VINDICA

Topic 1 - The Fumble and Halftime adjustment: The mother of all  fumbles  has happened.  South Korea and the US reported their first case on the same day - Jan 20th 2020.  Two months later, America has 120K cases and Korea has 9K .  I dont think the President intended this when cheerleading America First.  After this fumble, the administration is now making halftime adjustments and doing better.  But outlook is still not great (see Topics 2 and 3). Topic 2 - Wishful thinking: I do not think Trump supporters voted for him because of his perceived competence.  His wishful thinking on coronavirus makes sense if we think of him as a booster of America and American Economy.  He seemed to be wishing the virus away to protect his cherished economic engine.  Even assuming that his supporters give him slack, I am quite surprised by their apparent  preference to die rather than change their mind about him.  This is not a good sign ...

Voltaire, upon receiving a copy of the latest work from Rousseau, thanked him and then said "never was such intelligence used in turning us all into beasts. One feels like walking on all fours when reading your work". Uncharitable in its context for sure, but it seems strangely appropriate for our times.  I really hope someone out there runs on a platform of return to civility and wins big.  Civility has come to be identified strongly with weakness of late.  What we need is the the sensibility of being firm, while being civil.  It may be a hard balance to acheive, but this may be what is needed to bring down the currently entrenched culture of hate speech masquerading as free speech and as authentic.  Without this, base instincts of racism and sexism are likely to permanently polarize the nation and take it down a very dark alley by forcing a lot of otherwise decent people to make hard choices.

Trump's ban on all citizens from seven muslim countries from entering the US may finally do the impossible and unite the Shia and Sunni. The Democratic Party, all said and done, is making plenty of noise and is behaving like a party that won the plurality of the vote.  This is a relief.  However, they do need to figure out how to fine tune the message. We are clearly seeing a sunset era (maybe temporary) for globalization and trade deals.  The Democrats were clearly caught on the wrong side of this and Trump - shrewdly or accidentally - has ridden this wave to the white house.  This is a real problem, and the party needs to figure out which side they are on.  It is not OK for the Obama wing to be pro-TPP and the liberal wing to be against it and the Clinton wing to be everywhere at once.  Republicans can afford to be ride both horses at once on this because they are in power and Trump will dominate their public image for a while.  But democrats ne...

The strange rise, rise and fall of trump is underway.  Some trumpisms for future reading pleasure: http://qz.com/814511/trumpbookreport-people-imagine-how-donald-trump-would-interpret-great-works-of-literature/

This is a classic.  The way I understand it, he was Invited by the Government to promote tourism, but they rejected his visa!  He had to go back and the visa was approved soon after. 

Matt Taibbi (again) on Thomas Friedman There is also a link to the amazing and hilarious  Friedman OpEd Generator .

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/14/japanese-volcano-mount-aso-on-island-of-kyushu-erupts I have climbed that one during one of my trips to Japan in 2008.  It is too bad the SEMI business has shifted away from Japan and I don't get to go there anymore.

http://gizmodo.com/how-ashley-madison-hid-its-fembot-con-from-users-and-in-1728410265 This is just too good!  The Ashley Madison site had millions of men signed up but hardly any women.  To balance things out, the website had bots respond as women.  Millions of suckers paid hundreds of dollars to chat with bots.

  "La vuelta del malón" by Ángel Della Valle    On the walls of the national fine arts museum in Buenos Aires hangs the masterpiece painted by  Ángel Della Valle.  The blunt title "Return of the raiders" is appropriate for the blunt message.  It was painted to be exhibited in Chicago in 1892 during the 400-year anniversary celebrations of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas.  It won an award at the exhibition and was hailed as the "first truly national work of art" upon its return to Buenos Aires. The first shock is the immense size of the canvas on which the painting is rendered.  Everything that follows is also acutely honed to inspire shock and emotion.  It is dawn and the raiders are returning from their hunt.  The sky occupies almost half the canvas, punctuated only by the demonic countenance of the raiders and the religious artifacts they have plundered.  On the lap of one of the raiders is slu...

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/03/slipknot-corey-taylor-pop-culture-stupid-aliens-youre-making-me-hate-you

I watched them as I tried in vain to keep at bay the army of flies that were attacking my freshly cooked and newly dead goat.  The boys were wearing the bright Red and Blue  Shukas .  For hundreds of years, those colors have  terrorized lions  and inspired awed tales of young boys  hunting lions with spears .  There are now too many boys and too few lions. This is where the boys were instead.  The muggy heat was enervating.  The streets were filled with men and women in Shukas.  It was market day and the men had brought their cattle over for sale.  In a crumbling shed off the main highway stood a gleaming pool table.  A large host of Masai teens stood all around it, all in their Shukas.  Sipping beer, betting and talking animatedly.  Pool sticks, not hunting spears seemed weapons of choice.  There was not a girl among them. The goat was a bit too fresh.  Besides, I was sure the flies had alread...

New study suggests math skills are not correlated with genetic variations between male and females. It seems to be more correlated with the gender roles in society.

Recent opinion about Anna Hazare's movement has been getting some curious reaction from the chattering classes in India (which are predominantly "liberal"). The linked article written by Arundhati Roy is a very typical example. Anna Hazare movement is dangerous because: 1. It subverts due process (which in this case is democracy). 2. It uses Hindu religious iconography (like Bharat Mata) and is hence communal. 3. It is a middle class movement with no participation from "real india". This reminds me of the liberals in India who opposed Gandhi for pretty much the same reasons. Gandhi's method was considered to be unacceptably communal by none other than Jinnah, although his demands (like that of Anna) were never communal. The British establishment refused to negotiate with the Churchill's "half naked fakir" because he was subverting due process and bypassing elected "Indian" assemblies that the British had setup to administe...

Did Cisco collude with the government officials to get a man who was litigating against them arrested on spurious charges? Ars Technica makes a convincing case. I wonder why this story has not gotten more play.

It was clear even after the first bailout that Greece would never be able to pay back all its debt. Now there is talk of a haircut, with either the European taxpayer or the bond holders eating some of the losses incurred from a Greek default. Finland and German taxpayers are (understandably) reluctant to have their government effectively pay off Greek debt using their earnings. Finns want collateral (you know, the Parthenon) before giving any more money to the Greeks. However, there are a couple of points that these countries would do well to consider: 1. The more productive countries that adopted Euro (read Germany) made a killing exporting their products to less productive countries that adopted Euro. Greek debt financed by German Banks was used to buy German Engineering to build Greek Infrastructure (and pay lavish government salaries). 2. After WW-II, the Marshall Plan supported Germany financially in spite of all the ills that the Nazi state had caused the world. The Greeks (...

Hollywood makes a movie based on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and our author sees it as a sign of civilizational collapse. Civilization is always a fragile accommodation at best, precariously poised between barbarism on one side and decadence on the other, and as a civilization dissolves it begins to oscillate between them, ever more spasmodically, until the final collapse comes. Call it morbid curiosity on my part, but I often wonder where the debris of our civilization will ultimately be heaped; and, if this film portends what I fear, now I may know the answer. Rand was definitely on the side of barbarism. I really had to read the whole article twice to take in everything the author was saying. Like this one: I suspect that charity really is the only way to avoid wasting one’s life in a desert of sterile egoism. She regarded Christian morality as a poison that had polluted the will of Western man with its ethos of parasitism and orgiastic self-oblation. The condensed form of his le...

From the preface of Elements of Statistical Learning : In God We Trust. Everyone else bring data! It is attributed to Deming with the note that ironically, there is no "data" to support the fact that Deming said this.

The Gap between rich and poor has been named the 8th wonder of the world

It is now 250 years since the Battle of Panipat when the Afghan's under Abdali defeated the Marathas. Both were so weakened by the battle that they were soon supplanted by the Sikhs and British respectively in the areas that they sought to sway. Recent attempts have been made by Hindu activists to claim that the defeat was in fact a "strategic retreat". Abdali entered the battle with several disadvantages. 1. His armaments were inferior, as the Marathas were equipped with the best of the era French cannons, while Abdali's army featured camel mounted light cannons. 2. Maratha power was on the ascendency and their sway over the areas in contention were actually better than Abdali's. Abdali showed great military leadership in neutralizing both these disadvantages. He used his camel mounted artillary as a mobile firepower unit that overwhelmed and captured the Maratha cannons (it was after this that the battle turned). More importantly, he called on the loyalty of f...