3		3	Islamic jihad, terrorism, india, Pakistan, Islam\'s bloody borders, Huntington

What happened in Pakistan on the first day of the year is no different from what's been happening: routine killings by Islamic terrorists. BBC reports: "At least 88 people have been killed by a suicide bomb attack at a volleyball court", which it says brings up the last three months' total death toll of Islamic terrorism to around 600. Of course the BBC being what it is - biased - identifies the criminals as militants instead of Islamic terrorists. Never mind who denies Islamic terrorism - even this - and never mind how vociferous the denial. But Samuel Huntington's observation is being corroborated daily, across the world. He wrote, "Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power." (Ref. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.)

Like the rest of the world, India is also a victim of Islamic terrorism. In fact, India draws exceptional fire from Islam primarily because India is a shining example of Islam's failure to conquer the idol-worshiping kafirs. But for real bloodshed, one has to look at Pakistan which should be referred to as Pakistan, TC ( something like Washington, D.C.), short form for "Pakistan, Terror Central." Pakistan is TC because it not only manufactures the greatest amounts of Islamic terrorism, but aside from exporting Islamic terrorism (much of it to India), its domestic consumption of Islamic terrorism is quite significant. Yes, India also consumes some of its home-grown Islamic terrorism but because Pakistan is more Islamic (100 percent) than India (around 20 percent), Pakistan suffers more from Islamic terrorism. 

Islam's borders, as Huntington wrote, are bloody. Mark Steyn writes (Dec 29th 2009 Wall Street Journal): "The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally."

Pakistan is an Islamic state and its population is nearly 100 percent Muslim. Yet the bloodshed. That's what Huntington meant when he wrote about Islam's bloody innards. Shias killing Sunnis and vice versa. Half the Islamic population (females) are oppressed by the other half (males) - and this has religious sanction.

The world is pretty rapidly descending into a hell brought on about by an ideology. Humanity had the guts to oppose Nazism and communism. It appears to have lost the appetite to survive. The historian Arnold Toynbee noted that "civilizations die from suicide, not murder." I see that happening to the Indian civilization in front my very eyes. Every day I note the main stream media glorifying the ideology that has wreaked havoc on the Indian civilization for centuries. Europe is giving up on the enlightenment that it gained at great cost without a struggle - barring the odd little symbolic moves to ban scarfs or the construction of new minarets.

It is still not too late. We should look at what's happening in Islamic states such as Pakistan TC, and note that even if the whole world were to become Islamic, the wholesale murder and terrorism will not stop. It will only intensify till the collapse of human civilization. We have to fight back. We have to save ourselves from The Religion of Peace. There is no other option.   

			neuroscience, education

According to Keith Hudson, polymath extraordinaire, one of the greatest meta-discoveries in the last 10 years is that "each of us grows millions of new neurons during our lifetime." Allow me to quote his post to a select list of readers in its entirety before I add my few comments. 

There are some discoveries which the whole world knows about the next day and there are others, of similar potential, which only create a stir among specialists. And some of the latter don't even create sufficient stir among specialists for its wider implications to be discussed among themselves - at least not in that generation.

During the Christmas period I've been reminded of one of the latter after reading Graham Farmelo's biography of Paul Dirac, one of the most penetrative scientific minds of the last century.  He ranks alongside other geniuses such as Planck, Einstein, Bohr and Kapitza in his own field of physics, or Fisher, Eldridge, Gould and Margulis in biology, or Luria, Eccles, Sperry and Libet in neuroscience.

Strangely, however, there has been no single great mind associated with one of the greatest discoveries in neuroscience, revolutionary though it has been described by more than one its practitioners. It came with a whoosh about ten years ago. It can best be described as a meta-discovery.  It came as the result of many different experiments, none of which were actually aimed at the phenomenon itself.  It was a byproduct. To my knowledge there have been no books written about it so far - it is too recent.

Its implications are enormous, however. Sooner or later, it is going to overturn one of the foundations of modern society and modern politics. But let me backtrack now. What was said in the biography of Dirac?  Farmelo quotes what was said by many other scientists about Dirac in his later years, and it was said by many about many other scientists, too. It is this: "He will have no new ideas now. He is over 30."

So let me backtrack a bit further now to the great brain discovery of the last ten years. For one thing, it overturned the received wisdom of brain scientists for most of the past century that we grow no new neurons in our brains once we are born. It was said with the same conviction that we develop no more new genes once we are born. But it has been discovered not to be true. Each of us grows millions of new neurons during our lifetime.

They grow in the period between puberty and at around 30 years of age. Before puberty, million of neurons are culled. They are culled as they are not required by the particular environment into which a baby is born and grows up. If an individual is deprived of certain sounds, sights, experiences, skills and ideas up until puberty then many of his potential abilities are blunted for life. The neurons that could have expressed the full potential of that individual no longer exist.

So what about the millions of new neurons that grow after puberty? Can't they compensate? No, because they grow in the frontal lobes of the brain. The frontal lobes are only mainly involved in supervising the rear brain. Mainly, they can only largely develop the skills that happen to have been laid down already in the rear part of the brain - social, manual, intellectual, artistic, what-have-you. Even then, if those skills have been of a low standard, then it's a laborious process - often impossible - to raise them further, no matter how hard the frontal lobes try.

So what are the frontal lobes and the millions of new neurons for? Triggered into existence by sex hormones, they're preparing the individual for the adult world. And the most important of the rear brain skills that are developed are the social skills. If the pre-pubescent child hasn't learned the full gamut of basic social skills then even the frontal lobes can't rectify the deficiencies. Correspondingly, there's a whole gamut of psychopathologies as a result, ranging from mildly neurotic individuals through to killers and megalomaniacs.

Without at least some social skills, even potential geniuses can't burgeon after puberty. Even Paul Dirac, hardly ever being able to converse normally in childhood and for the rest of his life, came close to being sidelined into dead-end jobs very early on. He had some lucky breaks, however, in opportunities that came along and in older people who recognized his potential.

So how is all this going to "overturn one of the foundations of modern society and modern politics", as I wrote above? It is that modern complex society can't afford to have an old population. If it becomes deficient in young minds then new ideas will find it even harder to be discussed, or funded, never mind being adopted. 

Quite beside this, national economies will not be able to afford health care -- or even basic care -- for the old in future years. When state pensions were first adopted there were eight workers who could be taxed to support every old person. Now it's already getting towards only two or three workers to every old person in most advanced countries. Within a generation, it will be one-to-one. A generation afterwards it will be one worker supporting more than one elderly person besides himself and his own children -- if he can afford to have any!

Governments know this already, of course, even though the politicians dare not say so to their electorates. Society will adjust, just as it always has done. For most of our 100,000 years anyway. Hunter-gatherer societies had a multitude of cultural ways of dealing with their old folk when they became too heavy an economic burden -- starving them, bludgeoning them, leaving them behind on their nomadic travels, even eating them sometimes. Unless a group did so it imperiled its own future existence.

This is already happening in advanced society of course. In a kindly way, terminally ill people in some hospitals are being deprived of food to send them on their way quicker; less kindly, increasing number of old people in nursing homes are being treated cruelly; and increasing numbers of old people are living isolated lives, not even understanding the welfare benefits that are theoretically available to them, and dying alone.

So we are adjusting already, but it's all surreptitious so far. It's not being brought out into the open and honestly debated. This will have to happen one day - but, as always, such a momentous change will take at least another generation to be ancted into legislation.

But this - allied though it is - has been a diversion from my main thought today. The discovery of frontal lobe development, and that the vast majority of the seminal ideas only come from the pre-30 year olds will also have to be faced. That will probably take yet another generation after voluntary and involuntary euthanasia has finally become politically acceptable.

At the present time the white populations of Europe and America either can't afford or don't want to have more than two children per family. Thus, they're going extinct, never mind being able to support ever-larger proportions of old people. And, probably, once immigrant non-whites have integrated into the culture of the whites they, too, will have less than replacement-sized families. 

There's nothing more certain that mankind is on the path to extinction at present. There's only one solution that I can see: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going."  And, in all animal species so far - millions of them - when the going get tough, the tough fork off into a new species. If and when such a new Homo species is established then it will also have to carry at least three new cultural traits with it. The first is that old people must be cropped before they become too burdensome, the second is that it will have to organize itself so that parents can afford more than two children per family, the third is that it will fully appreciate the talent that is presently going to waste both in pre-pubescence and also in the ideas that arise in the frontal lobes of their young adults.

So what of the value of my ideas - being 74 years of age? I think they're valuable because they're not mine but have been in existence for at least a century now. Think of H. G. Wells or Aldous Huxley, for example. And those authors certainly engaged my mind before I was 30 years old. So I'm really only regurgitating what my own frontal lobes were already thinking about 50 years ago.  

Keith Hudson

I concur with his view that mankind is on the path to extinction. I also think that it is reasonable to argue that a new Homo species could be on the cards. My reason for posting Keith's post is somewhat different. It has to do with the implications of the neurological development of humans.

My point is that if we neglect to provide a well-rounded education to our pre-pubescent population (of which there are a few hundred million in India), we are forever dooming them to stunted intellectual growth. Let me repeat what Keith notes above: "Before puberty, million of neurons are culled. They are culled as they are not required by the particular environment into which a baby is born and grows up. If an individual is deprived of certain sounds, sights, experiences, skills and ideas up until puberty then many of his potential abilities are blunted for life. The neurons that could have expressed the full potential of that individual no longer exist."

Our policymakers of course are blissfully ignorant of these facts. Otherwise we would be doing whatever we could to change the education system.

			Poverty, charity, children, poor, responsibility

Most emphatically yes, if it is within your power to do so. A child accidentally falls into a river and your jump in without a second's thought - assuming that you can swim - and save the child. But what if there are people who are thoughtlessly or even deliberately pushing children into the river. Should you continue to be fully engaged in saving the drowning children or must you at least tackle the problem where it originates, and go tie up the adults who are dropping children into the river?

My friend Nihar over at hoopyfrood.org uses the analogy of saving drowning children in his new year musings to argue that we, the non-poor, have a moral responsibility for charitable giving for the benefit of the poor. I find much value in that argument. While I am willing to burden the rich with giving, I also have to hold the poor responsible to no small extent for the poverty in the world. The poor, as I have argued before, are responsible for their poverty. 

Here's a brief response I wrote to Nihar's post, for the record.

Nihar, an excellent post with valuable insights.

I agree with your view that helping alleviating at least some of the horrendous misery that exists around the world is an imperative for moral people. That said, I would like to look at the obverse side of the issue. It is good to hold people to higher moral standards and demand that they meet them. If one pushes responsibility on the affluent, one should also demand the non-affluent to be more responsible as well. Though cliched, it is still true that it takes two to tango. Alleviation of poverty cannot be the sole responsibility of the non-poor. Perhaps the poor are to some extent — maybe even to a major extent — responsible for their poverty.

If one puts a collective burden the rich to solve poverty, one should also put a collective responsibility on the poor for their poverty. I say collective because individuals are helpless to do anything about the circumstances of their birth. Life is a random draw and you don’t get to choose your parents. Collectively the poor help perpetuate their poverty by their fecundity. If the number of children born to poor parents exceeds the capacity of the society to lift children out of poverty and provide them with a decent shot at life, then the numbers of the poor will continue to expand.

Today you save one poor child from drowning, to use your analogy. But that poor child grows up and produces more children and the world then gets burdened with the saving of multiple children from drowning. At some point, you have to impress on people that they have a personal responsibility towards the children they produce — and that if they cannot care for the children they bring into the world, they out of basic human decency should avoid doing so. It is selfish for adults to procreate in circumstances where neither the adults nor the society has the wherewithal to take care of the children. The rights of the children must matter, not just the rights of the adults who have the opportunity to have sexual intercourse.

The charities that I support of two kinds: the first, those who help provide education to the children of the poor; the second, those that help the poor have only that many children as they can provide for. The former helps those unfortunates whose parents were irresponsible; the latter helps prevent more unfortunates from being born.

Warm regards,
Atanu

What say you?

4		7	India, Indian government, Indian success

That, dear boys and girls, is clearly not so. First of all, the storks did not deliver the babies that go on to make up the 1.2 billion population. There aren't that many storks in the world. Clearly Indians do have sex and I am certain that some even like it. Humans are sexual beings (just like all sexually reproducing species). Though going by Indian politicians it may appear that Indians are pond-scum, Indians are indeed humans. Therefore it is not the least surprising that Indians like sex. 

The government of India, however, does not like Indians to like sex. That's your paternalistic government for you. That's the cha-cha Nehru government for you. No cha-cha would like to allow his incompetent nieces and nephews to look at sexually explicit material, leave alone having sex. It's all for the good of the people, of course. The government would like to control what you read, what you see, what you write, what you think. Wonderful, isn't it? I just love the government of India to bits - in a platonic way, of course. 

I just did a search on bing.com for "sex". I captured a part of the screen of results. That picture appears on the top of this post. 

A Guardian article reports: 

A Guardian investigation has discovered that several internet companies have quietly introduced filters to prevent Indian users from accessing sexual content.

The Yahoo search engine and Flickr photo-sharing site (owned by Yahoo) altered their sites earlier this month to prevent users in India from switching off the safe-search facility. The block also applies to users in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea.

Microsoft has also barred Indian users of its Bing search engine from searching for sexual content. Users who do try to search for sexual material receive a notice informing them that "your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content".

The clampdown is understood to be in response to recent changes to India's Information Technology Act of 2000, which bans the publication of pornographic material.

That law, which is based on a 150-year-old statute (section 292 of the Indian penal code), defines obscenity as "any content that is lascivious and that will appeal to prurient interest or the effect of which is to tend to deprave or corrupt the minds of those who are likely to see, read or hear the same".

You read that right. Indians were repressed by laws that reflect the Victorian prudishness of the colonial rulers of India and after 1947, cha-cha Nehru, his descendants and their minions impose the same idiotic, imperialistic, insane, anti-human, irrational, senseless, paternalistic bullshit laws on Indians. 

Note that like cattle, the Indians meekly obey. No wonder Indians worship cows. The bovine attitude of the Indian population makes it quite appropriate to worship cows.

More seriously, it is not Big Brother but Big Daddy that is threatening India. Go read the Binu Karunakaran Jan 2009 article "India Sleepwaks to Total Surveillance" in Countercurrents.org and feel very afraid.

It was our age of innocence and Kafka wasn’t thought to be a realist. Under repressive regimes people lived in constant fear, but the terror they felt and the machinery that enforced it was tangible.

Not any more. We live in a time when information about our personal lives and behaviour are being gathered, stored and shared by governments and multinational corporations on a scale that no one ever thought was humanly possible.

In the name of fighting terrorism governments across the world have been creating new regulations that infinitely augment the state power of surveillance with no meaningful public or parliamentary debate.

The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2006 passed by the Indian Parliament recently allows the government to intercept messages from mobile phones, computers and other communication devices to investigate any offence. Not just cognizable offence, the kind you witnessed in Mumbai 26/11, but any offence.

Any email you send, any message you text are now open to the prying eyes of the government. So are the contents of your computer you surfed in the privacy of your home.

Around 45 amendments have been made to the original Act, which now treats both publishers of online pornography and its consumers on equal footing. A law so sweeping in its powers that it allows a police officer in the rank of a sub-inspector to walk in or break in to the privacy of your home and see if you were surfing porn or not. It’s the personal morality of the official that will decide whether the picture/content you were looking at was lascivious or appeals to prurient interest.

The amended Act also grants the state absolute power to block access to any website in the national interest. In short a total gag and surveillance act that doesn’t set any limits for law enforcers, or have inbuilt safeguards against misuse.

It is sickening how easily people give up their freedom. No wonder in the last 800 years or so, India has been sorta-kinda free for about 60 odd years. No, I take that back: Indians are not really free yet - the socialistic, licence, control, permit, quota, reservation raj is nothing even remotely close to freedom. 

As I say, if your government does not allow you basic freedoms such as that to read, write, watch and publish what you wish, you must be living in a third world country.

		2	Global warming, climategate, IPCC

Actually that is a provocative title. We are non-experts in the debate and we certainly cannot be sure of what the truth is. As lay persons in this context, the best we can do is to carefully read the evidence on both sides of the issue with -- and here's the important bit -- a skeptical mind. 

This article by the Viscount Mockton of Brenchley, "The Scientific American's Climate Lies", is instructive and well-written. It presents the view of those whom the Viscount Mockton calls skeptics but the Scientific American refers to pejoratively as contrarians, naysays and denialists. The author of the article points out logical fallacies such as the head-count fallacy and the reputation fallacy in the arguments that SA uses against the skeptics. Monckton quotes TH Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog"), "The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.” (1860). 

Here's a bit from the article, for the record:

Straw Man 1: “Anthropogenic CO2 can’t be changing climate, because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere and the amount produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount from volcanoes and other natural sources. Water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, so changes in CO2 are irrelevant.”

True skeptical argument: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, second only to water vapor. It is settled science that the direct effect of adding it to the atmosphere will be some warming – but not very much. The effect of measured changes in cloud cover over the past 30 years has caused at least four times as much warming as CO2, which is a bit-part player. Water vapor concentration – column absolute humidity – increases as the atmosphere warms, theoretically causing an amplifying feedback that is, however, offset partly by the lapse-rate feedback and partly by the cloud-albedo feedback, which the IPCC finds strongly positive when it is in fact strongly negative. Even large volcanic eruptions do not cause significant increases in measured CO2 concentration: to this extent, therefore, volcanoes are irrelevant.

			Spiritual, material, stuff

I came across this bit of wisdom in an email. "Growing older gives us an opportunity to sort through our value system. For example, we can better see that the spiritual really does contribute more to our life than the economic. We finally agree with the philosopher who says that who we are influences our happiness much more than what we have."

That raised the question: Is it indeed true that 'the spiritual does contribute more to our life than the economic'? I don't think that the answer is an unqualified yes. I believe that the proper answer is "It depends." It depends on what the levels of the two factors are in one's life. If you are so materially deprived that it is nearly impossible for the body and soul (as they say) to stay integrated, then the economic is most certainly going to contribute more to you than the spiritual. If starvation threatens one's life, a loaf of bread will be more welcome than a spirited sermon on the futility of merely seeking the material. But if one has a surfeit of material goods at one's service, then a bit of pondering on the ceaseless change as the nature of the universe would be good.

Wisdom dictates the the middle way, avoiding the extremes. That was one of the Buddha's insights and Buddhism is the "Middle-wayed Way." I believe that disparaging the material and elevating the spiritual unconditionally is unwise.

Several world religions preach that material things are unimportant. That appears to be wise. Note the word "appears." Here's a bit on that from a previous post from Sept 2004 titled "Why, oh why, are they so materialistic?" 

Indeed material belongings are unimportant. If several religions of the world make that point, they are indeed right. But if they don’t go to the next step, they have only a partial grasp of the true nature of things. The next step is to make sure that one does not get bogged down with having to mess around with the unimportant. Here is where “The Panchatantra” is wiser than most half-assed religions.

 From the introduction to the translation of the Panchatantra by Arthur Ryder:

"The Panchatantra, being very wise, never falls into the vulgar error of supposing money to be important. Money must be there, in reasonable amount, because it is unimportant, and what wise man permits things unimportant to occupy his mind? … Needless to say, worldly property need not be, indeed should not be, too extensive, since it has no value in possession, but only in use…"

Most people are “materialistic” because they don’t have sufficient material. If they had the required material, they would not be “materialistic.” Humans are rational creatures. They will not bother with something that is unimportant. A thing only becomes important when there is a shortage. To make a thing unimportant, see that reasonable amounts of the stuff is available.

Water is unimportant only when there is sufficient amounts available to go around. If you are stranded in a lifeboat, water becomes important. You can make the most impassioned speeches about the greatness of self-sacrifice and nobleness of sharing, but it will not amount to a hill of beans when there is only a little water left and people have to fight to survive.

The objection would be that some people can be “too materialistic.” Let me try to understand that. I suppose it means that some people spend too much of their time running after material things. So what? It is their time and it is what they evidently value. They have nothing better to do. For myself, beyond my basic material requirements (basic as defined by me, not by anyone else), I am quite happy to pursue other interests that I have. As far as I am concerned, a person who spends all his time and effort gathering stuff is more to be pitied than censured. He is being stupid and missing out on other things that life has to offer.

Running after material things at the cost of everything else is stupid, not immoral. So the proper attitude towards these people ought to be, “You are astonishingly stupid”, not “Be good or else god will punish you.” 

An old favorite British TV series was "Bless Me, Father." The stories were about an old parish priest and his young curate. At one point, the curate complains, "Father, why do you spend so much time with the rich. Don't you think that the poor need our spiritual guidance more than the rich?" The old priest replies, "No, that is not true. The rich need us more. They don't even have the comfort of the illusion that money is the answer to life's miseries." (It's been a while and the dialog is from memory. So it's actually a a paraphrase.)

We need material stuff because we are made of stuff. But that is something so obvious that it escapes our notice. Let's not forget that.