There are reports that a large volume of counterfeit currency is in circulation. Apparantly the government is worried. I wonder why. Nobel prize-winning economists tell us that a recessionary economy needs “stimulus”. Counterfeit currency is “stimulus” too. Shouldn’t we be applauding the counterfeiters for creating additional “demand” and thus helping the “economy as a whole”?

The climate is changing (via The New Clarion). And the change is certainly induced by humans. (I couldn’t resist the pun but it is not funny at all)

A couple of weeks ago I talked to the director of marketing for a leading private aviation company, which offers fractional jet ownership, pre-paid membership packages of private jet flight, and concierge-organized private jet travel. In her 15+ years in the industry, she said, she’d never encountered as many people who would not buy and travel in this manner because they were afraid of being seen and judged harshly. Many even feared having their companies singled out for reprisal by the government. She said, “I’m doing business in a climate of fear, almost clandestinely, as if engaged in espionage rather than commerce.” She too asked not to be identified.

Normally I would not have linked to an article that mentions no names. But I just read this (also via The New Clarion).

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens.
…
These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — informally known as the United States’ Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:
• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

What is most remarkable about Holdren’s views is that they are totally unencumbered by any sense of morality.

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems.
(Emphasis mine. Note that there is no mention of moral questions)

The man is a monster. He is in power and he has merely substituted overpopulation with climate change. Worse, the president who appointed him was elected with a comfortable majority. It has come to this. Can the situation still be reversed peacefully? I doubt it.

Update:

Here is an illuminating comment on the Holdren piece

It is way too late for forced sterilization and abortions! There have been mass dieoffs of our species before we are on the brink of one again. One way or another there will be far fewer of us by the end of this century. It blows my mind that youall mostly seem to think that we have a right to dominate this planet at the expence of all other life forms. Have a nice day.

I recently had a couple of meetings with a senior banker. In the first meeting, during some light talk, he mentioned his support for a signature campaign for the stricter implementation of the PCPNDT act (which bans sex determination tests). In the second meeting, he mentioned how certain regulations recently imposed by the Reserve Bank of India are so oppressive that his bank can either comply with them fully or serve its customers well but not both. Presumably he does not like the regulations and wants them removed.

Both the PCPNDT act and the banking regulations are a violation of the right of individuals to freely contract with each other. The advocates of both justify them by claiming that they serve the ”public good”. But recognizing this involves thinking in terms of principles. That is something that even the most successful businessmen seem incapable of. As another example, just read this piece on the budget in today’s Times of India by Narayan Murthy, the founder of Infosys. He starts off complaining about the fiscal deficit and then goes on to write that all the allocations in the budget are inadequate! Do these people ever bother to think?

I have been writing about anarchy in my last two posts and debating it. Meanwhile other people are worried about anarchy too. Sexual anarchy! Apparantly Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind (some Islamic organization) is worried that “the repeal of the section [section 377 of the Indian constitution which criminalizes homosexuality] would create ’sexual anarchy’ in the society”. (via The Rational Fool)

Recently, there have been reports about the killing of large number of civilians in the recently concluded military operations in Sri Lanka. Now, I have never followed Sri Lankan politics in any detail. So I cannot comment on which side (if any) is in the right. But that is not the purpose of the post. I am writing this post because I am a little surprised at my own reaction to this. Or rather the lack of reaction. I feel nothing at all. No sympathy for those killed, no anger or admiration for the fighters on either side, nothing at all. A single untimely death can be a tragedy but 20,000 just leaves me untouched. I believe in the benevolent universe premise and thus have a default good-will toward people I do not know, an expression of the idea that human life is valuable. Does the lack of reaction contradict this premise? Have I turned into a cynic?

To get atleast some minimal understanding of what the conflict was all about, I looked up LTTE on wikipedia. In a long article, the only reason mentioned for the cause of the conflict is this one line: “The Tamil Tigers claimed to be fighting to protect the country’s Tamil minority from discrimination at the hands of the successive Sinhalese majority governments that have ruled the country since independence”. That and the two maps in the same article indicate that the conflict is ethnic. An ethnic conflict is inconceivable to me in the sense that I cannot even remotely understand the kind of thinking that would motivate a person to participate in it. I have zero respect for any religion (never had any) or for tradition for its own sake. That people are willing to fight and kill for the sake of religion and/or tradition is inconceivable.

The conflict is not new. It has been going on for decades. What have all these “civilians” been doing while a civil war was raging in their country? Either they have actively supported it or they have ignored it even though they knew they would be caught in the cross-fire. Either way they have not demonstrated any respect for human life, not even their own. If they never cared much about their own lives, why should I? Anyhow, I don’t even subscribe to the idea that civilians should be exempt from military operations.

The first time I heard about the LTTE was when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. I was only a kid then. It is telling that in all the time since then (almost two decades) I did not even know what the conflict was about. I have never been particularly interested in politics but that does not explain it. I knew what the American civil war was about, for instance. I never knew what the conflict was about because in all the reports that I must have read or glanced at, I found no sensible reasons.

To sum up, my lack of reaction was because I did not care about these people at all, not because I did not know them but because I knew (only implicitly) that they were not acting sensibly. I still hold that “human life is valuable”. But human (in this context) is more than a biological description. And people who are willing to participate in ethnic strife or to live passively while it destroys everything around them do not qualify.

Note:
As I was writing this I remembered that Aristotle The Geek had recently written somehing about Prabhakaran (the LTTE leader). So I searched for LTTE on his blog and found these two posts. The first reveals that socialism was part of the idealogy of the LTTE. So the civilians who supported the LTTE are not just tribalistic but also socialist. The comments in the second raise another issue – how do collectives relate to individualism and should one recognize them? I will write about that later.

This post (via Gus Van Horn) shows how the government operates in the U.S. these days. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between it and a criminal gang. Except that unlike a criminal gang, it has the entire coercive apparatus of the state behind it. Scary.

Donald Luskin asks “Is TARP a criminal enterprise?” and goes on to describe a number of dubious details such as:

…it was disclosed that “nearly 20 preliminary and full criminal investigations” are underway, including “large corporate and securities fraud matters affecting TARP investments, tax matters, insider trading, public corruption, and mortgage-modification fraud.”

…Perhaps this refers to the controversy that surfaced last January when it was said that Barney Frank (D., Mass.), the powerful head of the House Financial Services Committee, intervened to get TARP funding for a favored constituent, Boston’s OneUnited Bank.

…It’s easy to guess that Barofsky is looking into the possibility that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson coerced the CEOs of the nine largest banks to accept capital investments from TARP, even though several of them didn’t want the government as a stakeholder.

…Cuomo writes that according to a deposition by CEO Lewis, “Bank of America did not disclose Merrill Lynch’s devastating losses . . . and would have done so but for the intervention of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve.”

But the important question to ask is not “Is TARP (or any other particular program) a criminal enterprise?”. The important question is “Could it have been otherwise?” The government is nothing more than an organization of people. A private organization does not have the authority to confiscate people’s property and use it for its own purposes, whatever those purposes may be. Neither does a government. The proper term for such confiscated property is loot. Is there a non-criminal way to acquire or distribute loot? I think not.

Via this piece at True Sailing Is Dead, I came across this post:

 The curious case of 200 nearly identical MSM headlines

The following headlines have appeared in newspapers within the last 24 hours. This is not an inclusive list.

• Third of Illinoisans went without health insurance in last 2 years: Sun-Times
• Report: 2.5M in Michigan lacked health insurance: Chicago Tribune
• Study: 29% of Ohioans have gone without health insurance: BizJournals
• Report: More NJ residents lacking health insurance: Forbes
• Study: Many Kansans are uninsured: BizJournals
• Report tallies uninsured in Hawaii: KPUA AM 670
• Study: 1 in 3 Alabamians have no insurance: BizJournals
• 1 out of 4 NH residents lacked health insurance within last two years: WBZ
• 1 out of 3 Coloradans lacked insurance in past two years: Denver Post
• Nearly 1 in 3 Idahoans lack health insurance, study says: Idaho Statesman
• One in four nonelderly Minnesotans has been without health insurance, study shows: Twin Cities
• 1 in 3 are uninsured in Georgia, study says: Augusta Chronicle
• 1.3 million Louisiana residents uninsured: Independent
• Millions in N.C. lack health plan: Winston-Salem Journal
• Uninsured are mostly working: Sun-Herald
• Nearly one-third of Wyoming residents went without health insurance in past two years: Wyoming Tribune
• Report finds health insurance lacking in W.Va.: Charleston Gazette
• Nearly 1/3 Of Kentuckians Uninsured Says Report: WFPL Radio
• REPORT: 254K Rhode Islanders Uninsured at Some Point from 2007-2008: ABC 6
(links dropped)

The post goes on to claim

Data from the Census Bureau debunks the lie continually promoted by the mainstream media of the legendary 47 million uninsured Americans:
• 9.5 million people are illegal aliens
• 8.3 million uninsured people are those who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and choose not to purchase insurance
• 8.7 million uninsured people are those who make over $75,000 a year and choose not to purchase insurance

Clearly the 200 headlines are propaganda in the sense I wrote about a few days back. And probably also in the sense of being misinformation specially designed to push an agenda (I do not have the energy to try to verify the figures). Putting aside the truth of the figures and my disagreement with the goal - nationalization of healthcare – this propaganda is intended to achieve, how does one judge the propaganda? Al (of True Sailing is Dead) writes

These papers did not randomly all come to the same conclusion on the same day. This “news” was obviously released into the mainstream to coincide with (surprise!) President Obama’s push for Universal Healthcare. Not saying it’s good or bad, just that it’s going on, and as a news consumer you can either accept that the “news” you read is the result of good old fashioned journalistic integrity or you can say “wait a minute” and realize that you’re being played by a national propaganda machine.
…
It’s propaganda, and it’s not a suitable purpose for any news publication to pursue. Yet it’s done constantly. Incessantly. Pervasively. And you don’t even know it.
Or maybe you do know it. Maybe you do.
Do you?

The proper purpose of a news organization is to publish news and perhaps to provide commentary on it. But what constitutes news? A working definition could be: an event that is seen as significant. But that raises questions like significant to whom? By  what standard? (Also read Burgess Laughlin’s post on bias) It is clear that the world view of the person(s) determining whether or not to highlight a particular event will determine what constitutes news. And since a news organization can only publish so many items at a time, it will have to prioritize, i.e, it may not publish a news item as soon as it occurs but at a time of its choosing. Getting back to the specific concrete at hand, what Al seems bothered about is the fact that a number of media organizations decided to publish findings in a concerted manner in an attempt to influence people. This could be called strategy or it could be called propaganda (negative moral judgement in the common usage of the word). Calling it stategy acknowledges the fact that people can and should form worldviews, can and should look for moral significance in events, can and should try to act in a manner that they judge to be in their best interests. Calling it propaganda (in the usual negative sense) implies a desire that the people in media should never form moral judgements or atleast that they should not allow their moral judgements to influence their decisions about whether and when to publish certain items and whether to coordinate with others in doing so. But this is an impossibility. Men necessarily act in accordance with their moral judgements and just because someone is in the media, does not mean that he can (or should) act like a robot. This desire is analogous to wanting a physical body to behave without inertia. Here it is mental inertia.

It might seem that I am making too much of a minor semantic difference. But, behind the negative connotation associated with the word propaganda is a major flawed idea that manifests itself in other ways too. It is the idea that the pursuit of truth or knowledge, the forming of judgements, objectivity etc are ends in themselves. They are not. They are means to live ones’ life. If they are seen as ends, then the pursuit of one’s life is seen as an impediment, something that might make the pursuit of truth less pure by tainting it with a purpose. It is the idea that leads to other ideas like “Media should be free from commercial influences”, “Science should be free from the bounds of practicality of its applications”, “The mystic who spends his life waiting for a revelation is on a higher plane than a person who lives a normal life.” (There might be others that I have not identified).

The Times of India reports

Mumbai: It was meant to be a grand procession, planned by Samajwadi Party candidate Abu Asim Azmi from the Bandra-Kherwadi signal to the collector’s office where he was to file his nomination papers for the Mumbai North-West Lok Sabha constituency on Monday. But it turned out to be a damp squib as TV channels began airing visuals of Azmi’s brother Shahid “distributing’’ cash among some people in the crowd.
    The TV visuals prompted Election Commission officials to conduct an inquiry into the incident although Shahid Azmi denied the charge.

So the Election Commission is worried about candidates handing out their own (presumably) money to voters. But no one is bothered when candidates of all parties make promises to hand out other people’s money to voters (search for the manifestos of various parties to see what I mean)!

In the same edition of the The Times of India that carried the news report on Hafiz Contractor, there was a report on a more interesting case. Titled “Coaching class ad leaves IIT dean red-faced”, the report states:

A newspaper advertisement for an IIT entrance coaching class had the campus in a flutter recently. Reason: The ad carried a photograph of IIT Bombay’s dean for student affairs, Prakash Gopalan, along with a note from him praising the coaching class.
    The ad … carried a handwritten note from Gopalan, … “Based on our experiences with our son, we very strongly recommend (this coaching class) to every parent and student in the process of choosing the best coaching class for JEE at Mumbai.’’
“I did not endorse the coaching class,’’ … “I had sent my son there and had written the note as a feedback. The note was written by me in good faith and in my capacity as a parent. I had not written the note as an IIT dean. I had no idea that it would be published in the newspapers. My permission was not sought for using my feedback in an advertisement,’’ Gopalan told TOI… 
   Praveen Tyagi, MD of the class, said he would not have used Gopalan’s feedback in the advertisement had he known it would have caused him so much trouble. Tyagi, however, felt there was nothing wrong with the ad. “If the dean’s son has studied at my coaching class and he is satisfied with the teaching he received, why should it not be publicised? I have the utmost regard for IIT professors and their feedback means a lot to me. I haven’t used this for personal gains. I just wanted parents to be aware of the calibre of my class. Many ads make false claims, but I was only telling the truth,’’ said Tyagi.

Apart from the issue of permission for using the feedback in an advertisement (a narrow technical issue that depends on how the feedback was given, privacy policies etc), just what is wrong with the advertisement? A conflict of interest between the dean’s roles as a parent and as a dean? How so? As Tyagi says, “I was only telling the truth”. Can the truth create a conflict of interest? Also note, how Tyagi feels it necessary to include the rather comic “I haven’t used this for personal gains” as part of his defence. How is it not personal gain? And what is wrong with personal gain anyway?

Part of the reason for the flutter over the incident is that most of the policy makers want to discourage coaching classes. But the coaching classes are there for a reason. The government-approved syllabus and examinations for the years leading up to undergraduate courses holds no challenges (and therefore provides no motivation) for students who aspire to join IIT Bombay. Nor does it prepare them for the highly competitive and challenging Joint Entrance Examination conducted by the IITs (Atleast it used to be challenging. Attempts have been made to lower the bar to make coaching classes irrelevant). The coaching classes (atleast the good ones) actually provide a much better education than the government recognized and mandated pre-undergraduate courses. Coaching classes are so prevalent that most students attend them in addition to regular (government-mandated) school. Indeed, there are government recognized colleges that allow students to take the mandated board examinations but do not require daily attendance (I do not know whether this is legal, but it is definitely widespread). The students attend coaching classes instead of the regular colleges, create fake records of laboratory courses which the coaching classes do not have and clear the board examinations with no trouble at all. All this because regular education is protected from commercialization by state decree. I do not know all the details of what is allowed and what is not but the end result is that any professional needs to hold a government recognized degree from a non-commercial government recognized and regulated organization, while the actual education that the degree is supposed to certify comes from parallel higly profitable commercial organizations. The parents (few students finance their own education) end up paying for both and the students end up wasting a lot of their time at useless institutions where they learn nothing.