The Daily Salty

Walk on the shoulders of giants

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:58:00 +0000

Once in a while, I pop into this site. This is the most amazing place of all at Cambridge University. It holds the largest and most important collection of Isaac Newton. They have digitised most of his work and you can spend a ton of time, browsing what the master wrote. You are actually seeing, as much as one can, what he actually did himself, wrote on his notebooks.

Fascinating fellow.

Some examples from his waste book. for his notes.

Some of his early papers

Gives me a serious shiver down the spine to observe these pages. Wonderful, what a brain.

Slaughter a bull at the Party Conferences UK/USA #ukpolitics

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 09:04:00 +0000

I think this should be a great way to start the UK Political Party Conferences. Sacrifice an animal. First the story.

The ANC centenary celebrations formally commenced on Saturday with a traditional cleansing ceremony in Waaihoek.
Taking place on the grounds where the church in which the ruling party was founded in 1912 lies, several animals were ceremonially slaughtered.
Traditional and religious leaders opened the cleansing ceremony outside the church on Friday evening with an inter-faith service that turned into an overnight vigil running until the sacrificial ceremony took place.
The animals' blood was spilled inside a kraal to the beat of drums and ululation.
Renowned poet and ANC member Walley Serote told reporters the sacrifice is part of "remembering African traditions" in the hopes of invoking the spirits of the ancestors to offer guidance.
"We spill the blood of these animals in the hopes that our ancestors will help us prevent spilling human blood in the future," he said.
Also in attendance was ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, party chairperson Baleka Mbete, Traditional Affairs minister Richard Baloyi and African-American civil right activist Reverend Jessie Jackson.
President Jacob Zuma brought the cleansing ceremony to a close by sacrificing a black bull. He carried out the symbolic slaughter with a spear presented to him by a former Umkhonto we Sizwe member.
Only a select few were privy to Zuma ending the cleansing ceremony as police kept the media and the majority of those attending away.
The stabbing was left to the "young" who could perform it practically, said Zuma.
"Some of the important remarks I made before the ritual was [about] the importance of the spear. The spear was one of the powerful weapons we used in the wars of resistance," Zuma said.
"This is very symbolic because of the struggle. The apartheid government responded with violence, with burning people and arresting people and finally banning organisations, especially the ANC and PAC."
Zuma then recounted how former ANC leader Albert Luthuli along with the national executive committee at the time created the ANC's military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) in order to defend itself.
"Luthuli said that as an African man, if you are faced with a powerful enemy ... you retreat to [your] own home where there is a spear, which is your last weapon. And once he follows you to your home, you are left with no alternative but to pick up your spear and stab him.
"We have spoken to the ancestors, it is done. The spear once used to fight apartheid is now used to protect our nation. Let us go out and enjoy the centenary celebrations," Zuma told the crowd afterwards.
The Mangaung Outdoor Sports Complex will play host to a series of inter-cultural performances from 10am onwards.

So lets see what will be the equivalent in the UK.

Conservatives have to go for the Pig or Cats given their associations with Hogging Pigs or Fat Cats

Labour has to go for the cow because of the Mad Cow disease and the beef they have with agriculture

Liberal Democrats would, I guess, prefer to sacrifice a turkey because, well, what else can you associate with that party?

Socialists have to sacrifice a bull because that’s what they peddle

Greens have to sacrifice a head of lettuce?

SNP perhaps has to go for sacrificing a deer? a barking deer perhaps?

BNP has to sacrifice a chicken. Because that’s what they are

I cant remember any other political names…

No questions about the USA, they have their donkeys and elephants already. But what about Libertarians? What should they sacrifice? I guess any civil servant will do?

The thingie

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:16:00 +0000

My home life is filled with thingies. Totally. Everywhere I turn to, I have a thingie to fix, observe, bake, cook, kick, hear complaints about, sniff, wear, you name it.

I dont understand this thingie but my wife does. I dont think I can explain this to you but this graph does so beautifully.

We also have invisible men in the house, but that’s for another post sometime.

An update on Assyrians

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:39:00 +0000

I wrote about Assyrians before in an essay. Got some comments there as well. I suggest you might want to read that first if interested in the background to this fascinating community.

Was reminded of this when I read this. The Kurds, however much sympathy I have for them, are frankly a bunch of nincompoops. They should know how they have been treated and one would have expected the Kurds to welcome minorities, but no, they are behaving in the same barbaric manner as Saddam Hussein and other barbarians did in Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq. I quote:

Inspired by the violent exhortations of a preacher during Friday prayers earlier this month, hundreds of young Kurdish men in the northern Iraqi town of Zakho went on a riot. Over four days, they set dozens of liquor stores alight, later threatening proprietors with further violence if they dared reopen their businesses. They also attacked an Assyrian church and homes in the neighbouring village of Mansouriyah and destroyed property including four hotels, a health club and an Assyrian social club in Dohuk.
The victims were Assyrians – an ethnically and linguistically discrete people also known as Chaldeans or Syriacs according to denomination – and Yazidis, members of two ancient communities who, like all the vulnerable elements of Iraqi society, have suffered disproportionately in the aftermath of the war.
The staggering upheaval and violence faced by Assyrians has led to a drop in their numbers from at least 800,000 in 2003 to 400,000 today. They represent 35% of Iraqi refugees since the war, as well as an enormous number of Iraq's internally displaced persons.

The sheer ethnic cleansing of Christians from much of what’s the Muslim nations is not mentioned politely but the numbers do not lie. In every country, you will see this happening. Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Iran, etc. etc. Maybe India should offer these Assyrians a refuge, India has a long history of offering refuge to people from the Middle East. If these nincompoops want to kick out their most productive, educated and intelligent lot, then hey, India could help no?

The sad thing is, this pressure on minorities is not going to cease once the Christians have left. These people are cannibals, they devour their own. Once they don't have the Assyrians to go after, they will go after the Druze, the Kurds, the other minorities. When they are gone, they will go after the minority Islamic sects such as the Shia. Oh! I am sorry, they are already doing that (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan etc.), their behaviour towards the other minorities such as women, gays and the like is already well known. And the Arab Spring has already brought forward the Salafis to the fore.

I welcome this step actually. This Islamism and basic illiberal thought is a boil in the body of Muslims. This shouldn't be lanced before it has gotten seriously ripe and the infection has run its course. So yes, I welcome the Brotherhood and the Islamist Parties taking power and trying to rule their countries with their perverted and bizarre philosophy. Let people know what they are asking for. Let them live in that pressure cooker of religious fanatics and then know that religion is NOT an answer. At this moment, if you go to a cook in a town or a farmer in a village, they will bang their chest and say Islam is the answer because their neighbourhood Mullah has said so (see above on how the pogrom happened).

Iran provides a classic example. See how a bunch of religious morons can drive their country into a ever restrictive circle of hell (Israel provides another example). But rest of the religious sheep need to understand that religion is about you and God. Not about you and the State. When you allow religion to rule your state, then you end up taking the logical step and kicking out or killing everybody who doesn't follow an increasingly narrow interpretation.

You can see when you take the argument ad absurdum infinitum. There will be one man standing in a field filled with empty houses and dead bodies proudly claiming that they have removed all impurity from his society.

Bah!

Careers in Finance–Voices of Finance

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:31:00 +0000

One of my common lectures to the various business schools is to describe an investment bank. Students,for some reason, just think of investment banking as either trading or M&A banker. There is much more to it than just this and frequently I tell kids, you can actually end up making more money over your lifetime in other banking areas than just being in trading or M&A. Anyway, the Guardian is running a series on voices of Finance. Very nice one. Here are the various links to various jobs:

Most recent

Industry journalist: 'The bond market is like my baby'

24 Dec 2011: The head of bond coverage for a bond market publication tells all, as part of Joris Luyendijk's Voices of finance series6 comments

Law firm partner: 'at major banks there's a token Brit in each division'

22 Dec 2011: Joris Luyendijk gets the inside story from a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, as part of the Voices of finance series41 comments

Voices of finance: IT consultant and developer

12 Dec 2011:
'I find the level of disorganisation in banking astonishing, especially considering its place in UK commerce'
56 comments

Voices of finance: risk analyst for a major high street bank

8 Dec 2011: 'What has really surprised me, coming out of university, was how few people in finance understand statistics in any depth'42 comments

Voices of finance: insurance broker

5 Dec 2011: 'I have been in several incidents of physical and verbal harassment. The thing is, you can't go public with it, because people talk'37 comments

Voices of finance: quant

1 Dec 2011: 'It's very tempting to just stay in the world where everything can be understood in mathematical language'
75 comments

Voices of finance: fund manager at asset management firm

27 Nov 2011: 'One of the greatest pitfalls for fund managers is thinking we are more important than the clients whose money we are managing. That's why there are not a lot of Gordon Gekkos among us'123 comments

Voices of finance: salesman for a brokerage firm

23 Nov 2011: 'You have to be very thick-skinned and insanely optimistic about life to get through without too many breakdowns, or alcoholism'117 comments

Women in finance

3 Nov 2011:
Twelve women give the inside view of working in the testosterone-fuelled City
298 comments

Voices of finance: risk and compliance consultant at a major bank

3 Nov 2011:
'My sense is that a lot of people in finance hate what they do. There's no passion. But they are trapped by the money'
21 comments

Voices of finance: employee relations manager at a major bank

2 Nov 2011: 'I do none of the fun things. I don't hire people, I don't give bonuses. I tell people they have lost their jobs'56 comments

Voices of finance: fundraiser at sharia-compliant venture capital firm

31 Oct 2011:
'Some people need to see that you have made a pact with the devil, compromised something. They want me to be one of those lonely career women'
35 comments

Voices of finance: chief operating officer (equity division) at a bulge bracket bank

30 Oct 2011: 'Why can't women be proud of those who made it in finance? Feminism for me is the opportunity to do whatever you want'76 comments

Voices of finance: the institutional stockbroker

28 Oct 2011: 'People need to understand that we are essential to their pensions and lives … but I am in favour of a tax on financial transactions, and for more regulation'122 comments

Voices of finance: partner at a major accountancy firm

27 Oct 2011: 'Suppose the trader is a typical alpha-male and he shouts down the back-office guy, who, intimidated or unsure, goes along. This is how rogue trading could happen'23 comments

Archive (16-30 of 33)

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Voices of finance: IT business analyst (vice president level)

25 Oct 2011: 'I'd never tell my friends back home how much I make. They are all working-class, like me. I really feel a bit fraudulent'29 comments

Voices of finance: investment management adviser

23 Oct 2011: 'I know when I walk past the desks at some divisions in an investment bank, the guys are instant messaging each other with score cards'49 comments

Voices of finance: head of marketing

21 Oct 2011:
'Try not to make men look too stupid. That would be my advice to women entering this profession. And try not to become a man'
44 comments

Voices of finance: recruiter #2

19 Oct 2011: 'It can get tough. I know of a candidate who handed in her resignation and returned to her desk to discover that everyone had been instructed to ignore her'30 comments

Voices of finance: bond pricer

16 Oct 2011:
'I wish more women took an interest in finance – knowledge is an extremely important part of being financially independent'
18 comments

Voices of finance: recruiter

13 Oct 2011:
'I never thought I'd become the person I am now. I used to work in a job where I'd help people improve their lives. These days I am cheating, lying, manipulating – all in the name of targets'
51 comments

Voices of finance: banker's ex-girlfriend

10 Oct 2011:
'Bankers like him have this need to impress, and when they can't use money to do that, they don't know what to do'
162 comments

Voices of finance: investment bank intern

4 Oct 2011: 'You have to be your own harshest critic. Unless you have a good relationship with a colleague, you'll never be told if you are underperforming … but everyone will have noted it'37 comments

Voices of finance: competition lawyer in mergers and acquisitions

15 Sep 2011:
'Boring is good, for lawyers. We sell reliability, solidity and caution. We want our presentation to mirror that'
60 comments

Voices of finance: computer programmer at a trading company

15 Sep 2011:
'Humility is essential for programmers like me. You must always assume something is your own fault'
64 comments

Voices of finance: financial journalist

15 Sep 2011:
'If for political reporters Watergate is the gold standard, the scoop financial journalists dream of is Enron'
19 comments

Voices of finance: MD, mergers and acquisitions, at an investment bank

15 Sep 2011:
'The sorts of deals we do are very, very important to our clients. Crudely put, we can make them very rich'
33 comments

Voices of finance: MD, corporate finance, at a major bank

15 Sep 2011:
'You are doing deals worth millions. Almost every deal is a truly major event in the life of the company concerned'
61 comments

Voices of finance: primary research firm manager

15 Sep 2011:
'The financial sector is not rocket science. You have to be willing to put in really long hours – it is an endurance game'
8 comments

Voices of finance: analyst at a private equity and corporate finance boutique

15 Sep 2011:
'We do some of the things that major investment banks do, but for smaller players'
19 comments

Voices of finance: PR officer for a brokerage company

15 Sep 2011:
'I am a barometer of the City. I follow developments, go for lunch, am on the phone a lot … People skills are everything'

Voices of finance: research analyst at a primary brokerage firm

15 Sep 2011:
'One of the things I like about the financial sector, it's meritocratic … the boardrooms are often really multicultural'

Voices of finance: sales manager for data management services

15 Sep 2011:
'If clients seek out my view on a project of theirs, it means they value my expertise and take me seriously'

How to tame a mountain

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:36:00 +0000

I came across two stories, one thanks to Yashasvi (thanks, you are a very smart cookie )

First.

Dashrath Manjhi was given a State funeral last weekend. During his life, however, government indifference remained as much a challenge for him as the rocks of Gahlaur Ghati, says Anand ST Das
He was ridiculed in 1959 when he started hewing a way through the Gahlaur Ghati hills of Bihar’s Gaya district, some 150 km from Patna. It would take 22

FOR THE PEOPLE: Manjhi’s feat will long outlive him
years for Dashrath Manjhi to finish his 360ft-long, 30ft-wide road — little wonder, for he worked alone, his sole tools his chisel,hammer and shovel. What was once a precarious passage just a foot wide is now an avenue that can accommodate cyclists and motorcyclists and is used by the people of nearly 60 villages with great ease. The road has also reduced the distance between Gaya’s Atri and Vazirganj subdivisions from 50km to just 10km. Children from Manjhi’s own Gahlaur and other nearby villages no longer have to walk eight kilometres one way to attend school — they can now study at a school just three km away.
We met Manjhi a few weeks before the cancer that finally ended his life on August 17 forced him to take to his bed. The 73- year-old was frail, but his energy was undiminished as he relived his work on the road. “I knew if I did not do it myself, neither would the government do it nor would the villagers have the will and determination. This hill had given us trouble and grief for centuries. The people had asked the government many times to make a proper road through the hill, but nobody paid any attention. So I just decided I would do it all by myself.”
Before Manjhi’s road, the hill kept the villages of the region in isolation, forcing the villagers to make an arduous and dangerous trek just to reach the nearest market town, or even their own fields. In 1959, Manjhi recounted, this resulted in a family tragedy on the treacherous slope. “My wife, Faguni Devi, was seriously injured while crossing the hill to bring me water; I worked then on a farm across the hills. That was the day I decided to carve out a proper road through this hill,” he told us. The mission he had set himself meant that he had to drop his wage-earning daily work — his family suffered and he himself often went without food. But his wife was not to see the fruits of his labour — a short while later, she fell ill and died as Manjhi could not get her to the hospital in time. “My love for my wife was the initial spark that ignited in me the desire to carve out a road. But what kept me working without fear or worry all those years was the desire to see thousands of villagers crossing the hill with ease whenever they wanted,” Manjhi said. “Though most villagers taunted me at first, there were quite a few who lent me support later by giving me food and helping me buy my tools.” Today, the villagers have nothing but gratitude for Gaya’s mountain man, known almost universally now as Sadhuji.
Dashrath Manjhi belonged to Bihar’s Musahar community, regarded as the lowest among the state’s Scheduled Castes. While other Dalits in Bihar had at least some land rights under the erstwhile zamindari system, the Musahars never enjoyed any such. Nearly 98 percent of the state’s 1.3 million Musahars are landless today. Not even one percent of them are literate, which makes them the community with the country’s lowest literacy rate. For many of them, the day’s main meal still comprises roots, snails or rats, from which the community’s name is derived.

UNDETERRED: Ridiculed at first, Manjhi later became a local hero
After Manjhi completed his road, he worked tirelessly for the betterment of his community. Among his other efforts, he managed to persuade nearly 50 Musahar families of his village to settle on government- granted land, although most of them were unwilling to leave their old homes. But when Manjhi started living on the allotted land, the rest followed suit. This new settlement is now known as Dashrath Nagar. Manjhi’s other efforts have been less successful. Despite his herculean feat, the Bihar government has given him only token appreciation and insincere help.

And second:

A weird love story has come out of China recently and managed to touch the world. It is a story of a man and an older woman who ran off to live and love each other in peace for over half century.
Over 50 years ago, Liu, was a 19 years-old boy, fell in love with a 29 year-old widowed mother named Xu. At the time, it was unacceptable and immoral for a young man to love an older woman.
To avoid the market gossips, the couple decided to elope and lived in a cave in Jiangjin County in Southern ChongQing area.

In the beginning, they had nothing, no electricity or even food. They had to eat grass and roots they found in the mountain, and Liu made a kerosene lamp that they used to lighten up their lives.
Starting the second year of living in the mountain, Liu began, and continue for over 50 years, to hand carve the steps so that his wife could get down the mountain easily.

A half century later in 2001, a group of adventures were exploring the forest, they surprisingly found the elderly couple and the over 6,000 stairs of hand carved ladder.
“My parents loved each other so much, they have lived in seclusion for over 50 years and never been apart a single day.” Liu MingSheng, one of their seven children said, “He hand carved more than 6,000 steps over the years for my mother’s convenience, although she doesn’t go down the mountain that much.”

The couple had lived in peace for over 50 years until last week. Liu, now 72 years-old, returned from his daily farm work and collapsed. Xu sat and prayed with her husband as he passed away in her arms.
So in love with Xu, was Liu, that no one was able to release the grip he had on his wife’s hand even after he had passed away.
“You promised me you’ll take care of me, you’ll always be with me until the day I died, now you left before me, how am I going to live without you?” … …
Xu spent days softly repeating this sentence and touching her husband’s black coffin with tears rolling down her cheeks.

The power of love can literally conquer mountains. Salutations and RESPECT!

A statue of books is idolatrous?

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:06:00 +0000

The mind boggles. First the story:

A council member of Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM) today filed a case at the police over "importing and keeping idols" for the SAARC Summit that wrapped up recently in Addu.
Speaking to journalists after submitting the case, Maz Saleem said the police were asked to look into how the "idols" were imported into the Maldives through Customs and the police "standing guard" around the idols.
PPM Council member, Ilham Ahmed said Customs failed to carry out its legal responsibility of preventing the import of items such as "idols" into the country.

Seems like the recent South Asian association met and the countries donated stuff to Maldives. Sri Lanka presented a statue of a lion while Pakistan, surprisingly, presented a monument shaped like a pile of books on a brick plinth. Guess what? People thought it was idolatrous and burnt it.

Sighs, what a bunch of morons. Do they not know what the first word of the Quran is? it says IQRA. or READ.

Do you think these guys are heading towards a Darwin Award?

Morons.

Maybe the Saudi’s need to know why salafism is so hated

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 08:53:00 +0000

So there is going to be a symposium on Salafism, a Shariah approach and a national demand. Maybe they should start with trying to understand why their extreme ideology, pandering to royalty which is unislamic in the extreme and how the entire world hates their ruling ideology called as Salafism. Bah. These Al Saud’s have much to answer for, descended from thieves and robbers and perpetrating a hypocritical system, what else can you expect?

RIYADH: Crown Prince Naif, deputy premier and interior minister, will attend a symposium on "Salafism, a Shariah approach and a national demand" which will be organized by the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University on Tuesday.
The symposium will cover seven themes. The first will address Salafism, an approach pursued by the state since its foundation and its connection to Islam.
The second highlights Salafism as an approach, the third focuses on misconceptions about the Salafi approach, the fourth addresses the Salafi approach and its connection with the modern religious discourse; the fifth tackles the relationship between the Saudi state and the Salafi approach in terms of originality and application, the sixth covers the link between the Salafi approach and school curricula in the Kingdom, and the seventh sheds light on doubts on the application of the Salafi approach and the response to these doubts.
The scientific committee of the conference has received more than 120 papers. There will be 62 lectures and 22 papers will be presented by postgraduate students.
Rector of the University Suleiman bin Abdullah Aba Al-Khail said the seminar aims to achieve several goals such as shedding light on the doctrinal teachings of the Salafist movement, clear misconceptions of Salafism, clarify the roots of Saudi government regulations and its rightful principles and lastly provide a clear image about the attitude of Islam toward non-Muslims.
The seminar aims to exhibit the role played by the Kingdom in fighting terrorism and maintaining international peace and security. The rector revealed the crown prince would also lay the cornerstone of a number of projects (constructions and technical) costing SR2.3bn.
Ahmed Al-Darwish, vice president for scientific institutes, called on members of scientific institutes and specialists in Shariah sciences to actively participate in the deliberations of the seminar. Al-Darwish said the country’s righteous ancestors adopted a moderate approach.
Abdurrahman Al-Nami, a faculty member and head of the media committee of the seminar, told Arab News that the objectives of this seminar were to clarify the reality of the Salafi approach representing the correct form of Islam adopted by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), to sanitize the concept from allegations made by some deviant groups claiming to be Salafi, and to reveal the essence of the ruling in the Kingdom which is based on proper moderate Islam.
It will also show the scope of the harmonious relationship between the rulers of the Kingdom and preachers in implementing the proper Salafi approach, to rectify misconceptions (extremism and exclusion) about the Salafi approach, to show the real position of the approach toward non-Muslims and that relations with them is based on justice, equality and realizing common interests, and to show allegiance to the country is a matter of instinct, reason, and religion.
He said the concept is the antithesis of some concepts such as tribalism, pan-nationalism, kinship, and other concepts that may come at the expense of religion and proper doctrine.
It also aims to refute all suspicions about the Salafi approach in terms of its impact on curricula and its alleged cause of extremism. The Kingdom’s position on crisis and natural catastrophe is well documented, he added.
“Salafism has many attributes, chief among them are denouncing doctrinal extremism and closure,” said Mohammed bin Hamad Al-Najdan. He said Salafism is neither a new invention nor new label. On the contrary, it is an old concept.
In his paper, “The Salafi approach: origin, continuity, and attributes,” Abdulwahid Al-Darwish refers to the position of Salafism toward other Islamic groups. He said the position of the Salafi group regarding other Islamic groups is similar to the position of any Muslim toward another Muslim. Al-Darwish touches upon the Salafists’ position on politics and collective work.
Ahmed bin Yousif Al-Darwish told Arab News that the objective behind holding this symposium was to clarify the proper meaning of Salafism that is based on both the Holy Qur’an and Sunnah.
“This kind of Salafism is based on moderation, rejecting terrorism, fighting corruption, fighting deviant and destructive thought, rejecting extremism and exploitation or dehumanization of others.”
He stressed the seminar aims to clarify that the Salafi approach adopted by the Kingdom is totally different from the kind of extremist Salafism that is not Islamic and does not express the essence of Islam. Correct Salafism is the one that renounces terrorism and murder and is not based on extremism or takfir, he added.

Allies of the USA, beware

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:13:00 +0000

We are all observing what’s happening in Pakistan. We also know that USA is very bewildered as to how India treats USA (refusing to buy their planes, refusing to get into security pacts, refusing the sign the NPT, voting against them in the UN) and refuses to become an ally. But India knows better, being an ally of the USA is very dangerous indeed. Because with the good things, come some very bad things. Democracies tend to manage USA a bit better because the USA, ostensibly and publicly, cannot really go against the will of the people (not that it doesn't try, look at the wiki leaks papers). But for dictators who think that USA is a good ally and are accustomed to operating on the Somoza model (President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) supposedly remarked in 1939 that "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch). So Pakistan should be very very worried and I do not find it surprising it at all that its sticking two fingers up to USA.

As the quote by Lord Palmerston, an English Statesman who died in 1865 goes, Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests. Dont ascribe human emotions to nations and foreign policy. This is why I found the Labour idea of an ethical Foreign Policy stupid. Anyway…

Here’s another relevant quote if one of the moth eaten generals of the Pakistani kind decide to take power.

Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favourite party dress. If you’re a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam’s fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was a strong partner in the war on terrorism, according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway. — Mark Steyn

Causes of Poverty, one reason is that people volunteer to be poor

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:50:00 +0000

A pithy statement, but interesting:

Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor. — Walter Williams

I look at poverty in India or the UK or many other countries and I see the truth of this statement. Yes, you can have a benefits regime which moves them up a bit more on the economic ladder or you can have a tax regime which moves some more dosh into their pockets, but the underlying causes remain the same. If they have to emerge out of poverty, then these 3 reasons hold true. In many cases, the benefits regime actively encourages them to remain in poverty.

But in countries such as India, they are actively hampered by the governments into staying poor, such as by the benefits regime, the labour laws, the food laws, etc. etc.

To improve the first reason, the poor need to be taught better, but the educational system in countries such as USA, India, UK etc. again fails them. Tell me, which educational system consistently tops the PISA regimes? Finland, Singapore, etc. Where brilliant teachers are taken and a medium amount of money is pumped into the schools and pushed ahead. Bad teachers are fired. But this doesnt happen in other countries because the educational system relies, either by omission or commission, to keep the students in a mess. Or else the rules and regulations on starting their own business is very difficult. The UK is 7th on the list. India is 132nd on the list. And then you wonder why India remains poor? Its because the government actively encourages and makes it so that they remain poor.

Finally people volunteering to be poor. Monks and such like. Good men, all power to them.

Incidentally, came across this fascinating story. I quote:

My name’s Ronnie Bryant, and I’m a mine operator…. I’ve been issued a [state] permit in the recent past for [waste water] discharge, and after standing in this room today listening to the comments being made by the people…. [pause] Nearly every day without fail — I have a different perspective — men stream to these [mining] operations looking for work in Walker County. They can’t pay their mortgage. They can’t pay their car note. They can’t feed their families. They don’t have health insurance. And as I stand here today, I just … you know … what’s the use? I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I don’t know. I mean, I see these guys — I see them with tears in their eyes — looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So as I stood against the wall here today, basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you.

spending cuts

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:32:00 +0000

Let’s pass a bill to cover the moon with yogurt that will cost $5 trillion today. And then let’s pass a bill the next day to cancel that bill. We could save $5 trillion. — Paul Ryan

This is what pisses me off, the sheer amount of spending that the governments are doing, its so easy for them to keep on spending and not just spending, but to increase the spending. And then to reduce spending, its such a big hoo haa.

When individuals can cut spending, when families can cut spending, when corporates can cut spending, when NGO’s and charities can cut spending, why on earth does the government find it so difficult to cut spending?

And here’s another one.

We are living in a bizarre moment in history. Our establishment–the press, the academy, all unions, most politicians, many in business who have skin in the Ponzi game–assure us that borrowing trillions of dollars to finance wasteful spending, while sticking our children with the tab plus interest, is perfectly sensible. On the other hand, believing that we should live within our means is? Crazy! — John Hinderaker

Why are my kids being stuck with the bloody tab? Its extraordinary for parents to do this, why would you do this? Why would you leave your kids with debt? What kind of a parent are you? Would you have liked it if your parents stuck you with a giant debt? oh! sorry, they did. mutters crossly.

STOP SPENDING MY MONEY!

The mind boggles

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:52:00 +0000

First you create a society that strictly segregates women from men. The idea that women can interface with men is so shocking that they have men selling undies to women. Then finally somebody with one working brain cell figures out that this isn't working. So what do they do? They forbid any man from selling to women. And given that this blithering society forces women into nursing, teaching or stuck within the 4 walls of their home, 28,000 women line up to take up sales jobs.

Then the ministry hires hundreds of inspectors. The stores have to hire male security guards to ensure that only women go into the store. heh. So now we have male inspectors and male security guards checking lingerie shops. Talk about stupidity piling on top of stupidity. I love these guys, its like a whole country fit for a Darwin award. And the best part is that their ideology and philosophy is spreading. More More, we need more of this.

Read this story for the background details.

While in another part of this wonderful world, the government has run a series of campaigns targeting fortune tellers, mannequins and cigarette vendors. I quote:

Police sources told …142 fortune tellers were forced to sign an agreement at the Ministry of Interior pledging that they would not practice their craft. As well as predicting the future, fortune tellers sell amulets for protection and are sometimes called on to solve personal or family problems.

Heh, I betcha they didnt predict that, eh?

And strangely enough,

owners of taxi firms have been warned not to allow any former security officers to work as drivers, police officers said.

Eh? why? what?

I just love reading these kinds of news item. WTF or Facepalm doesnt do justice, its just sitting back and watching this parade of idiocy pass you by while you crack peanuts and throw at these muppets.

Dogs can use protection but not women

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:13:00 +0000

I found this comment on this story fascinating. First the story.

Body armour filled with flaming Indian spices mixed with anti-freeze is the latest invention to protect dogs from wolf attacks when hunting in the Swedish woods.

"The specific spice I will keep a secret, but it's supposed to be 300 times more spicy than Tabasco," hunter and hunting entrepreneur Calle Ekström told Swedish online hunting site Jakt & Jägare.
The protection consists of a modified version of the body armour for dogs currently used to protect against boar attacks.
To this existing vest, Ekström, who is from Leksand in central Sweden, has added nine pockets which he fills with a mysterious blend of extremely potent Indian spices.
The spices are so hot, in fact, that Ekström has to use a face mask when preparing the messy substance.
To keep is from turning in to a bloc of ice during winter hunts, he mixes the spice with antifreeze in a blender and then seals it in vacuum packed plastic pockets.
The pockets are then placed to cover the entire body of the dog for protection from every possible kind of attack.
"It's important to provide protection on the belly since dogs often show their inferiority by turning onto their backs. In that case the wolf could kill the dog if it's not protected round the belly," Ekström told the paper.
Ekström said that although they haven't been able to test the vests yet, he has already sold a number to concerned dog owners.
They weren't allowed to try it on any captive wolves, but so far no dog wearing the 4995 kronor ($725) vest has been attacked in the wild.
Jens Karlsson at the wildlife damage centre (Viltskadecenter), an organization working to minimize damage to Swedish wildlife, has monitored the development of the spicy body armour, and seems somewhat optimistic towards it.
He has seen reports from the US where hideous tasting substances have been used to protect sheep from wolves, and the results were quite positive.
"With those experiments in mind perhaps Calle's Indian spice mix isn't such a bad idea, but that remains to be seen," he said.

Strange uses for Indian spices, lol, but this is the comment:

This is all well and good, but if a woman were to protect herself with pepper spray or something equally effective, she would go to jail. Ah, Sweden, dogs are more valuable than people.

Why isnt a women allowed to hold and use pepper spray? that’s curious indeed.

Ace Your Exams: Study Tactics of the Successful Gentleman Scholar

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 06:31:00 +0000

My dear Kannu

I saw this article and found it interesting, everybody has a different way of studying but there should be a plan always. Take a look at it, while you are an A* student, that doesn't mean that you cannot improve your studying skills, that will free up time for you so that you can run your own business with more time, see? More efficient use of time and acing those exams.

Another way is to ask people to evaluate how you are doing in terms of your studying time. Not your friends, but others who are independent such as Luca uncle or one of Mamma's friends. Ask them to give their advice on your study plan. Many times you get to hear suggestions and advice that you might not have thought about as its difficult to know oneself. Its not a criticism and don't be afraid to be evaluated by others, it will always be beneficial as it helps you remove your weaknesses and build your strength. So write up your studying and exam plan and then ask people how you can improve it. That is another option.

Love

Baba.

http://artofmanliness.com/2012/01/03/ace-your-exams-study-tactics-of-the-successful-gentleman-scholar/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheArtOfManliness+%28The+Art+of+Manliness%29&utm_content=Google+Reader/

Ace Your Exams: Study Tactics of the Successful Gentleman Scholar

by BRETT & KATE MCKAY on JANUARY 3, 2012 · 52 COMMENTS

in PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

When 160,000 undergraduates in the University of California system were asked to name the obstacles that impeded their academic success, the students listed things like work, stress, and depression. But the number one reason, which was given by 33% of the students, was that they simply didn’t know how to study.

When I first arrived at college, I was one of those 33 percenters who really didn’t know how to study. I was a stellar student in high school, but during during my first semester of college I nearly flunked Business Calculus, got a C- in Intro to Logic, and barely scratched by with a B in Spanish. I ended the semester with a 2.75 GPA.

Knowing that I was headed down the path of academic ruin if I didn’t change something, I threw myself into learning all I could about how to learn and study effectively. I read anything I could get my hands on. The effort paid off. After that initial semester, I earned straight A’s throughout the rest of my college career, even while working 20-30 hours a week. When I went on to law school, I managed to graduate ninth in my class while also working, starting the Art of Manliness, and writing a book during that time.

I share this not to brag, but to show that there’s a ton you can do to turn your academic career around, even if it’s had an auspicious start.

Many of our readers will be heading back to school for the start of a new semester next week. So I thought it would be helpful to offer some friendly study advice for those young men who might find themselves among the 33% of students who don’t know how to study effectively and might be struggling like I did. Even if you have some solid study skills, you’ll hopefully get something out of this article too.

The advice I provide is based on my own experience in college and law school. Maybe it will work for you as well. Of course, if you already have a study system that works for you, then use it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Note: Fair warning. This post is long. Double the length of a normal article long. I thought about breaking it up into multiple posts, but then decided it would be more useful to create a one page, single resource article that would be an easy reference to return to. So take it slow–you don’t have to read the whole thing in one go–although doing so wouldn’t be bad practice for your studies!

Time & Energy Management

In high school, your schedule is pretty well set for you, and your parents are always around, looking over your shoulder.

Then you get to college and each day is an ocean of time that is all yours to decide what to do with.

This is both a wonderful, glorious freedom and a great challenge. But mastering that challenge by learning how to successfully manage your time will reap you great benefits not only in school, but for the rest of your life.

Following the advice below, it’s possible to excel in school, while working part-time, andwhile still having a social life.

Create a master weekly study schedule before every semester. In his book, First Things First, Stephen Covey introduces the idea of “Big Rock” planning. The gist of it is that you should set aside time for your most important things first (your Big Rocks) and then plan everything else in your life around them. Watch this video to see Covey explain it.

When you’re young and in school, your biggest Big Rock is your education. You should (ideally) plan everything else around your schooling. To ensure that you actually make school a priority, block off the time during the week that you’ll devote to class and studyingbefore the semester starts. During the semester, plan around these blocked off times. Here’s what I suggest blocking time off for:

1. Block off your class and lab times. The most important appointments of your week. Schedule everything else around your class time.

2. Block off reading time for each of your classes. If you have a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule, you’ll probably want to block off an hour or two on Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday for reading.

3. Block off time for note review/outlining/homework for each class. You’ll want to set aside time so you can synthesize class notes, do some outlining, and complete any homework assignments you might have. I typically blocked off an hour right after each class for this. If a class was lecture heavy, like ancient Greek philosophy, I’d use that hour right after class to review my notes and update my class outline. If the class was heavy on problem sets, like calculus or symbolic logic, I used the hour to do that day’s assignment and any additional practice problems.

The amount of time you need for note review/outlining/homework will vary. I recommend setting aside at least one hour for each hour spent in class. If you need more time, schedule it.

4. Other possible permanent time blocks. If your work schedule is the same throughout the semester, you might as well block it off on your master schedule. I also blocked off time for exercise on my master schedule.

Make these times re-occurring events in your calendar. You should only change or modify them in extreme cases. Treat them like doctor’s appointments. If a friend wants to get together during your reading time, tell them you have a prior engagement and suggest another time.

Plan weekly. Once you have your master weekly schedule set up, every week set aside time for planning out the week’s variables–those activities that change from week to week. Write down in your schedule when you have to work or the times for any extracurricular meetings. Remember, try to plan around your Big Rocks if possible.

Reverse engineer big projects and final exam prep. Throughout the semester, you’ll probably have big projects like term papers to turn in. One thing that helped me complete these tasks on time and with little stress was reverse engineering the task. As soon as I knew the due date for a paper, I marked it in my calendar. Working backwards from that due date, I established mini-deadlines for myself. For example, a week before the actual due date, I might have a deadline to complete the rough draft. Two weeks before the actual due date the mini-deadline might be to write half of the paper. Three weeks before the actual due date, the mini-deadline might be to have the research complete. And so on.

I did this sort of reverse engineering for my law school finals as well. About mid-way through the semester, I sat down and planned out my finals prep for the subsequent six weeks, working backwards from the final exam and creating tasks for myself to complete as I got closer and closer to finals.

This takes some discipline, but this approach is much less stressful than waiting until the last minute to complete a project or study for a final.

Apply the 45/15 rule. People can focus on something for a solid 45 minute block before their brains start getting pooped and antsy, and their mental performance starts to diminish. To keep your brain running on all six cylinders, implement the 45/15 rule, or Pomodoro Technique. Under the 45/15 rule, you work nonstop for 45 minutes, and all your focus is on the task at hand for that block of time. When the 45 minutes is up, take a break for 15. Surf the web or get up and go for a quick stroll outside. As soon as the 15 minutes are over, get back to work. Just knowing that you always have a set break coming up can keep you on task. Check out these nine free online timers that help you implement the 45/15 rule easily.

Reading Assignments and Homework

Try to get ahead on reading. If your schedule permits, try to get ahead on your reading by reading the entire week’s assignments on the weekend. I did this in law school and it freed up a bunch of time for me during the week. On Saturdays and Sundays, I’d devote a couple of hours to completing all the reading assignments for the coming week. That allowed me to devote more time to outlining, memorization, and even working on The Art of Manliness and writing our first Art of Manliness book during the week.

Read actively. When you read, read actively. Highlight, underline, and write notes in the margins. This will ready you for any class discussion or questions from the professor. Also, actively reading simply helps you better retain the information.

Learn to speed read. Speed reading is a skill that I suggest all college students learn. It’s a huge help in getting through those 100 page reading assignments. As with any tool, you should use speed reading with discernment. Some class material might require slow, concentrated reading. My philosophy classes in college were like that. Other classes you can speed read right through the text and be in good shape.

Quickly skim your reading notes and highlights before class starts. Before class starts, take a few minutes to quickly scan over any notes and highlights you made in your book. You want to be ready to answer any questions that come your way.

Do all your homework (even if it’s not graded). Your professors assign homework for a reason: to help you learn the material so you can pass the final exam. One big difference between high school and college is that professors will often assign homework problems but won’t pick them up for grading. For many college freshmen, it’s tempting to just skip this homework altogether. Don’t do this.

I succumbed to this temptation my first semester of college. My calc class had homework problems assigned every class. As soon as I learned that the assignments weren’t graded, I pretty much stopped doing them. Result? My first (and, thankfully, only) D grade.

Make the Most of Class Time

Attend all your classes. Another temptation that new college students face is regularly skipping class. Unlike high school, you don’t have parents or truancy laws making sure your butt’s in a classroom desk every day at college. It’s completely up to you whether you go to class or not. My advice is to make it a goal to go to every class during the semester.

Learning requires constant reinforcement. Class time is part of that reinforcement process. More importantly, attending class simply saves you time. Every time I missed a class, I often spent double the amount of time studying to make up what I missed. If you want a life outside of studying, go to class.

Sit near the front. Yeah, it’s cliché, but it really works. You’re more likely to stay focused and pay attention to the professor when you’re sitting near the front.

Take notes. I remember seeing so many students come to class without bringing anything to take notes with. They just sat there expecting information to download to their brain like Neo from The Matrix. While you might have been able to do this in high school and still succeed, it’s harder to do so in college and graduate-level classes. Learning is an active process and note-taking is one of the steps in that process. Moreover, taking notes forces you to pay attention in class. Even in the most boring of classes, taking notes will keep you awake and alert.

How should you take notes? I could devote an entire post to note-taking strategies. Maybe we’ll visit that in a future post if there’s any interest. For the purpose of this article, just do what works for you.

Ask questions. As you’re doing your reading or working through problem sets, write down any questions that you have about the material. Bring these questions with you to class, but don’t ask them right away. You’ll pay more attention in class as you listen to see if the professor will answer your question during his prepared lecture. If he doesn’t answer your question, ask it. Don’t feel embarrassed. Chances are somebody else has the same question. If you’re still having trouble understanding a concept, show some respect for the professor’s and your classmates’ time by waiting until after class to ask for more clarification.

Participate in discussions. Many liberal arts classes focus on classroom discussion. Participate! Don’t be the guy who sits in the back with his arms folded and doesn’t say a word. Discussing in class engages you with the content and helps reinforce what you’ve read and heard. Also, more and more college professors are making participation in classroom discussion a part of your overall class grade. Don’t miss out on an easy 10% of your grade. Speak up.

Eliminate all digital distractions. Turn off your cellphone when you’re in class and put it in your backpack. If you’re using a computer to take notes, eliminate the temptation to surf the internet mindlessly while in class by disabling your computer’s wireless router.

Getting Extra Help

Go see your professor during office hours. Want to guarantee success in your class? Go talk to your professors during their office hours. You won’t believe how much professors want to help students that they see making an effort to learn (and how often this effort is reflected in your final grade). To make your visit with your professor as efficient and as effective as possible, have a list of specific questions you need help with. Don’t just show up and say “I need help,” thus forcing the professor to spend 30 minutes figuring out what exactly you need help with.

Attend review sessions. As final exams draw near, many professors or teaching assistants will offer optional review sessions. Go to them! In my experience, the professor will pretty much tell you exactly what will be on the exam. Definitely worth the time.

Attend workshops and tutorials. Throughout the semester, departments offer workshops and tutorial sessions to provide students extra help. For example, my calculus class had a daily workshop manned by brainy math graduate students to help you with your homework. At the time, playing Call to Power 2 seemed much more important, so I didn’t go to these workshops, and it bit me in the butt. Any chance you have to get free extra help, take it.

Create an Outline or Study Guide

Create your OWN outline and study guide throughout the semester. When I was in college, studying for finals simply involved looking over my hodgepodge of class notes. It worked fine, but it was inefficient. My notes weren’t very organized, so I spent a lot of time thumbing back and forth through them, trying to figure out how different sections of content related with each other.

When I arrived in law school, I learned about the power of outlining. And I wished someone had taught me this skill as an undergrad. Creating an outline for your class does a few things that help with learning. First, it helps you synthesize information and understand how everything fits together. Second, it keeps your content organized for easier studying later on in the semester. Sometimes professors give important insights about a concept you studied earlier in the semester towards the end of the semester. Those bits of information can be easy to lose if you don’t have a master outline you can plug them into.

It’s important that you create your OWN outline. Don’t rely on somebody else’s. The simple act of creating an outline for your class will do wonders in helping you learn the material for the exam.

Many students like to wait until the end of the semester to create their outline. If that works for you, do it. I preferred outlining throughout the semester so I could spend more time reviewing my outline and going over practice questions right before the exam instead of spending time creating my outline.

A Short Guide to Creating an Outline

Use the syllabus or textbook to create the backbone of the outline. Here’s the easiest way to create your outline. At the beginning of the semester, take a look at your textbook’s table of contents. Create the backbone of the outline using chapter titles. The teacher’s syllabus is also a good source for creating your outline’s backbone. In fact, the syllabus is often presented in the form of an outline.

Fill in with class notes. After every class, fill in your outline with your class notes. You’ll really have to think about how to organize your notes and what to put where, but the mental struggle means the info is anchoring deeper and deeper into your brain.

Supplement the outline with professor handouts and other students’ outlines. If your teacher provides any handouts, supplement your outline with that content. Also, feel free to supplement your outline with outlines prepared by other students or a publisher. Sometimes it helps to see how somebody else organized the information in order to understand a concept more fully.

Memorizing

Memorization is an important skill that you need to master in order to succeed academically. Because many exams are closed book, you’ll need to know everything backwards and forwards in order to answer the questions. Below, I provide some memorization techniques that I used during school to help me ace my exams.

Memorization is necessary, but not sufficient for academic success. One thing to keep in mind as you read through this section is that most college professors won’t simply test you to see if you can remember and regurgitate information to them. Sure, some do give those kinds of tests, but most actually want to see if you can apply your knowledge. So while memorizing facts, figures, ideas, formulas, and concepts is necessary for success on your exam, knowing how to synthesize and use that information is even more important.

Long-term memory should be the goal. Your goal for every class should be to commit the material to your long-term memory. Your brain’s short-term memory can only hold so much information at one time. Overloading it by cramming it full the night before will ensure that you’ll forget whatever it is you tried to memorize. Creating long-term memories takes time, so you should commit to memorizing information at the beginning of the semester.

Get a change of scenery. Traditional learning advice says you should study in the same quiet place every time you hit the books. But psychological research has found that just the opposite is true. In one study, college students who studied a list of vocab words in two different rooms performed much better on a vocab test than students who studied the words twice in the same room.

Researchers think that our brains make subtle associations between what we’re studying and what’s in the background while we’re studying. Those unconscious associations help you remember what you’re learning. For example, you might associate one fact with the leather chair in the student union and another fact with the smell of coffee in the cafe. By changing locations where you study on a regular basis, you’re giving your brain more material with which to create these associations.

Bottom line: mix up where you study for more effective memorization.

Space out review sessions. In 1885, German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the spacing effect. In a nutshell, the spacing effect shows that humans remember facts and figures for longer periods of time when the information is reviewed in sessions strategically spaced out over time instead of crammed in one setting.

He also discovered that we all have a “forgetting curve.” The rate at which we forget things depends on several factors, but the amazing thing is that it’s actually possible to figure out how long it will take to forget something. Knowing how long it takes you to forget new information allows you to strategically plan your next review session for maximum information retention.

One really cool computer program that figures out your forgetting curve and when you should review content is SuperMemo. You create flashcards of stuff you want to memorize and work through them on your computer. SuperMemo then uses an algorithm to figure out when you should be presented with the material again after you review it. I used this badboy for all my foreign language classes in college and it’s kind of scary how well it worked.

Review and synthesize notes right after class. Remember, our goal is to transfer information from our short-term to long-term memory so that we can easily access it come finals time. One habit that will help kickstart the transfer is reviewing and synthesizing notes right after class. Many learning researchers suggest that you should do this initial review within 24 hours of first learning the new information. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that the information will disappear from your short term-memory. After you do this initial review, take advantage of the spacing effect by reviewing this info a few days later.

Teach someone what you’re learning. I’ve found that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to somebody else. I did this all the time in law school. If I was having trouble with a particular concept, I’d sit down with Kate and try to explain it to her. The effort to make the ideas clear to someone else ends up clarifying them for yourself as well.

Talk out loud. Studies show that talking out loud when you’re learning something aids in memorization. Called “the production effect,” it only works if you talk about some of the things you’re studying, while looking over other parts silently; that which you speak out loud gets stored in your memory because it becomes distinct in your mind from the rest of the material. So save this technique for the important bits that you’re really struggling with.

Take a nap after a study session. Recent research shows that taking a nap after learning something can help strengthen memory retention. While in law school, I made it a habit to take a quick power nap after an intense study session. I don’t know how much my naps helped, but they certainly didn’t hurt my academic performance.

Brute Force Memorization. The above tactics require a long period of time to be truly effective. But sometimes you won’t have the luxury of having an entire semester to memorize something for class. If you’re short on time and need to memorize something fast, try myBrute Force Memorization technique.

Self-Testing: The Master Key to Academic Success

Take frequent practice tests. To really commit information to long-term memory, you need to test yourself on a regular basis. Research shows that tests are not only good for assessing how well you know something, they actually help you learn and retain information for the long-term. The process of retrieving information to answer a question fundamentally changes the way it’s stored in the brain. The more difficult it is to retrieve the answer, the more securely it will anchor in your mind.

Instead of just passively memorizing information, create practice tests for yourself throughout the semester. Your textbook usually has study questions at the end of each chapter. Answer them. And by answer them, I mean write out your answer just like you would for a real exam. To get the full benefit of this technique, you can’t just answer the questions “in your mind.”

Ask your professor if she has any old exams she’d be willing to share with you. Take those old exams under real test taking conditions. If they’re essay questions, write out the answers. See if your professor will take a look at your answers and offer any feedback.

Flash cards are another way you can quiz yourself.

St udies show that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes, so make sure that after you complete any self-test, you go back and review your answers and find out why you got something wrong.

Practice tests. Do them.

Study Groups

Use study groups with care. I used study groups very sparingly while in college and law school. I found that most study groups were a waste of time because they lacked focus and direction. Instead of talking about the class material, we often ended up discussing Sooner football.

If you’re going to do a study group, follow these general guidelines:

Keep it focused. Every study group session should have a pre-determined purpose. Never show up to a study group without an agenda. Setting a time limit for your study group also helps keep people focused and on task.

Get the right kind of people. Study groups should be mutually beneficial. Everybody should contribute. If freeloaders infiltrate your study group, abandon ship.

Great Resources on Improving Your Study Skills

For more information on how to improve your study skills, check out the following resources:

Study Hacks. By far the best blog I’ve found on study skills. The author of the blog has also written two books on the subject.

How to Study: A Brief Guide. Written by a college professor. No frills, practical advice.

SuperMemo’s Article Bank. Lots of great stuff here. You can spend hours reading through this material.

What are the study tactics that have worked for you? Share your tips with us in the comments!

Little Red Riding Hood

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 07:35:00 +0000

A tax on white people

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 07:36:00 +0000

Now here’s an idea.

A ‘white tax’ has been proposed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu during a recent book launch in Cape Town.
Acccording to The Cape Argus, a call for a wealth tax on whites came up during the Truth and Reconciliation Process. “It could be quite piffling maybe one per cent of their stock exchange holdings. It’s nothing,” he claimed. “Our white fellow citizens have to accept the obvious: You all benefited from apartheid.”
I realise that for many in the Anglican Communion, Desmond Tutu is regarded as virtually a saint, and that his words carry an almost infallible persuasion. Yet despite his vaunted status, and his undoubted courage, humour and singlemindedness in the face of the evils of apartheid, the same rules apply to him as they do to other prelates. The main rule is this: don’t imagine for a moment that any number of theology degrees and/or pastoral experience gives you the credibility to comment on specific tax proposals. You have as much authority as the man in the pub when you depart from your brief in this way.
However noble your aims, you don’t fight racism with racism. A tax on whites alone will hardly help the cause of reconciliation (one in which Archbishop Tutu has been such a great leader).

I am reminded about this when I read about Diane Abbott’s comments about white people. It is good that we have started understanding that its not just white people who can be racist, but everybody, of every race can be really racist. My mother who is darker was told in her face by relatives when she got married that she was too dark. India is basically racial through and through. The advertisements for skin lightening creams is another example. Arabs are seriously racist. Its everywhere. We have to fight it everywhere….See more posts here.

5047 Janitors in the USA with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:24:00 +0000

Gobsmacking

I quote:

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

Plant a tree to reduce crime

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:38:00 +0000

Now there’s a great idea.

The authors estimate the relationship between trees and three crime aggregates (all crime, violent crime, and property crime) and two individual crimes (burglary and vandalism) in Portland, Oregon. During the study period (2005-2007), 431 crimes were reported at the 2,813 single-family homes in our sample. In general, the authors find that trees in the public right of way are associated with lower crime rates. The relationship between crime and trees on a house’s lot is mixed. Smaller, view-obstructing trees are associated with increased crime, whereas larger trees are associated with reduced crime. The authors speculate that trees may reduce crime by signaling to potential criminals that a house is better cared for and, therefore, subject to more effective authority than a comparable house with fewer trees.
Source: "The Effect of Trees on Crime in Portland, Oregon" from Environment and Behavior

We need to plant more trees

Indians are incapable of History

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:15:00 +0000

While reading this research paper, I was constantly struck by the impact that colonialism has had on the historical development in the world. Whether we are talking about European Colonialism or Islamic Colonialism or American Colonialism or what have you, how you view history is dependent upon what colonisation you were faced with.

Some nations take up the colonisers ideology whole heartedly (look at the countries who have become Christian or Muslim due to the spread of that religion, or the Norman colonisation of UK, or the European colonisation of USA and and and) while some fight back.

Some sentences in the research paper made me think. I quote:

Ever since G.W.F. Hegel, Orientalist scholars had considered Indians to be incapable of history. India’s lack of historical consciousness,they reasoned, was a direct consequence of spiritual excesses. Indeed, the absence of historical consciousness could be directly attributed to the priestly caste’s need to control and to impose their religion on their naïve followers. As Theodore Goldstücker wrote in 1864, “When, by priestcraft and ignorance, a nation has lost itself so far as to look upon writings like these as divinely inspired, there is but one conclusion to be drawn: it has arrived at the turning-point of its destinies. Hinduism stands at this point…” (73). But all was not lost. “The causes of the gradual degeneracy of Hinduism,” Goldstücker reasoned, were no “different from those to which other religions are subject, when allowed to grow in the dark” (74). “In Europe, religious depravity received its check when the art of printing allowed the light of publicity to enter into the book whence her nations derive their faith” (74). So, too, “no other means” was capable of imposing a “check” on it “in India than the admission of the masses to that original book which is always on their lips, but which now is the monopoly of the infinitesimal fraction of the Brahminical caste able to understand its sense” (74).

As I said, perhaps its this excess of spirituality made India resist the colonisation of external parties, whether the religious kinds (Islam, Christianity) or the temporal kinds (British, French, Turkic)?

Besides this, the links between the silly Aryan Invasion theory and National Socialism hasn't really been explored in the public arena for the common man (Is this the reason behind the fascination Indians have for Mein Kampf?). There are some fascinating links between what Subash Chandra Bose did with the Nazi’s (he was a bit of a fascist himself), the linguistic arguments (Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit etc. are considered to be part of the Indo European Linguistic family)

Other than that, the article was discussing the German Indological academic framework and history. Might be a bit esoteric for most, but then academic debates are like that. I end with a quote:

“ACADEMIC politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” This observation is routinely attributed to former Harvard professor Henry Kissinger. Well before Kissinger got credit for that thought in the mid-1970s, however, Harvard political scientist Richard Neustadt told a reporter, “Academic politics is much more vicious than real politics. We think it’s because the stakes are so small.” Others believe this quip originated with political scientist Wallace Sayre, Neustadt’s onetime colleague at Columbia University. A 1973 book gave as “Sayre’s Law,” “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue—that is why academic politics are so bitter.” Sayre’s colleague and coauthor Herbert Kaufman said his usual wording was “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” In his 1979 book Peter’s People, Laurence Peter wrote, “Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.” He called this “Peter’s Theory of Entrepreneurial Aggressiveness in Higher Education.” Variations on that thought have also been attributed to scientist-author C. P. Snow, professor-politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and politician Jesse Unruh (among others). According to the onetime editor of Woodrow Wilson’s papers, however, long before any of them strode the academic-political scene, Wilson observed often that the intensity of academic squabbles he witnessed while president of Princeton University was a function of the “triviality” of the issues being considered.

Poverty in the USA

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:35:00 +0000

Dear Son,

We aren't poor. Actually, we are quite well off compared to earnings in the UK and much better off when you consider global incomes. But that wasnt always the case, when I was growing up, we were fairly poor and Dadu was even poorer, they came over from Bangladesh with literally the clothes on their back. I have done fairly well for a dirt poor and starving refugee's son, Dadu and Didu made sure that we were educated and fed and clothed as best as they could and its my duty to ensure that we do the best for you.

But never ever never assume that being rich or well off is given or you can take it for granted, son. I know you will do better than me and you will be much richer. But that doesnt mean that you dont take care of the possibility that you can become poor. This article below shows what happens to people who are poor in a rich country like USA. And you have to make sure you avoid this state, son. Being poor is soul destroying. It destroys your confidence, it destroys your love, your live, your family. It eats away inside you. As the quote goes, when poverty arrives at the door, love leaves by the window.
There are few ways you can do this.

1. Learn to save, mamma ensures that we save a shed load of our earnings. You should aim to save up to 1/3 of your earnings, that's the best possible target. If you can achieve this, then you will have the comfort that you have a backup pot of money, you have some dosh if any emergency comes up. I didnt save despite hearing entreaties from Dadu and even from your mamma, but I am now a convert. But we lost quite a lot of years. Still, better late than never son. But you can learn from my mistake, I know you are already saving and investing, that is good, keep doing it.

2. Always have a technical ability or skill son. It could be repairing cars, or planting or coding or welding, something technical. What do I mean by technical? I mean technical as in a skill for which somebody will pay you money even when you have become a manager or an entrepreneur. The skill depends upon what you like, but once you have this skill, then you will know that if your primary earning profession fails for whatever reason, you can always fall back on the skill. That is why i was asking you to understand coding. Ask yourself this question, if you do not have a job in your primary profession, how are you going to ensure that you get a regular source of income? And do NOT rely on benefits, that's not enough and as you can read below, you will be treated like shit if you have to go into welfare. I can think of alternative technical skills such as in the charity sector, writing articles, photography, project management, coding, academics, so make sure you are protected, son.

3. Never get too far away from poor people, son. The arrogance of the rich frequently means that they get disconnected from society and then the fall is bigger and faster. One of the richest men in the world, the Nizam of Hyderabad, had a poor room, where he would go and stay once a week or so. Wear cheap clothing and stuff. Just so that he would recognise and know that he can revert to poverty and to know his subjects. It could well be a myth, but that's one good thing to learn and follow. Be in touch with the poor people, try to help them, understand their pain. One of the things we do in the charities that we support is to help very poor people and being with them makes me know and appreciate what they are going through.

4. Reduce your spending, learn to do with less. I know, I spend a shed load but that's not good. There are so many things you can do which doesnt require money, every £ you save means that you have more savings. Plus you can retire earlier and use the money for a variety of purposes. This will also assist you in your savings. One quick way of doing this is to stop and ask yourself, do you really need it? Another way is to marry somebody like Mamma.

Well, hope this helps son,

in any case, read this article, its very interesting.

Love

baba

Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again) | TomDispatch
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175428/

Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again)
Posted by Barbara Ehrenreich at 7:05am, August 9, 2011.
It was at lunch with the editor of Harper’s Magazine that the subject came up: How does anyone actually live “on the wages available to the unskilled”? And then Barbara Ehrenreich said something that altered her life and resulted, improbably enough, in a bestselling book with almost two million copies in print. “Someone,” she commented, “ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism — you know go out there and try it for themselves.” She meant, she hastened to point out on that book’s first page, “someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands.”
That was 1998 and, somewhat to her surprise, Ehrenreich soon found herself beginning the first of a whirl of unskilled “careers” as a waitress at a “family restaurant” attached to a big discount chain hotel in Key West, Florida, at $2.43 an hour plus tips. And the rest, of course, is history. The now famous book that resulted, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, is just out in its tenth anniversary edition with a new afterword by Ehrenreich — perfectly timed for an American era in which the book’s subtitle might have to be changed to “On (Not) Getting a Job in America.” TomDispatch takes special pride in offering Ehrenreich’s new afterword, adapted and shortened, for a book that, in its latest edition, deserves to sell another million copies. Tom
Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version)
On Turning Poverty into an American Crime
By Barbara Ehrenreich
I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love not war,” and then — down at the bottom — “Screw it, just make money.”
When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, “I never thought…” or “I hadn’t realized…”
To my own amazement, Nickel and Dimed quickly ascended to the bestseller list and began winning awards. Criticisms, too, have accumulated over the years. But for the most part, the book has been far better received than I could have imagined it would be, with an impact extending well into the more comfortable classes. A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading it, she’d always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw as their self-inflicted obesity. Now she understood that a healthy diet wasn’t always an option. And if I had a quarter for every person who’s told me he or she now tipped more generously, I would be able to start my own foundation.
Even more gratifying to me, the book has been widely read among low-wage workers. In the last few years, hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories: the mother of a newborn infant whose electricity had just been turned off, the woman who had just been given a diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the newly homeless man who writes from a library computer.
At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to — only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29% of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes — though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.
The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.
Post-Meltdown Poverty
When you read about the hardships I found people enduring while I was researching my book — the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans — you should bear in mind that those occurred in the best of times. The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful.
In 2000, I had been able to walk into a number of jobs pretty much off the street. Less than a decade later, many of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff competition for those that remained. It would have been impossible to repeat my Nickel and Dimed“experiment,” had I had been so inclined, because I would probably never have found a job.
For the last couple of years, I have attempted to find out what was happening to the working poor in a declining economy — this time using conventional reporting techniques like interviewing. I started with my own extended family, which includes plenty of people without jobs or health insurance, and moved on to trying to track down a couple of the people I had met while working on Nickel and Dimed.
This wasn’t easy, because most of the addresses and phone numbers I had taken away with me had proved to be inoperative within a few months, probably due to moves and suspensions of telephone service. I had kept in touch with “Melissa” over the years, who was still working at Wal-Mart, where her wages had risen from $7 to $10 an hour, but in the meantime her husband had lost his job. “Caroline,” now in her 50s and partly disabled by diabetes and heart disease, had left her deadbeat husband and was subsisting on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. Neither seemed unduly afflicted by the recession, but only because they had already been living in what amounts to a permanent economic depression.
Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” — formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.
In 2008 and 2009, for example, blue-collar unemployment was increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Low-wage blue-collar workers, like the people I worked with in this book, were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared.
How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.
Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space — by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers.
It’s hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers, journalists, or anyone else who might be remotely connected to the authorities.
In Los Angeles, housing expert Peter Dreier says that “people who’ve lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent.” According to a community organizer in Alexandria, Virginia, the standard apartment in a complex occupied largely by day laborers has two bedrooms, each containing an entire family of up to five people, plus an additional person laying claim to the couch.
No one could call suicide a “coping strategy,” but it is one way some people have responded to job loss and debt. There are no national statistics linking suicide to economic hard times, but the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline reported more than a four-fold increase in call volume between 2007 and 2009, and regions with particularly high unemployment, like Elkhart, Indiana, have seen troubling spikes in their suicide rates. Foreclosure is often the trigger for suicide — or, worse, murder-suicides that destroy entire families.
“Torture and Abuse of Needy Families”
We do of course have a collective way of ameliorating the hardships of individuals and families — a government safety net that is meant to save the poor from spiraling down all the way to destitution. But its response to the economic emergency of the last few years has been spotty at best. The food stamp program has responded to the crisis fairly well, to the point where it now reaches about 37 million people, up about 30% from pre-recession levels. But welfare — the traditional last resort for the down-and-out until it was “reformed” in 1996 — only expanded by about 6% in the first two years of the recession.
The difference between the two programs? There is a right to food stamps. You go to the office and, if you meet the statutory definition of need, they help you. For welfare, the street-level bureaucrats can, pretty much at their own discretion, just say no.
Take the case of Kristen and Joe Parente, Delaware residents who had always imagined that people turned to the government for help only if “they didn’t want to work.” Their troubles began well before the recession, when Joe, a fourth-generation pipe-fitter, sustained a back injury that left him unfit for even light lifting. He fell into a profound depression for several months, then rallied to ace a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repairs — only to find that those skills are no longer in demand. The obvious fallback was disability benefits, but — catch-22 — when Joe applied he was told he could not qualify without presenting a recent MRI scan. This would cost $800 to $900, which the Parentes do not have; nor has Joe, unlike the rest of the family, been able to qualify for Medicaid.
When they married as teenagers, the plan had been for Kristen to stay home with the children. But with Joe out of action and three children to support by the middle of this decade, Kristen went out and got waitressing jobs, ending up, in 2008, in a “pretty fancy place on the water.” Then the recession struck and she was laid off.
Kristen is bright, pretty, and to judge from her command of her own small kitchen, probably capable of holding down a dozen tables with precision and grace. In the past she’d always been able to land a new job within days; now there was nothing. Like 44% of laid-off people at the time, she failed to meet the fiendishly complex and sometimes arbitrary eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits. Their car started falling apart.
So the Parentes turned to what remains of welfare — TANF, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. TANF does not offer straightforward cash support like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which it replaced in 1996. It’s an income supplementation program for working parents, and it was based on the sunny assumption that there would always be plenty of jobs for those enterprising enough to get them.
After Kristen applied, nothing happened for six weeks — no money, no phone calls returned. At school, the Parentes’ seven-year-old’s class was asked to write out what wish they would present to a genie, should a genie appear. Brianna’s wish was for her mother to find a job because there was nothing to eat in the house, an aspiration that her teacher deemed too disturbing to be posted on the wall with the other children’s requests.
When the Parentes finally got into “the system” and began receiving food stamps and some cash assistance, they discovered why some recipients have taken to calling TANF “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.” From the start, the TANF experience was “humiliating,” Kristen says. The caseworkers “treat you like a bum. They act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks.”
The Parentes discovered that they were each expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, although their car was on its last legs and no money was offered for gas, tolls, or babysitting. In addition, Kristen had to drive 35 miles a day to attend “job readiness” classes offered by a private company called Arbor, which, she says, were “frankly a joke.”
Nationally, according to Kaaryn Gustafson of the University of Connecticut Law School, “applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police.” There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting, and lengthy interrogations as to one’s children’s true paternity. The ostensible goal is to prevent welfare fraud, but the psychological impact is to turn poverty itself into a kind of crime.
How the Safety Net Became a Dragnet
The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalized in America.
Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
Most cities, for example, have ordinances designed to drive the destitute off the streets by outlawing such necessary activities of daily life as sitting, loitering, sleeping, or lying down. Urban officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about such laws: “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a St. Petersburg, Florida, city attorney stated in June 2009, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges…”
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually intensified as the weakened economy generates ever more poverty. So concludes a recent study from the National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness, which finds that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with the harassment of the poor for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container.
The report lists America’s ten “meanest” cities — the largest of which include Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Orlando — but new contestants are springing up every day. In Colorado, Grand Junction’s city council is considering a ban on begging; Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent at the end of June. And how do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.
That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekeley at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, D.C. — the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972.
He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until December 2008, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants. It turned out that Szekeley, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs, or cuss in front of ladies, did indeed have one — for “criminal trespassing,” as sleeping on the streets is sometimes defined by the law. So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail.
“Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Szekeley. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelterfor being homeless?”
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several middle-aged white vegans.
One anti-sharing law was just overturned in Orlando, but the war on illicit generosity continues. Orlando is appealing the decision, and Middletown, Connecticut, is in the midst of a crackdown. More recently, Gainesville, Florida, began enforcing a rule limiting the number of meals that soup kitchens may serve to 130 people in one day, and Phoenix, Arizona, has been using zoning laws to stop a local church from serving breakfast to homeless people.
For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization, and one is debt. Anyone can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t pay fines for things like expired inspection stickers may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail.
More commonly, the path to prison begins when one of your creditors has a court summons issued for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another, such as that your address has changed and you never received it. Okay, now you’re in “contempt of the court.”
Or suppose you miss a payment and your car insurance lapses, and then you’re stopped for something like a broken headlight (about $130 for the bulb alone). Now, depending on the state, you may have your car impounded and/or face a steep fine — again, exposing you to a possible court summons. “There’s just no end to it once the cycle starts,” says Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. “It just keeps accelerating.”
The second — and by far the most reliable — way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor succumbs to racial profiling, but whole communities are effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor. Flick a cigarette and you’re “littering”; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect. And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”
In what has become a familiar pattern, the government defunds services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Generate no public-sector jobs, then penalize people for falling into debt. The experience of the poor, and especially poor people of color, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks. And if you should try to escape this nightmare reality into a brief, drug-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too.
One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today, exactly the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing. And what public housing remains has become ever more prison-like, with random police sweeps and, in a growing number of cities, proposed drug tests for residents. The safety net, or what remains of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.
It is not clear whether economic hard times will finally force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment. With even the official level of poverty increasing — to over 14% in 2010 — some states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty, using alternative sentencing methods, shortening probation, and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missing court appointments. But others, diabolically enough, are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes,” but charging prisoners for their room and board, guaranteeing they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.
So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list — a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.
Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.
Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can’t afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty — though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they’re down.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of a number of books, most recently Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. This essay is a shortened version of a new afterword to her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, just released by Picador Books.
Excerpted from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, published August 2nd by Picador USA. New afterword © 2011 by Barbara Ehrenreich. Excerpted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Another bookstore bites the dust–this time in SAfrica

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:31:00 +0000

Thanks to John for this link. What a sad state of affairs.

South Africa may have produced two Nobel laureates in literature but a famous bookshop in Johannesburg is nevertheless about to close, a victim of the country's poor reading culture.
The Boekehuis, whose Afrikaans name means "book house", is in an old four-bedroom house a stone's throw from the city's two main universities.
Its waxed parquet floors, moulded ceilings, garden and coffee shop became the book-lover's refuge. The shop's literary events where readers could interact with writers were especially popular.
"This is like a house, not only a bookshop. People come here to buy books, but not only. They come for the ambiance, to have a nice time. And especially for the talks," says shop manager Corina van der Spoel.
Boekehuis which opened in 2000 has been widely portrayed as independent, but it is in fact owned by Media24, the country's largest media company.
The giant multimedia group, which owns most of the country's magazines and major newspaper titles, announced in December that the Boekehuis would be closing its doors at the end of January.
Leading figures such as award-winning author Andre Brink, photographer David Goldblatt and internationally acclaimed painter William Kentridge were among those who signed a petition to try to get Media24 to change its mind.
But their arguments have failed to sway the executives at Media24: the store has recorded annual losses of around a million rand ($120,000).
"Various possible solutions, such as finding a buyer for it, were pursued without success," the company explained in a statement.
"No interested buyers could be found."
National figures on readership — and literacy — help explain the problem.
"Only about one percent of the population buy books," says Elitha van der Sandt, head of the South African Book Development Council (SABDC).
And although the country can boast Nobel prize-winning authors such as Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J.M. Coetzee (2003), their works are mostly read abroad.
Professionals and researchers give several reasons for the nation's lack of a reading culture: one problem is the price of books.
The cheapest start at 120 rands ($14, 11 euros) — a high price in a country where most of the 50 million people earn around 2,000 to 3,000 rands a month.
"While a few books sell very well, most books will sell only a thousand or so copies," says Beth le Roux of the University of Pretoria, a specialist in the publishing industry.
"This means that publishers have small print runs, which also keeps the costs (and the prices) high." A sales tax rate of 14 percent and transport costs for imported books only add to the problem, she adds.
"To make it onto the bestseller list, you only need to sell a few thousand copies of a book here."
Le Roux estimates the book industry's turnover at 3.5 billion rands ($420 million, 320 million euro): but two thirds of that are made up of school and university textbooks.
Another 20 percent comes from religious books, which does not leave much of a niche for general literature.
A more fundamental problem however, is illiteracy.
In South Africa 18 percent of adults over the age of 15 are unable to read, and many of those who can read still struggle.
These depressing statistics are a legacy of the apartheid system, which gave lower quality schooling to the non-white population.
But even among white South Africans, the reading culture is limited.
Many of them are descendants of Protestants who have no tradition of diverse reading beyond the Bible.
Or as one bookseller quipped: "It wasn't just the intellectuals who left Europe!"
Stationery shops in the countryside sell a few romance novels, biographies of European royalty, thrillers and sports books. And there is no shortage of religious bookshops.
South Africa's main cities offer a few bookshops selling a broader range of literature: mostly branches of Exclusive Books, the largest chain in South Africa.
Increasingly however, many book enthusiasts are turning to the Internet to get what they need, even if for years, the Boekehuis was seen as an exception to that trend, partly because of the literary events it hosted.
Just a few kilometers down the road meanwhile, the local branch of Exclusive Books is also struggling. The chain, which belongs to a rival media group, just reduced the floor space of its biggest shop.

Now there’s courage for you

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:04:00 +0000

Michael O’Leary, the boss of a low cost airline in Ireland says what he thinks. That its basically the state in the form of politicians and bureaucrats who are the enemies of innovation. The sheer irony that the European Commission had to setup a conference to talk about innovation. The stupidity of these morons is breath taking, which is why I don't have much hope for Europe, its currency or its future. Its a shitehole.

Guess what? He is the CEO of Ryanair, but the EU cannot pay for low cost air fares. And this is why I am paying my taxes for? WTF?

STOP SPENDING MY MONEY!

Watch the entire thing, see why these dinosaurs of the European Commission are extinct, moron and stupid. That is a good thing, but the only problem is that they will end up spending a wodge of my hard earned cash.

The Swedish Experiment–Financial Transaction Tax

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:40:00 +0000

France, Germany and and and are trying to launch a Financial Transaction Tax and David Cameron has promised to vote it. Good. Business will run away into American or Asian markets, is that what they want? Morons.

I don't have any thing further to say. Here’s a newspaper article on this seriously stupid idea.

As Europe debates whether to apply a tax on financial transactions, a former Swedish finance minister says Sweden's experience in the 1980s was so negative it repealed the tax as plunging trading volumes led to disappointing tax revenues.
"The Swedish experiences were negative, both from the point of view of the state's finances and from a general socioeconomic perspective," former finance minister Bo Lundgren, 64, told AFP.
In 1984, the Social Democratic government introduced a tax of 0.5 percent on each purchase or sale of shares (a level that was doubled two years later) and 1.0 percent on options. The tax on bonds varied depending on the maturity, ranging from 0.03 to 0.001 percent.
The tax was levied on brokerage services.
The Swedish government later introduced a tax on currency transactions in 1989.
But the consequences of both taxes were considered so harmful to the markets that they were soon abolished: the one on currency transactions was removed after just 16 months, in 1990, and the other was removed after eight years, in 1991.
Lundgren, who had the tax on shares, options and bonds abolished when he was finance minister in a centre-right government, told AFP the effects of the currency transaction tax "were so dramatically negative that all currency trading basically moved from Stockholm to London, so the Social Democratic government (in power at the time) abolished the tax."
Meanwhile, the tax on shares, bonds and options "led to share trading moving abroad but the effects were not as dramatic as the currency transaction tax."
"The year we abolished it, in 1991, the tax revenue amounted to around three billion kronor", or about 375 million euros ($476 million) in today's currency.
"But on the other hand the tax had reduced share trades so much that once it was abolished, trading increased and that in turn led to an increase in brokerage fees which led to an increase in corporate tax (revenues) and other tax (revenues) increased."
"When the tax was abolished we estimated that there was no loss (of revenue) involved, because it led to such a sharp increase in trading."
In his proposal to parliament repealing the tax on shares, options and bonds, Lundgren said at the time that "activity on the Swedish stock market has decreased sharply in recent years which has resulted in a series of disadvantages for Swedish industry."
"The tax on shares and other securities has contributed to this development," he said.
He said Swedish companies suffered from reduced liquidity on the stock market and had a harder time raising risk capital.
Lundgren, who is now the head of Sweden's National Debt Office, and Sweden's current Finance Minister Anders Borg -- both members of the conservative Moderate party -- have voiced opposition to the European Commission's proposal to tax financial transactions.
The Commission in September proposed a tax of 0.1 percent on stock and bond transactions and 0.01 percent on derivatives, aimed at pulling in up to 55 billion euros ($70.4 billion) annually.
France and Germany are in favour of the tax and have said the 17-member eurozone could adopt it on its own, while non-euro member Britain is fiercely opposed to it amid fears it could prove devastating to its global financial hub, the City of London.
Paris has gone so far as to say it could begin introducing the tax on its own if a broader agreement is not reached.

But the best part was from France. They are all gung ho about implementing this tax. So what are they going to do? They will impose this tax on shares and derivatives. oh! really? why not on bonds? Of course not, no question of levying a tax on bonds as you see, they have to sell bonds. They cannot conceivable have a tax on sovereign bonds as it will raise the cost for them, see? So as long as others pay the tax, its fine, but if its a question of the state paying the tax, god, its bad then.

Good lord, the hypocrisy is mindboggling and nose wrinkling smelly.

Professors with Tattoos have higher approval rates

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 06:19:00 +0000

The abstract:

128 undergraduates' perceptions of tattoos on a model described as a college instructor were assessed. They viewed one of four photographs of a tattooed or nontattooed female model. Students rated her on nine teaching-related characteristics. Analyses indicated that the presence of tattoos was associated with some positive changes in ratings: students' motivation, being imaginative about assignments, and how likely students were to recommend her as an instructor.
Source: "Perceptions of a tattooed college instructor." from Psychol Rep. 2010 Jun;106(3):845-50.

Hmm, i find this interesting, is this because the professor ties in with the student’s own rebellious phase? plus imagination? plus the sexy factor? Interesting, but I don't think there will be a rash of professors making a beeline for the tattoo parlour, do you?

Gossiping does reflect on you

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:41:00 +0000

Abstract from here.

Spontaneous trait transference occurs when communicators are perceived as possessing the very traits they describe in others. Study 1 confirmed that communicators become associated with the trait implications of their descriptions of others and that such associations persist over time. Study 2 demonstrated that these associations influence specific trait impressions of communicators. Study 3 suggested that spontaneous trait transference reflects simple associative processes that occur even when there are no logical bases for making inferences. Finally, Study 4 used more naturalistic stimuli and provided additional evidence that the phenomenon reflects mindless associations rather than logical attributions. Together these studies demonstrate that spontaneous trait transference is a reliable phenomenon that plays a previously unrecognized role in social perception and interaction.
Source: "Spontaneous trait transference: communicators taken on the qualities they describe in others." from J Pers Soc Psychol. 1998 Apr;74(4):837-48.

I think this is pure karma. As you sow, so you reap, if you gossip about somebody, then the listener associates those bad things that you are gossiping on you.

Ergo, do not gossip. But its strange, I was speaking with somebody and she said that one of her colleagues and friends is a huge gossiper. Despite her being a good person, she is forever associated with gossiping and that’s not in a good way at all. Sad, no? what a sad state of affairs.

I personally find that gossipers are seriously insecure, they find some kind of closure in gossiping about others, tearing down others seems to improve their own standing. But here’s the tragic stupidity, they think it helps, but it actually impacts on them negatively, and with the very people she is gossiping about. Sad.