Garden - March 14, 2012

Garden - March 14, 2012, a set on Flickr.

Slow progress and race against Spring.

The Incredible Volkswagen Transparent Factory

The decline of Goldman Sachs

In Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs (NYT), Greg Smith writes:

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.
...
...
Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.
....
I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.
...
People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer. 

The God Botherers

Hunter dissects one such on dailykos. (a god-botherer is "defined as someone who has created a nice little God in their own image, for apparent exclusive use as cudgel for their perceived enemies").

Is Gandhi in Hell?

http://www.atone.me/?p=2509

Life as a dhimmi - 11

http://criticalppp.com/archives/73624

This has been going on, in pre- British India, in British India, and now in Pakistan.

The joke is on the Libertarians

In their divorced-from-the-real-world philosophy,  Libertarians hold as the primary principle the sacrosanctness of property rights.  In real life, though, when the billionaire Koch brothers assert their ownership of the libertarian think-tank, the Cato Institute, what happens?  ( The Koch brothers' goal is said to be "to align the institute more closely with the Republican Party… to transform Cato into an “ammo” shop, manufacturing whatever ordnance it takes stop President Obama from getting re-elected next November…")

Here, Prof DeLong tells us, "No libertarians in foxholes":

The Kochs' point of view is simple: since William Niskanen's death the shareholders' agreement says that they own a majority of the shares of Cato, and it is their property with which they can do as they wish. It is hard to see how any true libertarian could possibly disagree, and seek to do anything other than to vindicate the Kochs' liberty interest in what is their property. But…

I count fifteen strongly opposed to the Kochtopus, four of much lesser weight--Erick Erickson, Thomas DiLorenzo, Daniel Foster, and Robert Wenzel--climbing on the gravy train, and three--Arnold Kling, Walter Olson, and Jonah Goldberg--damning themselves to eternally chase the banners in the antechamber of hell as a result of their refusal to take sides.

From my perspective, of course, the delicious irony is that the arguments against the Kochtopus--powerful and convincing arguments--are not libertarian but rather Burkean, communitarian, and social democratic ones, and thus arguments that no true libertarian could ever possibly make...

 

Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-are-wrong/
Via realclimate.org, an excellent essay by William D. Nordhaus.

A1 Beta Casein

There are rumors of the danger of cow's milk.  Further googling reveals the culprit is possibly one of the versions of milk proteins -  A1 beta casein - which is produced in varying amounts by different breeds of cows.  (The safe form supposedly is A2 beta casein.)  A digestion product of A1 beta casein (and not A2) is beta casomorphin, BCM7, which is an opioid and an oxidant that can damage low density lipoproteins (LDL), and "opioids have an effect on immune function which is a possible reason why A1 beta casein and BCM7 are so closely associated with autoimmune disorders."   (We are also told that "BCM7 is too large to be absorbed through a healthy intestinal lining", so you have to apparently have some intestinal problem for BCM7 to act.)

A1 Beta Casein: The Devil in Your Milk.

A2 Dairy Products of Australia Beta Casein web-site.

The first link claims:

A1 beta casein is only produced by cattle belonging to the Bos taurus subspecies which predominately exist in the western hemisphere. The Guernsey breed tends to produce about 10% of their beta casein as A1, the Jersey breed tends to produce about 35%, and the Ayrshire, Holstein, and Freisian breeds tend to produce 50% or more. Goats don’t produce A1 beta casein which makes their milk and the dairy products derived from it an excellent alternative.

 Milk from Indian cows may be lacking A1 Beta Casein.  The second link has a scientific citation

" For instance, a recent study on the beta-casein allele frequency in indigenous Indian cattle (Bos indicus) and river buffalo breeds (618 animals of 15 zebu cattle breeds and 231 buffaloes of 8 river buffalo breeds) reported 99 to 100% presence of the A2/A2 genotype in its indigenous cow (0.987) and buffalo (1.00) breeds (11). The same study also reported an absence of the A1/A1 genotype, thus in Indigenous Indian cow and buffalo breeds, nearly all animals are homozygous for the A2 beta-casein allele. 

While who knows what is true, if it is true, look at the possible implications.  In India, a milk-heavy diet will not contribute to heart disease, Type-1 diabetes, autism and schizophrenia (in all of which A1 beta casein is supposedly implicated).  So the vegetarian Indian milk-heavy diet might cross over to the US of A, where it can no longer work.

Or, assuming that at some point, (e.g, the China Study), milk and specifically casein, was implicated in various diseases studied in the West, but the A1/A2 beta casein difference was not noted, milk alarmism might wrongly influence diets in India.

Also think about what a big mistake trying to cross European and Indian cattle would be for India, unless the European cattle were screened for A1 beta casein.

From the A2 Dairy Products site: (DM-1 = Type 1 diabetes mellitus)

 Figure 2: Correlation of A1 beta-casein per capita (excluding cheese) in grams/day and new cases of DM-1 in 0 to 14-year olds between 1990-94 (r=0.92, 95% CI: 0.72-0.97) (p<0.0001). Dotted lines are the 95% confidence limits of the regression line [adapted from reference (13)].

PS: Here is the counter-argument: (PDF)

Scientific Report of the European Food Safety Authority (2009).

Based on the present review of available scientific literature, a cause-effect relationship between the oral intake of BCM7 or related peptides and aetiology or course of any suggested non-communicable diseases cannot be established. Consequently, a formal EFSA risk assessment of food-derived peptides is not recommended.

1970s view of privacy

Netflix carries the TV classic from the 70s, The Rockford Files, about the Los Angeles-based private investigator, Jim Rockford.   The final episode of season 4, "The House on Willis Avenue" has a plot that is perhaps rapidly becoming incomprehensible to us (alert: possible spoiler ahead).

Garden - March 3, 2012

Garden - March 3, 2012, a set on Flickr.

This is the baseline garden at the beginning of spring. Let's see if I can make anything of it. :)

Mahatma Gandhi coerced into being a posthumous Mormon

The shameless Mormon Church has baptised Mahatma Gandhi as a Mormon after his death.
As per Huffington Post:

Mahatma Gandhi, who employed nonviolent civil disobedience to lead India to independence after more than a century of British rule, was posthumously baptized by proxy by a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to information provided to The Huffington Post.

Helen Radkey, a former Mormon who has until now has focused on researching incidents of proxy baptisms being proposed for or performed on dead Jews, discovered the Gandhi records on February 16 in a genealogical database restricted to Mormons. She was prompted to search for his name after seeing a statement by a Nevada-based Hindu activist, Rajan Zed, who expressed concern the practice might be performed in the name of many Hindus.

A screen shot of the database page sent to HuffPost by Radkey shows a proxy baptism for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was completed in a Salt Lake City Temple on March 27, 1996. The record has since been removed and Radkey said a subsequent search came up with "Unknown Name."

TOI:

Suhag Shukla of Washington-based Hindu America Foundation said, "The proxy baptism of Gandhi is deeply offensive, not only to Gandhi's legacy as a devout Hindu, but to Hindus world over.

What would Mahatma Gandhi have thought of it? It is evident from his writings that he was very much against proselytization. In 1927 he said in a speech at Sholapur he said "I cannot understand a man changing the religion of his forefathers at the instance of another". The same year in a long answer to the question of "what has Hinduism done for us?" he said that one of its beauties was the absence in it of modern proselytization.

One day, maybe, the Mormon Church will grow up and learn elementary respect for other people. But don't hold your breath.

Just how bad for us is sugar?

In his talk, "Sugar: The Bitter Truth", Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, goes on a jihad against sugar. What to make of it?

Lustig argues that fructose and ethanol are two carbohydrates in a class of their own. The metabolism of these two involves products that are not exactly good for the liver. Moreover, these are chronic toxins, the damage starts showing only after a thousand meals. The results are obesity, diabetes and heart disease. (Perhaps cancer, too.)

The only safe form of fructose is in fruits where it comes in relatively small quantities along with fiber, which slows down its absorption, and along with other nutrients whose benefits outweigh any harm from fructose. Fruit juice is a no-no. Sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are both equally bad.

Less convincing is Lustig's arguments about how fructose, which unlike glucose and other carbohydrates doesn't cause the body to send satiety signals, causes overeating. The simple reason is that in the cases where you overdose on fructose, you get an equal amount of glucose, which presumably will make you feel full.

Alan Aragon has a detailed criticism of Lustig's ideas, "The bitter truth about fructose alarmism".

Gary Taubes, in the NYT (April 13, 2011), agrees with Lustig.

Education doesn't cure closedmindness, it makes it worse

Chris Mooney finds that college-educated Republicans are more anti-science and less persuadable by evidence than less educated ones. Mooney also provides a good example that this is not true of liberals.

Carl on BRF pointed out:

upadesho hi murkhaanaam prakopaaya na shaantaye
payah-paanam bhujangaanaam kevalam visha-vardhanam

"Good instructions to deluded fools does not calm their rage. Feeding milk and fruit to the hooded serpent only increases its poison."

Mooney advises us:

Indeed, if we believe in evidence then we should also welcome the evidence showing its limited power to persuade--especially in politicized areas where deep emotions are involved. Before you start off your next argument with a fact, then, first think about what the facts say about that strategy. If you’re a liberal who is emotionally wedded to the idea that rationality wins the day—well, then, it’s high time to listen to reason.

Mormon disrespect of other religions

Fed up. This is the Mormon practice of posthumous baptisms. We are told here:

For those unaware, the Church of Latter Day Saints believes that one can be posthumously saved from eternal damnation; all they need is for a living Mormon to conduct a proxy baptism of the dead, whose soul will then be given the opportunity of remaining in hell or entering the Kingdom of Heaven (we presume most choose the latter). They’ve been doing this for years, but got into a bit of trouble years back when it turned out that they were baptizing Jews who’d died in the Holocaust. The Church had promised to stop baptizing deceased Jews, but a furor arose last week when it turned out that some Mormons, on their own initiative, had baptized Simon Wiesenthal.

Now the commentator quoted above thinks its a good deal, and how does it matter to the dead person?

But my concern is with the living. The only reason one can live in peace with a sect that thinks everyone but them is going to hell is because there are significant barriers to them imposing their will on us. But it shows the most profound of disrespect and intolerance of our traditions, faith, religion, beliefs, that they think they need to save us.

Juthika Roy - Bol re Madhuban mein Muraliya

The blurb says: "Juthika roy belonged to th golden era of Indian music (1938-1947) & she had no peer when it came to singing geets & bhajans of Meera & Kabir".

http://youtu.be/Oy2F7TvUQRs

Life as a Dhimmi - 10

As far as I can tell, this is a true story:

http://www.muslimsdebate.com/n.php?nid=6191

The Pennsylvania State Director of American Atheists, Inc., Mr. Ernest Perce V., was assaulted by a Muslim while participating in a Halloween parade. Along with a Zombie Pope, Ernest was costumed as Zombie Muhammad. The assault was caught on video, the Muslim man admitted to his crime and charges were filed in what should have been an open-and-shut case. That’s not what happened, though......The case went to trial, and as circumstances would dictate, Judge Mark Martin is also a Muslim. What transpired next was surreal. The Judge not only ruled in favor of the defendant, but called Mr. Perce a name and told him that if he were in a Muslim country, he’d be put to death.

OPERA - faster than light neutrinos resolved?

Tommaso Dorigo

It appears that the source of the problem is a connection of a fiber optic cable to a hardware board, which introduces a time delay which gets subtracted in the neutrino timing measurement.

So, no new physics from Opera neutrinos after all. Einstein may rest in peace, Relativity holds, and new physics model builders can have a good night of sleep tonight.

Against a Billionaire, who has free speech?

Glenn Greenwald on the unsavory practices of Frank VanderSloot, billionaire, and national finance co-chair of the Romney campaign.

And yet, some women will vote Republican!

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/how-the-gop-went-back-to-the-1950s-in-just-one-day.php

Life as a Dhimmi - 9

Maldives

The Maldives' national museum reopened Tuesday without some of its most valuable exhibits a week after a mob of suspected religious extremists smashed images from the pre-Islamic era of this Indian Ocean archipelago.

About 35 exhibits — mostly images of Buddha and Hindu gods — were destroyed. Some of the artifacts dated to the sixth century, museum director Ali Waheed said.

Waheed says 99 percent of the Maldives' pre-Islamic artifacts from before the 12th century, when most inhabitants were Buddhists or Hindus, were destroyed.

"Some of the pieces can be put together but mostly they are made of sandstone, coral and limestone, and they are reduced to powder," he said.

Nothing new here.  Thor Heyerdahl noted this behavior years ago.

Nutcracker Suite

Nutcracker Suite, a set on Flickr.

Some photographs from a Christmas performance of the Nutcracker.

Closer than you think

Religious extremism in politics is not something that happens just in Pakistan.

Molly Worthen in her NYT article has sentences that strike a chord.  A couple of them:

Evangelicals’ embrace of Santorum illuminates a crucial shift in American political culture: their honeymoon with the Tea Party seems to be over. They have turned away from the cries for small government and liberty — about which they have always been ambivalent — to rekindle their love affair with theocratic Catholicism. ....

The truth is that the Tea Party’s demand for “strict construction” of the Constitution and a return to the Founders’ “true intentions” is not really a cry for unfettered freedom. It is an attempt to uncover the immutable, divine will of the Founders — a homegrown version of natural law that would provide grounds for forbidding abortion, same-sex marriage and “Obamacare” in the name of American liberty.

          .......Natural law is a noble tradition that has shaped Western jurisprudence, but in the hands of conservative activists like Santorum it has become a dangerous cult of first principles. Santorum’s positions are perfectly logical if you accept his founding presuppositions — but, in his view, those presuppositions are not open to question. The genius of this emphasis on foundational assumptions is that if you can dismiss your opponent’s first principles, if you can accuse him of denying humanity’s “natural purpose,” you can claim to win the debate without ever considering the content of his argument.

Valedictory

The just-deposed President of the Maldives has an op-ed in the NYT.

DICTATORSHIPS don’t always die when the dictator leaves office. The wave of revolutions that toppled autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen last year was certainly cause for hope. But the people of those countries should be aware that, long after the revolutions, powerful networks of regime loyalists can remain behind and can attempt to strangle their nascent democracies.

HP's lousy printers

At least, with the HP 5510, you cannot set up the printer without the set-up cartridges that come with the printer. If one of those is defective you are SOL. The regular HP cartridges for the printer WILL NOT WORK. You cannot get a replacement set-up cartridge from your nearby friendly retailer. The HP web-site states this.

I hope HP meets the fate of Kodak for this lousy piece of engineering. Obviously, you will henceforth have to pay me to own a HP product.

More on Asperger Syndrome

Benjamin Nugent writes in the NYT: I Had Asperger Syndrome. Briefly.

On Asperger Syndrome

In the New York Times, Paul Steinberg writes what is bound to be a controversial op-ed.

Asperger syndrome and Aspies — the affectionate name that people diagnosed with Asperger syndrome call themselves — seem to be everywhere.

Considered to be at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, Asperger syndrome has become more loosely defined in the past 20 years, by both the mental health profession and by lay people, and in many instances is now synonymous with social and interpersonal disabilities. But people with social disabilities are not necessarily autistic, and giving them diagnoses on the autism spectrum often does a real disservice. An expert task force appointed by the American Psychiatric Association is now looking into the possibility of changing the way we diagnose Asperger. True autism reflects major problems with receptive language (the ability to comprehend sounds and words) and with expressive language. Pitch and tone of voice in autism are off-kilter. Language delays are common, and syntactic development is compromised; in addition, there can be repetitive motor movements.

A letter of note

From a former slave to his former master. Read through and enjoy the grim humor.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Lies!

1. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer

“They are awful,” she said. “Knowing that my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany, that I lost him when I was 11 because of that…and then to have them call me Hitler’s daughter. It hurts. It’s ugliness beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.”....Brewer’s father had in fact died of lung disease in California in 1955, a decade after WWII ended.

2. Claremont McKenna College

Claremont McKenna College, a small, prestigious California school, said Monday that for the past six years, it has submitted false SAT scores to publications like U.S. News & World Report that use the data in widely followed college rankings.

3. Former Yale football coach Tom Williams

...Tom Williams, had invented parts of his résumé, including a supposed Rhodes candidacy that he had dropped two decades earlier in favor of a chance at a professional football career ...

Finnair goes Bollywood!

(Via S.M.) Finnair surprised passengers with a Bollywood number:

Better than any Hedge Fund!

A stint in the Senate produces better returns than any hedge fund.
Mitch McConnell (R-Ky)
2004: Net Worth: From $1,734,029 to $4,410,999
Rank: 41st in Senate

2010: Net Worth: From $9,839,049 to $44,587,000
Rank: 10th in Senate

Some Money is Greener than Others

Over on CIP's blog, Cynthia points out:

Our tax code is custom made for wealthy people. Earned income vs. investment income is the crux of the issue. Consider a bright middle class kid whose family scrimps and saves all their after tax income to give the kid a good education. Then the kid goes on to benefit society, maybe a doctor, teacher, scientist, etc. The investment made by his family in his education is taxed at earned income rates: fed income, state tax, local tax, payroll tax. The kid pays 40-50% when all is totaled up, for benefiting society.

Then, take a rich kid who drinks his way through school, his family realizes he’s a loser, so they buy him some Brazilian government bonds paying 10% interest, maybe with money that’s never been taxed in a trust or an offshore account, and he leads the idle rich lifestyle of tennis, golf and vacationing year round. His income is taxed at 15%.

So I guess our system favors loafers over people who benefit society.

(via dailykos) Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post:

“The issue I think that’s going to play out this election is that question of Warren Buffett’s secretary,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said Wednesday on CNN. “We want her to make more money, we want her to have more hope for the future. . . . [But] this notion that somehow the income that Warren Buffett makes is the same as a wage income for his secretary, we know that’s not the same.”

In other words, it’s not just that the rich are better than the rest of us but also that their money is better than our money.

Japanese Snow Song

This Japanese song about the snow seems to be very popular in schools from the US to Macedonia. (Thanks to A for telling me about it.)


USA


Macedonia

Food for thought

Just how many digital crumbs should you leave for a Google to follow?
Sara Marie Watson in The Atlantic.

Bradley Horowitz, Google's Vice President of Product for Google+:

Until now, every single Google property acted like a separate company. Due to the way we grew, through various acquisitions and the fierce independence of each division within Google, each product sort of veered off in its own direction. That was dizzying. But Google+ is Google itself. We're extending it across all that we do -- search, ads, Chrome, Android, Maps, YouTube -- so that each of those services contributes to our understanding of who you are.

Sara Marie Watson writes:

“To me, the result of this consolidation that gives me cause for concern is the fundamental integration of my entire digital life. When you start pulling together email data with browser data, that really begins to paint a near-complete picture of a life lived on the internet. It's not just search terms, not just circles of friends. It's every last digital scrap of me.”

Industrial Ecology

A free market can fail to maintain the ecology needed for a manufacturing firm to thrive. At least, that is what I understand from this.

Krugman: Manufacturing firms often stand or fall not just on their own merits, but because they do or don’t have a surrounding cluster of related firms that are suppliers or customers, provide a ready pool of suitable labor, and so on.

Vintage Glenn Greenwald

The scary thing is that he is right!

"The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once the defining feature of American freedom that is now scorned as some sort of fringe, radical, academic doctrine. That is not hyperbole."

Epicurious Cake

Recipe for Pineapple Upside Down Cake adapted from Epicurious.

Shri Dakshinamurti

@Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, Saylorburg, PA.

Sky at 600mm

300mm + x2

I think this is Jupiter.

Nutcases are everywhere

Will the Secret Service arrest this guy? Send him to Gitmo?  Or is that reserved for Musalmans only?

Haaretz 

NEW YORK - The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran.


Adler, who has since apologized for his article, listed three options for Israel to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons in an article published in his newspaper last Friday. The first is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, the second is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the third is to “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

Adler goes on to write: “Yes, you read “three correctly.” Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If have thought of this Tom-Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?” 

 PS: My great sympathy for Israel from my younger years has been slowly eroding, and lately, much more rapidly. If Israel drags us willy-nilly into a war against Iran, then I too will start viewing Israel as a dangerous threat to world peace that must be defanged, and if that can't be done, then it needs to be abolished - become a UN protectorate or something, but it must lose its sovereignty.   I don't think any Islamist government, even a nuclear Iran, presents such a threat to world peace.

PPS: Chemi Shalev spells out the damage.

Strange Planet

Our wondrous universe.  (Discover magazine blogs).

How not to feed your kids in Norway

I had had a better impression of Norway than this.

SOPA and PIP

Google today:


Many websites today are engaging in an awareness campaign about two pieces of pending U.S. anti-piracy legislation -- SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (The Protect IP Act). The problem with these acts is that if this legislation passes, the primary requirement on the World Wide Web will be censorship-compliance.

Read more here.

See Daily Kos, too.

PS: Read Glenn Greenwald, too, the corruption of America's political class is on clear display.

PPS: Just how bad SOPA is:

The provision in question would force search engines, advertisers, banking and financial firms and even Internet service providers  to de-list websites accused - not proven, but simply accused - of copyright infringement. The provision even includes language that would allow the Justice Department to force ISPs to falsify DNS records so as to prevent users from being able to even locate a suspect site. That's bad... particularly for Internet users who are completely uninitiated. But for the rest of us who aren't members of Congress, two brilliant Firefox add-ons provide ingenious workarounds.

Nalanda

Dailykos story on the ancient university at Nalanda.

Hergé : Tintin in America - 1931-32

Commentary by Hergé on the US of A, around 1931-32, beneath the fold.

India's crisis of malnutrition

Shankkar Aiyar.

There is more shame. With four of 10 children under-5 underweight, India does worse than much maligned sub-Saharan Africa where only 22 per cent of the kids are underweight. India also has a higher proportion of children under five who are underweight, who suffer from wasting and who are stunted due to malnourishment, than in the dark region of Africa. And this has been the case for some time now. Consider the names of some of the countries (UNICEF data) who score better than India: Albania, Algeria, Bhutan, Cameroon, China (if you thought this was about scale), Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and even Myanmar!

The co-relation between poverty, malnourishment, primary school enrolment and school drop-outs had been recognised way back in the seventies. It was also very clear as early as in the eighties that state intervention in the form of income and food support was critical. Soon after MGR introduced the mid-day meals scheme for school children in 1982, it was clear (and later certified by the World Bank) that the intervention helped curb malnutrition and encouraged enrolment. Indeed, the first calls for a national scheme came up at the meeting of the National Development Council in 1985. And Manmohan Singh would remember this because he was then the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and Rajiv Gandhi the chairman. Yet it took till 1995 for the Centre to announce a national scheme and another 10 years for the scheme to be universalised finally in 2004 for all students. And that also happened only after the intervention of the Supreme Court.

Mind you, this is not about spending or resources. Countries with lesser resources, but a more committed bureaucracy have done it. And as early as in the eighties, the World Bank and UNICEF had concluded that it cost less than $10 per child per year to address malnutrition. Consider the arithmetic of costs for required intervention. Assuming India has currently 160 million children in the 0-6 age group, what would it cost to feed all of them? Do the math and think. Is the cost beyond the capacity of a trillion-dollar economy?

Catching on to the scam

Concluding a very negative review of a horrid Turkish play, running in the "Under the Radar" international festival in New York, Claudia La Rocco notes:

According to Under the Radar’s Web site, the play “was only performed once in Istanbul, due to protests by a fundamentalist newspaper.” It’s interesting to note just how often such tales of suppression are used in marketing materials at international festivals, as if they were badges of honor. (This work was too controversial for its narrow-minded native land, but you, sophisticated audience member, can support censored art!)

Veggies!

Sis. has a sort-of-theory about the unhinged nature of Pakistani public life - "they do not eat enough veggies".

Today, about the American Midwest, A. G. Sulzberger writes of his difficult experience of being vegetarian there (NYTimes)

Even though the region boasts some of the finest farmland in the world, there is a startling lack of fresh produce here. This is a part of the country — and there’s no polite way to put this — where the most common vegetable you’ll see on dinner plates is iceberg lettuce.

So those worrying about "What's Wrong with Kansas?" have their answer :)

----
In another NYTimes article, Mark Bittman notes that Americans are eating much less meat.

The department of agriculture projects that our meat and poultry consumption will fall again this year, to about 12.2 percent less in 2012 than it was in 2007. Beef consumption has been in decline for about 20 years; the drop in chicken is even more dramatic, over the last five years or so; pork also has been steadily slipping for about five years.

and notes:

We still eat way more meat than is good for us or the environment, not to mention the animals. But a 12 percent reduction in just five years is significant, and if that decline were to continue for the next five years — well, that’s something few would have imagined five years ago. It’s something only the industry could get upset about. The rest of us should celebrate. Rice and beans, anyone?

All I can say is - three cheers!

Anything is better than Fox News

Jonathan Levine,a lecturer in American studies and English at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has an Op-Ed in today's New York Times in which he advises unemployed or underemployed Americans to find a career in China. He talks about how he finds life in China, and among other things has this to say:

There are problems here, of course. China is a nation that unapologetically rejects Western democracy — and yet I am surprised to find that Chinese citizens and the news media have as much freedom as they do. For my money, CCTV News English, a channel offered by China’s major state television broadcaster, is more fair and balanced than Fox News.

Tintin - the movie

Tintin the movie is true to Tintin the comic. Steven Spielberg has done a great job. Tintin fans, enjoy!

What IQ Tests Test

This paper (PDF) by Ken Richardson is worth a read.

My favorite passage:

TEDx talk by Michael Wall

TEDxHONOLULU - Michael Wall - Groovin' Together: Adventures in Interactive Creativity

One reason why this talk is featured here is because it uses (towards the end of the second minute) a picture from this blog.

Three legs of the stool - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Consider this to be a continuing reply to libertarians:

During the Indian Constitutional Debates, B.R. Ambedkar said something like this (this source contains obvious typos)

The third thing we must do is not to be content with mere political democracy. We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life. These principles of liberty, equality and fraternity are not to be treated as separate items in a trinity. They form a union of trinity in the sense that to divorce one from the other is to defeat the very purpose of democracy. Liberty cannot be divorced from equality; equality cannot be divorced from liberty. Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.

Libertarians focus only on liberty. The last clause is also often overlooked. The fact is that there can be the rule of law only if most people voluntarily follow the law. (As the experience of the Prohibition in the US showed, there is no police force, no justice system that keep a law which a large number of people don't want to follow.)