Rajeev’s Almanack

Daniel Markey was Policy planning staff member, South and Central Asia portfolio, U.S. Department of State (2003-2007). He is now a senior fellow for South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. It is interesting to listen to the diissolution of Musharraf through the words of Dr. Markey:

Mar 3 2008

Musharraf is a diminished asset. He is exceedingly unpopular. No one disagrees with that. The time has come to really get on sort of the right side of history, essentially for the United States to jump into the future and work with more popular forces in Pakistan

Feb 23 2008

Musharraf is obviously a poison pill. He is fading out.

(more…)

Bill Foster, the former Fermilab physicist, won the special election to replace Speaker Dennis Hastert in the House of Representatives for the next eleven months. There will be a regular election with the rest of the country in November, for a full term of two years. The margin of victory, 53-47, would be respectable anywhere, but is a stunning upset in a heavily Republican district: Foster ran as a Democrat.

Foster was the first political candidate endorsed by the Almanack. Science is at the core of so many national issues. Yet, so few in Congress display a scientific frame of mind. We cringe when otherwise responsible politicians deny evolution, get overly excited over climate change theories, or diagnose a neurological condition just by watching someone on TV. Even basic arithmetic is suspect, when miracles are preferred over mere mathematics.

Foster’s victory is not going to put an end to any of this. It was probably caused by larger political factors rather than any new enthusiasm for science. After all, Chicago is the epicenter of the Obama phenomenon and Foster had his support.

Nevertheless, we take joy in Foster’s victory and wish him well in the tougher contest he will face in November.

The most important election this year could be the one just concluded in Pakistan. In spite of the rigging, and the low turnout from an electorate in mortal danger, it looks like a fairly credible result. Musharraf’s allies lost. A good first step on a long road to recovery for Pakistan. (more…)

North Indian migrant workers in Mumbai are being attacked by a militant organization (known by the acronym MNS) which exploits the resentment of the local population. The most odious of the political leaders egging the violent mob on is Raj Thackeray. A generation ago the same folks (Raj’s uncle Bal was the leader back then) were targeting South Indians. What changed? (more…)

Whenever a nation has done something deeply embarrassing, which shames its decent citizens, moral philosophy thrives. As though the obvious atrocity can somehow be hidden behind sophisticated reasonings about abstract thought experiments. Psychologists must have some fancy name for this phenomenon.

We live in such a time now. You cannot open the New Yorker or the New York Times Magazine without running into a conundrum designed by the best and the brightest to teach us lessons on moral values. The difference between us and the ancients is that we look to science, not religion, as the source of our values. Thus, neuro-scientists emerge as the Deep Thinkers of our time. Supposedly their knowledge of how our brain is wired allows them to deduce ab initio what is right and wrong.

One the most fundamental of these puzzles is the Trolley problem. It goes something like this.

On your morning walk, you see a trolley car carrying five passengers. It is hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. The passengers are oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five people. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

But wait a minute. Here is the twist. The single worker is Mr. Average Joe, who is working an extra shift so he can pay off his mother’s hospital bill. You just received a text message identifying the five conscious occupants of the Trolley car as Steven Pinker, Niall Ferguson, Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Joshua Greene. (You are carrying an iPhone. Duh.) And you have just enough time to Google these names before making the decision.

Now, which way would you throw the switch?

Who is more valuable? Five moral philosophers or an honest working man?

Those with the correct answer will be entered into a raffle for the complete works of Ayn Rand.

National Poll:

AP reports that Obama is catching up even in New York (Quinnipiac University Polling Institute)

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THE NUMBERS - DEMOCRATS

Hillary Rodham Clinton, 53 percent

Barack Obama, 39 percent

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A Quinnipiac poll on Jan. 22 had him trailing, 51 percent to 25 percent.

When we published the post reprinted below, we did not have President Clinton in mind. All of us are familiar with leaders who find it hard to bow out, even after their time is up.

The wisdom of the American people in imposing a limit of two terms on Presidents is clearer now than ever before. Not only does it save the country from ineffective leadership, it saves a President past his prime from making a public fool of himself.

Whatever Mrs. Clinton’s claims to the Presidency, her case is not strengthened by letting the former President be her main advocate. Clearly, she understands this. Early in the campaign, President Clinton played the role of strategist-in-chief. Karl Rove not withstanding, there is no one who understands American politics as well as him. So this would be how he is most useful for her.

So what changed in the last three weeks? It looks to us that Senator Obama successfully baited Bill Clinton into becoming an attack-dog. (more…)

Nano Nano
Nano has been a buzz word in physics for a while. Now it is also the name of a car, made by Tata Motors of India. It is cute, looking more like a toy car than a real one. It is small. I have seen potholes in Calcutta that are bigger. And most of all it is cheap. It costs less than the DVD player in the SUV that some of my neighbors drive. The Nano is unlikely to be another Yugo: India is not in danger of breaking up, destroying its supply chain. The dream is that will be the next Volkswagen Bug. More likely it will be the next Trabant. Not too bad.

Whether the Nano succeeds or not, it is part of a larger trend. This is what engineering for the masses will look like in the future. What the iPod did to the record industry and the arxiv did to costly journals is about to happen to many well-established businesses.

So what do the $2,500 car and the $200 laptop tell us? Driving and computing are not the only things that can be done much cheaper and smaller. (more…)

Other Posts on Pakistan

Contrary to popular wisdom it really is the time now to assign blame. It lies squarely with the Pakistani Army and its Commander-in-Chief, Pervez Musharraf. The same army assassinated her father, Zulfikar Bhutto, after a sham trial. The same army has been plundering the country’s wealth and put its judges in jail in the name of security. (more…)

Our publisher has described the origin of his name elsewhere. Interesting names are all around us.

The Roman Catholic Church had a Cardinal named Sin. He was the Archbishop of Manila, (more…)

Other articles on Pakistan
Excerpt from an interview with President Bush by ABC News Nov 2007.

What’s his name has agreed to hold elections in January, and he’s agreed to take his uniform off. Frankly, I think he should do that in the privacy of his own home, but hey, everyone wants the man to take off his own uniform, so lets let him do it anyway he wants. Make sure you cover it live Charlie.

Do you mean Musharraf?

Yeah him. Have trouble remembering his name. General. General something. Hey, he knows how to call me, I don’t need to remember his name. (more…)

Next in Line?

Despite his willingness to blog on our site , I also think it is time for Musharraf to go. It is not enough that he `take off his uniform’. It is time for Musharraf to retire from the Army and give up the Presidency. If he is merely overthrown by his own hand-picked successor, the situation will only get even worse. (more…)

The Lincoln of Pakistan

Other posts edited by P. Richard Saunders

Editor’s note I am posting here the full text of my dear friend Mushie’s decree imposing emergency rule. A partial text of the decree has been published before by BBC. I have been able to obtain additional secret parts of the decree as well as Mushie’s own commentary explaining the thinking behind it. A couple of words had to be redacted to preserve good relations with allies. So here goes: (more…)

Please welcome to our midst blogger and editor P. Richard Saunders. In addition to his own posts, Richard will also be moderating comments and answering emails addressed to the blog. (more…)

My friends abroad, I am writing this with joy in my heart. Our long national nightmare is over. Full Democracy has been achieved and Full Justice has triumphed. Extremism in all its forms has been defeated. The humiliation of public servants by the judiciary has been stopped. Our Mission has been Accomplished. (more…)

Read Also Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3

The shadowy machinations in Pakistan bring to mind another time and place where a President who had also been a General acted decisively to enforce a Court Order. The President was General (retd.) Eisenhower dealing with a crisis that started almost exactly fifty years ago today. The Governor of Arkansas, Mr. Orval Faubus, was determined to prevent black children from attending the same school as white children. In a bit of political grandstanding, he personally blocked the entrance to the school in Little Rock Arkansas to prevent the Federal Marshals from carrying out an order of the supreme Court (in Brown v. Topeka) to integrate schools. (more…)

Earnest Rutherford used to say that all science is either physics or stamp collecting. This could have been a dig at the biologists of his time, who were still collecting samples and classifying species. He probably would have thought more highly of modern molecular biology, which is a lot like his physics in outlook: everything is determined by the DNA. It is said that Rutherford’s worst insult for a student who had done something stupid was–Chemist. The chemists had the last laugh though: Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize not in Physics but in Chemistry for having achieved the transmutation of elements.

Should we understand the world bottom up or top down? Which is the proper scientific view? (more…)

We were just leaked a white paper on the situation in Pakistan written by up and coming analysts who used to man the South Asia Desk at State. Now they write in a blog named The Washington- Not!. For reasons of modesty they wish to remain anonymous. But they acknowledge the influence of the ponderous and inebriated Malarkey penned by a more senior former State Department official (from whom they hope to get a job some day). (more…)

Read Also Part 1, Part 2

Pakistan is at a turning point. There might be reason to be cautiously optimistic. The Supreme Court has recently (more…)

Read First: Longitude Zero

Indians call the bay between Africa and India the Arabian Sea. Throughout the medieval times it was controlled by Arab sailors. They established settlements down the East coast of Africa, as far down as Malindi in Kenya. (more…)

Continued in: Medieval Navigation in the Arabian Sea

One of the early achievements of Indian Mathematical Astronomy (jyotisha) was the system of latitude (aksha-amsa) and Longitude (rekha-amsa). The prime meridian passed through Ujjaini, the capital of the country of Avanti. (more…)

P. Richard’s Almanack

Politicians are despised everywhere. According to most of us, they are corrupt, devious, self-serving, lazy, unprincipled, ignorant and dumb. Not a day goes by that we don’t hear about yet another politician doing something idiotic or getting into legal trouble¹.Yet, we need these rogues. (more…)

What is the date today? A simple question, but with a complex answer.

The story of calendars is the story of human civilization itself. The millenial ¹ article by Amartya Sen tries to disentangle fact from fantasy in the history of calendars. Never an easy task in history, especially hard in the keeping of time itself. (more…)

Read the latest in this series Environmentalism is a Conservative Cause

The debate on global warming caused by human consumption of hydrocarbons appears to be over. We are told that the polar ice cap will melt. Bangladesh will get inundated. Hurricanes will increase in intensity. Crops will fail. Riots will break out. Anecdotal evidence of the coming catastrophe mounds day by day. A glacier in the Antarctic is shrinking. The NorthWest passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (that many generations of explorers looked for in vain) has almost opened up- only 60 miles of ice floes remain unmelted in the summer. The Sacred Phallus of Siva that forms every year from ice almost didn’t appear this year: the Himalayas must be getting too warm. Stranded polar bears have been spotted drowning as the ice floes they are standing on melt. Sea turtles are said to be dying off because the ocean is too warm for their eggs to hatch. (more…)