The Chinese rip-off of Pakistan?

Much is being made of the promised Chinese investment of $46 billion in Pakistan.

The plans envisage adding 10,400 megawatts of electricity at a cost of $15.5 billion by 2018. 

The China power deals with Pakistan are at $1.5 billion or so per 1000 MW of installed power.

In contrast, in Bangladesh,

"Reliance Power and BPDB today signed a MoU to develop four units of power plants to produce 3,000 MW of electricity with a cost of $3 billion," the company said in a statement. .....Adani Power will set up two coal-fired plants with a total capacity of 1,600 MW that will cost more than $1.5 billion.

The Indian companies are doing it in Bangladesh at $1 billion per 1000 MW.

This is consistent with Tata Power in Vietnam:

Long Phu 3 plant is also expected to cost roughly $2 billion, with a capacity of 2,000 MW.

Back to Pakistan:

The 1,320 megawatts coal-fired power plant, known as Port Qasim Power Project, near Karachi will be jointly carried out by Chinese Power Construction Corp with 51% and Qatar’s Al Mirqab Capital with 49% stakes in the project with a total cost of $2.1 billion.

The above is about $1.6 billion per 1000 MW, and this is without overhead one might think is contributing to the costs in other projects (e.g., setting up coal mining in Thar, or setting up railway capacity to transport coal from the port city Karachi to the interior of Punjab).

Same article, here's the Thar project, where mines will be set up to use coal relatively recently discovered in Thar:

The mining will cost $950 million while $1.1 billion will be required for power generation for the 660 megawatts coal-fired power project, he said.

$1.1B for 660MW works out to about $1.6B per 1000 MW.

It would seem to me that friendship with China is costing Pakistan 50% above the market rate for power plants. The friendship has to be indeed taller than mountains and deeper than seas for it to survive market forces.

I hesitate to call it the Chinese rip-off of Pakistan only because the Pakistanis have successfully extracted billions out of the US of A without giving anything substantial in return; and it may be in their nature to try to do the same with the Chinese.

PS: the cost in the US for a new coal power plant ranges from $3B to $6.6B per 1000 MW but I would expect costs in Pakistan to be more in line with Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Physics - A New Theory to Explain the Higgs Mass

Via a comment by David Metzler on Peter Woit's blog - this article explains a new proposal that explains the mass of the Higgs particle.

Here is the arxiv.org pre-print: http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.07551.

Cosmological Relaxation of the Electroweak Scale

Peter W. Graham, David E. Kaplan, Surjeet Rajendran

(Submitted on 28 Apr 2015)

A new class of solutions to the electroweak hierarchy problem is presented that does not require either weak scale dynamics or anthropics. Dynamical evolution during the early universe drives the Higgs mass to a value much smaller than the cutoff. The simplest model has the particle content of the standard model plus a QCD axion and an inflation sector. The highest cutoff achieved in any technically natural model is 10^8 GeV. 

In all the years since I crashed out of theoretical particle physics, I have not come across any work that I wish I had done. Of course, that may be due to my ignorance.  This, to me, is a strong candidate for such a work.  That too, may be due to my ignorance.   Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?

So I should explain why I think this paper is important.  I think the article at the first link explains to a non-physicist the problem that this paper solves about as well as is possible (until someone like Sabine Hossenfelder decides to write about it, something which we should all devoutly hope for.)

Let's just say that the Standard Model of particle physics has a problem, and the orthodoxy for the past many decades has been to try to solve it by tacking on additional particles and even things such as additional dimensions of space.   This paper solves the problem - provides an ansatz may be more accurate - without adding any such things. Its particular models may ultimately not be viable;  but it has broken the logjam; it is a demonstration that the huge zoo of postulated additional particles and such constructs of the theorists is not necessary to solve the problem, and thus is a good corrective to the last 30-40 years of mainstream particle physics theory.

As far as I can tell, there is nothing in this paper's content that could not have been figured out twenty years ago.  Perhaps it is the salutary shock of finding absolutely no trace at the cutting edge of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the theorists' burgeoning menagerie that enabled the mental break with the orthodoxy.  And thus it should be, physics is an experimental science; it is most certainly not mathematics.

Sarah Haider - transcript

"....an audience on the Left now frightens me nearly as much as an audience of Islamists does."



Transcript of

Sarah Haider: Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique
delivered at the
American Humanist Association 74th Annual Conference, May 7-10, 2015, Denver, Colorado.

Photographers?

This was too funny to forget:
Man with DSLR turns out to be a real photographer, IT industry shocked

Begins:

Bangalore. In a shockingly bizarre incident, a man with a DSLR, multiple lenses, and some very expensive camera gear was found to be an actual photographer, and not some IT engineer.

It should be noted that usually people with high end DSLR cameras are thoroughly bored-with-job engineers, desperately trying to find an alternate career in wildlife photography by capturing bored expressions of the wild animals and birds in a local zoo. They also use this passion to indulge in blatant voyeurism by clicking bikini clad women at beaches and passing them off as “candid portraits” on Facebook in hopes of a million “likes”.

Which is why the league of bored IT engineers were alarmed when a real photographer without any connection to the IT industry was found.

The War on Bangladeshi Bloggers

The Times of India reports:

He will be 'The Next', Ananya Azad was warned on a social networking site. A day after 'The Guardian' broke the story of how the 25-year-old Bangladeshi blogger was living a life of fear, Ananya spoke exclusively to TOI on Friday.

Speaking from Dhaka, Ananya — who is on a hit list containing the names of 84 atheist bloggers — said: "I am no stranger to death threats and bloodshed. My father, author Humayun Azad, was attacked on the streets. But what shocked me was the nature of threat that I got on Facebook. It addressed my father as 'Nastiker sardar'. It means the leader of atheists. It said being his son, I would meet a gruesome death. My throat would be slashed at Dhaka University's Raju Bhaskarjya! I feel lodging a police complaint is pointless. Eleven years have passed and the cops haven't been able to do anything about my father's assassins."

Today, Ananya wears a helmet even while walking the streets of Dhaka and moves around in a car with tinted glasses. Leaving Bangladesh is something he is considering after the threat. "Perhaps I need to rethink now. I've stopped writing my blog. I had begun writing a book that's halfway through. Next week, I am planning to go to India." 

Further:

TOI traced another blogger who is now in hiding in Dhaka. On May 12, a gang of masked assailants had chopped blogger Ananta Bijay Das. Ever since Ananta's death, his fellow blogger Monir Hussain has gone into hiding.

Exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin, who is now in New York, is trying to help him move out of his country. Monir has stopped writing his blogs. Speaking from an undisclosed location in Dhaka, he said: "For 15 days, I have been locked in a room. No television. No newspapers. I've deactivated my Facebook profile."

Taslima said: "I'm trying to help these bloggers get out of Bangladesh. I am requesting organizations in America and Europe to invite these bloggers to their countries. I have requested the Swedish embassy to grant visa to Monir. Bloggers in Bangladesh are panic-striken. The government isn't giving them any protection."

Monir has heard about Ananya's threat. "Ananta, I and four others had set up the Bigyan O Juktibadi Council since 2005. We also run the Jukti Patrika in Bangladesh. Threats have been coming for the past eight months. On the day Ananta died, I got a call around 9.20 am saying: 'Are you still sleeping? Ananta is lying in the hospital bed. Run...' Three minutes later, I got the same call again. I was numb. I rushed to the hospital to find Ananta dead," the 31-year-old Monir said.

The next day, Monir lost his job of a Bengali lecturer in a private college. "One day, I got a call from an unknown international number and was played a recording from the Holy Quran. I left my rented house in Sylhet to Dhaka. My neighbours later told me that two bikers, their faces covered with helmets, had repeatedly come looking for me. Today, I can't sleep without taking pills. I can almost hear Ananta say — 'they will kill anyone they can lay their hands on. That's how they want to make a name for the organization (Ansarullah Bangla Team)'," he added. Monir, like Ananya, doesn't want to inform the cops. "We believe cops leak most of the information to these extremists," Monir said. 

Further:

However, Bangladeshi film-maker Shahriar Kabir says, "Seeking asylum in another country won't help. One has to ban Jamaat e Islami. There have been 13 attempts on my life. Yet, I haven't left Bangladesh. I carry a gun and don't move out of my house alone."

*On February 15, 2013, Ahmed Rajib Haidar, an architect by profession and an activist in the Shahbagh Ganajagaran Mancha movement, was stabbed to death in Dhaka

*On February 26, 2015, Bangladesh-born US citizen Avijit Roy was hacked to death on the streets for his blogs

*On March 30, 2015, blogger Oyasiqur Rahman was killed.

Sarah Haider: Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique (AHA Conference 2015)

Please listen to Sarah Haider on the timid response of liberals to the problems posed by Islam.

My opinion is that absent a liberal critique of Islam, which is often muted from fear of being labelled Islamophobes or racists in the West or communal and non-secular in India, the narrative will be taken over by the violent right-wing in non-Muslim societies. When the topic is a difficult one, the most reason-oriented and committed-to-peace people must speak up and speak up forcefully, without mincing words. They need to own the narrative, they need to be the most outspoken.

Or else, it is my belief, that there will be eventually a global reaction led by people for whom violence is always justifiable and the ensuing war will be the most devastating the world has yet seen.

Song - Maria Mena - Secrets

Prof. C. Christine Fair is incensed that a book she authored was found in bin Laden's library.

The research project that culminated in the 2006 publication of Fortifying Pakistan began in 2004, when I was a new researcher at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). My boss, Paul Stares, (now at the Council on Foreign Relations) hired me to initiate a South Asia research program. This project was not an easy sell. Most of Washington had long decided that Pakistan was our most allegiant ally in the war on terrorism. That attitude endured until the Obama administration came into office.

Simply put: It was blasphemous to suggest, in 2004, that then-president Musharraf was playing a both sides with Washington. The Bush administration could not countenance such a possibility, or even consider the plausibility of it, given that its attention and resources were focused on Iraq.

 ____

Historians will judge the American Pakistan policy with confusion and contempt. They will logically ask why the Americans continued to treat Pakistan as a partner when it undermined so many salient American interests in the region. They will ask why the American tax payer continued to aid and arm Pakistan, even though it was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and NATO allies in Afghanistan and the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghan allies, in and out of uniform. They will ask why the US government was unable or unwilling to see that Pakistan was not a problematic ally, but rather, a hostile state that cynically manipulated and exploited an impotent and incompetent America.

For years, I hoped that American policy makers would begin appreciating these facts, and change course, rather than wait for our sons and daughters to write this scathing history long after such revelations ceased to matter.

With the US military presence in Afghanistan winding town, there is still time to hold Pakistan to account and begin treating it like the hostile state it is, rather than as the challenging ally so many policy makers delude themselves into believing. This will require courage and leadership across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, such qualities seem chronically lacking in the contemporary American landscape.

Math for Poets and Drummers

Rachel Wells Hall of St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia has a paper (PDF)  about the mathematical discoveries made by ancient Indians when studying the meters of poetry and musical rhythms.

Online degrees

A new twist on online degrees - from Pakistan, where else?

Declan Walsh in the NYT:

Seen from the Internet, it is a vast education empire: hundreds of universities and high schools, with elegant names and smiling professors at sun-dappled American campuses.
....
....

In fact, very little in this virtual academic realm, appearing to span at least 370 websites, is real — except for the tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue it gleans each year from many thousands of people around the world, all paid to a secretive Pakistani software company.

That company, Axact, operates from the port city of Karachi, where it employs over 2,000 people and calls itself Pakistan’s largest software exporter, with Silicon Valley-style employee perks like a swimming pool and yacht.
.....
....
Hands down, this is probably the largest operation we’ve ever seen,” said Allen Ezell, a retired F.B.I. agent and author of a book on diploma mills who has been investigating Axact. “It’s a breathtaking scam.”

Lots of detail in the NYT here.

Exceptionalism at risk

 http://thewire.in/2015/05/12/india-suggests-us-set-to-up-national-human-rights-commission/

India Suggests US Set Up National Human Rights Commission

By The Wire Staff on 12/05/2015
 

In response to a presentation made by the United States at the UN, India has welcomed the “openness of the US delegation in accepting areas of continuing concern such as racial bias in the criminal justice system; incidents of bias-motivated crimes including ‘those committed against Hindus and Sikhs'; and need for improved safety and living conditions at confinement facilities.”
Addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday during the Universal Periodic Review in which the human rights record of all countries is discussed, India’s ambassador, Ajit Kumar, also said the disproportionate use of force by law enforcement agencies in the US and deficiencies in their procedures “are areas of concern”.

Among the suggestions India made was that the US consider establishing a national human rights commission, though Kumar did not elaborate on what the structure and mandate of such a commission would be.

The US in the past has found fault with the mandate of the Indian NHRC, with the State Department noting, for example, in its periodic report on the human rights situation in India, that the commission had no enforcement powers and “is not empowered to address allegations against military and paramilitary personnel.”

In his intervention at the US, the Indian ambassador also urged Washington to quickly ratify international conventions on the rights of the child (CRC), the elimination of discrimination against women (CEDAW) and on economic, cultural and social rights (CESCR).

India encouraged the US government to “take adequate steps towards gender parity at workplace, protect women from all forms of violence and enhance opportunities in education and health for children from ethnic minorities.”

The Indian ambassador also noted US “efforts towards maintaining respect for privacy and civil liberties while addressing dangers to national security” and requested the American delegation to share more information about this.

USCIRF hypocrisy

Professor Jakob de Roover writes:

The annual reports of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) have long irked politicians and citizens from countries placed on its ‘watch list’. This is no different in India. In the 2015 report released about a fortnight ago, the country again occupies an unenviable spot in Tier 2, which includes countries where the religious freedom violations engaged in or tolerated by the government are serious.

Striking about this year’s report, however, is its claim that incidents of religiously-motivated and communal violence have ‘reportedly’ increased for three consecutive years in India. “According to Muslim and Christian NGOs that track communal incidents,” it adds, “2014 statistics, yet to be released by the ministry, will be likely higher” than the 823 incidents recorded in 2013.

What is so remarkable about this? Well, the Indian home ministry’s official data about communal incidents for 2014 give a very different picture. The number of incidents saw a significant decrease to 644 in 2014. The USCIRF report also includes Andhra Pradesh, “Chattisgarhi” [sic], and Odisha among states that “tend to have the greatest number of religiously-motivated attacks and communal violence incidents.” Yet the home ministry’s information recorded no incident in Chhattisgarh, just three in Odisha, and five in Andhra Pradesh.

How reliable then are the international religious freedom reports of the US government? The obvious retort to this question is that the home ministry’s data for 2014 must be very biased. But which other unbiased data could establish this bias? When asked this question, an American academic responded as follows: “I don’t have any data, but given who is in charge, it can’t help but be biased.” That, of course, is a knockdown argument.

Other academics point out that many incidents of communal violence remain unreported in India. But surely this is not the issue at stake. The real question is about the number of communal incidents in 2014 relative to the number of such incidents in the two preceding years. The data provided by the home ministry show that this number is lower. Now, are there facts (or well-founded reasons) that prove that in 2014 suddenly a much higher number of communal incidents were not reported than in previous years? If this is not the case, then we can only assume that the average number of unreported incidents has not changed significantly. And if that is the case, then the claims of the USCIRF must be false.

What evidence did the American commission draw upon to come to its conclusions? Its website claims the following: “USCIRF obtains information about violations of religious freedom abroad in multiple ways, including visiting selected countries in order to observe facts on the ground, meeting regularly with foreign officials, religious leaders and groups, victims of religious intolerance, and representatives of civil society, non-governmental organisations, government agencies, and national and international organisations, and keeping abreast of credible news reports.”

Indeed, the 2015 report shows the results of this type of deep research. It mentions conversations with minority religious leaders and NGO representatives. Its repetitive use of the words ‘reportedly’ and ‘report’ is striking: “Incidents of religiously-motivated and communal violence reportedly have increased”; “Christian NGOs and leaders report that their community is particularly at risk…”; “… Muslim communities have reported facing undue scrutiny and arbitrary arrests and detentions”; Indian Christians, converts and missionaries “have reported more frequent harassment and violence …”.

The evidence then seems to amount to impressions of particular people, hearsay, anecdotes and newspaper articles. Clearly, it gives a privileged status to the observations of certain NGOs, religious leaders, and the dominant media, which can hardly count as reliable and ‘unbiased’ sources in these matters. Moreover, the report depends on dubious concepts such as ‘religiously-motivated violence’, but forgets to mention what criteria it used to find out whether violent incidents are ‘religiously-motivated’ or otherwise.

Naturally, the fact that some religious groups feel threatened in their basic freedoms is important. Some Hindu nationalist organisations do commit unacceptable acts of violence against Christians and Muslims. Such crimes need to be addressed by the government. Some Hindutva supporters are also becoming increasingly aggressive online and elsewhere. This problem has to be examined and tackled. But can all of this serve as evidence for grand claims about the disquieting rise of religious freedom violations in India? Does it suffice to make recommendations to the US government about Tier 2 ‘watch lists’ and the like? No, it does not. It appears that forces other than evidence give shape to the claims of the American campaign for international religious freedom.

Which forces might those be?

To answer this question, you'll have to read the article. The title is a giveaway: "USCIRF hypocrisy: It's about the Protestant worldview, not religious freedom".

Seymour Hersh Fail

Seymour Hersh has a poorly constructed article on the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Consider this paragraph: (emphasis added) -

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

Those are two different things - knowing about OBL's whereabouts before the US raid and knowing of the US mission to capture/kill him.   Hersh raises questions about the second, but two of his three quotes deal with the first.

Carlotta Gall did not raise any question about whether Pakistani officials knew of the US mission.  Her question was about knowing OBL's whereabouts before the US raid:

Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid. “He knew of Osama’s whereabouts, yes,” the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. “Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy,” the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

.....
.....
In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge.

Durrani's interview with al Jazeera is available online though officially blocked in the US, and all that comes from there that this is a person who has no morals in the pursuit of his goals.  Why one would trust any information from him, I don't know.  In any case, he does not deal with the issue of whether Pakistani officials knew beforehand of the US raid.

That leaves Imtiaz Gul, whose sources just assert "the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation" -- it is obvious that this is a conclusion driven by reasoning from some assumptions, and not from direct knowledge.

PS: Vox has a complete takedown.

Curiouser and curiouser

Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) released a statement in which they claim credit for the murder of several Bangladeshis and Pakistanis.

Asim Umar, the Indian-born head of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, has claimed responsibility for a string of attacks that killed several secular writers and intellectuals in Bangladesh and Pakistan, including Avijit Roy who was hacked to death on a Dhaka street in February.

“Like the companions of the Prophet who defended him with their lives,” Umar said in a statement that was released online over the weekend, “the mujahideen of al-Qaeda have despatched to hell many who blasphemed against God, and insulted the Prophet.”

In addition to Roy, Umar named slain Bangladeshi intellectual Ahmad Rajib Haidar and Rajshahi University scholar AKM Shaiful Islam as victims of al-Qaeda hit squads. His statement also claimed the killing of Karachi University Islamic Studies scholar Shakeel Auj, assassinated last year while on his way to a meeting with Iranian diplomats. Auj had been condemned by Islamist clerics in Karachi for is purportedly blasphemous views.

The statement also mentioned an Urdu blogger Aneeka Naz as a victim. Naz, an academic, was reported killed in a 2012 car traffic accident, in which her husband was injured. Naz is not known to have held contentious political views.

“From Waziristan to Charlie Hebdo, this war is one,” Umar said, “whether it is waged upon us with drones or with Charlie Hebdo’s pen, with the International Monetary Fund or World Bank’s policies, or with the satanic conspiracy of Kerry-Lugar bill, which sought to humiliate the believers, or whether it is waged with the hate-filled words of Narendra Modi, which call for Muslims to be burned live.”

What on earth is the Kerry-Lugar bill doing in this list of grievances?  The people who were most staunchly against the bill and felt "humiliated" by it was the Pakistani Army.  Why would al Qaeda care about it in the least?

As SSridhar wrote on BRF:

The reference to Kerry-Lugar bill by AQIS and claiming it to have 'humiliated the Believers' is a dead giveaway that AQIS and the Pakistani Army have coalesced.

Despite stiff competition from ISIS in Iraq, Pakistan remains the epicenter of global terrorism.

Song

Some neuron fired for some reason and this song that I had forgotten for aeons came to mind.

Asha Bhosle, Hare Kaanch Ki Chooriyan, 1967.   I don't think I've seen the movie.

About the Wall Street Journal editorial page

Prof. Brad DeLong writes:

The point of the Wall Street Journal editorial page is to pander to the prejudices of its core readers. It is not as malevolent and destructive as Fox News, which takes its mission to be to scare its core readers so that they keep their eyeballs glued to the screen so that those eyeballs can be sold to advertisers. But its mission of reinforcing evidence-free right-wing epistemic closure against any incursion of empirical reality is a malevolent and destructive one.

As to why he writes the above, you'll have to read the article.

To Evangelists anywhere, and in Delhi in particular.

The new ArchBishop of Delhi, per the Wall Street Journal.

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/12/23/qa-new-delhis-next-archbishop

The next ArchBishop of Delhi says that "the religious and cultural pluralism within which the Christian community finds itself" is a problem for the Church, and it only gets better from there on.

WSJ: What do you think will be the main challenges you will face as the Archbishop of a diocese which includes a mega city?

Rt. Rev. Couto: The cosmopolitan nature of the Church in Delhi and the consequent multicultural situation of the people I am called to serve will certainly be one of the main challenges.
....
WSJ: Do you think Catholics are called to evangelize and convert others to Catholicism?

Rt. Rev. Couto: The Church exists to evangelize. She can never run away from the mandate Christ has given to her to proclaim the Good News in season and out of season and to place before all nations the truth of the Kingdom of God.
....
I also pray that God may give numerous new members to the Church through the sacrament of baptism.

----
So this is my statement to such people:

We Hindus welcome the news of Jesus as another of the infinite manifestations of the Divine. We think it mistaken to consider Jesus as the only or the most important manifestation of the Divine. As long as they do not fall into this error, there is no objection to Hindus to choose or not choose Jesus as their Ishta-Devata. We Hindus can love Jesus and Jesus can love us Hindus with no intermediaries. We are human, not sheep, and we do not see any value of being the flock of some pastor or church. We think the Church, with its officialdom and bureaucracy is what keeps Christians separate from the Divine, and while recognizing the Church's right to exist as long as some Christians mistakenly think they need it, we consider the Church to be a major error made in ignorance and impediment in the spiritual evolution of Christians in particular and humankind in general. As to missionaries and evangelists, we decry the egotism in their belief that they are instruments to bring God to us Hindus, or that they are doing some kind of good work or doing us a favor. We Hindus visit the Divine every day in our puja and meditations, and He/She/It/That replies to each of us individually and appropriately based on our abilities to receive and understand. We think Jesus will speak to us directly if He thinks it necessary, and so we reject all self-styled messengers, alleged carriers of the Good News, and such, who think that our Hindu relationship with the Divine is inadequate, or false, unless mediated through their good offices, unless we have membership in some Church. We pray that they are led from this Tamasic arrogance into the Light.

Asatomasatgamaya, tamasoma jyothirgamaya, mrityormaamritam gamaya!

I will add Pulikeshi's statement too:

Have you heard the Hindu Good News? – Live mindfully, cherish your land, its flora and fauna, and be kind, seek true knowledge and most of all be free.

The divine manifests itself in infinite ways - Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Zarathustra, Guru Nanak, Mani, Shukracharya, Bharadwaja, Vasistha, and so many were special in their own right. As a Hindu, you have the freedom to really choose any, all, any other or none of these sages to help in your journey of self-realization. Further, as a Hindu, no matter where you live, it is imperative that you stay connected to the land, its flora and fauna in your journey. All of Earth and her creatures are sacred, so give back more than you take from her. This means anyone arguing for exclusion or special status for any land, people or Religion should be viewed with suspicion.

The Church is man made and has often lost its way, every Hindu believes that they are the Temple, Church, Mosque or Gurdwara. Every waking hour is a prayer and every dreamy night is being one with the divine. Hindus do not need devices other than those they freely choose. Hindus detest organized Religion and embrace true knowledge, come rejoice in the quest for it. Spread the word of this Hindu Good News to others. Live free or not at all. May this Hindu Good News spread through you.

Om Shanti, Shanthi, Shanthi!

S is for Sanskrit

A note on Sisupala-Vadha by Paul M. M. Cooper.

Quote:


Magha was a manipulator of the Sanskrit language who knew no equal. This can perhaps best be demonstrated by the following verse, in the 19th chapter of the poem:

सकारनानारकास-
कायसाददसायका
रसाहवा वाहसार-
नादवाददवादना

sakāranānārakāsa-
kāyasādadasāyakā
rasāhavā vāhasāra-
nādavādadavādanā.

Now, if you reverse the lines as though placing a mirror beneath them, this forms a palindrome in four directions: the most complex poetic device ever created.

sa	kā	ra	nā	nā	ra	kā	sa
kā	ya	sā	da	da	sā	ya	kā
ra	sā	ha	vā	vā	ha	sā	ra
nā	da	vā	da	da	vā	da	nā
(and the lines reversed)
nā	da	vā	da	da	vā	da	nā
ra	sā	ha	vā	vā	ha	sā	ra
kā	ya	sā	da	da	sā	ya	kā
sa	kā	ra	nā	nā	ra	kā	sa

 “[That army], which relished battle (rasāhavā) contained allies who brought low the bodes and gaits of their various striving enemies (sakāranānārakāsakāyasādadasāyakā), and in it the cries of the best of mounts contended with musical instruments (vāhasāranādavādadavādanā).” (Trans. George L. Hart)

Bonus - via the same site - the wonder that is Sanskrit (PDF)

On Sanskrit Poetry

This sulekha.com article provides an introduction.

Among other fascinating things:

5.3. There are too many Slesha-kavyas where each of its lines gives forth more than one meaning. For instance, the Rama-pala –charita   by the court poet Nandin depicts at once two stories (dwi-sandhana—kavya), one of the Sri Rama and the other of King Rama Plala of Bengal (1104-1130). Another is the ‘Raghava-yadava- Pandavveya’ by Chidambara Sumati (16^th century) a court poet of Vijayanagara which narrates simultaneously three stories (Tri-sandhana kavya’) those of Rama, Krishna and Arjuna. Such Slesha-kavyas, by laborious splitting compound words; by repetition of sounds (srutyanusara), of vowels (varna-anusara) and of words (pada –anusara);    and by interpreting the words depending on the context, can yield five or even seven stories.

5.4. There is also a Viloma-kavya where the first half of the verse is repeated backwards (viloma) in the second half; and they together form an entire line (pada). When the method is extended in a certain order the verse becomes all-moving (sarvathobhadra) or half-moving (ardha-bhrama). A 16^th century poet Daivajna Suryadasa Kavi from Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh wrote a Chitrakavya in the Viloma (reverse)style narrating the story of Rama and Krishna (Rama-Krishna-Viloma-Kavya) in 38 slokas. Each sloka has four lines, of which the first two lines relate to Rama-story while   the next two lines to Krishna story. The specialty of this Kavya is that the third line is composed by reversing the order of letters in the second line, while the fourth line is a reversal of the order of letters in the first line.

There is also a Viloma kavya by Venkatadvari titled Yadava-raghaveeyam. The Yadava-raghaveeyam a poem with two meanings (anuloma-viloma-kavya ) comprises 30 verses and deals with the story of Rama and Krishna together by adopting the style of anuloma and prathiloma, that is, reading each stanza as such and in reverse order, the former telling the story of Rama while the latter narrating the story of Krishna. Hence this work actually consists of 60 slokas in all.

======

Here is an amazing sloka of 32 syllables using only one consonant (Ya) and one vowel (Aa):

 

 

The Paduka (footwear) which adorn the Lord , which help in attaining all that is good and auspicious, which removes all ills, which gives knowledge, which inspires desire to be in presence of the Lord, by which all places of the world can be reached, these padukas are of the Lord.(This verse is taken from Sri Vedanta Desika’s Padukasahasram).

Eastern Migration Into India?

Am able to only see the title of this National Geographic story:
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/21/genographic-southeast-asia/

DNA Reveals Unknown Ancient Migration Into India
As the Genographic Project celebrates its 10th anniversary, team scientists announce intriguing results from a study of more than 10,000 men from southern Asia.

Was able to find more in Google Cache:
"The findings, published in the Journal of Systematics and Evolution, showed that in the last 8,000 years humans expanded west from Southeast Asia back to India."

--- So the genetic record shows this migration, but not the famous Indo-European migration?

Life as a dhimmi - 15

News-item from Malaysia:

PETALING JAYA, April 22 — For years, two non-Muslim houses of worship in Taman Medan avoided the controversy that befell a neighbouring church that was forced by residents to remove its cross, by shunning open displays of their faith.

Instead, they go about their worship without the usual trappings of their respective religions, out of caution over how the overwhelmingly Muslim community may view these.
One local church, the Petaling Jaya Church of Christ (PJCC), said it does not display overt symbols of the faith or conduct open displays of its activities.

“It’s not about the symbol that matters, but how one wants to practise or follow their faith... our faith is strong and we are not concerned about our church not bearing a cross on its façade,” a representative of the church told Malay Mail Online yesterday.

....
....
....
At a Hindu temple a short distance away, priest N. Bala from India told Malay Mail Online that the need for non-Muslim religions to be discreet was a reality in Malaysia.
....
Like the representative of PJCC, Bala was similarly accepting of the necessity to keep a low-profile in order to avoid trouble, saying that the absence of religious symbols did not weaken his faith.

Still, he lamented how non-Muslims in Malaysia must be so wary about how they practised their faiths and how religion here was used to divide rather than unite.

“I myself feel my right is being infringed...there should be equality in matter of religion,” he said. “How are churches or temples lesser compared to mosques? All religion is good.”

More on that Doniger review - NSFW

Of all the major world cultures, the Hindus have been, on the average, the least prudish about sex.   From temple carvings to sacred and secular literature, sex has its place, so much so that prudish Europeans have termed it oriental licentiousness.  But it is only one part of life.  Artha, Dharma, Kama, Moksha - these are the four purusharthas - if you like, the main goals of life.  Sex falls in the Kama bucket, though Kama is encompasses more than just sex.   Hindus also write about Artha, Dharma and Moksha; and the great epics and Puranas teach about all four buckets. To take an example from the Puranas, when things go out of balance, towards the end of this story, also on my blog, the preceptor to the Devas, Brihaspati has to take steps to restore the married life of Indra and Shachi.

The problem with a commentator on the Hindus like Wendy Doniger and her school is that they are out of balance - they find sex even where it isn't.   The review I've referred to previously goes into this a little bit.   It is a gross distortion that Doniger and co. consistently do; and their apologists constantly let them get away with it.  Anyway, now I have a witness that this is not something that only Internet Hindus are imagining, the obsession with sex is real.  The witness is Prof. C. Christine Fair, whose analyses of Pakistan have been featured on this blog.

Incidentally, you can listen to C.C. Fair on the subject of sexual harassment, and Pakistan here: http://www.globaldispatchespodcast.com/episode-49-c-christine-fair/

Below the fold, Not Safe for Work.

Project Euler

https://projecteuler.net/about

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

If you are looking for problems to help exercise your newly acquired skills in a programming language, then this is a place you could try.

To date, I've solved 47 of the 511 problems posted there, mostly the easy initial ones.  The hardest one, per their difficulty rating, that I've solved, is problem 259.   The next hardest problem, by their rating system, that I've solved is problem 110.  The rest that I've done are way easier.

I'm using mostly LISP.   I'm currently working on problem 201, I have an algorithm, I'm quite sure that it is correct; but it is slow (I estimate O(n^5) where n is the number of terms in the set)  so I need to put more thought into it.  

By the rules, I cannot say any more in public than what I have written.

I learned so much solving problem XXX so is it okay to publish my solution elsewhere?

It appears that you have answered your own question. There is nothing quite like that "Aha!" moment when you finally beat a problem which you have been working on for some time. It is often through the best of intentions in wishing to share our insights so that others can enjoy that moment too. Sadly, however, that will not be the case for your readers. Real learning is an active process and seeing how it is done is a long way from experiencing that epiphany of discovery. Please do not deny others what you have so richly valued yourself.

 PS: My slow solution to problem 201 gives the correct answer.  Further,  I now have a faster variant, that completes in 9 minutes instead of 9 hours!

D. Abbott: The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics

I have considerable sympathy for the point of view expressed by D. Abbott in his IEEE paper, The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics (hattip a commenter on Peter Woit's blog).

"Mathematics is a product of the imagination that sometimes works on simplified models of reality."

Denial of the Platonist position does not mean that Mathematics becomes an arbitrary cultural construct.

An aside:

"A genius is merely one who has a great idea, but has the common sense to keep quiet about his other thousand insane thoughts."

PS: you may also like this comment on Peter Woit's blog.

Bangladesh's Struggle and America's continuing shame

Shashi Tharoor outlines the struggle between the secular and the Islamists in Bangladesh here.

The United States under Nixon and Kissinger ignored the genocide that accompanied Bangladesh's birth (see "The Blood Telegram" by Gary Bass).

And today, the United States essentially sides with the Islamists in Bangladesh.  E.g., when in 2013 the Bangladesh High Court deregistered the Islamic fundamentalist party, Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), thereby banning it from participating in future elections, the United States was officially unhappy.

Here is some background on JeI.

The historical fact is, apart from the Islamists who take up arms against the US, there is not an Islamist that the US does not love.  This is, incidentally, a long standing Anglo-US strategy.

As Gary Brecher wrote in this recent piece on Yemen, in the 1960s,

Arabs were getting very “modern” at that time. It’s important to remember that. You know why they stopped getting modern, and started getting interested in reactionary, Islamist repression?

Because the modernizing Arabs were all killed by the US, Britain, Israel, and the Saudis.
....
.....
...the West put its weapons and its money in on the side of “Allah and the Emir” over and over again, against every single faction trying to make a modern, secular Arab world, whether on the Nasserite, Ba’athist, Socialist, Communist, or other model.
....
Arabs are reduced to choosing which Allah and which Emir to support because a half-century alliance between the worst oligarchies in the West and the most reactionary elements in their countries wiped out the alternative.

If you do bother to read Gary Brecher's article, you can place what is written above in context of his style of writing; but the truth is there beyond the poetic exaggeration.

On Wendy Doniger's book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/014311669X/R10UJP16SRT3XP/

So much for an alternative history. Now, how about some mundane, regular history stuff? Let’s go back to the Mahabharata, an epic that Ms. Doniger brings up dozens of times in her book (she even calls the Mahabharata “100 times more interesting” than the Iliad and the Odyssey). Let’s ask two questions: When did the main events of Mahabharata occur? And exactly how long is the epic?

Ms. Doniger mentions the years as: between 1000 BCE and 400 BCE, most likely 950 BCE, or around 3012 BCE, or maybe 1400 BCE. That narrows down the chronology quite a bit, doesn't it? Really, there is more to writing history (particularly the alternative kind) than looking up the reference books and throwing in all the numbers one could find. But in Ms. Doniger’s defense, she is not a historian per se (and she clearly tells us so), so let’s let this one slide by. I’d even say she does deserve some credit here for at least bothering to look up things. On the next topic, she fails to do even that.

Ms. Doniger says the Mahabharata is about 75,000 verses long. Then she helpfully adds, “sometimes said to be a hundred thousand, perhaps just to round it off a bit." My goodness, 25,000 verses is some rounding error, don't you think? Most sources put it between 75,000 and 125,000. It took me all of two hours to find a very detailed account (not on the Internet though), compiled in the 11th century, putting the total at 100,500—and I’m not a researcher, not by a long shot. And yes, the exact number of verses is secondary to the big picture. What bothers me is the offhandedness with which Ms. Doniger brushes off 25,000 verses as a rounding issue. Why this half-baked research?

Oh well, maybe we expected too much from the bestselling book on Hinduism and it’s our fault. So, let’s try again, one last time. Where is India located?

Ms. Doniger states, very clearly, without any ambiguity, on page 11 (footnote): “Most of India… is in the Northern Hemisphere.”

The Puranas, Mahakavyas and Modern Business

Shekhar Gupta on the Pakistani National Security State

This is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in Pakistan: We respect all, we suspect all, until proven ok.

It is remarkable how much free speech and criticism even this security establishment allows the mostly western-educated intellectual class. But with one unwritten condition: it must remain confined to English, which is a marginalised discourse here. Follow some of Pakistan's finest, most courageous minds—many of them young women—in the new media. They have enormously more spunk than us in India. But all in English. Urdu is a different matter altogether. English publications' circulation is minuscule compared to Urdu and there isn't even one news channel in English, though they have in Mubashir Luqman someone who can by himself outshout all our English prime-time warriors, including the champion of champions. My friends tell me the story of Raza Rumi, a fine, brave liberal commentator and patriot. He was ignored as long as he confined himself to English. Then one day he succumbed to the temptation of TV, obviously in Urdu, and continued speaking the same honest truth. His car was attacked, his driver died and he escaped with a bullet and is now exiled in Washington. Do Google his writings.

PS: Raza Rumi's writings can be found here.

Shiv Tandav Stotra by Om Voices

Rajiv Malhotra: Are Sanskrit Studies in the West becoming a New Orientalism?

An important talk by Rajiv Malhotra, in Hindi, with very few English subtitles.

De-Macaulayization - 8

Aatish Taseer writes in the New York Times: How English ruined Indian Literature.

Two contrasting views of America - which one is true?

Ross Douthat in today's New York Times writes:

....And yet, for all these disturbances and shifts, lower-income Americans have more money, experience less poverty, and receive far more safety-net support than their grandparents ever did. Over all, material conditions have improved, not worsened, across the period when their communities have come apart.

Between 1979 and 2010, for instance, the average after-tax income for the poorest quintile of American households rose from $14,800 to $19,200; for the second-poorest quintile, it rose from $29,900 to $39,100.

Meanwhile, per-person antipoverty spending at the state and federal level increased sixfold between 1968 and 2008 — and that’s excluding Medicare, unemployment benefits and Social Security. Despite some conservative skepticism, this spending did reduce the poverty rate (though probably more so after welfare reform). One plausible estimate suggests the rate fell from 26 percent in 1967 to 15 percent in 2012, and child poverty fell as well.

and

But the basic point is this: In a substantially poorer American past with a much thinner safety net, lower-income Americans found a way to cultivate monogamy, fidelity, sobriety and thrift to an extent that they have not in our richer, higher-spending present.

But let us look at what has happened to the basics - housing, health care and education.

The median and average new house prices in the US from the Census Bureau:

http://www.census.gov/const/uspricemon.pdf
Jan 1979 Median: $60,300 Average: $67,700
Jan 2010 Median: $218,200 Average: $283,400

So the average new home price rose from 4.6 times of the lowest quintile's average income to 14.8 times over 1979 to 2012.

The next set of numbers comes from Affording Health Care and Education on the Minimum Wage by John Schmitt and Marie-Eve Augier from the Center of Economic and Policy Research (PDF).  It is expressed in terms of the minimum wage, but the point to take away is the dramatic increase in costs.

On health-care:

Health-insurance premiums have also increased enormously when expressed in terms of the minimum wage. In 1979, one year of individual health insurance coverage cost a minimum-wage worker 130 hours. By 2011, the same coverage cost 749 hours. (See Figure 2.)

The cost of family coverage increased from 329 hours in 1979 to 2,079 hours in 2011. These figures imply that after paying for family health insurance coverage, a minimum-wage worker would have just one hour’s worth of wages left over to spend on other goods and services after working 40 hours per week for 52 weeks in a year.

On higher education:

A minimum-wage worker in 1979, making $2.90 per hour, had to work 254 hours in a year to pay the $738 annual cost of tuition at a public four-year college. By 2010, minimum- wage workers at $7.25 per hour had to spend 923 hours to cover the $6,695 annual tuition at a public four-year college. (All our calculations ignore taxes and subsidies. More on that later.) (See Figure 1.)

In 1979, a four-year private college required 1,112 hours of work at the minimum wage. By 2010, the cost in minimum-wage hours had increased so much that it was no longer possible to pay for a full year of a private four- year college–3,201 hours–by working full-year, full- time (2080 hours) at the minimum wage.

Even the minimum-wage hours needed to pay tuition for one year at a two- year college almost tripled between 1979 and 2010, from 156 hours to 403 hours.

To be sure, the authors point out that government help has made the cost of higher education less onerous than the above simple arithmetic makes it out to be.  And the article was written in 2012, before Obamacare helped or arrested the worsening situation with respect to health-care for many Americans.

The narrative competing with Douthat's is that it was much harder in 2012 for a family to earn enough to cover housing, health-care and higher education than in 1979.  And even if monogamy, fidelity, thrift and sobriety were more in 1979 than today, people in 1979 were still in the mind-set of an era of increasing general prosperity.  No culture can withstand the great deterioration of economic expectations that occurred over the past 30 years.  At some point, fatigue sets in and the faith that things can be better evaporates.

On Social Mobility

Via an article on pakteahouse.net, this paper:
(only the abstract is available for free):

Abstract

Using educational status in England from 1170 to 2012, we show that the rate of social mobility in any society can be estimated from knowledge of just two facts: the distribution over time of surnames in the society and the distribution of surnames among an elite or underclass. Such surname measures reveal that the typical estimate of parent–child correlations in socioeconomic measures in the range of 0.2–0.6 are misleading about rates of overall social mobility. Measuring education status through Oxbridge attendance suggests a generalized intergenerational correlation in status in the range of 0.70–0.90. Social status is more strongly inherited even than height. This correlation is unchanged over centuries. Social mobility in England in 2012 was little greater than in preindustrial times. Thus there are indications of an underlying social physics surprisingly immune to government intervention.

Sweden, Germany say no arms for Saudi Arabia; will US ever be so principled?

Commentary here.
Excerpt:

Swedish politicians have done a lot of nail-biting over the contract. The cancellation has been under discussion for months, with various interest groups, from feminists to environmentalists, putting pressure on the government.

Prime Minister Stefan Loefven has denied it, but the last straw apparently came on Monday, when Saudi Arabia blocked Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom from speaking to the Arab League in Cairo.

Wallstrom had been invited because Sweden was the first EU country to recognize the Palestinian state, but because she had previously called Saudi Arabia a dictatorship, the kingdom’s representatives apparently feared she might further embarrass their county before other Arab leaders. It was only after Wollstrom’s invitation was rescinded that Loefven confirmed the Saudi deal was finally off.

Strictly speaking, military cooperation with the Saudi regime should have been a nonstarter for European Union countries since 2008, when they approved their Common Position on arms exports. The document makes “respect for human rights in the country of final destination” a precondition of defense cooperation. A country that uses Shariah law, as Saudi Arabia does, can hardly be a paragon of respect for human rights in the Western sense of this expression.

For a time, however, another paragraph in the Common Position has outweighed that consideration: “Behavior of the buyer country with regard to the international community, in particular its attitude to terrorism, the nature of its alliances and its respect for international law.”

The Saudis have managed to convince the West that they are a reliable ally against terrorist organizations. U.S. policy in the Middle East has been in large part based on its partnership with the Saudis. European voters, however, have long been irritated with what they perceive as the consequences of U.S. activity in the volatile region, including the increased flow of refugees from Syria and Iraq.

They find it hard to understand why their governments should support an oppressive and fundamentalist regime just because it is a U.S. ally. Politicians have to take the popular mood into account, so the tide began to turn against arms exports to Saudi Arabia.
Sooner or later, the United Kingdom, whose defense industry counts Saudi Arabia as its biggest foreign customer, will also need to confront the fact that it’s arming a blatantly undemocratic country in contradiction to EU commitments. It may decide in favor of holding on to its market share and its special relationship with the U.S., but that will inevitably weaken the U.K.’s diplomatic position in matters involving human rights. Germany, as Europe’s new leader, is at least trying to be more consistent in putting principles over cash.

India's New Forest Conservation Plan

See here.

India just did something big for the climate: it announced that it will allocate $6 billion a year in tax revenue in a way that will encourage forest conservation. That’s more results-based finance for forest conservation than any other country in the world, including the current biggest spender Norway.

Here’s how it will work: every year India’s central government collects about $200 billion in taxes. From that sum it then passes along about $60 billion to the 29 state governments. Following recommendations by India’s 14^th Finance Commission, Parliament this past week accepted a watershed reform that not only increases the size of transfers to states from $60 billion to $80 billion, but also changes how this tax revenue is distributed between states.

The reform changes the “horizontal devolution” formula so that the pie will now – for the first time – be shared between states not just on the basis of population, area, and income, but also forest cover.

We are also directed to this interaction with Dr Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser, Ministry of Finance, Government of India" for more details:

A pile of bunk

In his recent NYT column, Ross Douthat refers to this conversation on edge.org between Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Noah Harari.  Kahneman is a Nobel Laureatte, and Harari is a historian who has won attention for successfully pushing his greatly oversimplified view of reality. 

The best you can say about this conversation is that Harari is talking about many decades from now; and there's little original there - the masters of science fiction have long covered all these scenarios.

Let's take a few:

Nobody has a clue how the world will look like in, say, 40, 50 years.

There is nothing new or profound about that.  Consider the changes over the lifetime of a person who lived 1900-1980.  

But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it's done, it's over. 

This might be true in the future; but if it was true today, the USwould have ended the civil war in Syria, and failing that, it would certainly wipe out in zero time the excrescence that is ISIS/Daish. But military operations still require putting people in harm's way;  remote air power is insufficient to defeat ISIS; it needs "boots on the ground".

And the handful of people trickling in from Europe and America to join ISIS would not cause such consternation and alarm, if humans were so not-valuable for military purposes.

People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere. These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I'm rich enough, maybe I don't have to die.

The attitude may be there (Steve Jobs might be an exception?) but this way of thinking is delusional.  Not that there is an Angel of Death,  but  in thinking that "having some technical solution" means being able to achieve such a solution.    The problem of reconciling quantum mechanics and the General Theory of Relativity is a technical problem, and in essence, it should have a technical solution.  Good luck with that!   And how far have we gotten with curing cancer?  Or understanding the cause of autism?   All these are "technical problems".    Finding efficient computation for  NP-complete problems is a "technical problem" with a "technical solution".

If any ultra-rich person thinks that the world is like the Star Trek universe, where the Captain asks how long will it take to solve this never-before encountered complex engineering or scientific problem, and the crew says "5 hours", and the Captain says, "make it 4, make it so", and it all happens, please send that ultra-rich person my way, so I may join the ranks of the ultra-rich in short order.

The tax paradise that is Saudi Arabia

There are no income taxes, sales taxes, value-added taxes in Saudi Arabia.  Corporate taxes and capital gains taxes seem to be a flat 20% except maybe for oil & gas business.   This is possible because the Saudi state gets all its revenue from the oil business.  

Libertarians should be asked to explain why Saudi Arabia is not the economic leader of the world.

Drawing the boundaries of constituencies

In the US, it would seem that a Constitutional Amendment will be required to give the authority to draw the lines of constituencies to a body directly elected by the people, responsible to the legislature but not the legislature.  Legislatures are famous for gerrymandering, i.e., drawing constituency boundaries to favor the majority party.

Aam Aadmi Party's win in Delhi

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP - translates to Indian People's Party)  led by Narendra Modi won convincingly in the national parliamentary elections because Modi had a credible message of good governance and economic development.   This despite the "Hindu nationalism" charge constantly thrown against the BJP.   As M.J. Akbar narrated, Modi told people that they could have Hindu-Muslim fights and remain poor, or they could work together and prosper.

Now Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party (Ordinary People's Party) have swept the state elections in New Delhi.  This despite Kejriwal's various previous missteps.  The promise again was of corruption-free governance, and of government attention to the needs of ordinary people.

While the punditosphere is full of analysis of what all this means for the BJP, the Aam Aadmi Party, for the Congress Party (which is now virtually wiped out), to me it seems that the Indian electorate has moved away from identity politics - voting for one's religious group or caste.  Perhaps not yet decisively, they may relapse a bit, in the two-steps forward, one-step backwards dance that is the nature of progress in real life.  Performance and ideas matter a little bit more than identity now. 

It is very fortunate that Communism is a spent force now, just when the Indian electorate, more open to ideas, might have become enamored with it.   Per the Marxist commentaries that I read, the Communists found that caste-solidarity overcame all their attempts to initiate a class struggle in India, and they were rethinking how to use caste struggles to bring about the glorious Communist Revolution.

I wish well both the parties, ruling Delhi and ruling India from Delhi.  Each has in its grasp a not-easy-to-repeat historic opportunity to transform India in a very good way.  All the indicators are positive; if they squander their opportunities, it will be a tragedy of global proportions.

The Cure to Racism?

Over on the Partition of India blog, is posted an excerpt from a paper by Venkat Dhulipala, which describes Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani's Quranic/historic justification for Pakistan, that was influential in the founding of Pakistan.

One thing bothered me:

Usmani outlined Pakistan's significance to Islam in the modern world by declaring that Pakistan was the first step in the process of self purification of Muslims, purging them of all their earlier narrow identities based on race, class, sect, language and region and creating an equal brotherhood of Islam as had been the case in Medina.

The problem with this equal brotherhood is that it deals with differences by trying to eradicate them.  Eliminate differences in language by forcing everyone to one language.  Eliminate differences in tradition by eliminating all pre-Islamic literature and art.  Eliminate differences in dress by getting everyone into one costume. 

It is as though, since we all have different faces, any "narrow identity" based on the face can be dissolved by requiring everyone to keep their face covered with a strip of black cloth.  (Even so, some will try to decorate the black cloth.)

This equal brotherhood idea is not a way of living with being different.  It is closer to "if you are different, you don't live".    It as though religious edict can negate reality. 

This project has resulted in the colossal failure that is Pakistan.

Do Not Multi-Task!

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload

Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.

Prime Minister Modi's answer to the question - Why do we need the state?

At the star-studded (Krugman, Bhagwati, Taleb included) Economics Time Business Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi provided an answer to American Libertarians and Republicans.

Why do we need the state? There are five main components:

.. The first is public goods such as defence, police and judiciary.

.. The second is externalities which hurt others, such as pollution. For this, we need a regulatory system.

.. The third is market power, where monopolies need controls.

.. The fourth is information gaps, where you need someone to ensure that medicines are genuine and so on.

.. Last, we need a well-designed welfare and subsidy mechanism to ensure that the bottom of society is protected from deprivation. This especially includes education and health care.


These are five places where we need government.

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/45914598.cms


PS: more excerpts from Modi's speech here.

21F

Je Suis Charlie - Sand Artist Sudarshan Patnaik

On the failure to engage with one's own traditions

Pakistan has a law punishing blasphemy that is quite horrible in practice.  Pakistan's tiny "liberal" elite, which is rather disdainful of their traditional systems (as is the Indian "liberal" elite) finds it impossible to change the operation of the law (e.g., do a full investigation instead of arrest first, investigate later), let alone amend it.  The Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was gunned down four years ago by his own bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, for committing the blasphemy of criticizing the blasphemy law. Sherry Rehman got into trouble for proposing legislation about the blasphemy law.

It seems that the political configuration in Pakistan doesn't want to hear about freedom of speech, secularism, etc., etc., it prefers its blasphemy law.

But it seems that the blasphemy law, as it stands, is not in accord with Islamic tradition.   This article by Arafat Mazhar goes into it in some detail, but briefly,  Pakistan follows the Hanafi school of Islamic law; and while the Hanafi law makes blasphemy an offense, it makes it a pardonable offense; it certainly does not carry the mandatory death sentence that the Pakistani law has.  Why does the Pakistani law carry a death sentence?  I think it is because few of the people in charge have seriously engaged with their own tradition.

If the Pakistani liberals want a state that has laws that look like a modern secular European state, they are going to fail; if they want a state that has justice, regardless of what the laws look like, and that has the support of the generally Islamized population, they are going to have to engage seriously with their traditions.

PS: Part 2 of Arafat Mazhar's article.

There is a similar problem in India; a lot of the intellectuals at the top do not engage seriously with the Indian traditions.  Most of the Indic traditions are a embarrassment to them; and they basically engage in exercises of trying to wean people off of them.  Michel Danino points out this failure in an article in the Hindu.

Language and Genetics in the British Isles

The British Isles might be a good case to examine for the relationship between population genetics and languages.   In that context, I found this article in the popular press: Myths of British Ancestry, by Stephen Oppenheimer, Prospect Magazine, October 21, 2006.  No doubt science has advanced some more in the past eight years, but this might be a good starting point.

Notice that the Celtic languages are Indo-European and per this author they spread with agriculture, not with the horse. (Supposedly horses were being domesticated in the Eurasian steppes 6000-5500 years ago.)

Given the distribution of Celtic languages in southwest Europe, it is most likely that they were spread by a wave of agriculturalists who dispersed 7,000 years ago from Anatolia.... 

 Moreover, the conventional invasion & genocide theories are deprecated.

The other myth I was taught at school, one which persists to this day, is that the English are almost all descended from 5th-century invaders, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the Danish peninsula, who wiped out the indigenous Celtic population of England......

The genocidal view was generated, like the Celtic myth, by historians and archaeologists over the last 200 years. With the swing in academic fashion against “migrationism” (seeing the spread of cultural influence as dependent on significant migrations) over the past couple of decades, archaeologists are now downplaying this story, although it remains a strong underlying perspective in history books.

Whither Pakistan? Tarek Fateh with Dr Baland Iqbal

Sorry, Urdu/Hindi speakers only. Tarek Fateh dissects and examines under the microscope the Pakistani mindset. He sees as the only solution the dissolution of Pakistan into its four provinces.

Update: for the Hindi/Urdu challenged, my rough notes below the fold.

Indo-European Invasions into Europe

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/18/ancient-ancestors-europeans-dna-study

The findings suggest that the arrival of modern humans into Europe more than 40,000 years ago was followed by an influx of farmers some 8,000 years ago, with a third wave of migrants coming from north Eurasia perhaps 5,000 years ago. Others from the same population of north Eurasians took off towards the Americas and gave rise to Native Americans.

Genetically speaking, there seems to be no trace of any genetically significant movement of Indo-European people into Europe either (unless it is the farmers, but linguists think that 8000 years ago is too far back.  The last population-genetically significant influx of people into India was 12,000 years ago or earlier.)  On the other hand, the vocabulary of a language like Greek is estimated to be more than 30% non-Indo-European (e.g., compared to less than 4% of the 10,000 word vocabulary of the Rg Veda), so a elite dominance language replacement theory might work for Greece, where it can't work for the language of the Rg Veda.  The only way it might work is if an Indo-European language was superposed on a previous Indo-European language.

Replies to climate-change deniers

A good resource with replies to some of the more "scientific" climate-change deniers.

Bee on the Scientific Method

Bee (Sabine Hossenfelder) has an essay worth your time: Does the Scientific Method need Revision?

IBM's predictions from December 2009

IBM's predictions for today from five years ago:

ARMONK, N.Y.     - 17 Dec 2009: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled a list of innovations that have the potential to change how people live, work and play in cities around the globe over the next five to ten years:
·         Cities will have healthier immune systems
·         City buildings will sense and respond like living organisms
·         Cars and city buses will run on empty
·         Smarter systems will quench cities’ thirst for water and save energy
·         Cities will respond to a crisis -- even before receiving an emergency phone call

Lessons from a school shooting

Both houses of the Indian Parliament observed a moment of silence and passed resolutions condemning the killing of school children in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Beyond the natural empathy one feels at the cruel loss of young lives, there are some sharp lessons to be learned.

The Invasion That Never Was

Anand Rangarajan, here:

But it was the publication in 2011 of a path-breaking study that ultimately sealed the fate of the Aryan Invasion or Migration theory. Analysing 600,000 SNPs from as many as 30 ethnic groups – thereby extending the 2009 Nature ANI study through the inclusion of more European samples – Toomas Kivisild and co-workers discovered that both components of Indian ancestry, ANI and ASI, predate the Aryan Migration event by at least 9000 years. This was because the so-called k5 component, that bestows ancestry to South Asians, was found to contain no regional diversity differences; its spread across the Indian subcontinent must have happened well before 12,500 years ago (the detection limit) and not through a recent gene-flow event.

 In 2013 Singh and co-workers extended the Kivisild study with some acute observations, namely that the ANI and ASI populations mixed robustly between 1900 to 4200 years ago and that these two groups didn’t mix either before or after this window. The authors, by analysing genomes of 571 individuals representing 73 ethno-linguistic groups, also ruled out Eurasian gene flow during this time period, concurring with the finding of another study that such an event could not have happened before 12,500 years. Moreover, argued the scientists, 3500 years ago India was a already a densely populated region with well-established agricultural practices and therefore the Eurasian migration would have had to be immense in order to explain the fact that half the Indian population is derived from ANI.

The Aryan Migration event of 1500 BCE has also been questioned based on an authoritative haplogroup U linkage study wherein scientists found an extensive and deep late-Pleistocene link between Indians and Europeans, suggesting a coalescence near the time when Asia was initially being peopled. The migration that led to the Indo-Eurasian stock, according to these scientists, happened not 3,500 years ago but rather 12,500 years or earlier.

Another study, this time involving Y-DNA haplotyping, rules out substantial gene-flow from Europe to Asia at least since the mid-Holocene period, i.e. the last 6,500 years. It has also been shown that the gateway to the subcontinent, the Hindu Kush – where the earliest archaeological evidence of human remains dates back to 26,500 years before the Rig Veda – was a confluence of gene-flows in the early Neolithic period as opposed to an indigenous population.

There is one other way to corroborate that Eurasian migration happened much before the time-point vouched for by AMT proponents – skin colour. It has long been known that a single mutation, rs1426654, in the human pigmentation gene SLC24A5 accounts for the lighter skin tone of Europeans. A year ago, scientists discovered that an allele of the rs1426654 mutation was shared among many South Asian and Western Eurasian populations. The coalescence was calculated to be 22000-28000 years ago, with the frequency of occurrence of this mutation – called the allele frequency – found to be significantly higher in the ANI compared to the ASI.

The verdict of population genetics is clear, and profound, as pointed out subsequently by the lead author of the Nature study Dr Lalji Singh himself: “There is no genetic evidence that Indo-Aryans invaded or migrated to India. It is high time we re-write India’s prehistory based on scientific evidence.”

The Morning Moon

Fear

The transcript of the proceedings of the grand jury that examined the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson, on August 9, on the streets of Ferguson, MO, is interesting on many counts.  

Here is one excerpt that caught my eye.

Another Aatish Taseer Essay

Must-read: A Historical Sense: What Sanskrit has meant to me
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/a-historical-sense

Excerpt beneath the fold.

A telling Twitter exchange

FYI:

On twitter, I followed Sonia Faleiro, who is an author, and writes commentary on India for the New York Times and such.

I was blocked after this exchange:

Sonia Faleiro:
"Lakhs of years ago Sage Kanad conducted a nuclear test" says BJP MP determined to take India back lakhs of years: http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/ancient-india-conducted-nuke-tests-claims-former-uttarakhand-chief-minister-ramesh-pokhriyal-nishank/article1-1293029.aspx

Me:
@soniafaleiro LOL, back to the Sat-Yuga, I suppose!
@soniafaleiro Tho ancients having technology lost till modern times is a bit more rational than parting of Red Sea or man rising from dead

I wouldn't have mentioned it except that I noticed this morning that this "liberal" has blocked me.

That is, if the BJP MP said that "lakhs of years ago Sage Kanad conducted a nuclear test" is how he reads and interprets his "religious scriptures", and so is a part of his "religious belief", it is still irrational and inadmissible and wrong;  but God's parting of the Red Sea for Moses or the resurrection of Jesus, that is a legitimate matter of Christian belief and my saying it is less rational than the (non-supernatural) idea that the ancients had technology that was lost and that we again have only in modern times is bad manners.