Undulating Up

I'll be in Nepal for a few weeks from Tuesday. More info here.

"America today is governed by a ghost."

Obama isn't a muslim. He's an anti-neocolonialist, Islam-acculturated President who is way out of his depth. Becoming political kryptonite must be all the more harrowing for an affirmative action super-hero. Good. I wish him ill. My disdain turned to ill-will when I learnt of his active and crucial role in denying help to babies who survive abortion. Instead they die on a shelf, de-hydrated, panting, without a hand to hold or a voice to bless. That is the essence of this man. He did that.

Still here's some interesting stuff that came up - How Obama Thinks by Dinesh D'Souza:

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.

**

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.

I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century.

**

The climax of Obama's narrative [in Dreams From My Father] is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

Thoughts for the day

'We are not and never will be at war with Islam' - Barack Obama

'You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you' - Leon Trotsky

The Shard is going up fast

The Shard will be the tallest building in Britain and Europe. It's by London Bridge,  a few minutes walk from my London apartment. Here's an album.

Sola, perduta, abbandonata

Homosexual judge with long-term partner rules 'gay' marriage ban unconstitutional

So what we got here?

A judge nullifies a referendum.
A fed nullifies the law-making of a state.
An interested judge doesn't declare his interest.
A homosexual nullifies the assumptions of human society to date.

Government should have no role in marriage, but revolutions have started for less than this.

The world's longest bridge

Yesterday my wife and I walked across the world's longest bridge (in 1888):

Whose boot, whose throat?

Answer this multiple choice question:

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was most likely caused by -

A. BP who drilled and completed a nightmare well with unsafe techniques?

B. BP and Transocean who owned and operated the rig?

C. BP and Transocean and Cameron who made the blow-out preventer which failed?

D. The US government?

A report from the Center for Public Integrity suggests that the ultimate responsibility for the BP oil leak disaster lays with the Obama administration, mainly because of a botched response to the initial fire from the Coast Guard.
"The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.
"Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service's own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon's distress call to fight the blaze.
"An official maritime investigation led by Coast Guard Capt. Hung M. Nguyen in New Orleans is examining whether the salt water that was sprayed across the burning platform overran the ballast system that kept the rig upright, changing its weight distribution, and causing it to list."
Oil platform fires are generally fought using foam, which is a more effective fire suppressant. While the Coast Guard does not itself fight these kinds of fires, it is charged with coordinating fire-fighting activities at off-shore facilities like oil platforms.
The use of salt water rather than foam evidently led to the collapse of the oil platform. This is very important, because the oil leak did not occur until this happened.
"While investigators have zeroed in on a series of missteps and ignored safety warnings aboard the rig that preceded the fiery explosion April 20, the question of what caused the platform to collapse into the Gulf two days later remains unanswered and could prove vital to ongoing legal proceedings and congressional investigations.
"That is because the riser pipe from which the majority of BP's oil spewed did not start leaking until after the rig sank. Experts and some lawsuits have openly tied the sinking of the drilling vessel to the severity of the leak. "
While the Obama administration has received much criticism for its botched response to the BP oil leak disaster, it has, until now, evaded responsibility for having caused it to start with. This is not just a result of Coast Guard incompetence for which President Obama is ultimately responsible for as commander in chief, but, as an article in the Washington Examiner suggests, the direct result of Obama budget cuts that rendered the Coast Guard incapable of making a proper response:
"The crippling budget cuts President Obama proposed for the Coast Guard also deserve a closer examination. Obama's spending plan reduced the blue water fleet by a full one-third, slashed 1,000 personnel, five cutters, and several aircraft, including helicopters. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the Coast Guard updated its official maritime rescue manual -- advising against firefighting aboard a rig -- just seven months before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. That change in policy came at a time when Adm. Thad Allen warned the budget cuts threatened to turn the Coast Guard into a 'hollow force.'"

Bye bye, mouse

It's just a larger, lovelier, portable version of the trackpad on Macbook Pros.

Let me re-phrase that - it's just a larger, lovelier, portable version of the trackpad on Macbook Pros that will up the productivity of a billion people.

I've used a Magic Trackpad at my desktop for a couple of days now. The killer gesture is the drag. Yes, it drags windows around, which is handy, but it moves anything around, such as image boundaries in 'crop' mode, and window corners to re-size the window, files or other objects from hither to thither.

Oh, oh, oh! I've just discovered the 3-finger backward-forward gesture. My life will never be the same.

Et in Acadia ego..

The Obama family is on vacation in Acadia, an island of Maine which is also a US National Park. Yesterday they ascended Mount Cadillac, 1530 feet, the high point of the island.

I visited Acadia in January 2001. In 4 days on the icy, rocky trails I saw 4 other hikers.
Here's a ditty I left in the visitors' book of the b and b to record the names of all the Acadian hills I hiked:

Acadia, Mansell, Bernard, Beech,
Sauveur, Penobscot, Valley Peak,
Pemetic, Sargent, Dorr, North Bubble,
Gorham, Champlain, Connor Nubble:
I banged my head on icy tracks
All for the sake of Cadillac.
Imagine my concussive shock-
We could have driven to the top.
Goddamn!

'Goddamn!' could as well read 'D'oh!' except that it echoes this parody by Ezra Pound:

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, tis why I am,
Goddamm.
So 'gainst the winter's balm
Sing Goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm
Sing Goddamm, sing Goddamm,
DAMM.

Music for a summer evening when the markets love you

Father:


Son:


Unholy ghost:


Zappa's hierarchy:

Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is the best.