afraid that he was going to break out of the box that was built to contain him after the Gulf war of 1991, with hugely dangerous consequences for the region. But we were wrong about his WMD programmes. And we were terribly wrong about the human cost of the war. Had we foreseen that the country would collapse into such bloody mayhem after the invasion we would not have supported it.

Had we foreseen .... blah, blah, blah.  As my grandmother used to say, "if my aunt had balls, she will be my uncle" ... I tell you, every cheerleader for the Iraq War needs to pay a hefty dollar penalty, and the collections can go into a Iraq reconstruction fund of sorts.

And at the end of it all?

Mr Obama's priority is to extricate American forces as smoothly as possible by the end of next year without doing anything that risks rocking the fragile boat. He has Afghanistan to focus on, not to mention his own re-election. And after all the miserable unintended consequences of George Bush's "freedom agenda" in the Middle East, discretion may indeed be the better part of valour: time to get out while the going is reasonably good. But how tragic, and tantalising, to have come so close to establishing a moderately accountable form of government in Iraq, only to slip away before the job is done.

Nothing tantalisingly close!  It is too bad, though, that this utter chaos and failure of the Iraq invasion and thereafter will morph into Obama's legacy. 

Republicans shun 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

Unable to find a single Republican senator willing to break ranks and support the measure, Senate Democrats failed Thursday to stop the filibuster of S. 6253, a one-page resolution recognizing the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. "We almost had Scott Brown (R-MA) on board, but he balked when members of his party insisted the book only be commended if its court-room scenes were shortened a bit and the setting changed to Nebraska," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), explaining the procedural difficulties in passing legislation to honor the classic tale of a small-town lawyer's tireless efforts to defend an innocent man. "If we'd agreed to all their compromises, we'd have wound up with a watered-down version of the novel containing only seven of its original 31 chapters." At press time, Republicans said they would be willing to resume negotiations if the beloved work of American literature is revised so that Tom Robinson is a small-businessman wrongly accused of failing to provide employees with health benefits and Scout is a boy.

Thus reports the only finest news source that America has for such absolutely earth-shattering developments.
And, BTW, don't overlook Packer's description of how the Senate works (or does not!)

Government waste. Corporate waste. Are we stuck?

There is a great deal of truth in the increasingly popular sentiment that the compensation levels for government employees have become distorted, more so during this Great Recession.  But, such distortions are prevalent in the private sector too.

I do not mean to deny the problem in the public sector.  My graduate school professor, who has semi-retired now, often joked that he became a libertarian because of his experiences when he worked as a student intern with the Los Angeles County government—and this was forty-some summers ago! 

In my own experience as a student intern and later as full-time employee with different government agencies in California, I did encounter employees who did not seem to be delivering service that was equivalent to their high salaries.  In the decade since I returned to academia, one of my former employers has practically doubled the number of people in its payroll.

But, such issues are not only a characteristic of the public sector—they plague the private sector as well.

When it is a small business, like the one my neighbor owns, it is quite easy to maximize efficiency.  But, as organizations get larger, much to our displeasure as consumers and taxpayers, wastes do arise.  Various forms of economic inefficiencies, of which compensation levels are one, are characteristic of large organizations—private, public, and even the non-profits. 

Academics and management experts have been studying these issues for a long time.  One of my fellow graduate students—also from India—did his doctorate in “organizational behavior” and focused on such inefficiencies.  The interesting irony was that until we met in Los Angeles, as new graduate students, we didn’t know that we had worked for the same employer in India, Indian Oxygen Limited, after which, naturally, we shared many jokes about the wasteful practices at the firm.

Perhaps it is easy to go after public sector compensation because it is the metaphorical fruit lying on the ground.  But, while bending down to pick these up, are we overlooking far plumper fruits in the private sector?

A typical argument for ignoring the inefficiencies in the private sector is that options exist for us consumers, while as taxpayers we have no alternative but the government, which is a monopoly.  I.e., if we do not like, for instance, a multinational company’s wasteful approaches, then we can stop patronizing that business and move to somebody else.  However, as we find with the oil companies, there is rarely a difference between large firms, which means that there isn’t really a choice for us consumers—it is tweedledum or tweedledee!

Finally, looking at inefficient resource allocations within my own world of higher education, I would rather that we target first the ever increasing expensive spending for athletics.  It is no longer any news that often college coaches earn far more than corporate CEOs.  But, this is a losing battle—after all, even my left-leaning faculty colleagues love sports to the extent of organizing betting pools during the “March Madness.”

I suppose we are stuck with inefficiencies that we don’t like!

Image of the day: on beards

Two students, who are sisters and one just graduated, have a dog named Chesterton.  Yes, named after that literary intellectual G.K. Chesterton.
Well, perhaps as serious Chesterton fans they already know what he said about beards; in case you don't get all the way to the bottom of the graphic (click on the graphic for a clearer image), having a beard--even a shaggy one--is a sign of commitment and dedication because, as Chesterton said:

One cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion

Cool! But, Chesterton himself did not sport a beard, but had only a mustache :)

Quote (!) of the day: on Afghanistan

“Military reinforcements are only a small part of the response. To win the support of the Afghan population, you must bring economic development and prove you can not only change their lives, but improve them.”

The bizarre things about this statement is that it is from, of all people, the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari.

Pakistan, which has done everything possible to make sure that the screwed-up American-led war would be even more screwed-up now offers this sage commentary?  WTF, eh!  Wait, he said this, too:

“The international community, of which Pakistan is a part, is losing the war against the Taliban because we have lost the battle for hearts and minds”

Gee, thanks!

What does the US government have to say about this?

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said U.S. President Barack Obama doesn’t share Zardari’s assessment of the course of the war.

“I don’t think the president would agree with President Zardari’s conclusion that the war is lost,” Gibbs told reporters at today’s regular White House briefing. “The actions and the efforts that the coalition, international forces and American forces have taken over the last several months have very much the hearts and minds of the Afghan people at the forefront.”

Great.  Will somebody in the White House please get Gibbs a cup of strong coffee so that he might wake up to the reality!!!

Meanwhile, the increasingly attractive government in the UK is out on an offensive against the Pakistani involvement in terrorism.  Which then triggered a whole lot of flag-waving against the UK, and Pakistanis demanded that their president cancel the planned visit to the UK.

The Pakistani government yesterday summoned the U.K.’s top envoy there after Cameron, visiting neighboring India, said Pakistan mustn’t be allowed to “look both ways” in the fight against terrorism. Television pictures showed an effigy of Cameron being burned by protesters in Karachi. 

  Cameron couldn't care less, it seems; good for him.
BTW, do you suppose the "West" is now regretting having forced the exit of Pervez Musharraf? 

Homophobia caused Queen's demise in the US ...

I wondered earlier on why there wasn't as much an interest for, and excitement in, Queen here in the US.  My only hypothesis was that somehow the life and lifestyle of the singer--Freddie Mercury--was not received well, particularly during the virulent anti-gay days of the 1970s and 1980s, which was when Queen was soaring high.

I wonder no more.

Unfortunately that was the case.  And this was from the metaphorical horse's mouth--from Brian May, make it Dr. Brian May, who was the co-founder of the group and their lead guitarist.

May was a guest in Terry Gross' "Fresh Air", and her question to him was about the rather incongruity between most of the band's fans who in those years were not quite supportive of homosexuals.  May suggested that even though the world was aware of Mercury being gay, it was something like an unspoken topic amongst his fans.  He put it so well:

"I think it was an undiscussed thing for a long time. The truth of the matter is nobody should care. Why should anyone care what sexual persuasion people have? It's about the music, and Freddie would have been the first to say that. He never hid the fact that he was turned on by men instead of by women, but strange enough, I don't think it was always the case. Because in the early days, we used to share rooms. So in the early days, I know who Freddie slept with, and they weren't men, but I think it gradually changed. And I have no idea how these things work, but it wasn't really anybody's business but his, and we never talked about it as if it were important. Why should it be important? We just made music together."

May went on to say that in the US, it was indeed the gay aspect that resulted in the group touring in America much less than they liked :(  That they were the biggest group everywhere in the world, playing to packed stadiums, except here in the States.

In particular, he referred to the video they made for "I want to break free".

In the video, which is easy to make out that it is a spoof at various levels, the Queen's players dress up as women.  May said that in the promo tour interview in the Midwest, the ashen-faces of the people when they watched the video made it all clear ...

Anyway, apparently after Wayne's World made Bohemian Rhapsody and Queen famous all over again, by when Mercury was already quite ill, Mercury's comment was that he would probably be dead before they got big in America again.  It all makes sense, now, as to why his death did not register as a huge event here in America :(

Brian May is quite a Renaissance Man.  The way he explained the physics of the acoustics of their music making to the physics of inter-stellar dust .... he came across as a wonderful lecturer too.  Dr. May is now the Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.

Monkeys better than humans in economics?

Economics is not really a science, even though we all pretend that it is all scientific.  There are way too many factors, including one important aspect--that humans do not always behave rationally, while rational behavior is pretty much a fundamental assumption in modeling economics.
So, an interesting question then: how different from, or similar to, monkeys are we when it comes to (ir)rationality?  Take it away, Dr. Laurie Santos:

If I were younger ...

Only because I can compete for this opportunity :)

The hi-tech anarchist: WikiLeaks

Julian Assange now identifies himselfas the editor of WikiLeaks.  Which then has set off a whole range of discussions on whether what Assange does is journalism at all.

And then there are those who have already branded Assange a threat to national security and that he ought to be arrested. Who would have imagined that Time would have a piece with the title, "Should the US kidnap WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange?"

So, from my home-office in Eugene, Oregon, I have a different take on all these--Assange and WikiLeaks are the latest version of anarchism and anarchists who have always challenged the state and status quo.

It used to be that the meetings of the World Trade Organization or the G-8 or the IMF were the venues that provided anarchists with an outlet for their political and cultural dissent.  Most governments treated them as a nuisance, and every once in a while would make their police reaction so strong that anarchists ended up getting a lot more publicity and sympathy than would otherwise have been the case.

So, to all these rebels without a cause, al Qaeda and the Anglo-American "war on terror" have provided an ideal outlet for their passions, and with quite a focus as well.  This entire format of information-anarchy also works well for them--no need to gather in public places, and no visible confrontation with the establishment.  Given that the wars have affected the entire world now, and given the outright horrors of, say, waterboarding or Guantanamo or ... I can easily imagine that while those of us who are pacifists (or wimpy?) simply blog or write op-eds or grumble to our local Congress member, the young and radical anarchists have WikiLeaks.

To a large extent, this is a sign of the times--the information and technology world in which we live.  If our government can, from the comforts of military bases in Nevada, fly unmanned planes that kill people all the way across the world in Pakistan, then, hey, is it any surprise that these radical dissenters have their own remote operations?
WikiLeaks, I suspect, is only the beginning of all kinds of cyber-activities yet to come. 

The best email of the day :)

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The screwed-up US Senate

Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction.

George Packer's essay in the New Yorker is quite a depressing read on how the Senate works.  Just awful.  Here is Packer describing a typical senator's modus operandi:

Daschle sketched a portrait of the contemporary senator who is too busy to think: “Sometimes, you’re dialling for dollars, you get the call, you’ve got to get over to vote, you’ve got fifteen minutes. You don’t have a clue what’s on the floor, your staff is whispering in your ears, you’re running onto the floor, then you check with your leader—you double check—but, just to make triple sure, there’s a little sheet of paper on the clerk’s table: The leader recommends an aye vote, or a no vote. So you’ve got all these checks just to make sure you don’t screw up, but even then you screw up sometimes. But, if you’re ever pressed, ‘Why did you vote that way?’—you just walk out thinking, Oh, my God, I hope nobody asks, because I don’t have a clue.”

Whether it is in India or here in America, it is amazing how much life goes on in spite of politics and politicians. Do we have to wonder anymore why the energy bill is stalled, or nothing ever gets accomplished? 

The two lasting achievements of this Senate, financial regulation and health care, required a year and a half of legislative warfare that nearly destroyed the body. They depended on a set of circumstances—a large majority of Democrats, a charismatic President with an electoral mandate, and a national crisis—that will not last long or be repeated anytime soon. Two days after financial reform became law, Harry Reid announced that the Senate would not take up comprehensive energy-reform legislation for the rest of the year. And so climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans’ care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world’s greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing. Already, you can feel the Senate slipping back into stagnant waters.

Just awful!

The chicanery of Deepak Chopra

Let us face it; Peter Sellers as the Indian, Hrundi V. Bakshi, in The Party, offers a lot more wisdom than does Deepak Chopra through his highfalutin new age spiritual advice, where he seemingly blends modern science and reason with age old lore.

And the guy, Chopra that is, has an inflated opinion of himself enough to tweet a horribly failed joke that an earthquake in Southern California was a result of his meditation; he tweeted:
"Had a powerful meditation just now -- caused an earthquake in Southern California" ... "Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake. Sorry about that."

Perhaps all Chopra does is to test and confirm on a daily basis P.T. Barnum's line about suckers being born everyday.

Chopra's convenient mixing of scientific language and spiritual crap gets Michael Shermer's attention (ht).  The following line in his commentary about Chopra's version of "Theology 2.0," as Shermer describes it, is a beauty:

Chopra’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience.

Awesome, dude!
Take it away, Claudine Longet :)

Anton Chekov's 150th birthday

One of the few books I own is a collection of few of Chekov's plays.  His plays are not merely theatre, but are profound discussions of humanity and everyday life.

In an essay in the Chronicle Review, almost ten years ago, in which I discussed the wastefulness and pretentiousness of most of the academic "research," I quoted from Anton Chekov's "Uncle Vanya."  In that play, Vanya goes after the professor:

"All our thoughts and feelings pertained to you alone. Our days were spent talking of you and your work, we were proud of you, we uttered your name with reverence, our nights were wasted reading books and magazines for which I now have the deepest contempt! ... But now my eyes have been opened! I see everything! You write about art, but you understand nothing of art! All your works, which I used to love, are not worth a copper kopeck. You've swindled us!"

Chekov always has a simple way of saying things that are profound.  I then wrote:

The passage from Uncle Vanya reminded me of the public, whose taxes make it possible for universities like mine to exist. Would people be disillusioned if they knew that only a few of professors' publications are ever read by more than a handful of other scholars? Would people be disappointed in higher education if they realized that most academics' publications would not sell even for a penny? Would people agree with Uncle Vanya that professors who write but are rarely read and cited are swindlers? Could it be that people already grasp the truth, and that their knowledge is one cause of the decline in the prestige our society accords to faculty members? If I did not teach at a university, would I agree with Uncle Vanya? 

Life has never been the same ever since Chekov's Uncle Vanya helped crystallize the thoughts that had been fuzzy up until that point.  (Though, this approach to research and higher education, and a generally disgusted feeling towards the pretentious faculty colleagues, doesn't help me in the real world!)

The Guardian features an essay about Chekov and his plays, on the occasion of his 150th anniversary of his birth. (ht)

his stories are full of people who espouse views very similar to the above – enlightened misfits, philanthropic gentry, civilised professionals (often doctors like himself) holding a candle for reason, justice and all the rest.

The author then notes:

There had been sceptics, agnostics, doubters, questioners of every kind before Chekhov, but perhaps no writer in whom the utter mysteriousness of existence was felt so deeply, or counterpoised by such ­inexhaustible interest in the teeming variety of forms – human and otherwise – in which it manifests itself. To have found a way of expressing both, with such profligate inventiveness and such apparent ease, was, above all else, the mark of Chekhov's genius; his unsurpassed greatness as a teller of stories.

Music of the day

With my favorite band(s) :)

UK preferred over the US?

Europe, after ages, has upstaged the US as the preferred campus destination for Indians. More than twice the number of desi students who applied to fly abroad for entry into colleges this year chose the UK over America.
Data on the fresh visas for entry into colleges in 2010 reveals that the US issued 32,000 student visas, a little more than half the number issued by the UK (57,500).

And, this was even before the Tory/LibDem alliance!

The intifada in Kashmir

I have blogged about the fresh series of violence in Kashmir, which is why I am all the more worried about the escalation in the confrontation there.

The caption for the photo on the left reads:
A man throws a policeman's bamboo shield on a burning government vehicle after protesters set it on fire in Pampore, near Srinagar on Sunday.

According to the same news report, At least eight people were killed in fresh round of violence in Kashmir, taking the death toll in the past 36 hours to 12.

A commentary from across the border, in Pakistan, naturally takes on a completely pro-Pakistani slant, along with anti-Indian and anti-American rhetoric:
India continues to treat the Kashmiri people as if they were not human beings and as if they have no rights. It refuses to acknowledge the uprising to be a home grown insurgency. Instead, it finds it easy to blame it all on groups that it says Pakistan sponsors.

There are even more fascinatingly rhetorical and inflammatory sentences in that commentary.  But then that is what most commentators do anyway--we have quite a few of such shrill ideological voices spouting rhetoric in the television and newspaper outlets here in America.  Stupid ideologues all over this planet!

If only India's Vallabhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru hadn't arm-twisted the Kashmiri maharajah, and quite a few other territories into joining the union.  I suppose this is the one of the rare situations when I agree with Arundhati Roy, who refers to these and other acts as India's acts of territory grabbing and imperialism. 

Meanwhile, there is the other serious internal violence that Roy details.

The wonders of modern life

Every time I board an airplane, I am simply amazed that these heavy objects can fly.  And fly at five miles above the ground.  And fly without stopping even for 18 hours at a stretch, as was the case from Los Angeles to Singapore or Bangkok or Dubai. 

When I tell my students that modern human achievements have resulted from brain power, as opposed to the brawn of the past, I doubt if even one really understands and appreciates that. 
Which is why I liked this short essay (ht) about how much humans were in awe of machines until very recently:

Today, we no longer approach our many machines with awe; in fact, the more personalized and individualized our machines have become, the less humility we feel in using them. No longer the large, rare dynamos of Adams's day, our machines are often portable and are such a central part of our everyday lives that we barely notice their presence. Rather than awe-inspiring symbols of man's power, they are merely extensions of ourselves, like the cell phone that helps us communicate or the microwave that speeds the cooking of our dinner.

While I don't care much for the backer of the publication (The Templeton Foundation,) I resonate a lot with the final comments in that essay:

The decline in humility toward our machines comes at a time when we know almost nothing about how or why they work. Although overwhelmed by its power, Henry Adams nevertheless had a basic understanding of how the dynamo operated. Most of us know very little about how our laptop computers run or how to repair our washing machines. Today we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called "machine-made helplessness." This, too, is a form of blind faith, ...
The awe experienced by earlier generations was part of a different worldview, one that demonstrated greater humility about many things, not least of which concerned their own human limits and frailties. Today we believe our machines allow us to know a lot more, and in many ways they do. What we don't want to admit - but should - is that they also ensure that we directly experience less. Updating your Facebook page is a lot easier than venturing out into the world to confront a dynamo, as Adams did. But it is also, in the end, likely to be a lot less awe-inspiring.

The comment about how we don't know anything about the very gadgets we use reminds of the essay, "I, Pencil" that is often quoted by libertarians on the power of the free market. 
Thankfully, my Marxist and Socialists faculty colleagues are not into technology and, definitely, do not read this blog.  Else, I will be in more trouble for even referring to I, Pencil :)

Oh for a world without mosquitoes!

Summers in this part of Oregon where I live is fantastic.  The best weather conditions that I could ask for.  And, no mosquitoes!  A total contrast to the life I experienced in India.  I recall one stretch of a few weeks in Madras (as it was known then) when I almost gassed myself to unconsciousness by spraying huge amounts of flit (i think that was the name of the product)

What I didn't know, until I heard Sonia Shah on "Fresh Air" a few days ago, was that mosquitoes have been around for a very long time, and have been biting the blood out of us for millennia. Shah was talking with Terry Gross about her book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

It was neat to hear Shah talk about her experiences whenever she visited India, and how the mosquitoes would attack her--she would be left with huge bruises and bumps, while her cousins would have nothing. 
I can totally related to this: While the mosquito menace has decreased a lot in Chennai (as the city is now known) I find it more than annoying that those insects seem to target me way more than anybody else.  My joke (!) has always been that they know I am from America, and prefer that foreignness in the blood.  So, it was not just my experience, after all, with mosquitoes and American blood!

I don't recall though Gross making any comments on a counterfactual scenario--what if all the mosquitoes were eliminated from the planet?

That is the question that this piece in Nature tackles.  

Malaria infects some 247 million people worldwide each year, and kills nearly one million. Mosquitoes cause a huge further medical and financial burden by spreading yellow fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, Chikungunya virus and West Nile virus. Then there's the pest factor: they form swarms thick enough to asphyxiate caribou in Alaska and now, as their numbers reach a seasonal peak, their proboscises are plunged into human flesh across the Northern Hemisphere.
So what would happen if there were none? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers.

About mosquitoes, I have often joked that the worst and biggest ones I ever encountered and in large numbers was in Alaska.  Apparently, I was not imagining:

Elimination of mosquitoes might make the biggest ecological difference in the Arctic tundra, home to mosquito species including Aedes impiger and Aedes nigripes. Eggs laid by the insects hatch the next year after the snow melts, and development to adults takes only 3–4 weeks. From northern Canada to Russia, there is a brief period in which they are extraordinarily abundant, in some areas forming thick clouds....
Mosquitoes consume up to 300 millilitres of blood a day from each animal in a caribou herd, which are thought to select paths facing into the wind to escape the swarm.

So, back to the question--how about wiping these insects off the planet?  First, note this:

Ultimately, there seem to be few things that mosquitoes do that other organisms can't do just as well — except perhaps for one. They are lethally efficient at sucking blood from one individual and mainlining it into another, providing an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes.

Ready to kill 'em all?  Will the world's ecosystems suffer as a result?

The romantic notion of every creature having a vital place in nature may not be enough to plead the mosquito's case. It is the limitations of mosquito-killing methods, not the limitations of intent, that make a world without mosquitoes unlikely. And so, while humans inadvertently drive beneficial species, from tuna to corals, to the edge of extinction, their best efforts can't seriously threaten an insect with few redeeming features. "They don't occupy an unassailable niche in the environment," says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over."