Bill Maher’s Religulous

Bill Maher is not everyone’s cup of tea but I absolutely enjoy his shows. He pulls no punches when it comes to ridiculing monotheism. But then you may say it is an easy job considering that monotheistic religions are ridiculous. Here’s the opening paragraph of a Salon.com review of the movie:

What if there was a religion, asks comedian Bill Maher, in which an all-powerful god from outer space decided to send his unborn son on a suicide mission to planet Earth? So this space-god impregnates a human female in some mystical, not-quite-physical fashion, and she gives birth to a baby who is both a human being and a divine incarnation, simultaneously the space god’s spawn and the space god himself. (Oh, space god also has a third manifestation, one that’s totally invisible.) So space-god junior is born on Earth destined to be killed, even though he’s a space god and therefore immortal.

Read the rest of the space-god story in the New Testament (aka the Bible). Check out the Old Testament and the Quran (Koran) for the other versions of — to borrow a phrase from Richard Dawkins — breathtaking inanity.

India, being the land of people who are more Catholic than the Pope and more Mullah than the Ayatollahs (remember, India banned “The Satanic Verses” and thus set in motion the reward for the murder of Salman Rushdie), there is no chance of “Religulous” being shown in theaters in India. The government would not allow it. Only books and paintings denigrating Indic religions are allowed by the “secular” government of India.

So I do my best to counter the “secularism” of the government of India by ridiculing monotheism.

A bit more from the Salon review below the fold. Continue reading “Bill Maher’s Religulous”

Plagiarism by Big Media

Sudipta wants bloggers to wake up:

Bloggers, wake up! For long the mainstream media has been plagiarising pictures from our blogs for long. And they seem to get away with it with impunity. Because they don’t respond to emails. They don’t publish letters sent to the editor about their reporters lifting images with impunity. How can they — these losers can’t stand up to own their mistakes; . . . They copy images, text, opinions, and they aren’t man enough to acknowledge the source: let alone ask for permission or compensate monetarily. Twilight Fairy, Archana, Bobinson have pointed it out before. And now, Shrinidhi finds one of his pics on the Times of India.

So how does one respond to theft? By reporting it. And by using the law. But then, you have to have laws against intellectual property theft and have the time, money and persistence to go through with an expensive and protracted legal case. But what about petty intellectual theft? It’s possible but very unlikely that any individual has the capacity to drag something like The Times of India to court.

I guess that in the case of petty plagiarism of the sort that Sudipta is pointing at, the remedy is that sufficient people call “Shame on you!” Perhaps the word will get around and will deter theft.

Why Pakistan is Useful Just the Way it is

The Acorn says that now is the time to drop trade barriers with Pakistan.

Pakistan’s economy is in a tailspin. Since the second last thing that the international community wants in Pakistan is an economic meltdown, Friends of Pakistan are coming together to provide emergency foreign aid.

The “Friends of Pakistan are “Britain, France, Germany, the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Turkey, Australia and Italy plus the United Nations and the European Union.” Among these are nations — US, China, the Arab states, France, Britain — that give aid to Pakistan. The military component of the aid is what Pakistan uses to initiate and fight bloody wars with India. India, a desperately poor country, cannot afford these costly wars but it has to fight them because the Friends of Pakistan want that India bleeds. Pakistan is the instrument.
Continue reading “Why Pakistan is Useful Just the Way it is”

On the US Financial Crisis

Richard Feynman has claimed that “it is safe to say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics.” He was serious about it because of the complexity of the subject and the counter-intuitive consequences of the theory. Sometime I think that the global financial system is also beyond comprehension. But that is not quite true. Unlike quantum mechanics, the financial system is an artifact, albeit a very complex one. Also, it is possible to understand something and yet be unable to fully control it all the time. Once in a while, it can crash. When–not if–it does crash, you figure out what broke, fix it so that it does not break again, and get on with life. It will break again later due to a different bug but it will never be entirely bug free.

As I am an economist, I am supposed to understand the financial system. Luckily, I am not that sort of economist and so I don’t feel the slightest embarrassment admitting that I don’t have much of a clue. But sometimes I think that perhaps not too many people — even those whose business it is — have a clue either. Some suspect that even the chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, too is not fully clued in. Go figure.

Anyway, I wrote a piece on the meltdown of the US financial system for MailToday. Why? Because everyone and his brother is writing one. So why not I? It will be in the papers tomorrow. But you, dear reader, get to read it today!
Continue reading “On the US Financial Crisis”

Not your average Nigerian email scam

Steve, a friend in San Diego, forwarded me this email. It’s doing the rounds and sooner or later you are bound to read it. So you may as well read it here.
Continue reading “Not your average Nigerian email scam”

Another blogger on Nehru

I suppose you all know that I love them internets. It is the most potent instrument for the minor enlightenment of humanity. By “minor” I mean that which enables knowledge and therefore prepares the way for the major enlightenment. Once upon a time, not too long ago, you could only know what was allowed by those who were in charge of the information channels such as print, radio, and TV. The rich and powerful controlled what information the unwashed masses could be trusted with. Dictators found this very useful.

I think one easy test of whether a society is free or not is to check whether there is freedom of expression. Can you say, read or write what you please? More importantly, can you say, read or write what you please without being hauled off to some gulag? How does India figure on this test. Not very well, I am afraid.
Continue reading “Another blogger on Nehru”

We must free the Kashmiris

The op-ed “India can’t afford to fall victim to psywar” in the New Indian Express of Sept 19th did not make much sense to me. I find the entire piece confusing. Perhaps I am simple-minded and cannot navigate through contradictions, or perhaps because it is an “op-ed by committee,” signed by 20 prominent people.

It begins:

SOME stray voices in the media have been questioning, with surprising nonchalance and lack of depth, the wisdom and expediency of retaining Kashmir as a part of India. This matters not because such voices reflect any growing view in our country but because they play into the hands of enemies of the nation. Their suggestions embolden subversive forces both within and outside the country, and encourage our adversaries to entertain the hope that with a little more effort, Kashmir will secede from India.

Continue reading “We must free the Kashmiris”

On Competition and Ideas

The Dance of Creative Destruction

At the shining bright core of our galaxy of ideas lie a bunch of super-massive ideas that are tightly bound to each other. The core’s gravitational attraction holds the galaxy together, draws in stuff and transmutes them into higher elements.

Exploring the metaphor a bit further is interesting. At the center of galaxies dwell huge black holes which destroy both matter and time. And like the great god Shiva — the Mahadeva as Nataraja, the king of dancers, dancing the Tandava, the cosmic dance of creative destruction — the galaxy core produces novelty and thus advances the evolution of the entire galaxy. Black holes, just like Shiva, destroy time. Curiously, the Sanskrit word for time is the same for black: “kala”. The universe evolves because ceaseless change is imposed upon it through the dance of creative destruction.

Evolution. It is hard to escape the gravitational pull of the idea of evolution. The idea goes back into antiquity. But it was only recently (in terms of historical time) in the mid-1800s that Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) pondered the biological variant of evolution and figured out the mechanism. It was natural selection. That is one of the superstar ideas that populate the core of our ideas galaxy. Everything that is known about biological evolution can be explained through natural selection.
Continue reading “On Competition and Ideas”

Stopping terrorism by securing WiFi

Well, now we can be assured of our security and safety from Islamic terrorism. TRAI — the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India — is taking steps to combat terrorism by securing WiFi networks.

With terrorists using unsecured wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks to shoot off emails every time they carry out bomb blasts, TRAI is examining a series of measures to have security processes in place to protect such networks. [Source]

Continue reading “Stopping terrorism by securing WiFi”