Awesome April Fool prank by the White House!

Except, it was not meant as a joke.  They are serious about it.

What are they serious about?

Sexual harassment.

Given the current occupant of the Oval Office, I should clarify that it is not pro-harassment!

The President proclaims April 2018 as "National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month."

Perhaps you are thinking that The Onion came up with this headline, with all the recent news reports of this President's affairs with a porn actress and a Playboy model.  And then the long list of women who have accused him of harassment.

But, seriously, was this scumbag's character ever saintly?

The guy was well known as a scumbag, of the lowliest kind too, and yet was elected to the White House by 63 million voters, including the Bible-thumping and Jesus-loving Evangelicals!

And, even the statement from the White House is an atrocious piece of writing, as if the madman himself wrote it up while walking around in his bathrobe!  Consider this:

Sexual assault crimes remain tragically common in our society, and offenders too often evade accountability. These heinous crimes are committed indiscriminately: in intimate relationships, in public spaces, and in the workplace.

So, if the problem is that these "heinous crimes are committed indiscriminately," does it mean that there is a more polite, legal way to commit those heinous crimes?  Is that how this scumbag committed his?

And then, well, first read the following:

We must not be afraid to talk about sexual assualt and sexual assult prevention with our loved ones ... our Nation will move closer to ending the grief, fear, and suffering caused by sexual assult.

If students submitted such writing, I would advise them to get help from tutors at the Writing Center.  Don't the staff at the White House run even a simple spell-check before they issue pubic, er, public statements?  "Assualt"?  "Assult"

The error that stumped me the most is this one:

We must encourage victims to report sexual assault and law enforcement to hold offenders accountable, and we must support victims and survivors unremmittingly.

What the hell do they mean by "we must support victims and survivors unremmittingly"?  Again, let me remind you that this is an official statement from the White House!

Of course, grammar issues are the least of the character flaws of the pussygrabber.  This scumbag issuing a proclamation on "Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention"?  Seriously?!!!

When science gets politicized ...

I hate the tobacco industry, which does all it can do to tempt people to consume a product that is a slow killer.  I simply cannot understand how people volunteer to go work there.  Mercenaries!

But, there are plenty who do all kinds of jobs--and defend their businesses--for money.  It is not the market--it is the people.  After all, it is we the people who make up the market.

So, yes, any do I will do what I can do, to rant against big tobacco. Against the military-industrial complex. Against the prison-industrial-complex. Against unethical profiteers like the manufacturer of EpiPen.  It is a long list, typical of a person who is almost always on the left side of the political center.

But, there is one that plenty of people on the left side of the political spectrum rant against very loudly that has never made sense to me.  The virulent opposition to GMO.

I have blogged in plenty about this.  Even as recently when there was a nationwide march in support of science, I noted the lack of honest conversations about science.  While we are quick to laugh at the idiots who deny climate change ... there are plenty in the "save the earth" group who are adamantly anti-GMO.  I wrote in that post that I wished I could carry a sign like this:

Imagine the plight of the dedicated GMO research scientist.  Every scientific authority has ruled that GMO is safe, and yet the researchers cannot make headway!

One of those researchers has written a personal essay.  The guy, Devang Mehta, is from India and recently completed his PhD in Switzerland, "creating genetically modified organisms."  But, he is already exhausted:

Nevertheless, my time in GMO research creating virus-resistant plants has meant dealing with the overwhelming negative responses the topic evokes in so many people. These range from daily conversations halting into awkward silence when the subject of my work crops up, to hateful Twitter trolls, and even the occasional fear that public protesters might destroy our research. Little wonder then, that having finished my Ph.D., I’m part excited and part relieved to move to a new lab and work on more fundamental questions in plant biology: how plants are able to control the levels at which their genes are active.  

Like I said, it is virulent opposition :(

Mehta continues:

Beyond the issue of public acceptance and, frankly, a caving-in of many in the scientific community to pseudoscientific beliefs, I’m also glad to be moving away from transgenic research because anti-GMO activism over the last couple of decades has made a career in GMO research a risky proposition.

Research that never gets applied to helping people because of the opposition.  Like "golden rice" that is "still not available to the children who need it most" even two decades since it was successfully created.

My research has given me the opportunity to visit smallholder farms in two African countries, to teach a student from the “global south” the kind of modern biological techniques that remain a dream for many in her country, and to make discoveries that might help with an important problem in food security in the tropics. As a result, yes, I do feel a measure of guilt at leaving this field of research and quitting my lab’s quest to engineer better varieties of cassava for African and South Asian farmers halfway through the project.

What a loss!

Only Norwegians need apply!

Jamelle Bouie does a wonderful job presenting Mitt Romney for who he is:

Romney’s history on immigration is one reason why we should not treat Trump as an aberration from the Republican Party but the outgrowth—and perhaps the apotheosis—of forces that have driven Republican politics for at least a decade. Romney’s hostility to illegal immigration helped him win the Republican nomination. What’s more, he gave tacit approval to Donald Trump’s birtherism, even welcoming his endorsement in 2012. After he lost, Romney attributed Obama’s re-election to a promise of “gifts” to black people, women, and the “children of illegals.”
Romney holds sincere, conservative views on immigration, but he also helped give rise to the divisive politics that he now criticizes in Trump. Romney indulged the worst impulses of the Republican base, feeding it an appetizer of racial resentment and leaving it hungry for someone who could offer a feast.         

Which is why despite all his anti-trump stand during the primaries, Romney eagerly went to dine some fine frog legs with the very guy who trolled about him choking at the elections!



The scumbag in the Oval Office and his 63 million voters have made clear what they think of immigrants, especially the brown-skinned from shithole countries.  So, we will leave them alone and look at what trump's counterpart on the other side--Bernie Sanders--has said.  That should be interesting, right?

Here, Sanders is railing against immigrants in 2007.  Note that he is not merely against those who came here without documentation. Sanders was angry at the guest workers who come here legally!  Make sure you wait until you hear him rant about the millions who will come here and lower the wages for middle-class Americans!



In 2013, he calmly and forcefully asked whether it is really true that we can't find American workers to do the jobs that immigrant workers are doing.



I tell ya, Sanders was not that different from trump in his populism.  There is a huge difference between the two though--Sanders is a decent human being, whereas trump is the lowliest scumbag in public life.

The US has never honestly figured out how it should deal with immigration--legal and otherwise.  Instead of honest conversations and policy, politicians treat the topic as an opportunity for votes, depending on which way the wind blows.  Perhaps the best evidence for this is from the Republican debate in 1980, between the two candidates in the primaries--Reagan and Bush.




This is not a topic that comes up in most other countries.  After all, how many countries have even been open to immigration?  The US, more than say Canada or Australia, has always been a land of immigrants.  With the exception of Native Americans, we are all--including the damn politicians--immigrants or descendants of immigrants.  Yet, the country can't seem to figure out what to do with immigration?  "Sad!" as the scumbag often notes in his tweets!

Source

Some are more equal than others!

Recall those series of posts here in which I had quoted the Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich?  Those followed my summer reading in 2016.  Among other things,, Alexievich made possible for me to understand why putin continued to be in power in Russia.

Alexievich commented in an interview:

 “In the West, people demonize Putin,” Ms. Alexievich, who turns 68 later this month, said in a recent interview here, speaking Russian through a translator after a conference on her work at the University of Gothenburg. “They do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West, ” she added. “There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.”

The "humiliation."  The emotion that putin has tapped into, in order to Make Russia Great Again!

Source

After having read Alexievich, it does not surprise me that millions of Russians and Eastern Europeans believe that they were better off under communism.

As governments dismantled social safety nets and poverty spread throughout the region, ordinary citizens grew increasingly less critical of their state socialist pasts.
A 2009 poll in eight east European countries asked if the economic situation for ordinary people was ‘better, worse or about the same as it was under communism’. The results stunned observers: 72 per cent of Hungarians, and 62 per cent of both Ukrainians and Bulgarians believed that most people were worse off after 1989. In no country did more than 47 per cent of those surveyed agree that their lives improved after the advent of free markets. Subsequent polls and qualitative research across Russia and eastern Europe confirm the persistence of these sentiments as popular discontent with the failed promises of free-market prosperity has grown, especially among older people.

The surprise, if at all, is that we are surprised when, for instance, the Hungarian Prime Minister, viktor orban, systematically assaults the country's democratic institutions.

Alexievich remarked about that right in the introductory pages of her book:

I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them.  Do they know what communism is?

It is doubtful that a great majority of the people there are rooting for communism's return:

Ethnographic research on the persistence of red nostalgia shows that it has less to do with a wistfulness for lost youth than with a deep disillusionment with free markets. Communism looks better today because, for many, capitalism looks worse

The political economic system--loosely referred to as capitalism--in the US and the UK was not noble by any means.

The US, a country based on a free-market capitalist ideology, has done many horrible things: the enslavement of millions of Africans, the genocidal eradication of the Native Americans, the brutal military actions taken to support pro-Western dictatorships, just to name a few. The British Empire likewise had a great deal of blood on its hands: we might merely mention the internment camps during the second Boer War and the Bengal famine.

So, where do we go from here?

We should all embrace Geertz’s idea of an anti-anti-communism in hopes that critical engagement with the lessons of the 20th century might help us to find a new path that navigates between, or rises above, the many crimes of both communism and capitalism.

Easier said than done in these days of the scumbag, er, president of the US, tweeting hate!

It is the damn price, stupid!

For a couple of years, my primary care physician has talked to me about colonoscopy.  A well-accepted preventive care routine, he has assured me.  And, yes, when doing that, they will also check the state of my prostate.  And, yes, the insurance will pay for most of the expenses too.

"Let me think about it," is my typical response to him.  I have been putting this off for a while now.

If I were to pay out of my pocket, I would not undergo this. 

Given my dietary habits, the type-4 "regularity," if you get my drift, and a near-maniacal approach to a healthy living means that it is an ultra-low probability of something wrong in the colon.

In addition to the discomfort with the process, it is also insanely expensive--if I were to pay for it.  The cost of colonoscopies is typical of the most important problem in healthcare in the US: The astronomical prices:

Colonoscopies offer a compelling case study. They are the most expensive screening test that healthy Americans routinely undergo — and often cost more than childbirth or an appendectomy in most other developed countries. Their numbers have increased manyfold over the last 15 years, with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggesting that more than 10 million people get them each year, adding up to more than $10 billion in annual costs.
...
While several cheaper and less invasive tests to screen for colon cancer are recommended as equally effective by the federal government’s expert panel on preventive care — and are commonly used in other countries — colonoscopy has become the go-to procedure in the United States. “We’ve defaulted to by far the most expensive option, without much if any data to support it,” said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. 

If I were to pay for the colonoscopy, I would think about the benefit from such an expense.  For now, it is clear--way expensive and not worth it, irrespective of the fact that the insurance company picks up the tab.

Colonoscopy is merely an example of the pricing aspect of the healthcare crisis.  All Obamacare, which trump and the Republicans failed to repeal-and-replace, does is to make that healthcare affordable; there is nothing being done- to bring down the prices.

The Affordable Care Act did many things. It extended coverage to millions of Americans and created a more equitable health insurance market that treated healthy and sick patients equally.
But that law did not tackle the unit price of health care in the United States.
“The ACA didn’t change the trajectory at all,” Hopkins’ Anderson put it bluntly.
The ACA made health care more affordable in the sense that more Americans have someone else (Medicaid or a private insurance company) paying the majority of those medical bills.
But the medical bills themselves didn’t actually shrink — and that will vex any effort at reducing the cost of American health care going forward.

Ah, but do not ever reflexively think this is the market at work:

“In the U.S., we like to consider health care a free market,” said Dr. David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund and a former adviser to President Obama. ”But it is a very weird market, riddled with market failures.”                                         

We are screwed!

The orphan elders

A neighbor recently spent a lot of time and money going back and forth between here and another American city that is 2,000 miles away.  And there were times she even spent more than a couple of weeks there during her visits.

All because her dear friend was dying.  And, that friend did not have children.  Fortunately, the dying person's world of friends, which included people like my neighbor, was there to take care of her.

Single, childless, and old is increasingly a thing.

By 2030, about 16 percent of women 80 to 84 will be childless, compared with about 12 percent in 2010, according to a 2013 report by AARP.

Yet another "problem" that has resulted from the revolutionary past two centuries since the Industrial Revolution.  Decreasing fertility rates and the increasing rights for women have led to this situation where childless and old is no longer a statistical outlier.

Adult children play important roles:

Older single and childless people are at higher risk than those with children for facing medical problems, cognitive decline and premature death ...
Adult children typically help elderly parents negotiate housing, social-service and health care options. 

Life gets complicated, to say the least.

While most elder orphans manage to develop their fallback structures, when we think about the deteriorating quality of life as one gets older, well, this situation that was reported in India will not be any outlier either; An elderly couple "feel it is unfair to compel them to wait to die till they are afflicted by any serious ailment":

A Mumbai-based elderly couple have made a heart-wrenching plea to President Ram Nath Kovind seeking permission for active euthanasia or “assisted suicide” as they feel they are of no use to society or themselves.
Narayan Lavate (88) and his wife Iravati (78), who have no children and say their siblings are also no more, are of the view that keeping them alive against their wishes is a “waste of the country’s scarce resources as well as theirs”.

Longevity could become a curse!

Thank you for Facebooking!

Reviewing my posts on Facebook, I find that my earliest post on Facebook's business model goes back to October 2010.  More than seven years ago!

In that post, I commented about one of the most popular games that people were playing, at that time, in Faccebook--Farmville.  I could not understand why people were wasting their time tending to their virtual farms, wasting time and money on it.  When a student talked to me about Farmville, I told her about the millions that were made by the game makers (with Facebook getting a commission) but, "I didn't tell her that according to Zynga all the Farmville players in Facebook are considered as beta testers of the game."

source

Facebook users have always been the "raw material" that in so many different ways provided the company with dollar generating avenues.  If the users were stupid enough to play games and take quizzes that are clickbaits, well, they were forgetting that fundamental aspect of the market economy: Caveat emptor!

In July 2011, I wrote about the first of many posts in which I warned myself--and any interested reader--about how Facebook and other tech companies were mining us for data.

And there are more.  Plenty of posts.

Which is why I am not even a little bit surprised that Facebook's user data was (mis)used by cambridge analytica in the trump election.  Even a nincompoop like me was well aware that our data was out there for Facebook to monetize.  Tell me something new!

What we are forgetting in all this new-found (haha) wisdom about Facebook is that every big tech company deals with this same shit.  Some merely pretend to be holier than others.  But, they are all after the same thing--to know more and more about us, what we do, where we go, who we talk to, and more, and all these go into the developing the truly next big thing.  And that next big thing that will mess up our life more than we can imagine?  Artificial intelligence.

In a future world of AI, even dissent won't be possible.  Where would we possibly hide away in order to organize protests and plot against the government or a corporation, when our every move and every word that we speak and write will be tracked?  You can now see that precogs are just round the corner :(

We are fucked, folks.  But, there is no going back either.  Enjoy the ride, as they say!

We didn't start the fire? Yes, we did!

I don't make friends. And I piss off friends that I manage to make.  All because I want honest conversations, and it turns out that how much ever people are educated and worldly and sophisticated, well, unlike me most are good at making unprincipled tradeoffs as long as their objectives are met.  What an awful loser I am!

I would love to talk with rabid Barack Obama fans about his use of social media, given all the brouhaha over trump and bannon dealing with cambridge analytica.

Keep in mind that I am no trump sympathzier--I have not only been anti-trump from the day he announced his candidacy, I have banished from my social life trump voters, including friends and neighbors.

Back when Senator Obama launched his candidacy, he and his campaign worked the social media, which was a new thing at that time.  A couple of days after his historic election, the NY Times reported:

For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet.
“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

We set out on a new election campaign approach--the internet and the social media.

The highly organized Obama team correctly figured that "the electorate could be seen as a collection of individual citizens who could each be measured and assessed on their own terms."

After the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became celebrated for its use of technology—much of it developed by an unusual team of coders and engineers—that redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media, and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking the most active supporters; and “targeted sharing” protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.
But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.

"Turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be."  That is from a 2012 essay in MIT Technology Review.  Political advertising had been successfully weaponized. PhDs were writing algorithms to microtarget voters.

Few events in American life other than a presidential election touch 126 million adults, or even a significant fraction that many, on a single day. Certainly no corporation, no civic institution, and very few government agencies ever do. Obama did so by reducing every American to a series of numbers. Yet those numbers somehow captured the individuality of each voter, and they were not demographic classifications. The scores measured the ability of people to change politics—and to be changed by it.

Yep, every American was reduced to a series of numbers, who could be influenced by well-targeted ads.

We had started down a slope that was soon bound to end up in the hands of evil.  JFK mastered the television medium, yes.  But then it was also the same television through which another election was swung with the notorious Willie Horton ad. 

Yes, the trump team committed flagrant fouls. Egregious ones.  But, most people are sports nutcases and they will easily understand the following comparison: It is not uncommon in team sports for coaches and players to intentionally commit fouls in order to win games.  I find it deplorable. But, that is how it is done in sports and in politics.  And, often, fans cheer when their team commits those fouls and win games, but jeer when the opponent does that and wins.  As Michael Kinsley put it in the context of John Kerry being swift-boated: "People tell pollsters they are sick of nasty politics, then they respond to it every time."

The problem is not that fouls are committed, but that people--even the religious ones--have bought into the bottom-line:  "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

Sugar, Sugar

In a recent class discussion, when a student beat up on "corporations," I responded with a statement that perhaps was not exactly what she and the class expected from me.

"It is easy to beat up on corporations.  But, keep in mind that without us people consuming what the corporations are selling, they can't make their profits.  Right?  Which means it is really we the people who are largely to be blamed if we think something is wrong.  As an example, imagine what would happen if we decided that drinking carbonated sugary drinks is unhealthy and, therefore, stopped buying them.  But we don't, and Coca Cola makes its profits. Yes?"

Coca Cola makes awesome ads, yes. It tempts the kids, true.



I remember being a kid and practically salivating after the likes of Limca.  That's what we kids do.  But, as adults, we have the power to resist, right?

It is also a selfish act to say no to those products.  It is our health, dammit.  We can and should say "fuck off" to all those companies that try their best to sell us crap that is unhealthy.

However, it is tough to beat back that biological response to those unhealthy products that are all sugar and salt.  Did you notice that those corporations never attempt to make gazillions from selling other tastes like sour and bitter?  As biological creatures we respond to sugar and salt.  It reflects even in the language we use. We sugarcoat things. We share salty gossip.

But, first, we do need to acknowledge the reality:

an overabundance of simple carbohydrates, and sugar in particular, is the No. 1 problem in modern diets. Sugar is the driving force behind the diabetes and obesity epidemics.

Keep in mind that sugar is a carbohydrate. And one that quickly rushes through the system.  Our affluence has created this problem!

And, for most of us, the problem begins right at the very beginning of the day:

Many breakfast foods that sound as if they’re healthy are in fact laden with sugar. ... In the United States, as the science writer Gary Taubes says, breakfasts have become “lower-fat versions of dessert.”

Yep, this is all the more an American problem!

In much of the world, including large parts of Asia, breakfast is a savory meal, not a sweet one, just as lunch and dinner are.

When I visit India, I am often reminded of the awesome range of savory breakfast. But, even there, I am regimented.  I end up having either idlis and vadai, or puri/potato and vadai.  Note that I have vadai in either combo--it is packed with protein, which is the best way to start the day.  If only I could do that here in the US! ;)

It’s normal to have some sugar in your diet. The problem is all of the processed sugar that has snuck into the modern diet. It’s so prevalent that you need a strategy for avoiding it. Once you come up with a strategy, eating a healthy amount of sugar isn’t nearly as hard as it sometimes seems.

Not hard at all. You can have your cake and eat it too ;)

March Madness

This is not about the scandalous NCAA basketball fuck-offs.  Nope.  It is about something that is immensely more important that we apparently do not care about.

It is about this: War!

In recent years, the US launched on March 19th not one war but two.

In 2003, the draft-dodging bush/cheney combination engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to fool us Americans into going to war against Iraq.  We destroyed the country, from which recovery does not seem likely for a while.

No one knows for certain how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago. Some credible estimates put the number at more than one million. You can read that sentence again. The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry. (A year ago, I watched Mr. Bush on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” dancing and talking about his paintings.) The pundits and “experts” who sold us the war still go on doing what they do.

And then in 2011, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Obama led the US from behind when he lobbed missiles at Libya. 

When the US and NATO forces got ready to strike against al Qaeda and the Taliban forces in Afghanistan, I half-heartedly supported it.  There was no doubt that the Taliban and al Qaeda were evil, especially for the people living in Afghanistan.  Though, it seemed to me like the war was in haste and that we might be better with a little more planning, I supported it even as the specter of the Soviets, the British, the Greeks all loomed large in the background.

When bush, cheney, and rumsfeld started beating pretty loudly the war drums to invade Iraq, I was completely opposed to it.

I recall watching on television Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations and feeling sick in my stomach.  Harry Belafonte was correct!

As the war drums got louder, my colleagues at my new place of work here in Oregon decided that they would collect money to publish a peace petition in the student newspaper.

Despite my intense anti-invasion pacifist sentiments, I did not sign the peace petition and nor did I contribute for the advertisement expenses.  I hadn't yet been tenured and, yet, was firm about not signing on with the rest.

A couple of years ago, I found the petition on the bulletin board and made a copy for myself.  It was interesting to note that somebody had scribbled there about 9/11--perhaps a student who supported the war, and I continue to have a strong urge to convince that scribbler about a lack of connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

There was only one other colleague in the division at that time who didn't sign on that page, and he dissented because of his affiliation with, and support for, the GOP.  In my case, political party affiliation has never been a factor, nor was I in favor of the war.

I was not a signatory for a very good reason.  Not because of the phrasing, which is indeed a poorly constructed argument, especially considering the number of PhDs involved in the effort.

Unlike my faculty colleagues who apparently thought their duty ended after such a rhetorical display, which would have impressed only a few gullible students, I thought I ought to work on helping a few more students and members of the public understand about Iraq, the Middle East, and Islam.  As an academic, I have never been convinced that signing peace petitions is the best way I, or most academics, can contribute to society.  To join the academy is to think and inquire, which then means that by sharing the products of inquiry with students and the public we can contribute--a lot more than by signing petitions.

Meanwhile, the maniac in the Oval Office, who was the choice of 63 million voters and who dodged the draft citing his bone spurs, is itching to go to war and show that he is the manliest of men.

The madness continues!

The dumb fucks we are!

One of my go-to technology columnists, Farhad Manjoo, has gotten me worried about the "frightful five" for a while now.  As if I needed more to ad to my near-paranoia!  In one of those columns, Manjoo wrote:

This is the most glaring and underappreciated fact of internet-age capitalism: We are, all of us, in inescapable thrall to one of the handful of American technology companies that now dominate much of the global economy. I speak, of course, of my old friends the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

There are a gazillion posts in this blog where I have expressed my worries about all these companies.  The worries have not ever abated, but get louder and louder and louder and ...

Yet, the public is apparently not worried.  What’s going on here?

Why are people still so unafraid of the world’s richest corporations, even as those corporations collect fine-grained data on almost every aspect of our lives and shape the way we work, communicate, and spend our free time?
One relatively obvious factor may be that the big tech companies make things that people love: iPhones, Gmail, Instagram, and other flagship products have hundreds of millions of loyal users. The warm feelings those devices and services engender may blind people to the industry’s darker undersides of mass surveillance, targeted advertising, and addictiveness.

Those dark sides.

Now add domestic and international politics to all those, and you get a pitch black darkness.  The Darkening Web is the book that is the context for an essay in the NYRB.

The interests that now guide what technologies they produce are not entirely commercial ones. The national security community has exploited the private sector to help develop America’s immense cyber-capabilities. In doing so it has placed an extraordinary array of potential cyber-weapons in the hands of unaccountable private companies.

"unaccountable."

That should worry you, too. A lot.

And keep in mind that there is a lot of mutually beneficial crossover between the unaccountable frightful five and the unaccountable national security interests of the government.

the development in Silicon Valley of a hybrid public/private economy in which the government assists in the creation of new technologies it needs for national security operations by investing in companies that can also commercialize these technologies.
Government agencies have mitigated risk and even helped to create markets for companies whose products, while ostensibly strictly civilian and commercial, satisfy their own needs. The driverless car industry will incorporate, test, and improve technologies devised for missile guidance systems and unmanned drones. Facial recognition software developed by intelligence agencies and the military for surveillance and identity verification (in drone strikes, for example) is now assuming a friendly guise on our iPhones and being tested by millions of users.

In short, the "direction of technological development in the commercial sector, in other words, is influenced by the agenda of government agencies in ways largely unknown to the public."

Zuckerberg, in a well-known incident he now surely regrets, was asked in the early days of Facebook why people would hand over their personal information to him. He responded, “They trust me—dumb fucks.” We’re finally starting to appreciate the depth of the insult to us all. Now we need to figure out how to keep the corporations we have supported with our taxes, data, and undivided attention from treating us like dumb fucks in the future.

The dumb fucks we are!

At your service!

On quite a number of occasions, my father has expressed his surprise at how people earn money these days, in contrast to the old days when he was an active participant in the labor economy.  Back then the work products were a lot more tangible.  Farmers grew crops. Miners dug stuff. Workers made widgets.

His favorite way of expressing the change that he and all of us try to understand is "now, everybody is a consultant."

While that is an exaggeration, of course, it is true that even in the old country there has been a tremendous change in the percentage of labor in anything but agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.  There are consultants. Beauty parlors. Investment managers.  And that other comment that father makes: "if they are not consultants, they are all doing software."

If that is the story in the old country, it is even more dramatic here in the US.  However, listening to trump and his 63 million voters, one would believe that everybody is in farming or mining or making widgets in factories.  While facts do not matter to these minions, the rest of us care.

 “goods-producing” jobs like logging, mining, construction and manufacturing accounted for only 20.5 million jobs last month, in a nation with 148 million total positions.

Where do the overwhelming majority work then?  In the service sector.

If you have a mental model in which the only valuable jobs involve making steel or mining coal, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the middle-income jobs that are more common in the 21st-century service economy. Examples include the blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino, the nurse at a hospital renowned for its cancer treatments, the audio technician on a movie set, the engineer who advises companies worldwide on the best way to extract oil.

trump and his fellow idiots want to make America great again by trying to bring back those logging, mining, construction, and manufacturing jobs that will only fade more into the future?  What a bunch of morons!  "Fucking morons," to quote the now ousted Secretary of State, Wayne Tracker.

Services make a lot of money for the US.

The biggest is travel, which accounted for $204 billion last year. This is an area that the president should know well. When a Canadian couple stays in a Trump hotel in New York, the money they spend counts as a service export.
The next biggest category is “charges for the use of intellectual property,” a category that includes foreigners who pay to watch movies or music made in the United States, as well as licenses of patents and trademarks.
Other big ones include financial services, insurance, telecommunications and information technology, and a wide range of engineering and other consulting services.

If trump really cared for the average, forgotten, people, he should talk more about the plight of fast food workers than pretending to care about the coal mine workers.

Who am I kidding; the narcissist in the Oval Office cares for nobody but himself!

The Irish Saint ... Pattabi?

Rest assured. I am not losing my mind.

I know it is not St. Pattabi's Day.

But, in case you forgot ... I want to remind you something about the visiting Prime Minister of Ireland, Leo Varadkar.

What has that got to do with Pattabi?  I was playing on "P" of Patrick and came up with the Hindu name of Pattabi.

So, why Pattabi?

Leo Varadkar is not "truly" Irish. If trump and his minions lived in Ireland, they would have burnt giant crosses across from Varadkar's home and tried their best to deport him.

The 39-year-old Varadkar is Ireland's youngest prime minister. He's the son of an Indian immigrant and the first openly gay politician in the post.

His father was a brown-skinned non-Christian immigrant from a shithole!

Maybe you forgot.  But, remember that I had blogged about him, less than a year ago?

Here's an excerpt from that post:

In that ancestral home of his--in Ireland--an "American" history is being created: The son of a Hindu immigrant is all set to be the next prime minister of Ireland.  He is only 38--younger than JFK's age when he was elected president.  And, oh, this young man is gay:

A gay son of an Indian immigrant is now all but certain to become the next prime minister of Ireland, a country that has rapidly been leaving its conservative Roman Catholic social traditions behind.
Leo Varadkar, who was chosen on Friday by the Fine Gael party to be its leader, and therefore the head of the center-right governing coalition, will be the first openly gay taoiseach (as Ireland’s prime minister is called), and, at 38, the youngest.

The kind of a story that we normally associate only with the US.

Who were/are his parents?

Mr. Varadkar was born in Dublin in 1979, the son of an Irish Catholic nurse from County Waterford and a Hindu doctor from Mumbai, India. His parents met in England in the 1960s and lived in India for a time before moving to Ireland.
Growing up in a country where religious divisions have historically run deep, he attended a Catholic elementary school and a Protestant high school that followed the Church of Ireland tradition. He told The Irish Times in 2015 that he was raised Catholic but was “not a particularly religious person.”

How fascinating!  Almost a made-for-movie story!

Varadkar reminds us:

“If my election today shows anything, it is that prejudice has no hold in this Republic,” Varadkar said at Dublin’s Mansion House after the results were announced, adding: “Around the world people look to Ireland as a country where it doesn't matter where you come from, only where you want to go.”

I should never matter where you came from.

I can't imagine what you're going through

Take a look at this photo:

Source

And now this photo:

Notice anything different?

One person is missing.

She is dead.

Carmen was one of the 17 who were killed by a gunman at a Florida high school last month.

I was listening to the report on NPR when I was driving back home.  It made me teary as hell.

After that, I shut the radio off and drove the rest of the way in silence.

You, too, should listen to it.  Hear the parents and others. Their emotions.

I don't want to reproduce anything here about Carmen, her accomplishments in the short life that she had, and what people had to say.  Because I want you to listen to it all.

But, I will bring this in because I want us all to think about it for a long, long, time.  Carmen's father says:

People constantly say to me, I can't imagine what you're going through. Well, you should. You should try to comprehend your daughter, who you are so proud of and who was just beginning to live her life, being riddled by bullets. Being told when the medical examiner gives the body back to the funeral home, you can't see her. We have to spend days working on her body. And maybe, maybe you'll be able to see her then. Think about that

Yes, think about that, while you listen. And imagine what they--and many others like them--are going through.  That's the least we can do.



Fucking Second Amendment nutcase bastards and their fucked up NRA!

The Supremacists

It is easy to claim that we are not responsible for atrocities committed in the past.  But, that is a pathetically weak argument for so many reasons; the biggest of all is when our current fortunes are largely possible because of those atrocious practices.

I have often examined this in the blog. Unlike many others, I have voluntarily looked at how the Brahmin supremacy of the past has made my awesome life possible.  I even dragged into this discussion my sweet dead grandmothers.

I have blogged about universities that profited from colonialism and slavery. I have written about the white supremacist winston churchill--they make yet another movie that glorifies the bastard and the movie wins awards too!  I didn't leave out Thomas Jefferson either.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of people in powerful positions who deny these.  They shrug their shoulders. They actively engage in denying the past, and refuse to acknowledge how such practices continue in the present as well.

But, some of us continue with such examination anyway.

The latest to join in this is the celebrated National Geographic.  For years, many in academia have written about the horrible ways that the magazine portrayed non-whites in decades past.  The supremacy of the West and whites versus the primitive non-whites.  The naked breasts of non-white women were to be found in this magazine whereas the naked breasts of white women were in Playboy.

The editor of National Geographic writes about all these and more:

I’m the tenth editor of National Geographic since its founding in 1888. I’m the first woman and the first Jewish person—a member of two groups that also once faced discrimination here. It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past. But when we decided to devote our April magazine to the topic of race, we thought we should examine our own history before turning our reportorial gaze to others.

Yep, if only more among us spent some time looking into our own respective pasts--as individuals, communities, organizations, and as countries.  If only the highly educated, in particular, would take the lead on this!

What did the magazine archives reveal?

until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers. Meanwhile it pictured “natives” elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.

We need a lot more of such introspection and honest discussions.

I will leave it to the editor for the final words for this post too:

We hope you will join us in this exploration of race, beginning this month and continuing throughout the year. Sometimes these stories, like parts of our own history, are not easy to read. But as Michele Norris writes in this issue, “It’s hard for an individual—or a country—to evolve past discomfort if the source of the anxiety is only discussed in hushed tones.”

God is irrelevant

One does not have to believe in a god to appreciate life.  This is paradise on earth.

Well, almost a paradise.

I passed a homeless man who was lugging his belongings on an overfilled backpack, with his dog walking alongside.

What is my obligation to that homeless man?

An atheist I am, I worry a lot about such questions.

I could choose to help him.  Or, I could ignore his very existence.  I could try convincing myself that it is somebody else's problem.  Right?

One does not have to believe in a god in order to answer that question.  Bringing god into this is a distraction.  God is irrelevant to figuring out how to react to the sight of a homeless man in this paradise.

If the case of the homeless person is not convincing enough, consider the following:

•            It is wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land.
•            It is wrong to enslave people.
•            It is wrong to torture prisoners of war.
•            Anyone who witnesses genocide, or enslavement, or torture, is morally required
to try to stop it.

Aren't all those true.  Well, a dick cheney or donald trump will favor torturing prisoners of war.  An assad has no qualms killing his own people.  But, an overwhelming majority of us--irrespective of what we think about god or any religion--will agree with those statements, right?

To say that morality depends on the existence of God is to say that none of these specific moral judgments is true unless God exists.  That seems to me to be a remarkable claim.  If God turned out not to exist — then slavery would be O.K.?  There’d be nothing wrong with torture?  The pain of another human being would mean nothing?

So, then, what has god got to do with any of those situations?

Over the years, I have come to understand that it is a humongous waste of time to argue over whether or not god exists.  It does not matter one bit.  What matters is how we live our lives, which includes our relationships with fellow humans and with other life forms and non-living matter all around us.

Consider the flowing river.  Will it be ok for me to dump sewage or factory waste into that river?  Whether it is about slavery or about dumping sewage, the question of whether or not god exists, or whose god is the real god, is immaterial, right?

The awfulness is how, for instance, slavery and Christianity coexisted, with religious folks explicitly justifying slavery. Or, even now, how the religious right considers coal as a gift from god that should be shared with the world!

So, back to the homeless person.   He makes me feel uncomfortable.  Not because I worry about the safety of my life or my property, but because I do not know how to react.  Should I ignore him?  Shrug my shoulders and move on?  Should I engage with him and try to help?  Should I donate to the organizations that help the homeless?  If I do not donate, does it make me a bad person?  Do I want to be a good person?  What does it mean to be a good person?  Why have I not figured out the answer despite all these years?

God is irrelevant in trying to sort out these questions.

Leisure Suit Sriram

Even the retired folks these days don't seem to have leisure time.  How can that be?

The more I think about my own short life thus far, the clearer it seems that the dream was about a technological future that would launch us into an age of prosperity in which we would do very little work and enjoy a great deal of leisure time.  It would be a denial of gigantic proportions if we were to argue that we not incredibly prosperous now and, yet, leisure has become scarce?

To economists, this is no surprise.  Because, to them, leisure in prosperity means that there is much higher opportunity cost in terms of income that is not earned by doing nothing.  The more the income, the more the opportunity cost of sitting around.  So, people work themselves to death?

It is a strange world in which we live.  Ask yourself what exactly are we working for, and what exactly is it that we want to get out of the incomes that we earn?  Go ahead.  Do that first and then resume reading this post.

Yep, we earn in order to consume.  Our highly productive lives--as in economic productivity--are not about working fewer hours and creating leisure time that we can enjoy, but are about consumption.

It is almost as if we set aside the golden years for leisure.  When we can no longer do anything "productive."  What a wasteful approach to life!

There is one other problem, a nasty one:

Most people haven’t been taught to find fulfillment in their free time. To the contrary, rather than learning how to cultivate lifelong interests, students—both in primary and secondary schooling—are increasingly being educated to meet specific labor-market demands, demands that may also disappear or be automated away. Meanwhile, “It just is assumed that everyone knows how to handle their free time,” Henderson laments. “Not true!”

Yesterday, during a conversation with a student, I yet again heard the familiar: "I pack a whole lot of classes and activities because I am at a loss if I don't have things to do."

 Oh, do not for a second think of people spending time on the likes of Facebook as those enjoying leisure.  Nope. As I have blogged in plenty, people are "raw materials" in those activities, with the businesses making money out of them.  And, these businesses work on making addicts out of their users.

Over the past decade, more people have been spending more time on Facebook, whose business model is not all that different than the tobacco industry—it addicts its users, denies its own harmful effects, and expands its user base by targeting children and developing countries.
Commercial leisure and entertainment industries are undergoing a technological transformation that will be just as profound as the changes in work. But if the prevailing market incentive is to manufacture addiction, then the future of leisure could be bleak indeed. It remains to be seen if those designing social-media platforms, video games, virtual- and augmented-reality applications, and other technologies will feel pressured to do so responsibility.

So, where do we go from here?

Nowhere. We are screwed.

Not me though. Ask my neighbors--they will tell you that I rarely work.  Ask my colleagues--they will tell you I am goofing around and my work is mere mashed potatoes. Mine is a life of leisure! ;)

          Leisure

William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare

Immoral priorities

Of course we don't expect our politicians to be people of absolutely perfect moral standing.  We are humans and we are imperfect, and our elected officials will also be imperfect humans.

Thus, it has always been a question of how much imperfectness will we tolerate.  Gary Hart was on a roll, leading in the polls with a winning formula that had him practically in the Oval Office.  And then his monkey business came out, with his affair with Donna Rice and the infamous photograph on a yacht named Monkey Business.  He was gone in no time.

Thirty years later, trump was elected to the Oval Office despite--or because of--his horrible track record.  Ironically, his strongest supporters are the moral crusaders of our time--the evangelicals.  These Jesus-loving moralists elected him and support him.  Heck, even his current wife does!

And what kind of a scumbag is he?

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers.

An born-again friend of mine, with whom I have practically disconnected the old relations, is one of those trump supporters!  These people apparently know all too well WWJD!

These evangelicals have no problems with "the distinctly non-Christian substance of his values"

Trump’s unapologetic materialism—his equation of financial and social success with human achievement and worth—is a negation of Christian teaching. His tribalism and hatred for “the other” stand in direct opposition to Jesus’s radical ethic of neighbor love. Trump’s strength-worship and contempt for “losers” smack more of Nietzsche than of Christ. Blessed are the proud. Blessed are the ruthless. Blessed are the shameless. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after fame.

Gary Hart must be kicking himself for being 30 years too early!

So, where does this leave us?

Here is the uncomfortable reality: I do not believe that most evangelicals are racist. But every strong Trump supporter has decided that racism is not a moral disqualification in the president of the United States. And that is something more than a political compromise. It is a revelation of moral priorities.

Immoral 63 million voters need to have their own come-to-Jesus moments regarding:

For a package of political benefits, these evangelical leaders have associated the Christian faith with racism and nativism. They have associated the Christian faith with misogyny and the mocking of the disabled. They have associated the Christian faith with lawlessness, corruption, and routine deception. They have associated the Christian faith with moral confusion about the surpassing evils of white supremacy and neo-Nazism. The world is full of tragic choices and compromises. But for this man? For this cause?

For now, 63 million voters stand accused. The evangelicals have to additionally deal with their lord too!

Taking a dump in the commons

(I have sent the following to the editor)

Like many, I am disappointed that Oregon’s legislature did not pass a cap and trade bill in its short session that ended on March 3rd. It will be a while, therefore, before we Oregonians figure out how to stop pumping carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.

In discussing emissions, politicians often try to sell the laws they propose as jobs, jobs, jobs. Here in Oregon, the cap and trade bill was floated as the “Clean Energy Jobs Bill.” Politicians take this approach for a good reason—public discussion on emissions is incorrectly framed by climate change deniers as job killers. Hence, the constant repackaging of legislation in this arena as an employment generator.

If a significant percentage of the public and their preferred leaders are not receptive to straight talk about the urgency to limit the emission of CO2 because of the role it plays in climate change, then there is another way to repackage it in a form that will appeal to many—as public health infrastructure.

In order to understand limiting CO2 emissions as an “infrastructure bill” we can learn from recent history. When England, and later the US, started industrializing, cities grew rapidly. People rushed to London, New York, and Philadelphia, in search of jobs and fortunes, and the growth of such population centers was unprecedented. The crowding of people and their close contact with each other made it easy for pathogens to wreak havoc, and life in the city became nasty, brutish, and short.

Two hundred years ago, Londoners were not only in close proximity with each other, they also lacked the piped water supply and sewer systems that we now take for granted. In the absence of protected systems, human feces found their way into fresh water supplies, like wells, and illnesses and death followed. A widely discussed example is the cholera epidemic in London in 1854 that was traced back to a single well where a mother had washed her child’s dirty diapers.

When American cities started growing as important economic centers, the population here, too, experienced health issues. Cities recognized the importance of public health and started investing in protected water supply services. As the Harvard economist Ed Glaeser points out, by the end of the 19th century, municipalities in the US were spending as much on water supply systems as the federal government was spending on everything except the military and postal services. It was a massive public infrastructure investment that wins applause from even contemporary anti-government crusaders.

These public investments in clean water supply and sewer systems separated the bad—the feces—from the good—potable water—and did wonders to decrease the incidence of water-borne diseases like cholera, and contributed to sharp increases in life expectancy. Thanks to our public sewer system, we now use the bathrooms at home and at the office, and don’t worry for a nanosecond about what happens after we flush.

This infrastructure is not for free. We pay monthly bills to our wonderful local utilities that collect all our refuse, process them at large sewage treatment plants, and make our cities livable and beautiful.

We do not want people to treat the banks of the Willamette River as their bathrooms—unlike, for instance, how the poor do in India by the side of lakes and rivers. Yet, we are the same people who have been merrily discharging filthy CO2 waste into the air that all of us breathe! We need an infrastructure plan to address this public dumping.

CO2 is a harmful byproduct of our activities that should not be dumped in the commons. Whether it is the smokestacks in factories, or the tailpipe in the car that I drive, the CO2 that comes out is casually and irresponsibly released into the air. All of us—yes, I, too—should be held accountable for this public dumping, and be required to pay for the needed infrastructure.

However, unlike with human feces, it is not easy to capture CO2 from the air and process it, though scientists and technologists are working on that approach. An easier and simpler approach is to limit our use of carbon in the first place. The less carbon we use, the less CO2 we will produce and, therefore, we will dump less in the commons.

Which is why I suggest that attempts to limit the use of carbon, through taxation, should be an important aspect of public health infrastructure investment for the future, similar to how generations past invested for the betterment of our lives. I hope that our elected officials will decisively act on this in 2019.

Keeping time

In my previous life ... you know, as an electrical engineering student, I worked with three other students on our project work.  The "capstone" work, as we refer to in the higher educational settings here in the US.

The project work was a microprocessor based "Maximum Demand Controller."

Wait, wait ... don't fall asleep! ;)

Alright ... I will cut to the chase.

We demonstrated our work to the supervising faculty and to an external reviewer, who was from another engineering college in town.

He looked at our work.  He shook his head this way, and that way, and every possible way.

And then he had a question.  How would this account for deviations from the 50Hz frequency?

We were stumped!  We did not have an answer.

But, hey, we graduated.  That's all that matters!

Why write about that now?

I heard on NPR, and then read in the NY Times that clocks are running slow in Europe ... because of a row between Kosovo and Serbia.

A dispute between Serbia and Kosovo has disrupted the electric power grid for most of the Continent, making certain kinds of clocks — many of those on ovens, in heating systems and on radios — run up to six minutes slow.
It is one of the stranger examples of technology binding together far-flung parts of the world, and one quirky effect of more than two decades of conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
The slowdown began in mid-January, and since then clocks in 25 countries, from Poland to Portugal and Denmark to Turkey, have lost time.

So, what does this have to do with my undergraduate project work and the deviation from the 50Hz that we did not account for?

In technical terms, power systems in Europe, and much of Asia and Africa, run on alternating current at 50 hertz, meaning that the flow of electricity changes directions 50 times per second. (In the United States and most of the Americas, the standard is 60 hertz.)
Because of the disruption in the Balkans, the grid for most of Europe has run since January at an average of 49.996 hertz.

You see, even a small deviation from that number can lead to disruptions.

Most clocks tell time using internal mechanisms or, like cellphones, get the time from a radio signal, and those have been fine. But clocks that measure time by that alternating current have been fooled by the drop in frequency.

This is the same mistake that we had committed in the project work.  We had programmed the microprocessor chip to count the alternating current cycle as a way to measure time.  We did that mistake 33 years ago though--we were pioneers in screwing things up ;)

Rewriting history in the land of immigrants

Nope. The title of this post should not lead you to think that this is about trump and the United States of America.  Though, yes, that could work too.

It is about another land of immigrants. One of the oldest ever.

I quoted that country's Supreme Court back in 2011:

While North America (USA and Canada) has new immigrants who came mainly from Europe over the last four or five centuries, India is a country of old immigrants in which people have been coming in over the last ten thousand years or so. Probably about 92 per cent of the people living in India today are descendants of immigrants, who came mainly from the North-West, and to a lesser extent from the North-East.

Yep, this post is about the fascist and his party in the old country. 

modi, the fascist, was elected a couple of years after that remark by the Supreme Court.  And, boy have things changed in a hurry in India. The overwhelmingly majority Hindu population seems to have gladly signed on to the fascist politics!

After coming to power, they quickly started rewriting India's history itself, very much consistent with George Orwell's warning in 1984, in which he wrote: "Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." 

Rewriting history, in which Winston Smith was employed, has always been a favorite of those fascist thugs.  And that is exactly what is unfolding in India now.

During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to rewrite the history of the nation.
The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quietly appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier. Details of its existence are reported here for the first time.

Instead of the fictional Winston Smith, you have numerous modi's toadies working on this grand project. 

Where do non-Hindus fit into this history that is being rewritten?

For India’s Muslims, who have pointed to incidents of religious violence and discrimination since Modi took office in 2014, the development is ominous.
The head of Muslim party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, said his people had “never felt so marginalised in the independent history of India.” “The government,” he said, “wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens.”

Yep, who controls the present controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future.

Going slowly in this fast-paced world

"I attempted to talk to you after class but you left so fast I didn’t even see you leave!"

That was in an email from a student.  I tell ya, I might seem slow in many ways, but I am not always slow.  I am sometimes faster than a speeding rocket! ;)

Ah, who am I kidding!  I am one hell of a slow guy.  I don't like doing too many things. I leave the rushing around to others.

When others rush around, I even attempt to ask them why they are rushing.  But, they are gone even before I get the sentence out of my mouth ;)

Increasingly though I worry that this world is not made for us slow coaches.  People do not have patience for us anymore.

Even in talking.  The young talk a million words a minute and I imagine they see the world in ultra slow motion whenever I start speaking!

Take, for instance, that taxi driver in Costa Rica whose speed in driving and talking fascinated me.  She would perhaps join the people in America who find my driving and talking to be annoyingly slow.

But then there are places where people are even slower than I am.  It is not easy to figure who the tortoises of world are!

I suspect that the Aesops of the world spun stories like the hare and the tortoise only because more often that not, the storytellers were slow people like me. After all, it takes time to tell stories.  The storyteller can't merely say, "there was a young woman named Cinderella, who was horribly ill treated by her stepmother. But, don't worry, it ended well."  What kind of a story is that, right?  It takes time to set up the story.  It takes time to listen to the story. Which is why I think Aesop spun a story about the importance of the slow tortoise.

At least, that is my story, and I am sticking with it! ;)

The last emperor

I was still getting used to being in a new country when I watched The Last Emperor.  The couple of Chinese graduate students that I talked to did not want to discuss the movie with me.  I had lots of questions, because a good chunk of the finer details of the movie was all new to me.  But, they didn't want to entertain me and my questions.

Now, China is on the verge of a new emperor. Xi Jinping.

Source

Francis Fukuyama is concerned about the return of China's "bad emperor" problems:

The last bad emperor that China had was Mao Zedong. Mao liberated the country from foreign occupation but then went on to trigger two enormous catastrophes: the Great Leap Forward starting in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution starting in the late 1960s. The latter set China back a generation and scarred the elites who endured it. Collective leadership emerged as a direct reaction to that experience: Deng Xiaoping and other senior leaders of the party vowed that they would never let a single individual accumulate as much charismatic power as Mao.

Xi is well on his way to becoming the next Mao.

Did the West see this coming? 

As usual, the pundits in the “West” misplaced their bets on China, writes Pankaj Mishra:

Let there be no doubt: The world was a dangerous place long before Xi became China’s supreme leader and Donald Trump started to boast of winning trade wars. Its perils weren’t recognized because of the ideological intoxication and historical amnesia induced by the collapse of Soviet and East European regimes -- the blind faith that history had no choice but to move inexorably towards a terminus of Western-style capitalism and democracy. Xi’s power grab is simply another reminder that it’s time to put away such childish fancies and to reckon with the world as it is.

Thankfully, we in the US have the 22nd amendment to the Constitution that will protect us from emperor trump!