Hit the road, (Union) Jack

For all the angry anti-colonialist that I am, even I can't believe that I am cheering Britain.  Cheering for Britain to exit the European Union.  Brexit, Brexit, Brexit!

This New York Times report sets up the context:

underlying all the dire predictions of doom — that staying or going will cause Britain to fall apart in various apocalyptic ways — is a deeper emotional issue that speaks to the country’s sense of self. Who does it think it is, and where does it think it belongs? Has it ever felt like it’s part of Europe?

It is a "deeper emotional issue" about whatever it is that provides value to people.  In the brief time that we get to live on this beautiful planet, we handle our existential crisis in so many different ways.  We try to answer the question of "who am I?" through many affiliations and ideas,  When people search for meaning, there are different institutions that provide them with comfort.  Even though I seem to be getting more convinced about my evidence-based atheistic framework, I do not go about criticizing what people believe in their respective faiths because I understand--and appreciate--how their religious beliefs help them with making meaning of their existence.  And especially about that great certainty that awaits all of us, irrespective of the beliefs.

The political identity also plays an important role. While I personally and intellectually recognize that the political identity is a freakish accident--being born in a country--it is very much like the accident of being born in a family that practices a particular religion, speaks a particular language, eats particular foods, listens to particular music, ... All these accidents together help with understanding our own place in the cosmos.

We err when we conclude that those institutions that give us various identities are irrelevant.  It is a huge mistake to force people into behaving as one.  It was along these lines that I blogged two years ago about Scotland's (failed) effort to break free; I wrote then:

We are so much wrapped up with the idea of globalization that we forget we are humans and we like, we love, identities.  Identities especially when there is a long and rich history of the peoples.  Economics--being materially well off--does matter to us, yes.  But, we seem to overlook that we do not live on bread alone.  There is a lot more than mere material satisfaction that makes us human.  Identity--religious, ethnic, linguistic, ... and often these are also intertwined.

The challenge, as I see it, is to figure out how to understand each other and engage in constructive cross-cultural relationships even while holding on to the identities and without making those identities as a metric for hierarchical comparisons.  The solution is not to erase the identities but to understand that we can create a much better future even as we tightly embrace whatever identity that we want to hold on to.

Stinking history!

(I have sent this across to the editor)

Higher education has been afire with discussions—substantive and rhetorical—about the dark histories of the people after whom buildings and colleges have been named. Locally, at the University of Oregon, two buildings, Deady and Dunn Halls, have made us rethink the biographies of the namesakes. The older the university, the more the possibility of controversial history. For instance, recently, Georgetown University has been in the news for how it sold its 227 slaves in 1838 in order to pay off the debts and sustain the financially struggling college.

We humans have been struggling forever, it seems, to figure out how to respond and react to the origins of wealth that is then used for honorable causes, like education. By and large, we seem to have operated along the lines of a Latin phrase that is almost two thousand years old—“Pecunia non olet” which translates to “money does not stink.”

The “stink” of the money is, thus, not new by any means. It is just that we conveniently opted not to talk about it. The recent discussions about Georgetown and Deady and Dunn have, thankfully, brought to the forefront those difficult and inconvenient issues.

Many of us from India have often pointed to Yale University as an example of “Pecunia non olet.” In order to understand this, we need to know more about the namesake. Elihu Yale was a Bostonian by birth, but was mostly raised in London because his father found the New England Puritanism too stifling. Growing up in England, Yale signed up for the promising and pioneering multinational corporation of the seventeenth century—the East India Company.

In 1670, Yale was assigned to work in one of the most profitable operations—in Madras, which is in southern India. (This city, where my parents and sister live, was renamed Chennai in 1996.) It was in Madras that Yale even got married—to his friend’s widow—and it was in the same city that his three-year old son was buried after an untimely death.

Yale’s personal, professional, and political lives were all made in India after his relatively humble economic beginnings. As one author put it, “Yale had come to India with the entry-level title of a company "writer" and an annual salary of £10—about half a shilling a day at a time when an English cloth suit cost around 15 shillings.” Yale proved that he knew a thing or two about the art of making a deal and he quickly made himself rich and powerful, while helping make the East India Company rich and powerful. Thus, from a lowly “writer” Yale quickly rose to become the governor of Madras. His aggressive methods also led to his downfall—he was fired from the post in 1692 after which he returned to England.

The two decades-plus in Madras had made Elihu Yale a wealthy man. As he got older, and because he did not have children to whom he could have willed the inheritance, Yale’s fortunes were sought by many. One of the beneficiaries of his largesse was the Collegiate School in Connecticut that was later renamed to Yale College in 1718, as a way of honoring Yale’s contributions.

Because of the connections to Madras that provided Yale University with its name, some of us from that part of the world joke that we deserve legacy admissions with free tuition. After all, the East India Company was more than a mere trading corporation, and a monopoly at that. In a matter of years, the company became a mighty political force with its own military forces with which it ruled a vast territory in the Subcontinent.

The land became the British Raj after the monarch assumed direct control. India, which accounted for more than a quarter of the entire world’s economy when these mercantile operations began more than three hundred years ago, was reduced to a poster-child for poverty, starvation, and beggars by the time the British government reluctantly granted independence in August 1947 to the newly created countries of India and Pakistan.

Thus, whether it is Yale or Georgetown or the United Kingdom of today, the question is the same one from the Roman days: Does money have a smell?

Perhaps the best approaches in these troubling issues will begin with an honest recognition of the patron’s past, especially regarding the wealth they accumulated. 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.

I so want Scotland to break free. Jack the Union (Jack)!

I have never been to Scotland, and I doubt I will ever get there.  Despite all my longing for travel to far off places that have their own long and rich histories, that part of the world has never fascinated me enough to day dream about a Scottish lass.

I suppose there is one connection to Scotland that I can think of.  My accent.  No, not because the English I speak is as hard to understand as one spoken with the full-throated Scottish accent.  Apparently my accent is not the stereotypical Indian accent that people expect to hear.  Can't blame them when anything about me is far from stereotypical ;)  Once, at the end of a conference session, as I was exiting the room, another guy who was about my age said that my accent intrigued him.  "Obviously you are from India, but you seem to have picked up a Scottish accent too.  Did you live in Scotland for a while?"  He should know about Scottish accents--he said he was from Scotland.

So, there, that qualifies me to blog about Scotland!

I am all in support of an independent Scotland for a very simple reason.  We are so much wrapped up with the idea of globalization that we forget we are humans and we like, we love, identities.  Identities especially when there is a long and rich history of the peoples.  Economics--being materially well off--does matter to us, yes.  But, we seem to overlook that we do not live on bread alone.  There is a lot more than mere material satisfaction that makes us human.  Identity--religious, ethnic, linguistic, ... and often these are also intertwined.

Scotland is a prime example.  There are more in the queue: Basque, Catalonia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Kashmir, Balochistan, ... it is a long list.  You cannot convince them to stay put in whatever political union they are by merely offering economic arguments:

the economic arguments against independence seem not to be working — and may even be backfiring. I think I know why. Telling a Scot, “You can’t do this — if you do, terrible things will happen to you,” has been a losing negotiating strategy since time immemorial. If you went into a Glasgow pub tonight and said to the average Glaswegian, “If you down that beer, you’ll get your head kicked in,” he would react by draining his glass to the dregs and telling the barman, “Same again.”

No, it is not some crank basing it on the stereotype of a Scot who walks around drunk with whiskey.  Ok, it is a crank, but an accomplished intellectual, Niall Ferguson, who knows a thing or two about Scotland, and yet is baffled with the momentum that the "Yes" campaign has picked up:

With days remaining before the Scottish electorate votes on whether or not to remain in the United Kingdom, the result is too close to call.
Born in Glasgow, but having spent most of my life in England and America, I am rather baffled, too

Another Scotland-born author, who also now lives in the US, writes that "the idea of nationalism has also been redefined by this vote":

Foreign nationals who are resident, however, can vote. If you live in Scotland, you are taken to be part of the project that is Scotland—you are taken to be Scottish. (This is a fairly well-established idea, culturally. When I offered work to anthologies of Scottish writing as an up-and-coming author, submissions were usually sought using a form of words along the lines of “if you are Scottish by birth, residence, or choice…”) This definition of national identity—I would hope not an unfamiliar one to citizens of the great melting pot—has been echoed in Scottish parliamentary efforts to produce a country which is now perceived by immigrants as being one of the more welcoming areas of the UK—which is, admittedly, an increasingly racist entity. So a “Yes” vote isn’t a return to the SNP’s beliefs during the 1930s—the beliefs they’d like us to forget—which involved disturbing yearnings for an Aryan future. There is a tiny wild-eyed fringe of people who will vote “Yes” on a kind of racist autopilot, but they are a minority.The “No” vote largely reflects a secure type of Scottishness under a British umbrella, a fear that now is not the time to do something risky—financially or otherwise—and a lack of trust in Scotland’s available politicians. There is an ugly minority of “No” voters who are wedded to the brand of Unionism familiar to Northern Ireland—the one that’s about Empire supremacy and a feeling that rampant savages may overwhelm the white Protestant barricades at any moment. The “Yes” voters—and I would be one of them if I could vote—may detect also traces of post-Empire low self-esteem in the “No” camp.

Add me to that list of people who would love to watch the old British Empire get another kick in its ass. Er, make that "arse." ;)

The contemporary irrelevance of a small island where the sun never set

I blog in the English language, while living in what was once a colony of Britain, after having immigrated from a country that was also a British colony.  All thanks to Britain having colonized huge territories.

It boggles my mind how Britain managed to achieve all these and more from the tiny outpost it is in the northern seas.

It is not merely the conquering of lands along, which, I still have a tough time believing was possible at all.  I mean, think about it.  From far, far away, crossing the waters, and then ruling over countries with populations  large enough to have easily overrun the rulers!  Yes, we can talk forever about the advantage of guns over swords, and the cunning divide-and-conquer approach, and whatever else.  But, at some point we have to assemble that jigsaw puzzle and wonder how that ever happened, yes?

It is not merely the conquering, and ruling over, distant lands.  Britain's empire achieved way more than that.  It has made millions like me think in the English language.  Thinking in a language has profound consequences:

‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’

If you cannot imagine the sheer geographic aspect of this, look up in a world map the locations of the UK and Sri Lanka, which was home to Coomaraswamy.  Think about a world before modern ships and planes and emails and telephones.  Britain's rule forever changed the histories of the lands colonized in the name of the crown.  That historical continuity was gone. For eternity. 

When I visit India, there is far less Tamil literature anymore when compared to my growing up years.  When the Tamil nativists worry that Tamil is slowly dying, their concerns are not baseless.  Students there seem to be a lot more familiar with the British and American histories, for instance, than about the Sangam literature or even the Chola Empire.

Now, look at the same world from the British perspective.  Since the end of the Second World War, Britain's influence on the rest of the world has been in a rapid decline.  The sun, which once never set in the empire, now rarely shines.  The colonies in the past wondered whatever happened to their power and influence; that same set of questions preoccupies their erstwhile masters.

Thus, I bet it hurt their sentiments a lot when Vladimir Putin's aide brushed aside the UK with a single statement about Britain's irrelevance in the ongoing Syrian drama:

“a small island … no one pays any attention to them”

The old teenage emotions on colonialism and anti-Britain have never gone away inside me and, hence, I was delighted with that statement.  I wish somebody a lot more acceptable had uttered that and not one of the minions of the maniacal Putin.

The Telegraph reminds us that this is merely the latest in a rich tradition of insults directed at Britain, including this one that I particularly like for the obvious reason:

A demon took a monkey to wife – the result by the Grace of God was the English.
Indian saying 

Thinking about Britain along these lines reminded me of the tshirt I bought two years ago when I was in Chennai.  The young entrepreneur was impressed with my fondness for the Tamil language despite my life that is anything but that of a traditional Tamil.  We continued to chat even after I bought the tshirt about which I have blogged before.  I told him about the "Veera Vanchi" stories that I grew up with.  As he got a sense of how much I hated the fact that the lands became somebody else's colony, and how history was disrupted, he brought out another tshirt and said, "this is the last piece I have, and I didn't want to sell it.  But, I think you will like it."

I bought that thsirt too. 

That young fellow's website for the tshirt advertising and sales exists no more.  I bet his business failed because there is no interest even among Tamils in Tamil Nadu for tshirts with Tamil words, and even Tamils in Tamil Nadu prefer English words and sentences instead on their tshirts--the very social problem that the entrepreneur wanted to address via his tshirts.

That is one mighty legacy for a small island that no one pays attention to.

ps: I located this translation of the verse in the tshirt ... sounds good enough to me

Like the men,
who failed to think beyond the next meal;
who find pleasure, in the faults of the rest;
whose souls toil in constant despair - mind
tangled in desparation and agony;
who wish ills to their neighbour;
who subject themselves to luck's mischief;
who live burdened with miseries,
and passed life as a burden
Born human,
did you wonder, if like those men,
I would also fall for fate's follies?

Mr. Modi goes to London? I hope he doesn't get to New Delhi!

India recently celebrated its 66th birthday as an independent country.  If we parse those years into periods of 20+ years, it certainly looks like this is the end of the one of those periods and the proverbial fork in the road for India.

After about twenty years--in 1966--Indira Gandhi assumed the leadership position and set the country further down the path of nationalization, and empowering Ramamirthams in the licence raj that, in turn, worsened corruption, which is another form of "rent-skeeing" in economics jargon.

After another twenty-plus years, with the death of Indira and later her son Rajiv, the country's economy and polity took a different turn more because of a necessity than as a choice.  In politics, there was no Nehru/Gandhi scion to continue to treat the country like some kind of a kingdom over which they had a right to rule, and in economics it was crisis time.  A crisis that put India on the verge of defaulting on its loans. The IMF bailed India out, and Manmohan Singh entered the scene.

In the twenty-plus years since, India's economic liberalization paid off, enough to trigger slogans like "India Shining" and the country was famously discussed by Thomas Friedman when he suddenly discovered that there were things happening in India.  Friedman proclaimed that the world was flat, and Wall Street beat the BRIC drums.

Now, yet again, India is looking at economic and political transitions.  The rupee has been falling, sometimes way too steeply, which would surely cause the new chief of the central bank to have quite some sleepless nights.  There is less investor confidence and, hence, foreign capital isn't flowing into the country even to the extent it previously did. All these in addition to the wide trade and budgetary deficits ought to make people in India worry, a lot.

The country is in a better position to counter a crisis, with $277 billion foreign reserves, enough to cover more than six months of imports, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That compares with less than two months of import coverage in 1991, according to a RBI report in August 2012. 

But, no serious policy discussions might be possible at this time because the country is only a few months away from general elections. Manmohan Singh may have hoisted the flag for a record tenth time at Red Fort to mark the Independence Day, but it is most likely that there will be a new prime minister the next time around.

Narendra Modi wants to be that new guy. He so wants it. Wants it really, really, bad. But, he comes with train-load of baggage. A literal train-load as well. That baggage is also why he has been, for a few years now, persona non grata in the United States. Modi knows all too well that he needs to convince India that he will be able to deal with the rest of the world. Especially the US, the UK, and the Euro Zone.  He has found an opening--Modi "has been invited to address MPs in the House of Commons."

Barry Gardiner, Labour MP for Brent North, has defended the invitation to the politician to address MPs on "the future of modern India".
Mr Gardiner said: "This is a man who has been re-elected three times as the chief minister of the state in India with which Britain does the most business. In fact, we do more business with Gujarat than with the rest of India put together.
"He is now the leader of India's official opposition party. He is obviously a key player in Indian politics, and as such he is somebody British politicians need to hear from."
Shailesh Vara, Conservative MP for Cambridgeshire North West, has also invited Mr Modi to speak to a group of MPs in Westminster.
"I am aware that Mr Modi is controversial, but I am also aware that over the years there have been three inquiries, and that none of them have found anything against him," he told the BBC's Asian Network.

Interesting how both the Conservative and Labour arguments are being made with the business calculus.  Politics makes strange bedfellows, indeed!

But, hey, the UK is not China. So, the opposition to Modi is loud as well.

As if all these aren't enough hassles for the country that seems to be in perpetual denial with its obsession over cricket and movies, the siblings--India and Pakistan--seem to be getting angrier at each other with every passing day, and bombs are bursting across the Line of Control at Kashmir:

Using heavy calibre guns, Indian Army retaliated strongly after Pakistani troops on Thursday resorted to unprovoked and indiscriminate firing with rocket and mortar shell attacks at LoC posts in Jammu &  Kashmir's Poonch sector that injured three Army jawans and a civilian.
This is the 11th ceasefire violation by Pakistan in the past five days, Army officials said.

With a new government in Pakistan, and the end of the current government in India, it might be the most opportune moment for various factions to pursue their own narrow self-interests.  It won't surprise me if the fragile situation brings the worst from the humans. I will be surprised, however, if the crisis in both countries become opportunities for wonderful things to bloom.

I hope to be surprised.

The world is one big melting curry pot!

When I was a graduate student, a professor, Hugh Evans, invited a few students--all of us foreigners--to his home for a meal. Hugh was an immigrant himself--from Wales.

(Once I made a big time error, when during some casual chat during a break as the class was getting coffee and snacks, I told a fellow graduate student that Hugh was English.  He pretended to get mad that I erred about English versus Welsh!)

Anyway, his wife was also an immigrant--from Japan. The time we were invited to their place, she had, for whatever reason, taken a break from academe and other than a little bit of consulting here and there, she was mostly home.

We got to talking and it didn't take much for her to know that I was from India.  She excitedly pointed out a dish there--beef curry.  A curry made not because of any international theme, but because, she clarified, making a good curry dish in Japan means that the person knows how to cook.  Making the curry dish from scratch was apparently a mark of expertise.

Now, if they had asked me to guess, I would have ventured that it was Hugh who cooked the curry dish, given the British connections.  It was quite a learning experience that day.

Soon after that, coincidentally, I discovered that a Japanese fast food joint in the LA area--I have forgotten that name--had on its menu a beef curry with white rice. I would never have guessed, way back in India, that curry would have such a vaulted status in Japan.

It was much later in life that I read in a short piece in the NY Times magazine that:

katsu curry dates to the Meiji era of the late 19th century, soon after the opening of Japan’s borders. Japanese trade with the West led to a national fascination with foreign flavors and textures — a kind of reverse-twist culinary version of the Japonisme that gripped Europe around the same time. (There was until recently a curry museum located in Yokohama, one of Japan’s most prominent ports.)

The world has become one big common kitchen.  A few years ago, the chicken tikka masala became the national dish of sorts in the UK, displacing the traditional fish-n-chips as the most ordered item.  Sushi is big time here in America.  There aren't many cities around the world without pizza places.

What a contrast to my grandmother's life!  She ate nothing but the traditional Tamil brahmin food her entire life, and her biggest excitement was with the "English vegetables," and cauliflower in particular.  Now, her grandchildren have an overflowing number of food choices from so many different cultures. 

As one who likes tasty food, and enjoys cooking my own variations, I cannot imagine the dull life that it would have been a couple of centuries ago.  But then, what we don't know doesn't hurt us, eh!

Maybe it is the sheer number of choices that we now have in our everyday life that is making us all stressed out and less happy.  Maybe if porridge is all one knew and had, then that porridge everyday would be something we would have excitedly looked forward to?

Nah!  :)

The miseducation of rioting European students

So, there are student protests in Britain and in Continental Europe as well.  Apparently more protests are planned.  It is because of fee increases, which were triggered by the spiraling budget problems, except perhaps in cash-rich Germany.

I am not sure whether these protests are any sensible and rational behavior by students, and seems more like anarchic outpourings, like what we used to see at the annual meetings of the WTO or the IMF. 

I mean, these students should go after their parents and grandparents who gave themselves rich retirement and other benefits, which otherwise could have gone into subsidizing education. 

The citizens of many European countries have for decades had a social contract with their governments: The people pay absurd levels of taxes and the government takes care of them from cradle to grave. Nationalized healthcare, Ample pensions. Hefty labor rights. Early retirement. Generous unemployment benefits. But can this contract survive the euro crisis? The heavy obligations imposed on European government budgets by the welfare system were already set to become even heavier as Europe's population ages. That means fewer working age and taxpaying Europeans will have to support a greater number of retired old timers. Now here comes the euro crisis, in which the stability of the national finances of European states have come into focus. That's going to put extra pressure on European governments to keep their debt and deficits under control.

Heather Mac Donald writes:

What a boon to anarchy—having your self-righteous tantrums treated as important and newsworthy.  I don’t know how to break out of the dilemma that all such preening displays of lawlessness pose.  Ideally, they would not command any breathless coverage from reporters who come running, cameras flashing, at the slightest hint of revolt against the “establishment.”  Pretending that such theatrics are significant is especially galling when the protesters are ignorant students who don’t understand anything about the world and certainly not about work and commerce.  Yet at some level one does need to know  what is going on.  Perhaps photos of riots against common-sense government reforms or good-faith police actions could be balanced by photos of businessmen struggling to balance their books while drowning in a sclerotic, state-sodden economy.

The commentary at Spiked is, as always, an interesting contrarian read:

The excited student protestors first imagined that smashing an office window was a victory over ‘Tory scum’, and then did their victory dance in front of the banks of cameras (there apparently being as many photographers as rioters present) without trying to conceal their identities. More than a few of them will soon be facing up to the consequences of their naivety as prosecutors study the film for evidence. Cynics have observed that it is a sad reflection on the miseducation of the nation’s youth that some seem to think you riot first, then put the masks on afterwards. Don’t these young adults know how to dress themselves? They also failed geography, attacking the wrong building - because they assumed that the Conservative HQ was still in Millbank Tower - before they realised it had moved down the road.
But if anything, Her Majesty’s finest in the Metropolitan Police looked even more out of their depth. Police commanders more used to looking tough in a press conference than fighting street battles appeared never to have thought that there might be any unpleasantness at a demonstration involving thousands of pissed-off young people. Nor did it seem to have occurred to them that Prime Minister Cameron’s Conservative Party might just become a target for the anger.

Will someone please shut Krugman up

Leave it to the British (and Slate, here in the US) for bold and punny headlines.  In this case, a bold headline at the Daily Telegraph that says it all!  Really, I have borrowed the title for this post from there ...

Even before I get to the content, I could not understand why there is no question mark at the end of the headline :)

About the content itself, it is a squabble over the Lib-Con government's recent decision in favor of massive budget reductions.  Cameron is doubling down on a gamble that such reductions during this feeble recovery will actually do Britain good.  Krugman blasts that in his column and, hence, the response from Daily Telegraph, which is typically right of the political/economic center.

I suppose we will know in five years whose policy decisions turn out to be the correct ones.

As far as I am concerned, I yet again wonder if Krugman is diluting his value by pontificating a tad too much.  Even if Krugman is always correct, it might become like the nerdy guy in the class who always puts his hand up and provides the correct answer while the rest of the class begin to hate him for being so smart :) 

So, from a PR perspective, if not for the sake of content, perhaps Professor Krugman ought to chill for a while?

UK preferred over the US?

Europe, after ages, has upstaged the US as the preferred campus destination for Indians. More than twice the number of desi students who applied to fly abroad for entry into colleges this year chose the UK over America.
Data on the fresh visas for entry into colleges in 2010 reveals that the US issued 32,000 student visas, a little more than half the number issued by the UK (57,500).

And, this was even before the Tory/LibDem alliance!

"This is about your freedom"

Who would have thought, eh, that the Liberal Democrats would ever become a part of the government ... and, then for this video--yes, on YouTube--from their leader, the deputy prime minister, saying that the government would restore the civil liberties... I mean, "restore", as Reason highlights: "acknowledges that the British government has taken a good amount of freedom in the first place, something governments are generally loathe to concede. "

Now, may we have such a government here in the US?  It is an ironical twist that the old colonizer is now being the champion for freedom, and the colony that threw out King George and said "give me liberty, or give me death" is now in the third term of the Bush presidency when it comes to various forms of infringements on liberty.

What "third term" you ask, furrowing your eyebrows ... how about a couple of examples, you say ... sure:
Here is one on Guantanamo:

Stymied by political opposition and focused on competing priorities, the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.

When the White House acknowledged last year that it would miss Mr. Obama’s initial January 2010 deadline for shutting the prison, it also declared that the detainees would eventually be moved to one in Illinois. 

Another one, which is a neat comparison of quotes from the speeches by Obama and Bush; ok, that comparison is not exclusively about liberty.  So, how about this one?

"English muffins" are now "Freedom Muffins" :)

The anti-British rhetoric is getting a tad nasty ... click here for a round-up ....

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
America's Strained Relationship With England
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

A riddle for you :)

After a string of well-received topical posers, Motley asked the following:
A pocket-hole that grew so large,
A giant couldn't eat it.
A cache of gold that never was,
But nonetheless depleted.

So, what is the answer to this riddle? 
Hint: think economics, think country, think government, and the answer is ....

"the National Debt, of course."

A pretty neat one; but then what else can one expect from America's most trusted news source! :)

Anyway, speaking of debt, the new coalition of the willing--the Tory/LibDem alliance--has begun that most difficult task of tackling the debt.  The graphic below (ht) shows how difficult the challenge is ...

Quote of the day, and more about the UK democratic experiment

We will be strong in the defence of freedom.  The Government believes the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused fundamental human rights and historic civil liberties

That is the preamble to the "civil liberties" section of the platform that the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition government. (ht) 
Simply awesome.  After the triangulating Tony Blair and the rather dull Gordon Brown, and their bizarre fetish to faithfully follow the Bush/Cheney approach to infringing on civil liberties, wow, what a refreshing set of sentences.  It simply gets better; here is a sampling:

• We will introduce a Freedom Bill.
• We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.
• We will outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
• We will extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.

Hey, can we get that government here, too?  Andrew Sullivan points out that the new "coalition" government is going exactly where President Obama with his huge majority wimped out:

A judge will investigate claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said tonight. ...
Hague's statement redeems a pledge that both he and his then Liberal Democrat opposite number, Ed Davey, made in opposition. Hague told the BBC: "We have said again in the coalition agreement that we want a judge-led inquiry. So will there be an inquiry of some form? Yes, both parties in the coalition said they wanted that. Now what we're working on is what form that should take."
The coalition agreement published today by the government does not explicitly call for a judicial inquiry; it simply states: "We will never condone the use of torture."

Glenn Greenwald, too, points out this contrast:

[Just] contrast all of this to what is taking place in the United States under Democratic Party rule.  We get -- from the current Government -- presidential assassination programs, detention with no charges, senseless demands for further reductions of core rights when arrested, ongoing secret prisons filled with abuse, military commissions, warrantless surveillance of emails, and presidential secrecy claims to block courts from reviewing claims of government crimes.  The Democratic-led Congress takes still new steps to block the closing of Guantanamo.  Democratic leaders push for biometric, national ID cards.  The most minimal surveillance safeguards are ignored.  Even the miniscule limits on eavesdropping powers are transgressed.  And from just this week:  "Millions of Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted and added to a national database, according to a bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday" (h/t Dan Gillmor). Can anyone even imagine for one second Barack Obama standing up and saying:  "My administration believes that the American state has become too authoritarian"?

It will be neat if a news person can get Dick Cheney's reaction to the coalition government's platform.  BTW, where is that war criminal man?  He has not been snarking in the news lately ...

This is a carbon-starved planet!

A colleague recently returned from a trip to the UK--he was there for the Darwin experience, given that this is the 200th anniversary of his birth, and 150th anniversary of his famous treatise. This colleague was thrilled that it was Darwin's poster everywhere he turned. Which is exactly the way it ought to be. More so in this century, which I am convinced is the century of biology, as much as the 20th century was of physics.

Meanwhile, here in the US? Well, watch this Congressional hearing--yes, at the US Congress--and see for yourself where Darwin might fit :-(

How do you like this nutcase's argument that we are right now carbon-starved!!!
Thanks to the DailyDish for the Youtube link.

The "Global War on Terror". NOT!

Last Thursday, it was the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband who gave the real speech--not president Bush.  

In that speech, which was on the final day of his visit to India, Secretary Miliband noted that:

Terrorism was not invented or started on 9/11. But since then, the notion of a "war on terror" has defined the terrain. The phrase had some merit: it captured the gravity of the threats we face, the need for solidarity amongst allies, and the need to respond with real urgency - and where necessary with force.

But for a couple of years now the British Government has used neither the idea nor the phrase "war on terror". The reason is that ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken. Historians will judge whether it has done more harm than good. But we need to move on to meet the challenges we face.

The issue is not whether we need to attack the use of terror at its roots, with all the tools available to us. We must. The question is how we best do so.

The notion of a war on terror gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama Bin Laden and the organization of Al Qaeda. In fact, as India has long known, the forces of violent extremism remain diverse. Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology.

The global threat from violent extremism has become more real because technology enables terrorists to connect more easily with each other, whether to plot and plan or to ape each other's tactics and techniques. But it is also more potent because Al Qaeda and its ilk seek to aggregate different local, regional and religious problems into a single complaint: the alleged oppression of Muslims around the world.

Yet the motivations and identities of terrorist groups - from Hizbollah to the Taleban, Tamil Tigers and Lashkar e Toiba - are disparate not singular. The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common, and the more we magnify the sense of threat. The trap to avoid is inadvertently sustaining Al Qaida's propaganda - their claim that disparate grievances add up to a unified complaint. We should expose their claim to a compelling and overarching explanation and narrative as the lie that it is.

Recession watch: Now Japan, too

The G20 summit has ended, which is why the planet feels cooler all of a sudden--after all that hot air :-) ha ha. You know what was even funnier? This news report:

US President George W. Bush emerged from the G20 summit Saturday satisfied with having preserved the principles of free market economics, while leaving his successor wide room for maneuver

Excuse me, there is a "free market"? As Johnny Carson used to say, "I did not know that!" Would the "free market" apply to the 700 billion dollar bailout of private corporations? The proposed 25 billion dollar bailout of the Big3? The massive agriculture subsidies? I will stop here .... no time to list 'em all :-(

Anyway, the news is that Japan has caught the recession bug:

Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, has officially slipped into recession, hurt by weak export growth and steep cuts in corporate spending amid the worsening global slowdown.
Japan’s gross domestic product shrank at an annual rate of 0.4 percent from July to September after declining a revised 3.7 percent in the previous quarter, the government said Monday. It was the first time since 2001 that Japan’s economy has contracted for two consecutive quarters, the definition of a recession

The UK got into that even earlier:

The economy shrank for the first time in 16 years between July and September, confirming that the UK is on the brink of recession. The UK will be classed as being in recession if the economy slows in the fourth quarter as well.
On Wednesday, the Bank of England said the UK has probably entered a recession in the middle of 2008 and is likely to continue to contract well into 2009

In between Japan and the UK, in terms of the largest economies, are Germany and China. So, what is the news from them? Thanks for asking! According to the FT:

Germany has officially plunged into recession with economic activity contracting much faster than expected in the third -quarter, intensifying fears about the depth and duration of continental Europe's downturn.
Gross domestic product in Europe's largest economy fell by 0.5 per cent in the three months to September, extending a 0.4 per cent drop in the previous quarter, the German statistical office reported.

You are probably thinking, hey, Germany is the big dog in Europe. So, does it mean that that entire part of the world is in recession? Ah, the power of critical thinking! Doggone it, you are right, says AFP:

The 15-nation eurozone fell into recession for the first time ever, EU data showed on Friday, with Europe's economic powerhouse Germany among the hardest hit.
Gross domestic product in the economies using the eurozone fell by 0.2 percent in the third quarter after a similar drop in the second quarter, according to the Eurostat figures.

Everybody says the same thing: the worst is yet to come. And I am, like, you got to be kidding me! It was almost humorous to read in the following in the Guardian: "But while output is expected to contract next year, the US economy is predicted to lead the way towards recovery." Wait a minute; the US predicted to lead the recovery? How? By printing a few gazillion dollar bills?I don't get this.

And, you are meanwhile thinking, hey, what about China? You know, I have a pet theory. Let me present it:

For many years now, China's economy has grown at double-digit rates. However, in order to keep inflation under check, among other reasons, the government made sure that a significant surplus created was saved. And it saved that in the US and other places.

This kind of savings created the glut that Bernanke gushed about. Soon, we came up with dizzying schemes to exhaust the savings.

Meanwhile, China's prosperity came from ravaging the environment.

So, here is a thought experiment: we would all have been better off if only China's economy had not grown by leaps and bounds. If, for instance, their average growth rates had only been about six percent, then all the gains from the exports would have accrued pretty much to the Chinese.

No "additional" surpluses that would have resulted in China-dollars that made Americans consume like crazy.

That much of a slower Chinese growth would have also resulted in a significantly lesser environmental impacts.

Which means, in the crisis we have now, we have screwed up the environment for nothing. It is not even as if we have something to show for everything from the Three Gorges Dam to polluted skies to .....

I like my framework here. Not that I am blaming the Chinese for everything that has gone wrong. But, I do wonder about the wisdom in that relentless pursuit of economic growth that merely exported its natural resources as US Treasury notes!!!

The dollar's sudden rise

I am now addicted to this topic, I think. Somebody get me out of this--hey, any sex scandals anywhere? :-)
Megan McArdle has some interesting observations:

The yen has been strengthening fast against the dollar and other currencies, which is very bad news for Japanese exporters.

It's also wrecking the carry trade. That's when you borrow at low interest rates in one place just to lend at higher rates somewhere else. For a long time, Japan has been a popular place to do this, for two reasons: the longtime recession has kept its interest rates low, and the government's committment to keep the currency cheap in order to subsidize exports has seemed like a shelter against a sharp currency move that would force borrowers to repay the loan in suddenly-more-expensive yen. Now that the yen is rising seemingly uncontrollably, investors are racing to unwind their positions.

The sharp movements in the currency market are somewhat surprising, particularly the euro's decline. Not very long ago, we were asking whether the euro would replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency; not (sic) it's the "sick man of Europe", as confidence in banks and businesses has been badly shaken.

Now, it seems like a race between the British Pound and the Euro on which will sink faster. So far, the Pound is winning, as this Bloomberg report shows!

The pound fell against all 16 of its most-traded counterparts, dropping l.3 percent to $1.5420 as of 11:43 a.m. in London, from $1.5897 last week, when it had its biggest intraday decline in at least 37 years. Against the euro, the currency slipped to 80.73 pence, from 79.31. It traded at a record low of 81.96 pence per euro on Oct. 24.

The Euro is keeping pace with the Pound:

Against the US dollar, the European currency traded down during early deals on Monday. At 5:10 am ET, the euro- dollar pair declined to 1.2336, compared to Friday's closing value of 1.2605. This set the lowest point for the pair since April 28, 2006. The pair is currently trading at 1.2443, with 1.21seen as the next target level.

British MPs don't belive America's leaders :-(

It is one thing if some loony dictator like Mugabe or Kim Jong-il tells the US leaders to do what Dick Cheney famously told Senator Leahy.
But when the British start complaining, particularly in formal reports, that they can't trust the US leaders, we are in for some serious trouble.

Here is an excerpt from the Guardian's report:
In a damning criticism of US integrity, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said ministers should no longer take at face value statements from senior politicians, including George Bush, that America does not resort to torture in the light of the CIA admitting it used 'waterboarding'. ....
Today's committee report said there were 'serious implications' of the striking inconsistencies between British ministers continuing to believe the Bush administration when it denies using torture. 'The UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future,' said the committee. 'We also recommend that the government should immediately carry out an exhaustive analysis of current US interrogation techniques on the basis of such information as is publicly available or which can be supplied by the US.'
It also urges the government to press the US authorities for information on whether any American military flights landing in the UK were part of the 'rendition circuit', even if they did not have detainees on board at the time.

Biofuels: one of the worst moves ever?

When humans look back at 2008 from, say, 2058, I think they will see the fuel and biofuel issues as absolutely significant. Thanks to the dramatic increase in food prices, among other reasons, the British government has decided to slow down the biofuel drive. Here is what their transport secretary had to say:
"I believe it is right to adopt a more cautious approach until the evidence is clearer about the wider environmental and social effects of biofuels. We also need to allow time for more sustainable biofuel technologies to emerge."

Later on, in the same report from the Guardian, is an example of horrible use of metaphors. Why didn't the editor axe this?
Mark Avery of the RSPB said: "We all know what someone who finds themselves in a hole should do. This review seems to be saying that it's OK to keep digging, as long as we dig with a little less enthusiasm. The review's analysis is based on rational argument but its conclusion comes with a large dollop of politics mixed in."