Try this interactive feature from the NYTimes on balancing the US budget by setting priorities and choosing what to cut from the budget, and which taxes to raise. I did it without a problem, by adhering to the following dicta: 1) screw the rich; 2) screw the big corporations; and 3) screw the industrial/military complex. And I'm for that 95% of the US population below the wealthy class; reverting tax rates to Clinton-era levels (Kennedy era would be better); keeping Social Security and Medicare afloat; and keeping tax cuts and breaks for the middle class and those below. As one of my favorite bumperstickers says:
EAT THE RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?hp
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Nepal Feels the Heat from Expansionist China
Short but informative article on how pressure from China on Tibet has contorted Nepal's internal politics. The Chinese, ever so sensitive about their own internal politics, have been bullying Nepal for years now on the status of Tibetan refugees in Nepal, who have been there since China first invaded independent Tibet 60 years ago. China would like to see them returned, not allowed to enter, and if Tibetan refugees are in Nepal, the Chinese would like to see that the Tibetans' lives in Nepal are as uncomfortable as possible. And the Nepalese Communist and Maoist parties, run by ideologues and manned by illiterate thugs, gladly oblige, as they try to create their own Cultural Revolution.
Asian politics
Banyan's notebookChina, Nepal and TibetA thwarted election
Oct 4th 2010, 13:44 by Banyan
DISTURBING pictures of Nepali police in riot gear carting off ballot boxes illustrate both China’s clout in Nepal and its fears about the activities of Tibetan exiles. This was a primary election held among some 80,000 exiles to pick candidates for polls for a new parliament-in-exile and prime minister next year. The Nepali government has made sure that votes in the primary in Nepal at least will not count.
Most of the 120,000 or so exiled Tibetans are in India—either in the north, where the government-in-exile, and Tibet’s spiritual leader, have their seat in the Himalayan foothills at Dharamsala, or in the southern state of Karnataka. Every year more join them, mostly by fleeing the Tibet Autonomous Region of China through Nepal.
Some 20,000 live in Nepal, about half of them eligible to vote. In recent years, Nepal, at China’s behest, has curbed their political activities, such as protests. In 2005, floundering and looking to China to prop up his regime, the former king, Gyanendra, closed the Dalai Lama's representative office in Kathmandu. China has obvious objections to an election for a government-in-exile it does not recognise, and which supports the Dalai Lama, whom it regards as the source of many of its troubles in Tibet.
There are two other reasons why China objects to the voting. It does not want the world—or China—to be reminded that the Dalai Lama has insisted his exiled compatriots embrace democracy. Rather, it prefers to depict him as the representative of a cruel feudal elite which forced the miserable masses into monasteries or serfdom.
Also, the Dalai Lama’s advanced age—he is now 75—give elections increased importance, as the government elected may have to cope with the difficult transition to a new incarnation.
Nepal, sandwiched between two huge and overbearing neighbours, India and China, has no desire to antagonise either. India is by far the bigger influence in Nepal. To keep it in check, Nepal seeks good relations with China. One sure way of ruining those would be to show any sympathy to the Dalai Lama and his followers.
Asian politics
Banyan's notebookChina, Nepal and TibetA thwarted election
Oct 4th 2010, 13:44 by Banyan
DISTURBING pictures of Nepali police in riot gear carting off ballot boxes illustrate both China’s clout in Nepal and its fears about the activities of Tibetan exiles. This was a primary election held among some 80,000 exiles to pick candidates for polls for a new parliament-in-exile and prime minister next year. The Nepali government has made sure that votes in the primary in Nepal at least will not count.
Most of the 120,000 or so exiled Tibetans are in India—either in the north, where the government-in-exile, and Tibet’s spiritual leader, have their seat in the Himalayan foothills at Dharamsala, or in the southern state of Karnataka. Every year more join them, mostly by fleeing the Tibet Autonomous Region of China through Nepal.
Some 20,000 live in Nepal, about half of them eligible to vote. In recent years, Nepal, at China’s behest, has curbed their political activities, such as protests. In 2005, floundering and looking to China to prop up his regime, the former king, Gyanendra, closed the Dalai Lama's representative office in Kathmandu. China has obvious objections to an election for a government-in-exile it does not recognise, and which supports the Dalai Lama, whom it regards as the source of many of its troubles in Tibet.
There are two other reasons why China objects to the voting. It does not want the world—or China—to be reminded that the Dalai Lama has insisted his exiled compatriots embrace democracy. Rather, it prefers to depict him as the representative of a cruel feudal elite which forced the miserable masses into monasteries or serfdom.
Also, the Dalai Lama’s advanced age—he is now 75—give elections increased importance, as the government elected may have to cope with the difficult transition to a new incarnation.
Nepal, sandwiched between two huge and overbearing neighbours, India and China, has no desire to antagonise either. India is by far the bigger influence in Nepal. To keep it in check, Nepal seeks good relations with China. One sure way of ruining those would be to show any sympathy to the Dalai Lama and his followers.
Former CCP Officials Call for End to Censorship, Criticize Current Regime
Maybe there is hope for real change in China, and therefore hope for the many peoples who have suffered under the Hu's government. From today's NYTimes.
Former Chinese Officials Demand Media Freedom
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — A group of retired Communist Party officials and intellectuals issued an unusually blunt demand on Tuesday for total media freedom in China, stating that the current regime of censorship and government control of the press violates China’s constitution and debases the government’s claim to represent its citizens.
The document’s 20 signers, including academics and many former executives of China’s government-controlled press, have no public influence on the nation’s ruling coalition of Communist leaders. Some of them have issued other public demands for reform in past years, to no effect.
Still, the bluntness of their message — and its timing, coming days after the jailed intellectual Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — signaled that not all in the ruling establishment are content with the steadily tightening control over expression in the final years of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao’s leadership.
The letter’s language was notable for including an undisguised attack on the legality of censorship by the party’s Central Propaganda Department, which ultimately controls much of what is published, broadcast or posted on the Internet here.
“This is an invisible black hand,” the signers wrote of the department. “For their own reasons, they violate our Constitution, often ordering by telephone that the works of such and such a person cannot be published, or that such and such an event cannot be reported in the media. The officials who make the call do not leave their names, and the secrecy of the agents is protected, but you must heed their phone instructions.”
The “core demand,” the writers stated, was that China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, dismantle censorship procedures “in favor of a system of legal responsibility” for items that are freely published.
Some experts said that the demands, which were quickly squelched by censors after being posted on the Internet, were unlikely to have a serious impact on government policies.
“To the extent that people will learn about this letter, it resonates, because it shows there are different sensibilities within the party,” Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said in an interview. “But it does not, on the political level, alter the balance.”
Former Chinese Officials Demand Media Freedom
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — A group of retired Communist Party officials and intellectuals issued an unusually blunt demand on Tuesday for total media freedom in China, stating that the current regime of censorship and government control of the press violates China’s constitution and debases the government’s claim to represent its citizens.
The document’s 20 signers, including academics and many former executives of China’s government-controlled press, have no public influence on the nation’s ruling coalition of Communist leaders. Some of them have issued other public demands for reform in past years, to no effect.
Still, the bluntness of their message — and its timing, coming days after the jailed intellectual Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — signaled that not all in the ruling establishment are content with the steadily tightening control over expression in the final years of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao’s leadership.
The letter’s language was notable for including an undisguised attack on the legality of censorship by the party’s Central Propaganda Department, which ultimately controls much of what is published, broadcast or posted on the Internet here.
“This is an invisible black hand,” the signers wrote of the department. “For their own reasons, they violate our Constitution, often ordering by telephone that the works of such and such a person cannot be published, or that such and such an event cannot be reported in the media. The officials who make the call do not leave their names, and the secrecy of the agents is protected, but you must heed their phone instructions.”
The “core demand,” the writers stated, was that China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, dismantle censorship procedures “in favor of a system of legal responsibility” for items that are freely published.
Some experts said that the demands, which were quickly squelched by censors after being posted on the Internet, were unlikely to have a serious impact on government policies.
“To the extent that people will learn about this letter, it resonates, because it shows there are different sensibilities within the party,” Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said in an interview. “But it does not, on the political level, alter the balance.”
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Binge drinking, insecure 20-year olds are the norm...
As if you needed to be told that - psychology's baseline for judging others is formed on research, conducted by profs and their grad assistants, and their favorite group to study are undergraduate pscyhology majors! Read this article ... I don't agree that Aristotle and Buddha had, as did Freud, limited world views due to their lack of exposure to a wide variety of people, but obviously there's no way to prove that ... oh, from the NYTimes 8/25. Despite being my favorite punching bag, the Old Grey Dame of American journalism does post the odd good article ...
Currents
A Weird Way of Thinking Has Prevailed Worldwide
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Published: August 25, 2010
CORTES, CANADA — Imagine a country whose inhabitants eat human flesh, wear only pink hats to sleep and banish children into the forest to raise themselves until adulthood.
Now imagine that this country dominates the study of psychology worldwide. Its universities have the best facilities, which draw the best scholars, who write the best papers. Their research subjects are the flesh-eating, pink-hat-wearing, forest-reared locals.
When these psychologists write about their own country, all is well. But things deteriorate when they generalize about human nature.
They view behaviors that are globally commonplace — say, vegetarianism — as deviant. Human nature, as they define it, reflects little of the actual diversity of humankind.
This scenario may sound preposterous. But if a provocative new study is to be believed, the world already lives in such a situation — except that it is American undergraduates, not flesh-eating forest dwellers, who monopolize our knowledge of human nature.
In the study, published last month in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan — all psychologists at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver — condemn their field’s quest for human universals.
Psychologists claim to speak of human nature, the study argues, but they have mostly been telling us about a group of WEIRD outliers, as the study calls them — Westernized, educated people from industrialized, rich democracies.
According to the study, 68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner.
Western psychologists routinely generalize about “human” traits from data on this slender subpopulation, and psychologists elsewhere cite these papers as evidence.
In itself, such extrapolation is hardly fatal. Freud built his account of human behavior from his work on patients in Vienna and generalized for the world. So many great analysts of human nature, from Aristotle to the Buddha, reached for transcendent human truths despite limited contact with the range of humanity.
The Canadian study’s claim is not to invalidate all extrapolation so much as to suggest that American undergraduates may be especially unsuitable for it.
The study’s method was to analyze a mountain of published, peer-reviewed psychology papers. It found evidence both of a narrow research base and of the eccentricity of that base. Among the many peculiarities of the usual subjects who serve as “universal man” are these, the study found:
American subjects disproportionately prize choice and individualism. In a survey of six Western societies, only Americans preferred a choice of 50 ice creams to 10. Studies have found that Americans are all but alone in giving newborns their own room.
Americans are also peculiar in the so-called Ultimatum Game, in which a subject receives money and must make an offer to share it. The second subject can accept or reject the offer, but if it is rejected, neither subject gets paid.
Americans playing the game are fair in the extreme, making higher offers than most. But they are also outliers in another way. In various places, including Russia and China, psychologists observe the rejection of excessive generosity — a demurring when offered too much. This behavior is absent from American undergraduates.
The study’s list goes on and on. Westerners tend to define themselves by psychological traits, and non-Westerners by relationships. In some languages, including English, directions are built around the self (“Take a right after the church”), while in other languages, they refer to immovable objects (“It is behind the church”).
Americans are worse than many at overcoming common optical illusions about the length of lines. But they are better than East Asians at recalling an object when the background changes, perhaps because the latter focus on context.
(Page 2 of 2)
The data on these differences are patchy, the study’s authors acknowledge. Not enough work has been done on human variation. The Canadian attempt was simply to synthesize the existing research and to establish with their synthesis that psychological sameness is an implausible assumption.
Some critics of the study have suggested that there are universals underlying surface differences, and that the WEIRD variables may not be the right ones. But there has been little dispute about the premise that psychologists have extrapolated from an outlying few the ways of the global many.
It is an extrapolation with consequences. Democracy promoters tell us that all humans feel the same way about authority, despite evidence of diversity. Economists say that all humans are self-interested rational actors, though many succumb to selfless and irrational pursuits. Abstract rights are proclaimed for all humans, overlooking the fact that many prefer their ethics in more grounded, context-specific ways.
China, India and many other societies shy away from such universalizing. Their thinkers avoid proclaiming that all humans do this or do that simply because the Chinese or the Indians do. If they began to do so, how might things change?
For now, those outside the West continue to feel a certain pressure from beyond to think in ways not their own. The television sitcoms they watch, the books they read, the superheroes they grow up with, the PowerPoint presentations they give — these were often designed with someone else’s psychology foremost in mind, on the hope that they fit universally.
One response to the WEIRD study, by the psychologist Paul Rozin, is that extrapolating from Americans is acceptable because the world is Americanizing. “The U.S. is in the vanguard of the global world,” he said, according to Science magazine, “and may provide a glimpse into the future.”
But it is also possible that people around the world are not simply in the process of becoming like American undergraduates, and relying on WEIRD subjects can make others feel alienated, with their ways of thinking framed as deviant, not different.
Among the less-examined facets of globalization is its psychic pressure: a force that makes people feel that they are playing by others’ rules, that makes their own home turf feel like an opponent’s stadium. In this WEIRD people’s world, so many only know away games.
Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly.
Currents
A Weird Way of Thinking Has Prevailed Worldwide
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Published: August 25, 2010
CORTES, CANADA — Imagine a country whose inhabitants eat human flesh, wear only pink hats to sleep and banish children into the forest to raise themselves until adulthood.
Now imagine that this country dominates the study of psychology worldwide. Its universities have the best facilities, which draw the best scholars, who write the best papers. Their research subjects are the flesh-eating, pink-hat-wearing, forest-reared locals.
When these psychologists write about their own country, all is well. But things deteriorate when they generalize about human nature.
They view behaviors that are globally commonplace — say, vegetarianism — as deviant. Human nature, as they define it, reflects little of the actual diversity of humankind.
This scenario may sound preposterous. But if a provocative new study is to be believed, the world already lives in such a situation — except that it is American undergraduates, not flesh-eating forest dwellers, who monopolize our knowledge of human nature.
In the study, published last month in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan — all psychologists at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver — condemn their field’s quest for human universals.
Psychologists claim to speak of human nature, the study argues, but they have mostly been telling us about a group of WEIRD outliers, as the study calls them — Westernized, educated people from industrialized, rich democracies.
According to the study, 68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner.
Western psychologists routinely generalize about “human” traits from data on this slender subpopulation, and psychologists elsewhere cite these papers as evidence.
In itself, such extrapolation is hardly fatal. Freud built his account of human behavior from his work on patients in Vienna and generalized for the world. So many great analysts of human nature, from Aristotle to the Buddha, reached for transcendent human truths despite limited contact with the range of humanity.
The Canadian study’s claim is not to invalidate all extrapolation so much as to suggest that American undergraduates may be especially unsuitable for it.
The study’s method was to analyze a mountain of published, peer-reviewed psychology papers. It found evidence both of a narrow research base and of the eccentricity of that base. Among the many peculiarities of the usual subjects who serve as “universal man” are these, the study found:
American subjects disproportionately prize choice and individualism. In a survey of six Western societies, only Americans preferred a choice of 50 ice creams to 10. Studies have found that Americans are all but alone in giving newborns their own room.
Americans are also peculiar in the so-called Ultimatum Game, in which a subject receives money and must make an offer to share it. The second subject can accept or reject the offer, but if it is rejected, neither subject gets paid.
Americans playing the game are fair in the extreme, making higher offers than most. But they are also outliers in another way. In various places, including Russia and China, psychologists observe the rejection of excessive generosity — a demurring when offered too much. This behavior is absent from American undergraduates.
The study’s list goes on and on. Westerners tend to define themselves by psychological traits, and non-Westerners by relationships. In some languages, including English, directions are built around the self (“Take a right after the church”), while in other languages, they refer to immovable objects (“It is behind the church”).
Americans are worse than many at overcoming common optical illusions about the length of lines. But they are better than East Asians at recalling an object when the background changes, perhaps because the latter focus on context.
(Page 2 of 2)
The data on these differences are patchy, the study’s authors acknowledge. Not enough work has been done on human variation. The Canadian attempt was simply to synthesize the existing research and to establish with their synthesis that psychological sameness is an implausible assumption.
Some critics of the study have suggested that there are universals underlying surface differences, and that the WEIRD variables may not be the right ones. But there has been little dispute about the premise that psychologists have extrapolated from an outlying few the ways of the global many.
It is an extrapolation with consequences. Democracy promoters tell us that all humans feel the same way about authority, despite evidence of diversity. Economists say that all humans are self-interested rational actors, though many succumb to selfless and irrational pursuits. Abstract rights are proclaimed for all humans, overlooking the fact that many prefer their ethics in more grounded, context-specific ways.
China, India and many other societies shy away from such universalizing. Their thinkers avoid proclaiming that all humans do this or do that simply because the Chinese or the Indians do. If they began to do so, how might things change?
For now, those outside the West continue to feel a certain pressure from beyond to think in ways not their own. The television sitcoms they watch, the books they read, the superheroes they grow up with, the PowerPoint presentations they give — these were often designed with someone else’s psychology foremost in mind, on the hope that they fit universally.
One response to the WEIRD study, by the psychologist Paul Rozin, is that extrapolating from Americans is acceptable because the world is Americanizing. “The U.S. is in the vanguard of the global world,” he said, according to Science magazine, “and may provide a glimpse into the future.”
But it is also possible that people around the world are not simply in the process of becoming like American undergraduates, and relying on WEIRD subjects can make others feel alienated, with their ways of thinking framed as deviant, not different.
Among the less-examined facets of globalization is its psychic pressure: a force that makes people feel that they are playing by others’ rules, that makes their own home turf feel like an opponent’s stadium. In this WEIRD people’s world, so many only know away games.
Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly.
Monday, August 23, 2010
More Pictures
Looking down the Kali Gandaki towards Dhaulagiri
Bhaktapur
Looking north up the Kali Gandaki into Mustang from the village of Kagbeni
Boudinath, Kathmandu
Annapurna Himal
Friday, August 6, 2010
India angers US Law Firms while saving them LOTS of $$$$$$$
Ahhhhh, the hypocracy of US business. Here's an article about US law firms outsourcing legal research that often is done by junior associates in the US at hundreds of dollars an hour, to India, where equally well trained law associates, whose English is as good as Americans (if not better), do the job for less, for the same result.
Just another example of how uncompetitive America has become, and its assumption of global privilege is sadly outdated. And why should legal services be exempted from fair a balanced competition? One commentor on the website, WSGNY states their view, one I perfectly agree with.
"Perfect knowledge," as any economist will tell you, eliminates the possibility of earning revenues in the relevant field. One does not need an adviser, consultant or lawyer when the knowledge being sought is commonly available. The outsourcing of legal research will ultimately result in a near-zero cost to obtain an informed opinion of how a court should decide any issue. When the binding and persuasive arguments are reduced to briefs written in India, only requiring endorsement by State bar members; and when litigators can argue cases, pro haec vice, by "Court-Call" from locations thousands of miles away, the costs of litigation will become affordable for everyone. It will be a welcome development when "everyman" can have his/her day in court at minimal expense."
Here's the link to the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.html?src=me&ref=homepage
Just another example of how uncompetitive America has become, and its assumption of global privilege is sadly outdated. And why should legal services be exempted from fair a balanced competition? One commentor on the website, WSGNY states their view, one I perfectly agree with.
"Perfect knowledge," as any economist will tell you, eliminates the possibility of earning revenues in the relevant field. One does not need an adviser, consultant or lawyer when the knowledge being sought is commonly available. The outsourcing of legal research will ultimately result in a near-zero cost to obtain an informed opinion of how a court should decide any issue. When the binding and persuasive arguments are reduced to briefs written in India, only requiring endorsement by State bar members; and when litigators can argue cases, pro haec vice, by "Court-Call" from locations thousands of miles away, the costs of litigation will become affordable for everyone. It will be a welcome development when "everyman" can have his/her day in court at minimal expense."
Here's the link to the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.html?src=me&ref=homepage
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