Shunya's Notes

Food, Inc.

If you see only one documentary this summer, make it Food, Inc. Here is Roger Ebert's review, and the first 3-1/2 minutes of it.

The next time you tuck into a nice T-bone, reflect that it probably came from a cow that spent much of its life standing in manure reaching above its ankles. That's true even if you're eating the beef at a pricey steakhouse. Most of the beef in America comes from four suppliers.

The next time you admire a plump chicken breast, consider how it got that way. The egg-to-death life of a chicken is now six weeks. They're grown in cages too small for them to move, in perpetual darkness to make them sleep more and quarrel less. They're fattened so fast they can't stand up or walk. Their entire lives, they are trapped in the dark, worrying.

All of this is overseen by a handful of giant corporations that control the growth, processing and sale of food in this country. Take Monsanto, for example. It has a patent on a custom gene for soybeans. Its customers are forbidden to save their own soybean seed for use the following year. They have to buy new seed from Monsanto. If you grow soybeans outside their jurisdiction but some of the altered genes sneak into your crop from your neighbor's fields, Monsanto will investigate you for patent infringement. They know who the outsiders are and send out inspectors to snoop in their fields.

Food labels depict an idyllic pastoral image of American farming. The sun rises and sets behind reassuring red barns and white frame farmhouses, and contented cows graze under the watch of the Marlboro Cowboy. This is a fantasy.

Dreyfus on Second Life

In this terrific article, Prof. Hubert Dreyfus looks at Second Life, a 3-D virtual environment "filled with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity" that "offers its 'residents' a chance to invent a whole new life for themselves. Can it deliver on that promise?" This is also somewhat related to the issues I focused on in my recent article, "The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence." 

Of the more than 11 million people signed up as "residents" of Second Life, roughly half a million spent at least an hour a day in that world in December. Through avatars they create to represent themselves, residents visit art galleries, shop for virtual goods, go to concerts, have cybersex, worship, attend classes, have conversations, and buy and sell real estate. Residents also design clothing and buildings, write poems and books, compose music, and make paintings and movies. Others enjoy the way Second Life allows them to meet and converse with people all over the world. It's left to the participants to work out how realistically they present themselves. The Vatican has taken on the task of saving souls there, and Sweden has opened a virtual embassy to sign up residents to become real-life tourists in Sweden.

Second Life isn't a game. There is no overall goal and no way of ranking your success.... [it] offers the possibility of a virtual world that is more exciting than the real one. But at what cost?

More here.  If you liked this, check out why Dreyfus thinks Kierkegaard would have hated the Internet (via Peony).

Numen Inest

A slideshow of my landscape photos set to music (7 mins).

The Orangutans of Sumatra

In May 2009, Usha and I visited the Gunung Leuser National Park in north Sumatra to see orangutans in the wild. We hired a guide in the gateway village of Bukit Lawang and hiked several miles into a dense primary growth forest. Heavy rain on the previous night made the hike rather treacherous and we had to grab on to branches and roots to go up and down the hilly terrain. But the forest was beautiful, abundant with tropical flora and fauna (some of it unique to the island), rushing streams and animal sounds, and we did get lucky: we saw about ten orangutans on our daylong hike. One middle-aged female—rescued years ago by the orangutan center in Bukit Lawang and reintroduced into the wild—even came down and held Usha's hand! Other primates we saw include gibbons and Thomas's Leaf-monkeys.

The orangutan (“person of the forest”), whose habitat has shrunk to parts of Sumatra and Borneo, has cognitive abilities that rival those of the gorilla and the chimpanzee, the only primates more closely related to humans. Placid, deliberate, and mostly vegetarian, orangutans are known for their ingenuity and persistence, particularly in manipulating mechanical objects, and for their "cognitive abilities such as causal and logical reasoning, self-recognition in mirrors, deception, symbolic communication, foresight, and tool production and use. In the wild, orangutans use tools, but at only one location in Sumatra do they consistently make and use them for foraging, [defoliating] sticks ... to extract insects or honey from tree holes and to pry seeds from hard-shelled fruit." We saw one juvenile male using a stick as a tool.

Here is a slideshow of my best orangutan shots set to music (2 min, 25 sec). Check out some more pictures and a primer on orangutans.

The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has attracted lots of comments.)

As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent—intelligent, as in mimicking the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Neural network research was hot and one of my professors was a star in the field. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots.’ A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise.

I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of our life in the world—how much we subconsciously acquire and summon to get through life, how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living, and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined this was with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the unrestricted Turing test? How could a machine that did not care about its existence as humans do, ever behave as humans do? In hindsight, it seems fitting that I was then also drawn to Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kierkegaard.

My interlocutors countered that while extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter, amenable to the laws of physics. Our intelligence, and everything else that informed our being in the world, had to be somehow ‘coded’ in our brain’s circuitry, including the great many symbols, rules, and associations we relied on to get through a typical day. Was there any reason why we couldn’t ‘decode’ and reproduce it in a machine some day? Couldn’t a future supercomputer mimic our entire neural circuitry and be as smart as us? They posited a reductionist and computational approach to the brain that many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, continue to champion today. Just three months ago, Dennett declared in his sonorous voice, “We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.”

But despite the big advances in computing—for example, today’s supercomputers are ten million times faster than those of the early 90s—AI has fallen woefully short of its ambition and hype. Instead, we have “expert systems” that process predetermined inputs in specific domains, perform pattern matching and database lookups, and learn to adapt their outputs algorithmically. Examples include chess software, search engines, speech recognition, industrial and service robots, and traffic and weather forecasting systems. Machines have done well with tasks that we ourselves pursue, or can pursue, algorithmically, as in searching for the word “ersatz” in an essay, making cappuccino, or restacking books on a library shelf. But so much else that defines our intelligence remains well beyond machines, such as projecting our creativity and imagination to understand new contexts and their significance, or figuring out how and why new sensory stimuli are relevant or not. Why is AI in such a braindead state? Is there any hope for it? Let’s take a closer look.

The Omo of Ethiopia

(Photography by Hans Silvester. Link via Maniza Naqvi @ 3QD)

Dabashi on Obama in Cairo

Professor Hamid Dabashi's response to Obama's historic speech at Al-Azhar university on 4th June 09 mirrors my own:

Much hasty praise and considerable legitimate criticism has already been made about the president's speech, especially about the distance between its floral eloquence and the scarcity of its specific policies, which would push the speech towards hallowed, however soothing, vacuity. But the fact is that the world is so deeply wounded and it is in such dire need of truth and reconciliation with itself that President Obama's words, coming from the person that he is, an African-American descendent of an African Muslim, were like drops of merciful rain on an arid desert...

All legitimate criticisms notwithstanding, it is only at the symbolic, suggestive, or oratorical plane that the speech must be appraised. The most important problem with the president's speech -- healing and soothing as it was -- is not its lack of specificity, but in fact its general contour, its symbolic trajectory, entirely trapped as it is in a readily received and never questioned binary between "Islam and the West".

More here.

The Minds of Machines

From Philosophy Now, here is Nicholas Everitt's instructive review of a book on the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by Matt Carter, whose "main concern is to outline and defend the possibility of a computational theory of mind."

[A major reservation Everitt has with this book] is a matter of substance. Computer programs operate on purely ‘syntactic’ features – ultimately speaking, they depend upon the physical form of the inputs, transformations and outputs. By contrast, human thought is always a thought about something, it represents something, it has a content. It displays what philosophers call ‘intentionality’. One central problem for artificial intelligence is how to get aboutness into computer programs – how to get semantics out of syntactics.

More here. (Stay tuned for a major new essay on the philosophy of AI by yours truly — arriving 22 June.)

Do Languages Speak Us?

A really good article by Lera Boroditsky on how inseparably intertwined our language is with how we look at the world:

Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

More here. (via 3QD)

The Rise and Fall of the LTTE

Here is a short but insightful interview from Himal Southasian, recorded weeks before the defeat of the LTTE and the death of their leader Prabhakaran on May 18, 2009. In it, two former LTTE members explain the factors behind the rise and fall of Tamil militancy in Sri Lanka. In the excerpt below, they tackle the rise of the movement; read the interview for their reasons behind its fall. (Registration may be required but is well worth the effort.)

What followed from the 1950s onwards was the burgeoning of a virulent form of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, and the passing of a series of discriminatory legislation against minorities and Tamils in particular. The Sinhala Only Act was passed in 1956; the Republican Constitution was adopted in 1972, giving Buddhism a place of privilege in the constitution while removing the protection that was afforded minorities in the previous constitution; and immediately afterwards, the infamous policy of standardisation of marks for university admissions was also implemented in 1972, which Tamils found to be discriminatory. This came alongside colonisation attempts that had begun in the 1950s in the Eastern Province, where a lot of Tamils lived, radically altering the local demography and reducing Tamil and Muslim representation in Parliament. Non-violent protests by Tamil parliamentarians and their supporters were responded to with periodic violence by the state, throughout this period.

In my opinion, the minority leadership did not quite understand the forces driving this Sinhala nationalism. Therefore, rather than build a strong grassroots democratic movement, the minority leaders felt that their problems could be fixed by going into deals with the political leadership at the Centre, thereby securing concessions for their communities. The standard official narrative of Tamil nationalism will always tell us that the Tamil leadership waged a decades-long democratic struggle against the Sri Lankan state before giving way to the militant movement. I believe this to be incorrect.

The militarisation of the movement started not as a result of exhausting methods of protracted democratic struggle, but as a response to the 1972 standardisation of marks referred to earlier. This affected a miniscule percentage (about 0.01 percent) of the Sri Lankan population – the Jaffna and Colombo Tamil middle-class and upper-class youth. Years of poor economic conditions during the 1960s and 1970s prompted the first JVP [Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna] insurrection of mostly poor and rural Sinhala youth. Following its merciless putdown by the then government, the policy of standardisation was set forth to placate anti-government sentiment in the south. This policy required Tamils to have higher marks for acceptance into university, which marginalised Tamil youths who looked to university education as a means to secure employment in the state sector. The perceived discrimination catalysed the taking-up of arms by select middle- and lower-middle-class Tamil youth of Jaffna, initially.

Recruitment of people from the poorer sections of the Tamil community into the militant movement happened afterwards. Because of the narrow class composition of the movement’s leadership, many marginalised groups – Muslims, Up-country Tamils, Dalits, Tamils who hailed from the Eastern Province and the Vanni – were alienated and excluded from the so-called ‘Tamil nation’. While the ‘bourgeois’ struggle waged on, Sinhala Buddhist nationalism responded with violence, through periodic government-instigated pogroms against the Tamils. It was after the Black July killings of 1983 that Tamil militancy mushroomed.

China's Final Frontier

Prospect Magazine has an interesting article by Parag Khanna, who "visits China's remote, rebellious western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang—and sees how China's government is today bending central Asia to its will." (Thanks, Peony.)

Both Tibet and Xinjiang have the geographic misfortune of lying either on top of resources China wants, or on the path to resources it needs. Texas-sized Xinjiang has the country’s largest oil, gas, coal, uranium and gold deposits, while Tibet has timber, uranium and gold.... Since most of the ethnically dominant Han Chinese are in the east, and most of China’s resources are in the west, this ongoing westward march [of the Han Chinese] is inevitable. And it has meant the wholesale, systematic repression of the indigenous inhabitants by a mix of military, economic and, above all, demographic means. Like the native Americans, the Tibetans and Uighurs have been cornered, corralled and relocated under a system which condescends and harasses at every level. Han Chinese have been taught to think of Tibetans and Uighurs as barbarians, viewing their mission civilatrice today the way American settlers did: they are bringing development and modernity to people and places that have always lacked them.

Rawls vs. Confucius

Here is a thought-provoking study by Erin Cline that compares the political philosophies of John Rawls and Confucius (Kongzi):

Over the past two decades, a number of studies comparing Chinese and Western views of political philosophy have painted a picture of radically different approaches and theories. Some authors argue that while modern liberal Western theories are focused on rights, justice, equality, and freedom, Chinese Confucians are largely unconcerned with the received topics of Western political philosophy.... They also tend to argue that, while the assumption of atomistic individualism represents a fatal flaw in liberal theory, the Confucian view offers us a superior alternative partly because it takes seriously the view that family and community relationships constitute our identity. These studies have helped to highlight the way that philosophical traditions can provide insight into different cultural and historical concerns, as well as the need to take seriously the role of the family in the basic structure of society. However, some of these studies have neglected the diversity of views represented in both the Confucian and Western liberal traditions. They also tend to leave those who do not think the liberal tradition is fatally flawed wondering what can be gained from comparative studies of Chinese and Western sources.

In this article I aim to show that there is much more to be said about political philosophy in the Confucian and Western liberal traditions, especially when it comes to moral psychology and the development of political virtues.

More HERE. If you think the essay is too long, at least read the two concluding paragraphs below.

On the Measure of All Things

Chris Schoen on how very radically the human self participates in its own creation. Essential reading for all philosophers of science.

Is it possible that our understanding of the world expands and develops not before we describe it, and not because we describe it, but as we describe it? This seems much more plausible than the Darwinian explanation, in which we are in constant stenographic response to a world of given stimuli; and because the latter has us spinning our wheels, culturally, over alleged biological imperatives from a world long past, the possibility that we particpate in our description of the world also seems much more likely to allow some actual evolution of thought, philosophical, scientific, and moral.

More here. And here is an another good one by Chris.

Nandy on Indian Elections

The social scientist Ashis Nandy's take on the recently concluded Indian elections:

In our society, we live with radical diversities — diversity that is not based on tamed forms of difference. The US is a perfect example of tamed diversity. You get every kind of food and dress and cultural activity in America. You think you are very cosmopolitan if you can distinguish Huaiyang food from Schezwan food, or South Korean ballet from Beijing opera, or Ming dynasty china from Han dynasty china in a museum. This is diversity that is permissible, legitimate, tamed.

Radical diversity is when you tolerate and live with people who challenge some of the very basic axioms of your political life. Like most of South Asia, Indians have an old capacity to live with such diversity. A powerful example is Sajjad Lone contesting the election this year. Nobody objected that a secessionist wants to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. Everyone spoke of it glowingly. I consider that a tolerance for radical diversity. In such a society, all excesses are ultimately checkmated.

In India, we live in a country where the gods are imperfect and the demons are never fully demonic. I call this an ‘epic culture’ because an epic is not complete without either the gods or the demons. They make the story together. This is a part of our consciousness, and ultimately, I think it influences our public life. People go up to a point with their grievance, then get tired of it. They realise that to go further is a dangerous thing because it destroys the basic algorithm of your life. They say, enough is enough, let us go back to a normal life. This election represents something of that consciousness. We probably need this kind of interregnum in politics. They have a soothing effect on our public life. This is what most Indians feel.

The second underlying theme is that people were searching for a sort of minimum decency. Negative campaigns, excessively personal attacks, hostile slogans — all of this seemed to upset the voter. When the BJP and the Left targeted Manmohan Singh, making him the butt of jokes and accusations, Singh became a hero for the very qualities people joked about. His weakness, his absence of a political base, his susceptibility to pressures of the Congress high command — instead of looking like liabilities, these things suddenly began to look like a marker of a genteel type of politics. I think that paid dividends.

More here. (Also check out Prof. Bidyut Chakraborty's analysis.)

Atheistic Materialism in Ancient India

(Cross-posted as my new column on 3QuarksDaily, where it has received many comments. Also see a new announcement about the 3QD annual blog awards, the first one for the best science blog post. Nominate your favorites today.)
_______________________________

Various societies at different times have dazzled with their bursts of creative and intellectual energy. Historians have a penchant for dubbing them Golden Ages. Examples include the Athens of Herodotus, the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, and the India of the Buddha. But though India has long been famous for its "ancient wisdom", the few historical sources that survive shed woefully inadequate light on the Buddha's society. By contrast, far better portraits of classical Greece and Abbasid Baghdad are available to us.

Still, evidence at hand suggests that around 600-500 BCE, in parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain of north India, people were asking some very bold and original questions: What is the nature of thought and perception? What is the source of consciousness? Are virtue and vice absolute or mere social conventions? Old traditions were under attack, new trades and lifestyles were emerging, and urban life was in a churn, reducing the power of uptight Brahmins.

Philosophical schools flourished in a marketplace of ideas, and included chronic fatalists, radical materialists, self-mortifying ascetics, die-hard skeptics, cautious pragmatists, saintly mystics, and the ubiquitous miracle mongers. "Rivalries and debates were rife. Audiences gathered around the new philosophers in the kutuhala-shalas—literally, the place for creating curiosity—the parks and groves on the outskirts of the towns.... The presence of multiple, competing ideologies was a feature of urban living."[1] It was also an age of nascent democratic republics, which, like Athens later, did not ultimately survive the march of monarchy and empire.[2]

Indonesia Vacation Break

Indonesia is one of the most diverse countries in the world, with over 17,000 islands spanning one eighth of the earth's circumference, 300 languages, hundreds of ethnic groups, and an impressive history shaped by Melanesians, Malays, Chinese, Hindus, Buddhists, Arabs, Europeans, and others. What region does one focus on for a vacation? After much agonizing, Usha and I have a plan.

Our journey will begin in Medan, the largest city on Sumatra, an island known for its biodiversity and wildlife, indigenous cultures, active volcanoes, coffee, and Srivijaya, the first major kingdom of Indonesia. Medan is comprised of Batak, Javanese, Chinese, Indian, Minangkabau, Acehnese and other ethnic minorities such as Sundanese and Madurese, who have apparently turned the city into a foodie's paradise. Close to Medan is Bukit Lawang at the eastern edge of Gunung Leuseur National Park, where we hope to see orangutans in the wild. We will then proceed to the town of Berastagi and hike up an volcano called Sibayak. Atop the rim and peering into the cone, will we see tell-tale signs of this not-yet-dormant volcano, or will the view be obscured by clouds? Our next stop will be Danau Toba, the largest volcanic lake in the world. We plan to stay on an island in its middle—Pulau Samosir—as big as Singapore and home to the indigenous Batak tribe, who mix Prostestant Christianity with animist belief, ritual, and powerfully emotive hymns.

The action then shifts to West Sumatra, to Padang and the cool and lush region around Bukittingi, ringed by three active volcanoes and home of the Minangkabau tribe, who are Muslim but matrilineal; property and wealth are passed down through the female line, and every person is identified by his or her mother's clan. We hope to hire a local to take us on a day-long hike through the countryside, visiting market towns, old Dutch homes, and soaking in vistas of terraced rice fields and Minangkabau village houses adorned by buffalo horned roofs.

The final leg of the vacation unfolds in and around Yogyakarta, a short flight away on Java island. One guidebook claims that if Jakarta is the financial and industrial capital of Indonesia, Yogyakarta is its soul. It is also the launch pad for Borobodur and Prambanam, perhaps the two most stunning archaeological sites in Indonesia. Borobodur, a colossal Buddhist temple and monastery with finely sculpted panels depicting scenes from ordinary life, was built between 760-830 CE by the kings of the Sailendra dynasty, who sought to recreate Indian pilgrimage sites on Java. Prambanam, the largest and most exquisite set of Hindu temples in Indonesia, is known for its sculptural detail, including scenes from the Ramayana. They were built by the Sanjaya kings between 8th and 10th centuries CE when Hinduism was all the rage. Centuries later, when Islam was introduced by Arab traders, the realm of Hinduism shrank to the island of Bali. At the open air theater near the temples, we hope to see a performance of the famous Ramayana Ballet, Java's "most spectacular dance-drama".

As is our custom, all we have booked are the flights. For the daily journey on the ground, we will have to rely on our wits, guidebooks, and the kindness of strangers. We have packed a mosquito repellent and I will definitely take lots of pictures.

The Dance of Democracy

Professor Bidyut Chakrabarty provides a brief survey of the tangled coalition politics in the general election now underway in India:

The results of the last two consecutive Lok Sabha polls confirmed the decline of pan-Indian parties and their inability to form governments at the Centre without support from regional and state-based parties. Both the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) are illustrative of coalitions that are not ideology-inspired, but formed by parties clustered around two major parties, the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for specific political gains with regard to the constituencies they represent. By forming alliances with well-entrenched regional parties, both these national parties are guided by calculations of electoral victory. The smaller regional parties form alliances with leading national parties for a federal presence while the former agree to join hands with the latter to capture office.

More here.

And below a few election season cartoons from the English-language media:

No Small Mercy

A powerful story of how a Rwandan genocide survivor made peace with the man who almost killed her (via 3QD, read the discussion there):

One day, Emmanuel brought some sorghum beer and some sweet potatoes to the field where we volunteered... He started by grilling the potatoes; he took the biggest one and gave it to me, saying, “This is for our secretary.” We all drank and danced.

Then he asked if he could talk to me. “I have something to tell you,” he said. “I have a big problem.” He kept repeating this. “I have a big problem, I have a big problem.” After twenty minutes, he fell on his knees and asked me to forgive him.

“Why?” I asked him. “We are friends. What do I have to forgive you for?” He just kept saying, “Forgive me, forgive me,” and I kept asking why. Finally, he said, “I’m the one who cut you.”

“What did you say?” I asked him. He repeated, “I’m the one who cut you.” I asked him to tell me where and when. He did; his story was all true. So I left him there, on his knees, and I ran for miles.

Love After Love

(A Poem by Derek Walcott)

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

America, the Cold War, and the Taliban

(Cross-posted as my fourth column on 3QuarksDaily)

The US pulled out of Vietnam (video) in 1975 after more than a decade and a humiliating defeat. The war had been expensive, the draft unpopular, and too many white boys had come home in body bags. A strong antiwar mood had set in amidst the public and the Congress. Most Americans now believed it was never their war to fight. The Nixon Doctrine held that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.”[1] At least in the short term, direct military engagement in the third world seemed politically unviable for any US administration.

Besides Vietnam, the US had fought and lost another war in Indochina – in Laos – but rather differently. This was a proxy war, sponsored by the US but led by Hmong mercenaries on the ground. It was waged in relative secrecy, far from “congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and conventional diplomacy.” The advantages of such a war were soon evident: “Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that in Laos, the USAF had fought ‘the largest air war in military history ... dropping 2.1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation — the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during WWII.’”[2]

In the 60s and 70s, anti-colonial and nationalistic struggles were cropping up in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Blinded by its anti-commie paranoia, the US saw even popular movements for social and economic justice as precursors to communism, their leaders as Soviet proxies, and was determined to combat and crush them. But, given the unviability of direct military engagement on so many fronts, proxy war was the only military option left to the US. There was one minor obstacle though: how to finance all these proxy wars? Many Congressmen asked awkward questions, especially after the disaster in Indochina. When they agreed to fund, they wanted debates and oversight. The idea of a new, recurring source of money — bypassing the Congress — gripped the minds of many.

A Treasure Trove of Archival Footage from Around the World

I recently came across a YouTube channel, the Travel Film Archive, with over 300 short videos featuring archival footage from around the world, from the city streets of Trinidad, 1938, to the Ituri Forest in Africa, 1929; from the New York subway, 1905, to the Sahara Desert, 1953, or Sri Lanka, 1932. Much of the footage is silent, with only title frames to describe the location or action, but some is accompanied by documentary style voiceover. One James A. Fitzpatrick, something like the Rick Steves of his day, is a frequent narrator.

The footage itself, along with the commentary, is a fascinating glimpse into the past, a window on how people lived 60 or 90 years ago. We see bits of fading or vanished cultural practices in their local context, from a time when they were still real: Native Americans in Idaho in full feathered regalia, participating in a drumming ceremony; Australian Aborigines painted in white stripes, throwing boomerangs; Alpine Germans carving wood and staging the Passionsspiele; young Tahitian women dressed to pass as their French colonizers; life in a Sinhalese village, when coconut was king and people remained happily unfettered by excessive clothing.

Though the commentary will strike the modern viewer as naive, amusing, or poorly informed about the world (perhaps even offensive), one can't also help but be impressed by the boldness of those who endured the foreign climates and conditions, huge heavy cameras in tow, to learn something about other peoples and produce what's clearly meant to be a mind-expanding educational experience for the millions back home, who would never in their lifetimes have opportunity for such adventure themselves. The power of such films to transport us and bring us the mysteries of the world today is damped by the ubiquity of images and information. But I imagine that in their day, these gems must have gone some way toward enriching the lives and minds of their viewers.

The collection also provides a window on how Westerners (mostly Americans, here, it seems) thought of Others in those days, how little they saw as they looked on so earnestly. What struck me generally, as I watched and sampled many videos, was the way that things have changed as much as they have remained the same.

The full range of videos is definitely worth perusing. Here are a few random highlights that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

Vietnam: American Holocaust

I came across this 2008 documentary film made by Clay Claiborne and narrated by Martin Sheen, Vietnam: American Holocaust. Below is a short excerpt (9 mins); the entire film (87 mins) is online here. It contains some of the most horrifying and disturbing war footage I have ever seen. The oddly persistent idea that the United States was/is a "benevolent hegemon" seems utterly depraved in light of this. While at it, also check out this archival footage of a Napalm air attack on a Vietnam village. Be warned: you may need a stiff drink afterwards.

Witnessing Evolution

From AlphaGalileo, which dubs itself "the world's leading resource for European research news," comes a report of an experiment that allowed scientists to watch new organisms evolve by natural selection. It is, as they say, what Darwin only dreamed of:

Since publication of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin 150 years ago, it has been known that one of the dynamics of evolution is natural selection. Its results depend on environmental conditions and interactions between the species present (competition, predation, parasitism, cooperation). Some twenty years ago, a new field of research - experimental evolution - started to develop, and it has enabled scientists to better understand the mechanisms underlying evolution. For example, one idea was to cultivate populations of bacteria under well-controlled conditions over a large number of generations. These populations are made up of numerous individuals that were initially identical from the genetic point of view. And because the turnover of generations was very rapid, just a few months were sufficient to observe the emergence of new mutants, constituting a source of genetically-different lines. Instead of reconstituting the past, the scientists thus became eye-witnesses to the appearance of new species.

In the experiment, predator and prey bacteria are grown up together for hundreds of generations. Both evolve: the prey evolves to better evade its predator; the predator evolves to better catch its prey. (Link via NoBeliefs.com.)

Happy Holi!

More pictures from the Shunya archives here.

State of Emergency

Moni Mohsin's brief but compelling history of modern Pakistan:

Pakistan’s problems are not new. Established in 1947 as a homeland for the Muslims of the Subcontinent, its Islamic and secular identities have been in conflict ever since. In Pakistan’s sixty–year history, a corrupt, self–serving ruling class of land owners; a crooked bureaucracy; a boom–and–bust economy; long–simmering tensions with India over Kashmir; and a huge, powerful army that regularly enlists in coups have repeatedly thwarted progress. I do not recall a sustained period of peace, stability, and prosperity during my lifetime.

More here. (via 3QD)

Free Market Prisons

Ever heard of the Corrections Corporation of America, "the nation’s industry leader of privately-managed corrections solutions for federal, state and local government"? Traded on the NY Stock Exchange, it runs "more than 64 correctional facilities and detention centers from coast to coast, in small cities, metropolitan areas and destinations in between" in 21 states. As one might guess, the interests of its shareholders are singularly aligned with — you guessed it — growth in the number of prisoners. Each quarter, its financial results report key metrics like the growth of inmate populations and the number of new beds placed into service. If these numbers fall, the stock price falls. That's no good for a corporation, is it?

The land of the free already incarcerates 2.2 million people, or 1% of its adult population (the highest rate in the world; five times higher than in W. Europe and twice as high as in Singapore, which is infamous for its spartan legal system). British columnist George Monbiot describes what tends to happen when the prison industry becomes part of the free market system:

It’s a staggering case; more staggering still that it has scarcely been mentioned on this side of the ocean. Last week two judges in Pennsylvania were convicted of jailing some 2000 children in exchange for bribes from private prison companies.

Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan sent children to jail for offences so trivial that some of them weren’t even crimes. A 15 year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school’s assistant principal. Mr Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave a 14 year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6 million by companies belonging to the Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails. This is what happens when public services are run for profit.

It’s an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising.

More here.

Asian Food for Thought

Growing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option ten times out of ten.

The only times I ate meat was when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton (goat meat) dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration—I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.

Still, my parents encouraged us, holding meat to be salutary for growing kids. Their attitude later struck me as similar to Gandhi’s own during his early struggle and experimentation with eating animals. Gandhi saw meat as a contributor to the enviable vigor, material progress, and sturdier physiques of people from the West, while battling his own and his society's traditional dispositions against it.

I was introduced to eating fish and prawns in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too—cow, pig, turkey, crab, squid, etc. I had non-vegetarian food several times a week and it became a key part of my cooking repertoire—I acquired a bevy of fans for my spicy lamb curry and barbequed chicken. On my travels, I even sampled lobster, shark, snail, venison, guinea pig, and wild boar. But in the ensuing years my meat intake began to decline. I came to relish it less and less. About eight years ago, I gave up eating mammals, and now almost always choose vegetarian. Long live tofu, beans, lentils, and the huge range of Indian vegetarian cuisine.

Wired for War

Amy Goodman in conversation with PW Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

An amazing revolution is taking place on the battlefield, starting to change not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself. This upheaval is already afoot -- remote-controlled drones take out terrorists in Afghanistan, while the number of unmanned systems on the ground in Iraq has gone from zero to 12,000 over the last five years.  But it is only the start. Military officers quietly acknowledge that new prototypes will soon make human fighter pilots obsolete, while the Pentagon researches tiny robots the size of flies to carry out reconnaissance work now handled by elite Special Forces troops.

Wired for War takes the reader on a journey to meet all the various players in this strange new world of war: odd-ball roboticists working in latter-day “skunk works” in the midst of suburbia; military pilots flying combat mission from their office cubicles outside Las Vegas; the Iraqi insurgents who are their targets; journalists trying to figure out just how to cover robots at war; and human rights activists wrestling with what is right and wrong in a world where our wars are increasingly being handed over to machines.

Part 2 of 2 here.

The View from Gaza

Here is an outstanding documentary by Al Jazeera reporters Ayman Mohyeldin and Sherine Tadros, who were in Gaza during the recent Israeli-Palestinian war. Watch it for a glimpse of how the brutal Israeli assault was experienced by ordinary Palestinians (~45 mins; via 3QD).

The Horrors of Sierra Leone

Cross-posted from Neutral Observer

Ishmael Beah's book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, recounts his experiences as a child  soldier in Sierra Leone's civil war during the 1990s. He was twelve years old when the war engulfed him in 1993. He was away at a town called Mattru Jong with his brother and a few friends when his village was attacked by the rebel forces. Unable to return to his village, he was on the run for months. He had to eat whatever he could find in abandoned villages or rely on raw cassava and coconuts. When they reached occupied villages, he and his companions were often suspected of being killers, since both the rebels and the government troops were regularly recruiting children and turning them into killing machines. During those months, he endured horrors most of us can barely imagine. Beah saw a lot of the aftermath of rebel attacks, in addition to barely escaping them several times. Severed heads, hands chopped off, a baby shot while on her mother's back - these are some of the sights he chooses to mention. He keeps the descriptions to a minimum, but does not shy away from the blood, gore and horror.