Cartoon of the day

In memory of one of my favorite editorial cartoonists, Paul Conrad, who died at the age of 86

Dance of the day: Don Quijote - Gran Pas de Deux

Would love to see this live ... It was by accident that I watched this entire piece on television--thanks to the Classic Arts Showcase channel that the Comcast cable carries.  It was so awesome that I kept applauding along as if I were in the performance hall myself ...
And then tracked it down on TouTube as well :)

The soloists: Paloma Herrera and Angel Corella

About this free cable channel ... I like watching it particularly because I never know what is coming up.  Like right now, as I am blogging, I am watching a beautiful video to the "Flower Duet" piece from Lakmé.

The FAQ at the Classic Arts website makes the same point:

We do not publish a program guide because our weekly 8 hour show is downlinked by hundreds of channels across the country at different times, with different schedules, and we can never tell you when any particular clip will play in any particular area. Also, if people knew what was coming up they would only watch clips they like, and perhaps never try anything new. Surprise is an important part of our strategy of creating a new audience for the arts.

Quote of the day: on American higher education

America’s universities lost their way badly in the era of easy money. If they do not find it again, they may go the way of GM.

Yep.
I have been writing and blogging about this for years, much to the displeasure of my colleagues :)

Anyway, that quote is from The Economist's Schumpeter column, where it is further noted that:

Two right-wing think-tanks, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Goldwater Institute, have both produced damning reports about America’s university system. Two left-wing academics, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, have published an even more damning book: “Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It”. And US News & World Report, a centrist magazine, says in its annual survey of American colleges that: “If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost-cutting and painful reorganisations.”

The contemporary state of American higher education is under severe criticism from the right, left, and center; anybody feeling left out, please take a number and await your turn :)
So, ...

This luxury model is unlikely to survive what is turning into a prolonged economic downturn. Parents are much less willing to take on debt than they were and much more willing to look abroad for better deals. The internet also poses a growing threat to what Bill Gates calls “place-based colleges”. Online, you can listen to the world’s best lecturers for next to nothing.

Again, as far as I am concerned, Schumpeter is late to this party. I have consistently blogged about how such a system cannot continue anymore, and have repeatedly pointed to the online mode too.  But then, nobody listens to me, and if they do it is only to tell me that I have no free speech rights :)

I really, really, hope that the reforms will come from within. Because, those imposed from the outside will completely screw up the liberal education that I so cherish.

BTW, I had a delightful conversation with Claudia Dreifus.  First I got an email from her; apparently she had read something really interesting in my blog.  In my reply, I gave her my cell number, and a couple of hours it was Claudia Dreifus at the phone.  Her email and phone call made my day :)

A hunter. A bear. A clever ad :)

ht

Holy Shiite!

This Iran-centric map of west Asia, is also a Shiite-centric view of that part of the world.  And, it appears that the Shia versus rest of Islam violence is edging up.

This is certainly not the kind of development that will bring peace and stability to the people in that region.

Particularly when such violence occurs against a backdrop of ongoing struggles to form a government in Iraq; the floods in an already unstable Pakistan; the fragile start to the Israel-Palestinian talks; ...

In recent days alone the following have been reported:
In neighboring Pakistan, in the city of Quetta (notice it close to the Afghan border?):

A suicide bomb blast targeting a Shiite procession in the southern city of Quetta on Friday killed 58 people and injured more than 100 others, police said. The explosion came two days after bomb attacks killed 35 people during a Shiite march in another Pakistani city.

Shiites were marching near Meezan Square, a busy shopping area in the heart of Quetta, to express solidarity with the Palestinian movement when the blast occurred.  

Continuing on in a counterclockwise direction, in Lahore, which is very close to the Indian border:

Pakistani officials said two attackers detonated explosives as the gathering was dispersing on Wednesday, scattering bodies into the streets and sowing panic among the thousands observing an annual Shiite day of mourning. A third bomber struck about 20 minutes later in a packed city square as many of the worshipers were leaving.

Next stop in the map: Tajikistan, where while the Islamic militancy does not have any overt Shia-Sunni conflict, yet, Iran is stepping up its game:

On August 5, Teheran was hosting the fourth trilateral summit of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The three countries reached an agreement on the expansion of economic and cultural ties. During this summit, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proposed the use of a single currency by the three countries and the launching of a joint TV station.

Besides promoting regional extremist terrorist groups and stepping up its clandestine nuclear-weapons program, Iranian leaders are nurturing a false sense of Greater Persia. “The people of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, whose countries were parts of the Greater Persia in ancient times, consider Iran as their cultural homeland and believe the Iranian nation is the inheritor of their paternal legacy, the Persian Civilisation,” wrote the Tehran Times on August 28.

 The struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan are, well, by now even an elementary school kid ought to be aware of them.  A few days ago, I blogged that the treatment of the Shia population in Bahrain could be a barometer of what the future holds.

If you read until here, you deserve a bonus (from two weeks ago):

A car bomb exploded Monday in a town northeast of the Iraqi capital while a bus full of Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims was passing, killing five people and wounding nine, security officials said.

Are tests in schools biased against students?

Apparently that is indeed the case, according to experts in this report from America's Finest News Source!  Maybe this is the video I will share with students on the first day of classes ...

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

"Wives of billionaires": puzzle solved!

Every once in a while, when I take a look at the stats for my blog, I notice that one post always attracts considerable attention--the one about Tina (nee Munim) Ambani.  I have blogged before about this strange attraction.

So, today, with time on my hands, (editor: do you ever work at all?) I decided to follow up some more ... turns out that it could be because of one search phrase in Google.  A search for "wives of billionaires" brings up my blog post at the second in the listing of results!  How interesting ...

Not entirely satisfied, I decided to check with Bing, for the same same search phrase. My blog comes up in the first page of results, though only as #10.  But, hey, not bad!

It appears then that the interest may not be in Tina Munim as much as in the trophy wives of billionaires.

In any case, here is one more song/dance movie sequence featuring Tina Munim

Science has nothing to do with common sense

I first came across Simon Singh through his book on cryptography, which I even gifted to a visiting scholar--this was back in California. In that book, Singh presented a fantastic story on how much the lock/key had become sophisticated over time, all the way to the "https" that we routinely encounter now.  Of course, Singh's name and heritage was an added bonus--to make it that much more of a "Indian" connection.

A couple of years ago, Singh was sued because of his comments in the Guardian about chiropractic claims--he was examining the science behind them. Thankfully, he did not back down and won the case.  Wired talked to him about this, where Singh makes this important distinction between science and "common sense:"

Science has nothing to do with common sense. I believe it was Einstein who said that common sense is a set of prejudices we form by the age of 18. Inject somebody with some viruses and that’s going to keep you from getting sick? That’s not common sense. We evolved from single-cell organisms? That’s not common sense. By driving my car I’m going to cook Earth? None of this is common sense. The commonsense view is what we’re fighting against. So somehow you’ve got to move people away from that with these quite complicated scientific arguments based on even more complicated research. That’s why it’s such an uphill battle. People start off with a belief and a prejudice—we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth.

Yes, we need a lot more Simon Singhs in this world.

Cartoon of the day: Women's rights

Quote of the day: on education

This one is from across the Atlantic; the author, Anthony Seldon, is Master of Wellington College:

Schools and universities across the world should be places of engagement and delight: instead, students, especially in prosperous countries, often resent and shun schools, while they take university for granted, thinking insufficiently why they are there and how privileged they are. Parents should be actively engaged in and full of gratitude for the schools that their children attend: instead, they are too often indifferent and even unco-operative. Teaching should be a profession which the brightest and most energetic should aspire to and fight to join: instead, it is hard to encourage top graduates to apply.

 ht

Why the Ivy League is so...

When I was the director of the Honors Program at my university, the Honors Committee faculty put me through an inquisition led by a version of Torquemada--a psychology professor, in this case.

What was my sin?  It had to do with one of the essays I had assigned third-year Honors students.  This particular essay, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, was about "shaming" that routinely happens in athletics and questioned whether in academics faculty coddle students.

Yes, my sin was that I had assigned them this essay (not authored by me) from the Chronicle. This inquisition was the icing on the cake of pedantic idiocy--a year earlier, some of my colleagues questioned my decision to assign Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit.   So, a day or so after the inquisition, I wrote to the provost that I was not returning for a second term as the director of Honors. I couldn't be bothered with such colleagues.

I can only, therefore, drool at the reading list that Greg Mankiw has for his freshman seminar. Yes, freshman!

• The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbronr
• Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, by John McMillan
• Thinking Strategically, by Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff
• Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman
• Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, by Arthur Okun
• Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
• How the Economy Works, by Roger E.A. Farmer
• The Return of Depression Economics, by Paul Krugman
• The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek
• The Myth of the Rational Voter, by Bryan Caplan
• The Big Idea, by Steven Landsburg

BTW, what was Torquemada's explanation of his behavior?  He wrote in a follow-up email:

I did lack a bit of courtesy; however, if you are going to exist in an administrative/director position at any level at any university I suggest you quickly develop a thicker skin...faculty are frequently, mostly without intention, discourteous and disrespectful.

When the Chinese state collapses

So far at least, Deng Xiaoping's approach to open up the economy without political liberalization seems to be working, and much better (?) than Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost.

The latter quickly triggered the demise not only of the feared USSR but the entire Eastern European Communist bloc.

China, meanwhile, is going strong, and a pretty good economic speed.

Like many, I thought that the protest movements in 1989 would fundamentally restructure China's internal political arrangement.  But, Deng and Li simply wiped out the protesters. 

There is still a part in me that hopes that the Communist government would collapse. Soon.  But, there are no signs of such an apocalypse.

At least, that is what I thought until I read this blog post over at the New York Review of Books.  Pretty darn exciting:

On July 21 in Beijing, four days before WikiLeaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China. 

How fantastic it would be if slowly various secrets begin to leak out ... It has the potential for not only the downfall of the Communist government, but even for a completely new global order.

So, what are the kind of secrets that we might want to know about first?  Apparently there is a list of seven party secrets that have a priority over others:

1. The famine during the Great Leap Forward in 1959-62. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died because of bad policy, not “bad weather.” What exactly happened? What policies caused the famine and what policies suppressed information on it? How much grain was in state granaries while people starved? Is it true that Mao sold grain to the Soviet Union during those years in order to buy nuclear weapons?
2. The death of Mao’s military commander General Lin Biao in 1971. The official version of events, which to this day exists only in bare outline, strains credulity: Mao’s “closet comrade in arms” suddenly plotted a coup, failed in it, tried to flee to the Soviet Union, and was shot down in his plane. What really happened? Why? Why shouldn’t we know more?
3. Mao’s will and personal lockbox. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing said at her trial (as part of the “Gang of Four”) that Mao had a written will that mentioned her. Did he? What did it say? Mao also apparently kept his own lockbox of “most core secrets” that, in his later years, not even Jiang Qing could see. Mao’s mistress Zhang Yufeng kept the key until September 21, 1976, twelve days after Mao’s death, when Hua Guofeng, Mao’s anointed successor, is said to have taken it from her. What’s in the box?
4. The Beijing Massacre of 1989. The basic story is fairly well known from The Tiananmen Papers, Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, and Li Peng’s diary. But the records of some key meetings still are classified, and responsibility for the massacre remains an extremely sensitive question in Chinese politics.
5. The brutal suppression of the Falun Gong after 1999. Falun Gong claims there are concentration camps for their members and that internal organs of executed believers are surgically removed and sold. True? Untrue? What do the records say?
6. Beijing’s huge but secret “stability maintenance” budget. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences reports that Chinese government spending on domestic “stability maintenance”—the monitoring, intimidation, roughing-up, and illegal detention of petitioners, aggrieved workers, religious believers, professors, bloggers, twitterers, and other sources of “trouble”—now exceeds what the government spends in any category except the military. What are the details of this budget?
7. Bank accounts of Communist Party officials. Corruption and graft are widely viewed to be problems at every level of Chinese government, but exactly how much money have officials squirreled away? How much have they sent abroad?

 I can't wait ... here is to wishing that it will happen soon. Real soon.

Nothing seems to go well in Pakistan!

There are a few countries in the world that are in need of an extreme makeover.  Zimbabwe, North Korea are in the top rung. Not far behind them is Pakistan.  And, lately, everything seems to be going in the wrong direction for this country.

I mean, look at the recent issues alone, even without going too much back in time.  The catastrophic floods even failed to generate significant global interest in this human tragedy.  Even as the government was ineffectively managing that crisis (their version of "heckuva job, Brownie," right?) the cricket team decided that they needed to shine the Commonwealth's attention on the Pakistan--not because they played well, but with a few players engaging in match-fixing schemes. One can imagine the magnitude of this scandal when even the Los Angeles Times reports on this. In America.  On the game of cricket!

The Times notes:

At the core of the scandal are allegations that two cricketers colluded with a middleman to manipulate the course of a match against England last week in London.

Since then, Pakistani television channels daily have been airing video of the middleman, identified as London-based businessman Mazhar Majeed, flipping through wads of cash as he meets with British tabloid reporters posing as members of an Asian gambling cartel.

The tabloid, News of the World, said Majeed accepted $232,000 from the undercover reporters to ensure that Pakistani cricketers bowled "no balls," the equivalent of an illegal pitch in baseball, at specified times during the match. The manipulation, known as spot-fixing, occurs because gamblers sometimes bet not only on the outcome of a match but on individual occurrences or actions during the contest.

Say it ain't so, Joe Asif!

Meanwhile, the terrorists--of which many flavors operate in Pakistan--decide that this is no time to pause. So what if 20 million are messed up thanks to the floods is their thinking, I suppose.  Further, with the weak government's attention being forced on the crisis, and with people unhappy with the government's performance, perhaps the terrorist elements are all the more pumped up. Thus, Pakistan continues to rock with explosions; the latest was in Lahore, whose soil has been bloodied quite a bit with such tragedies in recent months.  The latest one:

At least 25 people have been killed and 170 injured after three bombs exploded during a procession by Shia Muslims in the Pakistani city of Lahore. ...

Officials say the first explosion came shortly before nightfall on Wednesday, at the end of a procession by some 35,000 Shia to mark the death in the Seventh Century of the first Shia imam, Ali bin Abi Talib.

Footage of the moment shown on Geo television showed a small explosion amid a crowd of people near the Karbala Gamay Shah imambargah, followed by a large plume of smoke.
Minutes later, as hundreds of people fled, a suicide bomber blew himself up near an area where food was being prepared for the marchers to break the Ramadan fast, a senior police officer, Zulfiqar Hameed, told the Associated Press news agency.
A second suicide bomber then detonated his explosive belt at an intersection near the end of the procession, Mr Hameed added.

That's right--in the middle of the month-long Ramadan fasting ... how awful!

Imam Glenn Beck :)

Michael Kinsley yet again proving that he has not lost his touch despite that awful Parkinson's he has been dealing with humor:

My first thought, when I heard that Glenn Beck was planning a huge rally at the Washington Mall on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s "I Have A Dream" speech at the same site 48 years ago was, "How obnoxious. How offensive. What a jerk!" My second thought was, "Well, he’s got a right to speak in that place on that date, as at almost any other place on any other date. Even jerks are protected by the First Amendment." My third thought was, "Sure, he has the right to have his rally there and then, but shouldn't he have more sensitivity to those for whom this date and this place have special meaning and importance? Couldn't he find some other place or pick some other date for his rally?" My fourth thought was, "Uh oh. This line of reasoning is starting to get uncomfortable."

This President, too, bullshits about the Iraq War

Joe Conason has a thoughtful essay on the "The truths about Iraq that Obama couldn't utter"
Glenn Greenwald is sick and tired of the "The "nobody-could-have-known" excuse"--though this particular essay is not directed at Obama's speech, but fits into the overall dominant narrative. And reminds us about Dick Cheney's explanations (which are right on the mark!) on why the US did not go all the way in Iraq--the first time.


Meanwhile, Tony "the poodle" Blair is publishing his memoirs, which is nothing but a crass route to making money from all the pain and suffering his decision inflicted.  And cries over the metaphorical spilt milk blood:

Iraq is his most divisive legacy, but Blair says he is not sorry for his decision to enter the U.S.-led war — although he wept for its victims. He is donating all proceeds from the book to a charity for wounded troops.

"I ... regret with every fiber of my being the loss of those who died," Blair writes. "Tears, though there have been many, do not encompass it."

But, he adds, "on the basis of what we do know now, I still believe that leaving Saddam in power was a bigger risk to our security than removing him."

"I can't regret the decision to go to war," he says, although he admits that "never did I guess the nightmare that unfolded" once Saddam was gone.

He knows his position is unpopular: "Friends opposed to the war think I'm being obstinate; others, less friendly, think I'm delusional."

Yes, obstinate and delusional. Thanks for saying that!

Speaking of delusional, the biggest of 'em all, George Bush, has his own book coming out soon.
Can't wait to hold it upside down and read it to the kids in the park as a great halloween prank.

Finally, why ignore Paul Wolfowitz's airbrushing!

Oh, how much I miss George Carlin!

The one and only science celebrity: Einstein

I remember being absolutely impressed--as a curious elementary school student--when we learnt in geometry about π ... The Pythagoras Theorem was also really neat. 
It felt magical that I could not do anything to alter them. They determined the fate of geometry, and we had to simply obey them. Awesome.

But, all those dwarfed when in the "modern physics" part of physics we studied about mass and energy, and Einstein's equation.
It looked so simple.
So simple.
I mean, just ridiculously simple a formula.
And that simple formula meant that not only academic physics, but the world outside of the academic walls also would never be the same.  It was an equation that shook the world. A big bang of its own.  I was blown away.
It also helped that my best friend in high school was a physics nut himself. (Ironically, neither he nor I are anywhere near physics in our respective professions now!)

Even years--30 years--later, I am as blown away as I was the first time.

Over the years, I have also come to appreciate how much the name Einstein is recognized all over. People know Shakespeare even if they have never read any of his works. It is the same with Einstein too.  And, of course, his face with his hair as a halo perhaps one of the most recognized faces, I would assume.

I would imagine that people went to see him even if they cared not for physics or relativity.  I wonder if people walked up to him to get his autograph, or to take photos with him. 

And, he pre-dates Cher and Madonna as a one-name celebrity. Absolutely cool!

Too bad there is nobody like that today ... oh well ...

More on China versus America: warships

Not that I am on a anti-China warpath ... I am merely blogging the facts :)
Guess which country has the most number of warships on this planet?  You got that right!

China: Not "Good Earth" but "rare earth"

A month ago, I blogged about the rare earth elements, and quoted Sam Kean there (from his book) that America, which used to be the big boy in the business, closed it shutters while China rapidly moved ahead. 

Though I have a personal connection to rare earth elements, as I discussed in that post, I had no idea that China had become that powerful.  But, even that was nothing compared to the latest news on this topic:

China cut its export quotas for rare earth by 72 percent for the second half of this year, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce on July 8. Shipments will be capped at 7,976 metric tons, down from 28,417 tons for the same period a year ago.

Mining for rare earth minerals and processing them is not something that can be done right away by a new player just because there is an international market demand for them.  We are looking at a lead time at eight to ten years.Meanwhile, the newer technologies we develop demand a lot of that rare earth, which makes China's decision all the more critical.

So, what is China's rationale?

Restrictions on the rare earth industry will help protect the environment, the state-run Xinhua News Agency cited Chen Deming, China’s commerce minister, as saying yesterday at a media briefing during China-Japan economic talks in Beijing.

The Chinese government's concern for the environment is nothing but crocodile tears to camouflage its flexing muscles in the marketplace.  (editor: too many metaphors! And mixing them!! is this what you teach your students?)

Slowly, America is waking up to this reality.  Unfortunately, the dominant angle appears to be from a national security perspective:

Rare earth elements are critical to advanced military technologies, computer and cellphone hardware, hybrid car batteries and wind turbine magnets. In other words, if you were going to target an industry crucial to dominating key technologies of the 21st century, rare earth element processing would be near the top of the list.

Andrew Leonard states that is:

[The] primary conclusion to be gleaned from a review of three recent studies of Chinese dominance of rare earth element mining and processing, "Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain," a report published by the Congressional Research Service in July, the Government Accountability Office's "Rare Earth Materials in the Defense Supply Chain," published in April, and China's Rare Earth Elements Industry: What Can the West Learn?" published by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in March.

The past decade has been one in which America was trapped in its wars, while China was all the more freer to pursue its strategic interests.  This is an important cost of war that we vastly underestimate.

Finally, the business model that China employs is pretty interesting: thanks to China, Wal-Mart was able to consistently lower prices, open stores all over the country and, thereby, wipe out local manufacturing and retailing.  China is now using the same model--it is a huge Wal-Mart by itself that takes over the global market, wipes out local competition (such as the American rare earth mining and manufacturing) and we are at its mercy now ... how oddly symmetrical!

BTW, Leonard notes that America did at least one thing right in this rare earth business:

I did not realize until reading the Hurst report was that the controversial, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the state-owned Chinese oil company to buy Unocal back in 2005 may have largely been a rare earth element play. There is one currently operating rare earth mine in the United States, California's Mountain Pass mine, owned by Molycorp.

In 1978, Unocal purchased Molycorp. In 1982, Mountain Pass Mine began processing samarium oxide and in 1989, it began processing neodymium oxide, both critical components of two types of permanent magnets. In 2005, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) submitted an $18.5 billion cash bid for Unocal, outbidding Chevron by half a billion dollars. CNOOC's bid raised a great deal of concern for U.S. energy security. While there was a media frenzy over these concerns, one issue received little attention -- repercussions of China gaining control over Molycorp through CNOOCs purchase of Unocal. If the deal were to have gone through, China would have gained control over Mountain Pass and therefore the country would have had a complete monopoly over all the current major rare earth element resources in the world.

In retrospect maybe it was a smart decision to block the Chinese purchase of Unocal, though I suspect that most of the politicians who were grandstanding the loudest about the dangers of letting China gobble up a U.S. oil company didn't have a clue as to the rare earth angle, and would likely have dismissed renewable energy technologies as hippie self-indulgence. But the bottom line is that China has its eye on the prize, while the U.S. continues to flail.

Image of the day: scatalogical?

Why this image?

It is from a link in an essay at Slate, which argues that:

sitting on toilets—a recent phenomenon, stemming from the invention of the flush toilet in 1591—might be unhealthy. ...
For most of human history—several hundred thousand years—we've squatted. Today, 1.2 billion people squat because they simply don't have a toilet, while many, many more in Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Europe use toilets designed specifically for squatting.

So, how about squatting in America?  Well, the same Slate essay notes:

Americans, now fatter than ever, are having trouble standing up from a sit, never mind a squat.

I have blogged often about the toilet issue, or the lack of, in many parts of the world, particularly in India.

Even now when I travel in India, it is disheartening that the country that spends gazillions on military infrastructure can't seem to put sanitation as a priority.  For 63 years since independence.  Unfortunate.

The liberal arts is dead. Long live the liberal arts.

There is nothing else I want to do but be immersed, the way I am, in liberal education.  To those who say put your money where your mouth is, well, I have: I gave up what would have certainly been a fantastically remunerative career in electrical engineering, which is more than enough evidence of my mouth and money.

This commitment and belief in liberal education is also why I am terribly disappointed with the contemporary state of liberal education.  Self-aggrandizing faculty through their endless intellectual Onanism have converted liberal education into a process to clone as many of their like-minded replicants as possible.  One unfortunate result of all this, among many, is that liberal education now arrogantly and systematically disses any kind of professional training--the trades, as Camille Paglia refers to them.

I have written about this and have, in the process, earned more enemies than I ever imagined would be possible.  But, it is an important issue that we cannot ignore--because, we are screwing up the futures of hundreds of thousands of youth.

Paglia's latest commentary is too good to merely provide an excerpt.  So, here is the entire piece--a short one to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the Chronicle Review.  (Only now do I realize then that my own essay that was published there in 2001 was in its infancy. Cool!)  Camille Paglia writes on "Revalorizing the Trades":

Vanishing of jobs will plague the rest of this decade and more. Meaningful employment is no longer guaranteed to dutiful, studious members of the middle class in the Western world. College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class.

Yes, an elite education at stratospheric prices will smooth the way into law or medical school and supply a network of useful future contacts. But what if a student wants a different, less remunerative or status-oriented but more personally fulfilling career? There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks.

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.

Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their hands—ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.

The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness. In a period of global economic turmoil, with manufacturing jobs migrating overseas and service-sector jobs diminishing in availability and prestige, educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings, with all teachers responsible for a core curriculum. But every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.

Sanskrit poem (couplet) of the day: on helping

मय्येव जीर्णतां यातु यत्त्वयोपकृतं मम ।
नरः प्रत्युपकारार्थी विपत्तिमनुकांक्षति ॥

- सुभाषितसुधानिधि

I do not wish to repay the help that you have done to me. Any person who wishes to do so, is actually wishing that you get into trouble so that he can help you back.

- Subhashitasudhanidhi

What a fantastic message!

Quote of the day: on Obama's presidency

If Obama’s politics leads to a Republican takeover of one or both houses of Congress, and even to a Republican president in 2012, then much of what Obama has accomplished could be undone. It’s unlikely that a new Republican president and Congress would actually repeal the health care or the financial reform bill. But the former could be starved of public funds and deprived of regulatory oversight; and the latter could be neutered by a hostile treasury secretary and by weak or hostile presidential appointees to the Securities and Exchange Commission or the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Reform legislation needs administrations and congresses committed to reform. That is where politics has to come in; and that’s where the Obama administration, with its aversion to populism, has fallen short.

John B. Judis writing about Obama's (and the Democrats') "Unnecessary Fall"

A similar take on the President, all the way from Germany where Candidate Obama had a phenomenal summer (how do you say "Obamania" in Deutsch?) ... just two years ago:

Even a year ago, I don't think I would have imagined the 2010 midterm elections to become this important ... and setting up one hell of a 2012 election season ... crazy!

There is still one thing, if happens, which will be the mother of all game-changers: the capture or death of Osama bin Laden.

When I knew I am a mortal with an expiration date ...

I was about eight or nine years old, I think.  Dad was in the local hospital for a surgery, and I recall going there with my mother.  In the room adjacent to dad's was a young fellow, barely a year or two older than me, who, I was told, was rapidly nearing the end of his life because of "blood cancer."  A phrase that I would come across quite often in movies with a melodramatic tune in the background, and here was a kid like me who really had it. And was dying.

It scared the shit out of me--that I could die. Of blood cancer.  In a culture where nobody talked about anything openly, I had to deal with this scare by myself.  (My other big scare then: after watching a Godzilla movie, I trembled quite a few nights thinking that any moment those creatures would come get me!) 

Even now the kid, frozen in time in my memory, but whose face has completely faded out, is a reminder of how much we are cartons with expiration dates of our own. 

A few years later, in the middle of my teenage years, I was in the taxicab as we took grandma to the same hospital.  We had been through the drill a few times--her enlarged heart would every once in a while make it extremely difficult to breathe, which then required a couple of days of appropriate medication in the hospital.  But, this time, as we were driving--mom in the back with grandma and me in the front with the driver--grandma stopped breathing.  And that was it.

It was quite a revelation that death could happen that fast. 

Grandma's death anniversary is a couple of days away.  Some memories don't fade away, and I am thankful they don't.

A new MIA: Muslims in America, that is

I didn't know this about Feisal Rauf--the man behind the Park51 project, which has become one insane controversy:

When a memorial service was held for murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, Rauf declared: "I am a Jew." When the scandal of Abu Ghraib broke, Rauf was among those asked to appear in an apology advert that was broadcast on Arabic television.

A Jewish reporter dies after crazy militant Islamist radicals slit his throat and even air a video of that, which is why Rauf's declaration in the tradition of JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" is immensely admirable, and echoing Pearl's own last words, "I am Jewish." He said:

"Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one."

What a contrast to this is the opposition to the Park51 project from Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League!

Media Matters notes that Feisal Rauf "has a long history of condemning terrorism, promoting pluralism, and arguing that the true meaning of Islam involves democracy, religious freedom and women's rights" and thanks that information-rich page I now know that, among other things,:

Bush administration sent Rauf on State Department trip in 2007. In an August 10 press briefing, Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley addressed the State Department travel program in which Rauf is participating, noting that its purpose is to promote "religious tolerance" and provide Muslim countries with a "moderate perspective" of being "Muslim in the United States." Crowley noted:

For Imam Feisal, this will be his third trip under this program. In 2007, he visited Bahrain, Morocco, the UAE and Qatar. And earlier this year in January, he also visited Egypt. So we have a long-term relationship with him. His work on tolerance and religious diversity is well-known and he brings a moderate perspective to foreign audiences on what it's like to be a practicing Muslim in the United States. And our discussions with him about taking this trip preceded the current debate in New York over the center.

Rauf's wife has an Indian connection--Daisy Khan was born in Kashmir, and immigrated to the US when she was 15.  I can't track down how she got her first name of "Daisy" ... Am not sure if that was the name her parents gave her at birth, or whether she adopted it to Americanize her name ...

In one of Khan's bio-sketches, there is a quote from Rumi, the great Persian Sufi poet:

"I looked for God. I went to a temple, and I didn't find him there. Then I went to a church, and I didn't find him there. And then I went to a mosque, and I didn't find him there. And then finally I looked in my heart, and there he was."

I have had wonderful friends who were/are Muslims--one was even briefly a roommate back in graduate school. The talented plumber, Samad, who was a jack of all trades, is a Muslim and was my parents' trusted assistant.  The only music performance that I ever attended in the fabled Music Academy in Madras Chennai, before leaving for the US decades ago, was to listen to Amjad Ali Khan playing the sarod.  Creating the fantastic mats in the village of Pattamadai, where my dad grew up, is almost exclusively by Muslims.  These are a few of the personal connections to Muslims and Islam.  It simply jars me when the Park51 critics lump all these people with the insanely radical Islamists.  Crap!

Update:
Glenn Greenwald writes:

One of the most under-reported political stories is the increasingly vehement, nationwide movement -- far from Ground Zero -- to oppose new mosques and Islamic community centers.  These ugly campaigns are found across the country, in every region, and extend far beyond the warped extremists who are doing things such as sponsoring "Burn a Quran Day."  And now, from CBS News last night, we have this:

Fire at Tenn. Mosque Building Site Ruled Arson
Federal officials are investigating a fire that started overnight at the site of a new Islamic center in a Nashville suburb.
Ben Goodwin of the Rutherford County Sheriff's Department confirmed to CBS Affiliate WTVF that the fire, which burned construction equipment at the future site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, is being ruled as arson. . . .

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It is the same Tennessee town that Aasif Mandvi reported about:

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