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Showing posts from May, 2010

Book review: The Alchemist

Up today: The Alchemist , by Paulo Coelho. I was the salutatorian at my high school graduation. My Dad helped me write my speech; he said it was a great opportunity to sneak a decent message into a ceremony that would otherwise be mostly "mind-numbing platitudes." He was right about the platitudes part, and I'd like to think that my speech was pretty good, at least by the standards of high school graduation. I gave a similar message to the one Coelho continually clubs you over the head with in this book--follow your dreams. You might as well, right? A decent moral, I suppose, and one worth remembering every so often. (In my speech, I went on to add that while following your dreams is a decent idea, one should also have a backup plan as sometimes failure is inevitable. It was better than it sounds.) Unfortunately, The Alchemist is also shot through with gauzy New Age "spiritual" twaddle trying to pass itself off as profound philosophical wisdom. Examp

Article of the week

From Nicholas Carr ; read it slow: Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving information from working memory into long-term memory. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by varying the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer much of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of knowledge and wisdom. On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream. He's definitely on to something. When I'm online, I'm usually doing seven or eight things at once, and my attention span is drastically shortened. (There's even an acronym for it: TL;DR--too long, didn't read.) I don't think t

Peace Corps advice

I've been getting a few emails from people asking for advice about being a volunteer in Africa. (If you haven't gotten a response yet, fear not, I've been away for the last couple days and I want to answer thoroughly. A response shall be coming forthwith.) I encourage people to check out PCV central , where there is a great deal of knowledge, if you haven't already. If you have a question for me personally, I wholeheartedly welcome any questions on any topic, just send them to the address on the sidebar or post them in comments, and I'll muster up what little wisdom I possess.

Alternative medicine news

Both of these are from the NYT. The first is on herbal supplements : Nearly all of the herbal dietary supplements tested in a Congressional investigation contained trace amounts of lead and other contaminants, and some supplement sellers made illegal claims that their products can cure cancer and other diseases, investigators found. The levels of heavy metals — including mercury, cadmium and arsenic — did not exceed thresholds considered dangerous, the investigators found. However, 16 of the 40 supplements tested contained pesticide residues that appeared to exceed legal limits, the investigators found. In some cases, the government has not set allowable levels of these pesticides because of a paucity of scientific research. The next is on Andrew Wakefield , a British doctor who was behind a discredited study linking autism and vaccines: LONDON — A doctor whose research and public statements caused widespread alarm that a common childhood vaccine could cause autism was banned on M

This American Life on Haiti

The episode this week was especially pertinent to development and NGOs. It was a look at the rebuilding efforts after the Haitian earthquake last year. One thing I didn't mention in my review of The Mbeki Legacy was his general skepticism of NGOs involved in race relations and HIV/AIDS. I don't know a great deal about NGOs, but they seem to make halting progress at best. Thoughts? On a related note, This American Life episodes can be downloaded by entering this URL into your download manager: http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/408.mp3 Replace "408" with any lesser number and get the correct episode. Nice file structure, eh?

Dubya carved his initial into the economy

I am totally exhausted

I just got a new bike. My friend from Heuningvlei , who got the bike from the previous volunteer that lived there, didn't want it. But I had to ride it 56 km back from his village over hellacious washboards. It wasn't that hard, but boy it was long. It's nice to have a free bike, but I'm a bit spoiled with a mountain biking hobby from back in the states. This sucker weighs about thirty pounds. It's got dual suspension, but it's basically one of those cheap Wal-Mart style jobs where the frame feels like it's made of solid iron. All I can say is that if it weren't for bike shorts I think I would be forever sterile.

Book review: The Mbeki Legacy

Up today: The Mbeki Legacy , by Brian Pottinger. This book takes a hard look at Thabo (coincidentally my Setswana name) Mbeki , the president of South Africa from 1999-2008. The book, while noting Mbeki's relative success in providing macroeconomic stability and reasonable growth, is mostly savagely critical of the Mbeki and the ANC. The main fault, according to Pottinger, was "ideological overreach" in that policies were often either flat-out ridiculous, or appropriate only for a much more advanced country with a very competent bureaucracy (like Germany or Sweden, for example). Affirmative action (which Pottinger acknowledges as vital) was undertaken so quickly and haphazardly as to cripple public services; he gives the example of the electricity shortages and blackouts in 2008--when in 1998 Eskom (the public utility) had large excess capacity and extremely cheap power. In a panic, Eskom ended up hiring many white engineers, some over seventy, who had been dismissed

Israel, South Africa, and nukes

Israel is now proved to have nuclear weapons. They offered to sell them to South Africa in 1975: Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons . The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa 's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret. The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence

US entry to 2010 Chinese Expo

Yglesias: US Pavilion at Expo 2010 is a National Humiliation Our group was briefly taken today to visit Shanghai’s Expo 2010, which is kind of like a World’s Fair. The whole concept seems a bit goofy to my eyes, but it’s caused a lot of excitement in China and I think the way you have to understand it is that China’s at a level of economic development where most Chinese people can manage a trip to Shanghai to visit an Expo but don’t have the means to engage in any international travel. So their way of seeing the world is to visit the various national pavilions erected there. And I’m afraid to say that the U.S. pavilion, though hugely popular (visits thus far ranking just slightly below China) really isn’t up to snuff. Apparently U.S. government funds weren’t appropriated to put the thing together, so the organizers had to raise corporate money. Which is fine, but instead of putting together a real exhibition about the United States and then slapping a nice “thanks to a generous sponsor

The vuvuzela: it's really a trom-bat

The vuvuzela is a South African tradition : But it is the vuvuzela, a cheap plastic horn, that may be the lasting South African symbol of the 2010 games, said Mr. Alegi, a scholar of soccer at Michigan State University. A stadium full of them make a racket so ear-splitting that the usual cheers and groans of the crowd are lost. And South African fans will undoubtedly be blowing their vuvuzelas, which are ubiquitous at South African soccer games, proudly, joyously, defiantly. On the river, one of the traditions is a call to dinner, usually with some kind of horn. There are a few choices, the most elegant being a large conch shell with the very tip cut off to make a mouthpiece. If we're lacking one of those, sometimes we have the loudest person on the trip yell everyone in. One trip though, I remember one family had made an improvised horn by taking a plastic bat, sawing off the far end, and cutting a mouthpiece in the handle end. They called it the "trom-bat," and it m

Parents and reading

The other day I monitored the Grade 4 as they took their home language (Setswana) test. Most of the test was questions about a very short paragraph. About half read slowly and with great difficulty. The other half couldn't read at all. Heartbreaking. I got to thinking. I could read better than that when I was four years old, before I ever went to school. By fourth grade I was reading John Grisham. Yet it had practically nothing to do with innate talent; rather it had everything to do with quality parenting. My parents didn't just tell me awesome stories , they read to me on a nearly nightly basis. One of my earliest memories is sitting in my Dad's lap, book open before us, constantly interrupting him: "What's that word? What's that word?" So I just figured it out. This isn't to say that the kids here are doomed to be permanently left in the dust, rather another reminder that a great deal of what gives me my station in life was total luck on m

The Story

[ Front matter: this another story from my Dad. This is probably his second-best one (though still easily New Yorker -caliber), but it's my favorite, perhaps because I feature prominently in it. Very highly recommended. This was also published in a collection called There's This River .] It's time for bed again. The Boy will need to hear another story. Preferably a long one; ideally one that doesn't end. Lucky for me I have this vast treasure of a tale that I've stored on the leaky floppy disk of my cortex; a story of Remote Glacier and the River Kleena Kleen, of Granite Mountain, Copper Canyon and The Maze. It's a tale all true, richly embellished, misty and more heroic in the soft focus of time, with a cast drawn from that pantheon of characters who were and are my friends: larger than life, bright and timeless as the stars, strong and wise and funny. All handsome men and lovely women who could perform the impossible with a wink and a laugh. This is a sto

The Iraq war

The bloggers I read most frequently are four: Matthew Yglesias , Kevin Drum , Andrew Sullivan , and Ezra Klein . Yesterday, I learned that all of them supported the Iraq War. (I already knew about the other three.) All of them have recanted their previous opinion, and probably learned a great deal from it. (Drum, most satisfyingly, said it was really fucking stupid of him.) Yglesias and Klein were pretty young at the time--they're only a couple years older than me. Still, that's a fairly devastating thing to be wrong about. When my convictions developed a little more, I thought--and still think--that the invasion was the most boneheaded major policy decision ever committed by the USA. Not the most horrible or devastating, but just the rawest, most undiluted dose of stupid ever. Way dumber than Vietnam. It got me wondering though...what did I think back then? I was a junior in high school, so it's a bit fuzzy in my mind. I was against the war, that much I rem

Article of the day

In Foreign Policy magazine, there's a nice piece about the drug cartels in Mexico: As the cartels have shrunk in number, the pressure on them -- from U.S. and Mexican authorities, and from their own competitors -- has increased apace, forcing the organizations to become better equipped and more violent. Today's Mexican cartels spend millions of dollars a year on assault rifles, explosives, armored high-end SUVs, and sophisticated intelligence operations, with the aim of avoiding interdiction and eliminating competitors. This is the grand paradox of drug enforcement. Unless enforcement agencies can intercept virtually all of the drugs crossing the border -- something that approaches impossibility -- their efforts are likely to simply produce more formidable opponents. The cartels' profits will increase, and with them the dangers they pose to Mexican authorities and the Mexican population. Worth a read .

Guest post: Oil Spill A Result of Government Regulations

[ Front matter: this is an Onion-style piece from my Dad. ] Major oil companies Exxon/Mobil and Shell Oil today joined with British Petroleum in blaming Department of Interior regulations for causing the explosion and sinking of a deep water oil drilling platform that is still in the process of causing the largest human caused environmental disaster in history. The offending regulations, crafted by then-vice president Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force with assistance of a host energy industry representatives, were written on the back of used pizza box that appears to have gone missing for the last four years. “They probably said something about not taking all the pressure off before you plug the well, “said BP spokesperson Warren Miphalt. “How were we to know? Somebody should have said something.” Interior Secretary Mudge Salazar promised to have the oil industry come up with a new set of regulations for itself by mid-June. “So this never happens in quite the same way again,” he em

On paleoconservatism

Daniel Larison is one of my favorite bloggers. He writes at the American Conservative . It's probably because I have a weakness for views that are skeptical of human goodness or capacity for change that I like him; nevertheless he provides a fresh breeze on a lot of rather stale left-right dichotomies. It's nice to be reminded that the Klein/Yglesias/Drum trifecta are not right about everything. Yet neither is Larison--witness this post from his old blog : Kirchick’s “discovery” that I have belonged to the League of the South for many years will come, I expect, as no surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for very long. On my sidebar are links to the League of the South’s webpage and its blog, I have written several times for Chronicles, which also links to the League’s site, and I have repeatedly defended the principles of secession, decentralism and constitutionalism that I regard as being an inseparable part of the political tradition of the Antifederalists

Harry Potter language camp

As you can see with my halting attempt at Spanish reviewing, I'm fairly familiar with the Harry Potter series. I'm not a die-hard fan--in fact I found the staggering popularity (something like 400 million copies sold) rather bizarre, especially for the later books, which seemed to get worse and worse. Certainly other young fiction is comparable or superior. In any case, one of the advantages of the that popularity of the series is the wide availability of the book in many languages --67 so far. My current rather feeble attempts at learning Afrikaans center mainly around deciphering dialogue passages in my translated copies. It's not a very effective way to learn a language, but as I don't have any native speakers on hand I have to make do. Reading books is best practice for people who are already fairly good at a language, I think. If one has a decent vocabulary and grammar, pounding thousands of words helps build the instinctive knowledge that one needs to be tru

On begging

The Peace Corps issues a handbook to volunteers called "A Few Minor Adjustments." It's a well-written and sensible guide to the kinds of problems one will face as a volunteer and upon returning home. In the section on accepting the behavior of host country nationals, they write this: The next step in adjustment, then, is developing the ability to "accept" host country behavior. The word accept is being used in a special sense here; it does not mean liking or approving, and especially not adopting, but rather accepting the inevitability and logic of a particular behavior. of trusting that, irritating as it may be, the behavior is nevertheless appropriate in the other culture. you accept the behavior because you understand that it makes sense in the local culture, however rude, offensive, or strange the behavior would be in yours. Just how do you come to such an understanding? The classic route to culutural understanding and acceptance has three basic steps:

Mearsheimer on Israeli apartheid

Ok, I promise I'll shut up about Israel after this. But John Mearsheimer had a bracing lecture some time ago about the endgame for Israel in the next decade or so: The story I will tell is straightforward. Contrary to the wishes of the Obama administration and most Americans -- to include many American Jews -- Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a "Greater Israel," which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream. [...] There are two other reasons w

Book review: Ubik

Fans of Philip K. Dick (Dickheads, they're called) have told me Ubik is his most accessible work, so I queued it up on my mp3 player (due to a freak coincidence, I have seventeen Dick works on audiobook). I really liked it. It's set in then-future 1992 where psionic phenomena are common. Joe Chip, the protagonist, works for Glen Runcider's "prudence organization," which employs people with anti-psi talents, hired to negate the telepaths and "precogs" who infest other organizations. Runcider manages the company with the help of his dead wife Ella, preserved in "half-life." A big contract takes them to the moon, which turns out to be an ambush. Runcider is injured but the rest survive unscathed. After the return to Earth, strange events start happening. Cigarettes and food are decaying, and everything begins to revert to the 1930s. I was reminded sharply of Kafka. I wouldn't call it Kafkaesque exactly, though there is a bit of the f

Article of the day

Since I've been talking Israel a lot recently with the series of posts about Richard Goldstone, this seems like a logical succession. It's a look at the ideology and demographics of the American Jewish establishment : Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. Really, really great read .

Guest story: An Exploration of the Little Colorado River Gorge

[ Front matter: Here's another piece from my Dad. Stories like this make me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life. ] Sitting in a courtroom on a hard chair is not my idea of how to spend a pleasant day in March. Particularly when it's the first day in what seems like months that it hasn't snowed or rained. Particularly when the courthouse is located only a few hundred yards from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Out there, with snow dusting the walls of the canyon and the air as clear as nothing—well, it looked pretty nice. This morning in the newly-remodeled interior of the courthouse a federal magistrate is arraigning two haggard-looking young men from Flagstaff, Arizona, charged with violation of Federal Regulatory Code 7.4H(3). It's 10:00 a.m. The two men have already hiked up from the bottom of the mile-deep gorge in the slush this morning. They are dirty and worn out. They face a maximum sentence of six months in jail and a 500-dollar fine. Conside

Chart of the day

Not to keep bemoaning the chumpitude of Nicholas Sparks, but Cracked.com has an excellent how-to guide: They also had a contest for the best fake Sparks cover. My favorite:

Nicholas Sparks: history's greatest monster

Nicholas Sparks earned my undying hatred when, while watching the movie A Walk to Remember , Mandy Moore's character drops this quote: "Einstein said the more he studied science the more he believed in God," in support of her whitewashed Joel Osteen-style fundamentalist dogma. It turns out Einstein actually said this, but he was not a Christian (or an atheist): It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (p.43) It's the worst kind of pseudo-intellectual sockpuppetry. Einstein said it, so it must be true. (The same goes for atheists who would do the reverse, but that's beside the point.) Whatever. The anger might have had something to do with