When Bret Stephens wrote his first column for the NY Times, there were protests online. A few wrote about canceling their subscriptions altogether. If you need a refresher about that episode, click here to read his first column.
Today, he showed yet again that he knows how to pick and choose in order to advance his argument. First, what was his column about? To some extent, Stephens has a legitimate point, like with this one:
Do the same people who rightly demand the removal of Confederate statues ever feel even a shiver of inner revulsion at hipsters in Lenin or Mao T-shirts?
I have written about this, too. (What have I not blogged about, eh!) In this post, for instance, I wrote:
Che's use of violence to achieve his version of utopia is no different from how Osama bin Laden didn't find anything wrong in killing civilians. Yet, while no rational person would walk around wearing an Osama t-shirt, thousands all across the world, including here in the US, think it is cool to wear a Che t-shirt. ...
I wish the world would stop applauding Che and making a saint out of this killer and, instead, remember him for what he was
So, yes, I agree with Stephens that we should denounce Lenin and Mao and Castro, with as much loudness as we demand the removal of confederate monuments.
But then, Stephens resorts to quoting the big time empire-building white supremacist bastard, winston churchill.
Oh please, churchill was not all that better than Castro. churchill was the guy who intentionally let millions of people in Bengal die. churchill was a passionate defender of the British right to rule over the brown-skinned even when there were plenty around him who were increasingly uncomfortable with the brutal colonization. churchill's rhetoric was all about saving the white skin; the browns be damned! He openly said things like this:
I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
As Shashi Tharoor says, churchill has as much blood on his hand as hitler does. I wish people would stop making a saint out of churchill. Fuck churchill!
Let's not cherry pick our way through; instead, let's be honest and admit that evil comes in all flavors--not merely the communist type.
A young white man and two young white women walked towards us. It was clear that they were not accidentally walking in our direction. There was a purpose to their motion.
What did they want?
After we exchanged "how are you?" in various forms, they got down to business.
"We are here to encourage you."
I am not kidding. You can check with the friend. That was their intention. To encourage us.
They were students at Redding, they said. At the Bethel ministry. One of them was from Washington state--from Tacoma.
We started gathering our stuff. As they sensed that we were leaving, the young man asked, "do you have problems? Like with your back?"
"Nope. We are good. We are yoga people," I said as we walked away.
The basic theological premise of the School of Supernatural Ministry
is this: that the miracles of biblical times — the parted seas and
burning bushes and water into wine — did not end in biblical times, and
the miracle workers did not die out with Jesus’s earliest disciples. In
the modern day, prophets and healers don’t just walk among us, they are us.
Aha, this is why the young man asked us about back pain. He believes that he can heal!
The Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry is at the forefront of a
burgeoning — and decidedly youthful — evangelical Christian revival.
Some have called its movement the fastest-growing religious group in
America — a loose network of churches, led by so-called apostles, who
see supernatural gifts like prophecy and faith healing as the key to
global conversion. While other religious movements struggle to retain
members and draw in young people, Bethel attracts millennials in droves.
America has all kinds of cults that make me wonder why this country is called an "advanced" country! These nutcases in Redding are not the first nor will be the last.
For school assignments, students hang out in parking lots and grocery
store aisles, asking strangers who use wheelchairs or crutches if they
can pray for them to heal.
Surely that story is going to unfold well, right?
There is almost always a correlation between such religious nutcases and the local economic geography, right?
[Redding] has a high unemployment rate and a crime rate that’s almost twice the
rest of California’s. Homelessness keeps climbing. So does drug use:
marijuana, grown in the idyllic countryside surrounding the city, but
meth too, and increasingly devastatingly, heroin, which is “exploding”
across the county. Shasta County hospitals see three times the number of
overdoses than the rest of the state averages.
Now residents swap
stories of people found shooting up in the streets, cars broken into
with cinderblocks in fits of desperation, and stores robbed, repeatedly,
in broad daylight. In a Facebook group called “Redding Crime 2.0,”
more than 27,000 members track down one another’s stolen cars, complain
about homeless encampments, and post photos of shady characters caught
dealing drugs in parking lots.
The only, ahem, bright spot here is this Bethel ponzi!
Bethel has devoted itself to fixing the struggling city of Redding, which is one of California’s poorest. It donates money to the police department. It buys out public buildings. It nurtures local businesses. It sends armies of students to clean the city’s trash- and syringe-strewn riverbanks. To the church’s leaders, Redding and Bethel are inextricable, and the city’s rebirth is one of the church’s most urgent missions.
Surely this story is going to unfold well, right? Maybe this is the beginning of yet another Waco. Or Rajneeshpuram. Or Jonestown. ...
I grew up in a cultural context where it was believed that if one chanted mantras, well, good things will happen. For quite a few years, I believed in that approach--after all, I was only a kid, who was being brainwashed into a certain way of thinking.
And then one day, the question arose within: If the mantras have that effect, then we should be able to bring about peace and prosperity in no time at all. Of course, there are mantras for peace and prosperity. There are mantras that when chanted rain should pour. When the intended effects did not happen, the answer was always ready and waiting--the chanter was not qualified enough.
In the modern, secular, world, people chant mantras of different sorts believing that those will deliver happiness. Epic failures. But, such practices continue on.
The app I eventually chose messaged me every hour or so with a positive
affirmation that I was supposed to repeat to myself over and over. “I am
beautiful,” or “I am enough.”
Mantras! Instead of some "holy" man teaching one the mantra, now an app coded by some stranger teaches one to recite the mantra.
I wish people would be confident like me, and go around proudly proclaiming that I am ugly. I am bald. I am an idiot. I tell ya, these are immensely confidence-boosting because they are honest to the core!
Ok, sarcasm aside, people have always struggled to be at peace and be happy. Some might want to explain this as the inevitable result of the original sin. Others might preach for a path towards nirvana that will deliver us from these existential struggles. I wish people would understand that what we are going through is not all that different from what our ancestors went through. Once we recognize it, well, only after that can we begin to understand that chanting mantras won't help.
But while placing more and more emphasis on seeking happiness within,
Americans in general are spending less and less time actually connecting
with other people.
Increasingly around the world too.
There is a difference between happiness that is within, versus a belief that happiness comes from within. Happiness that is within refers to the intangibles that make us truly happy, as opposed to the tangible stuff that we accumulate. The intangibles, it turns out, are dependent on people.
if
there is one point on which virtually every piece of research into the
nature and causes of human happiness agrees, it is this: our happiness depends on other people.Study
after study shows that good social relationships are the strongest,
most consistent predictor there is of a happy life, even going so far as
to call them a “necessary condition for happiness,” meaning that humans
can’t actually be happy without them. This is a finding that cuts
across race, age, gender, income and social class so overwhelmingly that
it dwarfs any other factor.
To recap, this is what most people seem to be doing: Buy a whole bunch of stuff, travel as tourists without gaining any understanding, and waste a whole lot of time by themselves either watching TV or on social media. To make things worse, they hang out with the wrong kind of people. And then they wonder what they can do make themselves happy!
So, what can one do? First, stop chanting any mantra--religious or secular. Then,
The most significant thing we can do for our well-being is not to “find
ourselves” or “go within.” It’s to invest as much time and effort as we
can into nurturing the relationships we have with the people in our
lives.
As simple as that. All you need is a few good people around you to be happy. Just a few. And then happiness gushes from within.
Fats Domino, the New Orleans rhythm-and-blues singer whose two-fisted
boogie-woogie piano and nonchalant vocals, heard on dozens of hits, made
him one of the biggest stars of the early rock ’n’ roll era, has died
in Louisiana. He was 89.
In his memory, maybe later today I will play the CD that I have, which has a couple of his songs, and thank him for how much he helped me find my thrill.
While this news is not the cause, a note to the hundreds who silently visit this blog, and especially to this guy, that I shall return after a break.
In high school, the language classes and discussions with friends on all things that really mattered helped me situate the math and physics that I loved in an appropriate context--humanity. Had I known back then what I now know, and had I lived in the US, I would have pursued liberal education in my undergraduate studies. But, all those ifs there are just that--ifs. It is like saying that if my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle!
The disconnect between engineering and the real world all around me was deeply troubling. It was flawed. It was messed up. It continues to be messed up; that is what I was reminded when I read this essay in The New Yorker. It is about automation, robots, and impact on jobs, with side notes on how they affected the elections that gave us the fascist.
Consider this excerpt about Stefanie Tellex, the roboticist at Brown University:
Tellex was admitted to M.I.T. and planned to pursue a liberal-arts
degree, but her mother told her that liberal-arts graduates didn’t make
any money. (“One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten.”) She
completed her computer-science Ph.D. there in 2010. ...
She told me that she had never thought about the political implications
of her field until the tense months leading up to the 2016 Presidential
election. Her parents were Trump voters, and she found herself
disagreeing with them about what the causes of society’s ills were, and
what the best solutions might be. She was alarmed by the anti-immigrant
sentiment emanating from Trump’s rallies, especially having spent her
adult life surrounded by researchers from all over the world. Economic
inequality was a driving theme of the election, and Tellex began to see
that automation was a contributing factor.
Until about a year ago, the roboticist had not thought about the political implications of her field--robots/automation! And, she is one of the better ones, given that she started with a real interest in the liberal arts. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists and programmers who even now do not see how their field has such startling political implications. How can one bring these to their attention?
I do not, cannot, understand how any professional can go about doing whatever it is that they do without systematically thinking about the larger societal implications. Heck, there are hundreds of thousands who work in the cigarette industry, even after decades of our understanding about how tobacco kills. I have no idea how all these professionals, with or without Ivy League credentials, make their peace.
I made mine years ago by quitting that career path, and doing what I now do. I try my best to convey to students, readers, anybody who wants to listen to me, about the importance of thinking about what it means to be human and to feel that we are contributing towards securing a better future for the people of tomorrow.
With regularity, I seem to blog about sleep. Yes, sleep! (Try this, or this, or this)
I find the topic of sleep to be fascinating for two important reasons: First, many--the young and the old alike--seem to have sleep issues these days.
I am interested in this topic for another reason too-- it is impressive that scientists have figured so many things out, but don't know squat about sleep, which babies do really well. In fact, we are often envious, it seems, so much so that if we had an awesome sleep, we even say, "I slept like a baby."
I clearly remember one incident from years ago, well, decades ago, during the wedding of a cousin (who tragically died young.) There was the usual loud thavil and naadhasvaram in the crowded setting. A much younger cousin, who was perhaps five or six years old, fell asleep while seated right next to the thundering thavil. An older uncle of mine commented jealously about the kid sleeping in that noisy setting. Slept like a baby, indeed!
I have a solution for all those who have trouble falling asleep: Listen to the recordings of my lectures in the classes. In no time at all, you too--like many students--will promptly and easily settle into a deep sleep! ;)
Every time I read yet another essay on sleep, I am impressed with the trivial and the profound alike. Like this one:
All humans dream, usually three to five times a night. And every time a
man dreams he has an erection; every time a woman dreams, the blood
vessels of her vagina become engorged. These changes in our genitalia
are apparently unrelated to sexual thoughts before sleep or to sexual
content in the dreams themselves. Rather, erections and vaginal
engorgement seem to be the result of the state of dreaming itself.
That is the trivial one, of course! ;)
But, seriously, what the heck, right?
Over the years, I have also become convinced that no amount of comfy mattresses and gadgets can really deliver that awesome sleep. Wasn't there an old Tamil movie song where that emperor of poetry, Kannadasan, wrote about this?
So, if science does not know any damn thing about sleep, and it is not all the fault of technology, then is there anything else we can think about as a way to good sleep?
A recent study
now raises the possibility that sleep could be affected by the degree
to which someone feels like their life is purposeful or meaningful.
A meaningful life.
Perhaps developing a sense of purpose in life could be as effective at
improving sleep as following healthy habits, such as limiting coffee. In
addition to promoting good sleep hygiene, doctors may end up
recommending mindfulness practices or exploring one’s values as ways of
helping older adults sleep better.
All I can say is that I am not surprised at such possible relationships in our behaviors. It is the total package. The more all our daily practices are aligned, the better off we will be. Of course, the downside is that others then refer to us as being regimented and boring. I will gladly take "boring" because I don't ever want to have sleep issues, as I prepare myself for that final sleep ;)
A year ago, I wrote about the controversies in higher education about names of buildings. I used the context of the discussions on two buildings at the local university in order to address a much larger issue:
History cannot be undone, of course. We can constructively move forward by learning from history, and by establishing procedures whereby philanthropy will be appropriately vetted for the money’s olfactory backstories.
An easy solution exists: Do not name buildings after living people. And wait for a while for history to vet the dead people.
But, that is all in an ideal setting.
In the real world, universities sell the naming rights, for all purposes, and then shit happens.
For instance, remember bill cosby? After his shit hit all over the place, universities hurriedly rescinded the honorary doctorates they gave him, and renamed the buildings that had his name.
Even my own small-time university engages in these naming rituals in order to gain access to money and power. Awful.
Sensing political advantages in having influential lawmakers on its side, my university named two buildings after two people (like this one.) And then two other buildings have been named after patrons who made significant donations (like this one.)
I am old-school when it comes to all these. I don't want to sell the naming rights. And, I want buildings to have names that mean something to the community. Especially in public buildings.
And, yes, even my university has one such awesome example. The residential dining hall carries the name Valsetz.
Why Valsetz, you ask?
No, it was not some old-time timber baron who donate a chunk of change.
Valsetz is a made up name for a community that does not even exist anymore. Exactly as Wikipedia notes:
William W. Mitchell Company started the town in 1919 and named it as a portmanteau of Valley and Siletz Railroad, whose terminus was at that location. ... Valsetz post office was established in 1920.
In the US, if there is a post office, well, that makes it a real town, however small that is.
Railroad and timber. Those were the old days. And those days are long gone. Timber became less important to the economy. The town was closed down.
In 1984, the town and most of its structures were removed, as everything
in the community, property and streets included, was owned by the
corporation. The post office closed the same year.
So, what is the connection with my university? The residential dining hall is named in honor of that community:
Between 1926 and 1931, WOU, then known as the Oregon Normal School, sent
16 to 20 student teachers for six-week sessions in the Valsetz
elementary school.
A kind of a history that we can, and will, always be proud about, right?
Way back in the old country, when the government launched family planning in a big way, "Nirodh" condoms were advertised in magazines, on the radio, and even in movie halls. Those were giggle times for us young fellas.
We tend to minimize the role of advertising in these important social causes. There are wonderfully constructive social projects in which advertising has played phenomenal roles. The use of condoms in India is one of those instances where without the creative advertisements--social marketing--India's family planning program would have stagnated and fertility rates would have stayed high for a long time. The government subsidies that went towards Nirodh, and go towards such programs even now, are worth every damn bit!
Manufacturing condoms that would appeal to users ain't no easy task. Through the years, a new breakthrough: We are talking about custom-fit condoms: "60 sizes, in combinations of 10 lengths and nine circumferences."
What's the urgency about this?
As
the custom-fit condom company, Global Protection Corp., pressed the
F.D.A. and industry standards associations for changes, a key priority
was smaller sizes, said the company’s president, Davin Wedel. Until
recently, standard condoms had to be at least 6.69 inches long, but
studies find the average erect penis is roughly an inch shorter.
If it ain't the right fit, then we have a great deal of public health complications. Men, and women too, might not want to use condoms. Keep in mind that condoms not only serve in birth control, but also in preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
Now, Americans can have custom-fit protectors.
The
custom condoms, marketed under the brand name myONE Perfect Fit, come
in lengths of 4.9 to 9.4 inches and circumferences of 3.5 to 5 inches.
(Standard condoms are typically 6.7 to 8.3 inches long and 3.9 to 4.5
inches in circumference.) The template that men are given to measure
themselves does not include inches or centimeters, instead using
randomly ordered letters and numbers. One man might be E99, another Z22.
Guess what? Within hours of launch, "customers had ordered condoms in all 60 sizes."
What is bizarre is this:
Although custom condoms became available in Europe in 2011, sold by
TheyFit, which Global Protection purchased, it took years of pressing
the F.D.A. and two standards organizations, ASTM International and ISO,
for the devices to reach the United States,
In 2011? All because of the FDA's regulatory process?
I wonder what some of the latest Nirodh ads in India look like.
Here's a beauty from another country that I blogged about a while ago:
"How come Deepavali is so early this year?" I asked my father.
Mid-October?
In my memories, Deepavali came about the time that the northeast monsoon also arrived, or at least threatened. There were quite a few Deepavalis that were dampened by the rains. Maybe my memories are messed up, eh!
I can't even recall the last time I celebrated this Hindu festival, or any festival for that matter. For this atheist, every single day that I am alive is enough cause for celebration. Yet, similar to how I keep track of football and baseball scores even though I don't really follow any team or sport, I keep track of the major Hindu festival dates too. Sports are conversational materials--especially with students-- and festivals are big deals for parents.
I use the word Deepavali because that is what we said during my years back in the old country. Every once in a while, I use that other--perhaps more common--usage of Diwali.
"Diwali" annoys my sensibilities for one highly frustrating reason--there is no "w" sound in the Indian languages and, hence, should be spelled with a "v" and pronounced with that "v" sound. "தீபாவளி" in Tamil has the letter for "v"--there is no "w" in Tamil! No wonder that many of us from that part of the world end up pronouncing, for instance, wax as vax or van as wan. I wonder why the old country's grammarians were so lax with introducing "w" where it does not belong!
Why overthink all these, you might ask. Why not shrug the shoulders, and simply get to eating sweets even if not celebrating the day for religious reasons, right? But, hey, thinking and overthinking is all that I can do. There are moments, though, when I have wished for that thinking to be turned off ;)
Anyway, back to that original question of why Deepavali is so early this year.
It is all because of the lunar calendar that is used in the traditions. When Deepavali is celebrated depends on when the new moon occurs in a certain month of that calendar.
I suppose it doesn't matter if it is Deepavali or Diwali. Nor does it matter if you are a Hindu, or a Scientologist or even an atheist. It is merely yet another reason to enjoy eating sweets. Have an awesomely sweet day.
Happy Deepavali!
ps: I don't want to make this political .. but, the way in which the Obamas so easily, elegantly, and charmingly engaged with such diverse socio-cultural moments, and to then have the current president and his wife ... what a shame!
With the background of the pussygrabber and now the weinstein scandals, one would think that journalists will be careful in their choice of words.
But then I am naive to have such expectations!
Monday morning, I picked up the newspaper that was waiting for me on the front porch, and the front page headlines was, well: pathetic, shocking, disgusting. Check it out:
Seriously, "a study in size" is how the editors decided to refer to a news story about a small college in town? Size? WTF!
There is a good chance that most of us do not even notice these anymore, because we are so much used to such language. Locker-room talk has been mainstreamed.
The report was not really a "study" in size either. It was not as if there was any analysis of educational outcomes across colleges and universities that are small and big.
In order to provide a link to the story, I searched the newspaper's website. Guess what? The headline there is different:
Why didn't they run that in the original, right? "Small is beautiful" is not only a phrase that many of us are familiar with, especially thanks to Schumacher, but guess what?
One of the taglines on Gutenberg’s website? “Small is beautiful.”
Yet, the newspaper's editors originally captioned the story as about "size." Idiots who continue to peddle that old and awful idea that sex sells!
First, there was Forrest Gump with his seemingly profound observations like "life's like a box of chocolates." Which perhaps drove you crazy enough, when you also (mis)heard him say "shit happens."
Now, we have another one:
life is like a shirt with buttons where you have to get the first few right or all the rest will be wrong
Who knew, eh!
If I had said that about life being like a shirt, you would have laughed at me, and decided that I have finally snapped after the months and months of yelling at the fascist.
Keep in mind that despite all the sucking up that Mark Zuckerberg has done, Facebook has no presence in China. The great security firewall prevents Facebook from tapping into the 1.4 billion, whom Zuckerberg wants to desperately sell Russian fake news! You don't mess around with Xi.
Where was I? Oh yea, with China's politburo meeting coming up, finally even the American press is waking up to what this guy already has written up.
This piece in the NY Times caught my attention. And then I looked at the byline: Reuters. The NY Times does not have its own people to cover the big political event?
The Economistreviews Xi's domestic and international presence. And then concludes:
Mr Xi may think that concentrating more or less unchecked power over
1.4bn Chinese in the hands of one man is, to borrow one of his favourite
terms, the “new normal” of Chinese politics. But it is not normal; it
is dangerous. No one should have that much power. One-man rule is
ultimately a recipe for instability in China, as it has been in the
past—think of Mao and his Cultural Revolution. It is also a recipe for
arbitrary behaviour abroad, which is especially worrying at a time when
Mr Trump’s America is pulling back and creating a power vacuum. The
world does not want an isolationist United States or a dictatorship in
China. Alas, it may get both.
All the power with Xi.
Here, the madman has the nuclear codes.
The warhead in North Korea is ready to go ballistic.
Vlad the impaler quietly goes around killing people.
Can somebody make the world great again, please?
In my early years of graduate school, I came to read about--and watch on television as well--the free speech movement at Berkeley, and how Reagan, who was the governor of California then, could not stand those student protests. Reagan perhaps even owed his political successes to the radical movements, which he attacked and capitalized on in his culture war against freedom in many ways and for many people.
Fifty years later, we continue to fight those same culture wars of free speech. But, oddly enough, young people these days prefer restrictions on free speech, and seem to be even losing faith in freedom!
protecting children from needless harm became conflated with shielding
them from stressors and uncertainties (such as having to solve everyday
problems, like getting lost, on one’s own) that are critical for
developing personal independence.
Those raised on free speech movements turned around to protect and shelter their precious kids so much that now these young adults are scaredy cats who don't want to be free! On college campuses, it has taken on crazy forms:
Colleges and universities have exacerbated the problem of dependence by
promoting what is sometimes called a culture of victimhood. American
college students (who are some of the safest and most privileged people
on the planet) are to be protected from, and encouraged to be
ever-vigilant about and even report, any behavior that could cause
emotional distress. Feelings and experiences that were once considered
part of everyday life, such as being offended by someone’s political
views, are now more likely to be treated as detrimental to mental
health.
I get angry and depressed with trump's words, yes. But, that idiot saying whatever pleases him is the very mark of freedom that makes America different. How can college-age adults--the key word is "adults"--not understand freedom of expression?
Suniya Luthar, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University who
has studied distress and resilience in both well-off and disadvantaged
teenagers, has found that privileged youths are among the most
emotionally distressed young people in America. “These kids are
incredibly anxious and perfectionistic,” she says, but there’s “contempt
and scorn for the idea that kids who have it all might be hurting.”
What are the adults doing?
In a seemingly well-meaning effort to help kids avoid what makes them
anxious, administrators actually make anxiety worse. “Anxiety is all
about the avoidance of uncertainty and discomfort,” Lyons explained.
“When we play along, we don’t help kids learn to cope or problem-solve
in the face of unexpected events.”
And, given that you have been reading this blog for years, you know well there is one major factor behind an increased level of anxiety these days: Social media!
Anxious kids certainly existed before Instagram, but many of the parents
I spoke to worried that their kids’ digital habits — round-the-clock
responding to texts, posting to social media, obsessively following the
filtered exploits of peers — were partly to blame for their children’s
struggles. To my surprise, anxious teenagers tended to agree. At
Mountain Valley, I listened as a college student went on a philosophical
rant about his generation’s relationship to social media. “I don’t
think we realize how much it’s affecting our moods and personalities,”
he said. “Social media is a tool, but it’s become this thing that we
can’t live without but that’s making us crazy.”
When these kids grow up ...?
Lyons
sees a connection between how some schools deal with anxious students
and what she worries is a generation of young people increasingly
insistent on safe spaces — and who believe their feelings should be
protected at all costs. “Kids are being given some really dangerous
messages these days about the fact that they can’t handle being
triggered, that they shouldn’t have to bear witness to anything that
makes them uncomfortable and that their external environments should
bend to and accommodate their needs,” she told me.
You can now see why college students now actually favor restriction on expression.
A few years ago, there was a young woman ready to graduate from the Honors Program. She was heading to law school on the east coast after graduation. Her only sister was already in London working on her graduate degree. I asked her what her parents thought about their two daughters going so far away from home, from Oregon.
Her response was awesome. And says a lot about her parents. The parents apparently always told the two daughters that their task was to help the daughters grow their wings, after which they expected--and wanted--the daughters to fly on their own.
At graduation, I met her parents. I shared with them what their daughter had told me. They smiled. They were happy. No anxieties. No fear. No worries. But that was a decade ago, and apparently life has changed a lot since then--seemingly for the worse!
In high school biology, I came across Drosophila in the textbook. There was a dead fly between the pages ;)
No, seriously, it was in high school that I knew about how it was not the frog that we dissected but the Drosophila that was the favorite of the researchers. For a very important reason--drosophila have a life cycle of two weeks. A fortnight later, you have a new generation. A month later, it is the grand kids buzzing around!
Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young – all based in the US – were awarded the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine
for their work on the molecular mechanisms that control circadian
rhythms – in other words, the 24-hour body clock that controls lives
throughout the animal kingdom. Crucially, this work was done largely by
experimenting on fruit flies. Nor was this a first for drosophila research. At least five other
groups have received Nobels for their work using fruit flies to unpick
the secrets of human physiology and biology in general.
How fascinating, right? Every day it is such awesomeness.
Today, scientists believe that about 75% of known human disease genes
have a recognisable match in fruit flies. These include Down’s,
Alzheimer’s, autism, diabetes and cancers of all types. “It’s almost as
if they were designed to help scientists,” says geneticist Steve Jones.
Re-read that line: “It’s almost as if they were designed to help scientists.” More than anything else, you will need that at the end of this post, and to puke when you watch the embedded video of a know-it-all!
This year, President
Trump proposed budget cuts of 22 percent for the National Institutes of
Health and 11 percent for the National Science Foundation. These two
institutes fund most basic biological research in the United States.
Exactly.
The importance of government support for basic research goes well beyond understanding nature. Basic research
leads to advances that can transform industry and technology. In
biology, current revolutionary approaches to genome editing and cancer
immunotherapy owe their existence to basic research.
To paraphrase Monty Python, other than all that, what has science ever done anything for us, right?
There is the accident of birth, which determines a lot of the rest of our lives. And then add the layers of the choices that we make and the decisions that others make for us.
"Self-made" success is, therefore, one screwed up idea that we celebrate for no reason other than to fool ourselves.
Self-made failures? How about a homeless person? Their lives on the streets are "self-made"?
Shaver is from the Seattle area. He says he grew up in foster care, that he is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, that he was injured in Afghanistan about half a dozen years ago and that he has done stints in jail. In conversation, his thoughts frequently meander — and the details of his life are often described cagily and hazily, making many of them impossible to verify.
But a rap sheet that matches his name and his circumstances in Washington state shows a guilty plea for drug possession, among other things, and numerous appearances at a Veterans Treatment Court.
“Depression has always been a thing,” Shaver says over breakfast at a Denny’s across the street from Union Station.
“I like to get baked,” he adds. “I like to get high occasionally.” Though he says that in recent years he’s cut back on drinking, which has a tendency to bring out his aggression.
Which part of his backstory would you like to focus on?
Shaver was featured not merely because he is homeless. But, because:
Matthew Shaver casually emerges from the packs of speed-walking commuters scuttling across Union Station and quietly takes a seat at the public piano at the heart of one of Los Angeles’ busiest transportation hubs.
For 20 straight minutes — the maximum play time, according to the posted rules — Shaver takes over the keys, filling the atrium with buoyant improvisations of jazz, pop and blues.
His playing often attracts a small crowd. Tourists film him. Regulars drop spare change and bills. He’s such a fixture that if the security guards are otherwise occupied (or feeling generous), he might get to play longer than the time limit.
Yes, he is a piano-playing, drug-using, homeless veteran.
A few months ago, the friend and I attended an event at the local university. It was therapeutic in so many ways, after the fascist took over the White House and made it a "white" house. The event was a talk by violinist Vijay Gupta, who:
deeply believes in music as a form of social medicine. He also believes that each of us has an obligation to share whatever our personal gifts are for the betterment of our communities and the world.
Gupta talked about his initiative to go to the shelters for the homeless and play music for the homeless and with the homeless. He was not doing this as a social service. Not as a resume-booster. Not as a charity.
In 2011, Gupta co-founded and began serving as Artistic Director of Street Symphony, a non-profit organization dedicated to engaging distinguished musicians in performance and dialogue with marginalized communities experiencing homelessness and incarceration. A gifted spokesperson for the power of the arts to change lives, Gupta believes that musical engagement reconnects us to our shared humanity across vast divides, and ultimately impacts social justice.
The piano-playing homeless Matthew Shaver adds more evidence to Gupta's point about our shared humanity, and the obligation that each of us have to contribute to the betterment of our immediate communities and the world.
“The salary has been at the same level ... I
haven’t seen my pay go up in five years.”
One might immediately think that it was somebody in the US who said that, right? After all, here I am in the US where wage stagnation has been a puzzle to experts, leave alone the regular people.
But, that was from Norway. From a 49-year old man in Oslo.
His
lament resonates far beyond Nordic shores. In many major countries,
including the United States, Britain and Japan, labor markets are
exceedingly tight, with jobless rates a fraction of what they were
during the crisis of recent years. Yet workers are still waiting for a
benefit that traditionally accompanies lower unemployment: fatter
paychecks. Why wages are not rising faster amounts to a central economic puzzle.
What is going on, right?
The reasons for the stagnation gripping wages vary from country to country, but the trend is broad.
On the other hand, unlike the working stiff who have not seen a wage increase in years, there are quite a few who profit phenomenally from the same system. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it,:"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." How different is their life? Here's one example: If you have enough money, you can buy yourself a citizenship in quite a few countries!
Between 30 and 40 countries have active economic-citizenship or
residence programmes, says Kälin, and another 60 have provisions for one
in law. Some demand a straight cash donation, others investment in
government bonds or the purchase of property. Some take a longer-term
view of the potential economic benefits, offering passports to
entrepreneurs who will set up a local company and create a minimum
number of jobs. The required investment ranges from upwards of $10,000
(Thai residence, for instance) to more than $10m (fast-track residence
in Britain). In some countries the original investment can be withdrawn
after several years.
Do not forget that the fascist campaigned about the welfare of the middle class for whom his heart supposedly bleeds, but has a son-in-law who peddles this passport for sale:
The use of EB-5 by Jared Kushner, President Donald
Trump’s son-in-law, to lure Chinese investors into his family’s
development projects has also tainted the programme. Some senators want
it scrapped. Congress is due to decide soon whether to extend it.
Ahem, if you believe that Congress will scrap this passport-for-sale program, then I have a bridge to sell you for a million dollars!
The typical passport buyer is unlikely to settle, will care little about
her new country’s politics and will have no interest in defending its
values. Unless her new citizenship is American – the United States is
particularly hot on extracting taxes from all its citizens – she may
well pay her new nation no taxes. The normal means of acquiring
citizenship acknowledges that there is a cultural component:
naturalisation typically takes years and requires an applicant to
establish a real connection to their new country. An industry whose main
purpose is to allow people to skip those queues does not.
I went to graduate school because I thought that I would find answers to the pressing questions of development. Within a couple of years, I realized that plenty of highly capable thinkers had already thought up everything that I was worried about. If everything had already been discussed, then what the hell?
I started understanding that addressing the human condition was not really about finding technical solutions. Instead, it came down to the power of persuasion and, ultimately, politics. I would no longer be fooled by fancy-shmancy data-driven models.
Which is also when I seriously started thinking about persuading others through easy to understand approaches. One of the big topics then was free trade, and NAFTA in this part of the world. I did not oppose free trade, especially after my experiences in the socialist India. But, my logic told me that freely moving goods and capital alone merely provides advantages to those who are better-off. I wanted free movement of people also.
I went to talk about this with one of the professors. He disagreed with me. He gave me the same old textbook argument of how the movement of capital will counter and complement the controls on movement of labor. I was not convinced. I wrote an essay and sent that to Economic and Political Weekly. Of course it was not published--I bet that it was one horribly written essay, stylistically and content-wise.
Over the years, I have been more convinced than ever that globalization ought to include freer, if not completely free, movement of labor. Yes, I know that this exactly what the fascist thug campaigned against and for which he was rewarded with 63 million votes. But, hey, the fascist can and will bullshit and lie. But, the truth cannot be simply tweeted away.
One of the best contemporary thinkers on the distributional aspects of globalization, Branko Milanovic, whom I have quoted before, writes this:
income gaps are unlikely to be eliminated. Which, in turn, shows the importance of migration. If a borderless cosmopolitan world is to be achieved (an objective with which I agree but see enormous political difficulties in reaching it), migration is absolutely essential. But as economic migration faces increasing obstacles in rich countries (and, it has to be added, not solely because of xenophobia but for economic reasons as well), the ideal of a world “without injustice of birth” recedes.
Yes, the injustice of birth. Click here if you need a refresher on that.
Milanovic concludes:
I am very sympathetic to the borderless world but to believe that it can be achieved through trade alone, and without significant migration, is unrealistic. And once we say “migration”, we immediately open the Pandora’s box that the most recent elections in Europe and the United States have shown is a reality, not an imagination. Thus, our new “intellectual revolution” should be rather to address the issue of migration and citizenship than free trade. Free trade alone cannot solve world’s problems.
We need to think about migration and citizenship in new ways. And we need to be able to think about that while dealing with the fascist thug's tweets and rants channeling his narrow and nativist takes on migration and citizenship. Eventually, in the long run, truth will prevail. But then, we need to also keep in mind that wonderful line: In the long run we are all dead.
A few days ago, I was taking a quick walk on campus, after my lunch and prior to my class. I heard a student yell out my name from the car that was passing by. I looked at the car. The driver stopped the vehicle and rolled down the window.
"I didn't expect to see you here, Jessica,"
We talked for a few minutes. She was one of the more self-motivated and smart students I have met in this university. It has been six years since she graduated. I inquired about her sister and her nephew and her husband. "You have a steel-trap mind," she said.
Fortunately, yes. I pay attention to important things in life, and they register in my memory. (I know I am setting myself up for the flip side of this: I am bound to insult somebody when I do not remember the details that are important to them, right?)
Now that our phones have made it so easy to gather information online,
our brains are likely offloading even more of the work of remembering to
technology. If the only thing at stake were memories of trivial facts,
that might not matter. But, as the pioneering psychologist and
philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, "the art of
remembering is the art of thinking." Only by encoding information in our
biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that
form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and
conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us,
the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.
But, of course. Duh! This is exactly what I have been telling students (and anybody who asks me about this) for a few years now. In my intuitive understanding, we need to keep working the brain and its memory functions. However, this is not about memorizing per se. Just as fluency with the English language is not about memorizing words in the dictionary. All these help us think, and think clearly.
It gets even worse:
It turns out that we aren't very good at distinguishing the knowledge we
keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones or
computers. As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific
American article, when people call up information through their devices,
they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel
as though "their own mental capacities" had generated the information,
not their devices. "The advent of the 'information age' seems to have
created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever
before," the scholars concluded, even though "they may know ever less
about the world around them."
You can see how we were ripe for the Russian fake news campaign that gave us the fascist, who turns around and calls all the real news as "fake news."
So, what can you do? You can read that entire WSJ essay by Nicholas Carr, whom I have cited many times before. Or, you can do what I have been suggesting for years: Keep that smartphone away from you as much as you can.
When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer
those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information
into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our
gadgets won't solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to
think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our
phones.
Not only will that help you think clearly, it will also reduce quite a bit of angst that the smartphones give the users. Because, our brains are wired to be hijacked, and it is our responsibility to protect our brains that can then serve us well:
Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as
well as a thinking system. ...
But even in the history of
captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet
unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone
is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and
entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a "supernormal
stimulus," one that can "hijack" attention whenever it is part of our
surroundings -- which it always is. Imagine combining a mailbox, a
newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a
boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing
them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone
represents to us. No wonder we can't take our minds off it.
Seriously, have I not been saying and writing these through all these years that you have been listening to me and reading my blog? You don't remember? ;)
While watching yet another segment of yet another late night comedian severely critiquing the fascist and his allies, I told the friend that I was getting more and more agitated. Politics, which was to me the theatre of the absurd that entertained me more than troubled me, has now become a stress agent in my life.
Many of us knew well that this was bound to happen with this thug who was elected by 63 million. But, I was confident that I would ride it out. Wrong I am.
Soon after the election, this NY Times piece said it best:
[trump] is, in a strange, meta way, a spectator of his own performance. For the
next four years at least, we are living in a TV show that Mr. Trump is
simultaneously starring in, consuming and live-tweeting.
A few months ago, this essay in Foreign Policy noted about "the impact of the shift to All Trump, All the Time News" that "is making it hard to focus on much of what might otherwise be worthy of our attention."
we need to tear our eyes away from the spectacle of this clusterfuck of a
presidency and its daily dramas and periodically look up and out to our
horizons, recognizing that the narcissism aside, there remains real
greatness in America that needs tending, planning, and nurturing in the
context of the real world — even if, at the moment, there is very little
evidence of that greatness at the center of our government.
That was back in March, which seems like eons ago in trump time! Like billions of people all around the world, I too have been unable to shift my eyes away from the "clusterfuck of a presidency and its daily dramas." The result: I feel like I cannot take this anymore, even as I know well that it has not even been one year into his four-year term!
At least television shows have commercial breaks when we can rest a while. No breaks whatsoever with this "All Trump, All the Time."
Late night shows that used to do silly comedy routines now have no time for silliness. It is "All Trump, All the Time." Initially, the laughing was therapeutic. But, increasingly, it is obvious that even the show hosts are plainly angry. They are even weepy.
Dinner conversations quickly turn to talking about the fascist thug and his people. In the classroom, students seem to be referring to him without naming him. It is no longer about I'm mad as hell and am not taking it anymore, but I am exhausted as hell and can't take it anymore!
Yet, I fully understand that I don't have a choice either. I cannot afford to not fight back and resist. I wonder how Gandhi and his people kept it up day after day. Or how MLK and the millions kept at it day after day.
Maybe this stress and exhaustion will be the route to nothing beyond 75!
As recently as 2007, 48% of Republicans and GOP leaners said it was
more important to control gun ownership, while 47% said it was more
important to protect gun rights.
That's a good chunk of the GOP, along with an overwhelming majority of the rest, in favor of controlling gun ownership. Until 2007.
So, was there anything in particular that happened in 2008 for the GOP folks to become nutcase defenders of gun rights? Think about 2008. Something dramatic happened in the country, remember?
In 2008, it seemed clear that the country would vote in a Democrat to the White House, after eight long Bush years of wars and crises that were ending with the global recession. The two leading Democratic candidates belonged to demographic categories that the GOP typically does not favor: A woman and a black man.
Nearly two-thirds of Democrats (64%) say there would be fewer mass
shootings in the U.S. if it were harder for people to legally obtain
guns; only about a quarter of Republicans (27%) say the same. And
Republicans are skeptical that making it harder to legally obtain guns
would have an effect on mass shootings: 54% say it would not make a
difference, while 18% think restricting access to guns would lead to
more mass shootings.
When talking with my mother, with my usual sense of awful humor, I asked her if she made sweets to celebrate Gandhi's birthday. And then on a serious note, I told her that Einstein said after Gandhi's passing that future generations might not even believe that there really was a man called Gandhi who did all those awesome things.
I was later reminded that a year ago, the local newspaper published my column that I had timed with Gandhi's birthday, in which I talked about the awful trump and his demagoguery without naming him.
All my worries--way more than this--have come true with the election of the fascist thug, thanks to the 63 million, including a couple of past commentators here. Violence. Every day, the fascist attacks somebody or the other, and his minions rejoice. He even openly threatens nuclear war with North Korea! And then the events like the one at Charlottesville. The fascist and his followers are clear evidence that neither Gandhi nor Jesus matter to the maniacs.
The United Nations marks Oct. 2 as the
“International Day of Nonviolence” for a very good reason — it is the
birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, popularly known as Mahatma
Gandhi.
Gandhi, who was born in 1869, led the
independence movement that, in 1947, resulted in the creation of two new
countries of India and Pakistan and, with that, the end of the British
Raj. The struggle for freedom, in which Gandhi passionately urged his
followers to observe non-violence even against the colonizer’s brutal
force, inspired many others, including Martin Luther King Jr.
Life is full of tragic ironies — Gandhi and
King, the champions of peace and nonviolence, fell to bullets aimed at
them. Unlike Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, King had not lived
long enough to live in the promised land of freedom.
Albert Einstein summed it up best for all
of us when he wrote about Gandhi that “generations to come, it may well
be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and
blood walked upon this Earth.” On Gandhi’s birthday, it certainly will
help us all to be reminded, as the U.N. puts it, of the human desire for
“a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence.”
In the contemporary United States, any talk
in the public space about peace and nonviolence is rare. Politicians of
all stripes want to prove how much tougher they are than the other, out
of a fear of being labeled a wimp. This has been especially the case
since the fateful events on Sept. 11, 2001. At the national level, the
“tough” ones smell blood when an opponent does not talk of war. At this
rate, even those running for the office of dogcatcher will have to prove
their toughness.
Of course, violence is more than merely
engaging in war. The political rhetoric during the past year seems to
have been anything but peaceful and nonviolent. A new day begins with
attacks on yet another person or group of people, based on whatever
cultural trait is deemed to be the “wrong” one for the moment. Even I,
as insignificant as one can be in the political landscape, have been a
target for those who are seemingly at ease with offensive words and
rhetoric.
While words, unlike sticks and stones, do
not break bones, the violence conveyed through words causes plenty of
harm. In the noise and confusion of the violent rhetoric that surrounds
us in the real and cyber worlds, we seem to have lost a fundamental
understanding of what it means to be human.
One of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it
all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who
are in misery.” Unfortunately, the rhetoric and practice these days is
far from that interpretation of humanity.
When it comes to the terrible humanitarian
crises, like the situation in Aleppo, Syria, it is depressing and
shocking to see how quickly we closed ourselves off from the “pain of
others” and how easily we refuse to “help those who are in misery.” We
have refused to budge even when the screens all around us flashed the
images of Aylan Kurdi — the toddler who was found dead, face down, on a
beach — or the five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, whose dust- and
blood-covered face looked dazed and confused.
Meanwhile, all around the world, the number
of people displaced from their homes continues to increase. The United
Nations estimates that by the end of 2015, the number of people who have
been forcibly displaced from their homes reached 65.3 million. The U.N.
High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, noted that “at sea, a
frightening number of refugees and migrants are dying each year; on
land, people fleeing war are finding their way blocked by closed
borders. Closing borders does not solve the problem.”
As I write, peace and nonviolence seem to
be evaporating even in Gandhi’s old lands of India and Pakistan. Tension
between the two countries is at such high levels that commentators
wonder, and worry, whether the neighbors are getting ready for yet
another war. As often is the case with these sibling countries, this
time, too, the fight is over Kashmir, but with plenty of nuclear bombs
on both sides of the border.
We shall certainly overcome, in the long
run. In the meanwhile, on the International Day of Nonviolence, like the
stereotypical beauty pageant contestant, I, too, wish for world peace.
Some of us knew that it was only a matter of time. It finally happened.
We have to deal with our own crap--it is no longer somebody else's problem!
"We" as in even right here in Eugene: "On Thursday, the reverberations of China’s tough stance reached Sam Miller, owner of Lane Apex."
What does Lane Apex do? "picks up curbside commingled recyclables such as plastics, unsorted paper, cardboard and metal cans from homes in Eugene."
What has this got to do with China?
China, by far the world’s biggest importer and reprocessor of
recyclables, has put the United States on notice that this fall and
early next year, it will begin turning away all but the most pristine
used plastics and unsorted waste paper.
Of course, it is not merely Eugene:
With China’s looming ban, the entire West Coast system for sorting and
shipping off recyclables is beginning to slow down, as the industry
realizes it may not be able to get rid of the stuff
Back in 1987, when I was new to this country, one of the interesting stories for me was about the barge from New York that was on the sea and for thousands of miles--the gar-barge. The awesomely rich geographic areas have always used poorer ones as their dumping grounds. China used to be one of those poorer areas. Not anymore. It is now an economic and political power in the world. And it is no longer interested in other people's garbage.
“It could have a negative impact on recycling in general, as the system
has relied
on China for so long now,” said Brent Bell, vice president of
recycling for Waste
Management, the largest waste-service provider in the U.S. If the
Chinese market is no-longer available, some experts question whether
U.S. municipal
recycling programs can remain viable, or if many of the products now
considered “recyclable”
will be reclassified as garbage bound for landfills.
How did this export of garbage to China come about?
For decades, the market for recycling exports has benefited thanks to the massive
U.S.-China trade deficit. With more container ships arriving on U.S. shores then heading
the other way, shippers were desperate for anything they could find for the return
trip.
“And the thing they chose was scrap materials,” Moore told Bloomberg BNA. “Because
of discounts the shipping companies offered, it ended up being cheaper to send that
stuff to China than to process it here.”
Let's see. China makes a whole bunch of stuff, while polluting its air, water, and land, and while treating its people like shit. We buy the stuff that we really do not need, and generate a whole lot of recyclable trash. But, we don't want to pay for the processing of the recyclables. We put them in the empty containers and sent them to China. Now, it is time to pay the piper!
Meanwhile, we have shifted to online shopping because, well, we don't have enough time to spend on Facbook and Instagram and whatever else and, therefore, we can't be bothered to go to the store round the corner to get a roll of toilet paper. We place orders online, and they are delivered with a whole lot of packing materials.
“Online retailers like Amazon still need cardboard
boxes and most comes from China,” said Jakob Rindegren, the recycling
policy adviser of the U.K. association.
One
corrugated box retailer on the online shopping site Taobao reached by
Reuters, said the price of cardboard boxes had nearly doubled since the
end of August to 8.8 yuan ($1.33) each.
I am especially drawn to issues like this because we are forced to think through the complications and question our own preferred ideas on how to make this world a better place for tomorrow. A constant examination, a Socratic questioning, in which there is no sacred cow, so to speak.
The solution to all these is simple, right? Consume less, and take care of your own shit!
