Logical Thinking

India Going to Crap?

2009-03-04T22:39:00.001+05:30

In the shadow of its new suburbs, torrid growth and 300- million-plus-strong middle class, India is struggling with a sanitation emergency. From the stream in Devi's village to the nation's holiest river, the Ganges, 75 percent of the country's surface water is contaminated by human and agricultural waste and industrial effluent. Everyone in Indian cities is at risk of consuming human feces, if they're not already, the Ministry of Urban Development concluded in September.

Economic Drain

Illness, lost productivity and other consequences of fouled water and inadequate sewage treatment trimmed 1.4-7.2 percent from the gross domestic product of Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam in 2005, according to a study last year by the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Program.

Sanitation and hygiene-related issues may have a similar if not greater impact on India's $1.2 trillion economy, says Guy Hutton, a senior water and sanitation economist with the program in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Snarled transportation and unreliable power further damp the nation's growth. Companies that locate in India pay hardship wages and ensconce employees in self- sufficient compounds.

The toll on human health is grim. Every day, 1,000 children younger than 5 years old die in India from diarrhea, hepatitis- causing pathogens and other sanitation-related diseases, according to the United Nations Children's Fund.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aErNiP_V4RLc&refer=home

A Humanitarian's worst nightmare:Zimbabwe

2008-12-23T03:02:00.001+05:30

NZVERE, Zimbabwe Along a road in Matabeleland, barefoot children stuff their pockets with corn kernels that have blown off a truck as if the brownish bits, good only for animal feed in normal times, were gold coins.

In the dirt lanes of Chitungwiza, the Mugarwes, a family of firewood hawkers, bake a loaf of bread, their only meal, with 11 slices for the six of them. All devour two slices except the youngest, age 2. He gets just one.

And on the tiny farms here in the region of Mashonaland, once a breadbasket for all of southern Africa, destitute villagers pull the shells off wriggling crickets and beetles, then toss what is left in a hot pan. "If you get that, you have a meal," said Standford Nhira, a spectrally thin farmer whose rib cage is etched on his chest and whose socks have collapsed around his sticklike ankles.

The half-starved haunt the once bountiful landscape of Zimbabwe, where a recent United Nations survey found that 7 in 10 people had eaten either nothing or only a single meal the day before.

Still dominated after nearly three decades by their authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans are now enduring their seventh straight year of hunger. This largely man-made crisis, occasionally worsened by drought and erratic rains, has been brought on by catastrophic agricultural policies, sweeping economic collapse and a ruling party that has used farmland and food as weapons in its ruthless and so far successful quest to hang on to power.

But this year is different. This year, the hunger is much worse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/world/africa/22zimbabwe.html?pagewanted=all

Recipe for Famine

2008-12-16T11:28:00.000+05:30

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=specialreport&srnum=2

Dec. 8 (Bloomberg) -- The bag of green peas, stamped "USAID From the American People," took more than six months to reach Haylar Ayako.

For seven of his grandchildren, that was a lifetime.

They died as the peas journeyed from North Dakota to southern Ethiopia. During that time, the American growers, processors and transporters that profit from aid shipments were fighting off a proposal before Congress to speed deliveries by buying more from foreign producers near trouble spots. As a result of legal mandates to buy U.S. goods, the world's most generous food relief program wasn't fast or flexible enough to feed the starving in Ethiopia's drought-ridden South Omo region this year.

"I am so grieved that I lost those children," said Ayako, a Bena tribesman, speaking in his local Omotic language. "They died of the food shortage."

The dry peas Ayako took home almost eight weeks ago had traveled more than 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) by rail, ship and truck, starting 15 miles south of the Canadian border with their harvest in August 2007. Stops included Lake Charles, Louisiana; Djibouti, the small African country whose capital on the Gulf of Aden serves as a port for food aid; and Nazareth, Ethiopia, two hours south of Addis Ababa, the capital. Warehouse stays punctuated each leg until the peas finally arrived in the village of Shala-Luka.

'Behind Closed Doors'

U.S. farm and shipping lobbyists have stifled efforts to simplify aid deliveries, leaving Africans to starve when they might have been saved, said Andrew Natsios, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington who led USAID, the Agency for International Development, from 2001 to 2006.

"No one can take the high moral ground against it, so they hide behind closed doors and kill it," he said. "It's all done behind the scenes."

Flunking the Intelligence Test

2008-12-01T11:55:00.001+05:30

Flunking the Intelligence Test

The only real question about the Mumbai attack was just when it would come.

Sudip Mazumdar

NEWSWEEK

Published Nov 29, 2008 | Updated: 12:25 p.m. ET Nov 29, 2008

The hostage takers in Mumbai didn't need to wonder how large an armed rescue team the Indian government was sending, or when to anticipate its arrival. They had only to click on the nearest TV set, and there was the federal home minister, Shivraj Patil, obliviously telling viewers that 200 commandos had taken off on the two-hour flight from New Delhi at 2:30 a.m. Even after the aircraft had landed in Mumbai, the gunmen had plenty of time to get ready, as the troops were herded aboard rickety transport buses to be hauled from the city's northern edge to its southern tip. The commandos finally reached the scene about 6:30, roughly nine hours after the terrorists had launched their murderous attacks in the financial capital of India. The battle would drag on for the next two days while the body count reached 195 before the last gunman went down.

In Mumbai and throughout India, people reacted the way Americans did after September 11: they demanded to know why their government had failed to protect them. "Since November last year I have been drawing attention to the iceberg of jihadi terrorism," says B. Raman, a former top official at India's equivalent of the CIA, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). "The government of [Prime Minister] Manmohan Singh reacted to the repeated warning signals of the moving iceberg in the same way as the Bush administration reacted to reports about the plans of the Al Qaeda for aviation terrorism in the U.S.it just didn't react. It was in a denial mode."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/171366/output/print

Fixing Indian education

2008-11-27T01:00:00.001+05:30

Private sector education entrepreneurs experiencing "schadenfreude" (German for joy in other people's misery) in the Manipal group's confrontation with the medical education regulator have much to learn from a poem written after World War II by a German pastor called Martin Niemöller about the Nazis. He wrote, "First they came for the Communists,/ and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist/ Then they came for the Jews,/ and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew/ Then they came for the Catholics,/ and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant/ Finally they came for me,/ but by that time there was no one left to speak up."

Irrational, corrupt and autocratic regimes must always be stood up to because there is no place to hide from them. Making peace (or an off-balance sheet settlement) only makes things worse because this beast feeds on itself. Medical education in India is regulated by an autonomous body called the Medical Council of India (MCI). MCI, like other vertical ayatollahs of education, has created a toll gate in milking education institutions with irrational capacity licensing norms around infrastructure sharing, faculty, curriculum, governance and much else. In true licence raj tradition, they have draconian inspection powers that create regulatory arbitrage with an answer looking for a question. MCI has arbitrarily halved the number of medical seats for Manipal and continues to make public noises about derecognition. Being singled out for selective enforcement means that an institution with students from 53 countries now mostly spends its energy (and money) expanding overseas because of regulatory cholesterol in India.

http://www.livemint.com/articles/2008/11/12225433/Fixing-education8217s-chole.html

India's Colleges Battle a Thicket of Red Tape

2008-11-13T09:37:00.001+05:30

MUMBAI -- P.M. D'Mello, the principal of a pharmacy college here, wants to double student enrollment, fill the empty space in her building and help remedy the shortage of skilled workers that plagues India's economy.

The government won't let her.

Dean M.L. Shrikant, left, has been trying for years to expand the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai.

Under the labyrinthine regulations that govern technical colleges nationwide, the Principal K.M. Kundnani College of Pharmacy must provide 168 square feet of building space for each student. The rule is intended to ensure students have enough space to learn. But it effectively caps enrollment at 300, even though students are spread so thinly in the eight-story building that the top floor remains unused, its lecture halls padlocked.

The rules also stipulate the exact size for libraries and administrative offices, the ratio of professors to assistant professors and lecturers, quotas for student enrollment and the number of computer terminals, books and journals that must be on site.

"I am not free to run this school as I wish," Ms. D'Mello, 51 years old, says. "I am at the whim of unrealistic demands."

Loosening the Indian government's famously bureaucratic "License Raj" when it comes to governing businesses has helped spur an economic surge that has transformed the country and its standing in the world. In contrast, critics say India's educational system remains mired in red tape that stifles expansion and innovation.

The system falls far short of meeting the demand among young people for places in good colleges and universities. And it deprives India of the ranks of well-educated graduates it needs to supply crucial industries such as information technology and pharmaceuticals.

The mandate that pharmacy colleges must provide 168 square feet per student, for instance, meant that nearly 75% of the 25,000 people who took the pharmacy-college entrance exam this year in the state of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, were turned away because there weren't enough seats, according to Ms. D'Mello.

The regulatory restrictions are especially severe in technical fields such as engineering, pharmacy, business administration and computer science. Almost every aspect of operations for about 8,500 private and public colleges and universities is overseen by the All India Council for Technical Education, a New Delhi-based government body empowered by law in 1987.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122652421295221817.html

Myopic policies: creation of world-class universities

2008-10-23T17:47:00.001+05:30

The government will create 12 Central universities, adding to the existing 18. This is a mammoth undertaking, for which Rs. 3,280 crore (about $73 million) has been allocated from the budget. Earlier in the year, India announced that it would create 30 "world-class" universities, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and seven Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in the coming five years. On the recommendation of the National Knowledge Commiss ion, the Centre is planning massive investment to upgrade and expand higher education. Other plans include enhancing the salaries of college and university academics by as much as 70 per cent.

[.............]

Just pumping money and resources into a fundamentally broken university system is a mistake. Establishing new universities, especially those intended to be innovative, requires careful planning and an understanding of the weaknesses of the current system. Let us outline some of the problems that need fixing before resources are given.

Bureaucracy without accountability: India is famous for sclerotic bureaucracy, and higher education fits into that mould. Few decisions can be made without taking permission from an authority above, and the wheels of decision-making grind slowly. Fear of corruption or loss of control entrenches bureaucracy. Teachers and academic leaders at colleges and universities have little incentive to innovate higher education indeed quite the opposite. It is completely impossible to build world-class universities in this bureaucratic context. If the new institutions must tolerate responsibilities to both the Central government and the States in which they are located, the bureaucratic burden will be completely overwhelming.

Location: Great universities need to be located on friendly soil. In general, the best universities worldwide are in or near major urban centres or in places with intellectual traditions and strength. While it is entirely appropriate to have a good university in each State, the idea of a truly world-class university (an institution that can compete with the best in the world) in cities like Guwahati or Bhubaneswar is simply unrealistic. It would be extraordinarily difficult to attract top professors or even the best students, and the "soft" infrastructure, such as most cultural amenities, is missing. High-tech industry is also absent in these locations and would be difficult to lure. No amount of money will guarantee the establishment of a world-class university in such places.

The academic profession: Indian academics deserve higher salaries, and the move to dramatically improve remuneration is a positive step. It would be a serious mistake to simply give more money to the professoriate without, at the same time, demanding significant reforms in the structure and practices of the profession. Indian academics are rewarded for longevity rather than productivity, and for conformity rather than innovation. The most productive academics cannot be rewarded for their work, and it is almost impossible to pay "market rates" to keep the best and the brightest in the universities. World-class universities require a salary structure that rewards productivity.

Academic culture and governance: Indian universities are enmeshed in a culture of mediocrity, with little competition either among institutions or academics. Universities are subject to the whims of politicians and are unable to plan for their own future. Academics are seldom involved in their leadership and management. Bureaucracy governs everything and holds down innovation. Without essential and deep structural changes in the way universities are governed and in the culture of the institutions, there is little possibility for improvement. An additional challenge is that some of the world-class universities are to be created by improving existing State universities. This will be extraordinarily difficult since these institutions, with very few exceptions, are mired in mediocrity and bureaucracy, and are hardly amenable to change and improvement even with the carrot of additional resources.

Corruption at many levels

An element of corruption exists at many levels of the higher education system, from favouritism in admissions, appointment to faculty positions, cheating in examinations, questionable coaching arrangements, and many others. Damaging at all levels, corruption destroys research culture and makes a world-class university impossible.

Meritocracy at all levels: World-class universities are deeply meritocratic institutions. They hire the best professors, admit the most intelligent students, reward the brightest academics, and make all decisions on the basis of quality. They reject and punish plagiarism, favouritism in appointments, or corruption of any kind. Much of the Indian academe, unfortunately, does not reflect these values. Some of the problem is structural. The practice of admitting students and hiring professors on the basis of rigid quotas set for particular population groups up to 49 per cent however well-intentioned or justified, virtually precludes meritocracy. Deeply ingrained in Indian society and politics, the reservation system may well be justified but to have successful world-class universities, meritocracy must be the primary motivating principle.

Role of research: World-class universities are research intensive. All highly-ranked universities in the world exhibit this characteristic. India faces several problems in developing a research culture. It is fair to say that today no Indian university, as an institution, is research-intensive. India's universities can claim a small number of departments that have a high level of research and many highly accomplished professors work in the system. And some institutions, such as the IITs and some non-university agencies like the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and AIIMS, produce impressive research and are respected internationally. The creation of a research-intensive university is mandatory to achieve world-class status.

Resources: Rs.3,280 crore for the 12 new Central universities, plus the other impressive amounts announced for related projects, sounds like a lot of money. In fact, it is very inadequate. A world-class research university that can play in the best international leagues is an expensive undertaking to establish and then to sustain. As an example, one large research-intensive new Chinese university cost around $700 million to build and has a total annual budget of close to $400 million.

Conclusion: The challenges facing the creation of world-class universities are daunting. Indeed, if India is to succeed as a great technological power with a knowledge-based economy, world-class universities are required. The first step, however, is to examine the problems and create realistic solutions. Spending large sums scattershot will not work. Nor will copying the American academic model succeed.

(Philip G. Altbach is Monan professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, U.S. N. Jayaram is professor and dean, School of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.)

http://www.hindu.com/2008/10/23/stories/2008102355501000.htm

Reform needs some 'vested interests'

2008-10-04T03:31:00.000+05:30

The same week that Singapore hosted the first Formula 1 race under floodlights and on its city's streets, Indian newspapers carried more depressing reports and photos about the state of the roads in Gurgaon. Yet, this satellite city to national capital New Delhi was once touted as the Singapore of India, a claim that is truly laughable today.

The difference between Gurgaon's roads and Singapore's in fact, almost no Indian road would stand up to comparison is also a measure of the distance India has to travel to bridge the gap in corruption, and, importantly, how little India's political system has perceived the true benefits of economic reform.

Since it is unfair to compare Singapore the size of a medium-sized Indian district with a country as large and diverse as India, the analysis here has been restricted to Gurgaon. Gurgaon's administrators seem to perceive no benefit in improving the quality of life and of doing business in their city. Singapore's rulers and citizenry are almost obsessive about the optimum delivery of public services. They are attuned to this way of thinking because they have clearly enjoyed the benefits of vibrant business activity.

http://business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=336162

Why Europeans are getting taller and taller-and Americans aren't

2008-09-29T21:15:00.001+05:30

When Vincent van Gogh was thirty-one years old, in the fall of 1883, he travelled to the bleak moors of northern Holland and stayed at a tavern in the village of Stuifzand. The local countryside was hardly inhabited then"Locus Deserta Atque ob Multos Paludes Invia," an old map called it: "A deserted and impenetrable place of many swamps"but a few farmers and former convicts had managed to carve a living from it. They dug peat, brewed illegal gin, and placed poles across the marshes to navigate by. Any squatter who could keep his chimney smoking for a full year earned title to the land he cleared.

There is little record of what happened to van Gogh in Stuifzandwhether he got lost in the marshes or traded sketches for shots at the bar. When I visited the village, the locals mentioned him merely to illustrate an even greater national obsession: height. At the old tavern, which is now a private home, I was shown the tiny alcove where the painter probably slept. "It looks like it would fit only a child," J. W. Drukker, the current owner, told me. Then he and his wife, Joke (a common Dutch name, they explained, pronounced "Yoh-keh"), led me down the hall, to a sequence of pencil marks on a doorjamb. "My son, he is two metres," Joke told me, pointing to the topmost mark, six and a half feet from the floor. "His feet"she held her hands about eighteen inches apart"for waterskiing." Joke herself is six feet one, with blond tresses and shoulders like a Valkyrie. Drukker is six feet two.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/05/040405fa_fact?currentPage=all

Echo of Moscow

2008-09-16T19:44:00.001+05:30

In the land of the Soviets, the voice of the Kremlin was everywhere, an omnipresent reality-via-radio that long preceded Orwell's dystopia. Lenin and Trotsky fomented revolution primarily in printin the commanding editorials of Iskra and Pravda, in the frenzied leaflets passed around in St. Petersburg meeting halls and later reprinted in "Ten Days That Shook the World"but the leading instrument of enculturation and inundation under Joseph Stalin was a broadcast technology called radio-tochka, literally "radio point," a primitive receiver with no dial and no choice. These cheap wood-framed devices were installed in apartments and hallways, on factory floors, in train stations and bus depots; they played in hospitals, nursing homes, and military barracks; they were nailed to poles in the fields of collective farms and blared along the beaches from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk.

The radio day commenced at 6 A.M.

First, the Soviet anthem, then "Govorit Moskva . . ." ("Moscow speaking").

If someone in a communal apartment shut off the radio, he was considered suspect, defiant, a potential "enemy of the people." The broadcasts issued the edicts of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, announced the details of the Five-Year Plan, declared the latest triumph of the Soviet Army and the perfidies of the capitalist West. In addition to the news, there was classical music and readings of classical Russian literature, along with "radio meetings" of village workers and soldiers' mothers. The Soviet people rarely heard Stalin's actual voicehalting, dry, with a thick Georgian accentbut through the radio they absorbed his pronouncements, his view of culture and the world, his implicit message of paternalism and threat. It is hard to imagine now the totality of the instrument and the perverse imagination required to conceive it, but radio-tochka existed for decades, as present as water and electricity and twice as reliable. It was such a successful tool of propaganda that when, in 1942, Hitler visited occupied Ukraine he expressed his admiration for Stalin's methodology and bemoaned the fact that the German people were still listening to shortwave broadcasts from the BBC.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all

India: Banana democracy

2008-09-11T11:50:00.000+05:30

The Olympics proved China is a dictatorship that achieves, Singur shows why India remains a curio to the world.

As coincidences go, Sunday, the 24th of August 2008 will always stay in mind as perhaps the most revealing. It made it clear to me, and to all who cared to notice, in a dramatic way and in the course of just one evening, why China shines so brightly despite being the world's largest dictatorship and India remains in the shadows despite being its largest democracy.

As the last fireworks were dying out in Beijing, at the end of a spectacular ceremony closing the 2008 Olympic Games, several thousand followers of Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress were preparing to sleep out in the open on Durgapur Expressway at Singur, a national highway (NH2), having occupied it by force and closing it off to all traffic to launch a protest aimed at derailing the Tatas' Nano small car project.

There, in the heart of Beijing, the Bird's Nest heaved and swayed to the steps of thousands of dancing feet, and a Memory Tower rose toward the sky and burst into amazing colourful patterns in a staggering display of human synchronisation. Here, in Singur, Mamata strutted and fretted upon her dharna manch, seething in anger, wildly gesturing and screaming, as fans turned NH2 into a private preserve and the line of stalled inter-state trucks got longer and longer, throwing traffic over a large area into total disarray. Nobody bothered. The police stayed away for fear of stoking a major conflagration.

http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=334067

Plight of the Little Emperors

2008-08-25T04:04:00.001+05:30

When Dawei Liu was growing up in the coastal city of Tai'an during the 1990s, all of his classmates95 percent of whom were only childrenreceived plenty of doting parental support. One student, however, truly stood out from the rest. Every day, this boy went from class to class with an entourage of one: his mother, who had given up the income of her day job to monitor his studies full-time, sitting beside him constantly in order to ensure perfect attention. "The teacher was OK with it," Liu shrugs. "He might not focus as much on class if his parent wasn't there."

Across China, stories of parents going to incredible lengths to give their only children a competitive edge have become commonplace. Throughout Jing Zhang's youth in Beijing, her parents took her to weekly resumé-boosting painting classes, waiting outside the school building for two hours each time, even in winter. Yanming Lin enjoyed perfect silence in her family's one-room Shanghai apartment throughout her five-plus hours of nightly homework; besides nixing the television, her mother kept perpetual watch over her to make sure she stayed on task. "By high school, my parents knew I could control myself and only do homework," Lin says. "Because I knew the situation."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20080623-000004&print=1

China in Africa: Young Workers, Deadly Mines

2008-08-24T14:35:00.000+05:30

Adon Kalenga works seven days a week collecting minerals from the ground with his bare hands.

He is 13 years old and lives in Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has no home and can't afford the $6 a month it costs to attend public school in this central African country of 62 million. Sometimes he sleeps in the streets; other nights he spends in an orphanage.

Mostly, he works, earning about $3 per day. He's one of 67,000 people in Katanga who earn a living collecting stones infused with two minerals that are in demand worldwide: copper and cobalt. Reddish-brown copper is used to make the electrical wires needed to light the world's cities. Cobalt, a silver-gray metal, is used to make jet engines, ink and mobile phone batteries.

Katanga, a region of green rolling hills that's bigger than California, is home to 5.5 million people. The province in the south of Congo contains 4 percent of the world's copper and a third of its cobalt reserves, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The minerals Adon and children like him wrest from the red, hard earth find their way to smoky smelters on the edge of impoverished towns near the mines. Most of these rusting, hand-fed furnaces are owned by companies based in a faraway country, one that was founded on an ideology that exalts the rights of workers: the People's Republic of China.

``My life is hard,'' says Adon, wearing black rubber boots, a hooded sweatshirt and ripped jeans that sag on his skinny frame.

`I Don't Know Why'

Adon's left shin is scarred from a fall during a mine landslide three years ago that killed workers, including four young friends. He spends the day around unstable, hand-dug mineshafts, using his bare hands to fill sacks with ore.

He then hauls the rocks down a steep trail. At the end of the path, he works knee-deep in a stream, the kind that has spread a cholera epidemic throughout much of Katanga. The boy's hands are raw from washing rocks in a metal screen.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/marketsmag/mm_0908_story3.html

Air-conditioning: Our Cross to Bear

2008-08-21T17:24:00.001+05:30

When it's hot and humid out and the air-conditioner's not running, America suffers. Babies break out in rashes, couples bicker, computers go haywire. In much of the nation, an August power outage is viewed not as an inconvenience but as a public health emergency.

In the 50 years since air-conditioning hit the mass market, America has become so well-addicted that our dependence goes almost entirely unremarked. A/C is built into our economy and our culture. Stepping from a torrid parking lot into a 72-degree, air-conditioned lobby can provide a degree of instantaneous relief and physical pleasure experienced through few other legal means. But if the effect of air-conditioning on a hot human being can be compared to that of a pain-relieving drug, its economic impact is more like that of an anabolic steroid. And withdrawal, when it comes, will be painful.

We're as committed to air-conditioning as we are to cars and computer chips. And a device lucky enough to become indispensable can demand and get whatever it needs to keep running. For the air-conditioner, that's a lot.

http://www.alternet.org/story/37882/?page=entire (part 1)

http://www.alternet.org/story/38154?page=entire (part 2)

California's Potemkin Environmentalism

2008-08-06T11:11:00.001+05:30

In January 2007, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood before the California legislature in Sacramento and delivered his fourth State of the State address since his improbable 2003 election. It was a rhetorical tour de force that would win him widespread acclaim. "California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta," said Schwarzenegger. "Not only can we lead California into the future; we can show the nation and the world how to get there."

Schwarzenegger especially celebrated California for its leadership on energy and the environment. Just three months earlier, he had signed the Global Warming Solutions Act, committing California to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levelsroughly 25 percent below today'sby 2020, and all but eliminating them by 2050. The Governator then lambasted the Bush administration for failing to tackle global warming: "It would not act, so California did. California has taken the leadership in moving the entire country beyond debate and denial to action." Such performances have helped establish Schwarzenegger as a national figure, even a statesman, on the environment. In April 2007, he posed for the cover of Newsweek, spinning a globe on his finger under the banner leadership & the environment, and in September, he even addressed the United Nations on climate change.

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_californias_environmentalism.html

Electro-Shock Therapy

2008-07-28T23:44:00.001+05:30

Last year, while he was working in Germany as an engineer for General Motors, Andrew Farah got a call from a senior engineer in Detroit asking him to come home.

Why?

A car. A special car.

Farah had heard about it, of course. The Chevrolet Volt was the automotive sensation of 2007, a new kind of electric hybrid that GM was proposing to have in showrooms in late 2010. Farah had advocated a similar design years earlier, so he didn't need to be sold on the idea.

Still, he hesitated. GM had called him because of his deep experience with battery-driven electric cars. In the 1990s, he had worked »

on GM's EV1, an all-electric technological masterpiece that had done so poorly commercially that GM wound up crushing the cars amid a hail of public condemnation. Farah had been fiercely committed to the EV1, and he was not about to relive the disappointment.

"Hell, no," he said. "I've been on programs like this before. They're not real."

"No," came the reply. "This one is real." Farah asked to talk to other senior executives, and they concurred. So, in the spring of last year, he took one of the hardest jobs at GM, and became the Volt's chief engineer.

And how, I ask over coffee early one February morning in Detroit, is it going? It is 6 a.m., and Farah, who is 47 and has angular features and prominent black glasses, is rushing to make a 7 a.m. meeting. The car, he says, is 10 weeks behind the original schedule. Any more slippage, and the 2010 deadline will be history. Even if no more time is lost, he will have only eight weeks to test the underbody, the car's structural base.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/general-motors

Hey, It's A Vast Conspiracy

2008-07-19T08:40:00.000+05:30

CPM's Stalinist ideology leads to a warped view of the world

Gautam Adhikari

It was a conspiracy, no less, a dire, globally networked plot. In an extraordinary piece of deduction, Sitaram Yechury, politburo member of the CPM, concluded in his 'Hindustan Times' column on Thursday that Manmohan Singh's ''hurry'' to take the nuclear deal to the IAEA this month came out of compelling reasons that tied together New Delhi, Tehran, Washington and hold your breath Tel Aviv. And we poor sods knew nothing!

Until Yechury laid it all out for us, thank you. You see, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is under pressure to quit for alleged corruption; that's why he wants to bomb Tehran to divert the Israeli Knesset's attention; US President George Bush, already facing a public outcry at home against his Iraq war, is in no position to attack Iran directly; he has, cunningly, given an amber light to Israel to carry out the dirty deed. So? Where does New Delhi fit in? Ah, Uncle Sitaram can explain all.

''If such an attack on Iran happens, then it would be virtually impossible to 'sell' the go-ahead to sections of the Congress and the UPA allies '' writes Yechury. ''This explains the desperate hurry to move ahead.''

Huh? I mean, does Manmohan's wife know? Will someone please check whether Bush called her to get her husband to run to Vienna with the deal? And what about the French? Or the Russians? They support the deal. Why? Could they be in league with Olmert?

''Arrey, no,'' said my knowledgeable buddy Jahangir. ''Yechury knows zilch. I'll tell you what happened. It's all Lalit Modi. The Americans said they won't send any cheerleaders to the next IPL unless the deal was signed. So, Modi got the PM to hurry up.'' Hmm. That sounded as plausible a thesis as Yechury's. Now, which one do we simple folk believe?

Seriously, we as a nation are in trouble if the level of political debate in this country can come down to such a dumb depth. Yechury is no run-of-the-mill hack. He is a product of St Stephen's and Jawaharlal Nehru University, a powerful voice in his party's politburo, and widely admired not just as an intellectual but as a man of wit and charm. So, unless he was being charmingly witty, how could he write such nonsense with a straight face?

The answer, alas, may lie in his religion or what in polite company is called ideology. Every religious doctrine is an ideology and the CPM's Stalinist brand of Marxism is little more than a religious belief-system. Remember, it remains one of those rare communist or socialist parties in the world North Korea's is another that is obtuse enough to display Josef Stalin's portraits in its offices despite the effort by almost every other Marxist party or group in the world to distance itself from the diabolical record of the late Soviet tyrant. But, how does it matter for us?

It matters in two ways. Such unreconstructed Stalinists as the majority of members of the CPM are tend to understand the movement of world history in a simplistic version of 'historical materialism', the way it was outlined by Stalin for the general masses in a thin Soviet booklet. That leads them to believe (a) in vast class conspiracies, which span the globe; and (b) in the inevitable arrival after a brief detour through socialism of their version of the communist paradise, where we shall all live ever after in happiness and cooperation, having liberated the world from the shackles of class conflict that so debilitates this exploitative and oppressive system called capitalism.

The problem is this kind of thinking leads them, first, to deconstruct all reality and reconstruct it in a framework of conspiracy that only needs to be explained for all of us to understand the progress of history. Thus, Yechury sees in brilliant hindsight, of course every link in a chain connecting those evil forces of the world that want the US-India nuclear deal out of selfish class interest. He doesn't ask before constructing his thesis whether Manmohan Singh wasn't in fact trying to take the deal to the IAEA for several months, and not just in the past two weeks, and that he was being held back by the Left. Surely, trying to close a deal over almost a year doesn't qualify as ''being in a hurry''.

But, no, everything is class-interest directed, therefore devious, mere plots to subjugate the innocent and the naive who haven't experienced the epiphany that communists have. They occupy a lofty moral summit on a hill that we gentiles cannot climb.

Secondly, they believe deep in their hearts that the tenure of precommunist societies is limited, soon to be overwhelmed by the inevitable contradictions of capitalism. It will give way initially to a necessary yamalaya of socialism and then it'll be Eden. That all such talk went out of the earth's atmosphere in most of the inhabited globe since the end of the Soviet Union indeed, even earlier at a theoretical plane does not bother our Stalinists. They know they have to build coalitions in this temporary phase of sham democracy before socialism arrives their so-called united front theory but they can merrily generate instability in that phase, because it is maya any way. Creating instability in an unjust and oppressive system doesn't count as irresponsible politics. It's actually quite desirable.

C'mon, give us a break, will you?

http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Daily/skins/TOI/navigator.asp?Daily=TOIBG&login=default

The Declining Value Of Your College Degree

2008-07-18T23:28:00.001+05:30

A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck.

Just ask Bea Dewing. After she earned a bachelor's degree -- her second -- in computer science from Maryland's Frostburg State University in 1986, she enjoyed almost unbroken advances in wages, eventually earning $89,000 a year as a data modeler for Sprint Corp. in Lawrence, Kan. Then, in 2002, Sprint laid her off.

"I thought I might be looking a few weeks or months at the most," says Ms. Dewing, now 56 years old. Instead she spent the next six years in a career wilderness, starting an Internet café that didn't succeed, working temporary jobs and low-end positions in data processing, and fruitlessly responding to hundreds of job postings.

The low point came around 2004 when a recruiter for Sprint -- now known as Sprint Nextel Corp. -- called seeking to fill a job similar to the one she lost two years earlier, but paying barely a third of her old salary.

In April, Ms. Dewing finally landed a job similar to her old one in the information technology department of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., where she relocated. She earns about 20% less than she did in 2002, adjusted for inflation, but considers herself fortunate, and wiser. A degree, she says, "isn't any big guarantee of employment, it's a basic requirement, a step you have to take to even be considered for many professional jobs."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121623686919059307.html?mod=hpp_us_leisure

Dissident's Tale of Epic Escape From Iran's Vise

2008-07-13T14:08:00.001+05:30

After three days on the run, Ahmad Batebi picked his way down a rocky slope to the stream that marked Iran's border with Iraq. His Kurdish guides, who had led Mr. Batebi, an Iranian dissident, through minefields and dodged nighttime gunfire from border guards, passed him to a new team of shadowy human smugglers.

At the age of 31, after nearly eight years in Iranian prisons, subjected to torture and twice taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose, Mr. Batebi had fled.

But in Iraq, his former captors had one more chilling message for him. Not long after his arrival in Erbil in March, the new cellphone provided by United Nations officials rang. Mr. Batebi was shocked to hear the familiar voice of the chief interrogator at one of Iran's notorious prisons.

"We know where you are," the interrogator said. "You must turn yourself in."

Instead, Mr. Batebi, one of Iran's best-known dissidents, received permission to enter the United States. He arrived on June 24.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/world/middleeast/13dissident.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

A Danish community's victory over carbon emissions

2008-06-30T22:49:00.001+05:30

Jørgen Tranberg is a farmer who lives on the Danish island of Samsø. He is a beefy man with a mop of brown hair and an unpredictable sense of humor. When I arrived at his house, one gray morning this spring, he was sitting in his kitchen, smoking a cigarette and watching grainy images on a black-and-white TV. The images turned out to be closed-circuit shots from his barn. One of his cows, he told me, was about to give birth, and he was keeping an eye on her. We talked for a few minutes, and then, laughing, he asked me if I wanted to climb his wind turbine. I was pretty sure I didn't, but I said yes anyway.

We got into Tranberg's car and bounced along a rutted dirt road. The turbine loomed up in front of us. When we reached it, Tranberg stubbed out his cigarette and opened a small door in the base of the tower. Inside were eight ladders, each about twenty feet tall, attached one above the other. We started up, and were soon huffing. Above the last ladder, there was a trapdoor, which led to a sort of engine room. We scrambled into it, at which point we were standing on top of the generator. Tranberg pressed a button, and the roof slid open to reveal the gray sky and a patchwork of green and brown fields stretching toward the sea. He pressed another button. The rotors, which he had switched off during our climb, started to turn, at first sluggishly and then much more rapidly. It felt as if we were about to take off. I'd like to say the feeling was exhilarating; in fact, I found it sickening. Tranberg looked at me and started to laugh.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_kolbert?currentPage=all

No Babies

2008-06-29T23:32:00.000+05:30

IT WAS A SPECTACULAR LATE-MAY AFTERNOON IN SOUTHERN ITALY,but the streets of Laviano a gloriously situated hamlet ranged across a few folds in the mountains of the Campania region were deserted. There were no day-trippers from Naples, no tourists to take in the views up the steep slopes, the olive trees on terraces, the ruins of the 11th-century fortress with wild poppies spotting its grassy flanks like flecks of blood. And there were no locals in sight either. The town has housing enough to support a population of 3,000, but fewer than 1,600 live here, and every year the number drops. Rocco Falivena, Laviano's 56-year-old mayor, strolled down the middle of the street, outlining for me the town's demographics and explaining why, although the place is more than a thousand years old, its buildings all look so new. In 1980 an earthquake struck, taking out nearly every structure and killing 300 people, including Falivena's own parents. Then from tragedy arose the scent of possibility, of a future. Money came from the national government in Rome, and from former residents who had emigrated to the U.S. and elsewhere. The locals found jobs rebuilding their town. But when the construction ended, so did the work, and the exodus of residents continued as before.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29Birth-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

The Bubble

2008-06-17T13:07:00.001+05:30

Washpost has published a 3 part series on the housing bubble. An interesting and simple explanation of all the financial monkey business that went on for a while. A partially similar series, published by the wsj on the demise of Bear Stears, search for "wsj bear stearns".

The black-tie party at Washington's swank Mayflower Hotel seemed a fitting celebration of the biggest American housing boom since the 1950s: filet mignon and lobster, a champagne room and hundreds of mortgage brokers, real estate agents and their customers gyrating to a Latin band.

On that winter night in 2005, the company hosting the gala honored itself with an ice sculpture of its logo. Pinnacle Financial had grown from a single office to a national behemoth generating $6.5 billion in mortgages that year. The $100,000-plus party celebrated the booming division that made loans largely to Hispanic immigrants with little savings. The company even booked rooms for those who imbibed too much.

Kevin Connelly, a loan officer who attended the affair, now marvels at those gilded times. At his Pinnacle office in Virginia, colleagues were filling the parking lot with BMWs and at least one Lotus sports car. In its hiring frenzy, the mortgage company turned a busboy into a loan officer whose income zoomed to six figures in a matter of months.

"It was the peak. It was the embodiment of business success," Connelly said. "We underestimated the bubble, even though deep down, we knew it couldn't last forever."

Indeed, Pinnacle's party would soon end, along with the nation's housing euphoria. The company has all but disappeared, along with dozens of other mortgage firms, tens of thousands of jobs on Wall Street and the dreams of about 1 million proud new homeowners who lost their houses.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/14/AR2008061401479_pf.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/15/AR2008061501949_pf.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/16/AR2008061602279_pf.html

The Reign of Thuggery

2008-06-12T08:49:00.001+05:30

The blood boils when one hears the words mugabe or mbeki. Certainly wish the US would bomb Mugabe to kingdom come.. F&*%ing bastards.

On a clea r spring afternoon in Harare in mid-May, South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, paid a call on Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's beleaguered dictator, six weeks after Zimbabwe's tumultuous elections on March 29 in which opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai claimed a clear victory over Mugabe. Mbeki had been largely silent as Zimbabwe descended into chaos. In mid-April, while Mugabe's handpicked Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) refused to release the final vote count, and Mugabe's War Veterans marched through the streets in an intimidating display of force, Mbeki had stood hand in hand with Mugabe outside the presidential residence in Harare and denied that the country was in "crisis."

In recent days, however, as evidence grew of widespread beatings and killings of supporters of Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Mbeki had found himself under attack in the press and at odds with members of his own party leadership. Jacob Zuma, the chairman of the African National Congress and Mbeki's likely successor to the presidency of South Africa, had criticized the delayed vote count and said that an April raid on MDC headquarters made the country look like "a police state." The Johannesburg newspaper Business Day revealed that Mbeki had several years earlier ignored a report by two South African judges describing widespread cheating by Mugabe's ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU- PF), in the 2002 parliamentary election. Now, with the electoral commission's official results showing that Tsvangirai had defeated Mugabe by 47.9 percent to 42.3 percentnecessitating a runoff electionMbeki faced mounting pressure to support a free and fair second round.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21531

Cracking Open

2008-06-02T02:00:00.001+05:30

ON HIS 18TH DAY OF FREEDOM, Michael Short awakened before dawn. In prison, corrections officers had paced the halls at night, jingling keys and shining flashlights. Now Mike slept fitfully, even in a king-size bed.

It was a damp, gray Tuesday late in February. He slipped on a pinstriped shirt that hid his tattoos, slid his feet into shiny new loafers and rubbed coconut oil into his hair, cut razor-straight at the temples and flecked with gray. He was 36, with a basketball player's long-legged gait and the lined brow of a man well acquainted with consequences. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he nervously knotted a silver-and-white tie that his girlfriend had bought him at Macy's.

On days like this, he wished the past were a room with a door you could close, a place you could walk away from, as he had walked away from prison after President Bush commuted his sentence. But the past wasn't like that, at least not for him. Over breakfast, he practiced the testimony he was scheduled to deliver that afternoon before a congressional subcommittee: My name is Michael Short. I am here because in 1992 I was sentenced for selling crack cocaine. Before that, I had never spent a day in prison. I came from a good family. I had no criminal history. I was not a violent offender. But I was sentenced to serve nearly 20 years. I was 21 years old.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/27/AR2008052702531_pf.html

The Lawyers' Crusade

2008-06-01T11:57:00.001+05:30

In April, on the highway outside the little Punjabi town of Renala Khurd, Aitzaz Ahsan was waylaid by a crowd of seemingly deranged lawyers. The advocates, who wore black suits, white shirts and black ties, were not actually insane; they just seemed that way because they were so overcome with excitement at greeting the mastermind of Pakistan's lawyers' movement, perhaps the most consequential outpouring of liberal, democratic energy in the Islamic world in recent years. The 62-year-old Ahsan was on his way to address the bar association of Okara, 10 miles away, but the lawyers, and the farmers and shopkeepers gathered with them, were not about to let him leave. They boiled around the car, shouting slogans. "Who should our leaders be like?" they cried. "Like Aitzaz!" And, "How many are prepared to die for you?" "Countless! Countless!"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/magazine/01PAKISTAN-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all