An Almanack

10. Wants to go hiking the Appalachian Trail.

9. This is not a retreat. It is an advance in the direction opposite to forward.

8. Wants to be appointed Ambassador to Africa. She still thinks it is a country.

7. Will be appearing on Wife Swap, with Jenny Sanford.

6. Michelle Bachmann was getting too much attention for being batshit crazy.

5. Thought she could put her job up for sale on EBay.

4. Palin is the sole beneficiary in newly found Michael Jackson will.

3. Took career advice from President Dan Quayle.

2. John McCain bailed out five times too.

And the number one reason why Sarah Palin quit as Governor of Alaska:

1. Wants to move to Chicago and become a Community Organizer.

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Duh. Next week’s revelation: Water is Wet. Really.

The Liberal blogosphere has turned Green. TPM and Rachel Maddow have become cheerleaders for what they think is the democratic movement of Iran. Obama and Kos have decided to stay out of the fray, while not criticizing others for commenting on the situation. On the Right Wing, there is talk that this cautious approach is somehow a betrayal of our allies in Iran. Remember how well McCain’s meddling in Georgia worked out.

As someone who grew up in another country (India) awash in conspiracy theories of American involvement in local politics, I believe that the best thing for Americans can do right now to support democracy in Iran is..nothing. Stay out of it. Obama, having lived abroad, understands this. As does Kos, for the same reason. Any whiff of American support for Moussavi will undermine him. The crowds in Teheran, chanting “Allahu Akbar”, will themselves turn against Moussavi if the US voices support for him.

As I write this, the Supreme Leader is giving a sermon in Teheran. Darkly warning against “arrogant Western powers” and asking for “prayer” and “divine guidance”. Even if the US Government stays out of it, if American media is involved, such as through blogs, it will be used against Moussavi and his party. In other words,

Don’t just do something. Stand there.

Besides, we may not really understand what is going on. Read the rest of this entry »

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Nobody speaks of Bush anymore. It is Cheney who haunts us as the ghost of errors past. Hard to believe that a little less than half of voters went for Bush in 2000, and then again a slight majority in 2004. Right after 9/11, Bush had the support of 90% of people. Even as he limped out of town, about a third of Americans approved of him. That is after the Iraq debacle, after the Katrina disaster,after the disclosures of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Some one must have supported torture back when Bush and Cheney were waterboarding prisoners. Someone other than just Bush must have thought that Brownie was doing a heck of a job in New Orleans.

It is not just evil people who cause great harm to the world. It is well meaning people who try to fit in, somehow contorting their thoughts to fit the conventional wisdom of the day. Many of these same people are now for Obama, fitting into the new CW,forgetting where they stood back in the brief dark age after 9/11. “The Google”, which just happened to come online about the same time, allows us to look up the celebrities among us.
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That sound you are not hearing is the roar of conservative activist groups enraged at the progressive in the White House. Other than a few buffoons like Limbaugh, right wing activists are demoralized, without a target to hit at.
The Globe

The arrival of a big-city liberal president backed by Democratic majorities in Congress should have given single-issue conservative interest groups concerned with guns, abortion, and religion a lot of new material. Yet only four months after taking office, Obama appears to have already fulfilled one of the murkiest pledges of his candidacy: to declare a cease-fire in the culture wars.

Rich Lowry is despondent that the new President is not waving the red flag at the conservative bulls:

Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can’t get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace.

This is how Obama, whose position on abortion is indistinguishable from NARAL’s, can speechify on abortion at Notre Dame and come away sounding like a pitch-perfect centrist. It’s natural, then, that his speech at the National Archives on national security should superficially sound soothing, reasonable, and even a little put-upon (oh, what President Obama has to endure from all those finger-pointing extremists).

Many liberals also seem angry that Obama is not being more provocative. But that was Obama’s style all along.
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What Went Wrong? is the title of a book by the Orientalist scholar Bernard Lewis about the Decline and Fall of the Islamic Civilization. There was a time when the Islamic Empires ruled from Spain to India and beyond. They had the best scientists, the most sophisticated literature. The basic degrees given out in Western Universitites today (Bachelors, Masters, Doctorate) are translations of Arabic terms used at Madrassas from Morocco to Egypt. The idea of tax exempt foundations to support research and charitable work is Islamic. The Shariah Law gave women the right to property, unheard of in the West till the eighteenth Century. And then it all fell apart. The Ottoman Caliphate lingered on as the sickman of Europe until it was finally abolished in the 1920s by the British.

Something like this is happening with the American Car industry. Obama just fired the Chairman of GM, the closest thing to a Caliph in America. Read the rest of this entry »

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Hat tip Public D

Publisher’s Note
The original author of this photo-cartoon remains anonymous. I took it from a post on Daily Kos and added the following speech explaining Andre’s fate. The photo has since appeared on many websites. The second speech below is a totally unfair parody of one by the CEO of Beth-Israel Medical Center. I blame our staff member Richard Saunders for the biting tone of that parody. Richard has been properly chastised. His only excuse is temporary loss of sanity from performing experiments on the nature of electricity.

Hello everyone. Thanks for taking the time to get together today at an actual work site. How is everyone feeling in those work overalls? Thought it would be a nice change from the eleventh floor.

I’m not going to waste your time or mince words. The reason for getting together is to bring you up to speed on the company’s status. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as we all would have anticipated even 6 short days ago.

There are several issues.
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As soon as I saw a picture of Rod Blagojevitch (back during the Dem Primaries) I knew he was up to no good. This judgement, now vindicated, did not come from deep knowledge of IL state politics. I just knew that someone with such a lush growth of hair on his head had to be a bounder. This would be true even if the hair were fake. Donald Trump. Gary Hart (in the eighties, not now). Bill Clinton. Elvis. All talented people, all got in trouble. What do they have in common? Hair where it is supposed to grow, not on their ear or back.

IL has a second chance now with Patrick Quinn. He is different from Blagojevitch in every possible way.

“He’s the anti-Blagojevich, for sure,” said State Representative Jack D. Franks

You have got to love the guy: NYTimes

Mr. Quinn, 60, can be so unassuming that he watched the inauguration of President Obama in Washington crunched down on his knees so that people behind him could get a better view. When prone to boasting, which is not very often, it can be about miserly stuff, like staying in budget hotels and eating discount meals.

More to the point I am making,

And with a hairline more John Lithgow than Elvis, he does not even look the Blagojevich part.

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A parable, possibly of Buddhist origin:

The baker dangled the freshly made bread under the Bodhisatva’s nose. He knew it was overpriced, but the smell still enticed Him. So He breathed in deep. The baker, knowing he had lost the sale, said

“Hey, if you are enjoying the smell of my bread, you have to pay for it”
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Perhaps the most spectacular early prediction of quantum mechanics was tunneling: that particles can do things that are forbidden in Newton’s mechanics, although with a small probability. Read the rest of this entry »

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Thermodynamics is the study of heat. Originally developed to understand steam engines and such, it led to a revolution in physics. It showed that time has a preferred direction. Also, that physics is not fully deterministic: the best we can do for large systems is to predict averages of physical quantities and probabilities of events. But with the even greater revolutions of quantum mechanics and relativity that happened soon after , thermodynamics lost some of its original wonder. Nowadays it is thought of a staid old field, barely taught in physics departments anymore ( except as a preparation for a Stat Mech course). This is a pity, because thermodynamics is perhaps the most remarkable of all physical theories. We have none other than Albert Einstein vouching for this¹: Read the rest of this entry »

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Earnest Rutherford used to say that all science is either physics or stamp collecting. This could have been a dig at the biologists of his time, who were still collecting samples and classifying species. He probably would have thought more highly of modern molecular biology, which is a lot like his physics in outlook: everything is determined by the DNA. It is said that Rutherford’s worst insult for a student who had done something stupid was–Chemist. The chemists had the last laugh though: Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize not in Physics but in Chemistry for having achieved the transmutation of elements.

Should we understand the world bottom up or top down? Which is the proper scientific view? Read the rest of this entry »

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Read First: Longitude Zero

Indians call the bay between Africa and India the Arabian Sea. Throughout the medieval times it was controlled by Arab sailors. They established settlements down the East coast of Africa, as far down as Malindi in Kenya. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Theology

His All-Holiness Bartholomew I is the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the city now called Istanbul. He is considered the equivalent of the Pope for the 300 million Orthodox Christians in the world. He is the `first among equals’ of the four Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem who are successors to the Apostles. (Several Patriarchates have been added more recently to reflect the growth of the Church in Eastern Europe, such as those Serbia, Moscow and Bulgaria). Read the rest of this entry »

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The Jaataka tales are a collection of parables about the 500 lives of the Buddha until he achieved Nirvana, salvation. After that there are no more re-incarnations. The stories proceed from simple morality tales in which the Bodhisatva ( the soul of the Budha) was alive in the body of a lower life-form: a rabbit, an elephant and so on. Until he attains human form and the stories get more sophisticated. Various versions of these stories have been told and retold over many generations all over the Eastern World.
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Athens and Sparta are prototypical early civilizations we learn to write essays about in high school. Even with the hind sight of middle age they remain interesting.

Most of what we know of the Spartans is from their arch-rivals, the Athenians. So we have to be a little skeptical of what we hear. Still, we know that they were a city state that was dominated by a small tribe of warriors. They had an underclass of agricultural workers,the helots. These were descendants of the messenians whom they had subjugated in earlier wars. The young men and women of Sparta were separated early on. The men received military training. Women received education as well, unusual in ancient societies. Spartan way of life was austere, based on a system of honor that emphasized valor above all else. They are most famous for the battle of Thermopylae, in which a small band of Spartan braves fought off the invading Persian army.
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Mira Nair’s movie `Namesake’ is about a man with an odd name
(Gogol) for an Indian. I have my own situation to deal with.
My name is usually written as Sarada G. Rajeev.
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Vedaanta is the end of all knowledge. End as in goal, or as in the ultimate kind of knowledge. It is a theory of what knowledge itself is. What practical use could it be? Volumes have been written on how to translate the abstract concepts of Vedanta to every day life. The ultimate authority in `modern times’ (only about a few hundred years ago) is Sankara Acharya. His Vivekachoodaamani and Bhajagovindam are attempts to explain this most abstruse of all branches of classical Indian philosophy to the masses; or at least to laymen.
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