Accidental Blogger

Another minor collateral damage in the great war on terror

I mean, couldn't this guy have been whisked out beforehand or even during the raid in one of the Blackhawk helicopters? Didn't the US intelligence know that Al Qaida sympathizers in the  Pakistani army and government, who were probably harboring bin Laden, were going to punish this guy for embarrassing them?

International Workers' Day

Happy May Day. A message from Noam Chomsky. 

A semi-righteous book (prasad)

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist best known for his work on the moral foundations, identifying the dimensions along which peoples' moral responses vary. The most fundamental moral concerns of human beings include, he says, care or harm, fairness or cheating, liberty or oppression, loyalty or betrayal, authority or subversion, and sanctity or degradation. The neat fact uncovered by his research is that not all people weigh these dimensions of morality seriously, that whilst conservatives bring all these dimensions to bear upon moral deliberation, liberals and libertarians use only the first three. The ''money'' plot is here, showing how much people of different political orientations care about a given moral concern. A significant portion of Haidt's new book, ''The Righteous Mind'' is devoted to explaining these dimensions and findings.

An important concern for Haidt is that liberals and conservatives in contemporary America are increasingly divided (his book is subtitled ''Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion''), and he thinks his moral dimensions help explain why. We simply respond to different moral criteria. We have different ''moral taste-buds'', he says, in an image used repeatedly in the book. It is not just moral disagreement he is interested in however, but moral incomprehension, the fact that we can literally fail to understand what someone on the opposite side might be thinking, or why he isn't a moral monster just because we disagree with him. Here he thinks a significant portion of the blame rests with the liberal side of the divide. One reason is just that the academy and cultural elite is overwhelmingly liberal, so it ignores perspectives from the other side, and participates in group-think. In his last chapter calling for political understanding, he makes much of sociologists like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert Putnam, together with insisting on the value of market libertarianism, and spontaneous economic order. He also points out how science itself has sometimes suffered from political considerations, with a star witness being the sociobiology wars of the 1970s. It is easy to push back here - how is anyone to stock Biology Departments with creationists, and surely conservatives can take more of the ''differing interests'' medicine they want to dish out on gender representation. Nevertheless, I do think he has a point here; at any rate I will not pursue this argument further.^†

Haidt's more interesting claim is that while conservatives have access to all the moral criteria (caring, fairness, liberty) that liberals use, liberals lack access to key conservative intuitions, pertaining to loyalty, authority and sanctity. People from ''Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic'' backgrounds, of the sort forming his core audience, are disproportionately likely not to possess the full human moral palate. The effect is of people who lack the taste-receptors for sourness trying to evaluate sweet-and-sour chicken. Haidt says that when asked to predict other peoples' moral responses, conservatives and moderates typically model liberals well, but not vice versa. Surprisingly, Haidt chooses not to include a nice figure or table showing this difference^‡, but it seems plausible to to me that (particularly the elite of) the cultural left does more frequently display rampant cluelessness about what motivates the right, than the reverse. Consider for example how many people thought post 2004 that Kansas was being ''duped'' into voting for Bush, as if they couldn't have non-economic, illiberal concerns of their own. Mind you, I suspect being embedded in a matrix of like-thinkers is more relevant here than differences in moral ''palates.''

Haidt also reviews evidence that the human intellect is principally devoted to quick, intuitive thinking, not to rational deliberation. The image he uses is of an elephant, or intuition and emotion, and a rider, or the consciously reasoning mind, where the elephant is roughly speaking in charge. I do not have much to say to this, and will direct the review to the rest of the book, focusing especially on a few particular points. First, the question of ''moral tastes'' and possible ways in which this model fails, or at least loads the die one way. I will have a hopefully constructive criticism of Haidt's decision not to use his framework in addressing some fairly obvious political questions. Then I will get on to ''the evolution stuff.'' This is the bulk of my criticism, so here I quickly summarize it by saying that I don't understand why Haidt needs an underlying framework, much less one based on group selection, that his conclusions for the most part acquire only a Science-y luster from it, and that in any case he's basically just pretending to derive his Moral Foundations Framework from biology (this last is perhaps the most aggressive criticism I make of Haidt.)

A word on ''emotional'' matters is in order. This book is intended to challenge liberals, and so might be irritating in any case if you're a liberal. The irritation is likely to be exacerbated by an unfortunate tendency Haidt has, to blur the boundaries between philosophy and psychology whenever convenient. He spends much of the book implicitly or explicitly suggesting that conservatives are ''right'', while backing away from explicitly arguing for the thing by playing the humble psychologist card - itself a hard sell when your opponents are everywhere called WEIRD. Then after a book full of this, he switches open-faced to saying that the ideas he has presented lead him to think conservatives are actually right much of the time, about happiness, community, welfare, diversity and the like - the last chapter sounds quite a bit like a conversion narrative, actually. One might want to throw the book against a wall when encountering such sleight-of-hand.

The usefulness of Haidt-the-evangelist to your thinking will likely depend on your exposure/openness to his conservative heroes to begin with. People who think conservatives are monsters with no brains and smaller hearts, will learn to think better if they persevere through their heartburn. Those instead who're acquainted with (indeed think fairly well of) some of his great heroes - Hume and Durkheim everywhere, a fair bit of Burke, Hayek and Smith, might find his presentation uncritical, bordering on cheerleading. No doubt this dichotomy is fraught; after all, the first group has a predominantly third person existence! Anyway, while Haidt does bring significant biases to his work, the book is worth reading for liberals who want to have their moral presuppositions inspected and scrutinized. In reading, one does well to watch out for the irritation, consciously deciding case-by-case whether to follow or swallow it. Contra Haidt, an ''emotional'' reading of the book really is likely to be inferior to a ''rational'' one! Despite my overall positive rating (I end up with 3.5/5), the following content will be largely negative. How much this is about valid counterpoints rather than residual irritation, I cannot say. All right. Enough throat-clearing. Let's begin.

If you can't say something nice ... redux

Given that this pretty little speech was delivered at the NRA convention in front of an audience that already believes it is losing money and freedom to an "enemy" government, does it amount to crying fire in a crowded theater or at the very least, come close? How much vileness can be excused for the sake of the First Amendment and because an aging performer has to live up to his public image of a crazy?

A Question of Crime (Sujatha)

Just what is the crime here?

Dharun Ravi, 20, formerly of Rutgers University, NJ, was convicted on all 15 counts brought against him: invasion of privacy, bias intimidation,lying to investigators, trying to influence a witness and tampering with evidence. From the NYTimes article:

"The case was a rare one in which almost none of the facts were in dispute. Mr. Ravi’s lawyers agreed that he had set up a webcam on his computer, and had then gone into a friend’s room and viewed Mr. Clementi kissing a man he met a few weeks earlier on a Web site for gay men. He sent Twitter and text messages urging others to watch when Mr. Clementi invited the man again two nights later, then deleted messages after Mr. Clementi killed himself."

"Mr. Ravi, 20, wearing a dark suit over his slight frame, sat expressionless as the jury forewoman read the verdict on the first count, of invasion of privacy. But he seemed surprised when she pronounced him guilty on the next charge, of bias intimidation. His eyes popped and he quickly turned his head from the jury."

...

"Mr. Ravi had rejected plea deals, because prosecutors would have required him to admit to bias intimidation. His lawyers said he simply did not believe he had committed a hate crime. They argued that he was “a kid” with little experience of homosexuality who had stumbled into a situation that scared him."

...

"Mr. Kaplan, the county prosecutor, rejected suggestions that Mr. Ravi would not have been on trial if Mr. Clementi had not killed himself. Even if he had not, he said, “under these facts, under this evidence, we would prosecute this case.”

I remember thinking "What a horrific case! What kind of values did the kid who spied grow up with?" when I first read about the suicide of Tyler Clementi a couple of years ago.  Then, as I read this article in the New Yorker, I felt more ambivalent about the charges. Is this a hate crime?

What must have gone through Clementi's mind over the whole incident, that prompted him to commit suicide? He appears to have been at a most vulnerable stage, the start of 'coming out' to the world, having informed his parents just shortly before joining college, and starting to explore his sexuality. Was he punishing only Dharun for harassing him, or trying to punish his mother, whose initial rejection he sensed. From the New Yorker article by Iain Parker:

"When he described that experience to Cruz, Clementi reported that his father was “very accepting” of his news, but added, “Its a good thing dad is ok w/it or I would be in serious trouble / mom has basically completely rejected me.” He later added that she had been “very dismissive.”

Jane Clementi told me recently that Tyler announced his sexuality to her in a private, late-night conversation, which “snowballed” to cover his perceived shortage of friends and the uncertainty he had about his faith. At the end of their talk, she recalled, “he cried, I cried, we hugged.” They said that they loved each other. But, Jane Clementi said, “I must admit, other than being surprised, I felt betrayed.”

And, finally, after the whole sordid saga unravels, in digital footprints and reconstruction of the sequence of events leading to the discovery of Tyler Clementi's body in the Hudson, a sad footnote from his mother.

"On the night Jane Clementi learned that Tyler was gay, she said, “I told him not to hurt himself.” Not long before, a girl from his school had committed suicide. “We had talked about it briefly that summer, and for some reason that thought came to mind. And all I said was ‘Don’t hurt yourself,’ and he looked me right in the eye and he laughed, and said, ‘I would never do anything like that.’ ”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/06/120206fa_fact_parker#ixzz1pTDkTaHF

So yes, Dharun Ravi was a jerk. He was definitely guilty of the charges of invasion of privacy, lying to investigators, trying to influence a witness and tampering with evidence. But as to the determination of 'bias intimidation', under the Hate Crimes statute, the situation is more murky. There is evidence of distaste and disgust, but not of hate, in my opinion.

Apparently, the jurors agreed with my opinion, until they were presented with the wording of the law.

 "Leverett said he initially doubted that Ravi had committed a hate crime, but after reading the statute of law presented to the jury, everyone agreed Ravi's crimes met the criteria.

"In my opinion I didn't think it was a hate crime until we were presented with an indictment (that explained the law)," Leverett said.

For instance, the bias intimidation statute in NJ reads:

"a. Bias Intimidation. A person is guilty of the crime of bias intimidation if he commits, attempts to commit, conspires with another to commit, or threatens the immediate commission of an offense specified in chapters 11 through 18 of Title 2C of the New Jersey Statutes; N.J.S.2C:33-4; N.J.S.2C:39-3; N.J.S.2C:39-4 or N.J.S.2C:39-5,
(1) with a purpose to intimidate an individual or group of individuals because of race, color, religion, gender, handicap, sexual orientation, or ethnicity; or
(2) knowing that the conduct constituting the offense would cause an individual or group of individuals to be intimidated because of race, color, religion, gender,handicap, sexual orientation, or ethnicity..."

So, yes. Dharun Ravi's actions were a crime, even if he thought he was just 'joking'. Justice has been served by the verdict. The laws are very clear on that. All that remains to happen is the sentencing, set for May 21.

Would this have been prosecuted as a hate crime if Clementi had lived? It is hard to know, even though the prosecutor avers that they would have done so with equal zeal. 

I wonder.

Michael Sandel on markets and corruption (prasad)

Michael Sandel has written a long, thoughtful, but frustrating article that raises questions about the intrusion of markets and market values into new domains. He begins with a long list of problematic goods and services that can now be bought and sold, then explains why we might worry about such things being sell-able. He has some things to say about deregulation and how the market has given free rein to greed. He worries too about inequality and its impact upon consumption, so that the more we do with markets the more inequality "matters."

The meat of his argument, however, is about "corruption." By corruption he means not bribery or nepotism, but rather the more "religious" cluster of debasement/pollution/impurity:

Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship.

Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about.

[…]

We don’t allow children to be bought and sold, no matter how difficult the process of adoption can be or how willing impatient prospective parents might be. Even if the prospective buyers would treat the child responsibly, we worry that a market in children would express and promote the wrong way of valuing them. Children are properly regarded not as consumer goods but as beings worthy of love and care. Or consider the rights and obligations of citizenship. If you are called to jury duty, you can’t hire a substitute to take your place. Nor do we allow citizens to sell their votes, even though others might be eager to buy them. Why not? Because we believe that civic duties are not private property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them, to value them in the wrong way.

This seems fair - not that many people believe the market should control everything, and I don't think anyone believes children should be sold to the highest bidder. However, Sandel's arguments, and especially his examples of inappropriate goods, are not persuasive (to me at any rate).

The Death and Burial of Peter Russo's Father – Part 1 (Norman Costa)

The Death and Burial of Peter Russo's Father – Part 1 (Norman Costa)

 

Death Is Near

Ellie Russo called me at 4 AM. Peter, her husband, just got a call from his brother, Rob. His father's condition took a sudden change for the worse. Tony Russo was near death, and was not expected to live more than half the day. Ellie asked if I would drive Peter to be with his father at the hospice center.

Peter and Ellie had returned from his father's bedside, only 90 minutes earlier, and barely got one hour of sleep. It's a two and a half hour drive to Glastonbury, CT, and there was no possibility either of them could drive and be safe. In 35 minutes I was at their house. Peter answered the door, hugged me, and said, “Thank you.” He went straight to my car and got in.

Ellie grabbed my arm as I was turning to follow her husband. “Listen,” she said. “Drive safely. No speeding. Peter's father is the one who is supposed to die. Not you and not Peter.” I patted her hand that held my arm and told her I would deliver both of us, safely, to his father's bedside. I gave her a hug, and left.

I thought Peter would sleep in the car. Not a chance. He was wide awake. I stopped at a diner, and picked up coffee and sandwiches. Ellie's admonition stayed with me the entire trip. I was never so conscious of posted speed limits, and staying alert. I was trying hard to ignore how much time had elapsed since Peter got the call from his brother. He didn't want to call ahead to check on his father. Life and death were out of his control. He would find out what happened when he got there.

We talked, not about Peter's father, but about my father. He died more than a year earlier. Peter kept me company, a few times, on the drive from Poughkeepsie to my Dad's nursing home in Catskill, NY. Peter and my father got to know each other in the last two years of his life. They enjoyed the company of each other, and their conversations.

Peter talked a lot about my Dad's wake, the Catholic funeral Mass, the eulogy I gave him, and the grave-side ceremony. Peter was raised a Catholic, but, for the past 15 years, he has been a Wiccan and active with his small circle. His father, though, would have a proper Catholic service. Tony, a Korean War veteran, would be buried in a military cemetery in Saratoga, NY, not with Peter's deceased mother and deceased older sister in a family plot in Fall River, MA.

 

Great Evil

The caste system in India - no one is immune...

Not even Islam or for that matter, any other major Indian religions which "officially" do not subscribe to social stratification by virtue of one's birth. Therefore it is not unusual to hear of "Brahmin" Christians, "Kshatriya "Sikhs and "Rajput" Muslims of high birth.The effects of the Hindu caste system go beyond the grotesque practices of exploitation and brutality for which it is notorious. Most social interactions from matrimony to business dealings are largely dictated by caste considerations. Indian politics are rife with loyalties and rivalries based on caste and religion. There are layers upon layers of cultural/ social / religious dimensions to regional and national politics in India, and the candidates for public office rely heavily upon identity politics. Communities in India irrespective of wealth and status, quietly practice their own individual forms of the caste system in private as well as public life, frequently giving shape to the political leadership. These differences are particularly sharp during communal unrest. In more placid times, people tend to think more of their own economic interests and the voting pattern of a particular religious group or caste cannot be taken for granted.  It is not uncommon for unethical politicians to instigate riots and disturbances close to elections in order to divide communities and then pander to one side or the other. Right now elections are being held in several north Indian states with sizable Muslim populations. Politicians are predictably watching the "Muslim vote bloc." But some are warning that to count the vastly diverse and complex Indian Muslim communities as a monolitic entity may prove to be a miscalculation. Shahid Siddiqui, a Muslim member of the Indian Parliament from UP explains why.

The myth of the Muslim vote bank, though denied by sociologists and debunked by psephologists, refuses to die. It reasserts itself with new vigour at every election. Even those well aware of the diversity within the community cannot resist building their arguments on this spurious claim.

The vote bank theory has been convenient for labelling Muslims and shoving them into handy brackets. It was done in India to explain the political behaviour of Muslims across regional, linguistic, caste, class and social barriers. Today it is done globally to gloss over inconvenient and inconsistent behaviour: it is a one-size fits all formula that cuts across regions and rides over locational differences and circumstances. Whether they are Thai, Chechen, Palestinian or European, Muslims are judged unfailingly by their faith and so-called beliefs. In this foretold story, everything is pre-decided: the crime, the culprit, the cause, the evidence and the punishment.

The vote bank

The idea that there is something called a “Muslim vote bank,” which behaves uniformly across the board, suits equally the Muslim leadership and its right wing Hindu counterpart. Muslim leaders and middlemen can bargain with political parties on behalf of this “collective” vote, as if individual Muslims have no opinion of their own and can be herded together in a pre-determined direction for a price decided mutually between the politicians and the community's self-appointed spokespersons. The Muslim vote bank helps communal Hindu organisations to manufacture their own “Hindu vote bank,” and use the whipped up Muslim threat to achieve their ultimate objective: a Hindu-Muslim electoral polarisation. The secular sections too have become unwitting participants in this game. Their intention is presumably to lift Muslims out of their sense of insecurity but the constant focus has only served to perpetuate the fear and victimhood that have been the bane of the community. Experts on 24x7 TV channels habitually use the vote bank theory to offer pat explanations for Muslim behaviour and to reach pre-fabricated conclusions.

I know I will be roundly attacked for these assertions for they question the very basis on which sectarian elements on both sides have built their arguments. The Muslim Ulema refuse to accept the ground reality of Islam in India which is as much mired in caste politics as any other Indian religion. The plain truth is that Muslim society is as divided as Hindu society and along the same caste and regional lines. Caste is such a formidable Indian/Hindu institution that no ideology can escape it: Islam, Christianity, Marxism, rationalism, modernism have all floundered on the bedrock of this hard reality. Islam became acceptable in medieval Indian society as a caste group and not as a religious group. Mughals, Pathans, Turks, Sheikhs and Syeds were regarded as sub-castes, so much so that other Indian converts to Islam came to be conveniently regarded as outcasts.

Then there is this story which points out the ways in which caste politics is now being exploited with Muslim voters by pandering politicians. What I found interesting in this article is what I had suspected all along. A community votes as a bloc when their existence or identity is threatened in some way. With right wing Hindu parties like the BJP mostly in a waning phase in Indian politics, Muslims in India are voting for pocket book issues and not cultural ones. More interesting is the Congress Party's shameless pandering to the community by awarding Scheduled Caste / Scheduled Tribe status to "low caste" Muslims. As I pointed out earelier, it is an open secret that in India, there is "always" a caste system, irrespective of the faith of a community and that there are indeed rich and poor Muslims in India whose livelihoods and status fall across social lines based on traditional occupations which mirror the Hindu caste system. But isn't it somewhat cynical and ironic to introduce this kind of stratification as policy for a religious group which at least on paper, doesn't recognize such classifications? The third interesting item in this news report is that the Muslim special groups which may benefit from the government quota are anxious not to anger the large and powerful Yadav community (a designated SC / ST Hindu community) of UP with whom the Muslims had in the past joined hands to break the upper caste Hindu monopoly in the politics of Uttar Pradesh. This is identity politics at its best - making strange bedfellows, creating and disrupting unlikely alliances and fostering atavistic tendencies.

Zoos and zoo-people (prasad)

Travel to tribal portions of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is fairly restricted, and access to particular local tribes is (in theory) hard to accomplish. Rationales for isolating these peoples are probably varied - lack of disease resistance, the desire to protect unusual cultures blending into Rousseau-style noble savage stuff, the interesting genetic structure of the people, pretext for possible naval strategic concerns, etc. Of the lot, only the first seems ethically clean to me, but in any case much of this is fig-leaf stuff anyway, since Indian and foreign tourists visit quite routinely to gawk at the tribesmen.

Now there's video footage (taken by a British newspaper) in the news, showing tourists making naked indigenous women dance for food:    

Rights campaigners and politicians on Wednesday condemned a video showing women from a protected and primitive tribe dancing for tourists in exchange for food on India's far-flung Andaman Islands.

British newspaper The Observer released the video showing Jarawa tribal women -- some of them naked -- being lured to dance and sing after a bribe was allegedly paid to a policeman to produce them.

Under Indian laws designed to protect ancient tribal groups susceptible to outside influence and disease, photographing or coming into contact with the Jarawa is illegal.

The tribe, thought to have been among the first people to migrate successfully from Africa to Asia, lives a nomadic existence in the lush, tropical forests of the Andamans in the Bay of Bengal.

India's tribal affairs minister V Kishore Chandra Deo promised to take action over the incident, terming it "disgusting" on Wednesday, and the home ministry has sought a report.

Survival International, which lobbies on behalf of tribal groups worldwide, said the video showed tourists apparently enjoying "human zoos."

"Quite clearly, some people's attitudes towards tribal peoples haven't moved on a jot. The Jarawa are not circus ponies bound to dance at anyone's bidding," said Stephen Corry, the group's director, in a press release.

In June last year, Survival International accused eight Indian travel companies of running "human safari tours" so tourists could see and photograph the Jarawa. [emph added]

I think this 'Survival International' group is grandstanding to some extent in drawing the zoo analogy, but clearly this is pretty unsanitary stuff. Still, my own view is that this wouldn't ethically be that different from people visiting Amish country, if these people were treated like human beings to begin with and not fetishized, by people across the political spectrum, including foremost the government. People - all people - like gratifying their curiosity about strange people, and channeling that interest in ordinary ways (modulo health impact) would be on the whole harmless, doing little more than diluting cultural heritage, and might even create economic and other benefits. But with things as they are, such visits have an illicit character, and people tend to behave rather worse than is strictly necessary.

The Daily Mail [NSFW] has a video and additional details making the thing more vivid, including a picture showing a long line of cars that looks quite a bit like a safari. What particularly stood out to me is this:

The 403 tribe members should, in theory, be protected by strict laws on the Indian-run island. A sign at the gate to the 'enclosure' states: 'Don’t give any eatables to the Jarawas.

'Don’t indulge in photography, videography. Otherwise you will be liable for legal action ­including seizure of camera.' [emph added]

I can think of reasons to bar outsiders from entering this enclosure. [Although I hope - without having much expectation of being right - that such finickiness doesn't extend to medical care or education. Jarawa cancer patients should not be expected to die wholesomely just because they have done so for thousands of years...] Given whatever limited entry right there is though, with at least some people being allowed to walk, talk, sneeze and drive on tar roads, what possessed the government to put up signs warning those people off giving tribal children snickers bars? Are they monkeys or ducks that visitors must be barred from feeding them? If this is a zoo, who's the real zoo-keeper?

Catholic Cardinal Francis George: Gay Pride = Klan Rally? (Norman Costa)

Catholic Cardinal Francis George: Gay Pride = Klan Rally? (Norman Costa)

FutureNews Network (FNN) - June 2012, Chicago, IL, USA

A record 850,000 people came to Chicago today to watch or take part in the Annual Gay Pride Parade. By all accounts, it was loud, fun, quirky, colorful, at times bordering on the ourrageous and risque, and a great success, according to parade organizers. 'It's all about pride,' said the President of the organizing committee for this year's event. 'It's about pride in ourselves, our friends, our community, and in Chicago for being a great city of tolerance and inclusion.'

Only six months ago, there was concern about the reaction of the Catholic Church. Our own Cardinal Francis George likened the rhetoric of some members of the GLBT to that of the KKK. The Cardinal said that to them, the Catholic Church is the enemy.

The Cardinal was prompted to make his remarks, because the parade route was changed and would pass right in front of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, RC Church, on West Belmont Avenue. The local pastor was very concerned because Sunday morning church goers would find it very difficult to get through the crowds and cross the parade route to get to Sunday Mass.

Predictably, there was an outcry over Cardinal George's remarks.  What seemed like an inevitable confrontation between the Catholic Church and the parade organizers, was transformed into a cooperative display of community spirit. It began when the Cardinal apologized for what he described as intemperate and uncharitable remarks. 

The Cardinal, himself, negotiated with the city and the parade organizers. Local parishioners organized themselves as escorts and path makers through the crowds, and crossing guards to get church goers safely across the street. The whole thing was supervised by the police so that there would be a minimum of interruptions for church goers and the parade. 

The real news was not the agreement on escorts and crossing guards, but a large sign put up by Cardinal George, in front of the Church. It had the schedule of Masses. 

'SUNDAY - 8:00 a.m., 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. 
AGLO Mass - Sunday 7:00 p.m. - Archdiocesan Gay and Lesbian Outreach'

In addition, the sign read, 'After the parade, come back for Mass, or for private prayer and meditation in our Church. All are welcome.'

We learned that both Cardinal George, and pastor Father Thomas Srenn officiated at the 7:00 pm AGLO Mass. No one expected the overflow crowd for the AGLO Mass. The only problems were two people who tried to disrupt the Mass, but they were quickly excorted out by plain clothes police. 

The Cardinal was asked if the Church would do the same for next year. 'Of course,' he said. 'That is why the Church is here.' When asked if he would do anything different, he was quick to say, 'Yes. Next year we will have two AGLO Masses, and sufficient time and priests to hear confessions beforehand.' 

A CNN reporter asked if there was anything else he would like to say. He said, 'Bless all gay Catholics, all gay people, and all children of God!' The reporter was heard to say, 'Amen.'
 

Can Gross National Happiness = Gross National Irony ? (Sujatha)

So much for the concept of Gross National Happiness, a concept developed and promoted as an index of well-being by the Royal Government of Bhutan in 2005. While efforts to quantify it were widely publicized and discussed, nobody seemed to take the Bhutan government to task for its treatment of the ethnically Nepali Lhotshampas and their being forced out of the country. There is an entire population of them resettled or waiting to be resettled in other countries.

"Over 105,000 Bhutanese have spent more than 15 years living in refugee camps established in Nepal by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
Thousands more are living outside the camps in Nepal and India, and some in North America, Europe and Australia."

I came across one of those Bhutanese Nepali refugees a few weeks ago, as I mention in my personal blog post" Threaded"

For some refugees, the change of location has led to a hope for a new life, for example, a group settled in Pittsburgh, PA. (Article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

"They arrive, for the most part, at Pittsburgh International Airport with little more than the clothes they are wearing. They must quickly learn to navigate an unfamiliar city, speak English, adjust to American practices and organizations, find work and send their children to school.

Their journey here and the acculturation process after they arrive involve layers of international groups, U.S. government agencies, a resettlement organization and social services."

But for some it is too much to handle, with tragic results.

"He was found dead hanging in a laundry room Friday morning,” Bhanu Phuyel, another refugee resettled in the same city, told ekantipur.com from the US….Six members of the family were sharing a two-bed room apartment along with another family with four people. They had not received any other facility except food card.

[Jit Bahadur Pradhan] was annoyed with the circumstances, and used to complain with his two sons that the situation there was no better than in the camp in Nepal."

Will these dispossessed ever have their questionnaires added to those back home in Bhutan? What will happen to its much-vaunted high GNH quotient then?

Gross National Happiness does equal Gross National Irony, in this case.

 

"Sunday Morning" on Sunday Night (Norman Costa)

"Sunday Morning" on Sunday Night (Norman Costa)

Last night, Sunday, I spent an evening with friends. I convinced myself that I provide an indispensable service by encouraging the cook and her dinner-in-progress. "What are you chopping up? Is that parsnip? It tastes like celery. Oh! It's celery root. That explains it. Terrific!" Toward the end of dinner, before dessert, I seconded her motion that adding capers and black oil cured olives would be even better, next time. 

Of course, Roberta doesn't need my culinary advice and cheering, but sitting on a kitchen stool in the proximity of gastronomic events is an opportunity to paint a picture of my life events since the last time we gabbed and ate. Sergio was finishing his laundry so he could garb himself, confidently, for work the next morning. Sitting amid these very domestic of chores I announced that I wanted to tell them about my recent encounters with poetry. 

Poetry is a big deal for me. It is only in recent years that I have been able to read and enjoy good poetry. Roberta writes poetry, herself, and can reach to her book shelf and pull out a poem that is apropos to any topic of discussion. I was telling her and Sergio about my earlier posting on Accidental Blogger, "To Hint of Religion, Or Not to Hint of Religion." HERE. In the comments, Dean Rowan mentioned Wallace Stevens' poem, "Sunday Morning," and we exchanged a few thoughts about it. 

I found the poem so alluring that I couldn't get myself away from it. Each time I read it, I enjoyed it that much more, but seemed to understand it less and less. Perhaps I should rephrase. I was less and less certain of what Stevens was trying to do, to say, to get across. I think it is a religious poem, a Christian one at that, but he seems unsure about what he believes. No matter. I still enjoyed reading it.

With Sergio's and Roberta's agreement and attention, I read the first two of eight stanzas, intending to go no further. Upon completion of my quarter way around the track, Sergio said, "Wow! That's very Pagan." "Yes," agreed Roberta, "it's a very Pagan poem." I was surprised and asked as to what made it Pagan. They said it was rife with nature symbols from beginning to end - of the first two stanzas. [You should know that they are both Pagans, and among an entire coven whom I count as friends.] "Would you like me to read the rest it?" I asked. "YES! Go on. But slower, this time."

And so I did. Now the poem is even more curious, intriguing, and mysterious. I enjoy it even more. Maybe you will, too.

Sunday Morning 

1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

Step lively, you wretches ...

Without additional commentary on the nature of the GOP presidential candidates, here is just one "idea" proposed by the current front runner Newt Gingrich whom some are calling the Newtron Bomb.

It's a fact, because he has told us so, that Republican primary candidate Newt Gingrich is first and foremost a historian, so it's no surprise when he buttresses his views with historical precedents. But in his recent plans for lifting poor children out of poverty, we were alarmed that he chose to follow the Dickensian model of child labor practices.

A few weeks ago, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he talked about his "extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America."

Calling child labor laws "truly stupid," he said that people who became successful in one generation "all started their first job between nine and 14 years of age." He proposed that schools in poor neighborhoods "get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school."

Where does one begin? Child labor laws exist to protect children from just such crackpot ideas. But then he went even further in a campaign speech in Iowa last week: "Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash' unless it's illegal."

We could splutter all day at the offensiveness of these assertions, but our time is better spent in thanking Charles Blow, (link here) the visual Op-Ed columnist of the New York Times, who last Saturday used his gift for information graphics to present a column that succinctly demolished Gingrich's careless, cruel stereotypes, showing them to have no factual basis.

Blow presented an analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which showed that three-quarters of poor adults ages 18 to 64 work - half of them full-time. Most poor children live in a household with at least one employed parent, and among children in extreme poverty, nearly one in three lives with at least one working parent.

And as for the most egregious, irresponsible claim - that poor children have no habit of performing tasks for money "unless it's illegal" - Blow wrote that Gingrich "vastly overreaches by suggesting that a lack of money universally correlates to a lack of morals."

Poverty is indeed a factor in crime increase, but Blow's data show that even though the number of Americans living in poverty has grown recently, the crime rate has dropped overall, specifically among juveniles.

But, given his historical leanings, we can at least be thankful that Gingrich has never been accused of modesty, so odds are that we'll be spared a revival of that famous "Modest Proposal," put forward by Jonathan Swift in 1729, "For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country."

(cartoon: Pat Oliphant)

More on the same from Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post.

 

To Hint Of Religion, Or Not To Hint Of Religion (Norman Costa)

To Hint Of Religion, Or Not To Hint Of Religion (Norman Costa)

For the non-believer, should a hint of religion in a poem, or even an obvious reference, detract from the appreciation of the poetry? The issue came up regarding a poem by Jim Culleny, “Caresses and Cuffs.” He posted it on 3Quarks Daily.

Here's the poem:

Caresses and Cuffs

Silence thick as her stews sometimes
filled my grandmother’s house
but for the cars on 15
hissing toward Picatinny
on a wet night
big black Packards or Buicks
heavy as a hard life,
Chevy’s wide whitewalls
spinning over asphalt on a two-lane
before the interstate sliced through
a table in her living room
cluttered with snaps of Jim and Jack
Howard Frank Velma Ruth
Gladys Leo Leroy Pat; the lot of them
in by-gone black and white
mugging hugging beaming being
young as they’d been for the ages
for their tiny taste of time
their vitality a temporal joke
their smooth skin taut as the sky
on a blue blue daya pillow-piled day-bed
against the front wall under a window
kitty-corner from the brown coal stove
radiating from October
till the geometry of earth and sun
more befitted blood & breath
fat chairs stuffed as her turkeys
on big Thanksgivings
all in this mist of imagination
as real as a pin prick, as
bright and huge as a moon,
crisp as frost
—memory’s a terrible and tender thing
the way it claws and cradles the day
its shadows and light shifting
like shapes of an optical illusion
filled with mercies and accusations
—the caresses and cuffs ofthe lord.

by Jim Culleny11/27/11

A reader commented, “"Tiny taste of time" is good. Not too keen on the last line. One of your best....I just don't like the hint of religion there. But overall, a very tight and rhythmic poem. I prefer it to a lot of the poems in the New Yorker.” I liked it too, and enjoyed reading it aloud to myself.

 

Why Renaissance Babies are ugly (Elatia Harris)

Elatia explains: 

The Warburg Method teaches us that devotional art is not only not always beautiful, but rarely beautiful -- because it is deeply coded and the untutored eye doesn't always get it. Is not intended to get it. This is true across civilizations, not just true in the Western painting tradition. 

As the blogger knows, his stock represents about 400 years of devotional painting, in the Byzantine as well as Western traditions. This is interesting not because it makes his blog title inaccurate but because it's a crash course in how observation-based painting changes things, and in how it doesn't. 

Does it matter if the painter is going for naturalism? This is something no Byzantine painter ever heard of doing. A Virgin enthroned on a huge wall 30 feet up from where the viewer stands is not meant to look like a sweet British mom wondering at the miracle of her rosy child. The heavy dark lines describing the faces are meant to suggest modeling and somberness from a great distance, in candlelight. The wall painter of any era knows -- the image must read. If you look at what the painter has done up close, in a book or in a photo blog, you miss that point and see only a coarse, hirsute appearance, one that seems inexplicable and uglified. The somberness and linear quality of Byzantine images is present in hand held icons too, but these are more delicately painted. What you will never see is a Byzantine genre scene -- painting was for depicting holiness. To be holy is to be set apart, and to look it. If you notice, the Buddha is never represented as a conventionally handsome South Asian man -- other stuff is going on in those representations, as it is in the way Byzantine painters represented holy men, women and babies. 

There are eras in painting where you would find only Madonna and Child images that speak of what an agonizing fate it is, to be the Son of God, and how grave and sorrowful His mother must be. There are other eras wherein the cult of the Holy Infant took a different turn, the art focusing on the deep joys of Christianity, on the life the Christian is given that is as new and as disburdened as an infant's life. Virgin and child are emblematic of perfect trust, even in the presence of great foreboding. If, as a painter, you mean The Awful never to be very far away, you will have your ways of demonstrating that. Christ is not "a guy like you," and the most strangely powerful images of Christ are intended to show the viewer the aspect of Christ that he can empathize with -- the Christ who is set apart, and bears about himself even in infancy the traces of an unendurable but splendidly meaningful life. What woman can be sadder than the Madonna, yet more convinced of her unique significance? Should she not occasionally look the part? A huge if not often explicated purpose of devotional art is to give courage to the devotee; images of extreme conventionality may fail in this aim. 

Well, I am NOT an authority, only a lifelong student and reader, with a (very) distant degree in Art History. But! The observation of children _as_ children, not as trainee adults who need to be fit to enter the labor force ASAP, is a moder...n phenomenon, in art and in literature. With that shift in focus comes all kinds of romanticizing: the savage, the angel, the superb victim, the young hero, and so on, with many of these categories overlapping or morphing into one another. Restricting myself to art, I want to point out that observation based painting and drawing is modern, as in Renaissance and Post-Ren., the Greeks and Romans being another subject. It was against Church and other laws to learn anatomy via dissection, and even Michelangelo risked much when he learned anatomy from corpses, so this left the art of the Middle Ages, and Byzantine art, as well as the art of the Early Renaissance, at a certain powerful disadvantage, IF good art is supposed to look like what you see with your eyes, not your inner eye. An important part of learning about art, of having the full experience of art, is to allow your own inner eye to magnify what is deep and true in many forms of expression, over many stylistic conventions. I am not the world's biggest fan of Byzantine holy images, for instance, but not liking them on the grounds of their being stylized, static, and a failure at resembling human beings is like thinking Haiku might be better if it were longer. And, yes! In any era, if an artist needed to take a wife away from her labors to "sit in" for a missing Madonna, or to borrow a toddler for John the Baptist or an infant for Christ, you may be sure it was over very quickly!

(Elatia tried to write the above as a comment on my last post on this subject. But for some reason even after several attempts by her as well as me, TypePad failed to publish it. She conjectured that our blog wouldn't accept " such a blatant appeal for treasuring religious images" :-)

Afghan rape victim sentence reduced, stays in jail (Norman Costa)

Afghan rape victim sentence reduced, stays in jail (Norman Costa)

Watch video and read article HERE.

Few Americans know that statutes of limitations in the U.S. have related effects upon victims of child sex abuse.

"The Mystery I'm Thankful For" - Me Too! (Norman Costa)

"The Mystery I'm Thankful For" - Me Too! (Norman Costa)

by Adam Frank

I once participated in a public debate with another scientist on issues surrounding science and religion. I was an atheist with sympathies for the sacred character of human experience and he was an atheist without such sympathies. At one point in the discussion I tried to convince him that inclinations to "spirituality" or a sense of "sacredness" (with or without an institutional religion) was a response to the essential mystery that came with being human. He paused for long moment and then replied.

"There is no mystery"

It took me a while to pick my jaw off the floor and find an appropriate response.

I had made it pretty clear that, being an atheist, I was not arguing for a "God" of the gaps. Neither was I arguing that limits to knowledge (if they exist) imply we should be worshiping before some choice of deity.

Instead I was simply pointing to that fundamental weirdness, that "stranger-in-a-strange land" quality of being human. I was pointing to that mystery because I think its best part of the whole trip. 

We just find ourselves here. With our individual birth we just "wake-up" and discover ourselves in the midst of an extraordinary world of beauty and sorrow. All around us we see exquisite and exquisitely subtle orders played out effortlessly. From the lazy descent of fall leaves to the slow unfolding of cloudscapes in empty blue skies, it is all just here and we are just here to see it.

Day after day we wake again to find the world still here, waiting for us as we play out our own small dramas with their small triumphs and terrible heartbreaks. And then, remarkably, astonishingly, just here just ends.

For me that is the mystery. No amount of explanation, be it a "Theory of Everything" or a religious theology, will reduce the power of its experience. The primitive quality of feeling, the presence of life and its luminosity, is the mystery and I am damn thankful for it.

It is the essential and unalterable question mark saturating the verb "to be" that makes science worth pursuing and gives art its potency. It sets our loves and loss into a context that has no context and somehow makes it all bearable.

I will feel that mystery again as my family converges from across the state and across the continent to gather at the Thanksgiving table. I will feel it, knowing how deeply I love them all and how bound I am to lose them all. I will feel the mystery and be thankful to it, to them and to the world entire.

What else, after all, is there to do?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/11/22/142645717/the-mystery-i-m-thankful-for

The Thanksgiving "Turkey Pardon": A dark parody

Justin E.H Smith at the New York Times Opinionator blog.

Joe Pa = Il Papa? The similarities are eerie.

This would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago but Penn State University saw no way out other than to clean house, a house that had been made into a citadel of national repute and a cash cow by some of the same people who have been given the axe. Penn's head football coach Joe Paterno, one of the two people let go this evening by the university is a decent and likable man by all accounts. But focused stubbornly on the tree of football, he failed to see the unruly forest in the real world outside the athletic arena. He had knowledge of a crime committed by a grotesquely opportunist predator who was a valuable associate whereas his helpless victims were inconsequential to the business of college football. Coach Paterno decided to look the other way. I feel no great joy in seeing an eighty four year old man's hard work and successful career come to an inglorious end full of shame. But this is the fitting outcome when in the mistaken judgment of a powerful football fraternity and an administration in its awe, the bottom line, booster clubs and NCAA rules trumped the law of the land.  

Since my arrival in the US I have always lived in "football country." So I know a little about football as religion. But as they say, when you live by the sword, you are most likely to die by one. The recent scandal surrounding Penn State's fabled football program is being treated in the media as a shocking development. I wonder why. When athletic programs in colleges and universities are treated with more reverence than academics (purportedly the primary reason why universities exist), it leads to hubris, closely guarded cliques, misplaced priorities and occasionally, criminal negligence. Many like me, are not surprised. 

(I am linking to  Maureen Dowd after ages. I believe a woman's voice here is apt and she doesn't mince her words.)  

.... So I’ve got to wonder how the 84-year-old coach feels when he thinks about all the children who look up to him; innocent, football-crazy boys like the one he was told about in March 2002, a child then Anthony’s age who was sexually assaulted in a shower in the football building by Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s former defensive guru, according to charges leveled by the Pennsylvania attorney general.

Paterno was told about it the day after it happened by Mike McQueary, a graduate assistant coach who testified that he went into the locker room one Friday night and heard rhythmic slapping noises. He looked into the showers and saw a naked boy about 10 years old “with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky,” according to the grand jury report.

It would appear to be the rare case of a pedophile caught in the act, and you’d think a graduate student would know enough to stop the rape and call the police. But McQueary, who was 28 years old at the time, was a serf in the powerfully paternal Paternoland. According to the report, he called his dad, went home and then the next day went to the coach’s house to tell him.

“I don’t even have words to talk about the betrayal that I feel,” the mother of one of Sandusky’s alleged victims told The Harrisburg Patriot-News, adding about McQueary: “He ran and called his daddy?”

Paterno, who has cast himself for 46 years as a moral compass teaching his “kids” values, testified that he did not call the police at the time either. The family man who had faced difficult moments at Brown University as a poor Italian with a Brooklyn accent must have decided that his reputation was more important than justice.

Neurological Basis of Really, Really Bad Behavior (Norman Costa)

The Neurological Basis of Really, Really Bad Behavior (Norman Costa)

Anatomy Of A Psychopath : The Neurobiological Basis Of Evil

WRITTEN BY JONATHAN PARARAJASINGHAM SEPTEMBER 30, 2011,

Editor’s Note: This is the first part of “Mind’s Matter”, a new series of articles by Dr. Jonathan Pararajasingham, exploring the Neurobiological basis of behaviour.

“We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere.” – Ted Bundy
One of the most controversial areas of research in neuroscience involves the search for biophysical causes of sadistic thought and behaviour. But there now seems to be enough complementary evidence to at least begin piecing together a coherent materialistic description of the psychopathic mind. A number of potential genetic and pathophysiological causes of violence and aggression have been investigated over recent years. These include things like the monoamine oxidase A gene, head trauma, serotonin deficiency, epilepsy, stress, and neuropeptides. But since the recent surge in quality of neuroimaging techniques, we are now finding exceptionally detailed anatomical correlates to certain types of behaviour, including antisocialism and criminality. Research now points to the discovery that impulsive aggression and violence arise as a consequence of faulty emotion regulation circuitry in the brain. In this paper I aim to outline the evidence and implications of this finding.

Read more HERE:

Greed, loyalty(?), chaat and three thousand year old "ola leaves"

The sentencing of Sri Lankan born hedge fund billionaire, Raj Rajaratnam to a lengthy jail term on charges of insider trading is big news in the financial world. The news has also proved to be of special interest to South Asian Americans who are used to seeing the conspicuous success of members of their community but not so much their downfall. I for one, cringed when I read the widely cited interview of Rajaratnam by Suketu Mehta in Newsweek and its sister web site The Daily Beast. The reason for my discomfort was not so much that I belong to the same community as most of the culprits of this gang. I once pointed out here that I rarely ever personalize the success or failure of people who share my ethnicity. What I found jarring in Mehta's otherwise very readable interview was the emphasis on the desi angle to Rajaratnam's crimes and subsequent arrest and conviction.

Rajaratnam is an immigrant, not American-born. He had grown up, as he tells it, in fear: of the Sinhalese majority in his homeland; of the skinheads in Britain where he’d studied; and of the established elites of Wall Street where he did business. At just about every stage of his life, there were people out to get him. “I saw myself as an underdog.”...

...Part of Rajaratnam’s narrative is that of a man from a smaller South Asian country seduced and betrayed by people from the Big Brother country. Kumar had introduced him to Rajat Gupta. The two of them wanted to start an Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. “I gave them [the school] a million dollars. I later found out they never contributed any of their money, and are listed as the school’s founders. And I’m not even a fucking Indian.”

The betrayal by the Indian associates hurts the most—he barely mentions the white government witnesses. He regrets doing a joint venture with the Indians.

The South Asian connection makes less sinister some of the allegations in the trial. For example, the prosecution noted that Rajaratnam would visit Goel’s house in Silicon Valley, presumably to talk about Intel. But the real explanation is more human. “His wife makes really good chaat[a savory snack]!” Rajaratnam and Goel were very good friends, so his betrayal hurts him personally.

“There are two types of plea bargains. One is, you cooperate with the government. You finger 10 other people. The other is a plea bargain without cooperation.” The white defendants all pleaded without cooperating; they did not wear a wire. “The South Asians all did the plea bargain with fingering,” he notes sourly. “The Americans stood their ground. Every bloody Indian cooperated—Goel, Khan, Kumar.” He puts it down to “the insecurity of being an immigrant, lawyers bullying them into that position.”

Rajaratnam has very deep pockets, lived in a Penthouse in Manhattan and stole like many other high rollers of Wall Street. That his network consisted mostly of Indians is not terribly germaine to the legal troubles he is in. After all, the prosecutor who went after him is also of Indian origin and one of the two FBI agents who arrested him is Asian. Do people feel more comfortable in committing crimes when they are among "friends" or cohorts who "understand" them? (Think of the Italian/Jewish/Irish Mafias of the mid 20th century) Perhaps. But it still makes them criminals. The fact that Rajaratnam and his partners are relatively new immigrants is relevant only if they were operating under the misguided notion that a) they would not be caught and b) that if caught, they could buy their way out as they may well have in the countries of their birth. Both Preet Bharara, the prosecutor and Rajaratnam himself hint that indeed the underlying mentality may have been a bit like that, even when it was clear that things don't quite work that way in the US for the most part and the American law can not accommodate a culprit's cultural background.

The whole story speaks to the South Asian–American community: its pursuit of success and money at any cost; the differences between immigrants and the first generation; and the immigrants’ incomplete understanding of the rigor of the law in the U.S.

“There are rules and there are laws, and they apply to everyone, no matter who you are or how much money you have,” says [Preet] Bharara. This is what was not easily understood by the South Asians named in the conspiracy. There are laws and rules in India and Sri Lanka, too, but they can be tested, ignored by those who have money or friends"...

As late as two weeks before the sentencing, Rajaratnam was still being asked by the government to turn on Gupta. But he wouldn’t wear a wire, he says, so he could sleep at night. “Anil Kumar’s son worked at Galleon one summer. I used to vacation with Rajiv Goel’s family. Their families knew my family. You don’t think this is going to haunt these guys? They wanted me to plea-bargain. They want to get Rajat. I am not going to do what people did to me. Rajat has four daughters.”

The Rajaratnam case can be seen as a metaphor of the difference between immigrants from South Asia, who have a more elastic view of rules and a more keenly developed art of networking, and their children, the first generation, schooled to play by American rules. Preet Bharara came to the U.S. when he was an infant. Yet for all his complaints about unfairness, Rajaratnam, surprisingly, still believes in American justice. “In Sri Lanka I would have given the judge 50,000 rupees and he’d be sitting having dinner at my house. Here, I got my shot. The American justice system is by and large fair.”

In your case too?” I ask. “I said by and large.” 

Suketu Mehta is a professor of journalism but he is also a successful fiction writer. Did the latter persona influence his interview in this case, emphasizing the "outsider" status of the players in a sordid case of corruption? In the end, what it really came down to was greed, opportunism, superstition about one's infallible luck and the lack of honor among thieves. There is no special ethnic angle to that age old story.

Follow up in the New York Times and a rebuttal in the San Francisco Chronicle .

The Lord Is My Shepherd (Norman Costa)

Who is your shepherd? (select only one)

1. Adam Smith
2. The Lord
3. I am. 

Where is fairness manifested? (select as many as apply)

1. The free market
2. In higher primates
3. The clan 

The Lord Is My Shepherd (Norman Costa)

by STUART KAUFFMAN

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures; 
He leads me beside quiet waters.

He restores my soul; 
He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me; 
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; 
You have anointed my head with oil; 
My cup overflows.

Surely goodness and kindness will follow me all the days of my life, 
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. --Psalm 23

"The exquisite 23rd Psalm is one expression of what philosopher Karl Jasper called "The Axial Age." This period from about 800 BCE to 200 BCE is when, in China, India, Persia, Greece and among the Jews in Exile in Babylonia, civilizations seem to have gathered themselves up and found new expression through Lao Tzu, Buddha, Zarathustra, Plato, Socrates and the writing down of the Old Testament. It was a period of revision some 5,000 years after agriculture led to the beginnings of property rights and the creation of greater accumulated wealth. Civilizations arose in China, the Indus valley, the confluence of the Tigres and Euphrates, the Nile Valley and Abraham gave birth to three great monothestic religions.

"The Axial Age is said to have focused attention on the individual, witnessed in David's Psalm above, a paeon to the relation between the Lord and an individual. Emphasis on the individual is a cornerstone of our United States Constitution and Adam Smith in the Scottish Enlightenment, setting the foundations of modern economics with his famous "invisible hand," where each acting for his or her own purely selfish interests unwittingly, through the invisible hand of the market, achieves the benefit of all.

"Now, 2,500 years after the Axial Age, we have learned much that may be of use as we face what historian Thomas Cahill called a "hinge of history." Our many civilizations around the globe are being woven together as never before in history. We will partially shape what we become.

"I write to raise a large question: Do we need to examine our Axial Age anew? I think we do."

Read more HERE:

Stuart Kauffman is an experimental and theoretical biologist.

Kauffman has written about three hundred articles and four books: The Origins of Order (1993), At Home in the Universe (1995) and Investigations (2000), published by Oxford University Press. Most recently he published Reinventing the Sacred (2008), Basic Books.

Kauffman is well known for arguing, in Origins of Order and At Home in the Universe, that self organization, as well as Darwin's natural selection, are twin sources of order in biology. Thus we must rethink the becoming of the biosphere.

Read more about Stuart Kauffman:

The World's First Temple! Or ... Not? (Norman Costa)

The World's First Temple! Or ... Not? (Norman Costa)

October 13, 2011

by BARBARA J KING *

"In Turkey over 11,000 years ago, people created a massive structure at a hilltop site called Gobekli Tepe. After carving limestone pillars with all sorts of animal images, they hauled the 16-ton stones into multiple huge rings — without the help of wheeled vehicles or domesticated animals.

"I have been fascinated by this site for years. For one thing, Gobekli Tepe (the accepted story goes) was constructed by hunter-gatherers. When announced, this was major news. Ancient hunter-gatherers, who neither farmed nor lived in settled villages, had long been thought to be too simply organized to pull off anything on the scale of Gobekli Tepe.

"For another thing, the site is billed by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt as the world's first temple. This provocative claim led to a National Geographic cover story last June. To pinpoint the dawn of religious ritual would, of course, be a fantastic accomplishment for anthropology."

Read more HERE:

The Better Angels of Steven Pinker's Nature (Norman Costa)

 

The Better Angels of Steven Pinker's Nature (Norman Costa)

Relative angels and absolute demons

By Razib Khan

My post below defending Steve Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature elicited some responses on twitter.  Robert Lee Hotz finds it odd that I defend a book I haven’t read. My logic here is simple: the outline of the argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature has been presented in shorter form. John Gray’s piece doesn’t even address this digest, so I am skeptical that it could address the data which is no doubt strewn across hundreds of pages. It is obviously theoretically possible that The Better Angels of Our Nature is thinner in results than the shorter essays and presentations I’ve seen over the years on the same topic from Pinker, but highly unlikely. If Gray does a disservice to the short form argument, I doubt he is being any fairer to a longer exposition.

Second, I already admitted that in many ways I’m more pessimistic than Steven Pinker when it comes to this issue. And from what I’ve seen I’m moderately skeptical of many of the rationales he presents for why violence has declined over time (though obviously I won’t be doing him justice if I come to any conclusion without reading the book with all its extended argumentation). But my issue with John Gray ultimately is not with his final assessment of Pinker’s argument on the net, but how he came by it. Steven Pinker is a serious thinker, who makes a good faith effort to arrive at the truth as he understands it. I don’t think he always succeeds, and I don’t always agree with his conclusions. But even if you disagree with him engaging someone like Steven Pinker can sharpen your own perspective, and refine your own models. Steven Pinker is not a fashionable intellectual whose aim in life is to receive adulation by the right people at the right time. He may be wrong, whether due to lack of background or faulty reasoning, but he’s a sincere person. I have friends and acquaintances who take great objection to his evolutionary psychology and representation of cognitive science, but even his false steps can serve as an opening to raise public awareness of your opposite perspective. Pinker’s stature, and the questions he shines the light upon, are opportunities to have a public discussion on the Big Ideas. If you’re going to criticize him, face his ideas full on, don’t just prance around preening so those with whom you already agree can see what a good and right person you are. That’s what John Gray did, and it disgusted me.

Read more HERE.

Pathological Altruism

Today's NY Times has a discussion of 'Pathological Altruism', but is it truly 'altruism' to give till it hurts the giver?

Altruism, on the face of it, is the opposite of selfishness. The dictionary definition (Merriam Webster)

1: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others

2: behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species

The NYT article starts with an interesting headline, but the very first example is poor: A physician insisting on heroic measures to save a dying patient, despite considerable pain and trauma to the patient, and resulting in a miserable death rather than a peaceful one. This seems to me not 'altruism' but a manifestation of selfishness, as in  the physician maintaining 'I am convinced beyond reason that I will save this patient, damn the costs.'

A far better example of the 'pathological altruism' occurs at the end of the article- the case of animal-hoarders. But there too, the question arises. How much of it is predicated on the person 'doing good'  doing it for the sake of the momentary rush of happiness at their perceived selflessness?