Obama to take a break from campaigning

Once again, only America's Finest News Source has the scoop that "Obama To Take Break From Stumping To Preside Over United States":

HARTFORD, CT—Following a speech tomorrow afternoon in support of Senate hopeful Richard Blumenthal, top Democratic Party member Barack Obama is expected to take advantage of a brief lull in his hectic schedule to govern the United States of America, sources reported Thursday. "Barack should have a little bit of free time in the car when we travel between the get-out-the-vote rally in East Hartford and the fundraising dinner for [Connecticut gubernatorial candidate] Dan Malloy," said Obama aide Lisa McMaster, admitting that most of the business of being leader of the free world would have to wait for the few days between the end of the midterm election cycle and the start of the 2010 presidential campaign. "Those 15 or so minutes should allow him to skim the past week’s national security briefings, sign a few pieces of legislation, and shoot a 45-second call to South Korean prime minister Kim Hwang-sik to hammer out a free-trade pact." McMaster added that if everything goes perfectly, Obama might have a moment between the dinner's salad and entrée courses to authorize a missile strike on suspected al-Qaeda sites in Yemen.

Corporations serve us, or do we serve corporations?

Many years ago, while still a high school kid reading every potboiler novel around, I read The "R" Document, by Irwing Wallace.  (I confess that as a teenager, whose biology was rapidly changing, I was way more fascinated by his "The Seven Minutes"!)

The novel, which my cousin from the big city of Madras had loaned me, was set in an America of chaos and violence, and a near breakdown of law and order.  The answer to this was going to be a constitutional amendment that would suspend the first ten amendments to the Constitution--the Bill of Rights.  And, of course, there is a much deeper conspiracy driving all these, and one of the conspirators is an all powerful multinational corporation, "Supranat Co." (at least, this is how much I recall from memory, which is fading by the day!)

Fast forward a few years, and I was among the audience at USC to listen to Ralph Nader who was critiquing the powerful rights that the government and the Supreme Court had awarded to corporations.  Nader was worried that scheming corporations will subvert civics and the Constitution.

Over the years, I have had my own love-hate relationship with mega corporations.  The one thing I know for sure that I hate is their ability to participate in elections.  If democracy is for, of, and by the people, only humans can participate in governance.  Yet, time and again, the Court re-affirms corporations as individuals, which is one hell of a screw-up.  Now, after reading this interview with Joseph Stiglitz, who is no dunce, I am really, really concerned:

"Corporations are a legal entity," Stiglitz explained. "We create them. And when we create them we create all kinds of rules. They can go bankrupt. And that means they owe more money and they get away scot-free. They can create an environmental disaster, and then go bankrupt and again go away scot-free. So, as legal entities we have the right to make the rules that govern them."

"As individuals we have certain basic rights," Stiglitz continued. "We aren't created by the law. We exist by nature. But corporations are man-made. They are supposed to serve our interest, our society's interests. And we are creating them with powers that are not serving our society's interests."

Profiles of adjunct professors

A caricature which is not that far from the reality that I have observed over the years
Come to think of it, the graphic could apply to the species called "teaching assistants" too--I was one decades ago ... which one of these was I, you ask?  You figure it out :)

A good year in sports: the Yankees lose :)

Every time the NY Yankees fail to win it all, I am all the more happier because it is yet another reminder that money can't buy one everything. 

And what a fitting end it was: A-Rod swinging his bat in the air for the final out.  A former Texas Ranger who left the team to follow a contract that was unheard of.  His gazillion dollar contract can't make his bat hit the ball, and the game and the series ends. 
What a Hollywood ending!!!

Rodriguez made the final out of the series, striking out against Neftali Feliz. The former Ranger marveled over the fact that he was the one to end the series, adding, "I'm sure it made it a little bit sweeter for them."

Made it absolutely sweet for me, yes :)

And thus the team with the highest payroll goes home. How sweet that the highest paid guy loses swinging his bat to the lowest (well, second lowest) paid player of the other team.  Makes up for a lot of crap this year!

A neat letter to Juan "I fear Muslims" Williams

A simple one, which responds to the latest development that Faux Noose has upped the ante for Williams.  It says a lot in just these sentences:

Juan: You are not a hero. You're a decent guy who said something dumb. Apologize, try to improve, and move on. More importantly, these people, these newfound supporters, Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly and Mike Huckabee and Pat Buchanan and Roger Ailes, are not your friends. They are using you, Juan. They are using you because of who you suddenly are: a black, moderate, journalist who was fired from NPR for saying you don't like Muslims. Those credentials are extremely valuable for Fox News, and for the right wing at large. Because they can be easily presented in a way that bolsters the myth of the "liberal media," a myth which the right wing has used to shockingly successful effect over the last two decades, to systematically erode the influence of media outlets that they don't like. Respected, earnest, good media outlets. Like NPR. Now, Juan, you are a convenient tool in their furtherance of this campaign. $2 million is cheap, for them.
If you had said that you feared white people, Juan, would you have so many new friends? No, you would not. But you fear Muslims, just like they do, and so there they are. This episode is nothing for anyone to be proud of. At the same time, it doesn't need to be the beginning of the end of your legitimate career. Of course you're angry at the people who fired you. But letting go of that resentment and moving forward will be its own great reward. Simply apologize, go get a new job with a real media outlet that is not a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and this will all soon be forgotten. Once you climb aboard Fox New for good, Juan, all of the respect that you've earned in your long career will immediately begin to disappear, until it is all gone, and you are just one more empty talking suit on the shameful, dishonest panorama of American cable news. You can do better.

ht

BTW, that letter refers to Juan Williams justifying himself after NPR fired him.  This justification further confirms his bigotry and how he doesn't understand that it is bigotry:

Yesterday, NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims.
This is not a bigoted statement.

I wish we could do a new version of "Guess who's coming to dinner" ... Put together a great surprise party honoring Juan Williams and everybody in the room will be in "garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims" ... wouldn't that be hilarious!

A season of China bashing for short-term wins!

So, China has become one heck of a bogeyman for political and electoral points.  There are plenty of valid reasons to beat up on China, but the way the candidates and parties are abusing the China dimension cannot possibly make us more endearing to the party bosses across the Pacific.

The following ad (via James Fallows) is almost creepy:

The Daily Beast notes:

No less than 30 candidates across the country are running ads that negatively tie their opponent to China. On a trip to Ohio this week, my television was flooded with campaign ads, including a telling salvo against incumbent Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy, featuring Chinese money, Mao, and the red communist flag. Anti-China themes are also evident in late-inning videos from California and Nevada to Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

And then there is all the punditry that beats up on China. Yes, including Paul Krugman.
It will be one hell of a G20 meeting, I imagine.

It gets better

First Hillary Clinton, and now Barack Obama. Am mighty glad they did the videos

What for a college degree?

More on this long running topic:

Some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

I am not sure how many of these entered these professions after earning their college degrees; I would assume that they are the majority.  In any case, do colleges and universities provide students with this data?  I guess not--it won't serve their enrollment business, right? 

The end is near ....

Meanwhile, student debts keep going up.

The class of 2009 graduated with an average of $24,000 in debts from student loans, up 6 percent from the previous year,

And the result in these awful economic conditions?  Examples like this story of a college grad working in the custodial services of the same university from where he graduated with a "degree in network and information-technology administration last December"

Obama chickens out: The Golden Temple fiasco

In the emotional response after 9/11, a Sikh was shot dead in Arizona--the turban that he wore, like many Sikhs who do for religious reasons, made the assailant think the Sikh was one of Osama's followers.  That ignorance about Sikhism as a religion cost an innocent Sikh man his life.

That was almost ten years ago. 

Now, it is not an uninformed person but the president of the United States who is apparently falling into that same ignorant trap.  The NY Times reports that Obama's people don't want the president to visit the Golden Temple because a few ignoramuses might then conclude that Obama visited an Islamic shrine because he is really a Muslim:

Mr. Obama was expected to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, next month, but there were questions about how he would cover his head. Sikh tradition requires that men tie a piece of cloth on their heads before entering the spiritual center. The president, who is Christian, has fought the perception that he is Muslim. Sikhs are regularly mistaken for Muslims.
“There’s a xenophobic trend in this country, where some people are calling him Muslim,” said Jasjit Singh, associate director of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a Washington-based civil rights group. “If he gives in to this trend then effectively he’s emboldening them.”

It will be unfortunate if such stupid politics make a chicken out of the allegedly most powerful man on the planet.

Now, as even the same news item indicates, there are plenty of security reasons for the President to avoid going there.  Amritsar, which is the city where the Golden Temple is located, is not too far away from the Pakistan border.  Lahore, in Pakistan, is just about twenty miles from Amritsar.  It is all that close. 

But, how come this administration seems so hell bent on messing things up, as if the South Asian situation is not crisis enough? :(

Free Falling: the US Dollar :(

Wiretapping: President Barack O'Bush

NPR should fire Juan Williams

Back in Feb 2009, I blogged my hope that NPR would get rid of Juan Williams and Mara Liasson.  Now, Williams has provided all the more evidence for why he belongs only at Faux Noose and not anywhere else.  What did he say?  Over to the Root:

On Monday's O'Reilly Factor, Fox News analyst Juan Williams told Bill O'Reilly that he supported his statement that "Muslims killed us on 9/11," and he feels nervous when he sees Muslims on the same plane he's on. In the words of ghetto prophet Ed Lover, "C'mon, son!" Is this another version of The Sixth Sense? Does Williams bury his head under his airline blanket and whisper, "I see Muslim people"? Guess what? We get nervous whenever Williams is about to speak. However, Williams should know nervousness, since plenty of paranoid folks feel nervous when they see him as a black man walk onto a plane or just walk down the street. Too bad he can't make the leap from one example of fear and paranoia to another, probably because of his Fox-induced coma.

Some Kool Aid they have at Faux Noose for Williams to preface these comments with "I am not a bigot." Yes, you are a bigot to say what you said.

It gets better

Stayin' Alive in The Wall

One of the best remixes I have seen/heard recently.  If we can create such things, then I am all the more in favor of Lawrence Lessig's proposal to teach remixing.

ht

I wish I could vote for "none of the above"

Couple of years ago I watched the fantastic thespians at Ashland enacting Shakespeare's Coriolanus.  I had no idea of the story and, therefore, found the play that much more engaging.  Coriolanus is an arrogant Patrician, and does not heed to the advice that he has to pretend that he can relate to the plebes--which is how the other patricians behave.  As I was watching the play, all I could think of was our own arrogant politicians (editor: aren't politicians by definition arrogant?) who pretend that they are one of the "middle class" common folk.  And we are supposed to play along as well.  I would rather that politicians revealed their inner Coriolanus and went around boasting why they are the elite while the rest of us are suckers.

Last August, George Packer's depressing essay was yet another layer of revelation regarding how our elected officials work to promote themselves and ensure their re-elections--and not to advance the country's agenda.  If that didn't depress us enough, the same magazine, the New Yorker, now has a fine essay on how any meaningful action on an energy policy died in the Senate.

No diagnosis of the failure of Obama to tackle climate change would be complete without taking into account public opinion. In January, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the importance of twenty-one issues. Climate change came in last. After winning the fight over health care, another issue for which polling showed lukewarm support, Obama moved on to the safer issue of financial regulatory reform.
In September, I asked Al Gore why he thought climate legislation had failed. He cited several reasons, including Republican partisanship, which had prevented moderates from becoming part of the coalition in favor of the bill. The Great Recession made the effort even more difficult, he added. “The forces wedded to the old patterns still have enough influence that they were able to use the fear of the economic downturn as a way of slowing the progress toward this big transition that we have to make.”
A third explanation pinpointed how Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman approached the issue. “The influence of special interests is now at an extremely unhealthy level,” Gore said. “And it’s to the point where it’s virtually impossible for participants in the current political system to enact any significant change without first seeking and gaining permission from the largest commercial interests who are most affected by the proposed change.”
Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman were not alone in their belief that transforming the economy required coöperation, rather than confrontation, with industry. American Presidents who have attempted large-scale economic transformation have always had their efforts tempered—and sometimes neutered—by powerful economic interests. Obama knew that, too, and his Administration had led the effort to find workable compromises in the case of the bank bailouts, health-care legislation, and Wall Street reform. But on climate change Obama grew timid and gave up, leaving the dysfunctional Senate to figure out the issue on its own.

I know what the solution is: stop reading the likes of the New Yorker!  if I didn't read them, I would not know how awful every one of these politicians are, right?  I truly wish for that blissful ignorance.

Oh well ...

The good news?  Coriolanus is soon coming to a movie theater near you.  Has some heavy-hitting actors: Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Gerard Butler (ok, not a great actor!!!) ...

My blog attracts traffic. even for searches like ...

I thought I might check the keyword searches that apparently generated some of the traffic to my blog. Interesting patterns.

Get this: my blog comes out as the first link (at least when I checked last) for quite a few.  I was impressed with these examples (all are Google searches)

• For readers who are curious about the intellectual (and personal) debate between Paul Krugman and Raghuram Rajan: the search for krugman rajan shows that my post is #1, even ahead of Greg Mankiw :)
• For those who are thinking of quitting engineering in favor of a different profession; such a search results in traffic to my page 

Who would have thought! 

And, of course, all the interest in the Ambanis and Tina Munim :)

Why I don't succeed: I like "all rounders"

I grew up watching cricket and obsessing about it, as most young boys did then (and most probably do even now.)  As much as I liked the artistry of the top-order batsmen, and the googlies of Chandrasekhar, my first hero was Abid Ali. 

Yes, Abid Ali.

Here was a player who could bowl pretty decently, bat pretty decently, and field excellently.  He could do it all.  And, from the radio commentaries and newspaper reports (no TV then!) I understood that he did all these without any flair.  Ali was an "all rounder," as such players are referred to in cricket.  After him, there were a couple more like Ghavri and Madanlal, but it was not the same. Not even Ravi Shastri.

And then the "all rounder" world simply became fantastic, and was way more than I could have imagined, thanks to Kapil Dev and Ian Botham.  These two took the idea of an all rounder to an entirely new level.  And, they seemed to approach every opportunity with the same level of intensity and excitement, without ever feeling jaded. 

I left India just about when these two had passed their peaks, and soon I was following college football and baseball.  And, in college ball too, it was the "all rounder" players that I liked.  I was a grad student at USC when Rodney Peete was the Trojan QB.  Peete (Twitter informed me that is he was following me there; I know not why!) could pass and also run--a contrast to Troy Aikman across town at UCLA, who was a much better QB but not a runner.  While they were both excellent baseball players too, only Peete continued playing college baseball.

However, most all rounders don't achieve "stardom," so to say because it is a very, very rare few who can perform exceptionally at more than one.  Abid Ali is probably a forgotten name among most Indian cricket fans, who might certainly remember Bedi and Pataudi, and even Venkataraghavan. 

I wonder how my life would have been if I had been a fan not of all rounders but of super-specialists instead.  Academe--even at regional teaching universities like mine--seem to want to encourage specialists and not generalists.  People whose focus is to know a lot about one or two small things, and not the other way around ...

Nah ... that would have been a boring life without the likes of Abid Ali :) 

Don't watch this video: it is a killer :)

Cornwallis defeated by Washington. Becomes India's Viceroy

A huge battle of historic significance came to an end in 1781.  Of significance simultaneously to the US and India.  The common denominator was the British general, Lord Cornwallis, who on October 17th began to negotiate the terms of surrender.

Yes, it was this very day that many years ago.

After two days of discussions, on October 19th, Cornwallis,:

signed orders surrendering his British Army to a combined French and American force outside the Virginia tobacco port of Yorktown. Cornwallis' second-in-command, Charles O'Hara, attempted to deliver Cornwallis's sword to French general, Comte de Rochambeau. But Rochambeau directed O'Hara to American General George Washington, who coolly steered the British officer to Washington's own second in command, Major General Benjamin Lincoln.

He then went home to England.

And then?

In 1786 Cornwallis headed to India to take over as the Governor General, and helped consolidate the colonization of India, particularly through the extremely successful divide-and-conquer strategy that the British so successfully pursued.  If only the various kingdoms had seen through the divisive approach, the outcomes--particularly in the military conquests--would have been disastrous for Cornwallis and the British.

Conwallis defeating Tipu Sultan was a tragic story that I read as a young boy.  Of course, there is no end to controversies related to Tipu Sultan and his father Hyder Ali.  But then, hey, remember that it is a land of argumentative Indians :)

I vaguely recall a romantic story involving the very religious Tipu Sultan and a Hindu woman ... maybe it is my imagination?

China's Charter 08, and the Nobel Peace Prize

Liu Xiaobo was one of the first to sign on to a document, Charter 08, the contents of which will/should astonish every American because we have, and take for granted, the basic rights and treatment that this document seeks for every Chinese.

The NY Review of Books presents the entire Charter, and the notes before and after are wonderfully explanatory both about the Charter itself, and about the people involved.

The planning and drafting of Charter 08 began in the late spring of 2008, but Chinese authorities were apparently unaware of it or unconcerned by it until several days before it was announced on December 10.

Soon, the authorities knocked on several doors, including that of the Nobel Peace Prize recipient:

It was also late on December 8 that another of the charter’s signers, the literary critic and prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo, was taken away by police.

I just can't see how the Chinese system can continue with its authoritarian structures forever.  I wonder what the endgame will be.  After all, how many experts--inside and outside--predicted the quick and sudden collapse of the Soviet Union?  And along with that, a redrawing of the political maps of Europe?  Most were caught flat-footed, including the CIA and even Condi Rice!

Here is to hoping for a quick and peaceful collapse of the Chinese Communism.

A shot at universities heard around the blogosphere

Like most people, I had no idea about the Thiel Fellowships until I read about it at Slate, where Jacob Weisberg rips into the idea and the man behind it.  Peter Thiel made his first huge gazillions from PayPal, and he is now an investor in new ventures including, yes, Facebook.

Thiel is offering fellowships to young and creative entrepreneurs.  So, what set off Weisberg?  Because, of the logic that the fellowships are founded on:

"University is a tremendously valuable experience, but when entrepreneurs are ready to launch, they should do so immediately, rather than sticking around to satisfy expectations of a full four years of college or eight of grad school,” said Elon Musk, who co-founded Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and PayPal. Musk himself stopped out of his graduate program before classes began to co-found his first company Zip2, which he sold to Compaq for $307 million.

It is pretty much a Kobe Bryant approach--Thiel says that if you are entrepreneurially as talented as Bryant is in basketball, then why go to college and waste time when you can get going right away?  And even more:

"Because education seeks to impart past knowledge, when you are trying to create a technological breakthrough, you have to create new knowledge, and there is no way to teach that. There was no course at University of Arizona on ‘‘how to cure aging.' Hopefully, this program will allow others to work on ambitious projects themselves, before they've taken on a crippling amount of student debt,” said William Andregg, CEO and co-founder of Halcyon Molecular.

There are many reasons to applaud this idea, and a whole bunch of reasons to critique it as well.  However, looks like Weisberg kind of lost it and let his emotions take over:

Where to start with this nasty idea? A basic feature of the venture capitalist's worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneself—perhaps literally in Thiel's case. Thus Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible, and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or contributing to the advances in basic science that have made the great tech fortunes possible. Thiel's program is premised on the idea that America suffers from a deficiency of entrepreneurship. In fact, we may be on the verge of the opposite, a world in which too many weak ideas find funding and every kid dreams of being the next Mark Zuckerberg. This threatens to turn the risk-taking startup model into a white boy's version of the NBA, diverting a generation of young people from the love of knowledge for its own sake and respect for middle-class values.

Secular Right points out, correctly, that most students (and their professors, too?) are not in universities because of their love of knowledge for the sake of knowledge:

Knowledge for “its own sake”? What planet does Jacob Weisberg live on where American university students are seeking knowledge for “its own sake”? The American university racket is by and large one of credentialing and signalling. Most college graduates are unabashed philistines. Their primary goal in life is to seem intelligent, not be intelligent.

 Reason summarizes Weisberg:

 as a critique, this is shoddy stuff. But as a window into the Weisberg worldview, it's very valuable indeed. Count the assumptions:
1. Intellectual development halts when you leave school.
2. Entrepreneurs do not "help others" or "contribute to advances in basic sciences."
3. Launching a startup is a "white boy" thing.
4. Respect for middle-class values and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake are inconceivable if you avoid the higher-education path that Jacob Weisberg followed. But Thiel's the guy who wants to clone himself.

As Ken Robinson so charmingly and funnily describes, education in its current structure is geared mostly to create university professors in the image of the current ones.  It is heights of narcissism right there.  If Thiel wants to provide another opportunity for the young, talented and creative minds, why not?  The only unfortunate aspect of the Thiel Fellowships seem to be the ideological motivations of the backer.  But, hey, aren't a good chunk of the university faculty dogmatically ideological as well?

Above all, I would argue that the Thiel Fellowship is merely yet another piece of evidence pointing to the growing unhappiness with the academic-industrial-complex.

BTW, Claudia Dreifus tweets that she and Andrew Hacker will be on BookTV on Sunday, Oct 24th @ 7:00 ET, to discuss their book, Higher Education?