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I am a fan of Princeton philosopher Prof Harry Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit in which he proposes “to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. … My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not”. Continue reading “Democracy, Taxes and Bullshit”

The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre aka the Amritsar Massacre was done on April 13th, 1919, one hundred years ago.

General Dyer’s soldiers, the ones who murdered unarmed innocents were Sikh, Gurkha, Baluchi, Rajput troops from 2-9th Gurkhas, the 54th Sikhs and the 59th Sind Rifles. Indians murdered wholesale Indians at the command of a foreigner. How morally depraved can a people become.

Truth be told, Indians have always helped the invaders — Islamic and British — to kill Indians. It’s cultural. It’s shameful. It’s morally detestable.

A couple of days ago, a picture of a black hole’s silhouette taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (ETH) was unveiled. The black hole is at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 which is around 55 million light years from earth. The black hole is huge — around 7 billion times the mass of the sun.

The National Geographic reports:

The new image is the stunning achievement of the Event Horizon Telescope project, a global collaboration of more than 200 scientists using an array of observatories scattered around the world, from Hawaii to the South Pole. Combined, this array acts like a telescope the size of Earth, and it was able to collect more than a petabyte of data while staring at M87’s black hole in April 2017. It then took two years for scientists to assemble the mugshot.

It also includes a video on “Black Hole 101“. Continue reading “The Supermassive Blackhole in M87”

Among other remarkable characteristics, humans are intelligent, bipedal, and have opposable thumbs. But so do other great apes, albeit to a comparatively limited degree. What is uniquely human? What distinguishes humans lies in their phenomenal ability to transform matter.

Broadly understood, humans take existing matter and make stuff out of them. They cut down trees to make lumber; they smelt ores to make metals, etc. They build houses and make metal pots and pans. They do it deliberately, consciously and purposefully. To create anything, some materials have to be transformed from their original form — which necessarily means the destruction of the original form or function. Creation and destruction are inseparable. You cannot have one without the other.

Continue reading “The Economics of Creative Destruction”

Today, Feb 12th, marks the birth anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest innovators. Charles Darwin was born on this date in 1809. And so was another great man — Abraham Lincoln — born on the same day and and the same year as Darwin.

Darwin was one of two people who came up with the novel idea that the mechanism for the evolution of biological life was natural selection; Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) was the other person. They explained what makes the biological world tick.

Continue reading “Happy Birthday, dear Mr Charles Darwin”

My blog post of Jan 26th (Whoever Fights Monsters …) was republished by The Quint and subsequently ended up on Yahoo also.

At the Yahoo site, a few hundred comments (and replies to comments) were posted. Most of the comments were critical of my opinion, and many simply declared that I was a paid Congress agent, and anti-Hindu and anti-India to boot. I had stirred a hornet’s nest.

Which was sad because it showed that those people have reading comprehension problems. In my piece I severely criticized Nehru and Indira, and the Congress. And I faulted Modi for not keeping his “Congress-mukt Bharat” promise. The Congress is corrupt, not stupid. It would have been stupid for them to pay someone who is implacably opposed to them.

Modi bhakts read my criticism of Modi as an endorsement of his opponents. That’s stupid. My limited point in my opinion piece was that Modi has not been good for India. That is not meant as an endorsement of the opposition. It is possible to be the best (which is a relative term) and also be quite terrible (which is an absolute term.)

Some even doubted whether I had ever supported Modi. Here’s a piece I wrote in May 2014 — a few days after the 2014 election results: Narendra Modi will Transform India.

I was so wrong.

It would be wonderful if our schools exposed students to those great ideas that are the foundation upon which our modern civilization is built. These ideas are primarily from the social sciences. Social sciences, such as economics, explore and explain how society functions, and the pathology of failed societies. Among great ideas, I think the idea that the individual matters is paramount.

The institution of slavery has been abolished. At least that’s what we’d like to believe. But in truth, the individual is ruled by the collective, even in the best of societies. Even in the “civilized world”, the individual is de facto partially enslaved although de jure he is free. That’s a truth that very few people recognize. That’s a truth that every student should be exposed to because it matters immensely. That truth matters because only when one realizes that one is not free that the struggle for freedom begins. Continue reading “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other”

Is my flight from IAD to LHR (scheduled departure 7 PM) going to take off or not?

JUST IN: Heathrow airport has suspended departures due to “drone sighting”. https://t.co/Rve1LoJ3Pb pic.twitter.com/BuMnJCPvGg

— euronews (@euronews) January 8, 2019

It makes good sense for the slave master to persuade his slaves that idleness is a sin and he’s doing god’s work when he flogs the slaves to work harder. The harder the slaves work, the more the master can take for himself. But of course the real motive has to be concealed and clothed in moral raiment.

“Work hard, you b*tches, and stop complaining.” That’s what Mohandas Gandhi meant but put it so very piously by saying, “Purity of mind and idleness are incompatible.” See what I mean? Continue reading “In Praise of Idleness”