Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger. Yes, that SNL skit!

Am so glad Hulu had this awesome Saturday Night Live piece, with all those comedy maestros.  The diner where customers get cheeseburgers, and Pepsi--no Coke :)

The best GOP candidate is ... already in the White House!

One can easily imagine that the NATO bombing a Pakistani base and killing its soldiers will push the US-Pakistan relations to a new low. 

Keep that development in mind as you read the following sentences from an op-ed by India's former foreign minister:

South Asia is riddled with multiple antagonisms and mutual suspicions. India mistrusts Pakistan and vice versa. Afghanistan and Pakistan are at loggerheads. On the sidelines, China, Iran and Russia look to Afghanistan for opportunities to help themselves and crimp the United States. US officials, meanwhile, are preparing to retreat from a decade of war in the Afghan hills and valleys.
...
On the surface, one would not think so. US-Pakistan relations have turned poisonous, with blunt statements proliferating from both governments. In Istanbul, a recent gathering of Afghanistan's concerned "neighbours" produced only a rather anodyne statement in preparation for a meeting in Bonn later this year.
When confronted by such a diplomatic snarl, there are, in reality, only two options: either allow the disputes to boil in their own cauldrons, or lower the temperature on all of the region's antagonisms before a cataclysmic explosion occurs. Clearly, today's frozen regional diplomacy must end; far too much of global importance is at stake.
India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US form a rectangle of relationships in South Asia, with India, China and the US constituting a triangle that not only contains the South Asia region, but is also a major theatre in an increasingly global struggle. The emerging geopolitical centrality of the Indian Ocean, through which an ever-increasing share of world trade passes, is a third, complicating, factor.
Untangling this web, and imparting to it a co-operative order, should be high on the agenda of all countries involved. Consider India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US. Can these relationships be transformed into anything resembling a co-operative effort?

Good luck on that.

On top of everything else, I wonder why President Obama felt compelled to move into China's sphere of influence, with his decision to locate a military base in Australia.  Really?  Come on!

I am all the more convinced that the best Republican candidate is already in the White House!  It is just that the Republicans have rushed so far to the right extreme that they don't realize that Obama is way to the right of where many Democrats hoped he would be.  No surprise that hawks, like Walter Russell Mead, are happy with all this:

Congratulations should go to President Obama and his national security team.  The State Department, the Department of Defense and the White House have clearly been working effectively together on an intensive and complex strategy.  They avoided leaks, they coordinated effectively with half a dozen countries, they deployed a range of instruments of power.  In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.
...
The US has won the first round, but the game has just begun.  The Obama administration and its successors will now have to deal with a long term contest against the world’s most populous country and the world’s most rapidly developing economy.  The Obama administration may not have fully counted the costs of the new Asian hard line; for one thing, it is hard to see significant cuts coming in defense spending after we have challenged China to a contest over the future of Asia.  It’s possible that less drama now might have made America’s point as effectively while reducing the chance of Chinese push back, but there is not a lot of point in debating that now.

Egypt and democracy: Two cartoonists play on puns

First this:

Now, the second:

I imagine cartoonists being fluent with puns and, therefore, cartoonists who work in two entirely different genres using the same pun with "gyp" is not that much of a surprise.  But, ...

And thus Black Friday reveals our consumption culture :(

BBC reports on a few ugly scenes:

A man is in a stable but critical condition in hospital after being shot in the early hours as he left a Walmart with a group of people in San Leandro, California, when they resisted two armed robbers who demanded their purchases

Police are reviewing CCTV as they look for a woman who left 20 people with minor injuries when she used pepper spray as shoppers rushed to buy Xboxes at a Los Angeles area Walmart on Thursday evening

A man was reportedly detained for resisting arrest after a fight at the jewellery counter in the early hours at a Walmart in Kissimmee, Florida

Police are looking for two suspects after gunfire erupted early on Friday at a shopping centre in Fayetteville, North Carolina; there were no reports of injuries

Security workers reportedly used pepper spray on shoppers who began grabbing at goods before they were unloaded from pallets at a Walmart in Kinston, North Carolina

A woman was shot in the foot by a robber as she loaded her purchases into her car in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; the gunman fled as one of the victim's companions brandished a revolver and fired warning shots

Seriously?  Pepper spray? Guns?  WTF!

This rap parody of life in the "first world" is more than a statement on our bizarre culture of consumption:

Saying thanks to ... teachers ... and students

Over the years that I have had to reflect on my life, I concluded that I have been a lucky guy who had quite a few wonderful teachers to guide me.  There wasn't any one special teacher, or any one particular moment, that stands out though.  But, with the exception of a couple of them, well, I have had fantastic teachers throughout, all the way to my PhD.

Today, the day that Story Corps suggests that we "thank a teacher," I pause to appreciate all those fabulous people.

Now, of course, I am one of them teachers.  Every year, practically every term, there are enough incidents where students explicitly and genuinely thank me, which is all I need to forget any professional disappointment and frustration, which are in plenty. 

A couple of days ago, a student, "B," popped her head into my office and sat down for a chat.  It had been a few months since I last saw her.  As we chatted about stuff profound and silly, she casually slips into the conversation that she is getting married in June and that I am invited. I was/am excited for her, and am so touched that she chose to privilege me with such a unique honor of being one of the few invitees at such a major transition in one's life.

A wedding celebration here in the US is, for the most part, very different from India in one important aspect: a typical wedding here almost always has a very small group in attendance.  In India, all the weddings that I have been to, well, they were major events with hundreds of people in the audience.  Thus, unlike in India, an invitation here is a result of a lot of thought on who gets invited and who does not.  To be then invited only as a result of teacher-student interactions is, therefore, very, very special to me.

This is not the first wedding invitation either. I could not attend a few because of scheduling issues.

Last summer, I attended the wedding of "L" and "P"--interestingly enough, they were both in my classes, and together in one term.  When I went there, "P," the groom, said "you will be the only teacher here, Dr. Khé.  In fact, you are only teacher we invited, of all the teachers from our first grade to college."  How special, right?  And when everybody from their parents to grandmothers to aunts treated me with "so glad you could come, professor" I felt like I had hit a jackpot!

This time, I don't even have to wait until next June to realize that I have won the jackpot.  In her follow-up email, "B" writes:

My father pointed out this evening that the only major event in my life that you will have missed so far is my birth. :-) You have really become a part of my family

Of course, it is not only through wedding invitations do students let me know that I played a constructive role in their lives. Even simple things like when they say "I don't care if I miss any other class, but I make sure to come to your because you are my favorite" or, as one student said a couple of days ago in a very appreciative tone, "you are so much like my father.  He is about your height and build, has a beard, and always has questions for us."  This was not from an "Indian" student but from a "white" girl :)

Because we don't have a "thank a student" day, I will use this context to note my thanks to all the students who have made it all worthwhile.

Do I have a groaner for my students! I Rock :)

I wrote about the (mis)pronunciations of Iraq and Iran, among a few others:

I make it a point to remind them that Iraq is not pronounced as “eye-rack” and Iran is not “eye-ran.” I do not mean to suggest that correctly pronouncing the names of these or other countries is all that matters. But correctly pronouncing their names will be a significant first step toward understanding them— particularly when we are the people determining the fate of Iraq, and when we are far from being a beloved country in the Middle East.

In case you don't trust my pronunciation, and you have good reasons to, well, here is Christiane Amanpour:

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They teach human sexuality in colleges by asking students to masturbate?

"Well, at least not in the classroom" is how I consoled myself after reading this news item about a student in Nevada who alleges that "a professor there required students to divulge personal details of their sex lives and assigned them to masturbate"

Royce, 60, is a medical technician who's working toward a degree in social work. She said she enrolled in the freshman-level Human Sexuality class, which fulfills a social science requirement, based on the description of the class in the course catalog. It says the class covers topics such as gender, sexual anatomy, sexually transmitted diseases and commercial sex, among others.
Royce said the course began with a discussion of different sexual positions, and she said the instructor went on to assign students to double their normal masturbation routine over the course of two weeks and write journals about their experiences.
"I joked, but was serious and said, 'I don't masturbate, so zero times zero is zero!'" Royce wrote in her complaint, which she filed with the U.S. Education Department's Office of Civil Rights. "He became angry and ordered the class to masturbate if they intended to pass the class."

In case you are freaking out already, wait, there is more!

Other journal assignments in Kubistant's class included requiring female students to write "your views of your breasts and vulva," and the instruction: "Your orgasms. Draw them!"
The term paper for the course requires students to write a 12- to 14-page sexual case study on themselves.
The project begins with a sex history -- including a directive to reveal any instances of abuse -- and continues through sexual values, arousal patterns and atypical issues such as fetishes.
When Royce asked Kubistant for an alternative assignment, she said, he again refused.
"He said I absolutely had to complete it as assigned or I would not pass the class," she said in the complaint. "Then he inferred to the class that I had issues that (I) need to work out and this might be sexual freedom."

I am glad I was not a student in that class!

The news item does state that no other student has complained about the course.  So, I am not sure what to make of it.

But, it is not difficult to believe that such assignments might have been required.  A few months ago, a psychology class at Northwestern hit the national news because ...

Led by a man whose website describes him as a “psychic detective and ghost hunter,” it was called “Networking for Kinky People,” and began with a towel placed neatly on the auditorium stage. Next, a woman took her clothes off, and—with an audience of around 100—lay down on her back, legs spread. As students moved forward from the theater’s back seats, for a closer view, “The girl grabbed the mic,” says Sean Lavery, a Northwestern freshman. “She explained that she had a fetish for being watched by large crowds while having an orgasm.”No, the girl involved was not a student. Yes, she was over 21, we’re told—and the guy stimulating her was introduced as her boyfriend. “It was a committed couple who did the demonstration, and it happened at the end of the class,” says Ken Melvoin-Berg, the guest speaker, who helps operate a tour company called Weird Chicago that offers sex tours.
We'll spare you the gory details—but let's just say they involved the woman's boyfriend bringing her to climax on stage, using a contraption called a "fucksaw," and plenty of gasps, not just from flabbergasted students. “I was gauging everyone’s reaction,” says Lavery, who’s been in Bailey’s class since January. “I think everyone was just like, ‘Is she really doing this right now?’”

I noted Joseph Epstein's comment in that context:

One of the most important things that departed from higher education with the old ideal of the university was intellectual authority. One of the first changes I noticed from my own undergraduate education when I began teaching at Northwestern—and this is certainly not true of Northwestern alone—was all the junky subject matter being taught. Courses in science fiction, in the movies, in contemporary or near contemporary writers already consigned to the third class ... 

As I noted then:

Oh well, whatever happened to the university as the intellectual authority?  When did they begin to allow fakes like me into their campuses?

I suppose sex does sell.

Perhaps I should start thinking about renaming courses that way.  "The Indian Subcontinent" ought to be retitled "Sex in Bollywood" and "Introductory Economic Geography" can become "Why is Pornography in the Silicone Valley?"

Nah; will never happen. I am way too square for that :(

Ignorance Is bliss, on complex issues. So, outsource it to ...?

The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
And the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware, according to a paper published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

This reports Science Daily (ht)

It is safe to assume then that people do not want to know about this finding either!

Even more worrisome is this:

people tend to respond by psychologically 'outsourcing' the issue to the government, which in turn causes them to trust and feel more dependent on the government. Ultimately, they avoid learning about the issue because that could shatter their faith in the government.

I tell students that I don't want them to blindly believe in anything, and that the single-most attribute I want to see in them is curiosity.  If they are not curious, then the purpose of education is lost, and with that will come crashing the whole idea of democracy.  To that effect, I remind them not to even trust what I say in the classroom, and that they ought to verify for themselves.  If the study's findings are largely true, then it is all the more important that I wage this battle, right?

We need to spend more on college football ... for retirement options!

$40,000 per month in retirement. WTF, eh!

I wonder if students ever think about how this misplaced priority is screwing them!

The consolation here: at least he wasn't a Paterno! 

Oh, BTW, Click here to get astounded by the gazillions that college coaches earn. 

An analysis by USA TODAY found that in 2006 the average pay for major-college coaches was $950,000. ...

The average compensation in 2011 is $1.47 million, a jump of nearly 55% in six seasons.

In the six conferences with automatic Bowl Championship Series bids, the average salary rose from $1.4 million in 2006 to $2.125 million in 2011. That's a jump of about 52% — meaning salaries at schools in the other five major conferences are going up at roughly the same rate as they are at higher-profile schools.

"The hell with gold," higher education lawyer Sheldon Steinbach says. "I want to buy futures in coaches' contracts."

Critics find it troubling that this rapid rise for coaches comes at a time when instructional spending at many schools has slowed or declined amid economic struggles and shrinking state education budgets.

Ha!  I am willing to sell you a Taj Mahal for about 20 mil :)

Worry about Facebook. A lot. And about Amazon, Google, ...

Yes, yet another entry on my love-hate relationship with Facebook, primarily, and, to a lesser extent, with others too.  As this piece at Slate puts it:

Facebook's monetary policy runs on just one simple idea: You can either give up your privacy and embrace the world of entertainment abundance—or you can fight to protect it and risk living in entertainment poverty. You choose.

That is the essence of the problem.

In the old days, well, just a couple of years ago, I could listen to any radio station I wanted to, read any book I cared about, watched ... well, you get the drift. But, such a level of anonymity seems to be rapidly evaporating:

What can compete with the seemingly infinite libraries of music available from streaming services like Spotify? Nothing—but try getting there today without a Facebook account and you would not advance very far: Spotify demands that new users already have an existing Facebook account—which they can't get unless they are prepared to register on Facebook with their real names! This is how listening to music anonymously becomes deviant; gradually, it may also become technologically difficult and expensive. Reading anonymously doesn't look deviant yet—but things will change as we bypass public libraries and start borrowing books from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The former would never think of selling our data to third parties; the latter wouldn't think twice about it. In fact, they would give us coupons for sharing our reading habits.
...
It's time that citizens articulate a vision for a civic Internet that could compete with the dominant corporatist vision. Do we want to preserve anonymity to help dissidents or do we want to eliminate it so that corporations stop worrying about cyber-attacks? Do we want to build new infrastructure for surveillance—hoping it will lead to a better shopping experience—that would be abused by data-hungry governments? Do we want to enhance serendipitous discovery, to ensure exposure to new and controversial ideas, to maximize our ability to think critically about what we see and read on the Net? Or do we want to build computers that would conduct autonomous searches on our behalf—only to pitch us the latest sales deals, recommend restaurants in the neighborhood, and feed us one answer instead of many? Do we want the Internet to remember everything that happens online, or do we want to introduce some noise and decay into our digital archives as they—and we—age? 

Christopher Hitchens on American Exceptionalism and the GOP primaries

The ancients taught us to fear “hubris,” and the Bible teaches the sin of pride.  I am always amazed that American conservatives are not more suspicious of self-proclaimed historical uniqueness. But proclaim it they do, as if trying to reassure themselves against the blasts of what looks like a very bad season.

The entire column is a must-read.

Update: Over at the Chronicle is this piece, which also discusses "exceptionalism" in the context of of the recent Pew Survey, I find this paragraph:

Any American who has spent time abroad, or read a book or two about people in faraway places, or who simply possesses an imagination, understands that Americans are hardly alone in feeling they are exceptional. With some notable exceptions, most people are convinced they, too, live in the greatest country on earth and that their way of life, and their values, are superior to everybody else’s. Exceptionalism, then, is a relative thing—a powerful illusion that seems to well up naturally. As long as there are distinct nations and cultures on this planet, exceptionalist feelings will endure.

Vegetables are like porn because ... "We know ‘em when we see ’em"

At the risk of sounding like a maniacal libertarian that I am not (only a maniac, thank you very much!) the recent tomato/vegetable controversy is a reminder that when government takes it upon itself to define something for all of us, then somebody who stands to gain from it will work to maximize their own self-interest.

First this update:

the House voted 298-121 that a slice of pizza spread with two tablespoons of tomato paste should be counted as a vegetable, at least when it’s fed to schoolchildren. Obama signed the bill into law on Friday.

One might question the wisdom of our reps at Congress worrying about tomato paste when they can't seem to figure out anything about the budget.

But, why this tomato paste bill you ask?

“It was Schwan and ConAgra that were lobbying the issue,” says Margo Wootan, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “If two tablespoons of tomato paste counts as a vegetable, pizza is a reimbursable meal. Because the crust counts as a grain, the sauce is the vegetable, and the cheese and pepperoni have protein. But two tablespoons of tomato paste isn’t a vegetable.”

You can't blame the food industry--they do what they have to do.  It is a logical consequence to government having taken up the responsibility to define a food pyramid and what our school kids can eat.

BTW, what is a vegetable anyway?

Suddenly all vegetables, not just the zucchini, are pornographic: We know ‘em when we see ’em. I asked a spokesperson for the Food and Nutrition Service, the USDA body that oversees the school-lunch program, how they defined a vegetable. “When it comes to defining foods, we hew to the FDA’s standards.” But Janet McDonald, an FDA spokeswoman, told me that such fundamentals were out of FDA purview: “We don’t have a definition of vegetables. Probably it’s under the USDA.”

Hahaha!

Pansies who can't kill. Glad to be one of 'em!

"You must never kill a man, particularly if it means taking his life" ... wait, was that Yogi Berra's wisdom?

Speaking of the "moral imperative," Ron Rosenbaum wrote about the Kantian imperative in Catch-22:

There's a scene in the World War II novel when some officer or other reproves the novel's anti-hero, Capt. Yossarian, for trying to escape another of the ever-escalating number of dangerous bombing missions he's ordered to fly.

"Suppose everybody on our side felt that way," the officer demands, echoing Kant's imperative—that one should decide how to act by envisioning the consequences if everyone else acted that way. It's a maxim much beloved by parents. Mine, anyway.

So, if everybody else acted that way? "Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way," Yossarian says.

Beautiful! It was one of the reasons I fell madly in love with the novel.

We pansy liberals read Catch-22, watch Woody Allen, and are anti-war and anti-killing.  May our tribe increase! 

Hey, we have the biggest weapon of all: Calvin :)