Pakistan needs a lot more Veena Maliks!

From the Spectator 

we are going to need many more like the Pakistani actress Veena Malik. Watch her take on a mullah, who is trying to accuse her of immoral behaviour. This is no small accusation in Pakistan where Islamist death squads and their collaborators in the state intelligence service, operate at will. The talk show setting of the attempt at trial by media is commonplace too. The murder of Salman Taseer followed days of hacks whipping up “Muslim rage” against him.
Instead of being frightened, Malik turns on her accuser and the journalist, who helped set her up, and lets them have it.
Brave, beautiful and utterly magnificent.

Yes, it is one powerful video that MEMRI has made available with English subtitles.  Hey, this is a must watch video.



Secular Right, where I came across this, notes:

So long as there continue to be people in traditionally Muslim countries with the courage to speak out against bullying clerics and the rising tide of retrograde and brutal religious intolerance there are, I think, still some grounds for some hope. 

Yes, indeed.

I didn't know anything about Veena Malik until now.   Slate notes:

Malik is a Pakistani actress who appeared on the Indian reality show Big Boss 4. Like Sheen and Brown, she’s a celebrity with a lot of anger. Unlike those miscreants, her anger is just and well-placed. Since her return to Pakistan, Malik has faced death threats for “humiliating Islam” and faced harsh criticism from conservative mullahs. Fortunately, she’s not running and hiding. She appeared on a show called Express News TV (think The O’Reilly Factor, only not as polite) in late January and first dismissed the question from the host asking whether her appearance on the show—as well as her “dresses and action—was an affront to the “ideological foundations of Paksitan.”

India's NDTV reports on this:

"Maulvis sexually assault children in madrassahs under their care. People are burnt alive in Pakistan. Corruption is rampant. Women are gang-raped and there is extremism everywhere and yet no one talks about these evils but everyone is concerned about me what Veena Malik did," she said.

Malik broke down when the host of the show called her "Begairat" (shameless) and she shot back at him.

"Who are you pass such indecent remarks about me who gave you this right," she questioned.

The criticism on Malik comes at a time when the country is facing a clear divide over the blasphemy law and religious fundamentalism appears to be spreading and where the liberals and moderates are afraid to express their views.

Read more at: http://movies.ndtv.com/movie_story.aspx?id=ENTEN20110167602&keyword=television§ion=Movies&subcatg=MOVIESINDIA&cp

But, for various reasons, including romance, it appears that Veena Malik will be in India, and not in Pakistan, for quite a while.

Nutty Republicans dig into Wisconsin professor's emails!

Just when I thought the Republicans had sunk low enough and had hit rock bottom, they provide more evidence for "it ain't over till it is over." (Oh, the Dems are screwed up in their own ways, as if it is all a variation of Tolstoy's famous line that "all happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way")

What is the latest?  The Republicans in Wisconsin want to get their dirty political hands on a University of Wisconsin history professor's emails:

the Republican Party of Wisconsin has filed an open records request demanding access to any emails Cronon has sent or received since Jan. 1 containing the search terms "Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell."
The obvious goal is  to find something damaging or embarrassing to Cronon -- although judging by Cronon's account, smoking guns seem unlikely to be lying around in plain sight. (Eight of the names referenced in the request belong to the eight Republican state senators targeted by Democrats for recall.)

Is the request legal?  Sure it is.  I have always operated under the understanding that emails received at, or sent from, my work address is "public property" because I work at a public university.  But, this Republican tactic appears to be be for all the wrong reasons. 

How much ever I find this Republican approach reprehensible, I agree with Jack Shafer, who points out that, well, this is allowed under the Freedom of Information Act:

Cronon's beef isn't with the Republican who filed for his emails but with the law. If he thinks that exposing university emails to the scrutiny of FOIA laws is an abomination, he should spend less time crying wolf about how the university's precious academic freedom is under assault and more time getting the law changed.
Professor Cronon also betrays a bit of naiveté in railing against "highly politicized" open records requests. Has he never inspected the FOIA docket? Many requesters have "highly politicized" motivations, and those motivations don't nullify their petition. Nor should they.

Yes, we have academic freedom.  But, academics in public universities ought to have known that academic freedom doesn't trump the laws of the land.  For some reason, even Paul Krugman argues that the law doesn't apply:

nobody, and I mean nobody, considers such academic email addresses something specially reserved for university business. Actually, according to Cronon he has been especially careful, maintaining a separate personal account — but nobody would have considered it out of the ordinary if he mingled personal correspondence with official business on the dot edu address. And no, the fact that he’s at a public university doesn’t change that: when my students take jobs at Berkeley or SUNY, they don’t imagine that they’re entering into a special fishbowl environment that they wouldn’t encounter at Georgetown or Haverford.

Uh, hello?  Really?  We might want to adopt a Dickensian stand that "the law is a ass, a idiot," but the law is the law, even if we are academics.

Andrew Leonard writes that perhaps this is the best time to pick up books by Cronon:

I just bought two of Cronon's books. We can't shape the future without understanding the past. The potency of Cronon's current involvement in the hottest political struggle of the day is all the proof I need that my own understanding of how the world works will benefit from more exposure to his work -- whether manifested in a blog post, New York Times Op-Ed, or book. What better response could there be to an attack on academic freedom than to spread that academic's ideas as widely as possible?

Stay away from religion: it is literally healthier!

As is my routine every morning, I scanned the latest at Arts and Letters Daily. 

One of the links there was to a CNN report that "frequent churchgoers frequently fatter:"

frequent religious involvement appears to almost double the risk of obesity compared with little or no involvement.
What is unclear from the new research is why religion might be associated with overeating.

So, for now all they have done is establish a strong correlation?  Well, it appears that the researchers were looking into a question on cardiovascular risks, and churchgoing pops up unexpectedly:

The new research, presented at an American Heart Association conference dedicated to physical activity, metabolism and cardiovascular disease, involved 2,433 people enrolled in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study.  The group was tested - at first between 20 and 32 years old - for various cardiovascular disease risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension, and smoking.  Those same tests were repeated in the same group over the next 25 years.
The results were mixed for many risk factors for cardiovascular disease, but as researchers analyzed the data, one disparity stood out.  Those who reported attending church weekly, or more often, were significantly more likely to have a higher body mass index than those who attended infrequently, or never.

I liked even more the following paragraphs in that report:

Yet another irony is the number of studies suggesting that religion and faith are actually beneficial for health.  Recent studies suggest that a "relaxation response" in the brain among people who pray, meditate, or engage in otherwise relaxing activities may alleviate anxiety and stress. Stress is implicated in many illnesses.  Other studies suggest an association between church-going and longevity.
"On the whole being religious has been shown by many studies to be associated with better mental health, lower smoking rates, lower mortality rates and better overall health status," said Feinstein.  "There are a whole lot of things religious people are doing right, but it's just this specific area where there appears to be room for improvement."
The upshot of the new research, said Feinstein, is that knowing there may be an obesity problem among church-goers provides a captive audience for intervention.

Yes, "captive" audience, indeed!

If there is only website that I am allowed to visit every day, then A&LDaily would be the one. Thanks to the late Denis Dutton for starting this site as a resource for all of us.  An exciting moment for me as a blogger happened three years ago: Denis Dutton had left a comment on my blog post!

Here is Dutton talking about his his last book with Colbert:

The end of "My Family" :(

For a couple of years I have chuckled and laughed away watching the beeb's "My Family" that PBS broadcast on Saturday nights.  (Ahem, does that mean admitting that I had nothing else to do on a Saturday night?)

BBC is ending that show soon:

The BBC has decided that, once the 11th series is over, we shall never again be treated to the sight of Robert Lindsay hanging out of his bedroom window in his underwear. My Family, that warhorse of ever-so-slightly risqué sitcoms, will reach its last corny punchline later in the year; the show following the travails of dentist Ben Harper is apparently just too long in the tooth.

I recall one of the really funny recent episodes in which Susan decides to hire a housekeeper, much against Ben's preferences.  When it turns out that the housekeeper is one heck of a Mary Poppins, well, Susan goes comes up with crazy schemes to get rid of her.

I suppose at some level all sitcoms get to be corny and they reach their expiration date.  Thank goodness South Park is still funny--though sometimes grossly so--anytime I am able to catch one. 

Margaritaville
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

Wisdom, according to "Pickles." One good reason for newspapers!

The local newspaper, likes most papers, runs the comic strip only in black/white on all days of the week except on Sundays.  I so wish that the funny pages will be in color all seven days of the week.  But then how many people read the newspapers in print form anymore, eh :(

When I travel outside the US, which is mostly to India these days, I miss the funny pages the most.  We are in comics heaven here in America.  Our paper features two pages of comics every day, and then a grander and colorful Sunday edition.  I wonder what the reason is for us Americans (note how I identify with this adopted land!) to enjoy comic strips that much.

It is not that newspapers in India are dying either; in fact, the dailies there have a lot more pages than here.  The state of newspapers in India seem to be perhaps as healthy as the industry was here in the 1970s.  But, not a huge spread of comics though.  Don't other people like to smile and laugh every morning at least to temporarily forget all the depression that results from the news pages?

Money and March Madness: NCAA basketball on PBS. not ESPN!

I noted here how many of my left-leaning colleagues are ardent college sports nuts fans, who easily set aside the gazillion dollars that drive the NCAA and, even worse, even organize March Madness betting pools!  One heck of contradictory responses; but then perhaps that is consistent with the ultra-left's obsession with "contradictions."

It is simply awful that colleges and universities, whose "non-profit" and public status is related to the commitment to education, have morphed into money-making multinational corporations themselves.  PBS will be airing a program (on March 29th) on the money behind March Madness; check your local listings, and make sure you tune in, think, and act.

the new president of the NCAA, Mark Emmert, defends the amateurism of college basketball and rejects any form of payments to players. “I think that it would be utterly unacceptable to convert students into employees,” Emmert tells Bergman. “The point of March Madness, of the men’s basketball tournament, is the fact that it’s being played by students. ... What amateurism really means is that these young men and women are students; they’ve come to our institutions to gain an education and to develop their skills as an athlete and to compete at the very highest level they're capable of. And for them, that’s a very attractive proposition.”

Yeah, right!

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

The sea floor was "a graveyeard." Revisiting the BP spill

We are fast zooming in on the first anniversary of the catastrophic explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico,  The incident began on April 20th of last year, and the final sealing of the leak itself was completed on September 19th.  I haven't forgotten how transfixed and depressed I was while obsessively following that story.

Claudia Dreifus, whose reputation as the NY Times science writer has now been eclipsed by the fame and notoriety as a result of the book on higher education that she co-authored with Andrew Hacker, has a neat interview with Dr. Samatha Joyce, whose team of scientists were the first independent trained and qualified observers to investigate and report on the crisis.  In response to Dreifus' question comparing Japan's recent and ongoing nuclear crisis with the BPO spill, Joyce replies:

No one can prevent earthquakes. That’s up to Mother Nature.
However, building nuclear power plants on an island adjacent to an active tectonic zone is inherently dangerous. Likewise, deepwater drilling into gas-overcharged sediments is dangerous. For me, both of these disasters are a very loud plea for green energy.

Yes, indeed.  Every major energy incident over the last forty years ought to have sharpened our attention on how much we are tied down by fossil fuels and nuclear power, and yet here we are in 2011 with carbon and nukes even more dominant in our lives than ever before.  

I wonder why.  Is it because technology to tap into other energy sources has not developed at the rate at which we think it ought to have?  Were/are we naive to think that somehow green energy technology will arise out of whatever levels of science and technology we now have?  If we were to use a comparison, and suppose that an iPhone symbolizes the level of green energy technology.  How much ever something like an iPhone might have fascinated people fifty years ago, well, it would have been impossible at that time given the scientific understanding we had then and the technological capabilities, right?  So, along that line of thinking, how far are we from an "iPhone green energy" technology?

For sure, I would hate for us to continue to burn, smoke, spill, and radiate for another fifty years.

Why carbon might rule over the 21st century, too

The versatility of carbon, explained in this video:



I wish we had such videos when I was in high school; I would have become even more of a nerd then :)

In my classes now, I routinely bug students about various aspects of carbon.  Often I tell them that perhaps my fascination with it is because I grew up in a town where the entire economy was built around carbon from under the ground--lignite mining.  The lignite then used for power generation.

Anyway, back to carbon in the 21st century.  There has been a lot of talk about carbon nanotubes and graphene.  But, so far it has been only that--a lot of talk.  A little while back, in the context of the Nobel Prize for the graphene scientists, Wired explained some of the potentially transformative applications.

But, I am not sure how many students find any of my stories interesting enough ... oh well, even if neither carbon nor I are a student's best friends, an allotrope of carbon is a best friend to at least one half of the population, right?

Too Many Doctoral Programs. Well, of course. Duh!

The Association of American Universities has a new leader, Hunter R. Rawlings.  His opening shot?

Mr. Rawlings did, however, make clear that he's concerned some universities, seeking the prestige of a top ranking, may be operating too many doctoral programs, producing students without good job prospects.

Way to go,  Dr. Rawlings.
(BTW, why does the Chronicle use a dull "Mr." ... is that their editorial policy?)

"It's thrilling to have a genuine humanist be the head of an organization like that," said Stanley N. Katz, a legal historian and higher-education policy expert at Princeton University. "He's one of the most deeply thoughtful people I'm acquainted with in higher education."
At the same time, Mr. Katz questioned the plausibility of Mr. Berdahl's suggestion that the country trim its number of research universities, and predicted that Mr. Rawlings will be no more successful in cutting down on doctoral programs.
... "It's not whether we will have fewer research universities—I think inertia will keep them going—but whether they'd be willing to police themselves," Mr. Katz said. "And the answer there is just clearly, flatly no. There's absolutely nothing in the history of research universities to suggest that they're capable of the kind of self-evaluation that he's talking about."

Every time I go to the annual meeting of scholars in my current discipline, and watch the many, many, eager beaver doctoral candidates, I can't but think about Marx's phrasing of the "army of unemployed."



The story is similar in most disciplines, and even more horrific in a few.  Yet, universities continue to churn out PhDs. 

We are in Libya because .... ?

Who better than Jon Stewart to point out that we don't have a clear idea of why we are doing what we are doing in Libya.  And, in the process, he does a great job of satirizing the charade that we go through before, during, and after wars.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
America at Not-War - Obama's Communication Gap
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Remembrance of things past: high school ends :(

This March, it is 30 years since the final class XII, CBSE, exams ended.

I recall "Alaigal Oivathillai" as the defining Tamil movie of the year, with a whole bunch of songs that seemed to be at the loudest volumes at every street corner.  Wikipedia says that the movie was released in 1980, but ... perhaps my memory is faded.  Or, maybe like we instruct students, hey, don't trust Wikipedia :) ...



Anyway, as I think back now, I realize now that I had intense pangs about leaving the town and school, which had been my world throughout my entire life until then. I was barely a month past turning 17 when the exams were all over and I had no idea how to express in words my anxiety that I might never see most of my classmates again.  It was much later in life, when I watched American Graffiti for the first time that I was even able to package all those high school leaving emotions into something understandable as one of the important milestones in one's life.



Thirty years!

I recall watching a movie in Bangalore, where a bunch of us went to take some stupid exam.  I couldn't care about the exam, and was a lot more excited by the fact that it was my first ever trip to that city.  All I remember from that trip was an important intersection in town called the Kempe Gowda Circle.  And the cinema hall where we watched Love Story was near this intersection.  Here is a song from that movie:


Did you catch something that sounds almost like an Abba tune in the beginning of the song, and throughout?  Oh well, the composer, R.D. Burman was notorious for mixing popular music from the West into his compositions.

Educating College Graduates So They Can be Unemployed

That is the title of this post at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. 

if young people with college degrees can’t survive in the post-recession era, nobody can. And this explodes the idea that education alone, instead of monetary and fiscal policy, is the way out of our current high unemployment rate.
I’ve been on a kick of watching the employment rates of 20-24 year olds with college degrees as a barometer for our economy’s health for some time. Some people on the right get that this is going to kill a generation – David Frum in particular has done great work. But in general everyone on the right is screaming about the Europeanization of the U.S. economy. Ironically, they have been screaming about the part where we could get universal health care and some decent trains and not the part where the young generation that is supposed to start building their careers, innovating and creating the future of the economy, is sitting idle. The part where a generation becomes permanently detached from the formal labor markets. An economy of insiders and outsiders.

I simply cannot understand why we fail to even acknowledge this growing and urgent problem of the idling of the youth.  For their own personal and professional growth, and for society as a whole, the youth need to be actively involved in the economy.  Yet, that is not happening.  And, we are hell bent on making it worse for them by forcing higher education down their throats and then idling them.

Colleges and universities are having a great time as a result--record enrollments.  Don't listen to the faculty or administration talk about not having enough money.  Of course that is what ponzi schemers will try to convince you.  After all, if they don't have money, how come they build multimillion dollar buildings with rock-climbing-walls, right?

I wish we would stop telling students in high school that a college degree is their passport to successful middle class lives.  Allow them to pursue their own interests, and don't put down their vocational curiosities.  If they want to learn about Socrates, awesome. But let us also make sure they understand that understanding Socrates will not necessarily lead to dollars; perhaps cents, yes.  And if they still want to learn, terrific!

Obama, Libya, and his Nobel Peace Prize ... and more

Pictures easily convey what a gazillion words might not:

Oh the irony of being the only Nobel Peace Prize recipient to have launched missiles!  But then maybe he is Bush; on Obama and his advisers being the center-left version of Bush and his neo-conservative advisers:

So, maybe Obama deserves not the Nobel but the Oscar for ...

Do we have any alternatives?  Nope; all we have is crazies like this:

Or this one:

Meanwhile, the deficit and debt keeps growing; the mushroom cloud we need to worry about:

But, in a democracy (however weak it might be) the state of the nation depends on we the people:

So, what is the bottom line?

Do the actions in Libya mean Iran will speed up the nuclear bomb?

The words recently used by Secretary Clinton, Senator Kerry, Ambassador Rice, ... well, the list of people is endless ... the words used to describe Gaddafi range from "delusional" to a much milder "dictatorial" ...

There are lots of delusional leaders of government. North Korea's Kim Jong-Il and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe are way on top of that pyramid, along with quite a few others.  These two together have been the cause of millions of their peoples dying early deaths.

We might even bomb the hell out of Zimbabwe, but the world knows that we won't go anywhere near North Korea.  Why?  North Korea has the bomb.  Having the bomb is the ultimate security blanket for any regime that tries to hold on to power.

Libya's Gaddafi was on that same path of acquiring a bomb--even tried buying from India!  In the end, in the international games that governments play, Gaddafi decided that he might be better off extending a peaceful hand to the West and, thereby, consolidate his choke-hold over Libya.  Thus, he abandoned his nuclear "Islamic" bomb project, and won kudos from the West.

The then British PM, Tony Blair, was all cuddly with "our man in North Africa"

Blair saw political capital in embracing the monster. The ostensible reason for this bargain was that Gaddafi would graciously abandon his WMD programme – although there is no real evidence that he has. Blair believed, too, that Gaddafi would be a valuable tool in the global war against Islamist terrorists.

And there was more in this Faustian bargain. Not only would the Bush administration welcome any intelligence that could be gleaned from this obscure part of North Africa, but Shell and BP would gain extensive drilling rights in an oil and gas-rich country much nearer Europe than the Gulf.

Imagine if Gaddafi hadn't abandoned his nuclear project.

the 2003 deal removed Colonel Qaddafi’s biggest trump card: the threat of using a nuclear weapon, or even just selling nuclear material or technology, if he believed it was the only way to save his 42-year rule. While Colonel Qaddafi retains a stockpile of mustard gas, it is not clear he has any effective way to deploy it. “Imagine the possible nightmare if we had failed to remove the Libyan nuclear weapons program and their longer-range missile force,”

So, that means that we have all the more highlighted to Iran's Grand Ayatollah Khamenei and president Ahmadinejad that their theocratic regime might want to insure itself by speeding up making the bomb.  So, should we be surprised with news like this?

 This also means that Israel will now be all the more itchy to prevent Iran from getting one.  Jeffrey Goldberg's thought experiment seems more real now than when his essay was published:

What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)
In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

Happy spring, everybody :)

College graduates and unemployment.Not a pretty scenario.

The idea of Occam's Razor tells us that the simplest explanation is also most likely the best and correct one.  A related idea is that if something walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is damn well a duck.

All set?  I premise this posting with those observations because everywhere we turn, there is an ever increasing body of evidence that we are overselling higher education.  Even this blog has enough of those.  With all that evidence, one would think that that simple explanation fits.  But, it is so difficult to get people to acknowledge that.

In one of his recent columns, Paul Krugman came close to concluding about the oversell, but then veered off into a discussion of the economic stagnation of middle class.  And, yet, he himself provides additional evidence of the wasteful allocation of resources for higher education, when he writes:

Mark Thoma leads us to new research from the San Francisco Fed showing that recent college graduates have experienced a large rise in unemployment and sharp fall in full-time employment, coupled with a decline in wages. Why is this significant?
The answer is that it’s one more nail in the coffin of the notion that employment is depressed because we have the wrong kind of workers, or maybe workers in the wrong place.

Wrong kind of workers, and workers in the wrong place ... while college grads are unemployed or underemployed.  Add these and what do you get?  This is not the time to push more high school graduates into higher education, and yet that is precisely what we continue to do.

Krugman prefers to console himself with an explanation that this is demand side slump, which means that he probably thinks that stimulating the economy will somehow miraculously provide those millions of productive jobs for college grads.  I think not.  Though, in saying this, I fully recognize the futility of going against a recipient of the Swedish Central Bank Prize.  (editor: why don't you simply say a Nobel Prize recipient?  Because, it is not a Nobel Prize.)

Where are we in job losses since peak employment?  Check this out:

This is one serious slump we are in strictly in terms of employment.  By continuing to emphasize the overall growth in GDP, economists and politicians are misleading us about the depth of the problem.

Now, of course there is an element of the demand slump, and there is evidence for that--such as:

the corporate saving glut - no I didn't mean the 'global saving glut'. Furthermore, the corporate saving glut is manifesting itself into the labor market, creating high and persistent unemployment. ... unemployment is not structurally higher, it's that when firms do not reinvest corporate profits, the lack of income flow manifests itself into the unemployment rate.

Even if one wholly subscribes to this explanation, how does pushing more young adults to college help?

So, who is the real Obama? The Libyan answer is ...?

Salon's War Room is up in arms (yes, a bad pun!) against the military action in Libya, and there is very little there with which I disagree.  Particularly informative were this piece, this, and this.

One that was simply fantastic, and very depressing, contrasted Candidate Obama on presidential war powers versus President Obama exercising those very overreaching powers.  Glenn Greenwald points out the harsh contrast:

consider what candidate Barack Obama said about this matter when -- during the campaign -- he responded in writing to a series of questions regarding executive power from Charlie Savage, then of The Boston Globe:

Q. In what circumstances, if any, would the president have constitutional authority to bomb Iran without seeking a use-of-force authorization from Congress? (Specifically, what about the strategic bombing of suspected nuclear sites -- a situation that does not involve stopping an IMMINENT threat?)
OBAMA:  The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent.

Obama's answer seems dispositive to me on the Libya question:  "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."  And he went on to say that the President could constitutionally deploy the military only "in instances of self-defense." Nobody is arguing -- nor can one rationally argue -- that the situation in Libya constitutes either an act of "self-defense" or the "stopping of an actual or imminent threat to the nation."  How, then, can Obama's campaign position possibly be reconciled with his ordering military action in Libya without Congressional approval

Awful, right?

Ralph Nader comes out of the shadows:

Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader recently rattled off a list of U.S. military and intelligence directives -- apparently including action in Libya -- that he views as egregious violations of international law and grounds for impeachment:

Why don't we say what's on the minds of many legal experts; that the Obama administration is committing war crimes and if Bush should have been impeached, Obama should be impeached.

Hey, Nader, thanks for making me aware many, many years ago that the two parties have rigged the system so much that they are nothing but tweedledum and tweedledee.

When not to use the word "Sisyphean"; no, not in Iraq, or Libya, or Afg...

From America's Finest News Source:

Microsoft Word Now Includes Squiggly Blue Line
To Alert Writer When Word Is Too Advanced For Mainstream Audience

The March Madness of Libya War: the barbarism of buffoons

Calling it a "Coalition of the Confused," Spiked's Brendan O'Neill is sharp in his critique:

The almost overnight formation of a Western ‘coalition’ against Libya does not spring from lingering colonialist instincts in Washington, London or Paris. Rather it speaks to a new and extremely dangerous reality. It reveals the incoherence and self-doubt at the heart of the West, to the extent that Western governments will go to quite extraordinary lengths to give the impression that their attack is not a Western initiative. It shows that foreign offices across the West are now staffed by people with little or no grasp of geopolitical reality. It has exposed the inability of the Western powers to drum up serious support or international consensus even for a relatively small-scale military operation: the Arab League, so keenly held up by Cameron as a moral fig leaf for the attack, expressed its concerns after just one night of bombings, while much of the Western media is warning about the possibility of ‘mission creep’ and getting bogged down, once again, in the unpredictable terrains of Africa.
Most of all, it speaks to the now almost complete rupture between Western political interests and Western political behaviour.

O'Neill is one of the many commentators pointing fingers at Samantha Power, who was/is a key Obama foreign policy adviser.  She, along with Hillary Clinton and the UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, have become the female and liberal versions of the warmongering Neo-Cons.  "liberal inteventionists are just ‘kinder, gentler' neocons, and neocons are just liberal interventionsts on steroids" as Stephen Walt notes.


Power's role in this is not difficult to imagine--she has powerfully argued about the West's inaction in various systematic killings by authoritarian and dictatorial regimes and exposed the hollowness of the slogan "never again."  But, if she were actively involved in this decision to go to war against Gaddafi, well, she was applying the correct lessons in a wrong context. 

So, why do these buffoons keep leading us into wars, presidency after presidency?

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama are all presidents that seem incapable of conducting a serious yet desperately needed discussion about foreign policy and America's place in a post-Cold War world. Until something like that happens, the result will be a fully ad hoc set of actions that make little sense and accomplish even less in the long-term. These guys are politicians first and foremost and they know that however non-interventionist the American people may be at any given moment, all will be forgiven if you can even vaguely claim success in kicking some Third World dictatorship's ass.

But then, we might ask ourselves, whatever happened to the checks and balances of the American system?  How come the President has so much power to take us into wars?  What about the House of Representatives?  What about the Senate?

Well, the framers of the Constitution did their best.  But, we have been goofing around a lot lately.

Matt Yglesias says that the wars are not examples of presidential power grabs as much as they are about Congress abdicating its responsibilities, and it does so because:

The main reason congress tends, in practice, not to use this authority is that congress rarely wants to. Congressional Democrats didn’t block the “surge” in Iraq, congressional Republicans didn’t block the air war in Kosovo, etc. And for congress, it’s quite convenient to be able to duck these issues. Handling Libya this way means that those members of congress who want to go on cable and complain about the president’s conduct are free to do so, but those who don’t want to talk about Libya can say nothing or stay vague. Nobody’s forced to take a vote that may look bad in retrospect, and nobody in congress needs to take responsibility for the success or failure of the mission. If things work out well in Libya, John McCain will say he presciently urged the White House to act. If things work out poorly in Libya, McCain will say he consistently criticized the White House’s fecklessness. Nobody needs to face a binary “I endorse what Obama’s doing / I oppose what Obama’s doing” choice.
Which is all just to say that presidents will go back to accepting congressional authorization for the use of force as a binding constraint when congress starts actually wanting that authority.

... But the trend is toward all postwar presidents asserting broad “commander in chief” powers and Obama’s no exception.

Well, we get the government we deserve!

Steve Jobs' Software Dating Game. Flashback to 1983

Grabbed the following video that was embedded at this discussion on liberal education and/versus professional focus.

In the video it is neat to watch a very young Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and their excitement for what they do is obvious.



I was left with a nagging thought on those two other guys who share the stage with Bill Gates: Mitch Kapor (of Lotus) and Fred Gibbons.  Gibbons?  Who the heck was that?  Turns out that one of the products that his company delivered was Harvard Graphics.  I remember using it, though the details are fuzzy.

Also, as you watch the clip from 1983, don't you think that Ashton Kutcher in "That 70s Show" looks so much like the early Steve Jobs?  :)

Governors without marriages. It is bi-coastal :)

So, a little over a month ago, I blogged about an irate letter in the local newspaper; the writer was upset that our governor, Kitzhaber, is living with his significant other, instead of being married to her. 

News that the governor has been living what I consider an adulterous life hurts, because voters hoped for a person who would lead Oregon to higher ethics.
History has long proved that nations with low ethics soon collapse, and is showing in our country.
Either the governor and his girlfriend get honorably married or people must recall him from office. Already people are noticing how nature is showing signs of distress by damaging storms. What is real?
God's laws still apply, even to top-level officials. They should look inside those Bibles they put their hands on and put those words into action again.

What I didn't know then, and I know now, was this: the governor of the Empire State, Andrew Cuomo, has been shacking up as well.

Over in New York, it is not the fear of earthquakes as a result of this arrangement that hit the news, but the fact that Cuomo is a practicing Catholic and, therefore, how dare he receive the holy communion!

The strange contrast though:  In Cuomo's case, it is not a letter in a local newspaper.
He has the Vatican upset.
Yes, the Pope apparently doesn't have better things to do.

Heather Mac Donald writes:

An advisor to the Vatican’s highest court had called for the denial of communion to Cuomo on the ground of his “public concubinage”—a perfectly reasonable interpretation of Catholic doctrine.  
The New York hierarchy, however, immediately closed ranks around Cuomo and brushed off this pesky Vatican busy-body.  The leader of the Albany diocese, Bishop Howard Hubbard, assured Cuomo and the world that the Church fathers would not dream of judging Cuomo’s domestic arrangements:

“There are norms for all Catholics about receiving communion and we have to be sensitive pastorally to every person in their [sic] own particular situation,” Bishop Hubbard said. 

"Public concubinage?" OMG! In what medieval century do these people live? A hysterically funny phrase!

Mac Donald adds:

I suppose I should thank Archbishop Dolan for indirectly buttressing the argument behind secular conservatism.  Not only is religious faith not required to justify traditional morality, religious leaders do not even have the backbone any more to stand up for traditional morality in the hard individual case, leavin’ jes’ us secular conservatives to stick our necks out.  If, after centuries of accumulating scientific triumph in understanding the causal mechanisms of our world, we still must have relics, amulets, magical potions, and incantations, the one indisputable benefit that religion could provide would be fearlessness in stigmatizing anti-social behavior.  Instead, we get an Archbishop who calls concern over a Catholic’s carnal sin a “tempest in a teapot” and who thanks God for cooling down said “tempest.” 

Yes, we can have morality without religions.
And that is precisely what Sam Harris argues in The Moral Landscape. 
(BTW, Harris looks like he could be Cuomo's brother!)

I, for one, point out to that rare student who engages me about my atheistic views that while the stereotype that people prefer is that those who are irreligious, or of the wrong religion, live immoral lives, hey, in my case I am an atheist who doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, eats very little of animal products ... and no "public concubinage" either ....

The scientific question then is whether we can make moral, value, judgments in "scientific" ways.  I am not sure.  Most arguments I come across, and perhaps even Harris', tend to be variations of utilitarian thinking.  But, as much as I incorporate utilitarian analysis in the courses I teach, there is always something about utilitarianism that bothers me.  It could be a reflection of the religious and societal contexts in which I was raised.  In any case, to live the life that I now live, religion is unnecessary for moral judgments.

So, leave 'em governors alone!

My heart will go on, but not government spending. Or, will it?

The Economist has a special feature on the "state" and explores a set of questions that is not unfamiliar territory in this blog.  The following chart, borrowed from there, immediately gives a sense of how much governments all across the planet have grown.

The reason I have "or, will it?" in the title:

A lot of economic theorists have predicted an ever larger state since Adolph Wagner linked its growth to industrialisation in the 19th century. The Baumol cost effect is often cited. In the 1960s William Baumol and William Bowen used the example of classical music to show that some activities are not susceptible to improvements in labour productivity. You still need the same number of musicians to play a Beethoven symphony as you did in the 19th century, even though real wages for musicians have risen since then. Larry Summers, Mr Obama’s main economic adviser till the end of 2010, argues that the goods governments buy, especially health care and education, have proved much more resistant to productivity enhancements than the rest of the economy. Since the 1970s real wages in America have risen tenfold if you measure them against the cost of televisions; set against the cost of health care, they have gone down.

It is too darn difficult to resist the temptation to characterize the state as the Titanic heading towards the twin icebergs of  health care and education--it does not look like how we can successfully negotiate these two without major damages. 

More on the March Madness that the Libya War is

After expressing my utterly baffled and disappointed response to the Obama government taking the country into yet another war, I wondered whether I am just plainly cuckoo and that everybody else was correct.  (editor: you are half right--about the cuckoo. Awshutupalready!)

Turns out that there is at least one commentator whose opinions and analysis I have followed over the years--James Fallows--who, too, wonders what the heck is going on.  First, his bottom line:

Count me among those very skeptical of how this commitment was made and where it might lead.

Yep, same here.

All right, more from Fallows:

the Administration has not made the public case that the humanitarian and strategic stakes in Libya are so unique as to compel intervention there (even as part of a coalition), versus the many other injustices and tragedies we deplore but do not go to war to prevent. I can think of several examples in my current part of the world.

I didn't like the "shut up and leave it to us" mode of foreign policy when carried out by people I generally disagreed with, in the Bush-Cheney era. I don't like it when it's carried out by people I generally agree with, in this Administration.

It is such a relief that I was not alone in thinking along similar lines.  In my post, too, I had referred to a few specific examples of horrible injustices and whether that means Obama will take his guns and travel around the world.  Awful crap from the guy who was supposed to bring in transformative changes.  Instead, all we have is a more oratorical version of Bush.  I bet Bush feels vindicated now.

And, Fallows concludes is pretty much the same way I did too:

I hope the results are swift, decisive, merciful, and liberating, and that they hasten the spread of the Arab Dawn.

I thought the way Obama went about the healthcare reform was the dumbest of his presidency.  Well, with this Libya War, Obama has shown that we are yet to plumb the depths of his imperial dumbness.  I am now all the more convinced about my right call in not voting for Obama, and not voting for McCain either.  It is really all tweedledum and tweedledee.

Meanwhile, the Arab League throws one hell of a curve ball by declaring that it was in support of merely a no-fly-zone, and not direct military strikes.  Oh, great, just the kind of complications we needed:

the Arab League’s approval of a no-fly zone on March 12 was based on a desire to prevent Moammar Gaddafi’s air force from attacking civilians and was not designed to embrace the intense bombing and missile attacks—including on Tripoli, the capital, and on Libyan ground forces—that have filled Arab television screens for the last two days.
“What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone,” he said in a statement on the official Middle East News Agency. “And what we want is the protection of civilians and not the shelling of more civilians.”
Moussa’s declaration suggested some of the 22 Arab League members were taken aback by what they have seen and wanted to modify their approval lest they be perceived as accepting outright Western military intervention

I suppose there is one way to sum up all my feelings: WTF!