Media: Tone of global coverage of India and China

Via twitter, Shamika Ravi of Brookings India++ has these. Am looking for the paper.

What is Myth?

Josh Marshall at talkingpointsmemo.com writes about the myth of John McCain:

The key point in my mind is that the origin of the McCain myth, his towering figure-ness, is this very particular fact: through his story and his actions he had a profound appeal to a generation of men who had guilty or angry or unresolved experiences with the Vietnam War and who were, at this point in McCain’s career, themselves moving into mid-life.

and explains:

I should note here that when I use the word “myth” I do not mean it as a fairy tale or cover story. To say something is a myth is not to say it is either true or false. Myths are stories we tell to make sense of and give meaning to the unorganized facts of existence, which themselves are mute and have nothing to tell us. As humans, we can only really understand things through stories.

This above is to be understood in conjunction with:

• What is इतिहास?
• What is Itihasa?
• History: a profound cultural difference

USA: the joys of pot legalization

This was so not unforeseeable.

“Cannabis is potentially a real public-health problem,” said Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University. “It wasn’t obvious to me 25 years ago, when 9 percent of self-reported cannabis users over the last month reported daily or near-daily use. I always was prepared to say, ‘No, it’s not a very abusable drug. Nine percent of anybody will do something stupid.’ But that number is now [something like] 40 percent.”

The Atlantic, America's Invisible Pot Addicts

India: the UPA's unsustainable growth spurt

In 2015, the Government of India adopted a new GDP calculation method with the base year of 2011-12.  (Resetting the baseline year is a routine matter.)   The new method was more comprehensive in the data it used.  Nevertheless, the new series provoked a lot of suspicion especially because the old GDP numbers were not restated in terms of the new series.

First biomarker evidence of DDT-autism link

Via dailykos.com and sciencedaily.com


First biomarker evidence of DDT-autism link

National birth cohort study finds DDT metabolites in the blood of pregnant women are associated with elevated odds of autism in offspring

Date:

August 16, 2018

Source:

Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

Summary:

A study of more than 1 million pregnancies in Finland reports that elevated levels of a metabolite of the banned insecticide DDT in the blood of pregnant women are linked to increased risk for autism in the offspring. The study is the first to connect an insecticide with risk for autism using maternal biomarkers of exposure.

Via nature.com

Brown's team found no correlation between the PCB by-product and autism. But when they measured DDT by-product levels in the blood samples, they found that mothers with high concentrations of this chemical — those in the top quartile — were 32% more likely than women with lower DDT levels to give birth to children who developed autism. The likelihood that a child with autism accompanied by intellectual disability was twice as high in mothers with elevated DDT levels compared to those with lower levels.
...
Brown cautions that although there seems to be a link between autism and DDT exposure, the overall risk of having a child with the disorder is low — even among women with high DDT levels. His group plans to look at other organic chemicals in the Finnish database to determine whether they might affect fetuses by interacting with DDT. 

Jonathan Chevrier, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, is interested in knowing whether DDT levels are linked to intellectual disability in children who do not have autism. He is currently following more than 700 children in South Africa — where DDT is still used — which could provide hints as to the mechanism by which the pesticide might affect the brain. It’s an important question, he says, given how much DDT persists in the environment, even in places that have banned its use. “At this point, essentially the entire planet is contaminated with DDT,” he says.

Naipaul quotes

Swarajya magazine featured some V.S. Naipaul quotes, of which two follow:

From ‘India: A Wounded Civilization’ published in 1976:

India has been a wounded civilization because of Islamic violence: Pakistanis know this; indeed they revel in it. It is only Indian Nehruvians like Romila Thapar who pretend that Islamic rule was benevolent. We should face facts: Islamic rule in India was at least as catastrophic as the later Christian rule. The Christians created massive poverty in what was a most prosperous country; the Muslims created a terrorised civilization out of what was the most creative culture that ever existed. India was wrecked and looted, not once but repeatedly by invaders with strong religious ideas, with a hatred of the religion of the people they were conquering. People read these accounts but they do not imaginatively understand the effects of conquest by an iconoclastic religion.

The effects of conquest - the Islamic histories describing the conquest of India pretty much describe what ISIS did to the Yazidis, we don't need to exercise our imagination any more.

On Ayodhya, according to Patrick French:

For the poor of India to identify something like this, pulling down the first Mughal emperor’s tomb, is a marvellous idea. I think in years to come it will be seen as a great moment.... It would be a historical statement of India striving to regain her soul. What puzzled me and outraged me was the attitude that it was wrong, that one must not undo the [Muslim] conquest. I think it is the attitude of a slave population.

I should mention that in the early 1990s I was on the opposite side of the argument.  My interest in Indian history began as I sought to justify to myself that my side of the argument - that the Babri Masjid should be let be - was right.   As in all matters that become political, all sides in the argument made false or misleading claims.  Also, the same outcome as that did transpire could have been realized in a more civilized and more lawful way.  Given that the Left's favorite religion is Islam (not just in India) and given that they controlled the discourse in India, getting through their distortion field took a while. In the final verdict, I must say that Naipaul is right.

Dr. Vishwa Adluri on the Mahabharata

Read the whole thing here.

In an interview with Swarajya, you stated, “Itihāsa is history that has overcome historicism: history that has become critical and self-consciousness.” Can you elaborate? How does this affect one’s understanding of the Mahābhārata?

Let us start with a philosophical problem. What is the reality of the external world and what is the validity of sense perception, our primary source of knowledge about the external world? Until we answer these questions, every history is merely contingent. We only have sense perceptions. Often, what we have is not perceptions of events but of artifacts, which we use to draw inferences about their underlying events, ultimately connecting the events into a narrative in view of some overarching purpose. There is thus no bare historical cognition. Rather, history is something we generate.

What we call “world history” is a creation of German scholars and philosophers in the nineteenth century. They provided a new intellectual framework for arranging events: the idea of a common historical space, a world stage on which cultures enter and successively vanish. This was a new way of looking at the world’s cultures—and of extrapolating the law of their succession. For Hegel, history was the process by which Spirit actualized itself, developing from primitive forms of statehood such as China and India to its ultimate expression, Prussia.

Compare this with the Mahābhārata: external reality is problematized through the author’s interventions in the narrative. Human affairs mimetically enact the paradigmatic conflict, the devāsurayuddha. Humans themselves follow the paradigm of their divine archetypes, the devas and asuras. Instead of a linear, progressive history, we have cycles of time. Instead of a distant salvific event, we have the inexorable rise and fall of souls caught between the conflicting imperatives of dharma and adharma. There is no national salvation; only singularized jīvas. This is a different understanding of history, closer to Empedocles, Plato, and Nietzsche than to Hegel and Ranke. Thus, itihāsa is a history that has become critical about external reality and self-conscious about history’s status as a narrative. And it is asking the Nietzschean question about the uses and disadvantages of history for life: Why do we need history? What purpose should history serve?

and

As progressive as Hiltebeitel’s stance on composition is vis-à-vis the German Indologists, it still grants them too much credence. Ultimately, all speculations as to authorship are trivial before the work, which by its very nature as a great literary work resists reductive analyses about the circumstances or motivations for its composition. This has been the greatest failing of Sanskrit studies generally. Every year more vapid dissertations appear, asserting that some work was written because the author wanted to enhance his status or to oppress someone or to insinuate himself with some sect or to assert the superiority of “his” gods. Every year more papers, these “unlovely exercises exacted by the scholarly code” as Arrowsmith calls them, are added to the pile. We are drowning in scholarship, yet little work of philosophical or artistic merit is done. Through Protestant literalism and its emphasis on the realia, we have entered a non-literary, indeed, a non-literate age. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche mocks the anti-intellectualism of the German university. Ironically, Sheldon Pollock runs around exalting the nineteenth-century German university (see my review of World Philology) when the best of the Germans already saw through it and discarded it.

Vedic Ritual along the Saraswati

Via Dr. Shiv:
Geography of Aryavarta (Indus-Saraswati Civilization) - Part-1: Talk by Sh. Mrugendra Vinod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfW4iLB ... e=youtu.be


Geography of River Saraswati (Indus-Saraswati Civilization) - Part-2 : Talk by Sh. Mrugendra Vinod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GA29oqlCko


Identification of Unicorn (Indus-Saraswati Civilization) - Part-3 : Talk by Sh. Mrugendra Vinod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqKOtc2gKTs

For those who can't/don't want to watch, but want a quick summary:

1.  A reiteration of the astronomical information in the Vedic literature that is date-able because of the precession of the equinoxes.

2. The geography of the Saraswati.

3. An explanation of the peculiar symbol appearing in Harappan seals as the yupa or tie-post of the sacrificial animals in the Asvamedha yagna.

On the geography of the Saraswati: in the Vedic rituals, there is one that is to be performed on the banks of the Saraswati.  It involves an altar on wheels, the yajamana throws a stick; the altar is moved to that point, the rituals are conducted; then the yajamana throws the stick again.  This is done going upstream from where the Saraswati disappears (Vinashana) through the junction with the river Drishadvati, which is a seasonal river, and then to the head of the Saraswati.   Then the final ritual bath in the Yamuna that is a day away. The ritual takes about 22 years.   The arithmetic (I haven't checked for myself) fits with the geography of the hypothetical Saraswati.

A key point that the speaker makes is that Western scholarship and those under its spell (that would include persons like me) have focused on the Rg Vedic poetry and rather neglected the ritual manuals.  Poetry is full of metaphor and can be interpreted in myriad ways;  but the ritual manuals are rather specific.

Another point is to understand how the tradition is taught and preserved.

The Braided River

The Waimakariri River in the South Island of New Zealand is braided over most of its course
By I, Gobeirne, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2437562

If you look for an inheritance tree, you will find a tree; but a tree is only a model.
Multiregional theory of human origins in Africa:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/the-new-story-of-humanitys-origins/564779/

The New Story of Humanity's Origins in Africa
Several new discoveries suggest that our species didn’t arise from a single point in space. Instead, the entire continent was our cradle.

Perhaps the same is true for the Indo-European languages.

Excerpt, emphasis added:

This can be a tricky concept to grasp, because we’re so used to thinking about ancestry in terms of trees, whether it’s a family tree that unites members of a clan or an evolutionary tree that charts the relationships between species. Trees have single trunks that splay out into neatly dividing branches. They shift our thoughts toward single origins. Even if humans were widespread throughout Africa 300,000 years ago, surely we must have started somewhere.

Not so, according to the African-multiregionalism advocates. They’re arguing that Homo sapiens emerged from an ancestral hominid that was itself widespread through Africa, and had already separated into lots of isolated populations. We evolved within these groups, which occasionally mated with each other, and perhaps with other contemporaneous hominids like Homo naledi.

The best metaphor for this isn’t a tree. It’s a braided river—a group of streams that are all part of the same system, but that weave into and out of each other.

These streams eventually merge into the same big channel, but it takes time—hundreds of thousands of years. For most of our history, any one group of Homo sapiens had just some of the full constellation of features that we use to define ourselves. “People back then looked more different to each other than any populations do today," says Scerri, “and it’s very hard to answer what an early Homo sapiens looked like. But there was then a continent-wide trend to the modern human form.” Indeed, the first people who had the complete set probably appeared between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Sri Lanka: Agriculture in the Pleistocene?

Anil Suri has an article at IndiaFacts.org: How Old Is Indian Agriculture?

The article goes over some well-known findings; but also makes an extraordinary claim.

To trace the trajectory from incipient cultivation as a dry crop to the wetland crop rice had become by around 7500 BCE, we must journey south, indeed, as far down as the southern part of Sri Lanka. To the mesmerizingly beautiful Horton Plains National Park, to be precise. Here, there is evidence of cattle herding and grazing, microcharcoal indicating the use of fire to clear the land of forests, cultivation of edible plants, and early management of barley and oats from – hold your breath – 15,500 BCE. It is believed the subcontinent experienced a semi-arid climate between 22,000 and 15,500 BCE, followed by a sustained, progressively warmer spell, with a concomitantly strengthening monsoon, starting around 16,500 BCE. Thus, early attempts at pastoralism and agriculture begin almost as soon as the climate became ever so slightly conducive. The climate got progressively better for agriculture, peaking in an extremely humid period around 6700 BCE. As the humidity increased, cultivated rice made its first known appearance here around 13,000 BCE. Notice that the early dwellers of the Horton Plains seem to have figured out which crop was best suited to a particular climate. Closely following the improvement in the climate, intensive agriculture in the region began around 11,000 BCE, and there was an abrupt shift in emphasis from oats and barley to rice after 8000 BCE. The fact that intensive rice cultivation was being done on the Ganga plain by no later than the mid-8^th millennium BCE, as described above, shows there were many independent centres for the establishment of agriculture in the subcontinent, and that the progress in agriculture happened closely in tandem with climactic changes.

In around 16,000 BCE, which falls in the Ice Age, India and Sri Lanka would have been contiguous as the sea level was about 120 metres lower than it is today. (Around 8000 BCE, it was still 50 metres lower.) This early attempt at agriculture was no flash in the pan. Archaeologists believe that there is a continuity of agricultural tradition in the subcontinent right from then. The archaeologist, Premathilake writes, “The evidence of early form of agricultural activities found in the Horton Plains do not appear to have got isolated at the regional level and similar type of evidence in the form of cultivated pollen and other proxies is available in the Indian subcontinent.”

Horton Plains is called "Maha Eliya Thanne" by the locals.

1. The above claim is based on the 2006 paper by R. Premathilake, "The emergence of early agriculture in the Horton Plains, central Sri Lanka: linked to late Pleistocene and early Holocene climatic changes", which seems to have been pretty much ignored, if one goes by the number of citations this paper has received.  A quick search does not show any follow-up activity going on either.
   
   
2. The Premathilake paper says: "It is clear that incipient management of barley and oats occur around 15 500 BC in the Horton Plains as evidenced by pollen and other multi-proxy records (e.g. phytoliths, diatoms, stable carbon isotope, organic carbon, total carbon, environmental mineral magnetic). The semi- humid event between 15 600 and 14 000 BC corresponds to incipient management of cereal plants (oats and barley). The pollen evidence also indicates herding, possibly of Bos sp. and supportive indications are (1) forest clearance/ burning, (2) grazing, (3) pastures, (4) the presence of a characteristic edible plant, (5) a cultivated shrub, (6) various types of disturbed fields, e.g: patanas, (7) enhanced anthropogenic erosion as indicated by the initial increase of the values in magnetic susceptibility parameters (8) and high percentages of microscopic charcoal particles. These observations can be interpreted as the result of the initial stage of slash- and-burn activity."

Agriculture 16000 years ago is an extraordinary claim and I think that these findings are in need of independent replication; and presumably much more intensive studies of the Maha Eliya Thanne region are called for.

On Denmark's Laws for Immigrant Ghettos

The NYTimes has a news-item  In Denmark, Harsh New Laws for Immigrant ‘Ghettos’.

Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.

...

Luck or method?

Manasataramgini has a problem from plane geometry embedded in a short story, which I extract here:

Given a unit square, if a point lies on the same plane as the square at not more than a unit distance simultaneously from each of the four vertices of the square then what will be: 1) the minimum distance it can reach from any side of the square; 2) what fraction of the area of the square can the point be located in.

Since the short story includes the requirement of solving it in 7 minutes, I was asked to try my hand at it.

Wim Borsboom and the order of the alphabet

Wim Borsboom claims some insight into the origin of the order of letters in the alphabet.  I think the key question is how much of the pattern can arise by chance.

amazon.com blurb:

“Alphabet or Abracadabra? - Reverse Engineering The Western Alphabet” details a ground-breaking discovery: the origin of the western ‘abecedary’ - the alphabet's sequence of letters.(Not to be confused with the origin of the design of the western alphabet letters.)

It must have been somewhere between 3400 and 3700 years ago that the western alphabet's linear sequence of characters (abecedary) was created by following an already existing tabular model of a South Asian Pre-Sanskrit ‘abugida’ or ‘alpha-syllabary’. In spite of it looking quite disorderly, the western alphabet letter sequence is found to be based on that ancient orderly pattern, a pattern that categorized sounds by how and where they were articulated in the mouth.

This study retraces the steps of how that copying process took place, a process that also included a number of 'errors and omissions' made by one, perhaps two ancient scribes most likely from the Near East. The errors eventually resulted in the apparent disorder of the western 'ABC'. By tracking these 'copied' errors across a number of ancient alphabets, the author was not only able to reconstruct the copying process, but he also arrived at a date before which it must have taken place.

An interview.
Academia.edu
Excerpts from the abstract:

 This paper proposes and details, how -- well before 3400 BP -- the current western Late-Roman  Alphabet character sequence [not to be confused with the graphic design of western alphabet letters] (the linear ABC or abecedary) was modeled after a pre-Sanskrit Devanagari-like character grid.....Even if the characters within the western alphabet (abecedary) look randomly distributed, we show how that letter-sequence was originally based on an ancient orderly pattern, a pattern that categorized sounds by how and where they were articulated in the mouth....When the western alphabet - once it is put in tabular format - is compared to an earlier and simpler "reverse retro-engineered" Sanskrit abugida....a percentage of similarity of only 25% (5 out of 20 characters) is calculated. However, after the error identifications and considering the varying but close pronunciations of several comparable characters as well as ...... a 90% match between them is obtained.

The Rg Veda

Manasataramgini, biologist, Sanskritist, gifted amateur mathematician,  staunch Hindu, more so than the so-called Hindu right-wing, and most relevant, long-time staunch Aryan invasionist - for years, ridiculing any Hindu who thought there was no invasion -  feels vindicated by the recent findings in ancient DNA.  Nevertheless, with the postulated dates of incursions, he sees a problem, and to solve it, he postulates:

“we conclude that the core RV, meaning a certain archaic kernel of it was definitely composed outside India and probably much earlier even if the final redaction and compilation happened later in India. We see no other way out.”

The problem is that there is no such “core Rg Veda”.  Even the postulated oldest parts of the Rg Veda are from within India.

realclimate.org - sigh

Over at realclimate.org, there is a discussion going on, "If you doubt that the AMOC has weakened, read this".  This is one of two articles mentioned by this commentary in Nature: "North Atlantic circulation slows down". 

As the blurb says,

Evidence suggests that the circulation system of the North Atlantic Ocean is in a weakened state that is unprecedented in the past 1,600 years, but questions remain as to when exactly the decline commenced.

And the article not by the leaders of the discussion at realclimate.org is mentioned thusly (excerpts):

"Thornalley et al. provide a longer-term perspective on changes in AMOC strength during the past 1,600 years....The researchers found that the strength of the AMOC was relatively stable from about ad 400 to 1850, but then weakened around the start of the industrial era.....However, the roughly 100-year difference in the proposed timing of the start of the AMOC decline in these two studies has big implications for the inferred trigger of the slowdown. Caesar et al. clearly put the onus on anthropogenic forcing, whereas Thornalley et al. suggest that an earlier decline in response to natural climate variability was perhaps sustained or enhanced through further ice melting associated with anthropogenic global warming. Nevertheless, the main culprit in both scenarios is surface-water freshening."

(Caesar et. al. is the first article.)   I quoted just about that much and asked for comments on this.  This morning there are 168 comments on that thread, most of them are entertaining, IMO, a troll; but my comment - nowhere to be seen.

From my perspective - entertain the trolls, and rail about Brietbart, ignorance, etc.; but ignore, IMO, a legitimate request to hear the perspective of the authors of the first article on this commentary.

If this is their attitude, then saving us from climate change will be in spite of climate scientists and not because of.

Foreign Direct Investment in India

The potential impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on a national economy is perhaps best measured as FDI as a fraction of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The nation as an FDI magnet is perhaps best measured as FDI as a fraction of World FDI.

The Influence of Sanskrit on the Japanese Sound Systems

For future reference.

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED043872

The Influence of Sanskrit on the Japanese Sound Systems.

Buck, James H.

The Japanese syllabary of today would probably not exist in its present arrangement had it not been for Sanskrit studies in Japan. Scholars of ancient Japan extracted from the Devanagari those sounds which corresponded to sounds in Japanese and arranged the Japanese syllabary in the devanagari order. First appearing in a document dated 1204, this arrangement has been fixed since the 17th century. This arrangement was most convenient for the study of Sanskrit and was later applied by scholars of the history of the Japanese language. It was a convenient means to order information and perhaps, even, its early use has a parallel in the earliest English dictionaries which were arranged according to our present alphabet, but whose major purpose was the study of a foreign language. For the English, it was Latin; for the Japanese, it was Sanskrit. (Author/AMM)

 

Note: Presented at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, University of North Carolina, April 17-18, 1970

Ta-Nehisi Coates' latest

The Atlantic has: "I'm not black, I'm Kanye".

It is a good piece of writing.  But consider:

It is hard because what happened to America in 2016 has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of past American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers—unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments, and the gallant General Lee. Here is a country that specializes in defining its own deviancy down so that the criminal, the immoral, and the absurd become the baseline, so that even now, amidst the long tragedy and this lately disaster, the guardians of truth rally to the liar’s flag.

Is there some truth in it? Undeniably.  But is this the America you experience and recognize on a daily basis? 

Or this:

There is no separating the laughter from the groans, the drum from the slave ships, the tearing away of clothes, the being borne away, from the cunning need to hide all that made you human. And this is why the gift of black music, of black art, is unlike any other in America, because it is not simply a matter of singular talent, or even of tradition, or lineage, but of something more grand and monstrous. When Jackson sang and danced, when West samples or rhymes, they are tapping into a power formed under all the killing, all the beatings, all the rape and plunder that made America. The gift can never wholly belong to a singular artist, free of expectation and scrutiny, because the gift is no more solely theirs than the suffering that produced it. Michael Jackson did not invent the moonwalk. When West raps, “And I basically know now, we get racially profiled / Cuffed up and hosed down, pimped up and ho’d down,” the we is instructive.

Really?  Sometimes music is just music, maybe? 

I don't deny Ta-Nehisi Coates his perspective.  But it is just one description that one of the blind men around the elephant; it doesn't describe the whole elephant. 

Now imagine that there is a whole mini-economy of academic India-studiers (Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock, etc., etc.) , NYTimes-like "liberal" media and its "native informants" and an evangelical movement, all out to "civilize" the heathen Hindus of India, and de-primitivize them and so on, all of them Ta-Nehisi Coates in their perspective.  And they claim to have the certified stamp of understanding India. 

Perhaps when one realizes that the NY Times collective does not comprehend its native country, that throws doubt that it can provide a basis for understanding of the rest of the world, and one seeks knowledge elsewhere.

Balu: Introspection vs Reflection on Experience

Well worth a careful read.

Book memo: The Hydrogen Sonata

Iain M. Banks has a reputation for his science fiction, so I said, why not?  Picked up "The Hydrogen Sonata" at the public library.  Well, I found it OK, not great.  Perhaps I picked up the wrong book?