Simplistic Art

Noted

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:14:00 +0000

Andrew Sullivan calls the Fort Hood killer like what he should be called - a jihadist - plain and simple!

The politically correct MSM would not touch this. As noted here before, there was no question...

SNL pans Goldman Sachs' H1N1 planning (or how Wall Street gets in front of the line everytime)

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:02:00 +0000

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

Weekend picture

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:35:00 +0000

Our gun fascination - theories...

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:12:00 +0000

Yesterday, a religious zealot shot up soldiers in Fort Hood using civilian firearms, today there is news of another individual shooting up people in Orlando, FL - apparently the guy was disgruntled. He shot 19 innocent people... When are we going to have the attention of our lawmakers? One theory being bandied about in an attempt at explaining this gun culture of ours is as follows: Did we get enough time to really get civilized and accept the fact that the state as an institution is an able protector of individual freedoms and liberties? An article in the latest New Yorker explores this in some depth...

In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.... The American homicide rate has been higher than Europe’s from the start, and higher at just about every stage since. ...What accounts for this remarkable difference?
Guns leap to mind: in 2008, firearms were involved in two-thirds of all murders in the United States. Yet Roth, who supports gun control, insists that the prevalence of guns in America, and our lax gun laws, can’t account for the whole spread, and a few scholars have argued that laws allowing concealed weapons actually lower the murder rate, by deterring assaults. Some Europeans suspect that Americans haven’t undergone the same “civilizing process,” as if, unmoored from Europe, Colonial Americans went murderously adrift. Spierenburg speculates that democracy came too soon to the United States. By the time European states became democracies, the populace had accepted the authority of the state. But the American Revolution happened before Americans had got used to the idea of a state monopoly on force. Americans therefore preserved for themselves not only the right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and fidelity to a culture of honor. We’re backward, in other words, because we became free before we learned how to control ourselves.

Comments/questions on the shootings at Fort Hood - II

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:17:00 +0000

For all those who will start to profess theories that the Fort Hood shooter was mentally deranged by the atrocities that he heard from soldiers coming back from war and was so discomfited that he finally went postal, it is instructive to also realize that the man was a rational cold blooded religious zealot who murdered human beings in the name of Islam. There does not seem to be any other way to put it - politically correct or not... Especially when one considers the deliberative steps (below) that he took before committing the act...

Hasan had apparently been a devout Muslim; Arabic words, reportedly a Muslim prayer, had been posted on his apartment door in Maryland; in conversations with colleagues he had repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers; on Thursday morning, hours before the massacre, he had supposedly handed out copies of the Koran to neighbors. A couple of these facts eventually surfaced on CNN, but only briefly; they were rushed past, left untouched, unexamined; the network seemed to be making a masterly effort to avoid giving this data a cold, hard look. Meanwhile it spent time doing heavy-handed spin — devoting several minutes, for example, to an inane interview with a forensic psychiatrist who talked about the stress of treating soldiers bearing the emotional scars of war. The obvious purpose was to turn our eyes away from Islamism and toward psychiatric instability as a motive.

And of course, some reports also suggest that the man shouted "God is Great" - Allahu Akbar in Arabic before he started killing people. Go figure...

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Glenn pwned!!!

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:00:00 +0000

Here. A must watch 8 minutes of Jon doing Glenn. For a taste of the actual madman, see this and this...

Comments/questions on the shootings at Fort Hood

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:07:00 +0000

Even if authorities are checking to see if the handguns used in the Fort Hood shootings were licensed or not, would this spur our lawmakers to enact comprehensive gun laws that make it illegal for anyone to purchase a gun from a local store with sometimes as little as a drivers license as proof of identity?

Would the fact that the Fort Hood shooter having a Muslim background mean that life will get even more difficult and spur new levels of bigotry focused towards dark skinned Asians (like our family) and Sikhs in particular (with their turbans)?

Will this incident provoke a change in Obama's Afghanistan troop policy - would he be more willing to increase troop levels (teach radical Islamic elements that we mean business anyway) or less inclined to send more troops (maybe better to concentrate on radicalism in our own midst)?

I guess the people caught in the middle are the troops - who now seem to face not only foes in the battlefield, but confronting that vague feeling that foes might be embedded in their midst...

Remembrance of things past

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:53:00 +0000

Despite its supposedly racist overtones, I liked Asterix comics. While Sesame Street (which I am sure my children will remember as fondly as I remember Asterix - or would they go the Manga way) turned 40 years old today, Asterix comics turns 50.

The Indian fondness for Asterix remained a mystery to me for years, until Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge revealed in an interview that they had chosen to weave a certain kind of public school English into their translations of Asterix from French to English. This generation of English-speaking Indians prefers a more robust, home-grown flavour to the language, but a previous generation had different and distinct preferences—we liked our English birthed by the BBC, consecrated by Kipling and baptized with a sprinkling of P G Wodehouse and Frank Richards. The richness of the puns in Asterix—especially with the names of characters, from Tragicomix—the dashing, handsome, ever-so-slightly ridiculous husband of Panacea; the Latin-English quips and the catchphrases (“These Romans are crazy”) draws from this tradition, and it’s a dying one.
Over the years, Asterix has had its share of controversy. Uderzo & Goscinny were gleeful in their perpetuation of racist stereotypes—the English had bad teeth and liked their food boiled with mint sauce, the Spanish are hot-blooded and tempestuous, the Germans are humourless and martial. As the series wore on, the exuberance of some of the best comics gave way to a more formulaic approach, especially after the death of Goscinny. (via Nilanjana)

The rendition ghost comes home to roost...

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:29:00 +0000

Even if Obama is not planning on looking back at practices like extraordinary rendition, the Italians are not letting go... It remains to be seen if they can manage that international arrest warrant against the individuals convicted...

The heaviest sentence — eight years in prison — was handed down to the former head of the CIA’s Milan station, Robert Seldon Lady, while 21 other former agents got five years each. U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Romano was also sentenced to five years, despite a request from the Pentagon that the case should be tried by U.S. courts. [Judge Oscar] Magi dropped the case against three Americans, including a former CIA Rome station chief, because of diplomatic immunity. Charges were also dropped against five Italians, including the former head of the Sismi military intelligence service, Nicolo Pollari, because evidence against them violated state secrecy rules. However, the judge sentenced two more junior Sismi agents to three years in prison as accomplices, indicating Italian authorities were aware of the abduction.

From here: Armando Spataro, the counterterrorism prosecutor who brought the case, said he was considering asking the Italian government for an international arrest warrant for the fugitive Americans. ...The former C.I.A. official said that if Italian prosecutors were successful in getting an international arrest warrant, the convicted spies would probably face the threat of arrest anywhere outside the United States for the rest of their lives.

Here we go again...

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:20:00 +0000

The next bubble might be in the Asian real estate markets - reports the WSJ...

... The World Bank warned Tuesday that the sudden reappearance of billions of dollars in investment capital in East Asia is "raising concerns about asset price bubbles" in equity markets across Asia and in real estate in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam. Also Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund cited "a risk" that surging Hong Kong asset prices are being driven by a flood of capital "divorced from fundamental forces of supply and demand." Behind the trend are measures such as cutting interest rates and pumping money into the financial system, which have left parts of the world awash in cash and at risk of bubbles, or run-ups in asset prices beyond what economic fundamentals suggest are reasonable.
Prices are surging across a host of markets. Gold, up about 44% this year, soared to a record high Tuesday. Copper is up about 50% in the past year. In the U.S., risky assets are rising rapidly in price: The risk spreads, or interest-rate premiums, on low-rated junk bonds have narrowed to about where they were in February 2008, before Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers fell, according to Barclays Capital.

... Asian stock prices are shooting up, in part due to low interest rates in the U.S. Investors looking for higher yields are borrowing in U.S. dollars and then pouring that money "into countries that are growing more rapidly," said Stephen Cecchetti, chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements, the central banks' central bank, which warned early of the last asset bubble and is beginning to do so again. "That runs the risk of creating property and equity booms in those countries."

Sign o' the times...

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:12:00 +0000

Facebook investor might find himself a target of Facebook users angst...

Billionaire Facebook investor, Peter Thiel, has donated one million dollars to NumbersUSA. NumbersUSA, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is one of six core groups in the movement for anti-immigration. ... Facebook participants are outraged by Thiel’s donation. The members of Facebook have begun using his own medium against him, in making an online group, on the network’s “grassroots page,” to lobby for the removal of Thiel from the Facebook board of directors.
Nearly 2,800 members have joined so far. Others have even gone as far as cancelling their Facebook accounts altogether. There have also been numerous advertisers who have removed their ads from Facebook as a result of Thiel’s donation.

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Tuesday video

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:11:00 +0000

Meat Appreciation: A NYC Restaurant Honors the Whole Animal from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo. via

Weekend colors

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:51:00 +0000

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:15:00 +0000

The Times on Claude Lévi-Strauss.

In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship. ...His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies.
....The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter. Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

Old virus, new tricks...

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:33:00 +0000

HIV patients are now living longer but with a trade off - they now experience accelerated ageing and dementia...

Some fifteen years into the era of protease inhibitors and drug cocktails, doctors are realizing that the miracles the drugs promised are not necessarily a lasting solution to the disease. Most news accounts today call HIV a chronic, manageable disease. But patients who contracted the virus just a few years back are showing signs of what’s being called premature or accelerated aging. ...Doctors are also reporting a constellation of ailments in middle-aged patients that are more typically seen at geriatric practices, in patients 80 and older. They range from bone loss to organ failure to arthritis.
Making matters worse, HIV patients are registering higher rates of insulin resistance and cholesterol imbalances, and they suffer elevated rates of melanoma and kidney cancers and seven times the rate of other non-HIV-related cancers.

Whether this is a result of the drugs or the disease itself, or some combination, is still an open question and certainly varies from patient to patient and condition to condition. Either way, it is now clear that even patients who respond well to medications by today’s standards are not out of the woods. Current life-expectancy charts show that people on HIV medications could live twenty fewer years on average than the general population.

Readings

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:24:00 +0000

From the movie review of a must-see movie 'American Casino'

... when the perpetrator actually explains it to you your reaction falls somewhere between nausea and hilarity. It’s as if the Russian Mafia had paid a Colombian drug cartel to certify its integrity. The banker, apparently still a young man, grows more chagrined as he digs further into absurdity. The debt obligation, thus packaged and affirmed, was divided into tranches—bonds rated from an inflated AAA at the top to worthless at the bottom. The bank then took one of the lower sets of tranches, consisting, say, of BBB bonds, repackaged them as a new instrument, and magically rated perhaps eighty per cent of them AAA.
In a final twist, some of the lowest tranches from this new instrument were spun into still another product, and once again some of the lower tranches were upgraded. This final iteration of the product—based on ratings that had passed through three degrees of fakery—was known in house as a “C.D.O. squared.” By now, the underlying assets were leveraged, the Shadow says, at a thousand to one, maybe even ten thousand to one. “Who was buying those C.D.O.s squared?” an interviewer asks. “Idiots,” comes the reply from the dark.

Linkage

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:12:00 +0000

TED India site here. I am sure they will have a great set of videos soon (as usual).
Droolworthy pictures of NASA's new Ares 1-X test vehicle here.
Results of mashing time travel and quantum computing here.
Toyota creates new plant species to offset the CO2 created by Prius assembly. How cool (or bizarre - depending on your point of view) is that...
Essay on our declining Tower of Babel. 100 years from now, about 6000 languages in use today will reduce to 600.
How Goldman Sachs left foreign investors holding the subprime bag. The third in a series of investigative articles about that firm by McClatchy.

Chart porn

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:54:00 +0000

Great collection of comparative prices of healthcare procedures across major industrialized nations. Looking at the assembled data there is no question, we are simply paying a lot more than the others. Obama's healthcare reform really does not address this part of the equation. My fear is that without a reduction in medical payments across the board (accomplished by structural re-engineering of healthcare delivery) while simultaneously increasing the extent of coverage (adding more people into the fold) we are just digging ourselves deeper into that deficit hole that already looms large.

The chart below (via Andrew Sullivan) is indicative and pretty shocking.

Meanwhile

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:38:00 +0000

Arundhati Roy examines the effects of the Maoists and their influence on growth rate obsessed India.

Meanwhile, the Indian establishment has unleashed its most potent weapon. Almost overnight, our embedded media has substituted its steady supply of planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about ‘Islamist Terrorism’ with planted, unsubstantiated, hysterical stories about ‘Red Terrorism’. In the midst of this racket, at Ground Zero, the cordon of silence is being inexorably tightened.
... The real problem is that the flagship of India’s miraculous ‘growth’ story has run aground. It came at a huge social and environmental cost. And now, as the rivers dry up and forests disappear, as the water table recedes and as people realise what is being done to them, the chickens are coming home to roost. All over the country, there’s unrest, there are protests by people refusing to give up their land and their access to resources, refusing to believe false promises any more. Suddenly, it’s beginning to look as though the 10 per cent growth rate and democracy are mutually incompatible. To get the bauxite out of the flat-topped hills, to get iron ore out from under the forest floor, to get 85 per cent of India’s people off their land and into the cities (which is what Mr Chidambaram says he’d like to see), India has to become a police state. The government has to militarise. To justify that militarisation, it needs an enemy. The Maoists are that enemy. They are to corporate fundamentalists what the Muslims are to Hindu fundamentalists.

New scrouges

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:31:00 +0000

How rapidly evolving product designs and upgrades on cellphones will come back to bite us...

Per a whitepaper by global consultancy Deloitte:
With the absence of a proper recycle and reuse program, about 8,000 tonnes of toxic cell phone components are estimated to be dumped in landfills by 2012.
... The problem begins when retired handsets end up in landfill sites or if they are dumped illegally, leading to toxic substances seeping into the groundwater, making disposal of old cells a problem for the world.
... About 65 per cent of subscribers in Asia, Europe and the Americas replace their cell phones at least once in two years. This means every 2 years, about 100 million cell phones reach landfills if they are not recycled or reused.

Toon

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:13:00 +0000

Cartoon by Mike Peters. Seen in the Sunday Times (week in review section)...

More damning stuff from McClatchy yesterday... (via)

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies. Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

Boo!

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Top ten Wall Street Halloween costumes here. Of course, in order to scare liberals, all one needs to do is to don a Ayn Rand costume and chant 'Here comes John Galt'.

From here: “All her life, when left to her own devices, she tended to wear shapeless garments for days on end. She was between 5’ and 5’2” and stocky and didn’t wear clothes terribly well. She loved her legs, though. She loved to wear high heels.”
...Rand had a habit of appearing in Adrian clothes at odd times, once wearing a silk and velvet dress embossed with astrological signs, with a 12-inch fan-shaped train, to dinner with another couple. “She was extreme,” Heller says. “On the one hand, her husband was always upbraiding her for her stockings that had runs and her hair that was never washed or combed. On the other hand, she loved to dress up.”

Pumpkin power pictures

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:44:00 +0000

Friday flowchart

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:39:00 +0000

(click to enlarge)

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Quotable (filed in the WTF section)

swapsun@gmail.com (Sunil) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:26:00 +0000

"I didn't force her, but used my experience to convince her of my love, and then we agreed to marry"

--- Ahmed Muhamed Dhore, a 112 year old Somalian man after his marriage to a 17 year old child named Safiya Abdulle.