Two depressing articles on Obama's "race" for a second term

I wonder what the reason was for me, even as a kid, to have gotten so interested in the news and events around me.  I remember even keenly following changes in the price of gold, and the exchange rates for the Indian rupee. Local and international politics--especially the Cold War issues--fascinated me.

Now, if only I hadn't that infection in my early years!  Because, then I would have never stuck my nose so seriously into attempting to understand this complex world.  I could have chosen a professional life where I could simply have punched-in and punched-out, and not worried about a damn thing.

Nah, that is an alternative that I would never have chosen! 

Thus, I end up reading and thinking and driving myself crazy.

A horrible feeling it was to read two articles, in two different publications, and feel that there is nothing I, or even millions of us, could ever do to change the way things are.

In the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the worrisome fear of a black President, and he notes:

After Obama won, the longed-for post-­racial moment did not arrive; on the contrary, racism intensified.

Yes, it is awful how much race has become a divisive issue.  Coates' essay is intense, and I hope that it will gain a much, much wider audience.  Towards the end, he writes:

In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.

Reading that essay while getting ready to sleep was a bad idea.  Instead of calmly drifting off into sleep, there I was wide awake, thinking about all the subtle and explicit racist jokes I have heard or read about Obama.  I wanted to yell out a big FUCK YOU in the middle of the night.

Sleep I did, eventually, and back to the routines of reading.  After laughing through the cartoons in the New Yorker, I settled down to read Jane Mayer's piece on the other race in this election--the race for money.  The more Obama falls behind in this race, Mayer thinks that he could even lose this election!  The idea(l) of one-person-one-vote is threatened ever more than before:

the top .07 per cent of donors are exerting greater influence on the 2012 race than the bottom eighty-six per cent. And this accounts only for publicly disclosed donations: much of the money raised during this election cycle consists of secret gifts to “nonprofit public-welfare” groups that claim to have no overt political agenda.

Rare are billionaires who donate gazillions to the Democratic Party and not to the GOP.  In the age of SuperPACs, that means disaster for Obama, or any candidate anywhere who is not aligned with the billionaire Republicans.

looking ahead, many Democrats grow more concerned. Bill Burton, the former White House aide who is now running Priorities USA, says, “My worry is that the numbers will just get even more astronomical. It could easily be doubled, or quadrupled, by 2016. Once big business realizes it can purchase the White House, you have to wonder what the limit is.”

Tell me why I should not be worried, and why I should not yell a big FUCK YOU in the day time as well.  You can now understand why sometimes I wish that I didn't have this intellectual curiosity when I was young!

Our roads are fast enough. Why is the internet connection slow?

Driving two thousand miles all the way to San Diego and back was a wonderful lesson on the role of infrastructure.

By infrastructure, I mean more than the interstate highway system for which we owe a lot to President Dwight Eisenhower's leadership. As efficient as driving on I-5 was, it was even more of a pleasure to take in the sights and experience the country along the complex web of state highways, and state and county roads.

This intricate network of roadways was, of course, not the first one in the country, when we refer to transport infrastructure.  The networks of railroads and canals had been developed even earlier.  The growth of railroads was remarkably correlated with the industrial revolution in the US, with the result that it is always tempting to ask economic historians whether the railroads led and triggered the American industrial revolution or whether the two simply went hand-in-hand.

Canals, railroads, and roads, along with air transport systems, are from centuries prior to this twenty-first century.  While in the contemporary world, we do transport goods and passengers by these different transport avenues, there is an important difference: our economic activities are not tied to manufacturing, which dominated the American economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Of course, a great deal of manufacturing happens even now in the US.  But, manufacturing is not the economic prime-mover as it was when Eisenhower led the charge to construct the interstate highway system. Now, almost eighty percent of our incomes and jobs are through the remarkably varied services sector.  The manner in which some of these can be bought and sold doesn't always require us consumers to travel by roads or planes, and instead our participation in the economy in increasingly electronic.  Streaming movies on Netflix means we do not have to head to theaters and video-rental stores.  Purchasing jeans at the Amazon website eliminates the need to drive to the nearest mall.  But, the infrastructure required to facilitate the rapidly growing cyber-economic activities do not seem to be the best in the world, unlike how the road systems complemented the previous economic landscape.

When it comes to the information superhighways, the US does not seem to have the numbers that will wow the rest of the world.  A recent report pegs the US with a number twelve ranking in a global comparison of average broadband speeds.  At an average speed of 6.7megabits-per-second (Mbps,) the US considerably lags behind the chart topper, South Korea, where internet connectivity speeds averaged at 15.7 Mbps.

This lagging behind in the twenty-first century highways ought to concern us in the country that created the internet in the first place. 

Instead, we are obsessed with winning the old-school infrastructure race; an example is this one, which asks:

"When will Americans realize we're losing the infrastructure race to China?"

Ahem, we are not losing any race, especially when it comes to roads and bridges.

Speaking of bridges and losing to China,

Oh, man, China’s infrastructure! President Barack Obama has praised China’s infrastructure investments and has frequently argued that we’ve got to follow in their footsteps.
Cue the sad trombones (via BBC):

A section of a multi-million dollar bridge in China that opened in November has collapsed, leaving three people dead and five injured, state media say.
Four lorries fell off the Yangmingtan Bridge in Harbin City, Heilongjiang province, when part of it collapsed, Xinhua news agency said.
Shoddy construction and over-loading have been blamed for the incident, it added.

This is the sixth major bridge collapse in China in a year. We can only hope the firms who built these bridges aren't the same Chinese firms that have been contracted to build bridges here in America.

I will mention it for the umpteenth time in this blog: China or India is not our competition!

Thank Iran (Persia) for Bollywood!

There is a good chance that most of the buffoons who chant "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" don't care to know anything at all about the country's gloriously rich history.  The theocratic buffoons ruining running the country seem to be hell bent on making sure the world would understand Iran only as a country of nutcases.

A long time ago, I read somewhere (where? the older I get, the more I forget such details!) that even as Arabic gained currency in West Asia as the language of science, Persian reigned supreme as the language of culture.  Something like the comparison between French and German, I suppose.

It was a good thing that the Central Asians invading India brought along with them the Persian culture, which then filtered all the way down to memorable Bollywood stars who played memorable Muslim characters with memorable melodies.

Some of my favorites:

Lies, damned lines, and political campaigns!

So, as if the Missouri intellectual's comments on illegitimate rape and pregnancy weren't dumb enough, the presidential candidate representing the Gross Old Party says this at a campaign rally:

“No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place where we were born and raised.”

Seriously?

WTF, eh!

Maybe there is a lot more truth than humor in the following editorial cartoon that explains why all those damned lies work!

Excitement building up for the GOP convention in Tampa

Hurricane Isaac, the size of Texas, is heading towards Tampa:

"Tampa is just as vulnerable as New Orleans was in the sense that the water will funnel into the bay area and from the storm surge which will flood completely the whole entire city of Tampa," Golembo said referring to Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans in 2005.
"It would be a disaster in the Tampa area," Golembo said.

Which, of course, is generating a great deal of enthusiastic tweets, like this one, for instance:

God is sending a hurricane to Tampa to punish GOP for drunk skinny dipping in the Sea of Galilee: wapo.st/NfuoDC
— Dana Milbank (@Milbank) August 22, 2012

With or without Isaac, one group is gearing up for action, reports America's Finest News Source (ht):

Chief Marketing Officers at universities? What next?

My neighbor "J" has for years criticized the "education business" as he calls it for a big reason that it behaves like a business but doesn't want to actually follow the rules of business.  This WSJ report will add more to his argument:



Marketing the institution is not really new, of course.  Even our small little university sends its administrative personnel to far flung states like Alaska or Hawaii to recruit students, and the president and provost even led delegations to China to recruit students from there.  Last year, a student told me that she went to China in one such recruitment trip, with all expenses paid for by the university.  I am not sure if the university paid for the trip with taxpayer dollars or privately raised money, though odds are high that the trip was publicly financed.

It was only a matter of time, therefore, that universities went that one additional step and hired Chief Marketing Officers.  As per Parkinson's Law, this office will quickly morph into a monstrous division with quite a few employees, and ... oh well, if only I did not cherish some outdated Platonic version of the academy--I could have financially gained as well from all the marketing.

As Professor Harry Frankfurt poignantly noted, bullshit is what happens when we have to market anything, even if that is higher education!



The line between a university and a diploma mill is getting increasingly blurry :(

I blame Steinbeck for my disappointment at Salinas!

It was neat to connect with with "S" and "J" over lunch (grilled chicken breast on focaccia, with brie, caramelized onions, local apple, garlic dill aioli.)

A short walk back to the car,  and northward bound I was again.

After holding steady in the mid to high 80s, the temperature started shooting up past the mid 90s, and was nearly into the triple digits when I pulled into the rest stop a little over an hour later.  But, I didn't worry much, because I was confident that the temperature would rapidly drop soon.  It did, and the winds picked up as well.

As I neared Salinas, it was barely at 70 degrees.

I swung by Salinas all because of John Steinbeck.  Years ago, I was in Monterey, which Steinbeck made familiar to us even in India through Cannery Row.  Later, living in Bakersfield meant that I was right there in the locale described in The Grapes of Wrath.  I have read a few short stories of his also.

A couple of years ago, I noticed on the first day of classes that a female student had the last name of Steinbeck.  As students introduced themselves one after another, when it came to her turn, I remember asking her after her self-intro, "are you related to the Steinbeck?"  She excitedly said yes.  I asked her if she gets asked this question all the time.  Her repose shocked me: in her couple of years in college, that was the first time ever that she was asked that question.  Naturally, I took a couple of minutes to engage the class about Steinbeck, and it was even more depressing that very few of the students had ever read anything at all by Steinbeck.  Apparently none of his works are good enough for a high school English literature canon?

So, of course, I wanted to swing by Salinas and check out the place where he was born and also visit the National Steinbeck Center. 

Even before the exit, and while driving into town, I couldn't help thinking that it looked like a run down place.  As I drove through the town via John Street, I was shocked at how economically poor the town seemed.

The more I drove in town, the more I felt I was not enjoying this.  I had assumed--yes, my mistake--that with all the Steinbeck heritage, and its proximity to Silicon Valley, that the town will be, well, very different from what I experienced.  It was as if somebody played a joke on me--inviting me to a party, but intentionally giving me the incorrect address!

I decided to skip the Steinbeck Center, and simply get the heck back on the freeway.  But, perhaps coffee first?

I parked.  I took out my camera, but decided against using it.  It says a lot when don't feel like clicking especially when I had so much planned on coming here.  I walked a few paces to see if there might be a good coffee place.


View Larger Mapa

There were a few interesting pastry items on the shelf.  One read "apricot raspberry," which sounded like an unusual combination.

"I'll have a cup of coffee and one of these apricot-raspberry things" I told the young fellow, who was engaged in a non-stop conversation with a young woman, also an employee, behind the counter.

With a light chuckle, he said "that will be a great combination.  But, those two are different.  We are out of the apricot ones, and only raspberry is available."

After a pause, he added, "actually, raspberry is the better one."

"Sounds good to me" I said.

I paid, grabbed the plate and coffee and a napkin and sat outside.  The town looked even bleaker.  The shortbread-ish raspberry-jam-topped snack and coffee was a delicious combination though.

I walked in with the empty plate, and asked where the restroom was. Coffee in and non-potable water out is how the system works, and increasingly so as I age. 

The young woman said it was all the way in the back.  "You need this token to get in" she said as she handed me a tiny coin.  When a cafe's customers have to be given a coin for restroom access, it is not a good place to hang out!

I followed the young man's instructions to get back to the freeway.  Oddly, in contrast to all my expectations, it felt great to leave Salinas.  How sad!