Catching Up with the News

La Republic bananier: Jean Sarkozy, the French President’s 23-year-old, undergraduate son is appointed to a powerful post as the head of the Epad, the public agency which runs La Défense, the big business district on the west side of Paris. (An internet petition is calling on Jean to get his degree before rising to high responsibility.) La Défense is the heart of Sarkoland, the President’s fiefdom. His son was elected to a seat on the notoriously sleaze-ridden departement council there last year. The president also orchestrated a public media trial of his bitter rival, former Prime Minister Dominic de Villepin for allegedly abetting an amateurish and ineffective scheme to smear Sarkozy Also, the fact remains that Sarkozy appointed (and stood by) a senior minister who had written about his exploits as a Bangkok sex tourist. Gay activists are also angry, because the minister in question, Mitterrand has tarnished homosexuality by at least appearing to associate it with paedophilia and prostitution.

IndeoChinese Cold War: Beginning in August, stories about new Chinese air incursions into India have dominated the news: China claims some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory–around Tibet, and of semi-independent kingdoms that paid fealty to Lhasa. Ever since the anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet last year, progress toward settling the border dispute has stalled. To add to the drama, many yonger Tibetans, many born outside Tibet, are growing impatient with the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” approach—a willingness to accept Chinese sovereignty in return for true autonomy—and commitment to nonviolence. If these groups were to use India as a base for armed insurrection against China, as Tibetan exiles did throughout the 1960s, then two nuclear powers will be brought to the brink of war. (Beijing will at least seize important Tibetan Buddhist monasteries that lie in Indian territory close to the border).

Beijing has launched a diplomatic offensive aimed at undercutting Indian sovereignty over the areas China claims, particularly the northeast state of Arunachal Pradesh and one of its key cities, Tawang, birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama in the 17th century. Tibet ceded Tawang and the area around it to British India in 1914. China has recently denied visas to the state’s residents; lodged a formal complaint after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the state in 2008; and tried to block a $2.9 billion Asian Development Bank loan to India because some of the money was earmarked for an irrigation project in the state. In India’s 1962 war with China, the latter launched a massive invasion along the length of the frontier, routing the Indians before unilaterally halting at what today remains the de facto border, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC). They are fearful of China’s expanding naval presence in the Indian Ocean. Bharat Verma, editor of the Indian Defence Review, predicted in a widely publicized essay this summer that China would attack India sometime before 2012.

Give Nukes a Nobel: The world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age–the Nazi death machinery, and assembly line murders. The truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I; by World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million, or 78 million — somewhere in there. Then came a world with nuclear weapons. As bad as they are, nukes have been instrumental in reversing the long, seemingly inexorable trend in modernity toward deadlier and deadlier conflicts. Major powers find ways to get along because the cost of armed conflict between them has become unthinkably high., and thus began the age of globalization and global economy. If a world with nuclear weapons in it is a scary, scary place to think about, the industrialized world without nuclear weapons was a scary, scary place for real. But there is no way to un-ring the nuclear bell–instead of fantasies about a nuke-free planet where formerly bloodthirsty humans live together in peace, what the world needs is a safer, more stable nuclear umbrella.

Haut-Karabagh Question: Azerbaijan is the only country criticiseing an agreement to normalize relations between Turkey and Armenia, saying it raises doubts about regional stability.The Azerbaijani foreign ministry said Turkey should not have normalised ties without a deal over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. During the war there in 1993, Turkey closed its border with Armenia out of solidarity with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s government wants Armenia to withdraw troops from Nagorno-Karabakh, the Aremenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and return land. (There was a chance that the Turkish-Armenian protocols might never be ratified by Turkey’s parliament). A timetable for normalising relations between Turkey and Armenia was agreed in April, after a century of hostility between the two neighbours.

News Roundup 18/09/09

Controversy over the Thames: ‘Furious’ London Mayor Boris Johnson has ordered the River Thames to be reinstated on the London Underground map after Transport for London decided to redesign it. Tfl’s decision to remove zone boundaries will also now be reviewed. The redesign caused so much outcry from politicians and passenger groups and fears that people could end up paying higher fares by accident. Tfl decided to remove the fare boundaries and river because it said some passengers had complained that the map, based on Harry Beck’s 1933 design classic, had become ‘too cluttered’. However, the Harry Beck map has been voted a British design icon alongside Concorde and Spitfire. ‘TfL treated it as an operational decision but clearly it’s much more significant than that,’ the City Hall announced. [Many people in London, this author being one, still use the Thames River to get their bearings]. One of the latest revisions also is that passengers entering Zone 1 – which covers much of central London – pay premium fares, while those who use circle line that circumvent the area gets a cheaper fare.

Berlin Wall, 20 years on, Divided They Stand: Twenty years on, there has been no grand new mission, no ambitious vision of remaking Germany — or Europe, or the world. As the continent’s largest economy, Germany could have taken a lead to ensure that the European Union came together to weather the worst economic downturn in 70 years; it did not. Germany has contributed 4,000 troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, but there is deepening unease in Germany about the nation’s involvement in the war there. The strongest impulse in German politics is to avoid big changes, to hold the country steady as she goes. The electoral system supports this by producing consensus-driven coalition governments.  Ossis — Easterners earn less, produce less and have higher rates of unemployment than Wessis — Westerners . One in every 10 Ossis wishes he or she were still living in the G.D.R., something that will be reflected in the rise of Die Linke, a hard-left party formed by Western socialists and remnants of the G.D.R. communists in the East. This division that Germans call “a wall in the head” is more evident outside Berlin, where the physical Wall has been all but expunged.

There’s also been a striking geographical reversal–the poorly paid, the unemployed, the migrated East Berliners were shunted into the high-rises of West Berlin while the rich West Berliners swooped on the elegant 19th century housing of Prenzlauer Berg, left to crumble in the East during the Cold War. Today East Berlin is cooler than West. That’s where people with money want to live. After World War II, both the G.D.R. and West Germany resisted serious examination of their collective culpability for Nazism–denial infused Germany’s student and counterculture movements with an anger not matched in other countries. A similar failure to confront the truth about the G.D.R. — its violent repression and the extent to which East Germans accepted and sometimes aided the regime — expresses itself in ostalgie, the rose-tinted nostalgia for a G.D.R. that never was. Ostalgie inspired the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! and underpins the renaissance of iconic East German brands. [There used to be a blank space on maps of East Berlin where the Hohenschönhausen jail stood. Germany's secret police, the Stasi, employed one officer for every 180 G.D.R. citizens and had a network of 180,000 informers..]

If that why Thatcher opposed German Unification? A strong unified Germany looks where??? Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. She asked that her remarks should not be recorded,  and the part of the conversation is reproduced from memory. She assured Mr Gorbachev that President Bush also wanted to do nothing that would be seen by the Russians as a threat to their security. The same assurance was later spelt out in person to Mr Gorbachev at the Soviet- American summit off Malta. Back then, the French were also puzzled at Moscow’s refusal to intervene in East Germany and questioned whether “the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it. This has caused a fear approaching panic.” An adviser to social President Mitterrand noted “France by no means wants German reunification, although it realises that in the end it is inevitable,” and that he would “fly off to live on Mars” if this happened. Gorbachev’s relaxed attitude to reunification later hardened. At his summit with Mr Bush,  he accused the West of trying to “impose” Western values on Eastern Europe, and launched a ferocious attack on Helmut Kohl,the German Chancellor, for hurrying the unification.

News Round-Up

How Berlusconi survived his scandals: “In some ways, Berlusconi is the Italian political equivalent of Bank of America or AIG: he is simply too big to fail. Too many who have carved out their slice of power would risk losing it all in the monumental shakeout that would follow Berlusconi’s exit from politics. And even in that unlikely scenario, the Prime Minister would have his ownership of the nation’s major private television networks to fall back on” [We doubt his statement that he is the best Prime Minister in Italy's 150-year history, but we have to agree that he is the most influential Italian of his generation.]

Tom Friedman is (again) on alternative energy: Applied Materials is one of the most important U.S. companies you’ve probably never heard of. It makes the machines that make the microchips that go inside your computer, and it maintains a real-time global interaction with all 14 solar panel factories it’s built around the world in the last two years, none in the U.S.: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. Germany now generates almost half the solar power in the world today and, as a byproduct, is making itself the world-center for solar research, engineering, manufacturing and installation. With more than 50,000 new jobs, the renewable energy industry in Germany is now second only to its auto industry. AM’s biggest U.S. customer is a German-owned company in Oregon. [Usual Friedman Soundbite: So, if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you’re going to love importing solar panels from China.]

…meanwhile, environment gets ignored (again): Carbon cap-and-trade bill, the legislation to limit national greenhouse-gas emissions, passed the House in June. However, Senate majority leader Harry Reid told reporters that the Senate might have to wait to act on cap and trade until after tackling health care and banking reform. Given how controversial cap and trade remains (the bill was weak but a bill nonetheless) even among many Democrats in the Senate — Republicans remain almost unanimously opposed — action in the election year of 2010 might be even tougher. The White House has taken  unilateral steps— like the move to place the first-ever national limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles — but that might not be enough.

Why the Illegal Immigrants should have healthcare: Insuring undocumented workers is ethically murky and politically impossible. If we’re hiring illegals, we have a moral obligation to care for them. Given that illegal immigrants have broken our laws, it makes sense that large numbers of upstanding citizens oppose any measure that would encourage more foreigners to sneak into America or make their lives easier once they’re here. However, American Journal of Public Health, contends that immigrants typically arrive in America during their prime working years and tend to be younger and healthier than the rest of the U.S. population. As a result, health-care expenditures for the average immigrant are 55 percent lower than for a native-born American citizen with similar characteristics. So if you add cheaper people to cover to the pool, you reduce the average cost. If illegals were covered, this hidden tax (on free emergency and charitable care) would decrease. Employers  have an incentive to hire undocumented immigrants because they don’t require coverage, thus giving illegal immigrants an unfair advantage in competing for jobs. Also, many undocumented workers leave the country before they’re old enough to require much medical care.

A Hope for Peace in Somalia? President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who became president in February, is a former high school teacher, who became president in February. His moderate Islamist government is widely considered to be Somalia’s best chance for stability in years, which included 21 years of dictatorship and the 18 years of chaos that followed. Ahmed has both widespread grass-roots support inside the country and extensive help from outside nations, who are counting on Sheik Sharif to tackle piracy and beat back the spread of militant Islam. After years of ambivalence about Somalia, the United States is playing an increasingly active role here, and recently shipped 40 tons of weapons to Somalia to keep Sheik Sharif’s government alive. This week, American commandos killed a Qaeda agent in southern Somalia in a daylight helicopter raid. However, Ahmed has a disarrayed armed force–many of his commanders still have ties to the Shabab, the Islamist insurgents working with Al Qaeda. If not for the 5,000 African Union troops guarding the port, airport and Villa Somalia–the presidential villa–his government would quickly fall. (The Shabab and their insurgent brethren now control most of Mogadishu and much of the country).

Meanwhile, we continue to exploit Africans: A British oil trading giant, Trafigura, has agreed to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge damages claim from thousands of Africans who fell ill from tonnes of toxic waste dumped illegally in one of the worst pollution incidents in decades. Trafigura, one of the world’s largest oil traders, allowed contaminated sludge from a tanker ship was fly-tipped under cover of darkness near Ivory Coast in August 2006. The incident caused at least 100,000 residents from the west African country’s most populous city, Abidjan, to flood into hospitals and clinics although Trifigura has always insisted the foul-smelling slurry, dumped without its knowledge by a sub-contractor, could not have caused serious injury or illness. [Trafigura, a privately-owned multinational which has 1,900 staff working in 42 offices around the world, last year claimed a turnover of $73bn (£44bn), a figure double the entire GDP of Ivory Coast]. Internal Trafigura emails, obtained by Greenpeace, show that Trafigura struck a series of bargains on the international markets in 2005 and early 2006 to buy cheap and dirty petroleum, called coker gasoline, and rather than send the oil to a refinery, Trafigura used a tanker as a floating processing plant creating toxic sludge on the high seas.

And the French won the Cold War for us? In new documentary movie, L’Affaire Farewell, the French claims that a French mole in the KGB leaked information so devastating that it hastened the implosion of the Soviet Union. The CIA’s website still carries a compelling essay, declassified in 1996, by Gus Weiss, who wrote, “[The] Farewell dossier… led to the collapse of a crucial [KGB spying] programme at just the time the Soviet military needed it… Along with the US defence build-up and an already floundering Soviet economy, the USSR could no longer compete.” The French taupe, or mole, was Colonel Vladimir Vetrov of Directorate T (codename Farewell), the industrial spying arm of the KGB. In 1981-82, he gave French intelligence more than 3,000 pages of documentss, the names of more than 400 Soviet agents posted abroad and the successful Soviet strategies for acquiring, legally and illegally, advanced technology from the West. His expose of the abject failure of the Communist system to match rapid Western advances in electronic micro-technology influenced President Ronald Reagan’s decision to launch the “Star Wars” programme in 1983: a hi-tech bluff which would drag the USSR into an unaffordable, and calamitous, attempt to keep up with the democratic world. Vetrov never asked for money or for a new life in the West. He was an “uncontrollable man, who oscillated between euphoria and over-excitement”,  who was later executed for stabbing his mistress and killing a policeman in a Moscow park in February 1982.The detractors, however, say that the whole affair, they said, had been concocted by the CIA to test the loyalty to the West of the Socialist president, François Mitterrand, after he was elected in May 1981 and to sound out jealousy among competing French spy services. Farewell was “run” – at the mole’s own insistence – by a relatively small, French counter-espionage agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which was not supposed to operate abroad.

Debutantes debut again in London: For the first time since 1997, young women dress in virginal white, curtsey to a minor royal and partake of a giant cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball. Queen Charlotte’s Ball – originally started in 1780, as a birthday whim for George III’s consort – acted as the starting point of the Season for centuries. Once held in May, it began the Season, a six-month whirl of parties and events to launch young ladies, aged 17 to 18, of certain wealth and/or breeding on to the marriage market. Before 1958, the debutantes (debs as they were called) were presented to Buckingham Palace too, but Queen Elizabeth halted the practice not because it was anachronistic but because, as Princess Margaret put it, “every tart in London was getting in.” Today, the ball is held in September, rather than May – which is considered too close to exam time, but it, as it always has, now raises funds for the west London maternity hospital and research centre that bears Queen Charlotte’s name.

Still talking about healthcare?

I guess we are. I have totally zoned out of the topic, but people haven’t yet. At least the late night shows are on August recess and we are spared of some uncalled for jokes.

But you don’t been Jon Stewart to create soundbites. This weekend, one soundbite got prevalent that it even reached me. The soundbite, the Facebook status that could change the world (according to ever sensational TIME magazine), read as follow:

“No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, join us in posting this as your status for the rest of the day.”

Despite the fact that that message concerns only the Americans with their shithole healthcare, I now see it everywhere. Someone who wrote a little too extensively on the healthcare, I find such oneliners extremely disturbing to the real debate about the healthcare. This morning, I replied with my own soundbite, 139 letters, Twitter-style.

“No one should die because NHS won’t foot their medical bill. No one should go broke because the others get sick. If you agree, repost this.”

Sorry, that statement doesn’t make sense but the statement to which i am responding make little sense too. People die because they cannot afford healthcare, and they sometimes go broke because of their sicknesses, but the healthcare reform won’t change that–if the politicians are more sincere about the reform, what they should be talking about is the subsidies on the medical operators, so that an affordable healthcare can materialize.

Who Lost Japan?

Recent developments in Japan may dramatically change the country and the region, but for better or for worse?

Last week, Japan elected Democratic Party, ending the ruling party (Liberal Democrats)’s virtually uninterrupted reign since the end of the Second World War. In the West, the story was not paid much of an attention because in Japan, the prime ministers change faster than their car models (and boy, they do upgrade the latter a lot). However, the 300+ seat majority in the parliament means that the DPJ will be here for three or four years. In the United States, we love to think that U.S.-Japan relations are shaped in Washington D.C. (and the lobby offices). However, throughout the post World War history, it is the Liberal Democratic Party that defined the U.S. relationships. Now, with LDP gone, who knows where this relationship will end up.

But we can venture a guess. The newly elected Democratic Party’s policies put a big question mark upon the Japanese contributions to the war in Afghanistan and the redeployment of American troops in Asia. That sentence sounds like something a talking-head on the television would say but it has deep implications–all US ships and aircraft carriers crossing the Pacific to patrol South China Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea are currently being refueled at Japan. A US Marine airfield in Okinawa and additional troops on Japan are deterrants to North Korea. This new government can jeopardize everything. This may be the first real foreign policy crisis President Obama faces.

The party’s leader (and soon-to-be Prime Minister), Yukio “The Alien” Hatoyama, whose speeches are boring as hell, droned against the American-led globalization and urged a greater Japanese focus on Asia. “A Bloc of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western powers?” For some of us this sounds eerily familiar to Japan’s pre-WWII Empire dreams, Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

To add insult to injury, Mr. and Mrs. Hatoyama are not quite there in the upstairs department. Mrs. Hatoyama, former actress Miyuki, said that she flew in a UFO to Venus and that in a previous life she met Tom Cruise. The First Couple are intensely ’spiritual’ and eat the sun, whatever that means. (Mr. Alien and Mrs. UFO should get on like a house on fire).

So the question is Who Lost Japan? The Democratic Party wining 308 seats out of 480-seat parliament is no accident. In Japan, a younger generation strives for a move away from its long-time dependence on the United States. Last year’s financial crisis also undermined the entire financial system in place since WWII. Hatoyama (the scion of the family hailed as Japan’s Kennedys) called for high taxation to the rich–the first attempt in decades to tap into Japan’s plentiful private-sector wealth. His message apparently resonated.

For now, Mr. Hatoyama will have to wade through Japan’s extremely bureaucratic, patriarchal political system, a system he detests. He has a mandate from the Japanese people, who voted for change and progress’ sake. Whether he will be a strong prime minster, or a good one remains to be seen. Always a minor political party, the DPJ is a fractious party, ranging from socialists to disgruntled former members of the LDP. Good Luck helming that herd.

A Temporary Transition

To follow me to Russia, go to cynicaltravels.wordpress.com. Caveat Emptor–it is not PC and extremely cynical.

The World We Ignored

The Top Foreign News We Missed:

Objectification of Women in Italy. Except: “Conservative ideas in Italy die hard because of  patriarchal culture and the Catholic Church, whose interference become even stronger since Mr. Berlusconi first became prime minister in 1994. The church, for example, has threatened to excommunicate doctors who prescribe the abortion pill as well as patients who use it. Italy ranks 67th out of 130 countries in the Global Gender Gap Index. Under half of Italy’s women have jobs, compared with the world average of nearly two out of three. Italian men have 80 more minutes of leisure time per day, the greatest difference in the 18 countries compared. Women had to devote extra time to unpaid work, like cleaning the house and are therefore unwilling to take on an additional burden of raising children. Italy has an extraordinarily low birthrate”.

Things We Need To Know: Why Elections and Bipartisanship are overrated, and other controversial answers, answered by Newsweek.

Belgian Justice. Except: “Most buildings are from the 19th century and not very functional in terms of security. There are 44 entrances to the huge Palace of Justice, many of them with little or no significant surveillance, almost no few metal detectors here. The minister of justice, Stefaan De Clerck, is now in the hot seat. Most of the escapees have been foreigners, given that roughly 57 percent of Belgium’s prison population is foreign-born. Almost all the recent escapees were serving time or facing trial for violent crimes.”

Where Ted Kennedy Mattered: He guided US policies in Vietnam, South Africa, Chile, Northern Ireland and Iraq, but let’s not forget his game-changer for East Pakistan.

Who are we robbing this week?

Something is wrong about (modern) pop-culture, and how it had been wrong for a millennium.

Every time I watch a superhero movie, I feel disgusted by this ‘end justifies the means’ attitude that these masked vigilantes hold. I know I sounded like someone denouncing the superheroes from the movie Watchman (Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?) but we usually hold high esteem for those who work on the fringes of the society, don’t we? Let’s us plunge into that cesspool of misfits:

It didn’t start with Robin Hood (there was probably some Cro-Magnon man who clubbed the better hunters and give their goods to poorer gatherers) but he helped romanticizing this phenomenon. From Scott’s Ivanhoe to Green Arrow, there were parodies and pastiches of the famed robber and his Merry Men. Libertarian Ayn Rand made fun of this with a character in Atlas Shrugged. A pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld, a Robin Hood-like character, considers himself the complete negative of the Medieval outlaw. (Rand viewed the idea to rob the rich and give to the poor highly pernicious). Ragnar, a libertarian like his creator, attacks on government property and never touch private property.

Literature was especially permitting to these lawless activities. Dumas’ Edmund Dantes (better known as the Count of Monte Cristo) has a moral compass that is misguided if not entirely broken. He was on a personal vendetta, which made things a little different, but among the swashbuckling gentleman-thieves (fashioned after Rt. Hon. Mr. Hood) that I read and misguidedly admired during my youth include: Hornung’s Raffles, LeBlanc’s Lupin, and Charteris’ The Saint. Even that Victorian staple of moral uprightness, one Sherlock Holmes, Esq., permitted the murder of a serial-blackmailer in The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.

Some will say that Citizen Vigilantes like The Scarlet Pimpernel in fiction and gut-toting sheriffs of the American West in real life balanced (and reflected) the culture of the day, but what separate them from becoming monsters like Fantomas or various outlaws of the American West. They can justify their missions but saying those mail-wagons and rail-cars carried the bourgeois society’s riches but the bottomline is that they disturb the social order of the day. An unfair social order can be revolutionized through reforms and political awareness, not through assassinations and fermentations. I am looking at you, Captain America, Batman and the CIA assassination squads–which eventually served the same purpose.

Then, the worst of all–or the king of this misfit hill–is Dexter. Serial-television character and serial killer Dexter Morgan was the primary inspiration for this blog post. (real-life John Dillinger, who has been glamorized of lately is another inspiration; Dillinger stole from the rich and gave to the whores). In his show, whose opening sequence is a masterpiece, Dexter kills people who the justice system let go on technicalities with what wikipedia calls ‘a strict moral code’. It sounded like something from Michael Douglas’ Star Chamber. Well, no matter how hard we root for Hannibal Lector or those fighting against killer-on-the-loose Fred Krueger, even killing those who deserve is wrong. I feel funny saying that, being a proponent of death penalty, but no citizen should take law into his own hands. [A tangent clip about Michael Dukakis and death penalty here.]

Dexter is worse: he is a serial killer with a mission–to get rid of the bad guys. Who decides who is good and who is bad? In the real life, these mission-oriented killers exist, “ridding the world” of “undesirables” (read, homosexuals, prostitutes, minorities or Catholics). We should not be glorifying them; it is akin to glorifying Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”, who had a modus operandi too, in targeting universities and the airline industry.

I don’t usually agree with Parent Television Council, but here I will have them the last say: “The series compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn’t get discovered”. It is about Dexter, but substitute ‘thief’, ‘robber’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘murderer’ instead of ’serial killer’ and you will have accurate description of my sentiments about above fictional and non-fictional people. It is one thing rebelliously admiring their carefree lawless life (you hippies) but it is another idolizing them.

Whose lobotomy am I paying this week?

Probably those of Washington politicos and 24/7 cable news anchors. But debate over healthcare continues:

Government Care is at least efficient, right?

Umm, can’t tell unless we try it. The president’s misguided analogy with post-office said as much: “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems,” not the smartest thing he said, considering that U.S. post lost $4.7 billions last year, another indicator of inefficient government bureaucracy. On the other hand Medicare, medicaid and veteran’s health administration run quite efficiently.

Two reasons are behind this: (1) not as many people use medicare, medicaid or veteran’s health administration as private health care, and patient-doctor ratio is reasonable. (2) they don’t have to keep an eye on profits as private health providers have to. (Public health options don’t need to advertise, therefore they also gain a little unfair advantage when it comes to competition). However, during the enrollment increases in those programs (changes based on population growths, etc.), there were signs of fiscal stress on the system, showing that this combination is precarious at best.

As footnotes, there is efficacy through competition:  tragic-comically, insurance companies arrive on scene before FEMA during Katrina. There are back-and-forth arguments over whether the efficiency of medicare is just a myth: here, here. Also, medicare, medicaid or private insurance never cover 100% of the bill, making this efficiency a bare mirage.

What is the current government healthcare spending like?

Indecipherable. Let’s break down Obama’s healthcare spending. The expansion of Schip (state children’s health insurance program) which subsidizes insurance for 6 million low-income children (twice vetoed by President Bush) cost $5 billion-a-year. It will be funded by increased tobacco taxes ($35 billion for next five years).

Medicare Advantage, insurance for the elderly cost around $100 billion dollars to taxpayers a year. If the government provide the coverage directly, instead of private insurance companies, the taxpayers will save 12%-15%. Where does that $15 billion go? The president said insurance companies just took it as profits. Insurers say they take it as a buffer for government’s inadequate reimbursements, which shifts the costs to the privately insured. The insured blame the uninsured for this loss. Economists, however, blame everyone for allowing excessive treatments.

To put the government spending (and potential spendings) into perspective, the U.S. spends $2 trillion a year for health care.  President Obama’s proposed public option will cost around $1 trillion dollar over a decade to bring the 50 million uninsured into the tent, and $250 billion of such spending will be put on the federal deficit. However, in practice, the figure may not be as high because (1) it includes illegal immigrants, stubborn young adults who don’t think they need insurance and poor people who are eligible for Medicaid, (2) only those without affordable employer-provided insurance and those in small businesses not offering employer-provided insurance will qualify to Obama’s ‘public option’.

Does financial crisis have any bearing on the healthcare reform?

Definitely. On one hand, it makes current healthcare companies less willing to take risky customers and yielding way for a government-run system. A lot of people lost their jobs and employer-paid health-insurance. As many as 14,000 people are losing their health insurance every day because of job cuts, according to left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund. On the other hand, it will further strain the national debt already stretched by the bailouts. A better lesson will be about risk.

In both financial and medical sector, insurance companies insure against risk. By taking on those risky health care coverage, the government (or insurance companies) are forced to take on risk and thus needs to diversify the potential damage. They do so by raising everyone else’s health care coverage. That was how the housing babble began and AIG/Lehman Brothers/Merrill-Lynch all ended by with risky asserts that turned into defaults. Dieu merci.

So health insurance companies are naturally lobbying against Obamacare?

No. They are against a government agency providing ‘healthcare’; that is why there is so much hot air against Britain’s NHS which employs hospitals and doctors. However, in the U.S., the reform will greatly benefit health insurance companies. They will gain tens of millions of new customers because Americans would be required by law to carry health insurance. Pharmaceutical companies would sell more prescription drugs because more people would have coverage for drugs. Hospitals and doctors wouldn’t have to provide as much free care as they do now.

Their profit margins would go down a little, but unlike with the Clinton care, the healthcare lobby is currently for the reform. However, so much political backlash (in town-hall meetings, ha) currently comes from small-businesses with low-income workers, which will now have to provide some insurance. [In Obamacare, small business is defined as an establishment whose annual payroll is over $250,000 annually, so most small businesses will be directly effected].

What is wrong with legalizing euthanasia?

Nothing really, but must be heavily regulated? It depends on how you frame legalizing part: assisted suicide is one way to interpret it, while mercy-killing (a noble concept pioneered in those benighted Crusader days and still used on dying horses) sounds a sunny idea. However, regulating this euthanasia will be a logistical, theological, and political nightmare. Suppose we impose a minimal age before which one cannot seek state-sponsored euthanasia. What will happen to those with incurable diseases under that age?

Tragically termed ‘easy way out’, legalized euthanasia can easily mark the beginning of this slippery slope. However, on the other hand are precipitous laws banning suicide. The assisted suicides of terminal patients are legal in Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands; Oregon requires two doctors to confirm that the patient has less than six months to live to conduct euthanasia. A Swiss group Dignitas is currently in the news for ending the life of an ailing (but not dying) British composer in a suicide pact with his dying wife. Everywhere in the world, the debate rages more violently than ever: in France, Je Vous Demande le Droit de Mourir, a 2005 book by Vincent Humbert, who a car crash left “unable to ‘walk, see, speak, smell or taste”, became a bible for people supporting euthanasia; in the Netherlands, a Dutch doctor is underfire for assisting the death of a Catholic nun, who he assumed refused euthanasia for religious reasons. No case is black and white when it comes to euthanasia.

Whose rhinoplasty am I funding this week?

The above title is misleading. I am not an American and have no wish to fund anyone’s rhinoplasty this week, but seeing everyone’s anger and angst compelled me to write about this debate, which is not as black and white as partisan politics made it out to be:

National Heathcare leads to long lines.

True and false. There are stories (anecdotes, fear mongering) about long waits for health-care services. Currently, 25% of Americans wait 6 or more days for an appointment with their primary-care physician, as opposed to 15% of Britons, 13% of Germans, 10% of Australians and just 3% of New Zealanders. Still a sweeping generalization cannot be made about these countries with strong public-health care: 2/3 of Canadians had to wait longer than six days, and they too have a national health care system.

Only 26 percent of Americans and Canadians reported being able see their doctor on the day they called, compared with 60 percent in the Netherlands and 48 percent in Britain according to the Commonwealth Fund. However, specialized care is a different story: 8 percent of Americans have to wait four months or more for specialized procedure, and 62 percent wait less than a month. In Britain, 41 percent of patients have to wait four months or more. All these stats are not reflections of private or public healthcare system, but of the disparity in earnings between physicians and specialists in North America. In the U.S., there is already a shortage of primary-care doctors, which means this Obamacare can put another strain on primary-care.

Massachusetts healthcare system works, so can we apply it to the entire nation?

No. It does work, but lamely. The Bay State’s system is a brainchild of Senator Ted Kennedy and his 20-year campaign for healthcare. It is based on the Swiss model, perhaps the most integrated private-public healthcare co-pay systems in the entire world. The government uses regulations and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered: everyone is mandated to buy insurance, insurers can’t discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies. However, the system is very costly.

Current prevailing health insurance in America (employer-assisted coverage) is already like Massachusetts model (actually, it was vice versa). Middle-income families are not being covered, and people who lost their jobs during the recession lost their insurance too.

Will socialism ever work?

Not in America. Healthcare-socialism connections (or connection) stop at the fact that the government will take over the entire healthcare system. Obamacare will not lead to this, but in Scandinavian countries, at least, the public healthcare systems make up the major portion of the healthcare coverage. There, even the hospitals are publicly owned institutions. It is one of the milestones of a social welfare state to provide a government-run healthcare system to its citizens.  The system worked in those Scandinavian countries because of a selection entry-and-exit model. America with its freedom to move within states and bad immigration problem will never embrace socialism.

Yes, in Scandinavia, it work thanks to the citizens who pay 50%-60% income and property taxes–another aspect of a welfare state. The state makes everything in life (from milk to education services) subsidized and therefore makes it impossible to immigrate from or emigrate to the said country. Emigration laws were tight and a person has so much to lose by leaving his society. That was the premise of socialism (and some futuristically-imagined self-sustaining societies); people hail this as a novel, revolutionary and even reactionary idea. No, it isn’t. Socialism is the bastard son of feudalism, where manor lord oversees every aspects of his peasants’ lives (birth, education, employment, marriage, health, infirmity, death); it is hard to leave because he owns you. In modern socialism, instead of literal droit de seigneur, the state figuratively rapes you.

Will this lead to dead panels?

No, but maybe in the future. Somewhere, William F. Buckley Jnr. is smiling. In 2007 novel on babyboomers, Boomsday, Bill’s son, Christopher wrote about a bunch of politicos spinning euthanasia as ‘voluntary transitioning’, and providing incentives (tax breaks for golf carts and segways) so that these 65 and older take government’s ‘voluntary transition’ pill. No. Obamacare won’t lead to this, but if Obamacare were to be successful, the dependence of the system can eventually lead to so-called dead-panels.

In England, a treatment is only approved if it adds the value of one additional year (which was valued around 30,000 pounds). If you are a penniless 80-year old depending on government-subsidized pills, what will happen if the government (or a new doctor) deems it should not be giving out pills to you anymore. It is not an unreasonable fear, but considering that if you are a penniless 80-year old under the current system, you will die anyway so why not trust the government for once. The worst it can lead to is … bad teeth.

Or certain bad body parts for that matter. The classic stereotype, the British bad teeth, comes from the expensive and inaccessible dental care under their NHS system. This combined with indifference (of 60 million Britons, only 14 million are entitled to dental care, and only 7% of the eligible people actually apply for the care), lead to the horrific dental appearance. The same goes for every body part (eyes, ears, etc.) not entirely covered by the public health care.

Everyone can use and abuse health-care statistics.

True, for all kinds of statistics. Don’t trust me; go on and read here. Read here about NHS in Britain.

(To be continued…)

Remembrance of Mischiefs Past

In May, I wrote about elitism. Last week, I wrote about my summer experiences with a bunch of privileged kids. With the following blog post, the trilogy will be complete and so will a chapter in my life.

The Sotomayor hearings this summer unfolded along with my summer camp experience with a bunch of privileged kids, who inherited republican genes of their rich parents. The funny thing was that the other mentors who populated the camp alongside me were liberals, who should espouse the E-word (empathy, not elitism) heartily.

Yet, there was no empathy in this summer camp. Probably because I went to a prep school and witnessed the entire power structure from the other side (compelling life experience?), I identified myself more closely with the highschoolers than with my fellow mentors. Thus began my eventful summer–I must vainly admit I was a mediocre mentor and a good friend to many highschoolers–and I tried to be a friend to them. (I was always partial to those who are on a learning curve as it is.)

A hardened veteran of a prep/boarding school, I assumed quite correctly that nothing in their behavior could shock me. Nothing did. Some genius once said the prep schools are where boys become men. If manhood revolves around breaking every single rule, then that saying is accurate. I won’t self-incriminate here by compiling a laundry list of what I (we) did in prep school, let it be duly noted that there were cigarettes taped under drawers, alcohol in cleansed lotion bottles and a bowl inside, now the creative part, a porcelain polar bear. [Some kid converted Meerschaum pipe that had been in his family for generations. Dieu Merci.]

So the bottomline this summer is that I was somewhat shocked to see them in the same spiral trap I was in pre-college years. I quit smoking and drinking a year ago, my belief (and those of my parents) being you have to do it once (or occasionally) while you were young. In the social, social world out there, you need to build tolerance to these substances and empathy to the others using them.

I don’t know how many people from my camp follows this blog (Vainly I will say more than two), but I will break that fourth barrier now, but directly addressing to you. Despite quite stressful obstacles you threw at me, I enjoyed working (and becoming friends) with you. Despite a hectic schedule, my recreational hours were made more complete by you all. There were times I felt overwhelmed and frustrated at all the administrative rigmarole (about which I ranted in my last post), but I knew I enjoyed your presence and you mine too.

I enjoyed helping you guys with your essays and homework. I enjoyed late night guitar renditions, hospital visits (*wink, wink*), 3 a.m. phone-calls and 7 a.m. wake-up calls, but not leftover food in the hallways. Every second was a memory. To say that I will miss someone whom I met eight weeks ago (and didn’t actually know) will be a gross overstatement. Some of you got to really know me, and good for you, but I don’t know your quirks, your personalities and your aspirations; as much as I would love to, there are 370 of you and only one me. Some of you are inspired by me (I am flattered), but you guys inspired me many times more; again, there are 370 of you–so full of angst, vibrancy, and rebelliousness. Oh, sweet old days. You made me feel old.

Life goes on for each and everyone of us, and again I truthfully concede that it is hard for me to remember and miss every single one of you. Yet, needless to say, I will remember this summer.

Thank you. Go on and have wonderful lives. I know I will.

Farewell Summer 2009.

From a totalitarian continent to a totalitarian summer camp, my summers seem to be getting worse.

Last summer, I embarked on an adventure. This summer, I said to myself, I should devote more time to my college life before I embark on another adventurous tour through Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia starting late August. I lost an internship opportunity with the House of Commons because of a scheduling conflict. Among the job offers for the summer was a mentorship position with a Summer College program for highschool kids. Nothing prestigious, nothing lucrative, but it fit the grand scheme of things and I took the job.

Wow. What an adventure it had been. I was confronted with problems within and without the program, the problems so overblown that they reached such a feral state that I didn’t witness last summer in the depths of Africa. Silver lining? I am now perfectly ready to be the headmaster of a sufficiently small school.

Firstly, there was this Facebook thing; my superiors ask all mentors not to add highschoolers. Not that we were actively adding them, but we were just responding to their friend requests. (Oh, I think I need to preface it by saying I am 20, and most mentors are only two years older than our wards, most of whom are under eighteen.) I don’t care much about facebook but when we ignore them on facebook, we created this entirely necessary ‘us vs. them’ barrier. Mentors didn’t know what is happening inside our wards’ community. They might as well be organizing beer pong parties or massive Satanic rituals via facebook, but we didn’t know. We were trapped behind this information Iron Curtain of our own doing.

Not to mention, it sent a wrong signal. It is as if their friendships were not worthy. It is better to be feared than loved, said Machiavelli. In reality, it is better to be trusted than either feared or loved, and this facebook episode showed that my superiors at the college didn’t trust us, the mentors, nor the students nor our relations with one another. Okay, facebook, I can deal with, but after a few weeks, the entire dynamic of the Summer College Program changed.

As someone who went to prep/boarding school, and tackled his smoking habit by taping the pack and the lighter to the bottom of the drawers (take note: teachers were not thorough searchers), I was fully prepared to tackle any problem they (students + program) threw at me, but the program sadly wasn’t. There were allegations about students stealing, drinking, smoking pot, etc.–allegations that were entwined with rumors–a situation not unfamiliar to the highschool cafeteria atmosphere. The program reacted strongly; we (shamefully I have to add my own name to this list of perpetrators) ignored the fact that the burden of proof was upon us and that we have to presume them innocence until proven guilty.

Edmund Burke, who did have a way with his words that I don’t, said ‘it is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph’. I finally filed a strongly worded email protesting this ignorance of burden of proof and innocence until proven guilty process. I was also flared up by the curfew check policy; the university treated these highschoolers as college students but the program didn’t. [College students are exempt from curfew checks by the 1961 Supreme Court Ruling, Dixon v. Alabama.] Students’ key cards which they used to access the building were catalogued so that the program could track who was re-entering the dorm and when. For mentors, they used card access and dining halls access to guestimate how many hours we spend at the camp. For a fierce critic of Bush administration’s wiretapping policies, it was just a slap squarely on my face.

Mentors are here to protect the students from themselves or one another, but this summer, I find myself protecting–or trying and failing to protect–them from the programs (authorities) or from the other mentors. I received significant support behind the administrators’ back for my righteous standings (I couldn’t believe I am typing this to describe myself but such was the reality here) but the silent majority didn’t utter a word when the vocal minority (of administrators and other mentors) decided that curfew breakers must help the program with chores (rearranging tables, etc.). You might never guess it from this blog but taciturnity was my policy so I said just four words, “It is not legal.” The program decided to go ahead anyway, but they acknowledged my fiery two cent by calling these chores ‘community service’. Then it is legal? After all, didn’t Pol Pot renamed his killing fields ‘reeducation camps’?

I began with an African anecdote, so I will end here with another, so that the story can come full circle. I once quarreled with my girlfriend in Africa. She said in her not-so-perfect English, “You hurt my feelings”. I replied, “You know what, I have feelings, too.” How often do we forget that? How often do we forget that the other party (in this case, 300+ students in Summer College) have feelings too. Why are we treating them as sub-standard human beings (paraphrasing a mentor who called them that)? They have feelings too. We just have to stand back and listen to them. How easy was that? Why make it so hard?

 

 

 

Confessions of a Lover

I took this post down for a reason earlier this summer. In retrospect, it was probably untruthful for me to do so, so here it is.

Relationships are composed of nothing but fleeting visions and brief encounters—when we started reaching for them, they ran away … and then, we fall. For me, the fall began on one fine November afternoon last year.

I first met Kirsten inside a locker room in the Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Yes, it is a chance encounter in front of an electric locker that started all. Likewise, our acquaintance itself is one of the most chancy and singular episodes in my life. I was lining for a locker directly behind her, and she was having trouble with the malfunction locker. I tried to help her, but we ended up queuing for another locker. We started talking and I insisted upon sitting beside her in the ride (which happened to be The Mummy so it is not exactly romantic stuff).

This is the point where those writers usually say smugly, the rest is history. No, it isn’t. Both of us independently decided to go on a studio tour. However, seeing a long line wait, we gave up and settled on a cup of mocha in a nearby café. We talked for nearly two hours—until the last studio tour beckoned us.

That is over the Thanksgiving. By Christmas, we were talking on phone and via chats. Before Easter, she has extended me an invitation to spend a week at her house in Denmark, and we have arranged (actually she arranged, and I concurred lackadaisically) a humanitarian volunteering in Africa. My friends said it is damn chancy to spend a summer with someone whom you have met for only a couple of hours, but it was a chance I was willing to take.

On my arrival in Copenhagen, I was pleasantly astounded. I knew that she belonged to landed gentry and that her father was a junior minister in the Danish Cabinet (who also was instrumental in arranging my travelling plans), I didn’t know that they also owned a billion-dollar fishing boat empire. At the airport, there were just her and her chauffeur waiting for my arrival, but back at her home (which is an understated term for a four-star hotel), the staff outnumbered the family.

Today, we widely frown upon the elitism practiced by the aristocracy, but Kirsten is a prime example that the aristocratic education has their own pluses. She is fluent in five languages, is knowledgeable in Latin and Ancient Greek, and is currently learning her eighth (Arabic). She rides, fences, dances and hunts better than I do. Her musical talents in viola and piano are only surpassed by her athletic acumen in hockey, polo, swimming, tennis and billiards. Never before in my life had I seen a person, let alone a woman, as well-rounded as she is.

Her education and upbringing do define her world, but they don’t—and can’t—limit it. Kirsten is a person whose CV won’t do her justice; you just have to meet her, and you will see how inspirational she can be. Self-conscious and introverted, a good orator she was not, but she knew how to express her views and justify them. Her world is built around a single word, “others”. Despite belonging in the topmost echelons of her social hierarchy, her compassion and altruism for those less fortunate than her are astounding. At the age of twenty-one (the age at which most of us are still hectically updating our facebook profiles and playing on our Wiis), she had already been in Serbia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Timor and now with me in Central African Republic.

I may not be exaggerating if I say that this last summer totally changed my views. In the middle of Africa, between fights and cleansing in Chad, Sudan and CAR itself, I found my own solace in her comforting eyes. Both of us gazed unwittingly into the very whites of the Evil’s eyes when we volunteered for the African mission; I admit I volunteered for my own reasons to embellish my resume, and to be together with her. She, however, had a nobler reason—to offer.

Offer and dedicate, she did. In the process, we had our private moments. During our stay together, I came to understand the human nature that lay hidden under her otherwise cool and logical veneer. She slowly recounted her trials and tribulations one by one—her private personal tragedies, which are no less or lenient than the tragedies of the African continent and her people. In those moments, her discernable frailty and fragility was so markedly different from the aplomb and self-assurance which radiates from her during day. Like the African Sun under which we toiled, she is a symbol of light and warm for many, but at night, her life is as empty and cold as an uninhabited cave.

My friends told me that I don’t care much about my girlfriends. Sometimes, it is true, but Kirsten, she is a different story. I didn’t spend entire days (let alone the entire summer) with my other girlfriends, nor meet their parents and families. During our stay in Africa (in which we alternately pretended to be a honeymooning or affianced couple), I came to know her in a different light—she is more personal, more humane, more compassionate, more … vivid.

When I am writing this, one of the best relationships I had ever—and will ever—had has come to an end. It didn’t ended with a loud and acrimonious quarrel that plagued my many another relationship; disquietly, it ended with a long and heartbreaking silence that seemed like an eternity. The hardest thing with the relationships is not how to start one, but how to live on after conclusion of one. In the term of angling, it is all about catch and release. You must know when to release your other half so that he or she can fly freer, see further and soar higher.

So it ended, with each of us deciding to let the other to freely fly. It was a classic parting of the ways moment—both of us reflected upon our futures, our careers and our respective chosen paths. With smiles, we admitted the relationship is not ideal or feasible under such conditions; gracefully, we embraced each other as friends. It is a moment I anticipated ever since the beginning of the summer. It is also the moment I have been dreading.

As the Bard would say, All’s well that ends well. However, memories live on—memories that l will cherish forever. Weeks before, a friend compared my tale with the one in Out of Africa, where a Danish noblewoman apparently has a doomed love affair. I replied, it is not the outcome, but the experience and memories that mark, define and immortalize a love. I am just glad that I live up to my words.

Watching Potter

T for Terrible acting. (5/10)

His world has grown, so have his fans. A review of the latest movie and the latest hype.

I haven’t been to an opening day of a movie in such a long time. In a decision I now regret, I brought a ticket to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, just because I can. I went to the theatre like a hour early, and was still like the 30th person in line waiting. Not so bad, you might think, but read on…

Before me in the queue were this bunch of kids–from whose age I can ascertain that they were in their mother’s wombs when the first book came out in 1997. Such popularity of HP books is astounding, but I digress. The thing was that these kids were from some sort of school and their friends kept coming and coming, and taking position in the line (which is less of a line than a melee) before me and the others who were there before. To add insult to injury, their parents were there, and not only did they not say anything to their kids’ disruptive queuing behavior but they themselves skipped the line and took the position beside their kids. That was just distasteful.

Then, the doors opened and my anger cooled off for a few minutes … until the trailers came up. I hated most of them; I kinda enjoyed Hitchcock allusion in Steve Carrell’s Despicable Me but that is it. The biggest claps and cheers from the audience went to the trailer of Twilight sequel and some asinine movie about a man going atop Empire State Building into a fantasy world or something.

Truthfully speaking, the film didn’t really disappoint me. It was a visual experience–something the last five movies (which possible exception of the Philosopher’s Stone) weren’t. Every scene is so meticulously constructed, and so perfectly lit that it is as if I was in an actual theatre. Visual effects have come a long way since the first movie too–Half-Blood Prince was part Gotterdammerung, part L.A. Confidential visually.

Acting, on the other hand, sucked. The greatest of the British theatrical corps cannot compensate the shortcomings of the young cast, who were given silly lines and silly parts. Unnecessary romantic subplot ran through the movie, which did away with far more important storylines. Malfoy was given too much screen time as a malicious lingering creep, but his fixing the vanishing cabinet apparently involves putting one thing after another in it. Inclusion of Aragog pleasantly amazed me, but the entire background of Lord Voldemort’s family and his loveless birth was left out. Bill and Fleur de la Cour were absent, and Fenrir Greyback is reduced to almost a caricature. The detailed information on Horcruxes were also withheld, which means that the last two movies will have a lot of things to explain.

Jim Broadbent was not Horace Slughorn I imagined but his acting was superb. Helena Bonham Carter steals the show as she always does, and the abandoned Great Hall scene reminds me of the Lord of Rings (perhaps another reason to recruit Ian McKellan as Aberfoth Dumbledore). However, the ending was anticlimactic–entirely devoid of emotion. It failed to implant a sense of anticipation or anxiety in me. Half-Blood Prince has no future.

If you haven’t read the books, don’t go to see it. You can get  Stendhal’s syndrome from the visuals, but as a movie adaptation of a book, it sucked. And as a movie? Both the acting and dialogue were hollow, cheesy and irreverent. Despite a stellar supporting cast, grand cinematography and splendid visual offering, it can only get 5/10 from me.

Divorce and Conquer

Morally, legally, politically, and religiously we view marriage as a sacred institution. The right to divorce should equally be celebrated if not cherished. A look inside the failing marriage system.

Time magazine’s recent article extolling marriage as really gnawing me. It gave some insight into the benefits of two-parent ‘ideal’ families over broken homes (but avoiding pressing questions I will outline later) but it began quite charmingly with an anecdote. So here I am, and I am going to open this blog post with an anecdote too.

My grandparents were happily married for nearly 70 years. It was a marriage of love — it was not a marriage with passions, nor one of demands, but rather a marriage of understanding. How did they manage it? Distance. My grandfather spent most of his life at work; firstly a civil servant, then an elected official, and eventually a busy businessman, he was never there to question my grandmother’s judgment or interfere with her decisions. For the last fifty years of their marriage, they slept in different rooms–grandpa toiling until the very morning hours and grandma looking after their every-increasing family. They enjoyed their time together, but they enjoyed their privacy even more. They longed for each other in their time away from each other, and that cemented and kindled their love again and again.

It was an ideal marriage… and how all marriages suppose to be. In our superficial and self-centered world, we quickly ran out of love–even from our closest ones–because we demand it as a panacea for everything. In the age when a mouseclick can satisfy many of our needs, we became a demanding generation. In our selfishness, we forget to pay attention or respect to our partners and more importantly still we oft fail to concede our failures. We remedy our failing marriages with other pleasures, or discretions. We fail to see exit signs or signals that precede them.

Some say divorce is an easy way out. No, in fact, it is the right way out, and the only way out. We lingered around too long after our loves have exhausted. Our failures to see why our marriages have fallen apart is one reason, but the other reason comes from our environment and its mores. Why is every recession coupled with a spike in divorce rates for middle-class and upper-middle class families? Because a bust means they have less joint ownerships to divide; they have less income and less taxes to pay. Marriage has become our haven away from government interference in our lives rather than a testament to our loves.

Thus we became a society unnaturally limited and even motivated by marriage. Every social issue or moral outrage of the age–genealogy and lineage, virility and heterosexuality, financial security, premarital sex and abortion, ad nauseum–was tied to marriage. Currently, the Defense of Marriage Act, legalization of gay marriage, adoption rights, and even taxation are invariably linked to so-called ’sanctity of marriage’.

So let’s review. Marriage as an institution was a relic of hunter-gatherer society. The Greeks and the Romans required no law for marriage or divorce (except between different castes, where it was forbidden). Until the late Middle Ages, marriage, divorce and even adultery were deemed private affairs. ‘Courtly love’, sans marriage, was a guiding literary and poetic adventure. Then along came the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. In 1545 the Council of Trent declared that a Roman Catholic marriage would be recognized only if the marriage ceremony was officiated by a priest with two witnesses. The days of marriage as an adventure were numbered after that.

Marriage and its far-reaching consequences are ridiculous. The idea that you gave away your freedom (to pursue other love interests, other partners, or just other recreation in general) for a measly signature of a piece of document just because it looks ‘official’ directly contradicts the principles of freedom and right to self-determination we espoused for three centuries. That a priest officiated our marriage should not mean a thing in the eye of law either; he is supposed to be sanctioned by God to perform marriage, so let God–not the state–judge us for our broken promises and broken marriages. If our marriages are ‘legal’ thanks to our religions, why do our divorces need to be affirmed by the state? If holding a man against his will is called ‘kidnapping’ or ‘enslavement’, doesn’t refusal to divorce also counts as such? Aren’t pre-nups just common sense and shouldn’t they be part of common law? And what assumptions are made in deeming two parents bound together in a luckless marriage is better for a child than a single parent?

No one actually answer these questions. They divert the attention away from the flaws of marriage itself to the flaws of divorce. Divorce courts, alimony, paternity suits, broken families etc. are not the results of divorce, but of the failure of marriage. Critics point out that more marriages are failing now because of our failing values. I don’t know about that. Our values, if anything, are shifting; birth control, feminism movement and parenthood outside of marriage–all of which contributed to marriage’s fall from grace–are not what I call ‘failing values’. We have reached a point where we no longer need to tie ourselves to a stronger, more capable person. We evolved thus far from Cro-Magnon hunters-gatherers.

Then how about our children? We were trained by centuries of folklore, literature and motion pictures to think that a stranger cannot be a good parent. From Hansel and Gretel to Parent Trap, we are exposed to this idea without any statistical proof. We came to live by it, but not it is time to grow out of it. Time magazine ended its article by saying that through our failing marriages we are sending a wrong example to our kids, which “is the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old”. Probably that same demanding, self-centered mentality is why some marriages just don’t work.

“To have and to hold” read the Common Prayer. Sometimes, we just need to let it slip.

Boom or Bust in Iran

Iran’s Ahmadinejad once called for a baby boom to double the country’s population to 120 million and ‘defeat’ the west. In the end, baby boom may just be a weapon to topple Iran’s theocracy.

I am not a subscriber to Carlyle’s Great Man theory. Socioeconomic factors–which coincidentally produced these great men–form and shape the great events. And sometimes we don’t even need a great men to helm the birth of a great event.

It is under this light that I view the ongoing struggle in Iran. It is not a battle amongst Khomeni or Moussavi or Ahmadinajed. It is a battle of ideas and concepts greater than these men. It is a battle between theocracy and its oppressed masses. It is a battle catalysted not by the Western media (as they alleged) but by an Iranian baby boom. Yes, you read it here first, a baby boom is going to topple the Iranian theocracy.

Baby Boom. It is a dangerous concept. A boomer is not born political but it usually matures into a highly political one. Consider the United States’ baby boom from the late 1940s to the early 60s. It led not only to social unrest of the 60s and the 70s but also to the stagflation and other economic problems of the 80s.

The youth are dreamers and idealizers. It was only logical that they were at the forefront of Woodstock and anti-Vietnam movements. When they reached an older age, an economy that couldn’t provide enough jobs for them went into a recession. This shockwave left by the post-WWII babyboom was not only felt in the United States but also reflected in the socioeconomic woes of many Western nations from the 60s to the 80s. The ‘68 Student Revolts in Paris and labor unrests in England leading to Thatcher years were a few example of this babyboom.

But Iran today do not mirror post-WWII Europe and America. Its boom is similar to the Romanian one that happened artificially in 1960s. Always known from repressing women, Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceausescu implemented harsh antiabortion measures in 1967. After this infamous decree, the total number of births doubled immediately. From 1966 to 1976, Rumania produced nearly 40% more babies than might otherwise have been expected. In 1972, there were twice as many children in kindergarten as the year before. In 1989, twice as many 22-year-olds were flooding into the labor force. As Ceausescu was unable to create jobs in the late 1980s as rapidly as mothers created babies in the late 1960s, a disenchanted demographic was born. In a communist country where jobs were everything, this spelled the doom for Ceausescu’s regime.

The Islamic Revolution and its misogynist stance in Iran brought forth a similar pattern. The country’s population grew from 35 million in 1979 to 65 million. Population growth peaked at 3.2% in 1986. Now, in a nation where the legal marriage age is nine, and where Islamic doctrine calls for more babies, at least 45% of the population is under 20 and 60% under 30.  (Prophet Mohammed said two things opposing birth control: that he was proud of those who had a large number of children and that he hoped that the number of Muslims would outnumber all other faiths by Doomsday).

Some birth control measures were implemented in the late 80s and 90s, but very little was done to provide education and employment to these boomers. Now, it is too late. The boomers have arrived; in 2007, unemployment was nearly 12%; now it is 20%–a steep rise considering Iran’s economy was free from much ramblings in the financial sector last fall.

In a study conducted in 2000 by a reformist mullah called Mohammad Ali Zam noted that 73% of Iranians (86% of students) did not say their daily prayers. It was a surprising secular turn for a country which had embraced a religious revolt only a generation ago. With these numbers and this modernism in mind, it is not surprising that the most news of the Iranian revolt arrived to us through Twitter and Facebook.

Iran’s theocracy may be able to survive this wave of unrest, but it will not outlive the babyboomers. This is always had to govern a nation this frustrated–especially if the disenchanted are the impressionable youth. But as we anxiously await and observe this dramatic denouement in Iran, we must also gear up for further climaxes in the region.

Approximately 70 percent of Saudis, Iraqis and Afghans are under 30. The Middle East witnessed an enormous babyboom as the oil prices peaked in the 70s. Whereas the mullahs in Iran had succeeded in reining the population growth by the 90s, other countries failed. They now need lebensraum, education, employment and energy resources. As these commodities become scarcer, we face a daunting challenge. We must help them or would risk losing these youth population to radicalism. Hamas, and Hezbollah both won democratic elections thanks to their populist approach directed towards the youth. Should we prevent such outbursts of vox populi? Do we have moral imperative to soften their tone?

By the sheer force of its numbers, the boomers remodel societies as they passed through them. Their effects are unpredictable. In hoping for change, the boomers usually meet their self-fulfilled prophecies. We must hope so in Iran and we must ensure that their hopes and dreams are for the society’s remodeling rather than its shattering.

Present Future in Iran

As punditry flares up and revolution falters in Iran, we look back to look into not forward.

If there is one thing that political scientists and analysts fear, it is unpredictability. It is like a Himalayan mountaineer fearing a blizzard—merely a job hazard. However, since we had tried so hard to present our field as a branch of science (with all these professional looking charts, pies and equilibrium diagrams), we try to predict obstinately in the face of political vicissitudes.

To ‘predict’ the unpredictable, we usually set up tree diagrams and probability charts to see the likelihood and ramifications of an event. We just don’t want to get off-guard. Last weeks’ events in Iran were interpreted thus—with analysts from left, right and centre unfolding the future of the Iranian people and pulling off that old phrase ‘domino effect’ from the dusty shelves.

The scene was highly reminiscent of the collapse of the Soviet Empire twenty years ago. The cataclysmic event was so unexpected that the political scientists had to resort to analyzing predictions of a Russian filmmaker. In the film, released in 1989, Gorbachev was overthrown in 1992. The Russian heartland is ruled by an ultra-nationalist military dictatorship, the Baltic republics by Catholic radicals, and Central Asia by fundamentalist emirates. Tanks patrol the streets of Moscow, and throughout the country a fearful, starving populace wreaks revenge on former Communist Party members, Jews and intellectuals. The film also predicted ethnic anarchy between 15 newly independent republics.

The implosion of the Soviet Union finally arrived, but the most dramatic of predictions didn’t materialize. Ethnic anarchy and fanatical nationalism never solidified. Although regional tyrants did seize power in Central Asian republics, religious radicalism also turned out to be a false prediction. The names of former Communist Party members were protected, once again showing the triumphant of common sense over wild imaginary predictions.

In the 1960s and the 1970s, the United States fought in Vietnam under the shadow of this ‘domino effect’. Analysts feared dominoes from Indonesia and the Philippines to Bangladesh and Burma would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence if the United States were to falter in Vietnam. And eventually falter it did, but dominoes did not fall. True, Laos and Cambodia were lost to the communists but interpreting Communism as a monolith, we didn’t see the killing fields of Pol Pot nor Chinese wars in Indochina in our crystal balls.

That is why last week’s predictions by neocons and liberals alike of Iran’s future may or may not hold. Neocons are gleeful that their bête noir, President Ahmedinajed is still there. Liberals want the cracks in the system to become chasms that could potentially become the regime’s doom. But are we missing the point? Are we missing any other possibilities?

That is why we need to take Iran’s new revolution at its face value. It is as big as the revolution that brought the ayatollahs to power and is a clarion call not only to the West but also to the ayatollahs and other regional leaders. Apart from that there is very little we can predict for the future. The action is now when it comes to Iran.

A window has opened briefly in Iran and in waiting for a better opportunity, we might be missing our chance. After all, future unfolds in mysterious ways. We could either be spectators in the future or the leaders and guides of the current situation. But in the world where mass hysteria sometimes trumps rational predictions, we should be acting now. Now more than ever.

The Purple Menace: Barney the Communist Dinosaur

Communism will never destroy America. But as Generation Barney matures, we look back at the dangerous legacy of communism’s top entertainer.

Throughout the 20^th century, popular entertainment was never just that. Thanks to the Legion of Decency, a kiss was never just a kiss, and a knowing smile had deeper meanings in the early part of the century. Later, better messengers proved to be the forms entertainment directed towards the youth.  Superman and Captain America battled every single public enemy and moral outrage of the age; the most enduring ads (Disney’s I like Ike, Duck and Cover) were conveyed through animation.

However, no other children’s television program in America was as iniquitous and reprehensible as Barney and Friends. The PBS Kids’ TV show about an anthropomorphic purple dinosaur doubles as a pinko commie propaganda machine promoting communism and socialism and exposing young and malleable minds of millions of American children to these dangerous and subversive ideas.

Before we started pointing fingers, let’s see what Barney brings to ‘preschool’ children, its targeted audience group. There were accusations that Barney promotes denial and ill-prepare the children for the existence of unpleasant realities. Many scholars and psychologists detest and denounce the show for it. However, children don’t go to these TV shows to learn about real life, so we need to bring the conversation about Barney to what it is within instead of what it is without.

Firstly, there is unhealthy eating. Barney consumes only peanut butter jelly sandwiches, while his girlfriend Baby Bop eats macaroni and cheese and pizza—the staples of American diet. The promoting a diet of peanut butter jelly sandwiches to preschoolers is unacceptable but mac and cheese and pizza—that is just downright wrong. The young minds are easily impressionable; in the age when we should be promoting healthy eating and well-balanced diet, the show was a slap in the face to many a nutrition expert.

Then came his theme song: “Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination”. The show was first aired in 1992, right after the fall of the Soviet Union. Choosing an extinct animal and reviving it may not directly suggest communist revival but Barney was originally meant to be red. Yes, red—like communism whose fossilized remains it came to symbolize. The production team claimed that red as a primary color would attract young childern’s attention, and only after a child psychologist warned that a bright red dinosaur could be perceived as threatening, color purple was chosen.

Thus like the Soviet Union, a purple Tyrannosaurus Rex remained an unnatural entity. Two additional lines from his theme song added to his unnatural, dishonest nature: “Barney shows us lots of things/Like how to play pretend” and “Barney can be your friend too/If you just make-believe him!” I don’t know what the producers (or the children who ‘imagined’ Barney to life) were smoking/drinking.

Children who grew up with Barney will remember a slew of his most famous songs. Apart from ‘I Love You/You Love Me’ with its hippy, free love message (another fossil from the 70s), all of his other songs and episodes promote communism towards young and defenseless children.  [‘I Love You/You Love Me’ song was not so innocuous either. Entirely devoid of musical value, it was used by the U.S. military in interrogating terrorists. It is probably a thousand times worse than waterboarding.]

Barney asks children to clean up after themselves. Although it might probably have been a great idea for parents to implant in their children, his actual lyrics are terrifying. “Clean up, clean up everybody everywhere. Clean up clean up everybody do your share,” sounds like a quote copied from Big Brother. It had been the propelling idea behind Stalin’s collective farms and Pol Pot’s killing fields. A world where everyone do the same ‘share’ instead of maximizing utilities and profits by outsourcing is not an idea espoused by anyone since Adam Smith. It is downright socialist.

The next message cements Barney’s stance as the premier agent provocateur of communism. “Sharing is caring” had been his message. In addition to becoming the tag-line of online piracy, the quote shed light into the minds of Barney’s creators (and its masters in Kremlin). Sharing is a communist idea; it leads to a society whose very norms inhibits the personal growth and motivation. How can a person be motivated if his society promotes sharing instead of gaining the benefits through his own exceptional work? It was the flaw with Peter Singer’s model world. In addition to that cheery, idealist society where everyone receives the same wage and the benefits, sharing leads to a brave new world where state-sanctioned theft was promoted. That is Barney’s world. That is Marx’s world.

The best example of this line of thought was epitomized in the song “Peanut Butter and Jelly”. “First you take the peanuts/And you crunch ‘em,/Then you take the grapes/And you squish ‘em,/Then you take the bread/And you spread it” were the lines directly taken from the song. Peanuts symbolize farmers and landowners. Grapes symbolize not only bourgeois class but also religion. (Grapes have been an enduring symbol of faith, fertility). Barney is promoting a society where we oppress  farmers, landowners, bourgeois and even religion. To do what? To take the bread and spread it. Ambiguously pronoun there brings back uneasy memories of breadlines behind the Iron Curtain.

“Communism will never destroy America,” proclaimed many politicians. But now as Generation Barney matures as and many who were directly related to Barney show becomes the icons of showbiz, we see America’s sudden turn to the left—nationalizing banks, healthcare, increasing taxation, etc. Those communist, socialist and nihilist ideas ingrained when these kids were little were definitely showing. Are we headed towards a Kleptocractic world where the rule of the jungle (viz., Sherwood Forest) is not only allowed but also sanctioned? It is time to expose this communist conspiracy. It is time to condemn Barney.

The Tale of Two Deaths

Twin obituaries to a generation’s face, and its voice — by someone who doesn’t belong to that generation.

Yesterday, I started to write this obituary of Farrah Fawcett. For an actress who made her name during one season of a popular TV show, Farrah’s shadow was long and her stride bold. I didn’t have that iconic poster of hers, but her face itself was iconic–it was the imprimatur of a changing generation, the symbol of a shifting trend and perhaps the face of the 70s, 80s and even 90s.

Indeed, hers was the first face of an actress I remembered from my childhood, which is surprising because I grew up in the 90s. Maybe I saw her in reruns of Charlie’s Angels–I don’t remember–but both my parents were already remembering her with nostalgia and esteem by the 90s.

Public memory was more divided on another celebrity whose death delayed this obituary. Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, who died yesterday at the age of 50, was also a larger-than-life figure. To some, he was an unparalleled genius but to people in my immediate vicinity, it was a matter of secondary importance.

This summer, I am living and mentoring a dorm of highschool sophomores and juniors, who broke the news of MJ’s death to me. It was one of those “you know where you were when…” occasions. I checked online but no major network (CNN, BBC, NYT) has called it yet. Several gossip sites were already proclaiming his death, but it wasn’t on wikipedia yet. That didn’t prevent the highschoolers from ‘celebrating’ his death with his songs. Gathering from their words, Michael Jackson with his almost extraterrestrial transformation, his fantasy Neverland ranch, his molestation charges, his eccentricities was merely a caricature, a bete noir we all love to hate.

Then, there is the older generation. I am not talking about those born in 70s and 80s, to whom Jackson was the voice of the generation as much as Farrah Fawcett was its face. I am talking about even older generation–that of our parents, to whom Michael Jackson was an usurper–the usurper of that ‘rightful’ iconicity occupied by Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles. Sandwiched between these two generations, I personally showed very little liking for Michael Jackson’s music; when I reached the music-listening stage, his once unique cords and choreographies were already trite.

Inside the Actors Studio, James Lipton asks ten questions complied by the French philosopher Berhnard Pivot to every guest. The last question is, “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?” Neither Farrah or Jackson appeared on the show, but both would be glad to hear ‘You did make a difference’ from the lips of the Almighty. That is what a lot of people were saying this morning, and afterall, Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

OMG, Omegle…!

In the age of ‘Net, moral degradation can come from anonymity and privacy. I report from that last frontier.

Last week, a friend sent me a link about www.omegle.com, an online chat website which pick ‘another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each’ anonymously, according to their website.

Omegle has an entry in wikipedia (so it might be a pretty big deal, right?), and was mentioned in a New York Times article. So, against common sense and my better judgment, I started using it. It went lackadaisically uneventful for me after a few minutes, but my friends—they are less fortunate. They were assailed by raunchy messages in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Dutch—which says something about the general social ineptitude of people in those countries, and also about what people do when anonymity is handed out to them.

Out there, it is like the chatrooms in the fledgling day of the Internet minus collective monitoring. Now, it is one-on-one and proposals for cyber-sex apparently galore in multitude of languages. It is like Babel mixed together with Sodom and Gomorrah.

We fear a day when governments will track our IP addresses and take away the last semblance of online privacy and anonymity. With websites like facebook and twitter, we are moving towards less private world in which everyone can see and judge us for what we are. Through Omegle, anonymous blog posts and comments (and perhaps even Second Life) we veer towards another extreme—an underground anarchistic world where cowards, perverts and hackers hide behind their monitors.

As we navigate the happy medium between these two extremes, we must also be aware that our online personae live in an ever-evolving world. In an age when etiquette, decency and accountability are fast evaporating, privacy and anonymity can be the last things we can hold on to. Yet, this too shall pass. In the future, when we—the facebook generation—become the employers of the next generation, how could we look down upon our employees who had put up incriminating pictures/stories on their websites?

Maybe we could, but let us not be hypocritical but be be public, frank and accountable.

Up: Pixar’s Wonderful life

Their latest offering is part farcical, part tragic. It is a story only Pixar can make so appealing.

It is a long overdue movie from Pixar. They have conquered land, sea and space. Their latest hit—succinctly titled Up—soared into air and certainly lived up to the expectations. Although it didn’t break the milestones set by Wall-E, it reaffirms them. Wall-E is a pretty hard act to follow, but Up is 9/10, if Wall-E is 10/10.

Pixar loves to place familiar characters (superheroes, fishes, robots) in unfamiliar situation. Up is no different—it is a heartwarming story between a grandfather-figure and a little boy. However, instead of the little boy living vicariously through his older counterpart as we saw in countless movies like Princess Bride, it is the other way around: Carl Frederickson, a curmudgeonly square-figure modeled after Spencer Tracy lives vicariously through his long-dead wife, Ellie and a boy scout he inadvertently acquired.

Up probably is the least serious movie Pixar had made in a long time. Dogs that talked through collars, a man nearing his 150^th year living in an isolated corner of the world and a house uprooted and lifted by balloons. I personally didn’t like some of these aspects—and a lot of people in the theatre I went to were puzzled by them—but these aspects dim in comparison to Up’s overarching themes.

With its stunning visuals or silent grandeur, Wall-E beats Up, but Wall-E’s parable on love and environmentalism loses out to Up in the profundity of message … and Up makes its message within the first ten minutes too.

A musical number that chronicles Carl and Ellie’s lives is part elegiac, part allegorical. Up is about life—life we live in the shadows of our heroes, life haunted by our memories, life constrained by our ideals, desires and cravings. Like the house Carl so uncannily carries on his back like a snail carries its humble abode, our past life—Pixar noted—is sometimes a cherished memory and sometimes a daunting burden.

One of Carl’s cherished memories that will come back to haunt him was that of his and Ellie’s hero, explorer Charles Muntz. It is comedic when we saw a similar story in The Incredibles, but in Up, it is heartrending. Carl’s stoic, taciturn but cynical features betrays little of his disappointment but we who have lived through it realize the deep ramifications behind his facade.

That is why the story of Russell, whose familial situation was never fully explained, was simultaneously intriguing and tragic. It is oft said not to judge someone without knowing them fully, but in Up, Pixar showed us how we are not only a Greek chorus in the story but also unwitting participants. It is the story of our lives—maybe it is vicariousness without empathy, but in being vicarious, we become empathic too.

Well done Pixar. I won’t be amazed if Up is It is a Wonderful Life of tomorrow.

Democracy’s loss is our gain…

A Machiavellian Primer: How we will lose the battle and win the war in Iran

American people don’t vote in large numbers; turnouts are depressingly low. It may be a collective action problem, but the Americans just don’t have to vote in numbers. They know their country is in good shape, and they know—so does Gallup—that a few voters can make educated choices.

However, when people do go to polls in unprecedented numbers, it is only to vote out an old flawed government. A referendum on the existing government, a large turnout is a sign that many people are angry with the old government. That is why it is surprising that last Friday, people elected the old government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, despite a large turnout.

Or did they? I am not going to dwell on the ‘irregularities’, we can create something productive, something useful out of this rigged election. Yes, Machiavellian it may seems but we are jolly well going to get a profit out of this god-send (or should I say Allah-send) opportunity.

As Washington begin its proposal for negotiations with Tehran, we all know that the power lies with the ayatollahs and not with the elected officials. Ahmadinejad is an irrational, but ironically enough, predicable character. Using his past words, the U.S. can get a win-win situation out of his second term—if Ahmedinajed negotiate, it can lead to a peaceful Middle East. If he does not, he is repudiating his (doubtful) words on rapprochement with the West and he also risks losing the confidence of now-already-sour Iranian people.

However, on the other hand, with Moussavi, we lose our biggest card—Ahmadinejad himself. The megalomaniacal president calling Israel’s annihilation is someone we love to hate. He is our Hitler. His bland opponent is more unyielding than Ahmadinejad on the nuclear issue, and lacks the support of the ayatollahs. Negotiating with him will lead us nowhere.

Speaking of the ayatollahs, now that they themselves are advocating for an electoral investigation, use the UN to send overseers. If they allow it, it is a step towards transparency. If they don’t, it is as good as a signed admission that the election is rigged.

Well, actually, it is rigged—we know it. The Russians know it and the Chinese do too. Should we be trumpeting this fact and alienating not only the ayatollahs but also the people who still pride that theirs is at least a ‘democratic’ country compared to many others in the Middle East? Instead, we should use the diplomatic brokering to convince the Europeans—France, Great Britain and Germany in particular—that their conciliatory approach towards Iran is not actually working, and that nations like Libya or Iran could never be democracies through negotiations.

Elsewhere in the world, Ahmadinejad’s win is a god-send card. In Iraq, it is their ‘Red Scare’ card. With President Obama’s troop withdrawal plans, the Iraqis should cast aside their religious and ethnic differences and come together as a nation—and a US ally at that. A hardliner regime in Iran can help this. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia–which don’t want a Shia (Iran) bomb–this election puts a leverage on their leadership. Now, with Ahmadinejad’s win, they have to try their best to aid US in containing Iran. Reciprocally, the US can use ‘nuclear proliferation’ card with China and Russia even more strongly now. In Israel, Netanyahu–with his hardliner agenda–is smiling. The US can now finally explain why undemocratic Iran or its irrational leadership threatens Eastern Europe and therefore necessitate a missile shield. The Russians won’t buy it, but they will have to live with it.

When the mullahs of Iran deliver a lemon, we will not only to make lemonade out of it, but also shove it down their throats. Mills of God grind slowly but …

Don’t get that excited.

I am a social liberal, but this morning’s Sotomayor nomination riled me up. Firstly, the nomination continues the recent political trend to nominate judges who are far removed from the actual governing. The best courts had at least one legislator–Sandra Day O’Connor, Hugo Black, Abe Fortas, Earl Warren, etc.

The nomination of a female, colored supreme court justice is exciting, but concerning ourselves with racial debates vitiates the very relevance and impartiality of the highest court of the realm. It is false and presumptive to assume that a colored candidate should (blindly) advocate for that race. I am not saying Justice Sotomayor will favor Hispanics, but that is what the Hispanic community expects of her….and there are detrimental precedents too: Every time the name of an African American justice is mentioned, there are shrill calls, “Marshall, not Thomas,” indicating that the black community wants someone as vocal as Thurgood Marshall as if a justice of another calibre or reticence is not representative of their cause. Sotomayor’s nomination is already clouded by her decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, in which she threw out the results of a firefighter promotion exam in which no minorities qualified for promotions. This is not the impartiality we want at the supreme court, which is currently debating to overturn Sotomayor’s decision. It is not fixing history’s mistakes. It is a reverse discrimination.

Some say the president is saving political capital by nominating a moderate liberal for a seat vacated by similar moderate. However, some (by which, I mean, I) see a wasted opportunity–the presidency sadly is limited in length, scope and breadth. The next year, the Mid Terms will come and who knows whether the democrats will be able to maintain its filibuster-proof majority. With relatively young Roberts, Scalia and Thomas firmly in conservative docket (with Alito sitting with them more often than not), the Americans need more liberal voices to balance the court, just to service what William J. Brennan called the first rule of the Supreme Court (rulings by five of the nine justices).

The next big debate for the supreme court would be with the same sex marriages since states from New Hampshire to Iowa are seriously debating and changing the existing legislation. The supreme court must gear itself for at least one issue concerning DOMA or same sex marriage in next few years. It is a sad missed opportunity that the nominee is neither Kath Sullivan or Pamela Karlan–openly gay legal scholars no less distinguished than Sotomayor.

When Justice David H. Souter retired, New York Times ran an article noting (perhaps somewhat disparagingly) that Souter was no Warren or Brennan. Most of us will agree, and if Sotomayor got confirmed, we will have to face twenty years or so (just pray her diabetes don’t interfere) of moderation. In the face of modernity, such stagnancy can be fatal. Yes, the centre of the court will be well tended, but it is to be noted that she is no Antonin Scalia or Pamela S. Karlan.

A Few Thoughts on Elitism

That famous socialite Leonore Annenberg had to resign her post as the White House protocol chief after curtsying to visiting Prince Charles. Michelle Obama was praised for breaching the protocol and touching Her Majesty, while her husband was demonized for bowing to the Saudi King. For a country that gained its independence by deposing a king (and crowning many more since: king of rock, of late night shows, poultry production; czar of drugs, intelligence, etc.), small gestures like these spoke shrilly.

I am not titled (no thanks to a morganatic marriage made a century before I was even conceived) and I am entitled…. and that’s probably how most of my friends view me–a naive, harmless simpleton who hid his second-rate intellect and closed mind behind a first-rate fortune. The latter, combined with my parents’ occupation, was enough to send me through an English boarding school and a prestigious American university, two bastions of elitism.

I don’t own a Ferrari, a Bond Street wardrobe or a villa overlooking Lake Como (all, perhaps, telltale signs of extravagance, rather than elitism) but I know people who do. I dined with royalty, presidents, dictators and ambassadors. My family and I were overnight guests of American actors, Greek shipping magnates, and British lords. The Conde Nest executives came to grouse hunts with us, I rode with the professors from Oxbridge, and every year, without fail, comes that coveted invitation to Royal Enclosure at Ascot. It is good to be an elite.

Why am I expounding on this? U.S. Presidential Election. On this side of Atlantic, the political system doesn’t look favorably upon the E-word. During this election season, the word ‘elite’ and ‘elitism’ was so excoriated that it paved the way for the rise of a ditzy, gun-toting, grammar-disrespecting governor. Inside my university–an institution that frequently produced presidents, senators, supreme court justices and other ‘elites’–the word was frowned upon, citing, “All Men are created Equal”. The framers of those lines ironically belonged to those ‘elites’.

‘Elitism’ is the closest the United States has ever come to aristocracy. Those East Coast WASPs who liberalism entails evading taxes and donating to charity organizations. They are elites, but elites also include those like the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the DuPonts, the Vanderbilts, a veritable who’s who of American greats, who asked what they can give to their country. Yet, it is a closed community too. An Ascot invitation had to be endorsed by someone who had been going there for years. A nouveau riche, unlike most French words, is only used with disdain.

But just became someone shops at Whole Foods, or gets a Prius means they are elitist. Sometimes, we have to be proud of our elitism. Sometimes, we have to be grateful that our lineage prevented Europe from the barbarians, fought for morality and decency in the heart of darkness, and produced great philanthropists. Sometimes, we have to be entitled that we went to Eton, Harrow, Oxbridge, the Ivies. Sometimes, we have to acknowledge that we eat healthier, live cozier. We have to be thankful for this (hence adding an ‘P’ to WASP and sending our kids to strict Catholic schools) but we can be thankful for giving back to.

By running for elected office or through charities, there are many ways that we can affect change. We have wherewithal and publicity to do it. Why waste it on some holiday home in Aspen or a $2,000 Max Mara? Be the change.

Meanwhile, the line “All Men are created Equal” remains a cheap punchline to a motivational poster. Perhaps because men are not created by some ethereal being, as much as our elitist prep-school education would like us to believe.

Terra Australis Incognita

The Southern Unknown Land–that was how Australia was known (along with Botany Bay and New South Wales) collectively before some Scottish busybody (Governor Lachlan Macquarie) popularized the current name in the early nineteenth century. I knew that–but we know surprisingly little about Australia and Australians, except the fact of course that they have weird animals and even a weirder animal watcher.

So, I was surprised to find in a friend’s room a 300-page travel journal, written by Bill Bryson. I like Bill Bryson’s books but I couldn’t imagine why he (or my friend for that matter) would want to travel to Australia. Granted that they have great beaches and forests, so do a lot of other more hospitable places (it is just me but a place devoid of any poisonous creepycrawlies counts as a more hospitable place in my book). After a brief disagreement with my friend about the Ayers Rock (with him insisting upon the unpronounceable name of Uluru-Kata Tjuta–yes, some letters underlined no less), I opened Bryson’s book. 

It is called, “In a Sunburned Country”. It is excerpted here. It began with the usual Brysonian mumbo-jumbo about how little he knows about the place. Well, everything is funny and sightly amusing until this moment:

“[in 1997--that book was released in 1999, so a little outdated] scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.” 

WTF? Someone set of an atom bomb in Australia and no one noticed it? Bryson continues: “Aum’s substantial holdings included a 500,000-acre desert property in Western Australia very near the site of the mystery event. There, authorities found a laboratory of unusual sophistication and focus, and evidence that cult members had been mining uranium. It separately emerged that Aum had recruited into its ranks two nuclear engineers from the former Soviet Union. The group’s avowed aim was the destruction of the world, and it appears that the event in the desert may have been a dry run for blowing up Tokyo.” 

I will probably buy the book for my summer reading (I can link the Amazon page of the book here, but I’d rather not, just because they won’t pay me) just to laugh at the Australians and the Japanese. But the, even after reading Bryson’s books on language, I still don’t understand why the Australians are plural and the Japanese not so–so I consider all my previous spendings on his books wasted.  

… and he comes from Des Moines, Iowa — which apart from being named after monks, also produced my college roommate (apparently they even share highschool alma mater) — which just proves my point that nothing important and nothing good come out of Iowa. 

A Photographic Memory of Art

1914: The Arrest of Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip is unintentionally one of the most influential people of the 20th century. The 19-year-old Serbian student started World War I by pulling the trigger on Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. After shooting Franz Ferdinand and his Duchess Sophie von Chotkovato, Princip–the member of the Black Hand organization, tried to shoot himself. A man behind him saw what he was doing, and seized Princip’s right arm. A couple of policeman joined the struggle and Princip was arrested. The above photo, one of the biggest photodocumentary scoops of the century was born as Princip was being led to a police station. After a 12-day murder trial in Sarajevo in October 1914, Princip was sentenced to 20 years, the maximum penalty since he was younger than 20 when he committed his crime. Probably tubercular before his imprisonment, he had an arm amputated because the disease spread to the bone. He died in hospital in April 1918.

1933: Migrant Mother

Dorothea Lange was one of the photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the social condition as a result of the Depression. Exhausted from photographing farms in Nipomo, California, Lange turned down a dirt road to investigate a migrant camp of pea pickers. In less than fifteen minutes, Lange was back on the road after making five exposures of a woman (Florence Thompson) and her children in the camp. She submitted one of these images (titled Migrant Mother) to her agency. The image put a face to the Great Depression, and became its symbol as well as one of the most iconic and important photographs in the history of photography.

1944: Cartier-Bresson’s Matisse

Henry Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Henri Matisse is fully of ironies. The great French painter, known for his use of color and called Fauve (wild beast) is depicted in black and white, surrounded by birds. Moreover, the photograph does not show energetic, vivid Matisse remembered by many of his contemporaries. Although it is taken in 1944, ten years before the master’s death, Matisse was already a broken man. In 1939, he and his wife of 41 years separated. In 1941, he underwent a colostomy, which confined him to a wheelchair. His daughter is a captive in a Nazi concentration camp. The photograph showed all these ravages. Cartier-Bresson and Matisse remained good friends–when Cartier-Bresson published his seminal book, The Decisive Moment, Matisse drew the cover for him. 

1945: Potsdam Conference

When the Great Powers assembled in the conference room at Potsdam’s Cecilienhof palace in July 1945, it was without doubt that a Quadripartition of Germany was imminent. The conference’s progress had been hindered by the change in the British government and by Stalin’s illness, but the end result was certain on everyone’s mind. The U.S. Army photographer Frank Gatteri’s picture of the council room at Potsdam reflected this atmosphere. Unlike any other photograph of the event, Gatteri took this picture from a high vantage point, revealing all parties’ cards and reminding the viewers the earlier cartoons of partitioning nations. Josef Stalin is the only figure distinctly recognizable in this figure–it is as if Gatteri foresaw that the shadow of Uncle Joe would be upon Eastern Europe even after the other people around the table (Truman, Attlee, Eden, Byrnes) were gone. 

1949: Picasso in Madoura

“Why not have him draw in the dark, with a light instead of a pencil?”  mused the photographer Gjon Mili as he was on his way to the Riviera to photograph the painter Pablo Picasso. At Madoura Pottery, Mill accomplished just that; he showed Picasso some of his photographs of light patterns formed by a skater’s leaps – obtained by affixing tiny lights on the points of the skates. Picasso reacted instantly and this photo of Pablo Picasso drawing a centaur in the air,  taken in the dark with a flashlight, was born. ‘This spectacular “space drawing” is a momentary happening inscribed in thin air with a flashlight in the dark – an illumination of Picasso’s brilliance set off by the spur of the moment,’ wrote Mill in “Picasso’s Third Dimension”.  

1954: A Man of Mercy

W. Eugene Smith took a magnificent photoessay for LIFE in 1954. A Man of Mercy, which chronicled Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s humanitarian work in French Equatorial Africa is at times controversial because Smith used his darkroom prowess to manipulate and composite negatives. [See Schweitzer's famous portrait, where a second negative of the hand and saw is superimposed on the first] However, in the above photo, the photography plays a second fiddle to the documentary–Schweitzer tired after a hard-day’s work is seen working back to his quarters. In the foreground play the Africans who contrast sharply with the white-washed tents Schweitzer set up in Lambaréné. It is a documentary of what a true Christian Empire looks like.    

1959: Eisenhower at the Lincoln Centre

During Robert Moses’ program of urban renewal in the early 1960s, a consortium of New Yorker led by John D. Rockefeller III started ”Lincoln Square Renewal Project” to transform the place into New York’s new cultural centre. Thus, Lincoln Center was born. On May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower thrust a shovel into the ground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to signal the start of construction. The occasion was lavishly commemorated. Leonard Bernstein was the master of ceremonies; the New York Philharmonic (which Rockefeller lured away from its old venues at the Carnegie Hall) and Juilliard Chorus performed the national anthem. The baritone Leonard Warren sang the prologue to Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.” The mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens sang the “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen.” 

1966: Chagall at the Lincoln Centre

In this photo of Sept. 8, 1966, the painter Marc Chagall poses by his mural “Le Triumphe de la Musique,” The Triumph of Music, during the unveiling ceremonies in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, in New York. Through the transparent windowpanes of the building, The Sources of Music in yellow (right) and The Triumph of Music in red (left) dominate the frontal view of the opera house. Although specifically created for the opera house, there were various autobiographical elements by Chagall in those paintings. Only at night, the murals are on view. During the day they are covered with white sheets in order to protect them from the sun. 

1974: Nixon in the Knesset

Richard Nixon disliked Jews and may even have been anti-Semitic. However, in Israel, Nixon is fondly remembered for his role in saving Israel in the dark days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. When Israel had run dangerously low on ammunition during the war, Nixon sent planeload after planeload to resupply the depleted Israeli military stocks. The relations between Nixon and Golda Meir remained strong throughout their administrations. In June 1974, Nixon visited Prime Minister Rabin–the first visit by an American President to Israel. Under central tapestry which depicts the history of the Israelites from Moses to the Holocaust in the Chagall Hall, the President spoke to the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. The picture by Harry Benson shows the president being upstaged and propped simultaneously by Moses who is seemingly preaching the Law to the beleaguered President, who will resign a few months later.

 

Coal Day In Hell

Coal is not good. Coal has no future. Yet, its Frankensteinian corpse is being revitalized by lawmakers and  the future of the coal industry is not as grim as it should be. So we dig for coal, and in process, we dig our own graves.

Coal is not good. Its difficulty to mine, transport and noxious burning severely limited coal’s widespread use when it was first discovered in pre-Industrial times. However, since then, our economies has dramatically shifted and now coal is the power behind many a developing nation. However, coal costs only 4 cents per kW-hour, which is the cheapest among all the alternative fuels if you exclude hydroelectricity (which is not really abundant). In comparison, natural gas and nuclear power costs 5 cents/kWh and wind costs 7 cents/kWh while solar energy costs whooping 50 cents/kWh. Coal’s relative cheapness becomes more apparent if one takes its energy density into account-energy from coal is roughly one-tenth the cost per unit mass as oil or natural gas (see Robert Zubrin’s Energy Victory, 2007).

In 2004, the New York Times ran an article, “Fuel of the Future? Some Say Coal,” which discusses the possibilities of lucrative investments in newly resurgent coal sector. Although policy uncertainty poses big risks for such investments in the coal industry, the investors are banking on the fact that the U.S. government would be unwilling/unable to take punitive actions against the coal industry.

Currently, America is driven by its own energy thirst. Although America’s own dependence on coal is not as serious as those of growing, developing Asian countries, the U.S’s own national security is at the stake with coal. As the possessor of the world’s largest hard coal reserves, the United States would not–and could not–let the industry die. After the September 11 attacks, the coal industry gained support from the American government which aimed to reduce its dependence on the Middle East Oil. 

Bureaucracy kept coal alive. Current Energy Secretary Stephan Chu once said, ‘Coal is My Worst Nightmare’. On the campaign trail, Obama was under criticism for saying that new coal plants will face bankruptcy unless they account for the future. However, now Washington, both of them have changed their tunes and seem to have espoused Bush’s Clean Coal Doctrine.  

Coal being such an important political, economical and social issue, it is not very surprising that there are attempts to make coal producing and coal consuming more palatable. At the forefront is the ambitiously titled “Clean Coal” initiative, supported by President George W. Bush and quickly endorsed by both Senators McCain and Obama during the election season last year. However, as the Sierra Club’s director Dan Becker pointed out, ‘clean coal’ is an ‘oxymoron’. The industry use the term to loosely refer to the number of technologies being developed to reduce the negative externalities of the coal usage. Burning coal produces chemical impurities (carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, etc) which intoxicate the environment by poisoning water supplies, polluting air and creating acid rains. Chemically washing minerals from the coal, capturing noxious emissions and storing them, and dewatering coal are a few methods proposed for clean coal but they are merely cures but not preventions.

The most vocal clean coal technology (and lobby, one is tempted to add) concerns removing of ash, soot and other particulates from the exhaust of the coal-fired generators, and desulfurization. However, after carbon capture and storage or IGCC installations, the cost of coal power will be raised by 40-90 percent (Sierra Club statistics). If this is the case, natural gas and nuclear power seem better alternatives. Even if American aid goes to clean emerging Asian coal plants, retrofitting old plants is a costly, efficiency-reducing and long-term process. In addition, ‘clean coal’ initiative blithely ignores other devastations caused by coal mining and transportation not to mention toxic ground water caused by the chemicals used in mining and bitumen.

In addition, coal advocates predicts the future as if the coal reserves of the world are limitless. This is not the case–if coal is produced at the current rates, the U.S. reserves would last only sixty four years. 

There are no real solutions to the coal dilemma–increasing the efficiency of the coal power plants fall under the umbrella of the clean coal, but a better alternative is to create internal market for carbon sequestration through cap-and-trade system. Carbon tax is an effective blanket tax on all emissions, but the political feasibility of such a tax is near zero. However, coal usage could be gradually phased out in the United States; first old coal power plants where there is extremely high cost for limited benefit can be effortlessly shut down. New coal plants should go through a thorough federal scrutiny and should be forced to use cleaner and more efficient method so the production will be economically unprofitable. However, in the other countries (especially China), such a control would be impossible. 

So the next time someone say we must find the new alternative energies to break oil addition, please be aware that we must break coal addiction too. Coal is not a substitute for oil, and coal addiction is not the substitute for oil addiction.

Three Photos, Three Wars

The Death of A Loyalist Militiaman

This picture of the Loyalist Militiaman is a photo taken by Robert Capa for the French magazine Vu. Although it is taken during the height of the Spanish Civil War, the photo is not about the Civil War itself. The vacant spaces make up the majority of the picture. The main focus is on the man-one Federico Borreli Garcia-but his identity or those of his executioners matter a little in this deeply impersonal photo . He is fighting against the forces he neither control nor see-a war that is so removed from his everyday life, and one that is so removed for the viewers too. 

The picture is not about the war’s destructiveness-the face of the falling soldier is almost relieved. Even the ravaged countryside of Spain is not showing in the picture. The picture is not about the physical warfare-amazingly absent from the picture are mortars, armies or other accessories of war. The picture is about the void it creates, the catharsis it provides from life and especially its mysterious presence (or lack thereof). War is vilified in the picture, not through visual blood or gore, but through its absence and the silent and subtle nob to man’s nature to fear the Great Unknown.

The Execution of A Vietcong Guerilla

There were a lot of pictures taken during the Vietnam War-those of burning monks, fallen soldiers and whirling helicopters. But this picture by Eddie Adams is the one that defined the conflict and changed history. In the sharp contrast with Capa’s Falling Solider, personalities and identities did matter a lot in this picture. Amazingly, the picture that polarized the American public and shown the personal nature of the Vietnam War did not involved any Americans. It was the gunshot heard all over the world.

It is almost dehumanizing to personally witness the execution, no matter what the victim had done. It mattered a little that the person about to be executed was a Viet Cong Guerrilla responsible for killing twelve only that fateful morning. America–a nation that still supports death penalty by overwhelming numbers (for various reasons)–was shocked to its core.  In the picture, its framing, its lighting and its depth mattered little. For instance, picture was cropped again and again just to display the general and his victim. However, the act, ‘the thing itself’ spoke directly–the general is the personification of America’s hidden hand and her dirty involvement in the Vietnam Quagmire. Within two months, President Johnson would be announcing his desire not to pursue a second time. 

Exposing of A Gestapo Informer

Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the greatest photographers of our time. He himself was a German prisoner-of-war and successfully escaped to France only on his third attempt. His photograph from inside Dessau exposed the society’s collective anguish in the aftermath of a war. It was a deeply personal photograph for him, and he ensured that it is a personal photograph for every viewer. 

In a camp of displaced persons waiting for repatriation, a Gestapo informer who had pretended to be a refugee is discovered and exposed by a camp inmate. The faces are the most striking part of this photo. On them are the judge’s aplomb, the denouncer’s rage, the Gestapo informer’s resignation, and faces of apathy and anger that frame the picture. The picture draws the audience into that anguished circle of the wronged. Had Cartier-Bresson been a painter, these would have been the allegories of Rage and Shame standing before Justice with a Greek chorus in the background. And we are that Greek Chorus. The intimate circle ensured that we share not only Agony, but also Shame and Responsibilities in the Aftermath of a War.

 

The Greatest Story Ever Sold

On Easter Sunday, one of the most mystifying of all the Christian holidays, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ–a semi-legendary man who may or may not have lived in Judaea two thousand years ago. To what extent is the story of Jesus original and true? To what extent is the story embellished or contrived? 

A lot of pre-Christian customs were adopted by Christianity, because eradicating them will only alienate the people whom they are trying to sermonize. It is not coincidence that one of the earliest writers of Christianity, St. Jerome was a pagan scholar and theologian. Jerome’s Vulgate Bible–amalgamation of truth and fiction, pagan and Christian is to this day the authoritative Bible of the Catholic Church. Jerome and other founders of the Church outlined one important part of Christian belief: that there is some good in everything, and that in general things can be redeemed instead of being destroyed.

So old customs remained. Easter Bunny–the pagan symbol of vernal fertility–being just one example. The Easter Bunny joins other esteemed figures like God himself in the pantheon of pagan symbols.

Six thousand years of Bibical narrative looks down upon the visitors in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. The most striking figure is of God himself, lushly illustrated by Michelangelo, as the wizened, muscular old man. The Bible said nothing about God being an anthropomorphic being. Judaism and Islam both rejected this representation of God. Christianity drew its inspiration of God from the ancient Hebrew god which appears to have originally been a local, tribal storm god and some polytheistic tradition. Muscular, bearded Zeus, the pinnacle of Greek god hierarchy served as a model for Christian God. Like Zeus, Christian God attempted to remove humanity from the face of the Earth by sending a flood.

And Christianity’s most famous symbol, the Cross? It is not original either. One of the most enduring human symbol, the cross quadrants the world into four elements and four cardinal points. The union of vertical divinity and horizontal secularism is frequently the symbol of Egyptian deities (compare Ankh) and Norse gods alike. The cross represented (and represents) the tree of life, and its usual portrayal inside the sun in Prehistoric Europe suggests its comparability to the yin-yang symbol of the Orient.

The arrival of baby Jesus (as the King of the Jews) was announced to the King of Judea Herod the Great by the Magi. To prevent his throne being challenged, Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem, creating an event now known as the Massacre of the Innocents. This episode, not recorded by any contemporary historian, is pure hagiography, which gave Christianity its first martyrs. The story drew its inspiration from the another earlier Biblical tale in the Exodus about the killing of the Hebrew firstborn by Pharaoh prior to the birth of Moses. This extremely suspicious description linking Christianity and Islam–the Moses stroy was recounted in the Quran too–was a trite literary trope. A similar story on Mordred’s birth appeared in the Arthurian legends but the source is thought to be the 7th century BC biography of Sargon of Akkad, who lived in the 24th century BC.

As predicted or annunciated (the birth of a religious leader of some importance, be it Buddha or Mohammed is usually uncannily foretold), Jesus did arrived through virgin birth. An oxymoron which laid the foundation for the Catholicism is by no means unique to Christianity. It is a long standing tradition burrowed from earlier polytheistic traditions where badly-behaving gods go about in assumed forms to impregnate women. Zeus was notorious for it; Hinduism is full of it and the practice is even observed with the Aztecs. The Zoroastrians furthered copied the concept from the Christians to elevate their prophet who lived in the 6th Century BC to divinity.

The New Testament doesn’t not give a date for the birth of Jesus. The first authority to date Jesus’s birth was the 3rd century scholar Sextus Julius Africanus, who conviniently placed the Annunciation on the spring equinox (March 25 on the Roman Calendar) and the birth on Sol Invintus, the feast-day of the unconquered Sun and of several gods associated with Winter Solstice in many pagan traditions. [Sol Invintus is a Syrian god later adopted as the chief god of the Roman Empire under Emperor Aurelian.]

If there was one single person primarily responsible for the fundamental feast days of Christianity, it was Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, who in 321AD introduced Christmas as an immovable feast on 25 December. He introduced movable feasts (Easter) and also designated Sunday as a holy day in a new 7-day week. Sunday, the typical day for the sun worship, was chosen for obscure reasons but the Bible itself vacillated between Friday, Saturday and Sunday in its descriptions of the Holy Day. (Some contend that Sunday was chosen because it was on a Sunday that the Resurrection occurred; the crucifixion indeed occurred on a Friday and the Resurrection indeed is recorded on the third day, but it being a Sunday depends on how you count).

Christianity drew inspiration from other pagan religions and sometimes try to show its superiority over the earlier polytheistic beliefs by uniting their selling points. Christian notions of eating and drinking the “flesh” and “blood” of Jesus were influenced by the cult of Dionysus–a mystery religious cult very important in Asia Minor and Greece. Dionysus, the God of Wine and Bacchanalia, is also thought to be the inspiration behind Jesus’ Marriage at Cana, which was only once reported in the Gospels despite its apparent importance. At the festival of Dionysus, three water pots are placed in a sealed room and the following day be found to miraculously be filled with wine. Dionysus’ feast day is on January 6th, and the Marriage at Cana took place on the same day.

Ever story needs a villain and Judas provided color to Jesus’s hagiography. Judas is the 13th person to sit at the Last Supper–bringing misfortune to the number. Twelve-Thirteen Dilemma Effected many an early religion and still have its discernible impact today. Loki in the Norse mythology is also the 13th god–and in order to be 12th, he engineered the murder of Baldr, and was the 13th guest to arrive at the funeral. Twelve, the dozen, is universally regarded as a perfect number–there were twelve Olympians for instance. By outcasting Judas, the Christianity incorporates the magic of the numbers into its religious diktats.

The Greatest Story Ever Told ends with a cinematic climax–the Resurrection of Jesus. Human beings’ fascination with death and afterlife ensured that this too is neither original nor revolutionary. The resurrection is expected on the humanity–like one enormous zombie uprising–on the Judgement Day, by both Judaism and Christianity. However, the idea of gods leaving their bodies behind or resurrecting comes down from ancient Egyptian Goddess Isis (who receives this divinity through tyet–a comparable symbol to crucifixion cross). Isis also resurrected her husband Osiris (who has been killed in an episode mirroring Cane and Abel) who like Jesus died again soon afterwards. As late as 6th century AD, the believers equally venerated Osiris and Jesus in Egypt.

Jesus’ face itself is based on one of history’s most depraved. Since the Middle Ages, art was considered as religious expression, and the Borgia family was notorious for painting themselves into the Biblical milieux. Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI became a Cardinal at 17, a commander in the Papal Army, a patron of Leonardo da Vinci and many other artists. Many of his contemporaries have left varying descriptions on Cesare’s appearance, but the celebrated portrait by Altobello Melone which depicts pondering and placid man belies Cesare’s bloodthirsty and depraved nature inside. However, when Altobello Melone painted his Christ figure in 1520, he drew inspiration from his earlier Cesare Borgia portrait, inadvertently blurring the distinctions between the visages and the ethnicities of one of history’s one holiest figures and one of its most depraved.

Jesus is succeeded by Peter, and other shepherds of the Church. No matter whether Jesus himself existed or not, his successors embellished his story (and history) to an extent that if Jesus were to return today, he will be flabbergasted–for instance, pagan or not, Christmas is now belongs to another latecomer with dubious background, Santa Claus. The fact is that we have been sheep for more than two millennia. Like sheep, we are being herded and chased into following someone, going somewhere, and giving something. May be it is time to rebel against that dogma most famously outlined in Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd.” I alone should be my own shepherd.

Little Things That Changed History

From Roman Chariots to Modern Railroad

The distance between the rails on a railroad (also called a gauge) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. This awkward distance comes from the length wide enough to accommodate the back-end of two horses. Yes, the first military vehicle to be mass-produced was the Imperial Roman Chariot, and they were specifically made to be just wide enough to accommodate two horses’ asses. When Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe for their legions, they built in ruts into the road. Rome may be long gone, but the rut remained and every man and every wagon maker since has been using the Roman rut distance for their wheels and axles. From wagon, the practice was transferred into trams and then into the modern railroads. Such was the power of tradition and human reluctance to change/adapt.

1st Century AD: Lead pipes fell the Roman Empire

A lot of causes has been cited at the source of the decline and the fall of the Roman Empire–decadence, incompetency of the latter empires, and internal strife. However, it seems that lead, the noxious metal the Romans used in water pipes and bath linings, was behind the fall of one of history’s greatest empires. Musonius, a Roman writing in the first century A.D., observed that masters were weaker, less healthy and less able to endure labor than the servant class. What Musonius didn’t guess was that the mysterious maladies were coming from the lead in food, water and wine. To boil crushed grapes, vintners insisted on using lead pots or lead-lined copper kettles for the best quality. Lead’s sweetness complemented food as well–the metal was used in one-fifth of the 450 recipes in a Roman Cookbook, complied by the gourmet Apicius. It was also used in the cosmetics. However, its toxicity and abilities to cause mental instability and impotency overlooked, lead would go on to play a major role well into the middle ages–its crowning achievement being the moveable type.

1347: Bubonic Plague kills Latin

There were many epidemics that plagued the Middle Ages, but not many epidemics were as devastating as the Black Death that occurred in the 14th century. Carried by the Mongols, who had been invading Eastern Europe for the past century, the first outbreak was recorded among the Tatar army ranks besieging the Genoese city of Kaffa in the Crimea in 1347. Over the next three years, the Bubonic Plague will sweep nearly every corner of Europe, killing a third of the population. The plague also set in motion one of the greatest linguistic transformation in history. Among the people who suffered the worst were the clergyman, who lived in close quarters in monasteries and attended their dying parishioners. Half of the Latin-speaking clergy died. Semi-literate laymen replaced these clergy, which hastened the fading of Latin and the rise of vernacular English, French, Spanish as languages of learning. Germany received the worst of the plague and it stunted the development of the German language. In addition, after the plague, the dwindling population demanded higher wages, consolidated wealth and broke free from the old feudal system. The new middle class and its vernacular language slwoly gained economic and social importance.

1415: Rain wins the Battle of Agincourt

Much has been written about the Battle of Agincourt–the stunning English victory over a larger French army in the Hundred Year’s War–starting with Shakespeare’s Henry V. Centuries of politicians and military strategists extolled this as a victory of both leadership and technology (longbow). However, it was another factor that played a bigger role in that fateful October day, 1415. Indeed, the odds were against the English – the troops were exhausted, hungry, and dysentery-ridden. Also the night before battle, heavy downpour left the English soaking wet. However, the rain was a blessing in disguise. It turned the battlefield into a quagmire. Having no cavalry of his own, Henry V was unperturbed, but the French cavalry, weighed down with heavy armour, were bogged down. The horses lost their footing in the mud and fell or ran into each other. They became an easy prey to Henry’s longbows, and within a few hours, a victory was secured. Above, central panel of ”The Battle of Agincourt” the triptych by Donato Giancola (2007).

1519: The Plague that Gave Us Bread and Butter

In 1519, Polish forces were besieged in the fortified town of Allenstein, a Polish town on the Prussian border. During the siege, the town was struck by a plague–a plague that comes from a contamination in bread supply. Sanitary conditions in the town were very bad, and the coarse black loaves were usually dropped in the dirty streets. However, luckily for the town, the noted scientist Nicolaus Copernicus [above] was in the vicinity. A man named Gerhard Glickselig suggested to Copernicus that the bread loaves be colored with a thin layer of light-colored spread, which would make it obvious if the bread was dropped or if debris fell on it. Copernicus ordered it be done, and the plague soon ended. For the first time in history, bread and butter were combined and the custom slowly spread in Europe during the following century.

1520: Jesus got his image from Cessre Borgia

Since the Middle Ages, art was considered as religious expression, and the Borgia family was notorious for painting themselves into the Biblical milieux. Some pictures of Jesus Christ produced in their time were based on Cesare Borgia, and that this in turn has influenced images of Jesus produced since that time. Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI became a Cardinal at 17, a commander in the Papal Army, a patron of Leonardo da Vinci and many other artists. Many of his contemporaries have left varying descriptions on Cesare’s appearance, but the celebrated portrait by Altobello Melone which depicts pondering and placid man belies Cesare’s bloodthirsty and depraved nature inside. However, when Altobello Melone painted his Christ figure in 1520, he drew inspiration from his earlier Cesare Borgia portrait, inadvertently blurring the distinctions between the visages and the ethnicities of one of history’s one holiest figures and one of its most depraved. [Above, Christ is the leftmost figure in Melone's Walk to Emmaus. Cesare is painted by Melone on right.]

1648: Dwaves to Democracy

One of history’s most dramatic entourages was maintained by Ferdinando I and Francesco II, brothers and dukes of Mantua in the early 17th century. Their penchant was for dwarves. In the process of collecting them, they managed to bankrupt the Mantuan state. Their family, the Gonzagas, had amassed what was at the time probably the greatest private art collection ever assembled. To pay for their dwaves, they had to sell the art. The buyer was Charles I of England. He wasn’t on very good terms with Parliament, and the purchase of the Gonzaga art collection helped put him over the line into the red, triggering the English Civil War. So constitutional government in the Sceptered Isle rests, in a way, on a pair of Italian princes’ insatiable need for dwarves.

1715: Nature Gives Us Stradivarii

Scientists for decades have been trying to explain superb sound quality behind violins of Antonio Stradivari. A group of American scientists claim that a drop in temperatures between 1645 and 1715 (because of a reduction in sunspots and solar inactivity known as the Maunder Minimum) enhanced the quality of wood from which the instruments were crafted. These factors slowed tree growth, thereby creating the ideal building material for violins later manufactured according to the tree ring science journal Dendrochronologia. This also explains why history’s most famous violinmakers—Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari—all hail from the 17th and early 18th centuries. Other contending theories however state that Stradivari and his contemporaries used a special varnish (the secret of which has been lost today), or that the wood was chemically treated, soaked in water, specially dried, or stored for long periods of time.

1862: Close but No Cigar

The bloodiest one-day battle in American history came on September 17, 1862 when some 24,000 soldiers died in the clash between Union and Confederate troops at Antietam Creek. The battle’s outcome was decided by McClellan’s ability to predict the Confederate Army’s movements–however, McClellan got his help from three cigars. Yes, the outcome of the battle and of the Civil War was decided by three lost cigars being discovered in a field. A Union solider discovered Special Order 191 wrapped around three cigars; the order noted Lee’s army’s movements. Although McClellan waited long enough to lose the opportunity to defeat Lee decisively, Antietam became the first battle in which Lee’s army had been denied its main objective. Lincoln decided to release the Emancipation Proclamation only after the Union victory at Antietam. [Prior, a string of disastrous Union defeats had prevented Lincoln from issuing the proclamation for fear of appearing desperate]. In the proclamation’s wake, the war not only gained a higher moral purpose, but also record numbers of now-emancipated slaves joined the Union Army, thereby increasing its military strength. A carelessly lost parcel containing three cigars extended the American Civil War for four years, tipped the scales to the Union side, and altered forever the United States’ future. And as , in great part, it came down to that carelessly lost, cigar-encasing battle plan. [Above, Lincoln at Antietam]

1873: Jamming leads to an iconic keyboard

The QWERTY keyboard, so-called for the top row of letters on its left-hand side, came into existence because of a terrible structural flaw when the typewriters were first invented. In the first practical typewriter, designed by an American Christopher Sholes in the late 1860s, the keys were arranged in a sort of circular basket under the carriage. The first typewriter was extremely prone to frequent jamming at fast typing speeds. To solve the jamming problem, Sholes and Co., who had originally arranged the keyboard in alphabetical order, decided to put the most commonly used letters as far apart as possible in the next model. The next year, 1873, when they came up with the new invention which would set the standard of the keyboards. A faster, more convenient keyboard ‘the Dvorak’ was patented in 1932, but the cost of changing into a new system perpetuates the Qwerty.

1940: A Geological Map aids the Miracle of Dunkirk

The Miracle of Dunkirk was portrayed as a “divine” injuncture where the British Expeditionary Force incredibly were saved from the marching armies of Hitler. However, the ‘miracle’ wouldn’t have happened without an inadvertent help from Hitler himself. Hitler’s specific orders to halt the advance of German Troops for 3 days (which gave the British enough time to escape) was one of the last unsolved mysteries of the World War II. Some historians contend that Hitler was thrown into panic by a geological map, which convinced him that his tanks would be trapped in waterlogged, low-lying fields near Dunkirk if he let them advance. Hitler was haunted by his own experience as a solider in the notorious Flanders mud, but the land was dry and safe for tanks during this period and Hitler’s frontline panzer commanders sent a message to Berlin. Immediately Hitler rescinded the command, but the rain began to fall, which made the fields genuinely impassable, allowing the evacuation to be completed despite Luftwaffe attacks. It was the pause that lost Hitler the Second World War.

Oh the Humanity!

To say I don’t pay much attention to modern ‘art’ is a gross understatement. In truth, I try to block modern ‘art’ from my system. Yet, in a strange reversal of fortunes, I found myself visiting not one but three modern art exhibitions in past few weeks. I had hoped to blog that my prejudice is washed away. In fact, the opposite just happened: my disdain is further cemented.

Above left the picture of a gallery marked ‘installation in progress’ in the MoMA. Judging from the quality of the other art on display in the MoMA (above right, a display of cardboard boxes), I will say the distinction is blurred between what is modern and what is left sloppily unfinished.

I was in the MoMA, the great citadel of modern art in New York, but I found less than a fifth of its collection interesting. I like impressionism, admire the efforts behind pointillism and accept cubism. However, as I descend into the lower levels of the MoMa, the level of art portrayed also diminished. I was confronted with monochrome or even blank canvases which looked eerily like an awful cutout from a Piet Mondrain. I was confronted with the canvases on which paint is dribbled (sometimes thanks to Jack the Dribbler himself) which would be a museum worthy piece only if it had been done by an orangutan.

When I was not making judgmental comments on the creativity (or lack thereof) of the modern artists, I was being assailed by modernist sculpture or performance art–folded or torn pieces of paper, bundles upon bundles of cardboard boxes, and one man’s sadistic efforts to cage himself. This Kafkaesque performance art (Hungerkunstler, anyone?), albeit not pointless, is nothing but a shameless, narcissistic and even a pathetic ploy of a failed artist.

Among the modern artists, Andy Warhol is someone whom I can at least accept (although with serious doubts about the man’s mental stability). That is why I went to de Young Museum in San Francisco yesterday to look at Andy Warhol exhibition. Although I can tolerate atrocious product placement in his work (Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola, Brillo soaps), some work–especially those done in his Silver Factory, a den whose ‘creativity’ lies in it being covered by aluminium foil–totally baffles me. The work seems the handiwork of a bunch of fraternity pledges having the time of their life.

The worst, however, is John Cage’s Four Minute Thirty-Three Second recording–which is less modern art than not-even-elaborate con-trick. Yet, Warhol, Cage and others left behind a legacy–a legacy now cherished only by their successor modern artists whom, I believe, now includes a bunch of 5-year olds (or those with mental agility of a 5-year old) who probably spent as much time with their brushes as I with my toothbrush.

Yet, this morning, I saw the news that Vatican has been trying to bless modern art. This following Pope John Paul’s blessing of breakdancing a few years back, I wouldn’t say I am surprised. I am just disappointed in the humanity. I may just be a disgruntled snob but I believe a disgruntled or confused mob makes up a silent majority. I have a gut feeling that we, the silent majority, usually walk through these modern art gallery scorning privately, or laughing cynically or mocking shrilly at incongruent, incomprehensible, abhorrent modern art. Well, at least, I know I do.

Most Beautiful Charts In History

Smoot-Hawley Spiral

The flawed protectionist measure enacted in 1930, known as Smoot-Hawley Act led to decreased international trade and furthered the Great Depression. The full disastrous effects of the act are usually portrayed in economic text books with an ugly spiderweb chart, which serves as a silent testament to the perils of protectionism.

Salyut Cyclogram

Very similar to Minard’s famed charts (see below), this chart is handmade by a Russian cosmonaut, Georgi Grechko. The ‘cyclogram’ shows a 96-day flight of Salyut 6. Some 22 parallel time-series show 1500 sunrises and 1500 sunsets during the flight, a schedule for space walks and baths, and visits of resupply ships bringing equipment, fresh fruit, and gingerbread.

Harry Beck’s London Underground

Before Harry Beck, the underground lines are superimposed on road maps. However, it was Harry Beck who came up with the idea of creating a full system map in color, doing away with the geographical accuracy. Predicting that passengers riding the trains were not too bothered by those accuracies, Beck drew his famous diagram, a cross between a electrical schematic and a map, on which all the stations were more or less equally spaced. Initially scoffed by the authorities, the map gained popularity with the commuters and has since been copied by many underground services around the world.

Orbis Terrae Maps

Describing the world as noted by St. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century, Orbis Terrae (or T and O map) represented the top-half of the spherical Earth–a convenient projection which included only the northern temperate (and inhabited) half of the globe. The T is the Mediterranean, dividing the three continents, Asia, Europe and Africa, and the O is the encircling Ocean. Jerusalem was generally represented in the center of the map. Asia was typically the size of the other two continents combined. Because the sun rose in the east, Paradise (the Garden of Eden) was generally depicted as being in Asia, which was posited at the top portion of the map. The most famous specimen of this T-O map are Mappa Mundi–the maps made during the middle ages.

Nightingale’s Coxcomb

At a dinner party in 1856 that Florence Nightingale met William Farr, the Compiler of Abstracts in the General Registry Office. Together, they complied a mortality table, listing causes of death in the general population–a novel concept popularized by Farr. Nightingale compared Farr’s numbers with her own and created a chart which noted that even in peacetime a soldier faced twice the risk of dying in a given year as a civilian due to bad conditions in barracks. The 1858 graph (now known as “Nightingale’s Rose” or “Nightingale’s Coxcomb”) was a stunning visual graphic that revealed that it wasn’t wounds killing the highest number of soldiers – it was infections.

Playfair Wheat Chart

William Playfair pioneered the first “pie chart” in 1801. It showed that, compared to other countries, the British paid more tax. Altogether, Playfair invented four types of diagrams now taken for granted in statistics: line graph, bar chart, pie chart, and circle graph. One of the first people to use data not just to educate but also to persuade and convince, Playfair compared the “weekly wages of a good mechanic” and the “price of a quarter of wheat” over time in 1821 to cast a light on the straining wheat prices. His overwhelming success in statastics didn’t prevent him from being profiled as “an engineer, political economist and scoundrel”, by Victorian biographers who remembered him mainly for his speculative get-rich-quick schemes.

Napoleon’s Russian Campaign

“The best statistical graphic ever drawn“ noted the statistician Edward Tufte. Indeed, Charles Jospeh Minard (1781-1870) created more than fifty memorable “cartes figurative” but this one ["Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Français dans la campagne de Russe 1812-1813"] depicting the advance into and retreat from Russia by Napoleon’s Grande Armée “defies the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence.” (Marey, 1878) The map unites six different sets of data: geography, the army’s path, its direction, the number of soliders, temperature (in the republican measurement of degrees of réaumur) and time. [Napoleon entered Russia with 442,000 men, took Moscow with only 100,000 men, only to escape the Russian winter with barely 10,000 soldiers, which included 6.000 returning soldiers from the north.]

It is alive! It is a LIFE!

This morning, I received a wonderful email (but its wonderfulness didn’t prevent it from being deleted from my increasingly cluttered email account). The email said, “LIFE and Getty Images have joined forces to provide instant access to millions of breathtaking photographs … with more than 3,000 new photos added every day.” So, LIFE, thrice-defunct magazine, is reborn again as of this morning. 

To commemorate this occasion, I selected a few less-famous, but notable photographs that defined 20th century in this blog:

Kings of Hollywood

In the above picture (left to right) Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper and James Stewart enjoy a joke at 1957 New Year’s party held at the Crown Room in Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. A photo in the series of four made by Hollywood’s premier photographer, Slim Aarons, the photo-op came almost unexpectedly when Clark Gable cracked a joke at the photographer’s expense. The conspiratorial laugher invited many into the rarified lives of Hollywood’s elite, in the picture Smithsonian magazine termed “a Mount Rushmore of stardom” and the novelist Louis Auchincloss ”the very image of American he-men.”

Khurschev at the Lincoln Memorial

Burt Glinn took many notable pictures in his life—he is the right man at the right place for Magnum, a photo agency he co-founded. (He captured Fidel Castro’s triumphant entrance to Havana in ‘59.) So, it seems ironic that the picture for which he is best remembered for today was the result of his tardiness. On the famous picture showing the back of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s head in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Glinn recounted: “I was late and I couldn’t get to where everybody else was, in front of Khrushchev …. If I’d been on time I would have gotten a very ordinary picture of Khrushchev and Henry Cabot Lodge looking at this statue of Lincoln but you couldn’t see the statue.”

Exposing a Gestapo Informer

If Death of a Loyalist militiaman exposed the pain afflicted on the individuals in the face of the unknown, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Dessau photograph exposed the society’s collective anguish in the aftermath of a war. “Dessau, Germany, 1945. In a camp of displaced persons waiting for repatriation, a Gestapo informer who had pretended to be a refugee is discovered and exposed by a camp inmate whose face is illuminated by the strong, sharp light of rage.” — that was how the photograph was described, but the words fail to convey the emotions seeping out of the picture. Like many a master with paintbrush centuries before him, Cartier-Bresson paints allegorical embodiments of Rage and Shame standing before Justice with a Greek chorus in the background. Cartier-Bresson himself spent three years in German prisoner-of-war camps, successfully escaping to France only on his third attempt.

Warschauer Kniefall

A picture can speak a thousand words, and that is what Willy Brandt had expected when he silently knelt down at the monument to Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The gesture of humility and penance was not favorably viewed by West Germans at that time. 48% thought the “Kniefall” was exaggerated. The opposition tried to use the Kniefall against Brandt with a vote of No Confidence in April 1972 which he survived by only two votes. However, Brandt’s Ostpolitik and Kniefall helped his reelection, as his reformist policies helped Germany gain international reputation, and he went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.

Alfred Krupp by Arnold Newman

“By exaggerating or minimizing his subjects’ surroundings, [Arnold Newman] crafted impressionistic gems… that suggested his sitters’ personalities,” wrote TIME magazine. He did, taking pictures of Igor Stravinsky under the piano which suggested a musical note or of Andy Warhol, whose photograph is a reflection of the latter’s paintings. In 1959, Newman cast master builder Robert Moses as a giant against the Manhattan skyline that he helped to shape. The above photo, although not notable in itself, was at the centre of a minor controversy in Newman’s life; the intentionally demonic portrait was that of German industrialist and alleged Nazi collaborator Alfred Krupp. “As a Jew, it’s my own little moment of revenge,” Newman later admitted.

The Red Flag over the Reichstag

Directly inspired by Joe Rosenthal’s photo of raising the flag on Iwo Jima, Stalin ordered the Ukrainian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei take a similar photo that would symbolize the Soviet victory over Germany. Taking a Soviet flag with him, Khaldei flew to Berlin where he sadly found out that the Soviet soldiers had already succeeded in raising a flag over the Reichstag a few days earlier. Yet, Khaldei recruited a small group of soldiers and, on May 2, 1945, proceeded to recreate the scene. On close examination, the censors noticed that one of the soldiers had a wristwatch on each arm, indicating he had been looting. Khaldei not removed the watches from the photo, but also darkened the smoke in the background (right) to make his picture more dramatic. The resulting picture(left) was published soon after in the magazine Ogonjok to achieved worldwide fame.

Lady Diana At the Taj Mahal

During her trip to India with Prince Charles in 1992, Lady Diana is pictured alone at the Taj Mahal. On a bench (now affectionately known as Lady Di’s Chair) in front of the greatest monument to love, Lady Diana was photographed alone. A statement on her solitude and a symbol of her failing marriage, the photograph shifted the public sympathy from the stoic prince to seemingly vulnerable princess.

On the Fifth Avenue

Depressing, Nostalgic, Stimulating–my adjectives will deplete if I describe Fifth Avenue thoroughly

For the past two days, New York has been meekly trying to get on my nerves-it is deceiving me. The weather is great. The lines at the Empire State Building were shorter than I expected (yes, I am complaining that), thus depriving me of essential Soviet Uni-I mean-Big Apple experience. Both Metro (dirt cheap at 25$ for a week pass) and taxis (to whose ostentatious and signature yellow hue I don’t approve) prove to be accessible and annoyingly quick. It was just not what I had in mind.

I have been to New York once before. But behind the glasses of the limousine my mother’s company provided, and of the Millennium Hilton (also a courtesy extended to my illustrious mother), I barely witnessed the actual New York. Hotdogs, fashionable commuters, subways, that sort of stuff. (Our suite at the Millennium Hilton oversaw a depressing and drab Ground Zero and equally drab skyline of Jersey at the horizon).

So I forayed back to the familiar territory–Fifth Avenue. Yes, with my mom, I got to see the 5th Avenue. But I don’t remember it at all, and so I went back there again today. I am surprised (and almost shocked) to realize that I practically know all the names on the 5th Avenue, from famous (Cartier) to exclusive (Harry Winston) to exotic (Van Cleef & Arfels). But the jewel in the Crown of Fifth Avenue is the original Saks. Yes, Saks Fifth Avenue derived its name from the street.

I am a little disappointed in Saks too. Despite being the premier couturier to the rich and the famous (I am tempted to put the prefix in- in front of that word), Saks didn’t have bowties. After being directed from section to section (which included a foray into a men’s fashion salon on 6th Floor, occupied entirely by guys who I suspect are gay), and after being guilted into squandering my two months’ worth of allowance, I finally gave up. Also, I learnt a curious thing-although 2nd level of Saks in titled “Designer clothes & Fur” (or something along those lines), I didn’t seen a single animal hair, let alone mink or vicuna stoles. We cannot let those PETArrorists win!

Outside the stores of the 5th Avenue are not raving PETAs, but small vendors who sell everything from T-shirts to ‘designer’ eyeglasses to what-they-claimed-to-be Venetian silk. It is almost a sacrilege to see these shops there (local flair be damned); it is like seeing a brothel or a witchdoctor’s next to a Church. But I must not be too judgmental because that is what exactly the 5th Avenue is.

Cohabiting the 5th Avenue with the very abodes of the decadent luxury they denounce are Churches. At least three famed Churches coexist with the cathedrals of fashion. Cartier is just a building away from St. Patrick’s Cathedral-the largest Catholic Cathedral in the United States.

The best ways to end your Fifth Avenue Adventure exist at, surprise, surprise!, the Central Park South end of the shopping district. There are novelty horse carriages (highly reminiscent of Vienna if only the Viennese were more gaudy) on one corner, and novelty glassy Apple store on the other. [I didn't like the store that much, but at least I was in the glass elevator. Thank you, Steve, for fulfilling my Roald Dahl fantasies].

However, I didn’t end my ambulatory (writing that word is almost as tiring as the act itself) sojourn with Apple. I ended it with a well-deserved dinner to recuperate from walking and shopping at the Plaza, one of Manhattan’s best hotels which is also conveniently located at the end of the 5th Avenue to.

I won’t make a Plaza Hotel product placement here, but I will say although the choices are limited, the meal at the Rose Club restaurant there is perfectly affordable. Their appetizer is addictive to say the least, and their dessert is, there is only one word for it, sumptuous. The lobster was one of the best I have ever eaten.

May be I am little partial because my appetite was whetted (and my judgment clouded) by the hotel’s signature cocktail, the Plaza Manhattan. Created to mark the inauguration of Gov. Samuel Tilden at a Manhattan Club party way back in 1874, the Plaza Manhattan is served with Jim Beam Rye Whiskey stirred nimbly with Noilly Prat Sweet Vermouth and Angostura Bitters-which I found a touch more stimulating (my codeword for intoxication).

But hey, don’t blame me. Blame it on the person who depressed me to drinking five Plaza Manhattans. And it is not Maitre d’.

An Elegy for Facebook

I remember the first days of facebook. We uploaded pictures; we poured our notes and pokes into it; we started chain letters, invited each other just to access countless useless applications. In short, we were introduced to this Brave New World of our lives. For an increasingly needy and attention-seeking society, Facebook provide a life where you can have friends (or their pale virtual selves) around you 24/7.

This Brave New World added a new flavor and a new layer to our lives. Universities and employers are checking their applicants’ facebook profiles. Someone was sacked because she candidly wrote she was bored at work on her facebook status. We post arrays of compromising pictures online, taking pride in those virtual Scarlet Letters. Yet, behind the facade of vicarious empathy or shallow outrage, our increasingly Schadenfreude society smiles at our collective ‘brainless’ acts and laughs at those misfortunes.

Then only last month, we realized our privacy was robbed away. Actually, more appropriate phrase will be that privacy withered—much like our money and 401(k)s. Facebook’s new terms of use is the wake-up call for many of us although many of us blithely ignored the warning signs. (I can draw endless but painful analogies to the financial crisis here, but I will spare you).

Web 2.0 sundered barriers. Instead of being six degrees away from someone, we are less than a mouseclick away. Yet, we don’t want to know about them. I don’t want to know what my less-than-popular nerdy friend from six grade math class is playing. You won’t probably want to know what your banker who is probably responsible for your toxic assets is having for lunch. But that is exactly what facebook’s latest trend, “25 things you don’t (want to) know about me” is conveying. [A friend of mine is declaring his Presidential ambitions on facebook, even naming the exact year when he will throw his hat into the ring. (If Ron Paul is dead by then, he will probably get a following over the webfolk--or as I like to call them "The Lost Generation"). But I digress.] And that is why we are immigrating to Twitter.

Yes, Twitter is ugly, and not user-friendly. It is a relic of a time where we had no iPhones and our investment portfolios looked good (oh, it seems such a long time ago). But we (I speak for myself while shamelessly invoking 2nd person again and again) like it—its minimalist approach appeals to Luddites and nerds alike. A 140-letter status bar plus a snippet of a profile picture is a synecdoche of facebook, and may even be the latter’s demise.

Just because we don’t want to know about what brand of toothpaste you use.

It is not easy being green

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (or to less religious people like me, Leprechaun Day or Ireland Day), I listed a few culturally significant things that come into mind where thinking about the color green. The word ‘green’ originally comes from the Old English verb growan (“to grow”)–an etymology shared by German and Scandinavian languages. 

Kelly Green and Leprechauns

The shade of green typically associated with St. Patrick’s day is called Kelly Green. The name derives from the fact that the surname Kelly, as well as the color green, are both popular in Ireland. However, association of leprechauns with green originated in the United States in early 20th century. Before this, it was generally agreed that the leprechaun wore red and not green. Yeats wrote as late as 1888, that a leprechaun is “something of a dandy, and dresses in a red coat with seven rows of buttons.” 

Greenbacks

In October 2003, $20 (the most counterfeited U.S. money) became the first American dollar bill since the American Civil War that wasn’t just black and green. When the federal government issued currency during the Civil War, it was backed by the Spanish dollars. To prevent counterfeiting, it was decided the back of the bills would be printed in a color other than black. The color green was chosen because it represented ’stability’, thus coining the term “greenbacks”. Since then, green not only carries a connotation of capitalism but also of money itself. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum described the Emerald City, where everyone wears tinted glasses which make everything look green as a social commentary. [Baum supported the Gold Standard.]

Soylent Green

In 1973 Dystopian movie, Soylent Green, the human race ridden by global warming and overpopulation lives on a depleted Earth beset with unemployment and poverty. Real fruit, vegetables, and meat are rare, commodities are expensive, and much of the population survives on processed food rations, including “soylent green” wafers. The film describes the efforts of a NY Police Detective Robert Thorn (played by Charlton Heston) who try to investigate a murder. At the end of the movie, Thorn sees how the corpses are processed into “soylent green” wafers, thus causing him to proclaim the movie’s most memorable last line, “Soylent Green is People.”

Evil Green 

In Othello and The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare talked about envy being “green-eyed monster.” The moniker was just a Bardic interpretation of the centuries-old superstition associating green with evil. Green signified witchcraft, and base, natural desires of man, and was associated with faeries and spirits in English folklore. It is an unlucky color, and green cars, wedding dresses, and costumes are all the objects of superstition–a superstition which found its way to modern cinema. Green is the color of death [see The Shining for instance] and evil [The Grinch; Bela Lugosi who wore green makeup for black-and-white Dracula, the Wicked Witch of the West]. 

Go Green 

The first traffic lights were installed outside the Houses of Parliament in London in 1868. Green and red gas lamps used for the lights were taken from a railway station, but the tradition dates back to early seafaring times: port is identified by red and starboard by green in maritime right of way, where the vessel on the left must stop for the one crossing on the right. However, using green-red lights in New York in the 1920s nearly backfired: residents of Irish descent had objected to the fact that the “British” red was placed above the “Irish” green. Mao Zedong’s attempt to reform traffic lights was more disastrous; noting that Red, symbolizing Revolution must also come to symbolize ‘go’, Mao ordered the cars to go on red and stop on green. Many traffic accidents ensued and Mao had to recant his plans. 

Absinthe

In the historical literature, it is “la fée verte” (the Green Fairy). It is said that one sees green fairies everywhere under the influence of this strong (and some contend, dangerous) anise and herbal drink. Originated in the canto of Neuchatel in Switzerland, absinthe gained green popularity in the 1840s, when it was given to the French troops as a malaria treatment. The Bohemians (luminaries like Baudelaire, van Gogh, Oscar Wilde include) quickly embraced the drink, which ironically required almost dandy-esque preparation (Absinthiana). It is preparing by pouring ice water over a sugar cube placed atop of a specially designed slotted spoon patched on a glass of absinthe. [Above absinthe, below 'green' tea]

Islam Green

Prophet Muhammad once noted that,  “water, greenery, and a beautiful face” were three universally good things. Thus, the Islamic green, symbolizing religion, harmony and nature was born. In the Qur’an, people in Paradise wear fine green silk. Al-Khidur (“The Green One”), is a figure who met and traveled with Moses. The tribe of the prophet Muhammad had a green banner. Many Islamic nations and sects (Saudi Arabia, Hamas) have green flags, which culminate with Libya’s ascetically plain monocolored green flag.

All About You Forever

 

“All About You Forever.” So runs the slogan of Trinity de Cartier, one of the famed jewel house’s signature pieces. A friend of mine just got that $1,200 ring for her 23rd birthday (oh, not from me, who won’t even remember her birthday if facebook doesn’t remind me) which piqued my interest in this pinnacle of jewels.  

Made from three bands (white gold, rose gold, yellow gold), each band of the uncomfortable looking ring represents friendship, love and fidelity according to its creator, French artisan Jean Cocteau. Cocteau, who also popularized the ring by gifting many copies to his friends extravagantly, was inspired by the rings of Saturn and Russian traditional marriage rings, but Trinity de Cartier’s significance has moved on from martial scene.  

[Of course, when thinking about a wedding band, a three-band entwined ring is the first thing that come into one's mind. This reminds me of the quote, "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded," by Princess Diana, who once also was a proud owner of Trinity de Cartier.] 

The Trinity ring was introduced in 1924 but it remains one of the most enduring symbols of creativity, timelessness and elegance.  

To buy or to gawk at Trinity de Cartier, go to Cartier.com 

Most Beautiful Libraries In the World

The Library of Congress

The de facto national library of the United States, the Library of Congress is also the largest library in the world (by shelf-length). Although it is open to anyone, only the Supreme Court Justices, the U.S. Senators, and the President can check out books from the Library. [Among his other duties, the Librarian of Congress appoints the Poet Laureate]. 

The Westminster Libraries

The two library complexes of the House of Commons (top) and House of Lords (bottom) were built together with the Palaces of Westminster. Originally they served as map rooms, and committee rooms. The Derby Room in the House of Lords (pictured) is one of the most beautiful rooms in the building. 

J.P.Morgan Library

In an unassuming residence of J.P.Morgan exists his library, one of the hidden treasures of New York. The original private collection was preserved and expended by Morgan’s own personal librarian. The above picture is the newly renovated facade of the building.  

The New York Public Library

Featured in many movies and books, NYPL is an institution in itself. Also famous are two famous stone lions guarding the entrance–Leo Astor and Leo Lenox (named after the library’s founders, John Jacob Astor and John Lenox). The lions are also nicknamed “Patience” and “Fortitude”.

Boston Athenaeum

An art gallery and museum as well as a library, Boston Athenaeum in Boston, Massachusetts was founded in 1807. The library contains extensive Confederate war documents and papers from George Washington’s home. 

Duchess Anna Amelia Library

It burnt down in 2004–an ironic twist for a building that survived two World Wars–but its collection was saved. [In the rabble was discovered an unknown Bach aria]. Founded by Duchess Anna Amelia in Weimer, Germany, the library contains the largest collection of Faust-related manuscripts in the world.

Abbey Library of St. Gall

Considered one of the richest medieval libraries in the world, the abbey library at St. Gall contains 2,100 manuscripts from the 8th to 15th centuries, 1,650 incunabula (those printed before 1500) in addition to 160,000 volumes. The manuscript B of the Nibelngenlied is kept under this Swiss library’s magnificently decorated ceiling. 

Senate Library, Palais du Luxembourg

The French Senate is housed in the Palais du Luxembourg in the 6th Arrondissement of Paris. Behind the wonderful Jardin du Luxembourg lies the library of the senate, decorated by various masters (including Eugene Delacroix).   

Klementinum, Prague

Currently the National Library of the Czech Republic, the Clementinum is housed in the historical complex of buildings that date back to the 11th century.  Amidst its twisted wood columns and under its trompe-l’oeil frescoed ceiling, the Baroque library contains a collection of Mozartiana and works of Tycho Brahe. The Czech Government is building a new modernistic library (above) designed by Jan Kaplický.

Rich and Famous: Bejeweled and Bewitched

Looking the Look and Talking the Talk:

A Primer Into the Glamourous World of Jewels

One important factor of being rich and famous (in short being celebrated) is based on appearing to be rich and famous–outward appearance, superficial though it may be, matters a lot. Well that is why people like my mother still have their jobs, despite clothes they design now cover less than half of what they should be covering. What they lack in sartorial coverage, the rich make up with jewelery one. Here are the names they mention (and drop) when they talk about jewels: 

Operating 17 salons (7 in the U.S alone) is Harry Winston Corporation, the current fad-favorite accessory provider for the celebrities and actresses. Harry Winston designers also work closely with another American diamond behemoth, Tiffany & Co., whose clientele is more refined: it include famous US families (the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, etc), Hollywood stars, and European royalty. Tiffany & Co. is also the patent owner of its signature Tiffany blue color. [On the left is the famous Tiffany blue box which contains a surprise every woman dreams to acquire.] In Truman Capote’s short story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the protagonist Holly Golightly mentions Tiffany & Co. as “the best place in the world, where nothing bad can take place.” 

In 2004 film, The Phantom of the Opera, the protagonists performed under a chandelier composed of Swarovski crystals (right). Swarovski is now the luxury brand name when it comes to crystals, glass and crystallized jewelry–the rich and the famous are sporting Swarvoski-studded accessories, which range from sunglasses to magazine covers. Yes, magazine covers. 

The fashionable jewellery reaches its pinnacle with Chopard, Geneva-based company which also has a considerable gravitas in watchmaking too. Chopard became the name after it started sponsoring the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, and redesigned the festival’s top award, Palme d’Or. Through its cooperation with William Goldberg Diamond Corporation (NY), Chopard dresses every celebrity on the red carpet at Cannes with its jewels and watches. 

Yet, the time-honored firm for the aristocracy in Europe has always been the Parisian firm, Cartier–which is appropriately referred as Joaillier des Rois, Roi des Joailliers (Jeweller to Kings, King of Jewellers). It is now not only the official royal warrant holder for many a royal court of Europe, but also the number one seller of luxury jewelry  in the world. Its famous slogan ”Les Must de Cartier” (Cartier, It’s a must!) paid off. 

Another Parisian firm Baccarat is the late comer into the jewelry business, but it has been supplying glass and crystalware to creme de la creme o Europe since the days of Louis XV. In Paris, it boasts the Musée Baccarat which displays many of its finest productions. Italian firm Bulgari is quite a reverse story; started by a Greek (in the days when most well-regarded jewellers are Mediterranean in origin). Bulgari’s jewels, watches and accessories are very bold, minimalist and brutal (in one word, distinctive) thus making it more of the most counterfeited luxury goods in the world. (A tip: Genuine Bulgari items have a unique serial number registered with the company.)

In the olden days, people go to Antwerp, Hatton Garden (London) or 47th Street (NY) to peer behind the drab facades of the imposing buildings to scout diamonds; since 2001 they don’t have to. In that fateful year, the diamond behemoth (and former monopoly power) De Beers entered into a retail joint venture with Louis Vuitton to establish De Beers diamond jewellery company. Like De Beers, the House of Graff symbolizes the highest craftsmanship when it comes to diamond, and it still prroduces polished diamonds from rough stones. 

Christian Bernard Group is the leading manufacturer and distributor of watches and jewellery in Europe. The skill of its jewelers (especially in its diamond section, Damiani), quality of materials and faultlessness of design render it not only accessory of fashion but also its legislator in Europe. The group’s wide-reaching range (its products are on sale in 4000 boutiques worldwide) helped too.  

It was once considered improper to wear pearls in the daytime or to afternoon-evening tea parties. However, it has changed since the days of Wallis Simpson, who like pearls so much that she defied the snobbish society (as she would later do again with her marital choice) by wearing them to daytime activities. The Duchess of Windsor would approve of Mikimoto, the name when it comes to pearls. The originator of the practice of cultivating spherical pearls, Mikimoto is also a shrewd business model too. When Japan was facing oversupply of pearls, Mikimoto decided to expand its markets to Europe and America, but popularizing pearl in the Occident. Now, it is the official jeweller of Miss USA and Miss Universe.

These are the exceptional jewel firms, but there are very few legendary firms, but one of them is Van Cleef and Arpels, Parisian jeweler whose output is very limited but whose designs and concepts are creative. It has won particular acclaim for a groundbreaking gem-setting procedure known as the Mystery Setting. My personal favorite? Its ‘Snowflake’, to which appellation jewellery is an understatement akin to dismissing van Gogh’s Starry Night as a mere painting.  [Snowflake, right]

If jewels are like paintings, you need to know the masters too: Jeanne Toussaint of Cartier and Renee Puissant of Van Cleef and Arpels once dominated the jewel world. Oher who’s who of jewel fashion include Suzzane Belperron, Seaman Schepps, David Webb, Fulco di Verdura, Paul Flato, Raymond Templier, George Fouquet, Jean Schlumberger, Andrew Grima and Fred Leighton. No one but fashion gurus can remember those names, so the tip is to just remember the firms, not the designers.

 

My Twitter Adventure, first few minutes…

Reader, I joined Twitter. I don’t know exactly why but I joined–jumping into that tech-bandwagon late. (Hey, better late than never.) However, my first hour at Twitter is marred with “wtf?” moments.

Firstly, I learnt that none of my loser friends on my primary email carrier has Twitter accounts. To add insult to injury, my secondary (and vastly expanded) email carrier is not listed, and there is no way (at least not easy or easily accessible ones) to add your facebook friends–just great, just apt, just right.

Then, Twitter offered me its menu–its a la carte choices for me to follow. I don’t know how they randomize the choices or how they recommend different Tweets to different demographics but their recommendations to me include Tweets of once popular (but perennially obnoxious) Britney Spears (along with those of two not-at-all-famous singers, both female–I think I see a trend there), a Dell computer repairshop (because only thing Dell users need are repairshops), JetBlue airways (because its channel is more useful to Twitter than that of Chesley Sullenberger), an unknown writer, someone from Slate (the only one I care to follow in Slate may be Elliot Spitzer, but that has nothing to do with his writing abilities) and last but not least, BBC Click. Yes, not the news website BBC but the small, marginally informational IT-show on it.

I gave up, and tried to add Tweets to follow. I added No.10 Downing Street Tweet, because I thought their Tweets will be more informational than those from three female singers whose combined IQ score is probably less than what I paid for my last pair of shoes. However, I may be in the minority in that line of thought.

A grim happenstance dawned upon me as soon as I clicked on “Follow” to No.10 Downing Street Tweet. I received an instant email saying, you have one follower! And guess what, that follower is No.10 Downing Street. What sort of government follows its citizens? I don’t know but this No.10 Downing Street Tweet, which claims to be the official twitter channel for HM’s First Minister apparently follows 182,247 citizens. Somewhere, George Orwell is smiling smugly.

The Greatest Predictors of the Future, Part I

Although I am not a believer in this spiritual hocus-pocus, these ten people no doubt left their mark on history: 

The Oracle at Delphi

The most important oracle in the classical Greek world, the Oracle at Delphi is the major shrine for Apollo, who he slew Python (God of the Naval of the Earth) on that side.  The priestess of the oracle at Delphi was known as the Pythia and Apollo spoke through this oracle. The sibyl sat on a tripod seat over an opening in the earth, fumes from which allegedly entranced her and caused her to predict in riddles. The Oracle survived under the Macedonians, Barbarians, and Romans before Emperor Theodosius I ordered to close it in 395AD.  

Robert Nixon (?)

A legendary figure, Robert Nixon is known more famously as Cheshire Prophet. In one legend, he served under Edward IV and Richard III, while another  conflicting story notes he lived during the reign of James I two centuries later. However, in the early 18th century, he is the claimed source of various prophecies widely circulated in the leaflet form. In those, he apparently predicted the rise and banishment of Napoleon, the invention of cigars, the Jacobite rebellions and the abdication of Edward VIII.  The story surrounding Nixon’s death was equally intriguing: summoned to the court of Richard III (because he foretold the Battle of the Bosworth Field), he predicted that he would be starved to death there. The puzzled king ordered him to be kept in the kitchen but, because he was always picking at food he was locked in the cupboard. The cook was called away and Nixon did starve to death.

Ursula Southiel (Mother Shipton)

There is no really trustworthy evidence as to her ever having existed, but Ursula Southiel (allegedly 1488-1561) apparently descended from a long line of witches. Ursula from her infancy was regarded as ”the Devil’s child,” because of her sinister appearance. She got her gift of ability to foretell the future when she turned 24. Her predictions, typical of those of the time, were presented in riddles, often in verse, and dealt mainly and accurately with the the predictions of deaths of famous people, including Cardinal Wolsey. In the 1862 version of her life by Charles Hindley, Mother Shipton predicts the end of the world in 1881. In 1881 there was some panic in Britain as the prophecy had become accepted as true even though in 1873, Charles Hindley confessed that he had made up this prophecy.

William Lilly (1602-1681)

The famed English occultist William Lilly was a popular astrologer under King Charles I. Particularly adept at interpreting the astrological charts, he published his comprehensive Christian Astrology anthology, which has never gone out-of-print since, and which is now considered the textbook for the study of traditional astrology. After the Restoration, he quickly fell into disrepute because of his previous sympathetic predictions for the Parliamentarians. Lilly was at the centre of controversy in 1666 for predicting the Great Fire of London some 14 years before it happened. Many people believed that he started the fire,  and Lily was tried for the offence in Parliament but was found to be innocent. 

David Goodman Croly (1829–1889)

Although he is now remembered only for his anonymous pamphlet Miscegenation, which tried to discredit the Abolitionist movement, David Goodman Croly also left behind a legacy of predictions. He wrote a column of business, political, and social predictions for the New York Real Estate Record and Builder’s Guide. He made his reputation by predicting the Panic of 1873 two years in advance, even specifying the first bank (Jay Cooke & co.) and first railroad (Northern Pacific, above) to fail. He also made fifty-three concrete predictions “to be read now and judged in the year 2000,” of which forty are proved to be correct:  World War I; the Russian Revolution; women’s rights, aerial reconnaissance, etc. However, his other predictions include the United States drafting a new constitution and conquering North and Central Americas. 

Anton Johansson (1858 – 1909)

Known affectionately as the Christian Seer of Finnmark, Anton Johansson of Sweden is famous for the prediction of the sinking of Titanic. He also predicted the First World War in Central Europe, the Russian Revolution, the defeat of Germany in the First and the Second Wars. As an old man, Johansson was highly obsessed by what he termed a Third World War. He stated it would break out at ”the end of July, beginning of August, I do not know the year”, but went on to detail a Russian invasion of Europe and Middle East. 

Evangeline Adams (1868-1932)

The best known astrologer of her day, Evangeline Adams was said to have “raised astrology to the dignity of an exact science,” by the end of her life. However, this did not prevent her from being arrested twice in New York for fortune telling. [Once, she was acquitted after recounting to the judge the details about the death of his son.] She predicted the Windsor Hotel fire, the stock market crash of ‘29, World War II, the deaths of King Edward VII, Enrico Caruso, and even herself. Her books, now all out of print, are eagerly sought after by students, and even stolen from library shelves. 

Cheiro (1866-1936)

Self-described clairvoyant, and self-titled Count Leigh de Hamong, Cheiro (born WIlliam John Warner) took his name from the word cheiromancy, meaning palmistry. He read the hands of celebrities ranging from William Gladstone to Mata Hari. The skeptical Mark Twain wrote in Cheiro’s visitor’s book: “Cheiro has exposed my character to me with humiliating accuracy. I ought not to confess this accuracy, still I am moved to do so.” Cheiro predicted the date of Queen Victoria’s death, the year and month when King Edward VII would pass away, the grim destiny that awaited the late Czar of Russia, the assassination of King Humbert of Italy, the attempt on the Shah’s life in Paris, 

Homer Lea (1876-1912)

A hunchback, American mercenary Homer Lea served as the military advisor to Sun Yet-Sen in China. He wrote two seminal works on geopolitics:  The Valor of Ignorance which predicted the rise of Japanese militarist aggression and a Japanese Empire in the Pacific, while The Day of the Saxon, predicted the rise of a greater German Reich based on national supremacy and ethnic purity. His unfinished third book, The Swarming of the Slav predicted a Russian move to dominate Europe. In The Valor of Ignorance, he predicted a possible Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor, and on the US mainland (using balloon bombs).  

Edgar Cayce (1877-1945)

An American psychic Edgar Cayce demonstrated abilities to answer questions while in a self-induced trance. Although many critics say Cayce exploited the contemporaneous newspaper articles, affidavits, anecdotes, and testimonials to gather information, many of his recorded predictions are proved to be accurate. He foresaw the Stock Market Crash and Great Depression, the existence of a ninth Planet, WWII, the independent India and the birth of Israel and noted that Hitler would remain in power until it will “come as an overthrow or an outside war.” His most famous prediction is on the existence of Atlantis, which he noted, populated ancient Egypt and pre Columbian America. During the height of World War II, he saw the possibility of a united world assembly but died before he had chance to see its fruition.   

(To be continued, with Nostradamus & co. in Part II)

Top 10 Astronomers

Sic itur ad astra: To commemorate the Kepler mission, NASA’s first mission to search for worlds that could potentially host life, here is a post about the greatest astronomers in history, chronologically: 

 

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) 

An alchemist and an astronomer, Tycho Brahe known more for the sheer volume of his observations than for his discoveries. Being a Danish nobleman, he had his own observatory/castle built by his king, from which he observed all known celestial objects. Although it has been down previously before, Brahe measured the Earth’s axial tilt more accurately than ever before. Brahe was not a Copernican, however; he proposed a stem in which the Sun orbited the Earth while the other planets orbited the Sun, while denouncing Coperinicus’ transparent rotating spheres. He observed a supernova now known as “Tycho’s supernova” and made the most precise observations of stellar and planetary positions. His death itself was surrounded in mystery, but his records of planetary motions enabled his protege (and alleged killer) Kepler to discover the laws of planetary motion and dispel the heliocentric theory for once and for all. Above, the monument to Brahe and Kepler in Prague, Czech Republic. 

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

A true Renaissance man, Galileo published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in 1610 in a short treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger). In the last portion of Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo reported his discovery of four objects that appeared to form a straight line of stars near Jupiter–four first Jovian Moons. Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede were originally named after the members of the Medici family (Galileo’s patrons) but later renamed as Galilean satellites. By proving Venus exhibited a full set of phases similar to that of the Moon, Galileo refuted Ptolemaic pure geocentric model. Galileo also observed the planet Saturn but mistook its rings for planets, thinking it was a three-bodied system. Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, lunar mountains and craters and also stated that Milky Way was made up of stars, instead of nebulous as previously thought. He even observed the planet Neptune but marked it down as a dim star, thus delaying the discovery for more than three centuries.  Above: the Inquistion confronts Galileo on his beliefs. 

Giovanni Cassini (1625-1712)

An astrologer as well as an astronomer, Giovanni Cassini served as the Count Astronomer/Astronomer to King Louis XIV of France. During his time at the Court of the Sun King, he accurately measured the size of France for the first time, which turned out to be considerably smaller than expected. The amused king noted that Cassini had taken more of his kingdom from him than he had won in all his wars. Along with Robert Hooke, Cassini was credited with the discovery of the Great Red Spot in Jupiter. He was also the first to observe four of Saturn’s moons. Those moons he once named Sidera Lodoicea (Louisean Stars after the Latinized name of King Louis), are now known as Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys and Dione. Above: Cassini (arrowed) arrived at the Sun King’s court. 

Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) 

Like many scientists of his days, Christopher Huygens is known for the discovery of many breakthroughs. In his annus mirabilis of 1655, he designed a refracting telescope, discovered the first of Saturn’s moons (Titan), formulated that Saturn is surrounded by a solid ecliptic ring, and discovered and sketched the Orion Nebula. He also observed planet Mercury’s solar transit in 1661, and wrote two monumental books Systema Saturnium and Cosmotheoros. In the latter, he speculated about life on the other planets, and imagined a universe brimming with life. A fellow of the Royal Society and of the French Academy of Sciences, he worked together with Giovanni Cassini at the newly completed Paris Observatory (opened in 1671) under the patronage of Louis XIV.  Above: King Louis and Minister Colbert visits Director Cassini and Huygens at the newly completed Paris Observatory in 1671. 

Charles Messier (1730-1817) 

Although many listings in his eponymous catalogue were discovered by his assistant Pierre Mechain, and many are not organized scientifically (by type, or location), Charles Messier left behind a lasting standard for astronomy. In 1774, he published first of his astronomical catalogues, which contained the observational data for 45 celestial objects. By the time the final version of the catalogue was published in 1781, the list of Messier objects had grown to 103. A comet hunter, Messier complied his ”Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des Amas d’Étoiles” (“Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters”) in frustration from his list of non-comet objects that frustrated his hunt for the comets. 

William Herschel (1738-1822)

A Hanoverian émigré to England, William Herschel was obsessed with music and telescopes since young. Working as a lowly music teacher in Bath, he discovered the planet Uranus in 17981 using a small homemade telescope. He named the new planet Georgium Sidus (Georgian Star) after his king, George III, but the French vocally protested it, and the planet was known as ‘Herschel’ until the name ‘Uranus’ was universally adopted. Handsomely rewarded in England and knighted, Herschel became the King’s Astronomer, and retired to become a telescope maker–his primary hobby. He, however, coached his sister Caroline (above) to become one of the greatest astronomers of her day. Caroline Herschel became the first woman to discover a comet. William himself went to measure the Sun’s motion, and to become discoverer of the  sunspots and the infrared range of sunlight. 

Thomas James Henderson (1798-1844) 

The first Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Thomas Henderson was the first person to measure the distance to a star (Alpha Centauri, the nearest stellar system to Earth). Working at the British Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, he made a number of stellar observations for which he is mainly remembered today. The 1830s version of the “space race” was to be the first person to measure the distance to a star using parallax, a task which is easier the closer the star. Doubts about the accuracy of his instruments kept him from publishing, but after he was beaten to the punch by Frederic Wilhelm Bessel (who measured 10.4 light years to Sirius) in 1838, Henderson published his results, thus claiming his rightful spot in history.  

William Lassell (1799-1880) 

Although he is today remembered as the pioneer of the age of “Grand Amateurs” in astronomy, WIlliam Lassell appeared as if he is least suited for this avocation–he is a career beer brewer from Liverpool. When “Le Verrier’s Planet” (later to be named Neptune) was first observed in Berlin, Lassell used the new planet’s co-ordinates, published in The Times, to discover its satellite (Triton) and its ring. Within a month of Neptune’s discovery (and before the planet was even named), Lassell announced his discoveries to The Times. Two years later in 1848, he independently discovered Hyperion (a moon of Saturn) and in 1851, he discovered Ariel and Umbriel, two moons of Uranus. Lassell also pioneered the use of an equatorial mount and built a 48-inch (1,200 mm) telescope on Malta. 

 

Urbain Le Verrier (1811-1877)

Best remembered for his discovery of planet Neptune, le Verrier was a mathematician first. From the illustrious Director chair at the Paris Observatory (its first director was Cassini, no less), Le Verrier predicted the existence of a then unknown Transuranian planet using only mathematics and astronomical observations of the known planet Uranus. Unknown to Le Verrier, similar calculations were made by an Englishman John Couch Adams, but le Verrier announced his prediction two days before Adams’s final solution. Encouraged greatly by his success, le Verrier went on to predict an unknown planet closer to the Sun than Mercury, which he tentatively named Vulcan. This prediction became his long-lasting, and controversial legacy, triggering a wave of false detections, which lasted until 1915, when Einstein explained Mercury’s anomalous motion with his theory of general relativity.  

 

Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997)

On the New Horizon spacecraft, launched for a flyby of Pluto in 2014, is a container inscribed: “Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system’s ‘third zone’. Adelle and Muron’s boy, Patricia’s husband, Annette and Alden’s father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997).” Best known for discovering the planet/dwarf planet Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh was working at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona while he was given the job to search for the Planet X (the trans-Neptunian planet), which had been predicted by the observatory’s founder Percival Lowell and William Pickering. Using the photographers taken by the observatory’s 13-inch astrograph, he found Planet X on Tuesday, February 18, 1930, using images taken in January of the same year. The name “Pluto” was suggested by an English schoolgirl, which was chosen because it was after the Roman god of the Underworld (who was able to render himself invisible) and because Percival Lowell’s initials PL formed the first 2 letters. 

United We Fell

Knotted Gun by Fredrik Reuterswärd in front the UNHQ is ironically metaphorical towards the state of affairs that happen inside the building.

In a trouble-beset century, the greatest challenges for the United Nation ironically comes from the inside.  – by Archibald S. Hone. 

“The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” said John Bolton, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Although I usually find myself vehemently disagreeing with Mr. Bolton’s agenda and political views, his quote directly reflects the painful truth and the frustrating bureaucracy that lie at the very foundations of the United Nations.

Now the United Nations is a 64 year old whose 401(k) has shrank to nothingness. It is a leviathan that has outlived its usefulness and has no bright future. It is a badly managed classroom–a hierarchy with an unruly, undemocratic Security Council presided by a wavering Secretary General at the top. Yet, it is not a relic of the Cold War, it is the last species of an era even more distant. It is the modern pale imitation of the age of the Great Statesman—the age where the fate of the world is decided in the cigar-smoke filled antechambers in the Chancelleries of Europe. When the United Nations (and its crippled predecessor, the League of Nation) was founded, that world still existed. In 1945, two colonial powers (the Great Britain and France) still controlled a third of the world, and the Soviet hegemon collectively and coercively spoke for ‘the united socialist workers of the world’.

Within a few years, that world is descended into history books. Empires fell; China embraced—or to be precise, was forced to embrace—Communism. The Russians boycotted the Security Council after the latter refused to sit the Communist government of China. Meanwhile, the United Nations sat forlornly as countries after countries plunged into civil wars and genocides. Hungarian Uprising, Vietnam War and Prague Spring are just three examples of this collective failure.

However, the institution’s honor was upheld by the events that started unilaterally and that are out of its control. The UN intervention in Korea was made possible by the Russian boycott in the UNSC (see above). The Suez Crisis was solved because of the American pressure. The UN’s role in South American development only followed the US and CIA’s efforts to stage coup d’etats. Even its intervention in Rwanda came only after the French threatened to deploy its military forces. It would also take an affronted world to mandate the UN actions in Kuwait, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.  

Yet, there are high points too—the humanitarian missions that build a social infrastructure would be impossible without an organization as universal as the United Nations. However, the high point of those missions came only in the 1990s (refer to the UN charts) when the Soviet Union isn’t on the UNSC anymore to effectively block interventions.

It will take a Messiah to save the UN.

Now with Russia and China back as the global hegemons, it is time to once again say our goodbyes to that unipolar world into which we grew up. The UN Resolutions from Zimbabwe to North Korea, from Venezuela to Iran are being thwarted by the vetoes of that two resurgent powers, while any attempts of reform the undemocratic vetoing powers in the UNSC are not favorably looked upon by any veto-carrying members.

Last year, during the presidential campaign, Sen. McCain put forward an idea called “League of Democracies”. It is not perfect nor 100% altruistic, but the plan is to create a expansion of NATO that will curb the Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus and to take ‘War on Terror’ to a new level. The plan’s genius is that we will be able to unite the nations that are divided by geography but are united by the ideology—a democratic ideology, that is.

America totally disregarded the UN with Iraq; Russia did in Georgia. In Middle East, nations have been disregarding the UN for years. So why are we still relying on the United Nations while simultenously outsourcing the important agenda to NATO, EU, Six-Party Talks, Davos, etc. The problem is that the UN has become its own Detroit: it is just too big to fail. It is a bad PR for any member nation to admit that nothing is being done at that 38-storied behemoth. So when we are talking about the reforms to the United Nation, we should probably look beyond a top-down approach to embrace bottom-up approach to create a new international organization, whose membership should be as exclusive as that to the EU. Through highly exclusive, highly selective cartel of the international states, we can relocate governments that are not representative of their people into the dustbin of history, i.e, the General Assembly and the Security Council. The bottomline is now more than ever, we need responsible international governance. It is time either to revamp the UN or just trade it in for a newer model. 

Although he quoted two Republicans, Archibald S. Hone is not a conservative, but just a cynic. This is his first article for the new column, “Pillory”, where he will try to crucify pretty much everything, from French wine growers to Jane Austen. 

12 Most Exclusive and Influential Societies

1. Freemasonry

Possibly the most easiest to gain access to in the groups on this page, Freemasonry allegedly extends its roots back to the Biblical times, linking the society with the building of the Temple of Solomon. Its members call it “The Craft”  and the society is split into various subgroups and orders, all of which consider God as the Grand Architect of the Universe no matter what their religious afflictions are. The Masons have various greeting gestures “Modes of Recognition”, which renders the society cultish; its square and compass logo is famous for being on the Cadillacs. Entire treatises were written about their secret handshakes and passwords. Its members are easily recognizable by their signature rings; originally more secretive, the membership is now open for everyone who is over 21 and who has the recommendation of a member. [Above: Insignia of The Regular Grand Lodge of England]

2. Bilderberg Group

Originally formed in Arnhem, the Netherlands in 1954 (and taking its name from the name of the hotel where the first meeting was held, Bilderberg Group still retains its headquarters in Leiden, the Netherlands. The Bilderberg Group annually meets for an invitation-only conference of around 130 guests, most of whom are persons of influence in the fields of politics, business and banking. As Jonathan Duffy for BBC reports, “No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted… In the void created by such aloofness, an extraordinary conspiracy theory has grown up around the group that alleges the fate of the world is largely decided by Bilderberg.”

3. The Bohemian Club

Named for the bohemian life longed by many of its journalist founders, the Bohemian Club (estb. 1872) is a prominent private club in San Francisco, California, USA. The original group of artistic talent was soon replaced by those with major financial resources. Every year the club hosts an annual three week camp at Bohemian Grove, which is notable for its illustrious guest list and its eclectic Cremation of Care ceremony involving human sacrifice imagery at the base of a forty-foot stone owl. In addition to that ritual, there are also two outdoor performances, often with elaborate set design and orchestral accompaniment. The more elaborate of the two is called High Jinks, the more ribald is called Low Jinks. Members have included many Republican politicians, and CEOs of financial institutions, military and oil companies. Some prominent figures are given honorary membership, for instance, Richard Nixon and William Randolph Hearst.

4. Club of Rome

 

Originally comprised of only six member, this greatest of all independent political think tanks was formed in 1968 by an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist. The original small group met at a villa in Rome, Italy, hence the name. Its website states that the Club of Rome is composed of “scientists, economists, businessmen, international high civil servants, heads of state and former heads of state from all five continents who are convinced that the future of humankind is not determined once and for all and that each human being can contribute to the improvement of our societies.” However, it is frequently criticized for its strongly elite membership. [Above, the founders of Club of Rome in a rare photo: Peccei, King. Thiemann and Okita, from L. to R.]

5. Council on Foreign Relations

From its daunting limestone headquarters at 58 East 68th Street (at Park Avenue) in New York City [above], the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the most powerful private organization to influence United States foreign policy. Formed as a working fellowship to brief Woodrow Wilson, the group has expended its scope and aims largely under the endowments of J.P.Morgan and J.D.Rockefeller. The membership is available only to US citizens, but very selective. Expensive corporate memberships exists as well, and many distinguished speakers, ranging from foreign leaders to American businessmen speak and share their views in the Council’s frequent luncheons.

6. Chatham House

The CFR is modeled on Chatham House (now called the Royal Institute of International Affairs) an English think-tank, founded in 1920. Its well-known headquarters are at 10 St. James’s Square, London (once home to three British Prime Ministers). Although anyone can apply to be a member, the House has a range of different types of membership, which differs greatly in access to the House and its exclusive seminars. To maintain the confidentiality of those seminars, the House promulgated now famous rule known as the Chatham House Rule, which provides that members attending a seminar may discuss the results of the seminar in the outside world, but may not discuss who attended or identify what a specific individual said. The Rule facilitates frank and honest discussion on controversial or unpopular issues by speakers who may not have otherwise had the appropriate forum to speak freely. [Above: Reagan speaks to Chantam House]

7. The Round Table/Society of the Elect

The Round Table movement was founded in 1909 through a large endowment from Cecil Rhodes to promote closer union between Britain and her colonies. It was affiliated with major lobbying groups in every major capital city of the world coordinated by a headquarters in London. Some believe that the Round Table Groups were connected to a society called the Society of the Elect, whose existence itself is doubtful. Although Rhodes planned the Round Table as the Association of Helpers for the inner sanctum, ‘Society of the Elect’, and much of the hierarchical structure of the organization wasn’t carried out. Instead, Rhodes abandoned the idea for creation of a scholarship program to Oxford, which still bears his name.

8. Trilateral Commission

Founded by the members of Bilderberg Group and the CFR, the Trilateral Commission is established to foster closer cooperation between United States, Europe and Japan. Founded in July 1973, at the initiative of David Rockefeller, the Commission received much attention and criticism when it became known that President Jimmy Carter (a former Trilateral member) appointed 26 former Commission members to senior positions in his Administration: 107 Americans, 150 Europeans and 85 Japanese members. Although the membership included corporate CEOs, politicians, distinguished academics, university presidents, union leaders and philanthropist, it is stipulated that members who gain a position in their respective country’s government must resign from the Commission. [The first Trilateral meeting was at Rockefeller's Pocantico compound in New York's Hudson Valley, above.]

9. The Immortals

Unlike their English counterpart, the Royal Academy, the Académie française in France, and Real Academia Española in Spain has limited number of seats. (Forty in the former and forty six in the latter.) In the Académie française, each seat is assigned a separate number, while in the Spanish one, each academician holds a seat labeled with a letter from the Spanish alphabet; upper- and lower case letters are separate seats. Because of the extreme prestige of the seats and imminence of the holders, the members of two academies are known as the Immortals—the inspiration being Cardinal Richelieu’s quote, À l’immortalité (“To immortality”). Candidatures are made to a seat, not to the Académie: if several seats are vacant, a candidate may apply separately for each. When elected, the new member must have an eulogy to the previous holder of the seat, an event sometimes controversial in the past.

10. The Rand Corporation

In 1970, a rumor was spread that Richard Nixon had commissioned RAND to study the feasibility of canceling the 1972 election. Thus, the RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development)–the think tank originally formed by the U.S. Military in 1946—was thrust into spotlight. Accused as militarist, RAND works with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations to recommendation military policy through quantitative analyses. Over the last 60 years, more than 30 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the RAND Corporation. [Above: its HQs in Santa Monica]

11. The Sacred College of Cardinals

Although they are the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church serving the Pope and has no actual ruling power, the College of Cardinals plays two prominent roles in the church by participating in papal elections and the Pope in a consistory. The cardinals are elevated by the Pope from the bishops and the archbishops all over the world to make up the upper echelons of this Catholic hierarchy. The rules of the Conclave state that the Pope need not be chosen from among the ranks of the Cardinals (any unmarried Catholic male may be elected Pope), this has been the consistent practice since the election of Pope Urban VI in 1378. Now, many cardinals take on lead roles in tackling global problems and engage in diplomacy.

12. The Alfalfa Club

The Alfalfa Club is an exclusive Washington D.C. social organization, that exists only to hold an annual banquet on the last Saturday of January–the group’s name is a reference to the plant’s supposed willingness to do anything for a drink. The Alfalfa Club was started by four Southerners in Washington’s Willard Hotel in 1913 to celebrate the birthday of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Its sole purpose was an annual night out for the boys, but it didn’t admit blacks until the 1970s, and women until 1994. The club’s membership, which numbers about 200, is composed primarily of American politicians and influential members of the business community, and has included several U.S. Presidents. 

12 Evil Fictional Characters

This is inspired by this list: 50 Greatest Villains in Literature. Since I don’t agree with some of their choices, this list was born. Here are the twelve notable flagrant omission on the Telegraph’s list:

1. Uriah Heep

One of the more vivid and polarizing characters in Dickens’ David Copperfield, obsequious, greedy and insincere Uriah Heep was physically modeled upon Hans Christian Anderson. Cloyingly humane and humble, Mr. Heep works as Wickfield’s law clerk, teaches himself law at night, and by blackmailing Mr. Wickfield, gains control over his business eventually. However, his biggest ambition is to marry Agnes, Wickfield’s daughter, and to obtain her fortune. Like most of Dicken’s villians, greed is his main motivation. Eventually unmasked by Mr. Micawber, he ends up in a prison, where he tries to put forward himself as a model prisoner. [Above: Roland Young as Uriah Heep and Freddie Bartholomew as the child David Copperfield in the 1937 film]

2. Injun Joe

In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the villain of the piece was Injun Joe, someone with whom the reader cannot identify or sympathize at all. The saddest part of Injun Joe’s depiction in the novel is that he was cast as a relic of a bygone era, an era when vengeful American Indians still roam the prairies. His evil nature was depicted as natural among the Indians, while he displays the culture of violence attributed to the Native Americans: ”When you get revenge on a woman you don’t kill her–bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils–you notch her ears, like a sow’s!” When Judge Thatcher closes the mouth of the cave to fatally asphyxiate Injun Joe, it is as if he metaphorically ended a chapter of American history. 

3. Fu Manchu

Envisioned during the Yellow Peril era, Dr. Fu Manchu (created by Sax Rohmer) encompasses all signs of an evil genius: height, gauntness, feline-agility, a Satanic face, high intellect and even mind-reading abilities. However, his signature mustache, only for which he is now known, didn’t appeared in any of the novels–it was a creation of the movie industry. He uses arcane methods (he disdains guns or explosives) ranging from dacoits and Thuggees to exotic animals, plants and chemicals for world-domination, and the restoration of the Imperial China. Although he was virtually un-defeatable because of his strength and life-extending elixir, his plans are thwarted and the society is saved by the diligent efforts of Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie, the Holmes and Watson of the series. [Above, he is played by Christopher Lee]

4. Dr. Nikola

A master of disguise and a mesmerist like Dr. Fu Manchu, Dr. Antonio Nikola (created by Guy Boothby) is another of those evil geniuses who populated Victorian, Gothic and Pulp fiction. Handsome yet puritanical, Nikola is always accompanied by a cat. His goal in life has also been the hunt for immortality, which, he believed, could be obtained from a mysterious sect of Tibetan monks. To aid him in this quest, he used many people whose loved ones they had a hold over (through blackmail or kidnapping) and various mutants he created through his own mad research. Nikola was hunted by Hatteras, a Mongolian assassin missing half of one ear before he finally  a fatal victim of his final experiment. 

5. Napoleon the Pig

Based on Stalin, Orwell’s hero pig in Animal Farm is also an allegorical figure of all dictators who have ever walked on this world. A common farm pig, Napoleon fights to free the Manor Farm from human control, but eventually becomes the tyrant of Animal Farm. Although his villainous activities (drinking milk the animals had gathered, taking others’ puppies for himself, teaching animals to use firearms, taking advantage of his comrade Snowball, historical revisionism) may seen trivial when compared to those of others on the list, Napoleon stands as a humiliating testament to human gullibility and shortcomings even outside the confines of the book. 

6. Cardinal Richelieu and Milady de Winter

In Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Cardinal Richelieu attempts to undermine Queen Anne (mother of Louis XIV) who was having an affair with an Englishman. However, Richelieu is action out of his own lust for power. The cardinal employed Milady de Winter–a woman with an evil (albeit tragic) past–as his chief secret agent to discredit the Queen and the English. The Cardinal and Milady plot to kill the English general (and the Queen’s lover) Buckingham. Although she was arrested, she seduces her jailer and asks him to assassinate Buckingham. Although both battled the musketeers, Richelieu and Milady de Winter both respected them, especially d’Artagnan. Yet, it didn’t stop Milday from murdering d’Artagnan’s lover, Constance. In the emotional last scenes of the novel, she was beheaded, but the ghost of Milady came back to haunt the musketeers in the sequel Twenty Years After with her son, Mordaunt. 

7. Lady Macbeth 

A mother. An antimother. A witch. A femme fatale. Lady Macbeth is one of the most marginalized and discussed figures in the literature. Starting from the point when she receives a letter from her husband saying three witches have prophecized his future as King, she plotted a regicide to the last detail. A real mastermind behind Macbeth (who is merely an instrument), she convinces to him that he first broached the matter and belittles his courage and manhood to coerce him into killing King Duncan. In her last appearance, she sleepwalks in a powerful and profound scene where she is tormented by horrific recollections of her past. She dies off-stage, with suicide being suggested as its cause. [Above, Lady Macbeth, by George Cattermole]

8. Elmer Gantry 

In Sinclair Lewis’ 1927 satire, Elmer Gantry, the eponymous hero is “a young, narcissistic, womanizing college athlete who, upon realizing the power, prestige, and easy money that being a Christian fundamentalist evangelist can bring, pursues his “religious” ambitions with relish, contributing to the downfall, even death, of key people around him as the years pass. Gantry continues to womanize, is often exposed as a fraud, and frequently faces a complete downfall, yet he is never fully discredited and always manages to emerge triumphant and reaching ever greater heights of social standing”, wikipedia quote succinctly. Although denounced by various religious groups, Elmer Gantry and Lewis were proven to be correct by a bizarre life-imitating-art events in the 70s and the 80s, when an array of Christian evangelists becomes entrapped in sex scandals.  [Burt Lancester played Elmer Gantry above]

9. The Queen of Hearts

“The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said,” wrote Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in the Wonderland. Foul-mouthed, foul-tempered, blind fury, the Queen of Hearts is the ruler and tyrant of all the lands in the story. Although she is not the villain of the storybook, all creatures in Wonderland fear the Queen, and her tyrannical tendencies (sentence before verdict!) makes her a proud entrant of this list. [Above, two Queens of Hearts: Carroll's characterization changed the loveliest card in the playing deck into a menacing threat by the time Mrs. Iselin arrives in The Manchurian Candidate.] 

10. Sunday

In G.K.Chesterton’s surreal novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, a poet Gabriel Syme is recruited by the Scotland Yard to be part of a secret anti-anarchist taskforce. Syme is later elected as the local representative to the worldwide Central Council of Anarchists, which consists of seven men, each using the name of a day of the week as a code name. Syme becomes ‘Thursday’, but he also discovers that five of the other six members are also undercover detectives. They are fighting each other and not real anarchists, in a cleverly concocted plan by the colossal evil genius Sunday. In a dizzying and surreal chase scene (which involves a cab, an elephant and a hot-air ballon), the six chases disturbing, whimsical and almost inhumanely big Sunday, the man who calls himself “The Peace of God”. The Council of Days may not just be a dream–but it sure is a surreal nightmare.

11. Madam Sara 

Madam Sara in The Sorceress of the Strand (1903) created by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace is on this list because she defies the most basic rule of detective fiction: good triumphs over evil, and the detective always captures the criminal. Madame Sara is a versatile and cunning criminal whose machinations thwart the attempts of sleuths Dixon Druce and Eric Vandeleur to bring her to justice for “blackmail, murder, and other crimes presumably too fiendish for the texts to explicate fully”. Female and foreign (she is half-Indian and half-Italian), she may not be a PC arch-villain, but as Ellery Queen put it, she “made [traditional] rogues like Colonel Clay and Raffles look like sissies.” 

12. Big Brother

It was not even a match let alone an even match. The nemesis in George Orwell’s 1984 is this enigmatic entity, the invisible dictator of Oceania, but it wasn’t even clear whether he exists or he is merely a propaganda tool created by the ruling elite of the Party. In Orwellian society, everyone under complete surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens, a fact that is constantly being reminded by the phrase “Big Brother is watching you”. The protagonist of the novel, Winston Smith finally succumbed to the “love” (the most awful euphemism if there is one) to Big Brother, who apparently demands sacrifices as if he were an Aztec god. Unlike many villains in other novels, Big Brother wasn’t defeated in the book. People like Alan Moore in V for Vendatta tried to show the collapse of such an Orwellian society, but in fact, it took a society to overcome this omniscient, omnipresent entity. 

 

Dishonorable Mention:

Javert

Inspector Javert who hunts down the protagonist of the novel, Les Misérables (written by Victor Hugo), Jean Valjean, is frequently voted as a villain although he isn’t one in the book. A devotee of the Law, he closely pursues Valjean, but when he finally sees Valjean’s brave and kind acts, he has an epiphany: Javert can be justified neither in letting Valjean go nor in arresting him. Faced with a choice between the Law and his morals–a conundrum that imploded his sanity–Javert drowns himself in the river Seine.

Literature’s Most Touching Love Triangles

My Tribute to Valentine Day

Rhett Butler & Scarlett O’ Hara & Ashley Wilkes

It was the greatest love story that never was. In 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell tells the story of young and adventurous Scarlett O’Hara during and after the Civil War. Scarlett believes she loves Ashley Wilkes, her aristocratic neighbour. She disdained the disreputable war profiteer Captain Rhett Butler although they had much in common. When Wilkes married another girl, Scarlett married one Charles Hamilton out of spite. Someone who repeatedly challenges gender roles of her time, Scarlett also embodies the general lifestyle of the Civil War South in her mixed feelings for the Southern gentleman Ashley and her attraction to the sardonic, opportunistic Rhett Butler. After much misfortune, Scarlett finally realizes she really loved Rhett, who by then had grown tired of waiting for her affection. The novel ends on an ambiguous note, with Scarlett vowing to find away to win Rhett back. 

Fitzwilliam Darcy-Elizabeth Bennet-George Wickham

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the readers see the unfolding plot through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet, the intelligent, lively and attractive daughter of the Bennet family. At her village ball, she met Fitzwilliam Darcy, who is apparently bored with the ball, and who snubs her at a public dance. Her gullibility and her tendency to judge on first impressions separated her and Mr. Darcy at first. She instead favored George Wickham who made up a story defaming Darcy. Elizabeth’s initial refusal of his proposal for marriage and Darcy’s subsequent letter that defends his wounded honour and denounces Wickham defined and changed the novel’s course. When Elizabeth finally realizes that her feelings for Darcy have come full circle, she accepts Darcy’s second proposal. Thus ended the novel, and began a thousand sequels.

Jane Eyre-Edward Rochester-St. John Rivers

“Reader, I married him.” opens the last chapter of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The novel goes through five distinct stages: her orphaned childhood, her education, her time as the governess of Thornfield Manor, where she falls in love with her employer, Edward Rochester, her time with the Rivers family, and her reunion with Rochester. After her first meeting with Rochester, she nearly married him, an ugly, moody yet Byronic gentleman before a lawyer announced that Rochester is still married to a madwoman whom he keeps imprisoned in the attic. Jane left Rochester, only to reunite with him after the mad wife set fire to Thornfield Manor (killing herself, and causing Rochester to lose a hand and eyesight). Rochester fears that she will refuse to marry a blind cripple, but Jane accepts him without hesitation. 

The Karenins and Alyosha Vronsky

A married woman, Anna Karenina come to Moscow to salvage the marriage of her brother, Stiva. Upon her arrival in Moscow, a railway worker accidentally falls in front of a train and is killed. Anna interprets this as an “evil omen.” Count Alyosha Vronsky soon falls in love with Anna after he meets her at the station and later dances the mazurka with her at a ball. Although Anna initially tries to reject him, she eventually succumbs to his courting, and confesses to her husband. The difficulties in her getting a divorce from her husband, a potentially bitter custody battle and Anna’s childbirth distanced two lovers eventually. In a jealous rage, Anna threw herself under a train like the railway worker in the first part of the novel. Vronsky finally realizes his guilt at Anna’s death and faces a life made more tragic than death by his own shortcomings

Le Chevalier Des Grieux, Manon Lescaut and Synnelet 

In the short novel Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost, ennobled and rich le Chevalier Des Grieux forfeits his hereditary wealth and incurs the disappointment of his father by running away with Manon. In Paris, the young lovers enjoy a blissful cohabitation, while Des Grieux struggles to satisfy Manon’s taste for luxury. Manon usually leaves him for a richer man but the two younger lovers were always reunited by their mutual affection. They finally settle down in New Orleans, where the Governor’s nephew, Synnelet sets his sights on Manon. In the duel that ensued, Des Grieux knocks the nephew unconscious, and thinking he had killed the man, the couple flee New Orleans. In the wilderness of Louisiana, Manon dies of exposure and exhaustion. Des Grieux returns to France to become a cleric after burying his beloved. 

Jay Gatsby and the Buchanans

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, James Gatz fell in love with Daisy Fay before the war, but he lost Daisy due to their different social standings. After the war, Gatz became a millionaire after being involved with the bootleggers. He reinvents himself changing his name to Jay Gatsby, get a mansion near where Daisy (now Mrs. Buchanan) lives, and hosts parties in the hope that she will visit. With the help of the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, two rekindles their love. However, a hit-and-run incident in Gatsby’s car (driven by Daisy at that moment) complicates the matters. The victim’s husband finds Gatsby floating in his pool and kills him before committing suicide nearby, thus ending Gatsby’s American Dream and Fitzgerald’s ambitious novel. 

Werther, Lotte and Albert

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe is written as an epistolary novel from the point of a young artist Werther, who retreat to a small village of Wahlheim to flee from an unwanted romantic entanglement. Thus, it was especially ironic when he meets and falls in love with Charlotte (or Lotte), a beautiful young girl who is taking care of her siblings. She is engaged to a man 11 years her senior named Albert. Werther cultivates a close friendship with both of them to be near to Lotte, but his letters become more and more incoherent after Charlotte and Albert marries. Out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband, Lotte convinces Werther not to visit her. After his last visit, and memorable and torrid recitation of “Ossian”, Werther shoots himself in the head. He doesn’t expire until 12 hours later. 

Humbert Humbert, Dolores Haze and Clare Quilty 

Recounted by the narrator who chose to be called by his pseudonym Humbert Humbert, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most marginalized novels of our time. Humbert lodges with a widow Charlotte Haze and later marries her just to be near to her daughter, Dolores (Lolita). When Charlotte discovers it, she is horrified; she bolts from the house but is struck and killed by a passing motorist. Humbert picks Lolita up from camp and intends to use sleeping pills on Lolita, but instead, she seduces Humbert. Driving Lolita around the country, Humbert falls genuinely in love with her. Their strange situation is further complicated by the presence of Clare Quilty, himself a pedophile and pornographer, with whom Lolita finally absconds. Humbert finally learnt that Lolita married an old, deaf war vetern after being abandoned by Quilty. Humbert confronts and murders Quilty and is arrested for murder. Lolita herslef dies during childbirth. 

Tess Durbeyfield, Alex D’Urberville and Angel Clare

In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the impoverish Durbeyfields send their daughter Tess to work with the aristocratic D’Urbervilles after learning that they are closely related. There, Tess is seduced and raped by Alec d’Urberville. In her next job as a milkmaid, she falls in love with a travelling farmer’s apprentice, Angel Clare. She tries to tell Angel her indiscretions, but the letter she sent gets lost under a rug. When Angel learns the truth, Angel leaves her to go to Brazil. Meanwhile, Tess started living with Alec D’Urberville again. However, when Angel returns, Tess confronts Alec and stabs Alec through the heart with a carving knife, killing him. Tess flees with Angel but their sojourn ends with a romantic night at Stonehenge, when the police arrest Tess and she was executed. 

Lord and Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellor

D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” is about Lady Constance Chatterly’s unhappy marriage to wealthy mine owner Sir Clifford Chatterly. His war wounds made him paralyzed and impotent and she begins to explore her sexual feelings else where–namely with Sir Clifford’s game keeper, Oliver Mellor’s. Although Mellors initially shuns her due to the class distance between them, they meet by chance at a hut in the forest and have sex. Many torrid meetings later, she becomes pregnant, and she seeks a divorce from Sir Clifford. He refuses to give her a divorce and this leaves Lady Chatterly and Oliver waiting only in the hope that Sir Clifford may die. When Connie returns from her vacation in Venice, she finds Mellors’ old wife has returned, causing a scandal. The novel ends the couple waiting for their respective divorces, with the hope that, in the end, they will be together.

The 10 Most Exclusive College Societies

The Seven Society, University of Virginia

The Seven Society, founded in 1905, is the most secretive of all university collegiate societies. Members’ names are only revealed after their death, when a wreath of black magnolias in the shape of a “7″ is placed at the gravesite, and the bell tower of the University Chapel chimes seven times at seven-second intervals on the seventh dissonant chord when it is seven past the hour. Nothing much is known about the society, and legends note that of eight men who planned to meet for a card game, only seven showed up,[4] and they formed the society. How the members are chosen are of an equal mystery. The only known method to contact the Seven Society is to place a letter at the Thomas Jefferson statue inside the University’s historic Rotunda, but one visible sign of society–the number 7 logo surrounded by the signs for alpha, omega, and infinity and several stars—adorn many buildings on the grounds of the University.

The Flat Hat Club, William & Mary

The oldest student club founded in the United States is the Flat Hat Club, founded in 1750 at the College of William and Mary, which proudly counted Thomas Jefferson as one of its members. The initials of the F.H.C. Society doesn’t stand for Flat Hat Club, but for Latin, “Fraternitas, Humanitas, et Cognitio” (“brotherhood, humaneness, and knowledge”). The founding fathers of the modern fraternity traditions, the “brothers” of the F.H.C. devised and employed a secret handshake, wore a silver membership medal, issued certificates of membership, and met regularly for discussion and fellowship. The society ceased to exist during the American Revolution and WWII, and fully revived only in 1972. [The Flat Hat refers to a graduation cap.]

The Corps Hannovera Göttingen, Georg August University

One of the oldest German Student Corps (Studentenverbindung), the Corps Hannovera Göttingen was founded in 1809 at the Georg August University of Göttingen. The name was chosen because the founders called the Kingdom of Hanover their home. It is a founder member of the Kösener Senioren-Convents-Verband (KSCV), the oldest governing body of student associations in Germany and Austria. A fencing society, Hannovera is a stringent follower of the blue principle—the promotion of gentlemanly conduct and social behaviour, as well as the common principles of tolerance and democracy. Its members wear cap and tricoloured sash, and its motto is Nunquam retrorsum, fortes adiuvat fortuna! (Never backward, fortune favours the bold). Corps Hannovera’s parties in their club house (Corpshaus) are the best parties in the town.

The Philomathean Society, University of Pennsylvania

The oldest continuously-existing literary society in the United States, the Philomathean Society took its name from the Greek word for “a lover of learning.”The Society emphasizes the arts of rhetoric, oratory, and writing and its three-step membership process reflects this. Governed by a Cabinet of eight officers (Moderator, First Censor, Second Censor, Scriba, Recorder, Treasurer, Librarian, Archivist), the society meets eight times per semester on the top floor of College Hall, and has regular afternoon teas with professors and sponsors. The Society publishes several books and anthologies every year, and was the publisher of the first complete English translation of the Rosetta Stone—a translation done by three undergraduates. The motto is sic itur ad astra (“thus we proceed to the stars”).

Final Clubs of Harvard

Increasingly stigmatized by their elitism, sexism and racism are the final clubs of Harvard. There are eight all-male clubs, whose reputations are marred by the frequent charges of sexual assaults and five all-female clubs, and most clubs have historical traditions that make them more of a reflection of Harvard’s predominantly white, trust-fund wealthy, Protestant past. The societies differ greatly in their exclusivity, wikipedia notes, “the clubs have an undergraduate membership of around sixty a piece, amounting to nearly 20% of the eligible male undergraduates and 5% of eligible female undergraduates. Some final clubs often hold parties and open their doors to women and male guests of members. Others, like the A.D., have only in recent history opened their doors to female guests of members and still do not allow male guests. Porcellian never allows non-members past “the bicycle room” in the building’s foyer, while the Delphic permits its guests access only to its basement by a separate entrance.

St. A’s. Columbia

Although the chapters of the Society of Saint Anthony (or commonly St. Anthony Hall) now exists all over the United States, the society still retains its secrecy, exclusivity and gravitas. The national chapters are known variously as social fraternities, clubs, secret societies, or literary clubs, but Columbia’s original society is known for its members’ extraordinary wealth. Founded in 1847, St. A’s at Columbia is usually at the center of controversy because of the alleged discrimination practiced by the young men and women of the society. Although Baird’s Manual referred it in 1897 as “the most secret of all the college societies,” and many novelists, some as prestigious as F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote slantingly about it, the society’s mystic as a secret society slowly withered as it expended its chapters.

Quills and Daggers, Cornell

First of the Ivy League Honors societies to open its membership to women, Quill and Dagger society, founded in 1893, recognizes exemplary undergraduates at Cornell University. Many professors, deans, trustees and administrators themselves are the alumnae of the prestigious society, and so are many famous American businessmen and CEOs. The society also has been responsible for starting numerous campus traditions. The meetings and proceedings of Quill and Dagger are closed, and the society’s activities on campus are typically concealed. The public is not admitted to the society’s sanctuary on the top floor of Lyon Tower.

Skull and Bones, Yale

The most secretive of all societies on this page is Yale’s Skull and Bones, which was formed in 1832. Alternately referred to as The Brotherhood of Death or Eulogia, the society’s macabre emblem is a skull with crossed bones, over a mysterious number “322″. The Skull & Bones Hall is known as “Tomb”, and members meet in the “tomb” on Thursday and Sunday evenings of each week over the course of their senior year. Some accuse Bonesmen of involving in Satanic practices in the tomb or conspiracy theories. Every year, fifteen seniors on the society “tap” fifteen new junior members to replace them. Although this is the highest honor a Yale undergraduate can receive, historically many members has been drawn from the same great American families. Members are assigned nicknames, chosen from literature. The society also owns an island retreat in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York named Deer Island. Another equally secretive group, Scroll and Key exists on the Yale campus.

Cambridge Apostles, Cambridge

Many don’t fail to notice that many energetic people who participated in Cambridge Union (the university’s debating society) ends up in the British Parliament. However, even more exclusive than the Union is the other debating society, the Cambridge Conversazione Society, known commonly as the Cambridge Apostles. Founded in 1820, the society takes its name from the idea that its members are the 12 cleverest students at Cambridge. The members were traditionally chosen from King’s and Trinity Colleges [Great court of Trinity College, above] (though this is no longer the case). Once a week, on Saturday evenings, a debate and discussion is held while the members eat sardines on toast, called “whales”. The Apostles retain a leather diary of their membership stretching back to its founder (George Tomlinson, who went on to become the Bishop of Gibraltar), which includes handwritten notes about the topics each member has spoken on. Former members are called “angels” and undergraduates being considered for membership are called “embryos.” Becoming an Apostle involves taking an oath of secrecy and listening to the reading of a curse, originally written by Apostle Fenton Hort, the theologian in 1851. The Apostles became known outside Cambridge because of the infamous Cambridge spy ring, in which two “angels” were found to have passed information to the KGB.

Bullington Club, Oxford

Satirized again and again inside the British High Society and inside the House of Lords and Commons for its excessive rowdiness and destructive binges, the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University is a club that England loves to hate. The New York Times informed, it is “the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford; it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership represents the ‘young bloods’ of the university”. Founded around 1780 as a hunting and cricket club, the club slowly evolved into a dining club at towards the end of the 19th century. Extreme drunkenness and destruction of private property (usually windows, glasses) usually couple the club meets, which led to the club being banned for long periods of time from the University. The membership is only by invitation, and membership elections are held twice a year, when successful new members are visited in their rooms, which are then ‘trashed’ as a symbol of their election. [In above photo, current opposition leader David Cameron is in the back row on the left.]

Unknown people….famous deeds

Forgotten censor causes the Russian Revolution

In 1867, Karl Marx published Das Kapital, a monumental work of 25 years, most of which he spent researching in the Reading Room of the British Museum. The first translation of his biting critique of the capitalism was into Russian. In early April 1872, the book was released in St. Petersburg. Giving his imprimatur to the book, the censor of Das Kapital noted: “Few people in Russia will read it, and still fewer will understand it.” The censor, whose name was Skuratov (sadly, this is the only thing we know about him) was wrong. The edition of three thousand sold out quickly—the feat that alarmed the Romanovs so much that they banned the second edition. However, they were too late. In 1880, Marx wrote: “Our success is still greater in Russia, where Kapital is read and appreciated more than anywhere else.” A revolution 37 years proved him correct.

 

Unknown native kills Magellan

The world today remembers Ferdinand Magellan as the man who circumnavigated the globe. Well, he didn’t. Of the 237 men who set out on the five ships, only 18 completed the circumnavigation of the globe. Magellan was not one of them. In 1519, Magellan proposed his plan to circumnavigate the world to King Charles V of Spain, who put five ships Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago under his command to achieve this feat. However, the circumnavigation almost never happened. Spanish authorities distrusted Portuguese-born Magellan, and agreed to let him sail away with the ships only after he switched his crew from Portuguese men to Spaniards. On the course of his voyage, Magellan became the first European to enter the Pacific from the strait now called the Strait of Magellan, and the first European to reach the Philippines. In the Philippines, during a fight, Magellan was killed by a poison arrow shot from a native from a group which he was trying to Christianize. His body was never recovered.

 

Unknown kid kills Richard the Lion-hearted

Richard the Lionheart (1157 – 1199) was one of England’s greatest kings. He started commending his own army at 16, and gloriously fought against Saladin during the Third Crusade. However, his latter years were far from glorious. On his return from the Holy Land, Richard was captured by his personal enemy, Leopold V, Duke of Austria, and had to be ransomed. In March 1199, Richard was in the Limousin suppressing a revolt by a viscount. He besieged an unarmed castle of Chalus-Chabrol, which capitulated quickly. Richard was admiring the last defender of the castle, a teenager with a crossbow who was using a frying pan as a shield. The teenager shot two arrow at the king, who was without his chainmail. Richard died from gangrene of the wound. Although Richard forgave his slainer (who was confusingly recorded as John, Brandon, Harold, Dudo and Bertrand), the boy was later skinned and killed by Richard’s soldiers.

 

Unknown prostitute indirectly causes the Holocaust

In Mein Kampf, volume 1, Adolf Hitler wrote extensively on syphilis and prostitution. Fourteen paged litany on what he called a “Jewish disease” caused some historians to speculate whether Hitler himself had the disease. Hitler reportedly had sex with a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1908. His possible discovery later that year that he had the disease may have been responsible for his demeanor; while his life course may have been influenced by his anger at being a syphilitic, as well as his belief that he had acquired the disease from undesirable societal elements which he intended to eliminate. A psychiatry team studied diary entries made by Hitler’s personal doctor, Theo Morrell, and concluded that there is “ample circumstantial evidence” for the theory. (Some, however, dispute that Dr Morrell deliberately poisoned his patient).

 

Unknown sniper kills Lord Nelson

Horatio Nelson was one of the most iconic and heroic Englishmen. His strategy and (unconventional) tactics produced a number of decisive victories and doomed the French hopes of conquering the British fleet. He was wounded several times in combat, he lost most of one arm and the sight in one eye. However, on 21^st October 1805, Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar, gained his eternal place in the Pantheon of British heroes and lost his life. Although fanciful Victorian retellings of the story noted Nelson was killed by a cannon fire from a ship that had already surrendered, what exactly happened during the Battle of Trafalgar is a mystery. Nelson’s flagship the Victory came under fire from three French ships Bucentaure, Redoutable, and Santísima Trinidad. A sniper from the enemy ships fired onto Victory’s deck as Nelson was walking on there. Nelson, who died shortly afterwards from wounds to his backbone, was given a state funeral and the subsequent interment in the St. Paul’s Cathedral. A sniper was never identified—Nelson’s deputy claimed that they killed the sniper, while a French fuselier, Robert Guillemard later claimed he fatally shot Nelson. This hidden identity was the plot device behind Dumas’ Le Chevalier de Saint Hermine.

 

Anonymous letter brings down a government

Many famous British political criticisms are anonymously authored, and so were the Federalist Papers. However, the most famous and damaging political missive in English history came in 1922. In September 1922, the British and French troops guarding the Dardanelles neutral zone near Chanak were threatened by Turkish troops. The British cabinet led by Prime Minister David Lloyd George issued a communiqué threatening Turkey with a declaration of war. The public, however, was alarmed by the possibility of going to war again. After the Commonwealth prime ministers explicitly stated that they didn’t want to go to war either, an anonymous letter appeared in “The Times” by “A Colonial” supporting the government but stating that Britain could not “act as the policeman for the world”. Beleaguered at home and aboard, Lloyd George resigned. The identity of this “Colonial” was never discovered by many believed he was Andrew Bonar Law (above) who succeeded Lloyd George as the Prime Minister.

 

Unknown Solider lights the first match to WWI

 

WWI started with the high-profile assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Serbia, but WWII’s first shots were fired by an unknown solider in Manchuria. Tensions between the Empire of Japan and China had been inflamed since the Invasion of Manchuria in 1931. In June 1937, Japanese troops were carrying out military training at the western end of the Marco Polo Bridge using the cover of the night. One night, the local Chinese, thinking an attack was underway, fired a few ineffectual rifle shots which resulted in a Japanese soldier being missing in action. Although the missing Japanese soldier—whose identity remains a mystery—had turned up unharmed afterwards, the border security on the both sides was tightened after the incident. Shortly after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Japan began a full invasion of China.

 

Unknown Serial Killer reforms London

His victims were women earning income as casual prostitutes. Their throats were cut, their cadavers mutilated. His murders were carried out in a public or semi-public places. In the second half of 1888, the person known only by the pseudonym ‘Jack the Ripper’ became active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area of London. The name is taken from a letter to the Central News Agency by someone claiming to be the murderer. Although many theories have been advanced, Jack the Ripper’s identity was never determined. While not the first serial killer, Jack the Ripper was the first to create a worldwide media frenzy around his killings. Mass-circulation newspapers of late Victoria era helped his publicity. On the flipside, the nature of the killings exposed the dark underbelly of London. For centuries, the poor of the East End had long been ignored by the affluent society. Jack the Ripper unintentionally drew attention to these wretched living conditions, and exposed the fact that the poor couldn’t be ignored much longer.

 

Unknown Father of Music Theory

Anonymous IV is the name given to the writer of an important treatise of medieval music theory. We know him as an English student studying at Notre Dame University in Paris in the 1270s or 1280s. Nothing else is known about his life, not even his name. His writings, which survive in two partial copies from Bury St Edmunds, are extremely important to the development of polyphony. The anonymous author also recorded the works of Léonin and Pérotin, the earliest European composers, and recorded Pérotin’s the four-part organa quadrupla Viderunt and Sederunt, and music-theorist Franco of Cologne’s treatises. His lasting legacy, however, is in his thorough descriptions of the musical instruments, rhythmic modes, musical notation, and genres of his day.

 

The Most Dangerous Unknowns

CrimethInc. (Ex-Workers Collective) is an underground anarchist group, which has published numerous articles and magazines widely read within and without the anarchist movement. First formed in the mid-1990s, CrimethInc. mainstreamed the American anarchist movement by publishing books, releasing records and organizing large-scale national campaigns against globalization and representative democracy, as well as by taking traditional controversial actions like arson and hacking. CrimethInc.’s activities and its philosophies are controversial even among the anarchists. CrimethInc. also has a long association with the North American anarcho-punk scene.

 

 

The Proverbial Unknown Soldier

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier At the Westminster Abbey 

….Things that Never Were

A Tudor who Never Was

In 1931, Anthony Hall (1898-1947), a former Shropshire police inspector wrote a letter to Britain’s King George V., saying he had a better claim to the throne than King George V., since, he wrote, he claimed his ancestry back to Thomas Hall, a “bastard son” of Henry VIII. Tall, polite and always impeccably dressed, Anthony Hall charmed the working class. His populist ideas, such as plans to scrap taxes, pay off the national debt, build thousands of police stations and set up a Ministry of Pleasure to “revive the ancient merry times” drew up to 800 people, united under a banner: “A New King, A New Country”. His other (more ridiculous) promises include plans to rebuild Tudor style homes and to popularize portrait painting. Buckingham Palace unsuccessfully tried to declare him insane. Later, he was shortly arrested for using “quarrelsome and scandalous language”. Hall died in 1947 leaving no male heirs, thus effectively ending the ‘Tudor dynasty’.

 

An Emperor who Never Was

Hall tried to claim the English throne, but an English Jew named Joshua Abraham Norton went a step further and claimed the non-existent throne of the United States. Unhinged by financial ruin, Joshua Norton turned up in California with an ill-fitting naval uniform with tarnished gold braid and a sabre. Storming into the California Legislature, he proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States, and later, Protector of Mexico. ‘The Emperor’ made a point of appearing at all public functions, where he was received with honor. The best restaurants dined him and his dogs for free. He attended in a front row seat all sessions of the Legislature at Sacramento. Banks cashed his modest, worthless checks and people took his imperial banknotes bearing 7% interest, which he promised to redeem in 1880. That year Norton I died. Ten thousand San Franciscans attended his funeral. In 1934, he was reburied under a tombstone that vaunted: NORTON I, EMPEROR OF THE UNITED STATES AND PROTECTOR OF MEXICO

 

The Land that Never Was

In 1817, a Scottish man Gregor MacGregor, captured Amelia Island, Florida from the Spanish and began his crusade against Spain in the Caribbeans. Returning to London as a hero, MacGregor published a guidebook supposedly written by one Captain Thomas Strangeways. In the book was a description of the Territory of Poyais, a tiny nation on the Bay of Honduras, fertile with untapped resources of gold and silver. In 1822, MacGregor raised a loan with the total of £200,000 in behalf of the Poyais government and also started selling land rights. When wanna-be settlers arrived in South America, they only found an untouched jungle. Under the harsh conditions, 180 of the 250 settlers perished. However, survivors refused to believe that noble-looking MacGregor (now self-styled Sir Gregor) was the main culprit. They blamed Sir Gregor’s advisers and publicists for spreading the false information, and the ‘colonists’ at Poyais for abandoning the colony. Meanwhile, MacGregor had absconded for Paris where he published a new constitution of Poyais declaring himself as the head of state. The French were less gullible and they publicly denounced him. A lonely broken man, “Poyais humbug” failed to reclaim his earlier successes and died unlamented in Venezuela in 1845.

 

The Man who Never Was

At 4:30 in the morning of April 30th 1943, the corpse of ‘Major Martin’ began his only battle. Secretly buried at sea from the British submarine Seraph, Martin was the strangest hero of W.W. II—a principle actor in a plan named Operation Mincemeat to convince the Germans that the Allied attack on Europe would take place on Sardinia, not Sicily. Major Martin never existed–British Intelligence officials, faced with the problem of finding a suitable corpse, selected a soldier who had died from pneumonia, for an autopsy would reveal water in the lungs and seem to prove that the victim had drowned. On his body were a bank overdraft of pound 80, a photograph of his supposed fiancee, a £53 bill for an engagement ring, and torn tickets for a London show. Because the corpse looked “too hopelessly dead,” another “double” was photographed for the identity card. Most importantly of all, Martin carried a letter personally signed by Lord Mountbatten which ended with a simple pun designed to trick the Germans into believing the Allied assault would be on Sardinia: “Let me have him [Martin] back, please, as soon as the assault is over. He might bring some sardines with him–they are on points here!” The Germans discovered the body and sent the letter to Hitler himself. Days later British Intelligence learned that the Germans had begun sending large reinforcements to Sardinia. When the Allies invaded Sicily, Field Marshal Rommel said that the failure of the German defenses was “a result of a diplomatic courier’s body being washed up off Spain.”

 

The Donation that Never Was

A ninth-century manuscript residing in Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, named “Constitutum domini Constantini imperatoris” is better known as the Donation of Constantine. It was believed to have been issued by the fourth century Roman Emperor Constantine I, granting the Popes of the Roman Catholic Church dominion over lands in Judea, Greece, Asia, Thrace, Africa, as well as the city of Rome, with Italy and the entire Western Roman Empire. The text claims that the Donation was Constantine’s gift to Sylvester for instructing him in the Christian faith, baptizing him and miraculously curing him of leprosy. The document is now believed to be a forgery made by Pope Stephen II to persuade Carolingian King Pepin the Short to donate his lands in Italy. The impact of this fictitious document was undeniable—these lands would become the Papal States and would become the basis of the Papacy’s secular power for the next eleven centuries.

 

The Sale that Never Was

One of the greatest con men in history, Victor Lustig (above rightmost, seen leaving prison) had his finest hour in trying to sell the Eiffel Tower. It was 1925. France was recovering from the First World War. In a Parisian newspaper, Lustig saw an article discussing the problems the city was encountering in maintaining the Eiffel Tower. Posing as an anonymous government official high up in the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, Lustig summoned six important scrap metal merchants to a meeting at one of the top hotels in Paris, where he explained that the city could not afford to maintain the Eiffel Tower and so wanted to sell it for scrap – although everything had to be kept utterly secret to avoid a public outcry. Lustig even gave the merchants a full tour of the Tower, enabling them to see it all at first hand, before inviting their secret bids the following day. He even took bribes from Andre Poisson, who ‘won’ the bid. Embarrassed, Poisson could never bring himself to go to the police. Lustig returned to the city a month later and attempted the same trick with six more scrap metal merchants. This time, however, the police were informed. Eventually, Lustig was arrested in the US for counterfeiting and died in jail in 1947.

 

The Fortune that Never Was

In 1881, Therese Humbert received a letter from an American millionaire Robert Henry Crawford, whose life she saved two years ago. The letter stated that Crawford had died and made her a beneficiary in his will. The will said that Therese was to look after the family fortune, which was locked in a safe, until her younger sister, Marie, was old enough to marry one of Crawford’s two nephews. In fact, there were no American millionaire named Crawford and Therese created the entire hoax. The story of the inheritance enabled Therese and her husband to obtain loans and improve their lifestyle. The larger loans were raised to cover the interest on the original loans and for 20 years, the Humberts were lived in luxury atop their pyramid scheme. By 1902, financiers realized that the amount of the inheritance would not be enough to cover all the loans. Calls were made for the safe to be opened. When it was opened, the authorities found a brick and an English halfpenny, but by this time the Humberts had disappeared. They were arrested in Madrid in December, 1902. Infamous trial (above) ensued. Therese was jailed for five years and her two brothers, who had played the fictitious nephews of the non-existent Robert Crawford, were sentenced to two and three years each.

 

The War that Never Was

Berwick was historically a royal burgh on the Scottish border. Traditionally, it was regarded as a special, separate entity, and some proclamations referred to “England, Scotland and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed”. It was claimed that in the Declaration of the War against Russia in 1853, Queen Victoria supposedly signed as “Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions”. However, when the Treaty of Paris (1856) was signed to conclude the war, “Berwick-upon-Tweed” was left out. This meant that one of Britain’s smallest towns was officially at war with one of the world’s mightiest powers for over a century. An investigation in 1970 disputed the story: although Berwick was not mentioned in the Treaty of Paris, it was not mentioned in the declaration of war either. However, only four years earlier, in 1966, a Soviet official waited upon the Mayor of Berwick and town councillors to sign a peace treaty. The mayor quipped: “Please tell the Russian people that they can sleep peacefully in their beds.”

 

The Country that Never Was

The killing of many thousands of Ibo tribesman in Northern Nigeria in 1966 plunged the country into the civil war. Home to around 8,500 Ibos, South Eastern region of Biafra declared itself to be independent (and it remained independent for three years). Biafra’s ‘President’, Oxford-educated Lieut. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, then 34, tapped a medical officer Albert Nwazu Okonkwo to lead the province of Benin. As Nigerian forces were to retake the province, Okonkwo declared the independence of the Republic of Benin at 07:00 on 19 September 1967. The republic lasted a little more than a day. On 20 September 1967, it was terminated as Nigerian forces recaptured the province. It was not recognised, not even by its “parent” country, Biafra, mainly because of the brevity of its existence.

 

The Book that never was

English explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton was a man who never shied away from sex and sexuality. He translated The Book of One Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra into English. He frequented brothels on his expeditions. Burton also translated The Perfumed Garden, a seminal work of erotic literature, but his translation was incomplete, apparently because the latter chapters concerned homosexuality and pederasty. When Burton died towards the end of 1890, he was working on a new translation of the original manuscript, which included the exised chapter. This translation was never published as Burton’s religious wife Isabel burned the manuscript soon after his death—despite being offered six thousand guineas for it. She regarded the burned manuscript as his “magnum opus,” and she said she was acting to protect her husband’s reputation, and imagined she was instructed to burn the manuscript by his spirit.

10 Greatest Monopolies

Some used shrewd business decisions, some illegal practices. In some instances, states sponsored it, in some, the nature of the market promulgated it. No matter how they rose (and fell), these monopolies gained more than money. They achieved something some governments dare not dream: power, influence and enduring legacy:

1. Standard Oil

History’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller, presided over an oil monopoly a century before the Middle East sheiks do. Formed in 1870 mainly by John D., who had already made a substantial fortune by commodities trade during the Civil War, Stanford Oil incorporated oil producing, transporting, refining, and marketing into one single behemoth which grew both vertically and horizontally (purchase of producers and distributors). In 1882, all of Standard Oil’s properties were merged into the Standard Oil Trust, and by the end of the decade (1890), it controlled 88% of the refined oil flows in the United States. That same year, the Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act — the source of all American anti-monopoly laws – which was used two years later against Standard Oil. In 1911, the corporate behemoth was divided into smaller companies (which included many currently famous oil companies Amoco, Texco, Exxon, Chevron) but the monopoly wasn’t broken because the old John D. still controlled all those smaller companies. The real competition began only years later when Rockefeller’s heirs sold the inherited shares.

2. Salt Commission

In Tang China, (618-907 AD), the Salt Commission is one of the most influential agencies. After a peasant revolution, the land tax revenues fell in China and salt commission was created in 758 (based on Guanzi, a book written in 3^rd century BC book which proposes various salt taxation methods) to intensify the taxation of salt. Salt was essential for its nutritional and preservational values. Since the government controlled all major salt productions, the Tang dynasty was able to maintain th virtual monopoly on the salt trade, and benefited greatly from allocating licensed producers and licensed merchants. The enfranchising of licensed merchants enabled the imposition of the policy even to the further reaches of the nation. The revenues from salt taxation of salt slowly exceeded half of tax revenues within a few years of its inception, and by 1300 AD, it was creating 80% of all tax revenues in China. Although the salt commission began and ended with the Tang dynasty, the state monopoly on salt in China existed from sometime in 1^st century BC to the end of Imperial China in early 20^th century, making it the most enduring monopoly of all time.

3. De Beers

For a firm that started out by renting water pumps to miners during a diamond rush, De Beers succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founder, Cecil Rhodes. In 1888, De Beers Consolidated Mines was formed with the sole purpose to be the owner of all diamond mining operations in South Africa. Using his colonial influences, Rhodes negotiated a strategic agreement with the London-based Diamond Syndicate in 1889, which fixed diamond prices. Whenever a new mine is discovered, it is absorbed into the De Beers cartel. At its height in the middle of the 20^th century, De Beers controlled 80% of the diamond market. Discovery of new mines in Russia, Canada, and Australia ended De Beers monopoly but De Beers is now more profitable today with a 40% market share than when it maintained an 80% market share.

4. Dutch East India Company

Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), established in 1602, was the world’s first multinational and mega- corporation, which possessed quasi-governmental powers, including the ability to wage war, negotiate treaties, coin money, and establish colonies. It is only natural that it also coined the standards for monopolies. To counter English and Portuguese colonial expansions, the Dutch government in 1602 sponsored “United East Indies Company” that was granted a monopoly over the Asian trade. The charter of the new company empowered it to build forts, maintain armies, and conclude treaties with Asian rulers. To establish its monopoly for the spice trade, the entire native populations in Indonesia were deported, decimated or enslaved in the Dutch plantations that replaced them. Although by 1669, the VOC was the richest private company the world had ever seen, a series of mismanagements and colonial encroachments by other great powers bankrupted the VOC in 1800.

5. Thurn and Taxis Mail

In 1489, Jeannetto de Tassis was appointed Chief Master of Postal Services in Italy. From that moment on to the early years of the 19^th century, his descendants, Thurn and Taxis family held its virtual monopoly on mail and postal services through a letters of grant and nobility given by Holy Roman Emperors Frederick III, Maximilian I and Charles V. In 1615, the position, Imperial Postmaster General was made hereditary. In its heydays at the end of the 18^th century, it took only forty hours to a letter from Paris to reach Brussels. The family’s horse relay system that connected nearly all of European capitals was the gold standard in communication. However, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars greatly disrupted the family business. In 1867, postal monopoly was nationalized. By then, the family had diversified into a various other enterprises from foodstuffs to banking to to railroads and to this day, the family is one of the richest families in Europe.

6. Pan Am Airways

Thurn and Taxis monopoly may be broken, but the importance of communication and transportation (and monopoly producing power of it) was not. For the better part of the 20^th century, Pan American Airways dominated the airmail and transportation not only of the United States but also of both Americas. Founded in 1927, Pan Am greatly expended under Juan Trippe who bought out many independent carriers in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and in South America. To counter the competition from foreign companies, the U.S. government itself endorsed the airline as the “chosen instrument” for U.S. air routes. After the World War II, however, despite its enormous lobbying campaign in the Congress, Pan Am gradually lost its status as America’s international airline to various American and foreign carriers. By 1991, “World’s Most Experienced Airline,” was broke.

7. U.S. Steel

U.S. Steel’s alumni were who’s who of America industrialists. J. P. Morgan and Elbert H. Gary founded it in 1901. The steel operations were owned by Andrew Carnegie. Its first president was Charles M. Schwab. Within five years of its founding, the corporation had become the largest steel producer and largest corporation in the world (as well as the world’s first billion-dollar corporation). During WWII, the U.S. Steel spearheaded American war efforts, employing over 300,000 employees and producing 20-30 million tons of steel every year. However, after the war, the Corporation (as it was famously known) has become a leviathan that had outlived its usefulness. As early as 1911, the federal government tried to break up the corporate goliath (which initially controlled 67% of all the steel produced in America), but it was the American steel industry’s own lack of innovation and efficiency that doomed U.S. Steel. It now produces less than 10 percent of the steel used in America and employs less than 50,000 people.

8. Caviar

Caviar lined the Soviet coffers with gold during the Cold War. However, the Bolsheviks and the Communists are not the first in imposing the state monopoly on caviar. Although sturgeon and their eggs have been eaten by the Russians as early as the 8^th century BC, it was not until Ivan the Terrible’s time that sturgeon producing Northern Caspian region was annexed from Muslim Tatars. Caviar monopoly was enforced by Tsar Peter the Great, who also tried to introduce the delicacy to the fashionable French court (without much success). However, by the time it was reintroduced to the Western Europe in 1860, caviar had already became the symbol of Russian luxury, and the Tsarist state had slowly relaxed its monopoly laws. However, after the Bolshevik Revolution, the powerful Soviet Ministry of Fisheries reintroduced tight measures to conserve sturgeons and to maintain the high caviar prices. The collapse of the Soviet Union killed the state monopoly, but also opened the Pandora’s box of overfishing, pollution and caviar smuggling.

9. American Telephone and Telegraph

Originally founded by Alexander Graham Bell and his financiers, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company managed to corner the telecommunications market of the United States even though Bell’s patent on the telephone expired in 1894. Since it was expensive to place copper wires all over the country (for different companies) the U.S. government itself agreed to this natural monopoly of having one telephone company for the nation. In 1907, AT&T president Theodore Vail announced “One Policy, One System, Universal Service.”–a guideline which AT&T used to purchase competitors. In 1918, the federal government’s nationalization of telecommunication industry profited AT&T which won the contract for the laying out of a coast-to-coast telephone system (potential competitors were forbidden from installing new lines to compete, with state governments wishing to avoid “duplication.”) The ‘natural monopoly’ was broken in 1970s with new technologies slowly replacing copper wires approach. Upon the settlement of United States v. AT&T, AT&T was split into seven companies and the monopoly was ended.

10. HBC

The Hudson’s Bay Company (Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson) is the oldest commercial corporation in North America and is one of the oldest in the world. Once the de facto government of North America and later its largest landowner, the company controlled nearly all of fur trade in the New World from its headquarters at York Factory on Hudson Bay. Although the company’s monopoly on fur trade (chartered by England’s King Charles II) was never complete due to the small competitions from independent fur traders, its trade covered 3 million square miles (where settlements are forbidden by its monopoly rules ) and employed 1,500 traders. Its network of trading posts formed the nucleus for later official authority in many areas of Western Canada and the United States. The decline of the fur trade and a high-profile illegal fur trade trial in 1849 broke the monopoly, but the company evolved into a mercantile business selling vital goods to settlers in the Canadian West. Today the company is best known for its department stores throughout Canada.

Afterthought:

Demysterifying Hoover ….

 

What happens in the Hoover Institution stays in Hoover. Usually. Sometimes some debate about this bastion of conservatism spills over to the adjacent university, and all the hell breaks loose in Stanford. So how did the liberal West Coast’s premier university end up with a conservative thinktank on its campus?

The 84-year-old Hoover Institution is the legacy of former Republican President Herbert Hoover, a graduate of Stanford’s first class, who retired to Stanford after his disastrous presidency and presided over the cataloging of papers and documents he acquired in his early days. Until his death in 1960, Hoover ruled his institute (later renamed institution to rival East Coast’s Brooklyn Institution) with an ironfist from his ninth floor office at the Hoover Tower, Stanford campus’ most ironic and iconic building.

From shelves inside the lanky tower, the collection itself has expended greatly—now there are two annexed wings and a vast underground storage where the non-browsable library in tightly guarded. The institution’s treasures include the video footage of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima (one of the most requested archival items), a skull X-ray of Adolf Hitler (from which picture’s bad teeth appearances that experts deduced the Fuhrer has contracted some sort of STD) and recently, the Saddam Hussein papers—the diaries and governmental papers of the late Iraqi dictator which the university agreed to keep from public for next seven years.

Originally funded directly by the university, the institution now has an endowment of $450 million and is generously supported by donors–some famous, some controversial—which include Boeing, Exxon and Chrysler. However, more controversial than its donors themselves is the institution’s distinguished fellowship program. Originally named to distinguish itself from ordinary fellowship (which any scholar wishing to study at the institution can apply to), the Distinguished Fellowship are nominated by any of Hoover’s research taskforces in a process not much different from the one the university’s various departments use. However, since the Institution’s director is answerable to none but the President of the Stanford University, the nominations are usually scrutinized under a different light.

Distinguished fellows are usually invited to lead or to participate in the institution’s research departments, but under a system formulated by Mr. Hoover’s handpicked successor at the institution, W. Glenn Campbell, many of them ended up teaching in Stanford’s economics and political science departments—a fact the liberal student body cannot stomach. Distinguished or visiting fellows in the past included Newt Gingrich, George Shultz (whose honorary fellowship was commuted/demoted to a distinguished fellowship by the current director), Gen. John Abizaid, Edwin Meese, Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Amy Zegart—the list has become Who’s who of Republican Party in recent years that under the Bush administration, as many as eight Hoover fellows sat on the Defense Policy Board advising Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who after his resignation would also be nominated for the fellowship.

Historically as well, Hoover has always been the centre of controversy. W. Glenn Campbell, director of Hoover from 1960-1989 was a staunch supporter of Ronald Reagan, whose crackdown on student protests of the Vietnam War he vocally supported. Meanwhile, his fundraising, which focussed on fighting communism abroad and on campus was frequently criticized. When Campbell turned 65, he fought vehemently against mandatory retirement age policy and secured a generous retirement package. Although his successor and the current director John Raisian hasn’t made any honorary fellow appointments in his 20-year tenure (and as he confided to me in a dinner last week, he hasn’t no plan to do so in near future), his predecessor did. As it is normally in the politicalized world, none of Campbell’s nominations (not of Margaret Thatcher, not of Ronald Reagan or not even that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn) were well-received. But it is with Mr. Rumsfeld that the sh*t hits….well, you get the idea.

Rumsfeld’s nomination being made in late August of 2007 before the university opened, many faculty members viewed this as Hoover’s deliberate attempt to overstep its authority, to downplay the issue before the students arrive and to bypass the university. Mr. Rumsfeld’s involvement in everything from Iraq War to torture to Abu Gharib was discussed bitterly. Usually politically removed, the faculty itself lend its voice of dissent to student petitions—an action which led to the Hoover Institution being examined by the Faculty Senate.

In front of the Faculty Senate, Raisian expressed his regrets that his nomination was misconstrued but he refused to withdraw the nomination. Mr. Rumsfeld’s own decision not to come to Stanford averted the potential crisis but not before the Standard Daily lampooned the choice with a mock headline: “Fidel Castro nominated as a Hoover Fellow”.

Like it or not, Hoover Institution is here to stay. In 2003, a political on-campus group, SCPJ (Stanford Community for Peace and Justice) petitioned the university’s president John Hennessy and John Raisian to change Hoover’s mission statement and its ‘partial’ political stance. The petition was not reviewed because it is not in par with the university’s policies. Meanwhile, the students may just have to be thankful that in 1987, the plans for the construction of Reagan Library on the campus (a plan not unsurprisingly endorsed by the Hoover Institution) were defeated in the board of trustees, which no doubt thought that the legacy of one Republican President is enough for this already politically divided campus.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ghosts of Politics Yet to Come….

Future. Such an enticing mistress–and an unfaithful one at that. I submit to you recent articles: 

 

The Nation That Fell To Earth,  Niall Ferguson

The article appeared in 5th 9/11 anniversary issue of TIME in 2006, as a look back from a generation removed (2031).

Predictions: “For a time, Bush’s approval ratings sank below Richard Nixon’s and Jimmy Carter’s worst. Yet history has been a kinder judge of Bush’s presidency. … on Nov. 3, 2008, [John] McCain conceded defeat to Mark Warner, the former Governor of Virginia…. To most Americans, the key issue in 2008 was … “the economy, stupid.” …. The Chinese stock-market crash sent a shock wave through the entire Asian economy. … Output collapsed. Unemployment soared. The Chinese banking system, which had never been entirely free of corruption, imploded.”

 

The Countdown to a Meltdown, James Fallow

The article appeared in June issue of The Atlantic magazine as a look back from two election cycles later (2016).

Predictions: An independent will win the White House in 2016. “But by dying when he did, at eighty-two, [Fidel Castro became] the “October surprise” of the 2008 campaign. … The fourth—and worst—world oil shock started [in 2008]. Our [unnamed] forty-fourth president seemed actually to welcome being universally known as “the Preacher.”" There came a market crash in 2009-2010. “Toyota’s acquisition of General Motors and Ford, in 2012, had a similar inevitability. … Political pros had always assumed that America’s first black president would be a Republican and a soldier, and they were right. He just didn’t turn out to be Colin Powell. … The Historic Campus of our best-known university, Harvard, is still prestigious worldwide. But its role is increasingly that of the theme park, like Oxford or Heidelberg, while the most ambitious students compete for fellowships at the Har-Bai and Har-Bei campuses in Mumbai and Beijing.”

 

Apocalypse Later: A Futurologist Looks Back at 2008, John Feffer 

The article appeared on August 21, 2008 at TomDispatch.com, as a nostalgic, apologetic look back from 2016.

Predictions: “[We thought] the new team in Washington … would close down Guantanamo and reverse the U.S. position on torture. They would begin the long process of withdrawing troops from Iraq. They would repeal the tax cuts for the wealthy and renegotiate the free trade agreements, and launch an Apollo-style program to develop alternative energies….  As it turned out, we were all wrong. But they came close enough. We finally signed the Kyoto agreement. The new administration made a big deal about it. The president gave the pen to Al Gore, who said that it meant more to him than the Nobel Prize and the Oscar combined.”

 

The Age of Mammals: Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century, Rebecca Solnit

Ms. Solnit writes this apocalyptic future of 2026 in the Republic of San Francisco as the year-end summary for Tomdispatch in 2006.

Predictions:  “By the time the Republican Party itself split in 2012 into two adversarial wings dubbed the Fundament party and the Conservatives, the American Empire was dismantling itself. Of course, the United States still nominally exists — we’ll pay a bow to it this year at the Decolonization Day fireworks on July 4 — but it is a largely symbolic entity, like the British Royal Family was for a century before its dissolution in 2020. … Every schoolchild now knows the Old Map/New Map system and can recite the lands that vanished: half the Netherlands, much of Bangladesh, the Amazon Delta, the New Orleans and Shanghai lowlands. …. former President Bush the Younger, extradited from Paraguay [was] found guilty [for war crimes] in 2013.”

 

 

Tomorrow’s world war today, Niall Ferguson

The second of three Ferguson articles on the list. Although not a futurist (and he himself hates futurists), Mr. Ferguson shared his MidEast views for 2007-11 in this January 16, 2006 article in LA Times. 

Predictions: “More than two-fifths of the population of Iran had been aged 14 or younger in 1995. This was the generation that was ready to fight in 2007. Tehran had a nuclear missile pointed at Tel Aviv. … The devastating thermonuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy; … the true significance of the 2007-11 war was to vindicate the Bush administration’s principle of preemption. For, if that principle had only been adhered to in 2006, Iran’s nuclear aspirations might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And then – hard though it is to imagine now – the Great Gulf War might never have happened.” Mr. Ferguson later defended his fiery article with an article equally controversial: One strike, Iran could be out. 

 

 

 

An imaginary retrospective of 2009, Niall Ferguson 

Niall Ferguson looks back from a year ahead (end of 2009)

Predictions: “Timothy Geithner, US Treasury secretary, requested an additional $300bn to provide further equity injections for Citigroup, Bank of America and the seven other big banks, just a week after imposing an agonising “mega-merger” on the automobile industry. … Japan was plunged back into the deflationary nightmare of the 1990s by yen appreciation and a collapse of consumer confidence.  Obama’s decision to fly to Tehran in June … produced a dramatic improvement in the Middle East region. Al-Qaeda’s bungled attempt to assassinate Obama – on the eve of Thanksgiving – only served to discredit radical Islamism and to reinforce Obama’s public image as “The One”.”  

Running Away from Revolutionary Road

Spoilers Alert: The latest movie from Sam Mendes is a little movie that could, but it is no American Beauty

Verdict: 7/10

There are a few things revolutionary about Revolutionary Road. It is about a couple living in the 1950s suburbia, who are united only by their defeated ambitions if by anything. Kate Winslet and Leonarod diCaprio in their first onscreen reunion since Titanic deliver powerful performances as April and Frank Wheeler. Into their life an array of character, including an insane mathematician John Givings, who provides the voice of conscience through his blunt observances and Mendes’ astute camera focuses. However, Givings’ voice was artificial, manufactured and reminiscent of Mendes’ earlier, more beautiful American Beauty.

From the first moment we met him, Frank Wheeler doesn’t have ambitions–he has ideas, whims and anti-ambitions. April, on the other hand, has a strong ambition to be an actress–an ambition perhaps tailored to her desires of escaping reality. Escapism is the prevailing mode in the movie–April wants to escape her suburban Stepford wife status; Frank wants to escape the conformity of the male-dominated workplace; all people in their surrounds try to find escapism somewhere or the other, whether it be in television, gossip about others, adultery or insanity.

April’s Great Escape plan to Paris, however, is not fueled by her love for the city life there, but by her unrealistic assumptions of life there, and by her desire to escape suburbia dead or alive. Frank also briefly shares this escapism, but after he managed to find another way to break the monotony of his office life (but not through adultery, the movie emphasizes), he finds his feet firmly on the ground of reality again.

The marriage of Frank and April is an example of the attraction of the polar opposites. However, when they began to live in two different worlds, the rift widens. Even Frank’s attempts to reforms the ways of  his citylife cannot heal the differences. In the end, to April, the child she is carrying becomes the fetters weighing her down. So she leaves by cutting those fetters loose, but not before leaving the scarlet letter of condemnation in her home, her prison.

To surmise, Revolutionary Road–not so-titled because the Wheelers are revolutionaries or they are traveling towards some cloud-cuckoo-land, but named after the road they reside–is a good movie. It is a big movie that explores a small facet of the 50s suburbia, before the woman liberation movement that switched gender roles between Kevin Spacey’s and Annette Benning’s characters in American Beauty. Despite engaging acting, the movie lacks certain elements, foists some onto the viewers (through John Givings) and overuses sex and running away as physical forms of escape.

The final scenes of other couples reminiscing the Wheelers serve as a testament to the fact that the rifts exist in all couples and that there are things even couples shouldn’t talk to each other about–their escapisms, for instance. Yes, that may be the reason we ourselves go to movies to escape too, but it is now almost cliched to see the movie couples trying to escape their two-dimensional confines too. If there is a lasting moral to Revolutionary Road, it is that by running away, we are no closer to our ambitions, aspirations and even destinies.

An Evening With A Tricky Dick

No, I didn’t see Nixon, but Musharraf was his natural successor. However, Stanford University’s hosting of former Pakistani President was not as eventful as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance in Columbia last year.

Magnanimity. The word sounds extremely ironic coming from General Pervez Musharraf—the former President of Pakistan—who displayed little of that in his eight year Presidency. However, magnanimity (on part of India and the international community) is exactly what Mr. Musharraf advocated to solve the recent crisis between India and Pakistan who arose form the Bombay terrorist attacks last month.

Mr. Pervez Musharraf gave a talk and a Q&A session to a packed Memorial Auditorium in Stanford University on his lecture tour on the United States. It is not an extraordinary event; many heads of state do that after they left the office to earn extra cash and to rehabilitate their popularity. (Note to President Bush: don’t do that, unless you want more shoes.) Surprisingly, Mr. Musharraf’s popularity also grew after his resignation last year, partially due to the economic rebound Pakistan witnessed under his rule and to even worse corruption levels in the government that succeeded him.

This polarizing attitude is reflected inside the Memorial Auditorium today. Musharraf said as little as possible (information-wise) in his own talk to the crowd, but the candid Q&A session was wildly received with both boos and cheers by one of the rowdiest audience I have ever seen in an academic setting. The first question-cum-accusation of an Indian student who listed Musharraf’s undemocratic acts starting from his coup d’etat was well-received; so was Musharraf’s strongman reply that he can go back to the podium and justify every single one of those accusations.

The mainstream media also reports this event: here and here. I see however from a totally different perspective. The event is just the reflection of the politics at its worst; Musharraf is a prime example of two classic adages: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” Today, he talked about the global community’s shared commitments to defeat extremism and terrorism, but also defended his Pakistan’s questionable tactics in pursuing those commitments, by underlining the differences between strategies and tactics. However, it seemed Mr. Musharraf’s sole strategy was to remain in power and he no doubt used all tactics in the book.

Last year, A.Q. Khan—the Pakistani scientist accused of selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and DPRK—gave an interview to ABC News saying he had been made a scapegoat by Musharraf and his government to cover up the government’s own involvement in the issue. In this case of he says, she says, Musharraf apparently didn’t have much to say—he defended his detaining (without access even to the Western intelligent services) and somewhat contradictory pardon of A.Q. Khan by using that magic word: “sensitivity”.

On Afghanistan and Taliban, Mr. Musharraf is quick to admit failures but even quicker to point fingers at the West, which abandoned the region after the Cold War ended. Maybe Mr. Musharraf’s statement that CIA/Charlie Wilson’s War was the last nail in the Soviet Union’s coffin is correct, but the West’s sanctions on the Pakistan (which Mr. Musharraf dated to the end of the Cold War) didn’t occurred until Pakistan started pursuing its nuclear ambitions eight years later.

During the heated Q&A session, Musharraf stated he has constitutional authority to sack of the Chief Justice (although he didn’t elaborate on the justification) and that he didn’t consult the legislature because of a conflict of interest between the legislature and the judiciary. He also blamed the bad press he and Pakistan has been receiving to ‘aspersions’ which became an overused word by the end of the talk. He skillfully treaded around the controversial issues of misappropriated U.S. anti-terror assistance funds (by noting Pakistan only received a few billion, as opposed to many billions of aid) and of National Reconciliation Ordinance, which granted amnesty to politicos accused of various crimes which ranged from corruption to terrorism (by taking a shelter behind his empty facade of democracy).

By the end of the talk, Mr. Musharraf’s talk has become nothing but a vacillating effort to redeem his presidency. Whether he was talking about his control over military or Kashmiri crisis or his deportations of Al-Qaeda and Pakistanis to U.S. torture camps, he glorified himself and shifted the blame to the others (not unlike a certain U.S. president a generation before). In his main talk, Mr. Musharraf metaphorically pointed out the tree of terrorism, its branches and ramifications and repeatedly, ad nauseum, emphasized its roots being more political. Yes, I partially agree. Maybe politicians like Musharraf are the root of many problems.

The Tale of Two Webs

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, ending a symbolic ornament of the Cold War, the conflict that staked paranoia into the hearts of the people on the both sides of the wall. It has been twenty years since that chilly November morning, but since then, more walls has been created in Russia and China-the invisible ones that are far more segregative and deadlier than the Berlin Wall.

The walls are of course those instituted on the internet. It is true that a conglomerate can never monopolize a market like internet. That is the reason that we believe in little search engines that could like cuil. That explains why Orkut is phenomenal in India and Brazil and Friendster is in Asia in this age of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. However, in nowhere is this gap more prominent than in Russia, where they apparently have an entirely different internet structure.

A photoshop contest winner in Cracked.com asked us to harken back to the past, and ponder about the future

The Russians have Yandex, their own search engine. They have moiKrug.ru-the Russian equivalent of Linkedln. Instead of Facebook, they use vkontakte.ru, which copycats the former’s design. Instead of youtube, they have another clone, rutube.ru. This self-imposed segregation creates a internet society similar yet different from the West in Russia, something  a Soviet Russia which invented this own version of MonopolyTM will probably revel.

However, it is bad for the outside world. Through social networking, one can have friends from Estonia, New Zealand, Peru, Germany, and South Africa but it is less likely to get one from Russia because they have their own social spheres, which hinders communication and spreading information-the values which can make the world a safer, better place in this new century.

Russians may not be deliberately disassociating from the Western networks, but China actually is, on the other hand. Taking lessons from glasnost and perestroika, China has learnt to monitor the websites,  to control the information available, and to change history itself. To use a recently popular buzzword, China imposed ‘pay to play’ policy on Google and Yahoo! to comply with its ideological whims. And when even the prestigious organizations like the IOC yield to China, and when social networking got filtered (MySpace launched squeaky clean, non-political China version), you know it is bad times.

Nonetheless, the specter of internet is haunting China and Russia. We have seen the advance of Web 2.0-an age where everyone contributes to the community. It is time to usher in the era of Web 3.0-an age where everyone is spurred into an action, whether it may be environmental, social or political. The era has already begun with grassroot internet movement for Obama presidential campaign, and has the precedent in 2001’s ousting of Philippine President Joseph Estrada through a riot coordinated through text messaging.

In 1989, China’s democracy movement was crashed in the bloody square of Tienanmen [see China's efforts to change that history here] when the Politburo called in the troops from the far away provinces to quash the revolt. Imagine an era when the troops from afar feel equally compassionate and caring towards the revolting students. It is an era where globalization has bridged the gaps and information has spread its wings. It will be the era of Web 3.0-the era in which we truly transcends meager national boundaries to network and communicate, the era in which the web-coordinated governed supplants their puppet masters. It is an era I am looking forward to; it is an era we can achieve in our watch. Let a billion free netizens bloom.

2008–the Year in Review

Pessimism is in the air-and it is contagious too. A few weeks before, during a conversation on the global financial meltdown, I assured my friends that if we are to harken back to 2008 in three years’ time, we will definitely laugh at our Cassandra-like pessimism and anxieties mainly with. They were not convinced–neither was I.

This was indeed a terrible year for the establishment and the politicians who inhibit it, a year when gossip columns shifted from covering celebrity DUIs to Spitzer’s hypocrisy, baby Edwards and  Blagojevich’s caveat emptor. In America’s longest election season, Hilary Clinton did everything (3AM phone-calls, Rev. Wright); Rudi Giulani nothing. Both lost. So did that not-so-maverick-y senator, whose campaign only proved that he himself was not so above partisan mudslinging. McCain threw his experience card away by nominating a folksy, yet inexperienced, Alaskan Governor who has strange ideas for naming kids, and even stranger ones on foreign policy.

On her way to become a hobgoblin for liberal media, Sarah Palin stopped only to shop and wink, but even her spending couldn’t stop Wall Street-and McCain’s campaign-from crashing. The Feds looked the other way as the Lehman Brothers’ stocks plummeted to a point where its headquarters came to worth more than the entire company. On the other hand, it helped AIG, which celebrated the bailout by throwing a lavish staff party. Automakers flew to Washington to proclaim their confidence in American cars. In the first half of the year, the oil prices increased from 100$ to 150$ before dropping precipitous in the second half. Apple learnt its five billion dollars lesson on the dangers of depending on one person when a internet rumor sleazed Steve Jobs’ health.

Change is also in the air in New Zealand where longtime Prime Minister Helen Clark got replaced by a stockbroker-New Zealand is apparently where the stockbrokers thrive after getting fired from the Lehman Brothers. Meanwhile, Republican politician comes in a close second to stockbroker on the jobs being cut list. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), notorious as Senator No for his isolationist policies, died. His successor to the curmudgeon title, Ted Stevens (R-AK), whose accomplishment so far has been calling internet a series of tubes, narrowly lost a senate race which, had he won, would have made him the first felon (nay, the first felon who got caught) in the Senate. The democrats dreamt of a filibuster-proof senate, but Joe Lieberman nightmare still hovered over their heads.

China celebrated its big coming out Olympics with virtual fireworks, lip-synching and by taking child-labor to the next step. While the international media is trying to downplay China’s gold medal count with Michael Phelps’ eight golds, Russia rolled her tanks into Georgia. Nicholas Sarkozy, found time to negotiate Russo-Georgian ceasefire while also managing a supermodel wife and YSL’s funeral.

In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi is back along with his gaffes: he called Barack Obama ’sun-tanned’. South Africa lost its AIDS conspiracy theories and its President, his seat. Meanwhile, Mbeki’s failed power-sharing talks kept Robert Mugabe in power in neighboring Zimbabwe.

Like Giuliani with early primaries and Mugabe with cholera, Burma’s junta blithely ignored a cyclone that devastated the nation’s agribusinesses. In neighboring Thailand, one prime minister got kicked out for appearing in a cooking channel and prime ministers changed faster than the sentries in the royal palace. Mortgage crisis hits Nepal as its king got evicted.

Putin stepped down in Russia but the rest of the world crowned him the new “Tsar”. Ahmedinajed visited Venezuela to pledge millions for an “anti-imperialistic” funds while Iran is witnessing its greatest economic crisis. The “Dear Leader” of North Korea disappeared while doctored photographs replaced him.

Pervez Musharraf resigned in Pakistan. Zardari Khan (or as the rest of the world calls him, Mr. Bhutto) succeeded him. So far, his only accomplishment has been getting a fatwa (because he called Sarah Palin ‘gorgeous’).  The U.S. Has increased its forays into Pakistan to hunt terrorists who were meanwhile creating havoc and mayhem in Delhi.

However, it would be unjust to label 2008 as the year when optimism ended. The change is in the air, from New Zealand to Pakistan to France, where Greenpeace put Sarkozy’s pictures on the famous Obama poster which was originally created by an underground artist. Yes, change and hope-the very campaign slogans of Barack Obama-are in the air. These words which carried him to the White House to become the first African American President of the United States were proof positives that the overrated tradition of optimism is still alive and kicking. Unfortunately, Americans felt equally enthusiastic and optimistic the same eight years ago when another prolonged election season ended at the Supreme Court. Once again, history has been a harsher judge.

The Blessing in Disguise

Financial crises are usually seen as blessings in disguise because they have the power change the course of history, mostly for the better. However, if the current crisis is a blessing in disguise, then it is in a very good disguise too. Low-income and middle-income family will suffer terribly; many will eventually lose their jobs. The pyramid schemes will be exposed. Moreover, in an age of globalization, there won’t be any miracle rescue packages nor economic Marshall plans. So, the bottomline is everyone must help oneself but have to bailout everyone else too. However, the worst of this maelstrom has passed us. A disastrous collapse of the Wall Street has been averted, so we can look ahead finally.

The financial crisis has already brought a blessing to Washington D.C.–the Obama administration. The crisis not only ended deficit ridden Republican Administration at its eighth year, it also revealed that two decades of Greenspan Chairmanship at the Federal Reserve—an undying legacy of Reagan’s  Republican Revolution—did more harm than good to the American economy.

Whatever you may think about Greenspan, the maestro presided over an unprecedented economic boom and propelled American consumerism into the frontiers. Today, Americans consume 13 Trillion dollars of goods, most of them produced in the developing world. This mean that when American market is in turmoil, the entire world will suffer. China—optimistically looked upon as a global survivor—can’t replace America when it is saving a lot for future economic growth/investment (which is exactly what Greenspan Fed dissuaded in the U.S.) and only consuming one-tenth of what Americans are consuming.

So, the positive externality is that America foreign dependence is likely to go down as well. Chinese and Saudi Arabian investors have been gobbling up the U.S. real estate and investment markets in past few years. When the crisis came, the sheiks and communist cadres knew little, cared little and did little. The Obama administration will impose protectionist measures (which I don’t agree) but the silver lining will be that the Congress may now consider the foreign investments with increased wariness.

American unemployment is going up, but Mr. Obama has promised three million jobs—it is clear that he have a master plan to revitalize America. After the WWII, the unemployed masses found their salvation in FHA’s development loans for suburbias. Mr. Obama should direct a similar national initiative to reform mass-transport infrastructure into a system akin to those in Europe. An affordable mass-transit and GPS/Satellite roadpricing are two of many environmentally-friendly ventures American government can do with a large unemployed workforce.

Along the same lines, the congress should use the auto-bailout plans to enforce the Big Three automakers to produce the cars energy-efficient and market-compatible with foreign imported cars like Toyota Prius. During the last regulations on automakers under Nixon-Ford-Carter administrations, the American fuel efficiency nearly doubled—it is now time to do it again.

The global economies usually have boom-and-bust cycles nearly every decade, but this 2008 one is pretty big. It is the big one that they predicted since 1987. Yet, we were hit hard not because of warnings are ignored but also because we believed, we were led to believe, we wanted to believe—and we even hoped and prayed—this prosperity (which is tenuously built on the ever-expending gap between the rich and the poor and the exploitation of labor in the developing world) will last forever and that mortgage prices and demand will go up forever. In our past, there had been many boom-bust cycles, and in our future, there will be more, but this one—mainly due to the media coverage it receives in increasingly tech-savvy world—will serve as a cautionary tale for a few generations to come.

Or will it?

I don’ approve of the following, but I thought these quotes are illuminating and reflective of a culture not far historical:

Thomas Jefferson on Immigration:

“They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. [Notes on Virginia]

….Uncle Thomas had pretty strong advice on racism, too…

“The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life….. [N]ature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America. I can add with truth that nobody wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be as fast as the imbecility of their present existence….[U]nfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. [Notes on Virginia]

2009: Our Odyssey, Eight Years On

2001: A Space Odyssey—a masterpiece, a chaos, a visual symphony, an incomprehensible mess. Call it what you may, but it remains one of the most impressive and enduring films of all time. It has been forty years since its direction and eight years since the events in the movie but how far have we traveled toward the self-fulfilling man-child prophecy?

After reading an obituary for the writer Arthur C. Clarke, I re-watched the movie 2001: The Space Odyssey last week. It has been exactly forty years since Stanley Kubrick directed it—visually mesmerizing and deafeningly silent epic, a film ahead of its time, an IMAX experience before IMAXs are even conceptualized.

But how ahead of time is the technology in 2001? There are those who lament that we haven’t reach that stage of space travel portrayed in the movie. True, we don’t have Lunar Hiltons, manned missions to Jupiter. The commercial space travel is also non-existent—despite Sir Richard Branson’s projects and a couple of trips the Russians offered to celebrities and tycoons for millions of dollars. We don’t have faux gravity or grip shoes. Not that we need them anyway.

However, on another level—that of computers—we have relocated HAL into dustbin of history. In the movie, it is said that HAL was built in 1992, and it was still being used in 2001—something utterly unimaginable in an age where even laptops are updated at least biannually. Speech recognition and motion tracking—the features that once made HAL9000 a dangerous foe—now assist the disabled, and assume their place at bathroom taps and urinals.

Nonetheless, HAL’s influence on popular culture is more indelible. Four decades after its ‘mind’ was gone, HAL is still alive and kicking, as evidenced in Pixar’s modern space opera WALL-E. When they unveiled a gizmo with an all-purpose circular dial, Apple invoked the line, “Open the pod bay doors.” HAL’s omnipresent eye—the symbol of a technological Big Brother—has appropriately came to represent Web 2.0, the epoch in which everyone is watching and everyone is being watched.

The age of Web 2.0 rendered Clarkian realm somewhat obsolete. Skype (and other innumerable services) now provide a better communication network than those Dave Bowman had in 2001. Phones and other gadgets have become smaller. Internet may now provide Dave with a quicker online shopping  and better tracking system.

But one question still casts a big shadow: have we outgrown our world? That seems to be the question Kubrick asked and we mused at the end of 2001. With unplugging of HAL, Dave Bowman broke human dependence on machines—a dependence that began with the arrival of the monolith at the dawn—and he therefore transcended limitations, expectations, dimensions and even rationality and order. It was a pivotal moment; like its namesake myth of Odysseus, the movie ends ambiguously: is it the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

My answer to “Have we outgrown our world?” is no. We haven’t—we shrank it with mercantilism, imperialism, capitalism and globalization, we withered it with radicalism, bigotry, war and pollution, but we haven’t outgrown it. We won’t be able to until we throw off the yoke weighed down on our shoulders by our establishments—centuries of religion, culture, tradition, faith and even nature.

In Homer’s epic, Odysseus longed to return to Ithaca, and return he did—only to learn that he must leave Ithaca again to one final greatest adventure. For millennia, we paid too close an attention to our egocentric Ithacas—our lifestyles, our one-way cultures, our values, our prejudices and our blind faith—to embark on that final great adventure. It is now time to do so. HAL, open the pod bay doors.

Small Things That Changed History

11. Thirst

The Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620 because the ship ran out of beer. In August 1620, the Pilgrims left Southampton, England on two ships the Speedwell and the Mayflower. Later, the former sprang a leak and the pilgrims consolidated themselves on the Mayflower. After 64 days, on November 9, 1620, the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod. Their patent from the Virginia Company of London authorized them to establish a plantation between 38 and 41 degrees north latitude but Cape Cod was just north of 42 degrees. However, the terrible weather and depleting supply of beer dissuaded the pilgrims from traveling southwards.  The colonists headed to a nearby shelter, then called “Thievish Harbor,” and settled there.

10. A sneeze

According to some historians the massacre of the boulevards after the coup d’état of Napoleon III   resulted from a mistaken command. Napoleon III is said to have been suffering from a severe cold, and to have exclaimed “Ma sacré toux!“—”My wretched cough”—which was misinterpreted by a zealous officer as “Massacrez tous,” or “Kill everybody.” There were some 1,200 prisoners of war incarcerated by the State, and they too were accordingly killed.

9. A comma

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads: A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. Or does it? The Library of Congress’ ratified version reads thus, but the document held in the National Archives has two additional and unusual commas, one between “Militia” and “being” and another between “Arms” and “shall” –thus syntactically relating “A well regulated Militia” to “shall not be infringed”. Whether this mean the goal of the Amendment is to protect the militia against federal interference is the million-dollar question asked by the Constitutional scholars since, leading to many heated debates and even many more heated criminal court cases.
Trivia: Wife of Russian Tsar Alexander III, Princess Dagmar of Denmark once changed a place of a comma and saved a life. Her husband personally wrote the death sentences with the following words: “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.” The princess changed the sentence to “Pardon, impossible to be sent to Siberia.”

8. A nail

When Richard was preparing for a war at Bosworth Field in 1485 with Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, he sent a groom to make sure his favourite horse was ready. The groom asked the blacksmith to shoe the horse quickly with the available materials. After he had fastened three shoes, the blacksmith found he did not have enough nails for the fourth. The impatient groom took the horse anyway. However, in the thick of the battle, as Richard charged to prevent some of his men breaking line and  falling back, one of the horse’s shoes flew off. The horse stumbled and fell, and Richard was thrown to the ground and the horse galloped away. As Henry’s troops closing around him, Richard shouted futilely: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”– the lines since  immortalized by Shakespeare. But there would be no horse for him, and Richard perished on the Bosworth Field.

7. Bad Design

In 2000, Florida voters who were confused by Palm Beach County’s butterfly ballot cost Al Gore the presidency. Unlike regular ballots, the butterfly ballot uses two pages to put the presidential candidates’ name so that the county’s many elderly voters can read the print size. However the contention came when many  voters assumed that Gore and Bush are the first two choices as Florida law requires. Instead, they found Buchanan, on the opposite page, between them. In nearly 7,000 votes, voters marked more than one name on the county’s now-infamous “butterfly ballot,”–the number which is more than 10 times the winning margin George Bush received to claim Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the White House.

6. A Photo-Op

During 1988 elections in the U.S., the Republican nominee George H. W. Bush criticized the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for his liberal positions, especially his ’softness’ on defense policy. Dukakis has also been under fire  for his vocal criticism of “Star Wars” defense initiative.  To refute the facts that he was soft on defense, Dukakis orchestrated what would become the key image of his campaign—a publicity shoot that went terribly wrong. In September 1988, he visited the General Dynamics plant in Michigan to take part in a photo op in an M1 Abrams tank. Dukakis’ ridiculous “tank moment” was used in television ads by the Bush campaign, as evidence that Dukakis would not make a good commander-in-chief, and “Dukakis in the tank” remains shorthand for backfired public relations outings. Bush handily beat Dukakis in the election.

5.  Haemorrhoids (Piles)

On the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was too exhausted and distracted by pain from his haemorrhoids to focus or to ride out. Two days earlier, his doctors had lost the leeches used to relieve the pain of his piles and accidentally overdosed him with laudanum, from whose ill-effects he was still suffering on the morning of the battle. Napoleon rescheduled launching his assault, originally planned for 6am, to 9am and then again to midday. Marshal Ney took command in Napoleon’s absence and made some poor decisions that altered the battle’s outcome.

4. A stamp

In the late 1800s, the United States government negotiated with Nicaraguan President Jose Santos Zelaya to build a canal through Nicaragua. President McKinley nearly signed the authorization to build Nicaragua Canal before he was assassinated. However, one Philipe Bunau-Varilla was lobbying Congress to suppport a French company constructing a similar canal across Panama. In the spring of 1902, Mt. Momotombo, a volcano in Nicaragua, erupted. Bunau-Varilla sent a copy of Nicaraguan stamp depicitng the volcano to all 45 U.S. Senators, with a note saying the menacing volcano would threaten the canal route. Although the volcano is far away from the planned route, the Senate voted in the favor of the Panama route.

3. A boardgame

During World War II, the British secret service smuggled escape kits to prisoners of war inside Germany through monopoly boxes. The secret service asked the British manufacturer of Monopoly, John Waddington Ltd. , to manufacture a “special edition” Monopoly set. The manufacturing was done is a secret room in the factory, where small niches in the games’ cardboard boxes were carved. Inside the playing pieces, metal files, magnetic compasses, and maps made of silk were included. Real money was substituted in the place of monopoly money. Departing allied soldiers and pilots were told that if they were captured they should look out for the special editions, identified by a red dot in the Free Parking space. By the end of the war, it’s estimated that more than 35,000 Allied POWs had escaped from German prison camps.

2. A key

Just before HMS Titanic’s departure from England in April 1912, Second Officer David Blair was removed from the ship’s roster. In the haste of being replaced, Blair failed to pass to his replacement the key to the crow’s nest locker, which held the binoculars. After the disaster, one of the surviving lookouts, Fred Fleet, giving evidence to the US inquiry, confirmed that they did not have any binoculars. Had they done so, he testified, they could have seen the iceberg earlier. When the inquiry chairman asked, “How much earlier?” the lookout replied, “Well, enough to get out of the way.” The key was later auctioned off.

1. A Translation

At the end of the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allies issued an ultimatum demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan. Although she was nearing the breaking point, Japan wanted to negotiate for peace, rather than to unconditionally surrender. So, the Japanese Council of War issued a press statement saying it offer “no comment” on the ultimatum. The Japanese word used – mokusatsu – has several meaning: to ignore or to refrain from comment, its literally meaning being ‘to kill by silence’. The Japanese and American interpreters used “ignore”. The national pride and diplomacy prevented the Council of War from recanting the statement or correcting it. With the Japanese ‘refusal’ in mind, the Americans continued to fight in the Pacific until two atom bombs were dropped in August 1945 and Japan unconditionally surrendered.