Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Don't rain on my parade

I think China has control issues. There's Taiwan, Tibet, their silencing of all human rights activists, the baleful record on press and religious freedom, and now an attempt to make the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games rain-free by pre-draining the clouds.

babelfish will give us nothing but babble

Read here about someone's idea to creat a universal translator in the event we're visited by extraterrestrials. I can't help but think it's premise, that there is a universal structure underlying the existing languages on earth and beyond, is false.

Monday, April 21, 2008

George Clooney's historical analysis/determinism

Almost Hegelian in a way.

“My father and I were saying that we’ve been lucky as a country historically. When we needed a constitution – something which has to be really well-handled – we had Thomas Jefferson. Then we had a civil war, which could have destroyed the country, and there was Lincoln. With the Depression, we had Roosevelt. The Cuban missile crisis was the closest we’ve ever come to a nuclear holocaust and there was Kennedy. These are some of the greatest leaders of our time, and then we had 2001 and got unlucky. And, listen, I can’t believe that Bush is an evil man – I just think he wasn’t equipped. But maybe 2001 or September 11 wasn’t that moment – although they were two of the biggest moments in our country’s history – but now that our economy is in the tank, our face across the world is probably at its most blemished, our country has been assailed, the fact that we don’t necessarily adhere to the Geneva Convention… maybe in terms of that moment when you absolutely need someone to lead, not manage the country, maybe it’s now.

“Because here’s the thing that’s sort of astonishing. Even at the time of the civil rights movement or Vietnam – when kids actually had something to lose – they still didn’t show up at the polls. But you know what? They’re voting right now like you cannot believe. So maybe this is that moment where, for the first time in our history, kids are going to understand that they have to take the reins of our country and that may be why Barack Obama is around right now.”

Sunday, April 20, 2008

notes on food crisis

As the food crisis continues, it's a good idea to find the causes and possible solutions. Most will lay the blame squarely on the governments of some developed states. The subsidies to produce ethanol, rather than food, that they grant their farmers has lowered the supply, increased the demand, and raised the global price of food. Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has blamed such policies for creating mass starvation and has said they amount to "silent mass murder". Canada is very involved in this process, to be sure, because "Canada's Conservative government, playing to the farm lobby and a coterie of rent-seeking corporations, has showered millions on the biofuels market."

Of course, like most things, this is not a simple issue. Taking biofuels out of the equation will not necessarily solve this problem. Some say monocrops (the mass production of a single food in a given environment) is the real cause of the current food crisis...but not too many people have been talking about that.

Anyways, we should only hope this food crisis will be resolved immediately and lead to clear and practical reforms for a more equitable and just future.

Friday, April 18, 2008

William James: “Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.”

Embodied Cognition is the thesis that: "Cognition evolved to guide real bodies in the real world...Our thoughts are constrained and influenced by the details of our flesh. How you move your arm or leg actually shapes the way you perceive, think and remember. " To put it differently, thought is a tool for the purpose of more effective action. We should not think of thought as an end-in-itself, but as something useful only in properly guiding us as social beings with practical, not abstract, problems to solve.

This may explain why young students have so much trouble with algebra: that paragon of abstract and detached (read: disembodied) thought.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

conservation refugees

Here's an interesting article on what the writer calls "conservation refugees" - indigenous groups in India, although the term applies to groups throughout the world, as well, who are evicted from their homes and the regions they normally farm, hunt, or gather in, for the expressed purpose of conserving the environment and/or a specific species of wildlife. This alone is wrong. But to make matters worse, conservation is rarely the actual practice:

While the alleged purpose of the evictions was wildlife conservation, teak and eucalyptus plantations eventually replaced more than 40 of the evacuated hamlets. As it has in Botswana, Kenya and elsewhere, conservation in India has become a convenient and respectable cover for less savory motives when the very same national government that removes native people from their land in the name of conservation has no compunctions about giving up ecologically sensitive areas to large-scale development projects.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

For the most part I sided with the protesters of the Olympic games. China's human rights record is abysmal, and their stance towards Tibet is obviously unjust and should be reversed by any means necessary. But, I'm also a pragmatist and Fareed Zakaria's suggestion that the protests could have some dire unintended consequences has made me pause.

In his words: "Diplomacy can be scoffed at, but every multinational business that has had success in persuading the Chinese government to change course will testify that public humiliation does not work nearly as well on the regime as private pressure."

Monday, April 14, 2008

Martin Luther King Jr: "only when it is dark enough can you see the stars"

Because of rising food prices and the gnawing hunger borne of widespread poverty, many Haitians have recently begun protesting their government and have even stormed the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
• One person died during riots caused by rising food-prices in the West-African country, Ivory Coast. “The protests are linked to the high price of oil, the growing demand for bio-fuels and the expanding economies of Asia and Latin America, our correspondent says.” To explain: bio-fuel, that more-or-less clean-burning source of energy, is made from corn, palm oil, sugar, and some other crops. So with a greater demand for bio-fuel, there’s been a corresponding increase in the price of those food items. So, people already hovering around the poverty line are now starving. But there may be a way out. “One solution: make biofuel from nonfood crops. DaimlerChrysler, for example, is promoting jatropha, a thorny plant that grows on marginal land in Latin America, Africa and India. With intensive labor, it yields high-quality biodiesel without boosting food prices. In fact, it has no value as food; it's poisonous.”
• Bio-fuel is not the cause of all the current food ills in the world though. There have been dramatic increases in the cost, and decreases in the supply, of rice in places like the Philippines for very different reasons.
• Burma is officially a military dictatorship and, after the monks led a protest against the state only to find their selves imprisoned, tortured, and killed, it made perfect sense many Burmese would flee. But sadly, some have left one cell for another. In neighboring Thailand, they are granted very few rights as migrant workers and experience regular abuse. Here: “Unregistered migrant workers often face poor working conditions, low wages, exploitation by employees, and are prey to extortion by authorities and deportation to Burma if caught. While there is a bilateral agreement between the Thai and Burmese governments on managing labor migration, it has yet to be fully implemented, and the formal process is slow, expensive, and restrictive to certain occupations.”
• The Chinese government has sent a clear message it wants to keep its more outspoken citizens in line, stiff and quiet, in the lead-up to the Olympics, by sentencing the prominent human rights activist, Hu Jia, to jail for “inciting subversion of state power”. If the International Olympic Committee granted China the honor of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games because the added attention would soften and civilize their approach to dissidents, as some have said, they might tragically be wrong.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

what gives me panic attacks



A reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog posted this passage on the force of infinity from James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I thought I would share it:

For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.

notes on Iraqi refugees

A Vancouver based writer and journalist, Deborah Campbell, wrote an interesting article on a relatively under-reported development, which was published in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine. The piece is called “Exodus: Where will Iraq go next?” and it covers the state of Iraqi refugees.

The Iraq war and the sectarian violence, between Sunnis and Shiites, have created unimaginably unlivable conditions for Iraq’s inhabitants. Many have been displaced – 2.5 million within Iraq, and 2.5 million from Iraq. Most of those displaced from Iraq have gone to Syria, although you can find large numbers spread throughout the Middle East. Yet, these refugees haven’t escaped their troubles upon reaching Syria. The Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, in concert with the Bush administration’s goal of feigning progress and stability in Iraq, has tried to bring the refugees back to Iraq. He wants Syria to close its borders to the influx of Iraqis searching for safety, and for Syria to stop handing out the residency permits Iraqi refugees use to stay temporarily out of the Iraq war. By bringing the refugees back, and claiming they were able to do so because of a renewal of stability, Bush and the Iraqi government can unjustifiably maintain what Campbell calls a “narrative of impending triumph”. Many Iraqis in Syria have eventually lost their residency permits, thus forced to return again; and many have returned because they had run out of money. But why didn’t they have anywhere else to go?

Iraqis trying to move abroad have faced other obstacles. Campbell mentions the “material support ban” on immigrants who have supported terrorist groups, financially or otherwise. A very reasonable ban, to be sure. But, it has been so loosely defined as to become unfair to a lot of innocents seeking asylum.

The ban is so broadly applied that any Iraqi who has paid ransom to such groups – and rare is the Iraqi who has not had a friend of relative kidnapped – is considered to have materially supported terrorists and is thus, along with his or her spouse and children, ineligible for resettlement.

Those Iraqis remaining in Syria, bracing the financial strain and the realization they are not for the most part wanted in the West, and somehow unbowed in the face of pressure to return home (if you could call it home anymore), are once again experiencing exactly the kind of sectarian violence and constant intimidation they tried to leave behind. In the Syrian suburb where Campbell spent time, Sayeda Sainab, Iraqis were locked in a tragic fate Sisyphus would have understood:

Stories were circulating of young girls being sold as brides to rich men in the Gulf. An Iraqi widow was strangled by a family member in an “honor killing” for engaging in prostitution to support her children. A wealthy Iraqi man was kidnapped from his home in Damascus and forced to pay a $100,000 ransom, and three Iraqi ex-generals were discovered bound and strangled in an apartment in Sayeda Zainab. Another ex-general, a neighbour, fled as soon as the bodies were discovered, and no one knows where he went or where he will go next.

And so, like an Escher sketch, we return to the beginning, the article’s subtitle: “Where will Iraq go next?”

Friday, April 4, 2008

brown eyed angels

Many people use awareness-ribbons to display a mostly feigned concern for issues they know little about, as this great review discusses.*

*Note: If you're on facebook, the act of joining facebook groups that advocate this social cause or that political movement might be your most immediate way to forming flattering fabrications - of constructing your own personal counsel of angels.**

**Abraham Lincoln: If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Be truthful because life is short; and know that we are only the sum of our actions.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

patty is a meathead

Writing about the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Pat Buchanan comes awfully close to saying African-Americans should be glad they were kidnapped and made slaves in the United States:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

I wonder why no one is talking about this strange essay, penned by a man that is not, in most ways, a peripheral figure.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

There is a new religion in our midst and it is Environmentalism. Like many doctrines, it tends towards the absolute and perfectionist - naturally to the detriment of other commitments. Read here, here, and here.

Be a little more pragmatic and a lot less rigid.