Rick Perry gives up on god

Who woulda thunk it, eh!

After god did not answer the prayers for rain, led by him and thousands of Texans:

Governor Perry seems to have given up on the divine angle for now, however, and is asking for aid from a more reliable source: the federal government.

Muahahaha!

Nutjob on steroids. No, not that one!

 

Take it away, Jon Stewart:

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"Have a nice night" she said

I casually scanned the movie listings on a Thursday evening, and "The Beginners" was listed at the dollar theatre. "What if it is gone when a new schedule comes up on Friday?" I thought. I had only about 30 minutes to decide before the final ten pm show.

I had wanted to watch this movie from the time I heard its writer/director's interview on Terry Gross' show.  I was driving home from work, and was absolutely fascinated both by the plot and the earnestness of the guy. And, I like both the main actors--Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer.

So, I went.

It was ten minutes before movie time, and I was the only one in the hall. I was a tad worried--if I got whacked there, then nobody would find out anything until the movie ended and the cleaning people walked in.  I sat with the cellphone in my hand--ready to call 911 if needed.  Strange worries we have as we get older, I suppose!  I imagine I will become one of those cranky old men ready to use the walker as a weapon even when people merely ask "may I help you?"

Five minutes later, a young couple walked in and sat a few rows ahead of me across the aisle on the other side.  My cellphone went back to my jeans pocket.

And, just before the lights dimmed for previews, a mother/daughter duo walked in--well, they looked like a mother/daughter.  About a 20 year old girl.  True to the gender stereotypes, they couldn't decide on where to sit. I was reminded of an experience at a coffee shop many years ago in Bakersfield. The woman ahead of me reached the counter, and hewed and hawed and placed her order.  Just as the clerk was punching in the order, she told him she didn't want that.

And then she turned around to me and said "it is a woman's prerogative to change her mind."  I threw my hands up in a mock surrender and smiled.

The mother/daughter duo chose a row, then another, and then finally sat down.

"Too crowded the theatre is, eh" I remarked with a chuckle.

They laughed.  "Too many choices" said the older one.

The previews didn't start though--the projector was stuck.

I walked over to the lobby area and informed a guy there, who seemed not too pleased that he had to work that evening.  "Yeah, that one has been causing us problems all day long" he said as we walked back.  He went to the projection booth as I returned to my seat.

"Thank you" the only other man in the audience said.

"What? Only a thanks?  You owe me five bucks."  Ha ha!

The previews and then the movie played.  Was well worth the money and the time.  The credits barely started rolling when the couple left.  Less than a minute later, the mother/daughter duo stood up, stretched and starting walking out.

The mother was first and the daughter followed her.  As she passed my row, the daughter paused and said "have a nice night."

For a nanosecond, I was pleasantly stumped.  I had never been wished a good evening in such a setting. "Oh, thanks. Have a wonderful evening" I replied.

Life is wonderful!

BTW, it is Friday and, yes, the schedule has changed and The Beginners is not listed anymore.

The unbearable (intellectual) lightness of ... our senators :(

Jon Stewart explains:

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Anna Hazare's 15 minutes are over!

Three weeks ago, as the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement hit a high note, I blogged that this will not be any version of Arab Spring in India:

India is a country with a history of exciting events, which eventually die down without doing any serious damage to the status quo.

More than anything else, Hazare was proposing something quite bizarre--setting up an all-powerful body, and assuming that this will somehow be insulated from corruption.  I remarked elsewhere that such reforms cannot be legislated and that it has to come through changes in the everyday practices of people.  I have a metric for this: the day trash will not be dumped anywhere and everywhere.


Anyway, I am not the only one who thinks that this will not be productive, and could become highly counter-productive too.  Here is another immigrant from India, writing at Reason:

Protests are like morning ablutions in India’s cacophonous democracy: routine and purgative. One can’t sneeze without running into a demonstration by some interest group fighting for some special benefit....
one agency can’t effectively deal with the volume of grievances it is likely to receive. Alternatives to the Hazare proposal suggest creating mini-Lokpals at the municipal level. But all of them suffer from a fatal flaw: They treat corruption like an enforcement rather than a policy problem. ...
Eradicating corruption will require more than simply adding yet another layer of bureaucracy, however. So long as government officials have too much to gain from dishonesty—and citizens have too much to lose from honesty—corruption will remain a fact of Indian life.

The Economist adds this:

Mostly sceptics bristle at Mr Hazare’s methods. The most revered Dalit leader, the late B.R. Ambedkar, chief draftsman of India’s constitution, has been much quoted this week for an early warning about the “grammar of anarchy”, by which he meant using Gandhi-style fasts to impose your will on a democratic government. Hunger strikes, a form of blackmail, might have been justified against the British, but not against elected leaders.
Such grumbles will not dent Mr Hazare’s progress. His camp hints at possible future campaigns on electoral changes and education reform. Rival fasters might also jump in since a hunger strike’s extended drama so clearly suits live television. Yet elected politicians can push back. They have an easy way to remind voters how they matter, by getting on and passing many long-promised bills, for example on further economic reform. Dull and undramatic: but for many voters it matters at least as much as corruption.

Meanwhile, the country's attention has already turned away from Hazare to terrorism in the capital city of New Delhi:

Less than four months after a mysterious bomb went off in the parking lot, a powerful blast ripped through the reception counter of the Delhi High Court complex in the heart of the capital on Wednesday, leaving at least 11 people dead and more than 75 injured.

Even as a red alert was sounded in the city, an email sent to various media organisations claimed responsibility for the blast on behalf of the ‘Harkat-ul-Jihadi.'

The claim, sent from harkatuljihadi2011@gmail.com, threatened similar blasts at the Supreme Court and other major High Courts if the Parliament attack case convict Afzal Guru's death sentence was not “repealed.” (sic).

 Caption at the source:

"A man injured in the bomb blast being brought to the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital in New Delhi on Wednesday."

You are what your font is? But, no Comic Sans, please!

Every once in a while, I tell students that I am looking for their originality in thinking and not in the bizarre fonts they think best represent who they are.  Once a student turned in a paper with the text printed in green color, which she said best represented her ecological self!

All the font-mania thanks to Steve Jobs, writes Simon Garfield (ht):

Shortly after he dropped out of college, Mr. Jobs found that he had the freedom to attend classes on subjects that pleased him rather than bored him. At one of these he discovered the joys of calligraphy and typefaces. He found the experience "beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture," as he once said.
And so when the Mac was born a decade later, Mr. Jobs gave its users something novel, a choice of fonts—everything from Times New Roman to the original Chicago and Venice—a revolutionary act that loosened our dependence on the professional designer. (Whether your nice new printer could cope with them was another matter.)

Even as my students explore fonts that I never knew were even possible, it is not that the typewriter has gone away.  The LA Times reports (ht) that typewriters and the typing profession are alive and well in India:

India's typewriter culture remains defiantly alive, fighting on bravely against that omnipresent upstart, the computer. (In fact, if India had its own version of "Mad Men," with its perfumed typing pools and swaggering execs, it might not be set in the 1960s but the early 1990s, India's peak typewriter years, when 150,000 machines were sold annually.)

Credit for its lingering presence goes to India's infamous bureaucracy, as enamored as ever of outdated forms (often in triplicate) and useless procedures, documents piled 3 feet high and binders secured by pink string.

Other loyalists include the over-50 generation and, conversely, young people in rural areas who dream of a call-center job but can't yet afford a laptop. There are also certain advantages to a machine without a power cord in a country where 400 million people still lack electricity.

So, when typists in India switch over to computers, will the following happen? (ht to a friend)

There is no business like the higher education business!

A few years ago, a new provost joined the university where I work.  As much as I was unimpressed with the man upstairs, I met with him a few months after to talk to him about the university's Honors Program for which I was the director.

I had the typical data one would have needed for such a meeting: number of students, average SAT scores and high school GPAs, basic demographics of the students, and the like.  I briefed the provost about these and highlighted a few areas where the university might invest in Honors.

"How many Honors students do study abroad?" he asked.

"Not many. Study abroad is very rare here because it is expensive and most of our students cannot afford to" I replied.

"How about graduate school?  How many go on to professional schools?"

"Again, not many. Perhaps an MAT for those going into teaching."

"I need to see that kind of outcomes before we can spend more money in Honors" the provost flatly stated.

The rest of the meeting, I made sure I didn't show how pissed off I was and I exited.

His yardstick of study abroad and graduate school is not the metric for the university whose mission is very different from a Harvard.  Many of our students are first in their families to attend college and earn a degree.  Most have not traveled more than a few hundred miles from their hometowns because they can't afford to.

Yet, that was the provost's yardstick.

As depressing this conversation was, it was even more disappointing when I debriefed about this with a couple of faculty colleagues.  They thought that we ought to encourage students to think more about study abroad and graduate school.  It was quite a "et tu" moment for me.

Of course, those were still the days when most of the faculty had not gotten over their fascination for the new provost.  I was in a tiny minority who was not impressed by any means.  Slowly and steadily, these colleagues also started seeing things differently.  But, of course, he was soon off to a presidency :)

From then on, I suddenly became aware of how much faculty and administrators alike measure the work we do in educating students in terms of the numbers they have sent to doctoral programs, or law and medical schools.  "Oh, I have these letters of recommendation to write" is a fancy complaining way to let others know that their students are applying to graduate schools.

It is bizarre to think that success in higher education means more education! Of course, to students who talk to me about graduate school, I first warn them about the economic realities and most of them never step in to my office again!

What about the great majority of students who complete their degrees in four, five, or even seven years, work hard, pay taxes, raise families, volunteer their time, and lead productive lives?  Are these then nothing but the metaphorical chopped liver?

The irony is that pretty much every college, including mine, will boast something along the lines of how their mission is to produce well-rounded individuals who will be productive members of society.  Where in this is a requirement that students have to do study abroad and/or go to graduate school?  Department websites, for instance, rarely ever list students who complete their undergraduate programs and lead productive lives.  Do they not recognize that a John Doe, B.S., working in an advertising agency is an educated person?

To make things worse, faculty compete to offer graduate programs.  As one colleague, who has since retired, uttered out of sheer frustration, "it is all about the faculty who can then talk about the number of graduate theses they have chaired."

I suppose there is no business like the higher education business. What a tragedy!

Why economics? Like so! :)

In cartoons and video (ht):

In the beginning:

From such beginnings, here is a four-minute history of economics:



And, thus, into the present:

Bachmann and Perry, and their irrational god. Fun times for us atheists :)

This post by Heather Mac Donald requires no additional comment whatsoever:

Michelle Bachman recently suggested that the summer’s catastrophic weather reflects God’s displeasure with the course of American politics:

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians . . . We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said: ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’”

Predictably, she has now retracted her theological claims and says she was just joking. 

If the earthquake and hurricane did not represent God’s will, what did they represent in a world governed by an omnipotent, omniscient God?  Screw-ups?  Things that just slipped by his attention?  Any believer who dares articulate the unavoidable implications of religious practice these days, however,  will be forced into just such a recantation as Bachmann’s, for religious faith conflicts with what, for contemporary society, is the far more important secular ethic of tolerance and inclusion. 

This spring, Texas Governor Rick Perry issued a proclamation declaring April 22 to April 24 as “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.”   Now what is logically entailed by such a proclamation?  The same implications regarding divine will as were behind Bachmann’s unacceptable gloss:

1.  That God has omnipotent power over earthly events.
2.  That such power exists whether the power-holder decides to change or to maintain a status quo: both action and inaction represent deliberate Godly intentions towards reality.
3.  That if God wants to end the Texan drought, he can.
4.  That God is aware of our prayers.
5.  That God has the capacity to act upon our prayers.
Specifically to Perry’s proclamation (and to every other such “group day of prayer”):
6.  That God employs democratic pollsters who tabulate public opinion: the more people praying to him to take a particular course of action, the more likely it is he will rouse himself to that action (this corollary of all such calls to collective prayer conflicts of course with the equally prevalent meme that all it takes is one voice crying out for help to move God to action).

Since Perry and his fellow Texan prayer-senders believe that God should be moved by their collective appeal, they assume that he will clearly understand their worth and their need for relief and that such worth and need for relief constitute a persuasive ground for action.  Therefore, and necessarily, they must feel that they are more worthy in God’s eyes than the victims of the Japanese tsunami, of the Joplin, Mo., tornado, and of every other victim of the daily slaughter of the innocents whom God has allowed to perish in natural disasters which he had the power to cancel.  After witnessing such mass devastation in Japan and in the U.S., why else would Perry and his fellow Christians now come to God with their request for some rain?  Clearly, they must present more persuasive cases for aid than did the thousands of tsunami victims.  Otherwise, God would have spared these latter their sorry fates, which none of them or their relatives and friends would have wished upon them and which every victim would have prayed to avoid if, like Perry, they believed in the power of prayer.  

To suddenly invoke the obscurantism defense—“Oh, God’s grand, majestic will is inscrutable to us, how dare you, you measly, ignorant worm, draw any implications about God’s attitudes towards his victims from the daily massacre of the innocents“—simply will not do, given the confidence with which believers attribute “miracles”—such as the survival of a single child in a village devastated by an earthquake—to God’s love. 

There is no middle ground between a view that every thing that happens is the consequences of God’s action or deliberate non-action, and a view of the universe as proceeding randomly without divine guidance.   The latter view is far easier to square with the daily massacre of the innocents; only the human need for, as Michael Novak puts it, a special “Friend” in the sky that can be called on to get us out of fixes leads humans to posit a loving God, whose existence requires the utter torture of logic and reason to reconcile with the randomness of human tragedy. 

Bachmann’s attribution of divine pique to Hurricane Irene and other natural disasters is perfectly consistent with Christian faith.  It is the retraction of that claim that is inconsistent.

Or, a picture is worth a thousand words :)

The best thing about the Siskiyous: keeps California away from Oregon :)

The Los Angeles-San Diego area is almost a contiguous urbanized land area except for that stretch in southern Orange County and northern San Diego County.  Where there is very little sign of the busy built environment to the south and the north.  And the one recognizable sign off the freeway warns motorists to watch out for the possibility of humans (illegal aliens!) running across.  Thus, southern San Diego County and its cities have not been messed up by the urbanites from north.

A similar barren patch insulates Oregon from any overwhelming influence from California--the mountain stretch all the way from Ashland in the southern tip of Oregon until Redding in California, from where the great valley extends up to Bakersfield, where I lived for many years.

I am so thankful for this geographic feature that stops California at the border, so to speak.

California is a great place to visit, as is New York City. Great to visit only because of the comforting and reassuring feeling that, unlike with the Eagles' Hotel California, I can truly leave after checking out.

I did :)

The Cascades on the eastern side and the Pacific Ocean on the west further ensure minimal interference from those sides. Never before have I paused to appreciate these geographic features for how much they help with the Oregon story.

It is, therefore, a figurative island that this part of Oregon is.  Or, perhaps like the setting in Brigadoon.  Ironically, even the "native" students seem confused when I tell them this is a paradise on earth; I suppose they are yet to check out other places ... they, too, will soon find out :)

Weed and Mexican food. No Cheech nor Chong!

It was a couple of miles to the exit at Weed, up in the mountains of California.  It was also my lunch time and I was in no mood for fast food.  I hoped there would be a sit down restaurant.

The sign board before the exit ramp was encouraging: "Dos Amigos."  With a tag line of "authentic Mexican food."  I was off the freeway and to the parking lot.

There was no menu posted outside. I cautiously walked in, and a Chinese looking woman in her late fifties welcomed me. How authentic can the Mexican food be if the only person there is Chinese, I worried.  I paused to take a look at the menu even before I reached the table. It was Mexican food on the menu.

To buy myself more time before I made any decision on to eat or skip the place, to the washroom I went. If the restroom was clean enough, I thought, I would eat in this place. It was.

I sat at the table and the Chinese woman brought me chips and salsa. "A tostada please" I said.

"Anything to drink other than water?" she asked in what came across as a rather strong British accent.

"No, thanks" I said, now placing her to be a emigrant from Hong Kong.

I was busily wolfing down the chips and salsa to quieten my growling stomach when she paused at the table.  "You are from India, right?

I nodded.

Another waiter brought my food, and he seemed Mexican, but also Indian.

I was half way done with the meal, which itself was nothing to write about, when the Chinese woman came to my table, again.

"Where in India are you from?"

"From the southern part. Madras. That was a long time ago. I live in Oregon now."

"I am also from India. From Calcutta."

I nearly fell off my chair. "No kidding!"

"Really. I am an Indian, of Chinese descent. I came here fifteen years ago" she said.

"Oh wow!  what brought you here?"

"Family immigration, you know. I am here because my brother owns this place; his wife is Mexican."

"I lived in Calcutta for two months" I told her. "Near Park Avenue."  I wanted to add that I have eaten a lot of Chinese food in that area, but I didn't. And, boy were they some tasty chow meins!

"That was my neighborhood for forty years" the Indian-Chinese-American woman said. "What do you do in Oregon?"

"I teach there, in a university."

"So, you came here as a student?"

"Yes. In Los Angeles.  Which is where my daughter lives."

"Indians do very well here in America, no!  I feel so proud" she said touching her chest.  Her face was beaming now, and was considerably friendlier.

"Yes they do."

We chatted a little bit more, and later when she brought  the bill, I thanked her. "Am so glad you talked with me" I told her.

"I am too" she said.

Only in America, I suppose, will we find an "authentic" Mexican restaurant owned by Chinese from India.  To quote a classic line often uttered by another immigrant, Yakov Smirnoff, "America, what a country!"