I can't afford to eat out. Nor go to movies. Yet, I travel?

My neighbors enjoyed the Pink Martini concert and were relating their experiences when they asked me whether I had been to a live performance by that group.

I told them I have not.

"You know their music, right?"

Yes, I know about the group and the music they make. I love it. A few years ago, when a cousin got married and relocated to New England, my gift to her included a Pink Martini CD.

"Oh, I love their music" I told them.  "My favorites are when they do their covers of older songs.  And I love their Hang on little tomato."

Seeing my neighbors' expressions, I clarified: "I just cannot afford the tickets for a live performance."

"Yes, you can" replied my neighbor.

Honestly, I cannot afford.

It is the same reason I cannot afford to eat out either.  I feel terribly guilty if ever I spend money eating out.  And, as much as I love good movies, it has been a long, long time since I watched a newly released one--heck, even the two-dollar movies are not affordable anymore.

Yet, it is the same me who spends his fortunes on travel.  Like the recent budget-busting Costa Rica trip, for instance. Or the visit to India that is only a hundred days away.

It is all about priorities.

Travel to, and in, a strange place is worth immensely more than the money I spend on it.  The visit to spend a few days with parents has returns that far exceed the cost of the air ticket.

We differ in our interests and priorities.

"I save the pennies and when they add up to get myself somewhere far away, I take off" I told another neighbor who is still sitting on a travel prize she and her husband won more than a year ago.  That couple don't have any burning desire to explore another part of the world.  "Can I buy that prize from you for something like 50 cents on the dollar?" I joked with them.

George Orwell wrote about priorities and expenses in the context of cigarettes and books.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine, a newspaper editor, was firewatching with some factory workers. They fell to talking about his newspaper, which most of them read and approved of, but when he asked them what they thought of the literary section, the answer he got was: “You don't suppose we read that stuff, do you? Why, half the time you're talking about books that cost twelve and sixpence! Chaps like us couldn't spend twelve and sixpence on a book.” These, he said, were men who thought nothing of spending several pounds on a day trip to Blackpool.

With that introduction, Orwell goes on to compare his personal costs of reading against the spending on cigarettes.

Orwell concludes that wonderful essay with:

if my estimate is anywhere near right, it is not a proud record for a country which is nearly 100 per cent literate and where the ordinary man spends more on cigarettes than an Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood. And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

It is all about priorities, and not necessarily because something is too expensive.

It is the same thought I have when I see see students, who complain about the cost of college, holding in their hands five-dollar Starbucks concoctions that I simply cannot afford.

It is priorities that I think about when society prefers to spend gazillions on entertainment while criticizing education as prohibitively expensive.

It is my own set of priorities when I admit that I cannot afford to watch Pink Martini at a concert--despite the fact that I love their music :(

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

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

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

That is the essence of the problem.

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

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

What would George Orwell say about Facebook?

Exactly one word, and ever fewer and fewer words ... ending up with "like" .... (source)

If it is not "war" in Libya, then ...

In an op-ed piece in the NY Times, though not about the Libya war itself, a University of Chicago law professor and "a longtime supporter and colleague of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago, as well as an informal adviser to his 2008 campaign" writes about his disappointment with the candidate who promised transparency who then has morphed into "our untransparent president":

The record of the Obama administration on this fundamental issue of American democracy has surely fallen short of expectations. This is a lesson in “trust us.” Those in power are always certain that they themselves will act reasonably, and they resist limits on their own discretion. The problem is, “trust us” is no way to run a self-governing society.

In making criminals out of whistleblowers, Obama worse than Nixon?

Earlier this morning, I was on the ready-set-go mode to head to campus when I was reminded that I fell asleep, with the bedside light on, half-way through Jane Meyer's essay in the New Yorker, on the NSA whistle-blowers.  So, grabbed the magazine and sat down on the chair ... and was absolutely depressed even before I reached the following final sentences in the essay:

“The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”

President Obama has even managed to make the Bush/Cheney and even the Nixon folks look better:

the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. ...
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a conservative political scientist at the Hudson Institute, who, in his book “Necessary Secrets” (2010), argues for more stringent protection of classified information, says, “Ironically, Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon.”

Hey, that is probably the kind of changes Senator Obama promised, eh! 

What has President Obama managed to achieve through his relentless pursuit of whistle-blowers?  Meyer quotes Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin:  "We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state."

How does this bipartisanship manifest itself?  Here is an example: Glenn Greenwald notes that the Patriot Act got a four-year renewal, without reforms, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote

So when they were out of power, the Democrats reviled the Patriot Act and constantly complained about fear-mongering tactics and exploitation of the Terrorist threat being used to stifle civil liberties and privacy concerns.  Now that they're in power and a Democratic administration is arguing for extension of the Patriot Act, they use fear-mongering tactics and exploitation of the Terrorist threat to stifle civil liberties and privacy concerns ("If somebody wants to take on their shoulders not having provisions in place which are necessary to protect the United States at this time, that's a big, big weight to bear," warned Feinstein).  And they're joined in those efforts by the vast majority of the GOP caucus. 

Chronologically we might be moving far away from 1984, but politically, we are getting closer and closer to lining up to admit that thoughtcrime is death and to then proudly proclaim "I love Big Brother."

Writing, in 800 words or less

Paul Krugman writes:

If I had my way, we’d require students to write 800-word essays, just for writing and reasoning practice.

I have been doing this for years now.  It forces students to develop well-focused arguments.  There is also one other huge benefit: it minimizes the possibility of Bullshit.  (Come to think of it, we need to impose such word restrictions whenever faculty speak or write anywhere, anytime!  editor: does that include you? Awshutup!)

Anyway, back to Krugman:

It’s really, really hard to say something meaningful in a limited space. And yet, that constraint has its virtues: it forces you to be concise, to figure out what you really need to say and skip the rest, to find turns of phrase that are shorter and usually plainer. And my experience is that the process of doing all that almost always makes the thing read better.

Yep.  While my columns do not have the importance or reach that Krugman's have, I am always aiming for a length of between 675 and 725 words.  Unless the newspaper restricts me to 500 words or less.

Fast food, "buy local", and insanity

Every once in a rare while, a student, like "M", walks over to my office, slowly sits on the chair and says something like "I am surprised you had that article for us to read."  The explanation they have is that their expectation and understanding that I walk around with a certain political ideology does not match the readings I have for the class.

I suppose it is because of two streaks in me--the "libertarian" within the left-of-center framework, and the preference for clarity and truth irrespective of ideology!  I think these are the same reasons why I have always been drawn to George Orwell, and in contemporary times, to Christopher Hitchens.  Orwell's sympathies for the left-of-center did not prevent him from writing the powerfully influential 1984 and Animal Farm, which were/are both highly critical of socialism and the Soviet Union, when it was not at all fashionable for intellectuals to be anti-socialism.  There was then only only one breed of intellectuals--leftists.  All others were deemed not only as not being intellectual, but as anti-intellectuals.  (Such a world still exists at my place of work which has quite a few self-professed socialist colleagues!)

I am sure that Orwell would not like to be associated with fans like me, though :)

One of the "contrarian" readings that throws off students is anything that critiques the fashionable "buy local" movement.  In the first place, it irritates me that they could not even employ proper grammar--it ought to be "buy locally" and not "buy local"--if the latter, then "local" is a product that we can purchase as much as we can say "buy tomatoes."  It ought to be "buy locally" because, well, brush up on the verb/adverb aspects of English grammar!

"Locavore" which gained enough popularity to even sneak into the dictionary, makes us focus on the geography--local--as opposed to the larger issues of health and well being.  Locavore does not make any economic sense:

Local food is generally more expensive than non-local food of the same quality. If that were not so, there would be no need to exhort people to "buy local." However, we are told that spending a dollar for a locally produced tomato keeps the dollar circulating locally, stimulating the local economy. But, if local and non-local foods are of the same quality, but local goods are more expensive, then buying local food is like burning dollar bills—dollar bills that could have been put to more productive use. The community does not benefit when we pay more for a local tomato instead of an identical non-local tomato because the savings realized from buying non-local tomatoes could have been used to purchase other things. 

 The "rootedness" of the locavore movement is remarkably stupid when you compare it against the history of humans on this planet:

Our agrarian ancestors may well have been more connected to the land, but they died younger, spent little time in education due to the need for human labour and rarely travelled far from their place of birth. They also made appallingly inefficient use of the land and natural resources.

But, how about locavores as an environmental movement?

After an extensive literature review, other researchers have concluded that "it is currently impossible to state categorically whether or not local food systems emit fewer [greenhouse gasses] than non-local food systems."8 Minimizing the use of natural resources entails producing food in the least-cost location, which will not typically be local.

And other effects of closing off:

The idea that localism will bring resilience is also seriously mistaken. An insular community which does not trade regionally or internationally is at risk from the most basic threats, such as crop failure due to local extremes of weather. The evidence for this is all too apparent in the developing world. In a global community, local crop failure is not a life-or-death issue since food can be temporarily imported in exchange for other goods or services. During times of plenty, excess food can be exported and the long-term surplus and deficit balanced out. The community is buffered against extremes of weather through international trade. While an isolated village has to depend on its own grain store to smooth out times of feast and famine, a trading nation has the entire world as its grain store.

I suppose locavores will be great fans of North Korea then :)

In urban planning, we often reminded ourselves that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  I am a fellow traveler when it comes to the feel good intentions of localism.  When I travel, I try--as much as possible--to eat local foods.  I do enjoy the fresh-off-the-garden tomato, whenever a neighbor gives me a few.  But, that is it.

How much such insanity exists is best illustrated in this following Daily Show clip.  While it is not about localism, it is about the idiocy that results from wanting to do the right thing but in the most illogical ways

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
San Francisco's Happy Meal Ban
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

Cartoons of the day: Google and privacy

But, of course, it is not only Google:

Many, many, big brothers!

Big brother is watching you!

The commentary in text is here

Rewriting history, in a capitalist manner :)

The Soviets airbrushing photos, or Winston Smith in 1984 being one of the employees to constantly re-write history are, well, old ...
Here is a new twist to how to rewrite the past:
A few days ago, Roy Halladay of the Florida Marlins pitched a perfect game.  Suppose you want to claim that you were there at the ballpark, and you witnessed that rare event ... but you weren't actually there.  Yet, you want a piece of real evidence that you can use ... hurry up; don't let that opportunity slip past :)

Here's a chance to buy tickets to a guaranteed perfect game -- the one Roy Halladay already threw.
The Florida Marlins will begin selling on Tuesday unused tickets to the game in which the Philadelphia Phillies ace pitched the 20th perfect game in major league history, a 1-0 victory over the Marlins on Saturday.
All tickets will be regularly priced at "face value" and on sale both online and through the Marlins' box office.

ht

Are "1984" and "Animal Farm" read anymore?

Many moons ago, when I felt like I was at ideological crossroads, knowing not whether I should hang a left, it was George Orwell who guided me along through Animal Farm and 1984 ... granted, it has been years since I read them, and would flunk a test on those two books because I have lost track of the nitty gritty details.  (Editor: you are a faculty with lots of "free" time!  What prevents you from reading them now?)

Then, later on, as a faculty I have every once in a while quoted from Orwell's essay on Politics and the English Language, whenever I felt the urge to really "lecture" about writing.  But, any time I bring up Orwell in a classroom environment, that name does not seem familiar to students.  And when I ask about 1984 and Animal Farm, well, no luck there either.

In fact, it is the same story with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Crime and Punishment, ....

I am beginning to think that there is something odd going on.  I mean, if the purpose behind requiring students to read works in literature is to help them understand many aspects of society, so that they can then be responsible and productive citizens, shouldn't Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451, for instance, be books that college students ought to be familiar with?  In fact, shouldn't these be required readings at the high school level?  So, what do students then read in literature classes anymore, if books like the ones I am ranting about are no longer in the canon?  Spiderman? :P)

Or, are my expectations inconsistent with ground-level reality, whatever that might be?  But then as a university faculty, well, am I not supposedly living in that ground-level reality?  There is something seriously wrong here ....

On intellectuals ....

I detect today a certain public scepticism when intellectuals stand up to preach to us, a growing tendency among ordinary people to dispute the right of academics, writers and philosophers, eminent though they may be, to tell us how to behave and conduct our affairs.  The belief seems to be spreading that intellectuals are no wiser as mentors, or worthier as exemplars, than the witch dotctors or priests of old.  I share that scepticism. A dozen people picked at random on the street are at least as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia. But I would go further. One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so man millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is--beware intellectuals.  Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.  ... For intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behaviour.  Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value.  That is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action. Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas

Paul Johnson in Intellectuals, published way back in 1988.

My favorite intellectual, (whom the conservative Johnson does not critique) ....?

George Orwell, of course :)

Why?  Because from the little bit of reading that I have done, Orwell came across as essentially a left-of-center guy who did not care for ideological labels.  And he was highly suspicious of conformity.

Christopher Hitchens says it best:

My worry has more to do with another thing Orwell warned about—the willingness of people to police themselves, and to believe anything that they're told. Especially the willingness of intellectuals and academics to become worshipers of whomever is in power, or passers-on of whatever the reigning idea is. Conformity, in other words. That will always carry on being a threat. People don't remember Orwell for his opposition to conformity as well as they should.

I don't know if I have always had that intense suspicion of conformity, which was then reinforced by reading Orwell, or if watching 1984 at the British Council in Madras was the real trigger.  In any case, Orwell is my go-to intellectual. 

Quote of the day (re. the Polanski trial)

In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.

If you also found it awesome, then you will be happy to know that it was George Orwell who wrote that.  (via Nick Gillespie)

Megan McArdle provides a link to excerpts from the transcripts of the trial.  What Polanski did was brutal. Just brutal.  It is a shame that he has been free for so long.

Take things seriously. And tell the truth.

A long time ago, like many of my contemporaries, I too read Nineteen Eighty-Four while in high school. I don't think I quite understood the phenomenally profound importance of what George Orwell was conveying there. Later I watched a movie version of it at the British Council in Madras (yes, it was Madras then!) The visualization of the message, and the fact that I was older, drove home the message a lot more this time.

Animal Farm plus 1984 is one lethal combination of ideas and arguments. One of my other favorites is his essay on the usage of the English language. Orwell had a pretty simple bottom line: use simple words and simple sentences. Took me a long time to understand that message and practice it :-)

In a recent essay in the New Statesman, I liked the following comments:

It is interesting that Orwell did not go to university. He went to Eton, but loafed around there and, afterwards, went off to Burma as a police officer. University is where you sometimes get loaded up with fancy terms whose meaning you’re not quite sure of. Orwell was an intellectual and a highbrow who thought Joyce, Eliot and Lawrence were the greatest writers of his age, but he never uses fancy terms.

You could say that Orwell was not essentially a literary critic, or that he was the only kind of literary critic worth reading. He was most interested in the way that literature intersects with life, with the world, with groups of actual people. Some of his more enjoyable essays deal with things that a lot of people read and consume – postcards, detective fiction, “good bad books” (and poetry) – simply because a lot of people consume them.

Postwar intellectuals would celebrate (or bemoan) the “rise of mass culture”. Orwell never saw it as a novel phenomenon. He was one of the first critics to take popular culture seriously because he believed it had always been around and simply wanted attention. These essays are part of a deeply democratic commitment to culture in general and reading in particular.

...

He was not, as Lionel Trilling once pointed out, a genius; he was not mysterious; he had served in Burma, washed dishes in a Parisian hotel, and fought for a few months in Spain, but this hardly added up to a life of adventure; for the most part he lived in London and reviewed books. So odd, in fact, has the success of Orwell seemed to some that there is even a book, George Orwell: the Politics of Literary Reputation, devoted to getting to the bottom of it.

When you return to his essays of the 1940s, the mystery evaporates. You would probably not be able to write this way now, even if you learned the craft: the voice would seem put-on, after Orwell. But there is nothing put-on about it here, and it seems to speak, despite the specificity of the issues discussed, directly to the present. In Orwell’s clear, strong voice we hear a warning. Because we, too, live in a time when truth is disappearing from the world, and doing so in just the way Orwell worried it would: through language. We move through the world by naming things in it, and we explain the world through sentences and stories. The lesson of these essays is clear: Look around you.

Describe what you see as an ordinary observer – for you are one, you know – would see them. Take things seriously.

And tell the truth. Tell the truth.

Thanks to A&L Daily for the link.