Temporarily, another stage

I'm afraid to announce that I may not do much blogging at The Middle Stage for the next few days. I'm going to Chennai in a few hours, and from there will visit some of the areas affected by the tsunami. I shall be blogging on my experiences, if I get internet connectivity, on my other blog, India Uncut. Do check that out, and rest assured, I'll be back at The Middle Stage soon. Thank you for your (hopefully continued) patronage.

Do you still believe in god?

Some readers of The Middle Stage have written in to me to ask why I'm not blogging about the disaster that has struck Asia. Well, I have posted a bit on it, but on my other blog, India Uncut, as it seemed rather more relevant there. But here's something which asks a broader question: Martin Kettle asks in the Guardian, "How can religious people explain something like this?"

The most common explanation, and one that I find repulsive, is that such natural disasters are punishment from God for something or the other. But as Kettle writes:

Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike.

A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life?

Also read: Douglas Adams on atheism.

Butler attacked by bear

Well, not quite. We're talking the creators of the most famous butler and the most loved bear in literature. Here's James Parker on the rift between two great comic writers, PG Wodehouse and AA Milne.

Link via Arts and Letters Daily.

From independence to freedom

"For 14 years we have been independent. Now we have become free." - Victor Yushchenko declaring victory in Ukraine's presidential elections.

George W Roosevelt

People often ask how history will remember our generation of leaders in comparison with Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many comment that today's leaders look small compared with the giants of the past. This is, I believe, a misconception.

In their day, both Churchill and Roosevelt were frequently criticised, often savagely, by their countrymen, including legislators who had little knowledge of the behind-the-scenes reality of the war.

Martin Gilbert, renowned historian and author of a superb biography of Churchill, argues that if George W Bush and Tony Blair achieve their aims, they will eventually be regarded as highly as Roosevelt and Churchill. Writing in the Observer he elaborates:

Their societies are too divided today to deliver a calm judgment, and many of their achievements may be in the future: when Iraq has a stable democracy, with al-Qaeda neutralised, and when Israel and the Palestinian Authority are independent democracies, living side by side in constructive economic cooperation.

If they can move this latter aim, to which Bush and Blair pledged themselves on 12 November, it will be a leadership achievement of historic proportions.

Read the full thing.

Do they know it's Christmas?

In Darfur? Of course not, says Alice Thompson in the Daily Telegraph. And they couldn't care less.

2.7 million

That's the size of John Kerry's email database. Brian Faler wonders in the Washington Post quite what the Democrats will do with it.

Janet, not John

My belief that the Democrats chose the wrong candidate to take on George W Bush has been confirmed. Go to the Google Zeitgeist page, scroll down to Google News Queries and see who the "top public figures" of 2004 are. See what I mean?

Or maybe Kerry should have exposed a strategic nipple.

The real fascists

Here's Thomas Friedman in an excellent piece in the New York Times titled "Worth a Thousand Words":

As the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum so rightly pointed out to me, "These so-called insurgents in Iraq are the real fascists, the real colonialists, the real imperialists of our age." They are a tiny minority who want to rule Iraq by force and rip off its oil wealth for themselves. It's time we called them by their real names.

However this war started, however badly it has been managed, however much you wish we were not there, do not kid yourself that this is not what it is about: people who want to hold a free and fair election to determine their own future, opposed by a virulent nihilistic minority that wants to prevent that. That is all that the insurgents stand for.

Indeed, they haven't even bothered to tell us otherwise. They have counted on the fact that the Bush administration is so hated around the world that any opponents will be seen as having justice on their side. Well, they do not. They are murdering Iraqis every day for the sole purpose of preventing them from exercising that thing so many on the political left and so many Europeans have demanded for the Palestinians: "the right of self-determination."

Yes, Merry Christmas.

More Moore

Michael Moore is reportedly planning to make a film on the pharmaceutical industry, and he's going to call it Sicko. (No self-referential irony there, I fear.) And Big Pharm is worried, with six of the top companies in that sector apparently having issued a warning to their employees to beware of "a scruffy guy in a baseball cap".

I can already imagine the gags. Moore stalking senior executives asking them to pop one of the pills they make. Moore following a Big Pharm victim around and stooping with her to keep the camera on her face when she bends down to throw up. And so on. Frankly, I can't see what the companies are worried about. Moore's last target was George W Bush, and he ended up getting more votes than any US president in history. Pfizer's stock should be rising with this news.

More global warming

State of Fear, with a first printing of 1.5 million copies, resembles Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged – about 6 million copies sold since 1957 – as a political broadside woven into an entertaining story. But whereas Rand had only an idea – a good one (capitalism is splendid), but only one – Crichton has information. State of Fear is the world's first page-turner that people will want to read in one gulp (a long gulp – 600 pages, counting appendices) even though it has lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions – American Geophysical Union.

Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data. Crichton's subject is also how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society.

George Will on Michael Crichton's latest, and the hysteria around global warming, a subject I have blogged on in an earlier post ("Book causes global warming"). Also read Bjorn Lomborg's latest piece on the subject, "Let's first tackle hunger and disease", in the Australian.

The celluloid painter

Akira Kurosawa was a great film-maker, but that was not his only art. An ongoing exhibition at the Mori Art Gallery in Tokyo reveals that his storyboards, by themselves, were something to marvel at. As Julian Satterthwaite writes in the Daily Yomiuri:

Usually seen as a disposable part of the filmmaking process, storyboards here are elevated to an art form in their own right – and if they fall into any genre, Impressionist is probably it.

With more than a few nods to Van Gogh, Kurosawa's work is none the worse for its debt to the masters of the medium.

The director's interest in Van Gogh is most evident in the storyboards for his 1990 film, Dreams, in which a fictional Kurosawa steps back in time to watch the painter in action, and then walks through several of his paintings. In this, it offers a lesson in the circularity of artistic influences, with Van Gogh himself having been much inspired by the work of Japanese artists, particularly Hiroshige.

What stands out in the pictures shown here, however, is the filmmaker's love of movement and change.

Where painting is an unavoidably static medium, film celebrates motion, speed and action. And if Kurosawa's storyboards cannot actually move, they look like they might at any moment.

I wonder, if Kurosawa was born in the 19th century would he perhaps have been one of the great painters? What kind of films would Van Gogh have made? Sorry? No, no, I meant Vincent, not Theo. The guy who cut off his ear.

Link courtesy Chandrahas.

Why gifts and not money?

"Americans will spend billions on gifts this Christmas. Inquiring economists want to know why," begins James Miller's piece, "The Economics of Gift Giving", in Tech Central Station. Miller, the author of a wonderful book called Game Theory at Work, points out: "Most people have a better understanding of their own needs than you do and so would presumably rather have, for example, $50 in cash than a $50 gift."

So why do most of us still prefer to give gifts for Christmas and other such occasions? Read the full thing for some theories that attempt to answer that question.

WUCIWUG

Many articles have been written about how the popularity of texting, and the entirely new idiom it has given rise to, is bound to affect the literacy and writing skills of people growing up today. Well, a new study has found that these fears are misplaced. The Guardian reports that the study "comparing the punctuation and spelling of 11- and 12-year-olds who use mobile phone text messaging with another group of non-texters conducting the same written tests found no significant differences between the two." It continues:

According to the author of the research, the speech and language therapist Veenal Raval, the findings reflect children's ability to "code switch", or move between modes of communication - a trend familiar to parents whose offspring slip effortlessly between playground slang and visit-the-grandparents politeness.

WUCIWUG, by the way, means "what you see is what you get" in texting parlance. What this study proves, of course, is WUCINWUG

The more things change ...

A longtime correspondent, Wraye Wenigmann, writes in after reading my previous post, "The whore who can't sing", and says that the inability to understand irony is not new to the British. She writes:

About 100 years ago, Aleister Crowley wrote,

"I'd give all and more
in this Kingdom of boredom
for a girl who's a whore
and is proud of her whoredom."

The above poem referred not only to his own physical cravings, but also to the attitude towards female emancipation at that repressed time and even to certain political relationships (some might claim the Bush-Blair relationship to be a good example here and today).

The irony was lost then too.

As they say, "plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose". No-one sang.

The whore who can't sing

Tom Wolfe, who was recently awarded this year's Bad Sex Award for some passages from his latest book, I am Charlotte Simmons, has said that the sex scenes in question were meant to be ironic, not erotic, and the British judges just did not get the irony. Reuters has quoted Wolfe as explaining: "There's an old saying – 'You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her sing.' In this case, you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can't make him get it."

As readers of this blog tend be rather, how shall I put it, sophisticated, I am certain that they will understand the irony in Wolfe's writing. So here's an excerpt:

Slither slither slither slither went the tongue. But the hand, that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological (ears, nose and throat) caverns – oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest – no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now!

Are you singing yet?

The scientific temper

I asked him whether he had any genuine enemies. I suppose it would have been more to the point to ask him whether he had any genuine friends.

‘You’ve got to have enemies, haven’t you, where I live,’ he said. ‘That’s why I never walk, I always creep.’

‘Do you ever get into fights?’ I asked.

‘I’m up for assault,’ he said, ‘because I get these violent mood swings.’

‘Whom did you assault?’

‘One of my mates.’

‘And why?’

‘Because I wanted to see how he would like it to be beaten up.’

A disinterested inquiry into truth, therefore.

From a column in the Spectator by that marvellous essayist, Theodore Dalrymple.

Ending poverty

In economic terms, the human race has never been richer, or better armed with the medical knowledge, technological prowess and intellectual firepower needed to beat poverty. In rich countries, it has been possible to shift the focus of domestic policy from absolute poverty (now a rarity) to the relative sort — a giant step forward. In poorer countries, too, the past couple of decades have seen an unprecedented rise in the income and standard of living of hundreds of millions of people, mainly in Asia, who no longer struggle just to survive from one day to the next.

From "Making poverty history", the Economist's argument that the world could take big steps towards eliminating poverty in 2005. (If you feel that inequalities are actually increasing in developing countries like India, please do read my earlier post on this subject, "The myth about the rich and the poor".) They identify three big policy areas that could accelerate this process, and the third one that they name is the most crucial: trade liberalisation. The more we cut down on tariffs and subsidies, the closer we'll get to eliminating poverty. But how long will it take?

Quick, think of something

Thought? Now go over to 20Q.net and let an artificial intelligence program play 20 Questions with you. I thought of three things, and it guessed them all within 15 questions. (And then I thought of “blog”, but it finally guessed “nightmare”, which some of my readers, I suppose, would say was close enough.) The remarkable thing about the programming is that it actually learns as it plays, entering each new game into its database and getting more and more efficient. Give it a spin.

And if you like it, buy it for Christmas! 20Q is now available as a battery-powered game, and it is one of the best-selling games this season. Unlike the website, the game is not attached to and updated by an online database, and so it does not learn on the fly as it goes along. But it’s still pretty darned good, and it seems to be a big favourite with kids this season.

For more, read reviews of the game by Business Week and Time magazine.

How to reach pasta heaven

Bill Vallicella, a fellow chess player who writes the fascinating blog Maverick Philosopher, turns his attention to food in an excellent little piece called “The Seven Deadly Sins of Pasta”. When he sees people commit Sin No. 7, he says, he is “tempted to make like al-Zarqawi and engage in an Islamo-fascist act,” so in the unlikely event that you dine with him, don’t chop the capellini on your plate.