A tree falls. I am there. I hear the noise.

As is often the case these days, I was lost in thoughts when walking by the river.  Sometimes the mind wanders across the world.  Sometimes it is focused on my classes.

Or, yes, about my own life and problems and unhappiness, which always seems to be in plenty.

The amazing thing is that by the time I return home, I have simply no idea what those thoughts were. It is like waking up after a good sleep, knowing that I had some great dreams but being unable to recall even a small piece of what was once vivid in my mind.

A sudden cracking noise of a tree falling somewhere separated me from my thoughts.  I looked around.  No fallen tree.  Two couples walking pushing strollers is all I saw.  They were also looking around.

A new variation of that old philosophical problem I was facing: if there is a loud noise of a tree falling in the forest but no tree is to be found, then did a tree really fall?

I chuckled within.  What a nerd, I thought to myself!  A smile might have even escaped my lips, I would imagine.

Two minutes later, there it was. A big branch across the bike path.  And my neighbors standing on the other side. R was on the phone.

"What did you do?" I asked D.

Apparently the tree cracked and branches fell only a step or two behind them."R is talking to the city" she said.

A dude, perhaps in his late 20s, on a bike stopped.  He took the earbuds out and let them hang.

"I bet a couple of us can lift and at least push these off to the side" I said as I grabbed one end of a weighty branch.  The dude, who had meanwhile parked his bike, grabbed the other and we heaved it off to the side.  And another.

We then went about clearing the broken branches off the bikepath.

R was done with the phone call, and he and D said bye and started walking home.  I stayed back for a couple more minutes pushing the debris away and looking at the scene.  The dude hopped back on his bike and sped.

I slowly walked towards home.  It felt good that we regular folks cleared the potential hazards from the path.  A couple of hands can get things done.

The next day, I again ran into D and R--I was returning home, while they had just started the walk.

"Don't break any trees today" I joked.  We laughed.

It has been a couple of days since.  The broken branches continue to lie there by the side. 

R says the city made it clear it is not the city's legal responsibility.

Charles Dickens said it best for all of us via Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist: "The law is a ass--a idiot."

More on utilitarianism in education policies

After reading my post on whether the utilitarian cost-benefit analysis that governs government policies killed liberal education, a high school classmate, "J," who lives and teaches in India comments:

Dickens' 'Hard Times' speaks exactly about this kind of utilitarianism in Education. It is a pity that we are still facing the crisis more than a century later.

Not only it is apt, I would think it is worse--utilitarian calculations seem to govern everything now.

"J" also provides this lengthy excerpt from Hard Times:

... Mr and Mrs M’Choakumchild never make any mistakes themselves, I suppose, Sissy?’

‘O no!’ she eagerly returned. ‘They know everything.’

‘Tell me some of your mistakes.’

‘I am almost ashamed,’ said Sissy, with reluctance. ‘But today, for instance, Mr M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural Prosperity.’

‘National, I think it must have been,’ observed Louisa.

‘Yes, it was. — But isn’t it the same?’ she timidly asked.

‘You had better say, National, as he said so,’ returned Louisa, with her dry reserve.

‘National Prosperity. And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation, and a’n’t you in a thriving state?’

‘What did you say?’ asked Louisa.

‘Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,’ said Sissy, wiping her eyes.

‘That was a great mistake of yours,’ observed Louisa.

‘Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now. Then Mr M’Choakumchild said he would try me again. And he said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion? And my remark was — for I couldn’t think of a better one — that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million. And that was wrong, too.’

‘Of course it was.’

‘Then Mr M’Choakumchild said he would try me once more. And he said, Here are the stutterings — ’

‘Statistics,’ said Louisa.

‘Yes, Miss Louisa — they always remind me of stutterings, and that’s another of my mistakes — of accidents upon the sea. And I find (Mr M’Choakumchild said) that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or burnt to death. What is the percentage? And I said, Miss;’ here Sissy fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest error; ‘I said it was nothing.’

‘Nothing, Sissy?’

‘Nothing, Miss — to the relations and friends of the people who were killed. I shall never learn,’ said Sissy. ‘And the worst of all is, that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I am so anxious to learn, because he wished me to, I am afraid I don’t like it.’

Hard Times by Charles Dickens, that is. 

Not to be confused with the 1975 movie by the same name. 

Though, it does seem like the movie, which is set in the Great Depression era, is also apt for now--when we are still struggling with the Great Recession's aftershocks:

"The law is a ass--a idiot"--continued

A follow-up to this earlier posting where I used the Charles Dickens quote in the context of a law suit that had worked its way up to the Supreme Court.  A quick recap of that case:

Ralph Fertig hardly resembles a terrorist, but the soft-spoken 79-year-old pacifist and human rights activist from Los Angeles might well qualify as one under the government's strong anti-terrorism law.
He is the lead plaintiff in a Supreme Court case to be heard next week that will test whether speaking out on behalf of an oppressed foreign minority -- represented by a group that's been deemed a terrorist organization by the U.S. -- can result in a long prison term.

So, what did the Supremes say?  Are we to be surprised that the uber-conservative Supreme Court supports the government's position?

The court ruled 6-3 Monday that the government may prohibit all forms of aid to designated terrorist groups, even if the support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.

Material support intended even for benign purposes can help a terrorist group in other ways, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his majority opinion.

Six to three!  even the retiring Stevens sided with the conservatives on the bench.  (Well, this is merely another piece of evidence that Stevens is not that much a "liberal" justice, as is often mistakenly presented.)

What did the three dissenting justices say?  Here is their spokesman, Justice Breyer:

I cannot agree with the Court’s conclusion that the Constitution permits the Government to prosecute the plaintiffs criminally for engaging in coordinated teaching and advocacy furthering the designated organizations' lawful political objectives. In my view, the Government has not met its burden of showing that an interpretation of the statute that would prohibit this speech- and association-related activity serves the Government's compelling interest in combating terrorism. And I would interpret the statute as normally placing activity of this kind outside its scope.

It is bloody f*ed up, I say. Again, as a reminder, what did Ralph Fertig do, and what does he want to achieve?

The Palestine Liberation Organization and the Irish Republican Army, two of history’s most notorious terrorist groups, have never appeared on the State Department’s List of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations. By the time the list was first compiled in 1997, both groups were deemed to be moving away from violence and toward a peaceful resolution of their grievances.
Ralph Fertig, president of the Humanitarian Law Project, wants to encourage a similar change within the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a violent separatist group in Turkey also known as the PKK (its Kurdish initials). But he worries that doing so will expose him to prosecution for providing “material support” to a terrorist organization, a crime Congress has defined so broadly that it includes a great deal of speech protected by the First Amendment. When it hears Fertig’s case next week, the Supreme Court will have a chance to correct that error.
Fertig, a civil rights lawyer and former administrative law judge, seeks, as the district court described it, to “provide training in the use of humanitarian and international law for the peaceful resolution of disputes, engage in political advocacy on behalf of the Kurds living in Turkey, and teach the PKK how to petition for relief before representative bodies like the United Nations.” Fertig says he also wants to “advocate on behalf of the rights of the Kurdish people and the PKK before the United Nations and the United States Congress.”

I am looking forward to Glenn Greenwald's and Dahlia Lithwick's analyses ...

BTW, does this mean that the 80-year old Ralph Fertig is looking at prison time?

Best lines of the day :)

On Monday night in Ohio, a 62-foot-tall statue of Jesus got hit by lightning and burned to the ground. (The adult bookstore across the street was unscathed.) 

Those were the opening lines from Gail Collins' column in the NY Times.
Pretty good.  Not Dickens, or Tolstoy, or Melville.  But, pretty good :)

Dickens' Scrooge was a caricature of Malthus. Awesome!

[It] is the height of arrogance for us in the rich world to downplay the importance of our own environmental footprint because future generations of poor people might one day have the temerity to get as rich and destructive as us. How dare we?

I could not have phrased this any better!  I am concerned--worried is more appropriate--about climate change, yes.  But, this whole idea of pointing the fingers at the rapidly growing poorer economies, while we in the rich countries continue to binge is simply not ok and, in fact, comes across as a twisted approach to keeping the poor, well, poor!!!

Anyway, that quote is from Fred Pearce's essay, (ht) where he adds:

Some green activists need to take a long hard look at themselves. We all like to think of ourselves as progressives. But Robert Malthus, the man who first warned 200 years ago that population growth would produce demographic armageddon, was in his time a favourite of capitalist mill owners. He opposed Victorian charities because he said they were only making matters worse for the poor, encouraging them to breed. He said the workhouses were too lenient. Progressives of the day hated him. Charles Dickens attacked him in several books: when Oliver Twist asked for more gruel in the workhouse, for instance, that was a satire on a newly introduced get-tough law on workhouses, known popularly as Malthus’s Law. In Hard Times, the headmaster obsessed with facts, Thomas Gradgrind, had a son called Malthus. In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was also widely seen at the time as a caricature of Malthus.

Malthus, it should be remembered, spent many years teaching British colonial administrators before they went out to run the empire. They adopted his ideas that famine and disease were the result of overbreeding, so the victims should be allowed to die. It was Malthusian thinking that led to the huge and unnecessary death toll in the Irish potato famine.

We must not follow the lure of Malthus, and blame the world’s poor for the environmental damaged caused overwhelmingly by us: the rich. The truth is that the population bomb is being defused round the world. But the consumption bomb is still primed and ever more dangerous.

Jail time for teaching geography? More on the law is a ass!

A couple of days ago I wrote about the case that was waiting for the Supremes--the retired pacifist 80-year old judge whom the government has tagged as a terrorist! 

Earlier this morning, there I was having my morning fresh brew and listening to NPR when I almost choked with the coffee going down the wrong way--all because I heard Nina Totenberg say that according to the Patriot Act teaching political geography is a crime.  I was sure it was my sleepiness that made he hear things that did not happen ....
So, I checked the transcript over at NPR, and it is true:

the way the U.S. government interprets this law is itself so complicated that the courts have said, so far, that an average person would have a hard time knowing for sure what is a crime. For example, the government says teaching geography is not giving expert advice, but teaching political geography is.

I will quote Dickens yet again: the law is a ass--a idiot!!!  The Patriot Act is a large herd (is that the word?) of asses, perhaps the largest collection in our legal system.  Oh wait, there is one that is even worse: the claim that waterboarding is not torture!

Great (economic) Expectations

What would you say if the economy grew at 5.3 percent? I bet you would say that is fantastic, right? Well, it all depends. It depends on the geographic area where this number is touted. In India, the 5.3 percent growth is described as "dismal":

The Indian economy grew by 5.3 per cent in the third quarter, the slowest quarterly growth this fiscal, pulled down by contraction in manufacturing and farm production even as some services showed robust expansion.

What a contrast to the downwardly revised GDP numbers for the US that shows a nastier recession than previously estimated! Anyway, the good thing in this case: India is a democratic society with elections a few weeks away. So, depending on the mood of the electorate, there might be a change in the government--but, not anything chaotic.

That is not the story with China, Russia, Venezuela, ... where the regimes have a contract with the people. The contract is that people give up their political and human rights, and the government in return gives them high economic returns. Thomas Friedman likened the Chinese contract to the movie "Speed"--that the regime will not run into problems as long as a rapid economic growth rate is maintained. Robert Skidelsky writes that:

Deepening economic recession is bound to catalyze political change. The Western democracies will survive with only modest changes. But strongmen who rely on the secret police and a controlled media to maintain their rule will be quaking in their shoes. Even Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who built his power on populist anti-Americanism, must be praying for the success of US President Barack Obama’s stimulus package to lift his falling oil revenues.

The big countries with the highest political risk are Russia and China. The legitimacy of their autocratic systems is almost entirely dependent on their success in delivering rapid economic growth. When growth falters, or goes into reverse, there is no one to blame but “the system.”

Igor Yurgens, one of Russia’s most creative political analysts, has been quick to draw the moral: “the social contract consisted of limiting civil rights in exchange for economic well-being. At the current moment, economic well-being is shrinking. Correspondingly, civil rights should expand. It’s just simple logic.” The rulers in Moscow and Beijing would do well to heed this warning.

Harvard's Dani Rodrik writes that we are on the verge of designing a Capitalism version 3.0.

When Chinese-style capitalism met American-style capitalism, with few safety valves in place, it gave rise to an explosive mix. There were no protective mechanisms to prevent a global liquidity glut from developing, and then, in combination with US regulatory failings, from producing a spectacular housing boom and crash. Nor were there any international roadblocks to prevent the crisis from spreading from its epicenter.

The lesson is not that capitalism is dead. It is that we need to reinvent it for a new century in which the forces of economic globalization are much more powerful than before. Just as Smith’s minimal capitalism was transformed into Keynes’ mixed economy, we need to contemplate a transition from the national version of the mixed economy to its global counterpart.

This means imagining a better balance between markets and their supporting institutions at the global level . Sometimes, this will require extending institutions outward from nation states and strengthening global governance. At other times, it will mean preventing markets from expanding beyond the reach of institutions that must remain national. The right approach will differ across country groupings and among issue areas.

Designing the next capitalism will not be easy. But we do have history on our side: capitalism’s saving grace is that it is almost infinitely malleable.

It looks like a fitting ending to this post will be from Dickens--not the opening lines from Great Expectations though. Instead, it is from A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way