Aphorism for the day

There is no such thing as a downturn; there are only adjustments.

Bestest thing I read today

Tucked away in the Books & Art section of this week's Economist is a review of an exhibition in New York of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. A review of some obscure exhibition is hardly the place to look for great reading, but this indeed is one of the boldest reviews I have seen in a while and is chock-a-block with sociological insights. If you have even half-an-unconscious-eye for popular Japanese culture, you will appreciate it even more.

Murakami, reacting to criticism of the unabashed marketing of his works, is quoted as saying:

"Discriminating between fine art and popular merchandise, or individual genius and learned craft, is a Western preoccupation..."

and qualifies his copatriots art sensibilities thus:

..the Japanese fixation with violent comic books, titillating plastic figurines and super-cute creatures, such as Hello Kitty, is a product of the country's sense of impotence following the second world war.

Read the whole review here.

Earth Day grammar

Oxymoron: Green Car

Folks who live in glass houses...

Yesterday, US Secratary of State Condoleeza Rice mocked Muqtada al-Sadr for threatening disturbance in Iraq while he lives safely in Iran.

"I know he's sitting in Iran," Rice said dismissively, when asked about al-Sadr's latest threat to lift a self-imposed cease-fire with government and U.S. forces. "I guess it's all-out war for anybody but him," Rice said. "I guess that's the message; his followers can go too their deaths and he's in Iran."

LOL! Am I the only one laughing here - an American Secretary of State accusing someone else of waging a remote-control war?

Surely Ms Rice, given America's legion of cronies who sharpened their knives in exile (Benazir Bhutto, Ayad Allawi, Hamid Karzai), you understand the import (pun intended) of exiles, don't you?

Barrack bought a bit of butter

After a recent post on Barrackophrenia, a couple of you sharp-eyed smart-asses were quick to inquire if I had shifted my support from Ron Paul to Barrack Obama. The answer is no; I still support Ron Paul for the Republican nomination (a highly chimerical stand, I agree) and Barrack Obama for the Democratic one.

That said, while my support for Paul is based on a robust concurrence of moral and political ideals, I support Obama simply because he represents the lesser evil. Except for my belief that he is the best person to intervene globally on America's behalf on two critical issues - the West's relationship with Islam and the global environment - there is little in his manifesto that I agree with.

Indeed, supporting Obama is like marrying a porn artist who is very cheerful, patient, and accomodating in real life. As long as you come to terms with his/her work ethic, your married life will rock. Listen to what the man had to say in defence of his "bitter" quote:

Americans don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t believe Washington can deliver. So people end up voting on issues like guns, gay marriage (etc)...

Really, in a bottom-up economic structure like America, what is the federal government supposed to deliver? Generate five-year plans? Send bread and soup to people? Bail out people with bad credit histories who make stupid investments? This is not the first time that Obama sounds like he is talking about the Union of friggin' Soviet Socialist Republics.

Makes me want to recast Barrack as Betty in the tongue-twister about trying to make bitter butter better with more butter...

Tire pressure and the environment

I once heard an avidly 'green' radio commentator, talking on the subject of climate change, advocating to her listeners how they should regularly check the tire pressure of their cars because the right pressure helps run the car efficiently, thus helping reduce global warming. However well-intentioned, the suggestions came across as ridiculously lame. How about suggesting that people simply not drive as much as they do?

You don't have to be a physicist to reckon that when you move up from not driving a car (i.e., taking public transit or simply avoiding the trip) to driving a car, you undertake a quantum leap in the amount of energy you consume and effluent you release. On the other hand, the difference in energy use/effluent between cars with correct and incorrect tire pressures is simply a matter of degrees.

I have since adopted the term 'tire-pressure approach' to mean an approach to a problem whereby you avoid a difficult or unpopular solution in favour of one that is easy and palatable, even if ineffectual.

You can see it in action all around. Think of the tire-pressure approach when you see General Motors (the maker of some of the largest and more inefficient passenger vehicles on US roads) using the green pitch to sell its 2008 Chevy Tahoe - "America's first full-size hybrid SUV" (if you have already decided that you want a monster the size of a bedroom smoking up 320 horsepower to ferry you around, does it really matter whether it runs on petrol or electricity?). Think of the tire-pressure paradigm when your neighbor (who drives a car) chides you (a public transit user) when she sees you carrying a plastic grocery bag (she uses paper, duh). Think of the tire-pressure approach when half of America self-righteously replaces its incandescent bulbs with fluorescent bulbs while their gigantic houses hum along merrily on gigantic AC units and furnaces.

I found Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to be a sincerely-made documentary, no matter what I think about the facts, but I fell off my chair laughing when the post-movie text rolled up on the screen. Instead of urging patrons to make any lasting lifestyle changes aimed at better stewardship of the environment, all Gore did was throw tire-pressure tidbits at them (last week, Al Gore launched a three-year, $300 million advertising campaign aimed at pushing America towards cutting its greenhouse gas emissions).

When it comes to the environment, the argument that some action is better than none at all is compelling, but so is the contention that tire-pressure approaches only breed a false sense of complacency and delay effectual action indefinitely.

An unusual stand

A homeowner from Pune made news recently by holding up against her neighbors who objected to her selling her house to a Bohra family. The lady is Hindu, and I assume so are her neighbors. After persisting and closing the deal, she told the press:

“They [the housing society] took a long time to give me a No Due Certificate. We took a lot of legal advice and checked out with lawyers whether this was against the constitution of India."

Remarkable. Not that the woman took on the society single-handedly (my mother does that all the time), but the fact that she invoked and referred to the constitution in support of her defiance. This is rare act, normally resorted to only in circumstances with far more significant consequences (for instance, the Delhi Lt. Governor's decree that all citizens carry ID cards).

Barrackophrenia

I have never been any good at mathematics and the only math concepts I really embraced and remembered were the ones taught to me using associative tools. Take for example, the concept of dependent probabilities which seems to be taught universally using the red-sock-blue-sock example. I found the idea fascinating that every time you dip into the sock drawer and fish out a sock without replacing it, you influence the probability of future socks being of a certain colour.

I think of the red sock and blue sock whenever I read a news item or commentary on the fortunes of a particular candidate in the US presidential elections. Every word written about the possible outcome of the elections itself has a bearing on the outcome because, obviously, the readership/viewership of the media is comprised of the same individuals who will contribute to the outcome (via their votes). Sometime before Super Tuesday, I heard a nutty right-wing radio commentator urging people to switch off their TVs because the mainstream media was subtly influencing them into not voting by presenting poll after poll slanted towards a certain candidate, and I believe he was half-right (no pun intended).

There is surely a term in the social sciences to describe the act of influencing an event by the very act of studying it, but whatever it is, there is plenty of it present in the media's (over)coverage of the Obama-Clinton battle. It is quite apparent that much of the mainstream news media loves Barrack Obama and this affection seems to, deliberately or not, manifest itself as an influencing factor through the bias in the reporting and commentary. For example, most media outlets presented Senator Patrick Leahy's call for Clinton to abandon her campaign with a straight face...while an Obama supporter might find nothing unusual with this, the empirical truth is that Obama's national lead over Hillary has rarely been in the double digits (it is 4 percentage points today), and Leahy's opinion certainly needed a lot more qualification than it got.

So here is what I call Barrackophrenia - the skewed perception that because you and your friends all like Obama, everyone else does too (schizophrenia [skĭt'sə-frē'nē-ə, skĭt'sə-] Any of a group of psychiatric disorders characterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, hallucinations, and psychotic behavior). I find it in most Obama supporters I personally know, and the mainstream news media is full of it - the media is of course more successful than my friends in palming off its delusions as its findings. As an Obama supporter myself, I certainly pray that the red-sock-blue-sock ruse works but recent electoral debacles of media favorites like Ayad Allawi (Iraq), Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney show that a rational pruning of one's expectations may be in order.