Theobenism

Study reinforces what we already know...

2012-01-13T03:30:00.000-08:00

A recent Harvard study concludes that good teachers in grade school helps guarantee a great life for the students and "students assigned to such high value-added teachers are more likely to go to college, earn higher incomes, and less likely to be teenage mothers."

For the study, click here.

Asia's developing middle class

2011-06-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

The prospect for a greater Asian middle class seems to be increasingly optimistic even in the two great countries of India and China. Interesting. This will have great repercussions. If the world's greatest production region becomes the world's greatest consuming region (due to the buying power of the increased middle class), you are seeing a relatively autonomous market and this will have a big impact on regionalism.

In an article published in the East Asian Forum, Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution observed that: e

Asia today has a middle class of around 560 million people, of which 230 million are in the rich economies of Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, and Taiwan (China). The rest live in emerging economies. This latter group is growing very fast as these economies grow. In China, because of the low share of labour in GDP and very low rates of household expenditure, the middle class is small — perhaps only 12 percent of the population — compared to what one would expect from an economy at its level of development. India also has a small middle class by global standards, only about 5 percent of its population, because it is still a rather poor country. But the middle class in both China and India is growing at extraordinary rates. If China is successful in its policy ambition to foster wage growth at least as fast as GDP growth, and if it continues to grow at its potential, its middle class could swell to 50 percent of its population in just 12 years. India’s middle class could rise even more rapidly because Indian households benefit more from Indian growth than do Chinese households, given the prevailing distribution of income.

While the two Asian giants are obviously the most important drivers of the aggregate numbers of growth in the Asian middle class, the exciting possibility is that many large South and East Asian countries could enjoy the same kind of prosperity — Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are poised to become predominantly middle class countries within a decade to 15 years.

Full article here.

Where is the Philippines in all these? I wonder if our elites see the dilemma of a increasingly middle class Asia with the Philippines maintaining a tight pyramidal structure.

I wonder if we'll all wake up and realize it's also "bad for business."

We'd become an Asian developmental pariah in terms of the underdevelopment of the middle class.

Chinese incursion into Southeast Asian Waters

2011-06-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

Last week's incident near Vietnam seemingly is escalating as Vietnam accuses China of sabotage.

I perfectly understand China's move to protect its sea lanes as part of securing its economic life--but incursion into foreign waters so close to other neighboring countries is an act that sends more than mixed signals with consequences that may signal more regional and subregional policy changes.

BBC Vietnam reported the incursion into Philippine waters incident. While the Philippines remain preoccupied with the death of fishes in the region and the resignation of a particular department secretary, international security issues loom. Philippine government representatives seek to file protest with the UN.

And US takes notice as we observe how US Defense Secretary Robert Gates unveiled his plans of "increased military involvement" in the Southeast Asian region. (Story here.)

How this will all play out will have the potential to change regional relationships.

Business and Human Rights

2011-04-14T18:48:00.000-07:00

There is a rising popularity of the linkage of business and human rights. It's proponent is Mr. John Ruggie.

See his talk at the 10th Conference of NHRIs.

In the ASEAN region, I think of the production networks and the great impact this may have in human rights in the region. I also think of the ASEAN Economic Community and how they can help in bringing human rights into the forefront by bringing together economic integration and economic legal standardization.

I also wish to point out the existence of ISO 2600 which is the first ISO certification that requires human rights compliance.

1 in 4 Filipinos live on less than 1 US dollar a day

2011-02-08T20:32:00.000-08:00

While the international media is focusing on the political upheaval in Egypt, and the Philippines is focused on the suicide of a former high official and military general amidst a corruption scandal (which is as common now as telenovela plots in the Philippines), this news came in:

Poverty worsened in the Philippines over the past decade despite strong economic growth, with one in four people now living on a dollar a day or less, the government said Tuesday.

...

A total of 23.14 million Filipinos scrape by on 46.14 pesos (1.04 dollars) a day or less, the National Statistical and Coordination Board said, citing the results of a 2009 nationwide survey.

This equates to 26.5 percent of the population, up slightly from 26.4 percent in 2006 and 24.9 percent in 2003, said the board's secretary-general Romulo Virola.

The number of people living at or below the dollar-a-day threshold grew even though the economy expanded by an average of 4.7 percent annually over the past decade.

Growth peaked above 7.0 percent twice, in 2007 and last year, sandwiching poor years of 3.8 percent in 2008 and 0.9 percent in 2009 during the global crisis.

...

Further highlighting the economic problems of the Philippines, the government said Tuesday the unemployment rate had jumped to 7.3 percent in January, with another 18.7 percent underemployed.

The jobless rate was 7.1 percent in October last year, when the last set of unemployment data was released.

Full article here.

One in 4 Filipinos live on a dollar a day. (What can a dollar buy?) That means less than 100yen. That means less than a coffee from a vending machine here in Japan. That means twice or thrice (depending on your order size) less than a latte from Starbucks. Although the "purchasing power parity" might show something else, like how food is cheaper in the Philippines--it still does not speak much when compared to how its neighbors are becoming fairly better.

Now if there is an affront to human rights, that would be the shackles of indignant poverty and the lack of an opportunity to find yourself better. The afterlife would most surely be welcomed by those who are in great despair today. But what if the situation becomes better elsewhere? This will surely push Filipinos to migrate further outside their own countries--and remittances to again rise because of strong family bonds.

This recalls to my mind a speech by the former Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno:

x x x

Indeed, in countries where the task of maintaining body and soul together is getting more and more to be a mission impossible, man’s efforts should be focused in enhancing the socio-economic rights of the vulnerable in our society. For what good is not being arrested if one is already incarcerated by the prison of poverty? What good is freedom of expression if the only idea you can mumble are words begging for food? What good is freedom to think on the part of the ignorant who is even ignorant of his ignorance? What good is the right to property to him who is shirtless, shoeless, and roofless? What good are political and civil rights to those whose problem is how to be human?

Let me conclude by saying that total human liberation requires not only the preservation of political and civil rights but demands the enjoyment by our people of their socio-economic rights. Only then can we translate the dream of Rizal into reality that in every person there is self-worth that the State should bring to life. In Rizal’s immortal words: “[Because] every being in creation has his spur, his mainspring; man’s is his self-respect; take it away from him and he becomes a corpse; and he who seeks activity in a corpse will only find worms.” (Indolence of the Filipinos, La Solidaridad, Aug. 31, 1890, p. 194.)

I cannot but find myself agreeing to what the great Chief Justice said.

The question for us now is: Quo vadis? Where to from this?

Universal International Law

2011-02-04T01:47:00.000-08:00

Arnulf Becker Lorca writes about the universalization of international law, the non-Western adoption of international law theories and what happened to them. I would like to highlight the discussion on the Japanese and Chinese international law scholars and their adoption of many theories (i.e. they didn't have problems with the natural vs. positivist divide, but later sided with the positivist side after having been schooled in Europe etc.).

Interesting reading. I wonder what effect of having many of the brilliant legal thinkers schooled in the US is in the Philippines. How much did this influence the Philippine legal system? Is this good or bad? Are we ahead of the influenced curve then? So what?

Full article here.

The Emerging Global Regime for Investments

2011-02-04T01:32:00.000-08:00

Jeswald Salacuse writes about "The Emerging Global Regime for Investments." Worth reading for investment lawyers, investment bankers and international relations students concerned about rules based systems viewed from the regime theory prism.

Abstract contains:

Although the 3000 international investment treaties concluded since the end of World War II are separate and distinct international legal instruments, they constitute, as a group, an emerging global regime for investment. Drawing on regime theory from the field of international relations, this Article examines the elements of the international investment regime, the reasons for its development, the goals that it pursues, and the challenges that it faces. While having all the characteristics of other international regimes, the investment regime also has three unique features: it has been bilaterally, rather than multilaterally, constructed; it decentralizes and privatizes decisionmaking processes; and it is not based on a multilateral international organization. All of these features have significant consequences for the functionality and sustainability of the regime. The regime also faces four major challenges: (1) disappointing regime results; (2) perceived defective decisionmaking processes and unjustified constraints on national sovereignty; (3) divergence of participant expectations; and (4) the impact of national and global economic crises. On the other hand, certain other factors tend to give the regime a sticky quality that makes the departure of members difficult. Nonetheless, the international investment regime will require wise management and flexible leadership in the future if it is to withstand these challenges and achieve its potential.

When I was doing research for the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA), I had to do some research into ASEAN related investment agreements and to me, it did seem like a network of Bhagwatian spaghetti. I wonder how a global regime could take precedence over the unsettled number of FTAs, BITs and what nots. This article is a refreshing read for it gave me some sense of characterization of the issues concerned. I like the use of the regime theory from IR.

Full article here.

On Changing the 1987 Constitution

2011-01-23T02:41:00.000-08:00

Recent calls for changing the 1987 Philippine Constitution have been making headlines in Philippine newspapers. One of the more authoritative calls have come from a former Chief Justice of the Philippines, Mr. Former Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno.

As reported in a local newspaper:

Puno called for constitutional amendments to rid the political system of “dinosaur ideas” and “save it from irrelevance.”

“I reject the argument that there is no urgency in amending the Constitution to arrest the decline of our democracy,” Puno said in an hourlong speech at the University of the Philippines College of Law, prompting nods from his listeners.

“We do not need a democracy on a stretcher. We cannot wait for our democracy to be in the ICU before calling the doctors,” he said before an audience of legal luminaries, among them justices and law professors.

There have been several notable moves to change the 1987 Philippine Constitution. In 1995 several proposals were actually fielded and studied, with notable changes in the political electoral processes and standards for election, and economically, an obliteration of the citizenship requirements in many areas (if not all) of business.

See for example this draft.

It is high time that we review the Constitution. For me, I would add several principles that would make us friendlier with other countries and yet insistent on state sovereignty. I would caution about issues on national territory especially concerning Southern Philippines. In this sense, I would wish to seek fair representation in the drafting. We don't want another constitution drafted by 48 APPOINTED individuals with 70% of not really participating in the drafting; with only a handful few who were quite capable.

And ratification-- I wonder how people would ratify a document they would barely understand the consequences of (think about how many law students can't even get through their Constitutional Law classes with ease).

One thing I would not wish to impose on the populace though, is the "divine" nature of a codified constitution. It is an enumeration of rights and a structuring of government. It is a leveling of the playing field and a proper demarcation of the public sphere.

It serves the people as time dictates.

The laws of future kings should not bind the kings of tomorrow. And in a popular sovereignty system: those kings are the people.

----
Inquirer article link here.

Human Rights and Human Security

2011-01-18T22:56:00.000-08:00

Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan writes a very provocative short policy paper on Human Rights and Human Security. Legal scholars and lawyers are very aware (in different levels) of human rights as a discipline of law; and many international security scholars and development economists are quite knowledgeable about human security discourse. This essay shows an interesting intertwining:

Human Rights Define Human Security

To be secure is to be safe, protected. Security is a secure condition or feeling1. It is respectfully submitted that international human rights norms define the meaning of human security. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Convention on the Elimination of the Discrimination Against Women, the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families are all meant to make human beings secure in freedom, in dignity, with equality and the protection of human rights.

It was a major breakthrough of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to provide basic guarantees regarding food, health, education, housing, protection of the family, democracy, participation, the rule of law, and protection against enslavement, torture, cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. These seminal provisions were amplified in the subsequent conventions and they have a simple rationale: these human rights and fundamental freedoms must be respected, assured, and protected, if the individual human being is to be secure, to develop to the fullness of his or her personality, and to breathe the air of liberty.

For the full article, you may download the paper.

Happy 2011 Everyone!

2011-01-01T03:32:00.000-08:00

Auld Lang Syne

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

We twa hae run aboot the braes
And pou'd the gowans fine;
we've wander'd mony a weary foot
Sin' auld lang syne

We two hae paidled i' the burn,
Frae mornin' sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin' auld lang syne

And here's a hand, my trusty friend,
And gie's a hand o' thine;
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

by Robert Burns
1788

For Old Times' (sake)

Pakistani Legal

2010-11-26T00:21:00.000-08:00

Feisal Naqvi, a lawyer from Nahore, Pakistan writes on the problems he has observed and his thoughts on the Pakistani jury system.

I found this article interesting. Sharing it with everyone:

A JURY of ONE
Feisal Naqvi

Every night on my TV screen, Alan Shore stands up in defense of a quixotic quest. Sometimes he defends the clearly guilty; sometimes he protects the innocent. But in each episode full of courtroom magic, he bends the jury to his will.

As a lawyer working in Pakistan, I have no shortage of interesting cases. But it is difficult for me to re-enact my Lahori version of Boston Legal because we have no jury trials in Pakistan.

Interestingly, the case which led to the end of jury trials in the sub-continent was certainly worthy of a Boston Legal episode, if not several.

In 1959, Kawas Nanavati, a commander in the Indian Navy, was stationed at Bombay. Married to an English beauty by the name of Sylvie, and universally described as handsome, the 34-year-old mariner seemed to have it all. Unfortunately for him, his wife was sleeping with his best friend, Prem Ahuja.

On April 27, 1959, Nanavati confronted his wife and learnt of her adultery. Pausing only to sign out a revolver from the Navy’s storeroom, Nanavati then dashed off to Ahuja’s house where his friend was lolling around in a towel. Nanavati asked him if he would marry Sylvie and take care of the children. Ahuja’s somewhat undiplomatic response was blunt: “Will I marry every woman I sleep with?”

What happened next is unclear. Nanavati claimed that after Ahuja spotted the revolver, he and Ahuja struggled and that he shot Ahuja during that struggle. In self-defence. Three times.

The Bombay police did not agree with Nanavati’s interpretation of the facts and promptly charged him with murder. The trial became a cause celebre in India. The Parsi community to which Nanavati belonged was outraged, organising rallies and petitions in his favour. Newspapers gave saturation coverage to the case, and later the trial. When Nanavati left the court room after testifying, he was showered with hundred rupee notes smeared with lipstick. Like many teen idols after him, he received marriage proposals by the handful, as India concluded that he was too good for his wife even as a penitent Sylvie, dressed in a white nylon sari, testified in favour of her husband. Bombay’s merchant community also jumped in on the act, selling miniature Nanavati revolvers and Ahuja towels.

The prosecution, of course, never had a chance. Their biggest talking point was that if Nanavati had indeed struggled with Ahuja, Ahuja’s towel would have come off instead of staying on. The fact that Nanavati had first dropped his family off at cinema before signing out a revolver under false pretences also seemed to indicate that he had been in control of his emotions and that the “heat of the moment” story was not true.

None of this mattered to the jury which returned a not-guilty verdict. Considering the judgment to be perverse, the trial court judge referred the matter to the Bombay High Court which ultimately found Nanavati guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Shortly thereafter, the Indian government abolished all jury trials on the grounds that jury verdicts were overly susceptible to media pressures.

Full article here.

---

The Philippines does not have a jury trial system. The reason: the designers of the legal system (who borrowed a majority of the United States system's procedures and precepts--excepting some very important fundamental ones) didn't think the people could handle it. They thought judges were better equipped, trained and more dispassionate.

Sometimes, I reconsider whether popular sovereignty could be served better by a trial with a jury of one's peers than with this high and mighty, Judge Hercules. Who, unlike Dworkin's baby idea, is not infallible. And definitely, not democratic.

Stiglitz on Rule of Law and Property Rights

2010-11-14T22:27:00.000-08:00

JOSEPH STIGLITZ writes "Justice for Some," stirring in me the old ideas of how I entertained the thought of how the laws and legal systems of a country can be used to establish (or replace) a ruling order.

The mortgage debacle in the United States has raised deep questions about “the rule of law,” the universally accepted hallmark of an advanced, civilized society. The rule of law is supposed to protect the weak against the strong, and ensure that everyone is treated fairly. In America in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, it has done neither.

Part of the rule of law is security of property rights – if you owe money on your house, for example, the bank can’t simply take it away without following the prescribed legal process. But in recent weeks and months, Americans have seen several instances in which individuals have been dispossessed of their houses even when they have no debts.

To some banks, this is just collateral damage: millions of Americans – in addition to the estimated four million in 2008 and 2009 – still have to be thrown out of their homes. Indeed, the pace of foreclosures would be set to increase – were it not for government intervention. The procedural shortcuts, incomplete documentation, and rampant fraud that accompanied banks’ rush to generate millions of bad loans during the housing bubble has, however, complicated the process of cleaning up the ensuing mess.

To many bankers, these are just details to be overlooked. Most people evicted from their homes have not been paying their mortgages, and, in most cases, those who are throwing them out have rightful claims. But Americans are not supposed to believe in justice on average. We don’t say that most people imprisoned for life committed a crime worthy of that sentence. The US justice system demands more, and we have imposed procedural safeguards to meet these demands.

For the full article, click here.

Human Rights to the Fullest

2010-10-12T15:08:00.001-07:00

If we consider, just for a moment, a state with a complete grant of human rights to its fullest--with no negative limits nor without government intervention, would we be seeing a state near what John Locke called the "State of Nature" where man may do what is necessary to appease self-preservation tendencies?

Rich in heart

2010-08-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

An interesting survey yielded a finding that the poor would most likely give more than the rich.

The world could one day be an economically equal place, if the lower-income population have anything to do with it. In an interesting yet disheartening series of socioeconomic experiments, led by a team of UC Berkeley researchers, the findings are that those on the lower-income levels are more likely to give and be charitable than their higher paid counterparts. In one experiment in particular, led by doctoral student, Paul Piff and his researchers, participants completed a questionnaire reporting their socioeconomic status and a few days later were provided with $10 to share anonymously. The findings concluded the more generous of the income brackets were on the lower-income scale. A recent national survey reiterates the results, revealing lower-income people give more of their hard-earned money to charity than the wealthy.

For the full article, click here.

Recalling Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

2010-08-06T09:24:00.000-07:00

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, or Arrow’s paradox, states that, "when voters have three or more discrete options, no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide ranking while also meeting a certain set of criteria."

These criteria are called unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives.

The theorem is often cited in discussions of election theory.

In short, no "fair" voting system can be designed to satisfy these three criteria:
(1) If every voter prefers X over Y, then the group prefers X over Y.
(2) If every voter's preferences between X and Y remain unchanged when Z is added to the slate, then the group's preference between X and Y will also remain unchanged.
(3) There is no "dictator": no single voter possesses the power to determine the group's preference.

Some fun reading materials:

Grant M. Hayden Some Implications of Arrow's Theorem for Voting Rights Stanford Law Review, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Jan., 1995), pp. 295-317

Fred M. Frohock Rationality, Morality, and Impossibility Theorems The American Political Science Review, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Jun., 1980), pp. 373-384

William Riker. Liberalism Against Populism. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1982.

Sakamoto Ryoma

2010-06-05T17:42:00.000-07:00

This guy deserves my praises. Sakamoto Ryoma (or Ryoma for short) is THE RENAISSANCE MAN of Samurai Japan.

As one author put it,

[He] was once a low class samurai, a ronin without allegiance and a wanted man. But today he is recognized as the Japanese equivalent of America’s George Washington – a person who marshaled a unique strength of personality, diplomacy, and historical vision to help transform his nation, a vision that produced a unified modern Japan out of the rough cloth of a fragmented feudal tradition. Ryoma’s life is a tale of Shakespearian proportions -- a life of daring and personal triumph that helped mold a nation, but also a life lived without regard to personal gain or safety. His life tragically ended prematurely with his brutal assassination. (Romulus Hillsborough, Ryoma - Life of a Renaissance Samurai (1999).)

It's hard to put in my own words the things that made him great. Anyhow, I visited the Ryoma Den exhibit in the Edo-Tokyo Museum.

At the Edo-Tokyo Museum's Special Exhibition of the Ryoma Collection

For me, some of the highlights of the Ryoma Den Exhibits:

1. His writings and his personal reflections. Translated for me by Toshi and Sumi-chan.

2. The first draft of the Meiji Constitution.

3. Various swords and weaponry used to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate

4. Ryoma's Katana

5. The wakisashi that was used to assassinate Ryoma. (Those who live by the sword, really do die by the sword.)

Unfortunately, no pictures allowed in the Ryoma Den.

Some words of wisdom from Ryoma:

“In whatever situation a person finds himself, he should not abandon his favorite ways and his special abilities."

"A hero should go his own way!"

“Anything can be accomplished if you take responsibility for doing at least 80 percent to 90 percent of it yourself. Pass the remaining 10-20 percent of responsibility on to others and give them all the credit."

"I never do verbal battle with others, since even if I win an argument I can’t change the other person’s way of life.”

"I am a person who raises himself up to the next level, rather than becoming discouraged."

"If you are a man, even if you die in a ditch during battle, you will die pitching forward."

"The purpose of coming into the world is to accomplish one’s duty.”

To say I like the guy's idealism is to put it lightly. I rank him with Supremo Andres Bonifacio and Che Guevara way up there among the GQ list of revolutionaries.

Apple Overtakes Microsoft

2010-05-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

Apple Surpasses Microsoft as Most Valuable Technology Company

Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, overtook
Microsoft, the computer software giant, on Wednesday to
become the world's most valuable technology company.

In intraday trading in the afternoon session, Apple shares
rose 1.8 percent, which gave the company a value of $227.1
billion. Shares of Microsoft declined about 1 percent, giving
the company a market capitalization of $226.3 billion.

This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning
turnarounds in business history, as Apple had been given up
for dead only a decade earlier. But the rapidly rising value
attached to Apple by investors also heralds a cultural shift:
Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the
leading force shaping technology.

For the full article here.

---

Photo taken from the net. Fair use claim, for academic review.

Neural approach to aesthetics

2010-05-25T18:19:00.000-07:00

Beauty and brains exhibit:

Why do some works of art appeal so strongly to the human mind? Are artists really neuroscientists, trying to discover new and powerful ways to stimulate perceptual mechanisms in the brain? This collaboration between the Walters Art Museum and the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute at The Johns Hopkins University is a pioneering study in neuroesthetics, a new approach to the neural basis of the aesthetic experience.

Beauty and the Brain is both an exhibition and an experiment. Visitors will be invited to explore aesthetic spaces created by digitally morphing original works of art. Subject areas include modern abstract sculptures by renowned 20th-century artist Jean Arp. Responses from participants will be used to analyze how 3-D shape characteristics define aesthetic preference. The results will form the basis for experiments measuring aesthetic responses in the human brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Full event informationhere.

Mark Twain's Autobiography

2010-05-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

100 years after his death, finally, Mark Twain's autobiography is finally going to be released.

Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.

Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.

One thing's for sure: by delaying publication, the author, who was fond of his celebrity status, has ensured that he'll be gossiped about during the 21st century. A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy.

Full article here.

Nikita's Shoe and a Filipino Provocation

2010-05-20T21:50:00.000-07:00

In an International Relations class, we discussed Nikita Khrushchev, a classic figure in IR history. I find myself smiling at recalling how the shoe banging incident in the United Nations on October 12, 1960 happened.

According to the Wikipedia article on the matter:

During the meeting, head of the Filipino delegation to the United Nations Lorenzo Sumulong stated the following in reference to Soviet foreign policy:

"My delegation, the Philippine delegation, attaches great importance to this item entitled "Declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples", the allocation of which is now under discussion.
We have been a colonized country. We have passed through all the trials and tribulations of a colonized people. It took us centuries and centuries to fight, to struggle, and to win our fight for the recognition of our independence, and, therefore, it would only be consistent with our history, our experience and our aspirations as a people that we vote in favour of having this item referred to the highest possible level of the General Assembly. While this is not the occasion to discuss the substance of the item, I would like to place on record my delegation's view on the import as well as on the scope, the extent, the metes and bounds of this item. We feel this to be necessary in view of the statements made at the start of our meeting by the Premier of the Soviet Union. It is our view that the declaration proposed by the Soviet Union should cover the inalienable right to independence not only of the peoples and territories which yet remain under the rule of Western colonial Powers, but also of the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union."

Mr. Khrushchev came to the rostrum, being recognized on a Point of Order. There he demonstratively, in a theatrical manner, brushed Sumulong aside, with an upward motion of his right arm — without physically touching him — and proceeded to demand that Assembly President Frederick Boland from Ireland call "the toady of American imperialism" Sumulong to order. The President did caution Mr. Sumulong to "avoid wandering out into an argument which is certain to provoke further interventions". Khrushchev pounded his fists on the table during the continued speech of Sumulong and even picked up his shoe and banged the desk with it. The Philippine Delegate was again interrupted. Now on a Point of Order, made by Romanian Foreign Vice-minister Eduard Mezincescu. The latter also managed to provoke and insult the Assembly's President to such an extent that Mr. Boland, crimson in face, turned off the Minister's microphone. The chaotic scene finally ended when Mr. Boland pounded the gavel (which shattered and bounced off), adjourning the meeting.
Other sources report a slightly different order of events: Khrushchev first banged the shoe then went to the rostrum to protest.

Lorenzo Sumulong was later on apologized to by Mr. Khrushchev the following day. "Khrushchev acknowledged that he had offended Sumulong, though he asserted that he in turn was likewise offended by the delegate from the Philippines."

Inclusive Growth and Social Protection

2010-05-20T01:11:00.000-07:00

I'm in this lecture by a Filipino researcher for the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBi). Prof. Gloria O. Pasadilla, lectures on the effects of growth in the poor.

It is interesting to see empirical data on this issue. I have been reading theory on this. Political and legal theory, as well as the somewhat emotional sociological theories do not show strong relationships. Econometrics can actually show you the direct and indirect impacts of several factors of growth in the poorest of the poor.

Growth seems to be beneficial for the poor. But which factors that affect growth are important for poverty reduction? Some of the studies presented tried various suspects. Testing for openness and measuring by trade in GDP for example.

We hear arguments on liberalization and the effects on growth. Well, regarding the increase in trade volume being positive or negatively correlated with growth, the conjecture is positive. The results show how there is no direct relationship between openness and poverty alleviation.

What about with GDP? Positive or negative? Well, it could be both. With consumption in GDP it could be negative—high consumption can be destabilizing.

Rule of law? Well, a huge body of literature is there saying that rule of law quality is very important. Institutional quality is high, and then over the long term there is a higher growth.

It is very interesting to see all these things through numbers and graphs. If you can picture how those graphs. It is noteworthy to see that macroeconomic stability is very important for the poorests’ income. Stable means no hyperinflation. If you have a stable economy, the income of the poor would be the ones most affected.

The problem is how to create that environment.

First Automated Elections in the Philippines

2010-05-11T20:51:00.000-07:00

I join the country in commending the people who made the automated elections a success.

As a commentary from the Philippine Daily Inquirer wrote:

CONTRARY to the most dismal expectations, quite a number of which were shared by the Inquirer, the country’s first nationwide automated elections have turned out to be a success. Not as originally advertised, but well enough as to make a return to the old manual system with its months-long canvassing, its tried-and-tested modes of wholesale cheating, politically untenable. Much needs to be improved in the new system, and close local contests must continue to be zealously monitored, but we can already say that the May 10 vote marked a true rite of passage. Our electoral system has finally caught up with the 21st century.

Now if only the entire political system were as open to modernity.

There will be a time to talk about building in better safeguards into the automated election system, or streamlining the voter verification process (in countless precincts, the true cause of the long lines), or resolving the issue of clustered precincts (savings on expenses versus voters’ convenience), or avoiding the obvious sources of public skepticism in the new system (for instance, the demonstrated incompetence in aligning the compact flash cards with a change in the ballot layout beforehand). For now, and while taking into consideration the remaining uncertainties in the election, our civic duty is to commend the many people who helped turn the first computerized polls into a success.

Click here for the full commentary.

Jose Almonte

2010-05-07T01:57:00.000-07:00

Excavating the records of the past presidencies for my Policy Design course under Prof. Ohno, I find myself reading some of the writings of Jose Almonte, one of President Fidel Ramos' adviser. He writes in a way that evokes social philosophy and like he is not out to please anyone or apologize. Apologists tend to water down statements, Almonte's writings were far from being apologetic.

This one's is on economic and political freedom, while this one talks about the promise that the Philippines held.

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Photo taken from the Internet. Please inform me of claims over copyright. I make a fair use claim.

Did Adam Smith really preach the rule of self-Interest?

2010-05-06T21:57:00.001-07:00

Amartya Sen in the New Statesman:

Smith discussed that to explain the motivation for economic exchange in the market, we do not have to invoke any objective other than the pursuit of self-interest. In the most widely quoted passage from The Wealth of Nations, he wrote: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love." In the tradition of interpreting Smith as the guru of selfishness or self-love (as he often called it, not with great admiration), the reading of his writings does not seem to go much beyond those few lines, even though that discussion is addressed only to one very specific issue, namely exchange (rather than distribution or production) and, in particular, the motivation underlying exchange. In the rest of Smith's writings, there are extensive discussions of the role of other motivations that influence human action and behaviour.

Beyond self-love, Smith discussed how the functioning of the economic system in general, and of the market in particular, can be helped enormously by other motives. There are two distinct propositions here. The first is one of epistemology, concerning the fact that human beings are not guided only by self-gain or even prudence. The second is one of practical reason, involving the claim that there are good ethical and practical grounds for encouraging motives other than self-interest, whether in the crude form of self-love or in the refined form of prudence. Indeed, Smith argues that while "prudence" was "of all virtues that which is most helpful to the individual", "humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others". These are two distinct points, and, unfortunately, a big part of modern economics gets both of them wrong in interpreting Smith.

Full article here.

Economics, like Philosophy, is a way of looking at things in the world. Market fundamentalists are recently blamed for the US Financial Crisis (2008). Joseph Stiglitz, one of the sensible economists I read, wrote recently how the whole fundamentalist ideas have become like a broken vessel for international economy. In Stiglitz's new book, Freefall, he wrote an unfettered (thus, interesting) and scathing exposition on the recent crisis that woke the Western world. I say it woke the western world, because for the longest time, it thought that the markets were better left on its own. This should not, however, be a cause for communists or socialists to jump for joy. The Capitalist - Communist debate may seem to have been lost in the pragmatic theater. But it is the moderate application of government intervention that makes the market system work, as Stiglitz argued.

In this article, Sen gives us thoughts to ponder on what being rational human beings really mean. To be selfless may sometimes be for one's self-interest. More so, to be left unregulated may actually be as bad as to be regulated. Maybe the comfortable median or the moderate (a moving equilibrium, that is) would be the goal for idea and policy formulation.

Production Networks

2010-05-06T01:36:00.000-07:00

The ASEAN+3 region should see some positive cooperative benefits in "production networks." These production networks refer to:

...inter and intra-firm relationships through which the firm organizes the entire range of its business activities: from research and development, product definition and design, to supply of inputs, manufacturing (or production of a service), distribution, and support services. We thus include the entire network of cross-border relationships between a lead firm and its own affiliates and subsidiaries, but also its subcontractors, suppliers, service providers, or other firms participating in cooperative relationships, such as standard setting or R&D analysis." (Borrus et al. 2000).

According to Willem Thorbecke, a lecturer in one of my classes here at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), "these networks have allowed firms to exploit comparative advantage by slicing up production processes and allocating the production blocks throughout Asia."

The promise of these networks is that it makes production cheaper and basically, everybody in the region gets something from the baking of the pie. The problem however is who determines who cooks, makes the putty, and bakes the pie.

In any case, aside from Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows and Exchange Rate coordination, this issue was highlighted by Thorbecke in his lecture on "Trade-FDI-Linkages in East Asia" in my Asian Economic Development and Integration class during Spring Term.

I see a good promise in economic development for the region in this one. An idea worth exploring.

Alms

2010-05-05T18:14:00.000-07:00

Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, was passing along a street one day when a beggar stopped him and pleaded for alms. The great Russian searched through his pockets for a coin but finding none, he regretfully said, “Please don’t be angry with me, my brother, but I have nothing with me. If I did, I would gladly give it to you.

The beggar’s face flamed up and he said,” You have given me more than I asked for. You called me brother.”

(Theosophical Digests, 1998 Issue).

Does America Unconciously Desire Judicial Activism?

2010-04-28T19:38:00.000-07:00

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

The public conversation about the judiciary in recent decades has often conflated a broad fear of unelected judges with a clear definition of what judges should do. In the wake of the Jackson Pollock-style jurisprudence of the Warren Court, anxiety about overreaching judges morphed into a widespread sense that judges simply do too much. Conservative groups happily pushed the line that liberal judges were all merely unelected "activists" bent on "legislating from the bench." But this says little about how a judge should decide cases and much about our fear of the bench. Originalism and textualism aren't the only way to constrain judges, but they dovetail nicely with the idea that if you confine yourself to what the framers would want, you can't make as much of a mess with the yellow paint.

That's how judicial "activism"—a word we all should acknowledge is meaningless—turned into a catchall term for judges who did anything one didn't like. They were, after all, acting. It's only in recent years that we've discovered that the opposite of an "activist" judge is, in fact, a deceased one.

When John Roberts captured the hearts of America during his confirmation hearing, with his language of "minimalism" and "humility" and "restraint," he brilliantly reassured Americans that at his very best, he would do just about nothing from the bench.

For the full article, click here.

Differential Geometry and Globalization

2010-03-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

Steven Strogatz, writes for the New York Times on how to think globally (with a bit of mathematical paradigmatic shift):

The most familiar ideas of geometry were inspired by an ancient vision — a vision of the world as flat. From parallel lines that never meet, to the Pythagorean theorem discussed in last week’s column, these are eternal truths about an imaginary place, the two-dimensional landscape of plane geometry. Conceived in India, China, Egypt and Babylonia more than 2,500 years ago, and codified and refined by Euclid and the Greeks, this flat-earth geometry is the main one (and often the only one) being taught in high schools today. But things have changed in the past few millennia. In an era of globalization, Google Earth and transcontinental air travel, all of us should try to learn a little about spherical geometry and its modern generalization, differential geometry. The basic ideas here are only about 200 years old. Pioneered by Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann, differential geometry underpins such imposing intellectual edifices as Einstein’s general theory of relativity. At its heart, however, are beautiful concepts that can be grasped by anyone who’s ever ridden a bicycle, looked at a globe or stretched a rubber band. And understanding them will help you make sense of a few curiosities you may have noticed in your travels.

For the full article, click here.

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Image (C) Encyclopedia Britannica. Fair-use claim for academic review purposes.

How Christian Were the Founders (of America)?

2010-02-27T02:10:00.000-08:00

The Wall of Separation between Church and State is an anachronism for many of the world's states. Many Islamic states see the two as one and the same, emanating and deriving their authority from the same source. The political and legal theory of the wall of separation between church and state was born in the United States of America through then President Thomas Jefferson (one of my favorite "T.J.'s"). The Jeffersonian wall of separation however was not borne out of some desire to make a clear division. Russell Shorto of The New York Magazine writes:

There was a religious element to the American Revolution, which was so pronounced that you could just as well view the event in religious as in political terms. Many of the founders, especially the Southerners, were rebelling simultaneously against state-church oppression and English rule. The Connecticut Baptists saw Jefferson — an anti-Federalist who was bitterly opposed to the idea of establishment churches — as a friend. “Our constitution of government,” they wrote, “is not specific” with regard to a guarantee of religious freedoms that would protect them. Might the president offer some thoughts that, “like the radiant beams of the sun,” would shed light on the intent of the framers? In his reply, Jefferson said it was not the place of the president to involve himself in religion, and he expressed his belief that the First Amendment’s clauses — that the government must not establish a state religion (the so-called establishment clause) but also that it must ensure the free exercise of religion (what became known as the free-exercise clause) — meant, as far as he was concerned, that there was “a wall of separation between Church & State.”

This little episode, culminating in the famous “wall of separation” metaphor, highlights a number of points about teaching religion in American history. For one, it suggests — as the Christian activists maintain — how thoroughly the colonies were shot through with religion and how basic religion was to the cause of the revolutionaries.

For the full article, click here.

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Image: "Declaration of Independence,” by John Trumbull/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Interesting Readings in Game Theory and International Relations

2010-02-22T22:40:00.000-08:00

Avinash Dixit and Susan Skeath. 2004. Games of Strategy, 2nd edition. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company.

Robert Powell. 1999. In the Shadow of Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press. p. 23-39

Barry R. Weingast. 1998. Political Stability and Civil War: Institutions, Commitment,
and American Democracy. In Analytic Narratives, edited by Robert H. Bates, Avner

Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry R Weingast. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.

Roger B. Myerson. 1999. Nash Equilibrium and the History of Economic Theory.
Journal of Economic Literature 37(3): 1067-1082.

John F. Nash. 1950. Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 36(1): 48-49.

John Nash. 1951. Non-Cooperative Games. The Annals of Mathematics 54(2): 286-295.

George W. Downs, David M. Rocke, and Randolph M. Siverson. 1985. Arms Races
and Cooperation. World Politics 38(1): 118-146.

Todd Sandler. 2005. Collective Versus Unilateral Responses to Terrorism. Public Choice
124: 75-93.

Barry R. Weingast. 1997. The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law.
American Political Science Review 91(2): 245-263.

How to Win At Poker, and Other Science Lessons. The Economist. October 12, 1996.

George Tsebelis. 1989. The Abuse of Probability in Political Analysis: The Robinson
Crusoe Fallacy. American Political Science Review 83(1): 77-91.

Brett Ashley Leeds. 1999. Domestic Political Institutions, Credible Commitments, and
International Cooperation. American Journal of Political Science 43(4): 979-1002.

On Uncertainty

Andrew Kydd. 2000. Trust, Reassurance, and Cooperation. International Organization
54(2): 325-357.

Navin A. Bapat. 2006. State Bargaining with Transnational Terrorist Groups.
International Studies Quarterly 50(1): 213-229. (on strategic bargaining)
Robert Axelrod. 2006. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York, NY: Basic Books.
ch. 1-3. (on repeated games)

Robert Powell. 2002. Bargaining Theory and International Conict. Annual Review
of Political Science 5: 1-30. (on bargaining)

John F. Nash. 1950. The Bargaining Problem. Econometrica 18(2): 155-162.

John Nash. 1953. Two-Person Cooperative Games. Econometrica 21(1): 128-140.

Clothes of Heaven

2010-02-20T22:58:00.001-08:00

William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

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One of my favorites. This should be read in conjunction with Steve Job's "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" speech.

Are Corporations People?

2010-02-15T00:31:00.000-08:00

Larry Lessig, my now favorite legal theorist, posts the question that has bothered me in law school since the time I read the legal provisions that equated an artificial person (i.e. corporations, etc.) with a natural person (i.e. you and me) in terms of the extent of some rights (while some would even go as far as say all the property rights and even constitutional rights).

Listen to his ideas. Recommended for corporate lawyers, statist thinkers, regulators and interested legal theorists.

For Real Change, Change Congress

2010-02-08T18:22:00.000-08:00

Lawrence Lessig argues that:

At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt. Bush v. Gore notwithstanding, Americans' faith in the Supreme Court remains extraordinarily high--76 percent have a fair or great deal of "trust and confidence" in the Court. Their faith in the presidency is also high--61 percent.

But consistently and increasingly over the past decade, faith in Congress has collapsed--slowly, and then all at once. Today it is at a record low. Just 45 percent of Americans have "trust and confidence" in Congress; just 25 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job. A higher percentage of Americans likely supported the British Crown at the time of the Revolution than support our Congress today.

The source of America's cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic. Gregory House, of the eponymous TV medical drama, is a hero not because he is nice (he isn't) but because he is true. Tiger Woods is a disappointment not because he is evil (he isn't) but because he proved false. We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution "dependent on the People," the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers--as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered--not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power.

This is corruption.

For the full article, click here.

Habermas on Present Theories in Religion

2010-02-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

Over at The Immanent Frame, Jurgen Habermas is interviewed:

EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral, and cognitive. In your Yale lectures from the fall of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the need to rethink the link between social theory and secularization theory. In those lectures, you suggest that we need to uncouple modernization theory from secularization theory. Does this mean that you are taking distance from the dominant trends in social theory in the West, which began with Pareto, continued through Durkheim, and reached their apogee in Weber, and thus also from its explicit and avowed Eurocentrism?

JH: We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The debate over the sociological thesis of secularization has led to a revision above all in respect to prognostic statements. On the one hand, the system of religion has become more differentiated and has limited itself to pastoral care, that is, it has largely lost other functions. On the other hand, there is no global connection between societal modernization and religion’s increasing loss of significance, a connection that would be so close that we could count on the disappearance of religion. In the still undecided dispute as to whether the religious USA or the largely secularized Western Europe is the exception to a general developmental trend, José Casanova for example has developed interesting new hypotheses. In any case, globally we have to count on the continuing vitality of world religions.

In view of the consequences of which you speak, I consider the program of the group around Shmuel Eisenstadt and its comparative research on civilizations promising and informative. In the emerging world society, and concerning the social infrastructure, there are, as it were, by now only modern societies, but these appear in the form of multiple modernities because the great world religions have had a great culture-forming power over the centuries, and they have not yet entirely lost this power. As in the West, these “strong” traditions paved the way in East Asia, in the Middle East, and even in Africa for the development of cultural structures that confront each other today—for example, in the dispute over the right interpretation of human rights. Our Western self-understanding of modernity emerged from the confrontation with our own traditions. The same dialectic between tradition and modernity repeats itself today in other parts of the world.

For the full article, click here.

Google Books: Unsettled-settlement issue

2010-01-28T06:57:00.001-08:00

Lawrence Lessig shares his thoughts on the Google Copyright issue:

There has been a rage of attention to the recently revised proposal for a settlement by Google of a lawsuit brought against it by the Authors Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers (AAP). In 2004, Google launched the sort of project that only Internet idealists such as the entrepreneur and archivist Brewster Kahle had imagined: to scan eighteen million books, and make those books accessible on the Internet. How accessible depended upon the type of book. If the book was in the public domain, then Google would give you full access, and even permit you to download a digital copy of the book for free. If the book was presumptively under copyright, then at a minimum Google would grant “snippet access” to the work, meaning you could see a few lines around the words you searched, and then would be given information about where you could buy or borrow the book. But if the work was still in print, then publishers could authorize Google to make available as much of the book (beyond the snippets) as the publishers wanted.

The Authors Guild and AAP claimed that this plan violated copyright law. Their argument was simple and obvious--at least in the autistic sort of way that copyright law thinks about digital technology: when Google scanned the eighteen million books to build its index, it made a “copy” of them. For works still under copyright, the plaintiffs argued, this meant that Google needed permission from the copyright owner before that scan could occur. Never mind that Google scanned the works simply to index them; and never mind that it would never--without permission--distribute whole or even usable copies of the copyrighted works (except to the original libraries as replacements for lost physical copies). According to the plaintiffs, permission was vital, legally. Without it, Google was a pirate.

For the full article, click here.

Criminal Law and Economics

2010-01-21T20:21:00.000-08:00

Just a quick thought this morning.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could find a way to make reading Book II of the Philippine penal code more interesting?

Maybe if we consider price theory in analyzing penal provisions and consider putting a non-pecuniary price for every infraction or offense.

The price for a crime you commit is the number of years in prison. And it's all in Book II.

Looking for an interesting article on it now... if anybody got some thoughts, please send a comment along the way.

Star Wars Game Theory

2009-12-15T15:52:00.000-08:00

DANIEL HAMERMESH from the Freakonomics website posts a very interesting Game Theory problem... from Star Wars:

In the original Star Wars movie (Episode IV), Luke Skywalker pleads with Han Solo to help the Rebel Alliance battle the Empire, but Han refuses and a disgusted Luke storms off. Chewbacca, being a student of game theory, lays out the payoff bimatrix to Han in their “conversation”:

Han understands that the Rebels have a dominant strategy of fighting. Knowing that, although he has no dominant strategy, and being the self-centered person he has already shown himself to be, Han realizes he is better off choosing to aid the Rebels and fight. (Fight, Fight) is a Nash equilibrium and also a Pareto optimum. I wonder how many other Star Wars games there are.

Game theory and Microeconomics + Sci-Fi Cinema = Win.

Obama's Nobel Remarks

2009-12-15T15:50:00.001-08:00

Following is the transcript of President Obama's speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on Wednesday, as released by the White House:

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world:

I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations -- that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.

And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. (Laughter.) In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who've received this prize -- Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela -- my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women -- some known, some obscure to all but those they help -- to be far more deserving of this honor than I.

But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 42 other countries -- including Norway -- in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

Still, we are at war, and I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict -- filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.

Now these questions are not new. War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease -- the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.

And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

Of course, we know that for most of history, this concept of "just war" was rarely observed. The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God. Wars between armies gave way to wars between nations -- total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred. In the span of 30 years, such carnage would twice engulf this continent. And while it's hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished.

In the wake of such destruction, and with the advent of the nuclear age, it became clear to victor and vanquished alike that the world needed institutions to prevent another world war. And so, a quarter century after the United States Senate rejected the League of Nations -- an idea for which Woodrow Wilson received this prize -- America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace: a Marshall Plan and a United Nations, mechanisms to govern the waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide, restrict the most dangerous weapons.

In many ways, these efforts succeeded. Yes, terrible wars have been fought, and atrocities committed. But there has been no Third World War. The Cold War ended with jubilant crowds dismantling a wall. Commerce has stitched much of the world together. Billions have been lifted from poverty. The ideals of liberty and self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced. We are the heirs of the fortitude and foresight of generations past, and it is a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud.

And yet, a decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.

Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work, and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower.

But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions -- not just treaties and declarations -- that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another -- that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.

So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly inreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. "Let us focus," he said, "on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions." A gradual evolution of human institutions.

What might this evolution look like? What might these practical steps be?

To begin with, I believe that all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do, and isolates and weakens those who don't.

The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense. Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait -- a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression.

Furthermore, America -- in fact, no nation -- can insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don't, our actions appear arbitrary and undercut the legitimacy of future interventions, no matter how justified.

And this becomes particularly important when the purpose of military action extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor. More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region.

I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That's why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.

America's commitment to global security will never waver. But in a world in which threats are more diffuse, and missions more complex, America cannot act alone. America alone cannot secure the peace. This is true in Afghanistan. This is true in failed states like Somalia, where terrorism and piracy is joined by famine and human suffering. And sadly, it will continue to be true in unstable regions for years to come.

The leaders and soldiers of NATO countries, and other friends and allies, demonstrate this truth through the capacity and courage they've shown in Afghanistan. But in many countries, there is a disconnect between the efforts of those who serve and the ambivalence of the broader public. I understand why war is not popular, but I also know this: The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice. That's why NATO continues to be indispensable. That's why we must strengthen U.N. and regional peacekeeping, and not leave the task to a few countries. That's why we honor those who return home from peacekeeping and training abroad to Oslo and Rome; to Ottawa and Sydney; to Dhaka and Kigali -- we honor them not as makers of war, but of wagers -- but as wagers of peace.

Let me make one final point about the use of force. Even as we make difficult decisions about going to war, we must also think clearly about how we fight it. The Nobel Committee recognized this truth in awarding its first prize for peace to Henry Dunant -- the founder of the Red Cross, and a driving force behind the Geneva Conventions.

Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. (Applause.) And we honor -- we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.

I have spoken at some length to the question that must weigh on our minds and our hearts as we choose to wage war. But let me now turn to our effort to avoid such tragic choices, and speak of three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace.

First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior -- for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure -- and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one.

One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. In the middle of the last century, nations agreed to be bound by a treaty whose bargain is clear: All will have access to peaceful nuclear power; those without nuclear weapons will forsake them; and those with nuclear weapons will work towards disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I'm working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia's nuclear stockpiles.

But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted. Those who care for their own security cannot ignore the danger of an arms race in the Middle East or East Asia. Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war.

The same principle applies to those who violate international laws by brutalizing their own people. When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma -- there must be consequences. Yes, there will be engagement; yes, there will be diplomacy -- but there must be consequences when those things fail. And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression.

This brings me to a second point -- the nature of the peace that we seek. For peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting.

It was this insight that drove drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War. In the wake of devastation, they recognized that if human rights are not protected, peace is a hollow promise.

And yet too often, these words are ignored. For some countries, the failure to uphold human rights is excused by the false suggestion that these are somehow Western principles, foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation's development. And within America, there has long been a tension between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists -- a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world.

I reject these choices. I believe that peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please; choose their own leaders or assemble without fear. Pent-up grievances fester, and the suppression of tribal and religious identity can lead to violence. We also know that the opposite is true. Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace. America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens. No matter how callously defined, neither America's interests -- nor the world's -- are served by the denial of human aspirations.

So even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal. We will bear witness to the quiet dignity of reformers like Aung Sang Suu Kyi; to the bravery of Zimbabweans who cast their ballots in the face of beatings; to the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran. It is telling that the leaders of these governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation. And it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear that these movements -- these movements of hope and history -- they have us on their side.

Let me also say this: The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach -- condemnation without discussion -- can carry forward only a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.

In light of the Cultural Revolution's horrors, Nixon's meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable -- and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies. Pope John Paul's engagement with Poland created space not just for the Catholic Church, but for labor leaders like Lech Walesa. Ronald Reagan's efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe. There's no simple formula here. But we must try as best we can to balance isolation and engagement, pressure and incentives, so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time.

Third, a just peace includes not only civil and political rights -- it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want.

It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine and shelter they need to survive. It does not exist where children can't aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

And that's why helping farmers feed their own people -- or nations educate their children and care for the sick -- is not mere charity. It's also why the world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement -- all of which will fuel more conflict for decades. For this reason, it is not merely scientists and environmental activists who call for swift and forceful action -- it's military leaders in my own country and others who understand our common security hangs in the balance.

Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. All these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that President Kennedy spoke about. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, the determination, the staying power, to complete this work without something more -- and that's the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there's something irreducible that we all share.

As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we're all basically seeking the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.

And yet somehow, given the dizzying pace of globalization, the cultural leveling of modernity, it perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities -- their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict. At times, it even feels like we're moving backwards. We see it in the Middle East, as the conflict between Arabs and Jews seems to harden. We see it in nations that are torn asunder by tribal lines.

And most dangerously, we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan. These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded. But they remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint -- no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one's own faith. Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but I believe it's incompatible with the very purpose of faith -- for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature. For we are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best of intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.

But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached -- their fundamental faith in human progress -- that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

For if we lose that faith -- if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace -- then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.

Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."

Let us reach for the world that ought to be -- that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls. (Applause.)

Somewhere today, in the here and now, in the world as it is, a soldier sees he's outgunned, but stands firm to keep the peace. Somewhere today, in this world, a young protestor awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what few coins she has to send that child to school -- because she believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child's dreams.

Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that -- for that is the story of human progress; that's the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

Travel

2009-11-02T16:03:00.001-08:00

Wanderlust, the urge for adventure, and the desire to know what is over the next hill are like echoes in the backs of our minds that speak of sounds not quite heard and places not quite seen.

You should listen to these echoes. Take the chances and follow the voices that call you to distant places. Live, if only for a short time, the life of a traveler. It is a life you will always cherish and never forget.

The magic of travel is that you leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity, but as you travel, the world in all its richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in space and time. You return a different person.

* * *

Travel doesn’t have to be to some dreamlike and foreign destination. It can take you on an evening stroll through a distant forest or to a park bench in a town a hundred miles from your home. What matters is that you have left the comfort of the familiar and opened yourself to a world that is totally apart from your own.

* * *

Many people don’t want to be travelers. They would rather be tourists, flitting over the surface of other people’s lives while never really leaving their own. They try to bring their world with them wherever they go, or try to recreate the world they left. The do not want to risk the security of their own understanding and see how small and limited their experiences really are.

To be a real traveler, you must be willing to give yourself over to the moment and take yourself out of the center of your universe. You must believe totally in the lives of the people and the places where you find yourself.

Become part of the fabric of their everyday lives. Embrace them rather that judge them, and you will find that the beauty in their lives and their world will become part of yours. When you move on, you will have grown. You will realize that the possibilities of life in this world are endless, and that beneath our differences of language and culture we all share the same dream of loving and being loved, of having a life with more joy than sorrow.

* * *

Travel is not as romantic and exotic as you imagine it. The familiar will always call. Your sense of rootlessness will not give you rest.

You may wake once day and find that you have become a runner who uses travel as an escape from the problems and complications of trying to build something with your life. You may find that you have stayed away one hour or one day or one month too long and that you no longer belong anywhere or to anyone. You may find that you have been caught by the lure of the road and that you are a slave to dissatisfaction with any life that forces you to stay in one place.

But how much worse is it to be someone whose dreams have been buried beneath the routines of life and who no longer has an interest in looking beyond the horizon?

* * *

If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small, and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t life to the horizon; we don’t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.

Travel, no matter how humble, will etch new elements into your character. You will know the cutting moments of life where fear meets adventure and loneliness meets exhilaration. You will know what it means to push forward when you want to turn back.

And when you have tragedies or great changes in your life, you will understand that there are a thousand, a million ways to live, and that you life will go on to something new and different and every bit as worthy as the life you are living behind.

* * *

Because I have traveled, I can see other universes in the eyes of strangers. I know which parts of myself I cannot deny and which part of myself are simply choices that I make. I know the blessings of my own table and the warmth of my own bed. I know how much of life is pure chances, and how great a gift I have been given simply to be who I am.

When I am old and my body has begun to fail me, my memories will be waiting for me. They will lift me and carry me over to mountains and oceans. I will hold them and turn them and watch them catch the sunlight as they come alive once more in my imagination. I will be rich and I will be at peace.

I want you to have that peace, too.

* * *

Take the chances a traveler has to take. In the end you will be so much richer, so much stronger, so much clearer, so much happier, and so much better a person that all the risk and hardship will seem like nothing compared to the knowledge and wisdom you will have gained.

(Simple Truths by Kent Nerburn)

Impeccable Salute

2009-11-01T03:49:00.000-08:00

Image from NY Times. Fair use claim. For academic purposes.

This is how a President should salute, "impeccable in every way," as author Carey Winfrey of New York Times wrote in this article.

Now this is a Commander in Chief I could respect.

Prof. Clausewitz

2009-10-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

"Von Clausewitz as an educator" is the subject of this article.

Vegetius, a Roman writer of the fourth century AD, said, "Let him who desires peace prepare for war." Carl von Clausewitz sharpened the point: "The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms." Darfur has made clear that that is not just a metaphor.

Clausewitz (1780-1831) studied total war. Although he knew nothing of tanks, air forces, or satellite communications, he knew from combat how wars kill, confuse, and terrify. In war studies, expertise matters enormously; he had plenty.

At the age of 12, Clausewitz joined two brothers as cadets in the Prussian army. (Eventually all three became generals.) He fought for Prussia against Napoleon at Jena, was captured, taken to Paris, exchanged, and returned to duty. When Prussia was intimidated into joining Napoleon for his disastrous 1812 campaign, Clausewitz resigned his commission and fought for the czar. In 1815, again with the Prussian army, he fought at Ligny. In 1818 he became director of the Military Academy in Berlin, where he devoted the last 15 years of his life to scholarship. His major work, On War (three volumes of Vom Kriege were published, from 1832 to 1843), was left unfinished at his death.

On War has become something of a classic, often cited, discussed in numerous recent books, seen in the company of Sun Tzu's Art of War (thought to be circa fourth century BC), and studied in military academies. On War appeals to anyone who wants to see how a general thinks, and to all who suppose that warcraft applies to an office, company, college, or team. Clausewitz himself compared war with commerce and alliances with "a business deal."

For more Clausewitz articles and papers, click here.

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I know only two great books on war: Sun Tzu's and Von Clausewitz's.

Everything I Own, I Carry with Me

2009-10-08T15:55:00.000-07:00

Herta Muller just won the Nobel Prize, some excerpts from the book:

I carried everything I had. It wasn't actually mine. It was either intended for a different purpose or somebody else's. The pigskin suitcase was a gramophone box. The dust coat was from my father. The town coat with the velvet neckband from my grandfather. The breeches from my Uncle Edwin. The leather puttees from our neighbour, Herr Carp. The green gloves from my Auntie Fini. Only the claret silk scarf and the toilet bag were mine, gifts from recent Christmases. The war was still on in January 1945. Shocked that, in the depths of winter, I was to be taken who-knows-where by the Russians, everyone wanted to give me something that would be useful, maybe, even if it didn't help. Because nothing on earth could help. It was irrevocable: I was on the Russians' list, so everyone gave me something - and drew their own conclusions as they did. I took the things and, at the age of seventeen, drew my own conclusion: the timing was right for going away. I could have done without the list being the reason, but if things didn't turn out too badly, it would even be good for me. I wanted away from this thimble of a town, where all the stones had eyes. I wasn't so much afraid as secretly impatient. And I had a bad conscience because the list that caused my relatives such anguish was, for me, tolerable. They feared that in another country something might happen to me. I wanted to go to a place that did not know me.

---

I sometimes think that we can never really own things in this life. We can only own two small pieces of real estate: those which are beneath the soles of our feet.

Obama addresses the UN

2009-09-23T20:26:00.000-07:00

This is a transcript of Obama's UN Speech (September 23, 2009):

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Good morning. Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to address you for the first time as the 44th president of the United States.

I come before you humbled by the responsibility that the American people have placed upon me, mindful of the enormous challenges of our moment in history, and determined to act boldly and collectively on behalf of justice and prosperity at home and abroad. I have been in office for just nine months, though some days it seems a lot longer.

I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted, I believe, in the discontent with the status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences and outpaced by our problems.

But they are also rooted in hope. The hope that real change is possible and the hope that America will be a leader in bringing about such change.

I took office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust. A part of this was due to misperceptions and misinformation about my country. Part of this was due to opposition to specific policies and a belief on, on certain critical issues, America had acted unilaterally without regard for the interests of others.

And this is has fed an almost reflexive anti-Americanism which, too often, has served as an excuse for collective inaction.

Now, like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interests of my nation and my people. And I will never apologize for defending those interests. But it is my deeply held belief that, in the year 2009, more than at any point in human history, the interests of nations and peoples are shared. The religious convictions that we hold in our hearts can forge new bonds among people or they can tear us apart.

The technology we harness could light the path to peace or forever darken it. The energy we use can sustain our planet or destroy it. What happens to the hope of a single child anywhere can enrich our world or impoverish it.

In this hall, we come from many places, but we share a common future. No longer do we have the luxury of indulging our differences to the exclusion of the work that we must do together. I have carried this message from London to Ankara, from Port of Spain to Moscow, from Accra to Cairo, and it is what I will speak about today.

Because the time has come for the world to move in a new direction, we must embrace a new era of engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. And our work must begin now.

We know the future will be forged by deeds and not simply words. Speeches alone will not solve our problem. It will take persistent action. For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.

On my first day in office, I prohibited without expectation or equivocation the use of torture by the United States of America.

I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And we are doing the hard work of forging a framework to combat extremism within the rule of law.

Every nation must know America will live its values, and we will lead by example. We have set a clear and focused goal to work with all members of this body to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda and its extremist allies, a network that has killed thousands of people of many faiths and nations and that plotted to blow up this very building.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, we and many nations here are helping these governments develop the capacity to take the lead in this effort, while working to advance opportunity and security for their people.

In Iraq, we are responsibly ending a war. We have removed American combat brigades from Iraqi cities and set a deadline of next August to remove all our combat brigades from Iraqi territory. And I have made clear that we will help Iraqis transition to full responsibility for their future and keep our commitment to remove all American troops by the end of 2011.

I have outlined a comprehensive agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. In Moscow, the United States and Russia announced that we would pursue substantial reductions in our strategic warheads and launchers. At the Conference on Disarmament, we agreed on a work plan to negotiate an end to the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons. And this week, my secretary of state will become the first senior American representative to the annual members conference of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Video Watch as Obama says the world must stop the spread of nuclear weapons »

Upon taking office, I appointed a special envoy for Middle East peace. And America has worked steadily and aggressively to advance the cause of two states, Israel and Palestine, in which peace and security take root and the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians are respected.

To confront climate change, we have invested $80 billion in clean energy. We have substantially increased our fuel-efficiency standards. We have provided new incentives for conservation, launched an energy partnership across the Americas, and moved from a bystander to a leader in international climate negotiations.

To overcome an economic crisis that touches every corner of the world, we worked with the G-20 nations to forge a coordinated international response of over $2 trillion in stimulus to bring the global economy back from the brink. We mobilized resources that helped prevent the crisis from spreading further to developing countries, and we joined with others to launch a $20 billion global food security initiative that will lend a hand to those who need it most and help them build their own capacity.

We have also re-engaged the United Nations. We have paid our bills. We have joined the Human Rights Council.

We have signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We have fully embraced the Millennium Development Goals, and we address our priorities here in this institution, for instance, through the Security Council meeting that I will chair tomorrow on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament and through the issues that I will discuss today.

This is what we have already done, but this is just a beginning. Some of our actions have yielded progress. Some have laid the groundwork for progress in the future. But make no mistake: This cannot solely be America's endeavor.

Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone. We have sought in word and deed a new era of engagement with the world, and now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.

If we are honest with ourselves, we need to admit that we are not living up to that responsibility. Consider the course that we're on if we fail to confront the status quo: extremists sowing terror in pockets of the world, protracted conflicts that grind on and on, genocide, mass atrocities, more nations with nuclear weapons, melting ice caps and ravaged populations, persistent poverty and pandemic disease.

I say this not to sow fear but to state a fact. The magnitude of our challenges has yet to be met by the measure of our actions.

This body was founded on the belief that the nations of the world could solve their problems together. Franklin Roosevelt died before he could see his vision for this institution become a reality. He put it this way, and I quote, "The structure of world peace should not be the work of one man or one party or one nation. It cannot be a piece of large nations or of small nations. It must be a piece which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world."

Cooperative effort of the whole world -- those words ring even more true today, but it is not simply peace but our very health and prosperity that we hold in common. Yet we also know that this body is made up of sovereign states and, sadly but not surprisingly, this body has often become a forum for sowing discord instead of forging common ground, a venue for playing politics and exploiting grievances rather than solving problems.

After all, it is easy to walk up to this podium and point fingers and stoke divisions. Nothing is easier than blaming others for our troubles and absolving ourselves of responsibility for our choices and our actions. Anybody can do that.

Responsibility and leadership in the 21st century demand more. In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate other nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.

No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional divisions between nations of the south and the north make no sense in an interconnected world nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War.

The time has come to realize that the old habits, the old arguments are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people. They lead nations to act in opposition to the very goals that they claim to pursue and to vote, often in this body, against the interests of their own people.

They build up walls between us and the future that our people seek. And the time has come for those walls to come down. Together, we must build new coalitions that bridge old divides, coalitions of different faiths and creeds, of northern and south, east, west, black, white, and brown.

The choice is ours. We can be remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of 20th century into the 21st, that put off hard choices, refused to look ahead, failed to keep pace because we defined ourselves by what we were against instead of what we were for. Or we can be a generation that chooses to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters ahead; that comes together to serve the common interests of human beings and finally gives meaning to the promise embedded in the nation given to this institution, the United Nations.

That is the future America wants; a future of peace and prosperity that we can only reach if we recognize that all nations have rights but all nations have responsibilities as well. That is the bargain that makes this work. That must be the guiding principle of international cooperation.

Today, let me put forward four pillars that I believe are fundamental to the future that we want for our children. Nonproliferation and disbarment, the promotion of peace and security, the preservation of our planet, and a global economy that advances opportunity for all people.

First, we must stop the spread of nuclear weapons and seek the goal of a world without them. This institution was founded at the dawn of the atomic age, in part, because man's capacity to kill had to be contained. For decades, we averted disaster even under the shadow of a superpower standoff. But today the threat of proliferation is growing in scope and complexity.

If we fail to act, we will invite nuclear arms races in every region and the prospect of wars and acts of terror on a scale that we can hardly imagine.

A fragile consensus stands in the way of this frightening outcome, and that is the basic bargain that shapes the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It says that all nations have the right to peaceful nuclear energy, that nations with nuclear weapons have a responsibility to move toward disarmament, and those without them have the responsibility to forsake them. The next 12 months could be pivotal in determining whether this compact will be strengthened or will slowly dissolve.

America intends to keep our end of the bargain. We will pursue a new agreement with Russia to substantially reduce our strategic warheads and launchers. We will move forward with ratification of the test ban treaty and work with others to bring the treaty into force so that nuclear testing is permanently prohibited.

We will complete a Nuclear Posture Review that opens the door to deeper cuts and reduces the role of nuclear weapons. And we will call upon countries to begin negotiations in January on a treaty to end the production of fissile material for weapons.

I will also host a summit next April that reaffirms each nation's responsibility to secure nuclear material on its territory and to help those who can't, because we must never allow a single nuclear device to fall into the hands of a violent extremist. And we will work to strengthen the institutions and initiatives that combat nuclear smuggling and theft.

All of this must support efforts to strengthen the NPT. Those nations that refuse to live up to their obligations must face consequences. Let me be clear: This is not about singling out individual nations. It is about standing up for the rights of all nations that do live up to their responsibilities, because a world in which IAEA inspections are avoided and the United Nations' demands are ignored will leave all people less safe and all nations less secure.

In their actions to date, the governments of North Korea and Iran threaten to take us down this dangerous slope. We respect their rights as members of the community of nations. I have said before and I will repeat: I am committed to diplomacy that opens a path to greater prosperity and more secure peace for both nations if they live up to their obligations.

But if the governments of Iran and North Korea choose to ignore international standards, if they put the pursuit of nuclear weapons ahead of regional stability and the security and opportunity of their own people, if they are oblivious to the dangers of escalating nuclear arms races in both East Asia and the Middle East, then they must be held accountable.

The world must stand together to demonstrate that international law is not an empty promise and that treaties will be enforced. We must insist that the future does not belong to fear.

That brings me to the second pillar for our future: the pursuit of peace.

The United Nations was born of the belief that the people of the world can live their lives, raise their families and resolve their differences peacefully. And yet we know that in too many parts of the world this ideal remains an abstraction, a distant dream.

We can either accept that outcome as inevitable and tolerate constant and crippling conflict or we can recognize that the yearning for peace is universal and reassert our resolve to end conflicts around the world.

That effort must begin with an unshakable determination that the murder of innocent men, women and children will never be tolerated. On this, no one can be -- there can be no dispute.

The violent extremists who promote conflict by distorting faith have discredited and isolated themselves. They offer nothing but hatred and destruction. In confronting them, America will forge lasting partnerships to target terrorists, share intelligence, and coordinate law enforcement, and protect our people.

We will permit no safe haven for al Qaeda to launch attacks from Afghanistan or any other nation. We will stand by our friends on the front lines, as we and many nations will do in pledging support for the Pakistani people tomorrow. And we will pursue positive engagement that builds bridges among faiths and new partnerships for opportunity.

Our efforts to promote peace, however, cannot be limited to defeating violent extremists for the most powerful weapon in our arsenal is the hope of human beings, the belief that the future belongs to those who would build and not destroy, the confidence that conflicts can end and a new day can begin.

And that is why we will support -- we will strengthen our support for effective peacekeeping while energizing our efforts to prevent conflicts before they take hold. We will pursue a lasting peace in Sudan through support for the people of Darfur and the implementation of the comprehensive peace agreement so that we secure the peace that the Sudanese people deserve.

And in countries ...

And in countries ravaged by violence from Haiti to Congo to East Timor, we will work with the U.N. and other partners to support an enduring peace. I will also continue to seek a just and lasting peace [in] Israel, Palestine and the Arab world.

We will continue to work on that issue. ...

Yesterday, I had a constructive meeting with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and President [Mahmoud] Abbas. We have made some progress. Palestinians have strengthened their efforts on security. Israelis have facilitated greater freedom of movement for the Palestinians. As a result of these efforts on both sides, the economy in the West Bank has begun to grow, but more progress is needed.

We continue to call on Palestinians to end incitement against Israel. And we continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.

The time ...

The time has come -- the time has come to relaunch negotiations without preconditions that address the permanent status issues, security for Israelis and Palestinians, borders, refugees and Jerusalem. The goal is clear: Two states living side by side in peace and security; a Jewish state of Israel with true security for all Israelis and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967 and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people.

Now, as we pursue this goal, we will also pursue peace between Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Syria, and a broader peace between Israel and its many neighbors. In pursuit of that goal, we will develop regional initiatives with multilateral participation alongside bilateral negotiations.

Now, I am not naive. I know this will be difficult. But all of us -- not just the Israelis and the Palestinians -- but all of us must decide whether we are serious about peace or whether we will only lend it lip service. To break the old patterns, to break the cycle of insecurity and despair, all of us must say publicly what we would acknowledge in private.

The United States does Israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its security with an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians.

And nations within this body do the Palestinians no favors when they choose vitriolic attacks against Israel over constructive willingness to recognize Israel's legitimacy and its right to exist in peace and security.

We must remember that the greatest price of this conflict is not paid by us. It's not paid by politicians. It's paid by the Israeli girl in Sderot who closes her eyes in fear that a rocket will take her life in the middle of the night. It's paid for by the Palestinian boy in Gaza who has no clean water and no country to call his own.

These are all God's children. And, after all the politics and all the posturing, this is about the right of every human being to live with dignity and security. That is a lesson embedded in the three great faiths that call one small slice of Earth the Holy Land. And that is why -- even though there will be setbacks, and false starts, and tough days -- I will not waiver in my pursuit of peace.

Third, we must recognize that in the 21st century there will be no peace unless we take responsibility for the preservation of our planet.

And I thank the secretary-general for hosting the subject of climate change yesterday.

The danger posed by climate change cannot be denied. Our responsibility to meet it must not be deferred. If we continue down our current course, every member of this assembly will see irreversible changes within their borders.

Our efforts to end conflicts will be eclipsed by wars over refugees and resources. Development will be devastated by drought and famine. Land that human beings have lived on for millennia will disappear. Future generations will look back and wonder why we refused to act, why we failed to pass on -- why we failed to pass on an environment that was worthy of our inheritance.

And that is why the days when America dragged its feet on this issue are over. We will move forward with investments to transform our energy economy, while providing incentives to make clean energy the profitable kind of energy.

We will press ahead with deep cuts in emissions to reach the goals that we set for 2020 and eventually 2050.

We will continue to promote renewable energy and efficiency and share new technologies with countries around the world. And we will seize every opportunity for progress to address this threat in a cooperative effort with the entire world.

Now, those wealthy nations that did so much damage to the environment in the 20th century must accept our obligation to lead, but responsibility does not end there. While we must acknowledge the need for differentiated responses, any effort to curb carbon emissions must include the fast-growing carbon emitters who can do more to reduce their air pollution without inhibiting growth.

And any effort that fails to help the poorest nations both adapt to the problems that climate change have already wrought and help them travel a path of clean development simply will not work.

It's hard to change something as fundamental as how we use energy. I know that. It's even harder to do so in the midst of a global recession. Certainly, it will be tempting to sit back and wait for others to move first.

But we cannot make this journey unless we all move forward together. As we head into Copenhagen, let us resolve to focus on what each of us can do for the sake of our common future.

This leads me to the final pillar that must fortify our future: a global economy that advances opportunity for all people.

The world is still recovering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In America, we see the engine of growth beginning to churn, and yet many still struggle to find a job or pay their bills. Across the globe, we find promising signs, but little certainty about what lies ahead.

And far too many people in far too many places live through the daily crises that challenge our humanity: the despair of an empty stomach; the thirst brought on by dwindling water supplies; the injustice of a child dying from a treatable disease; or a mother losing her life as she gives birth.

In Pittsburgh, we will work with the world's largest economies to chart a course for growth that is balanced and sustained. That means vigilance to ensure that we do not let up until our people are back to work. That means taking steps to rekindle demand so that a global recovery can be sustained. And that means setting new rules of the road and strengthening regulation for all financial centers, so that we put an end to the greed and the excess and the abuse that led us into this disaster and prevent a crisis like this from ever happening again.

At a time of such interdependence, we have a moral and pragmatic interests, however, in broader questions of development, the questions of development that existed even before this crisis happened.

And so America will continue our historic effort to help people feed themselves. We have set aside $63 billion to carry forward the fight against HIV/AIDS, to end deaths from tuberculosis and malaria, to eradicate polio and to strengthen public health systems.

We are joining with other countries to contribute H1N1 vaccines to the World Health Organization. We will integrate more economies into a system of global trade. We will support the Millennium Development Goals and approach next year's summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.

Now is the time for all of us to do our part. Growth will not be sustained or shared unless all nations embrace their responsibilities. And that means that wealthy nations must open their markets to more goods and extend a hand to those with less, while reforming international institutions to give more nations a greater voice.

And developing nations must root out the corruption that is an obstacle to progress, for opportunity cannot thrive where individuals are oppressed and business have to pay bribes. That is why we support honest police and independent judges, civil society and a vibrant private sector. Our goal is simple: a global economy in which growth is sustained and opportunity is available to all.

Now, the changes that I've spoken about today will not be easy to make, and they will not be realized simply by leaders like us coming together in forums like this, as useful as that may be.

For as in any assembly of members, real change can only come through the people we represent. That is why we must do the hard work to lay the groundwork for progress in our own capitals. That's where we will build the consensus to end conflicts and to harness technology for peaceful purposes, to change the way we use energy and to promote growth that can be sustained and shared.

I believe that the people of the world want this future for their children. And that is why we must champion those principles which ensure that governments reflect the will of the people. These principles cannot be afterthoughts; democracy and human rights are essential to achieving each of the goals that I've discussed today, because governments of the people and by the people are more likely to act in the broader interests of their own people, rather than narrow interests of those in power.

The test of our leadership will not be the degree to which we feed the fears and old hatreds of our people. True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home.

The people of the world want change. They will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history.

This assembly's charter commits each of us -- and I quote -- "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women." Among those rights is the freedom to speak your mind and worship as you please, the promise of equality of the races, and the opportunity for women and girls to pursue their own potential, the ability of citizens to have a say in how you are governed, and to have confidence in the administration of justice.

For just as no nation should be forced to accept the tyranny of another nation, no individual should be forced to accept the tyranny of their own people.

As -- as an African-American, I will never forget that I would not be here today without the steady pursuit of a more perfect union in my country. That guides my belief that no matter how dark the day may seem, transformative change can be forged by those who choose to side with justice.

And I pledge that America will always stand with those who stand up for their dignity and their rights, for the student who seeks to learn, the voter who demands to be heard, the innocent who longs to be free, the oppressed who yearns to be equal.

Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside. Each society must search for its own path, and no path is perfect. Each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its people and in its past traditions, and I admit that America has, too often, been selective in its promotion of democracy.

But that does not weaken our commitment. It only reinforces it. There are basic principles that are universal. There are certain truths which are self-evident, and the United States of America will never waiver in our efforts to stand up for the right of people everywhere to determine their own destiny.

Sixty-five years ago, a weary Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the American people in his fourth and final inaugural address. After years of war, he sought to sum up the lessons that could be drawn from the terrible suffering, the enormous sacrifice that had taken place. We have learned, he said, to be citizens of the world, members of the human community.

The United Nations was built by men and women like Roosevelt from every corner of the world, from Africa and Asia, Europe to the Americas. These architects of international cooperation had an idealism that was anything but naive. It was rooted in the hard-earned lessons of war, rooted in the wisdom that nations could advance their interests by acting together instead of splitting apart.

Now, it falls to us. Where this institution will be what we make of it, the United Nations does extraordinary good around the world feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, mending place that have been broken. But it also struggles to enforce its will and to live up to the ideals of its founding.

I believe that those imperfections are not a reason to walk away from this institution. They are a calling to redouble our efforts. The United Nations can either with a place where we bicker about outdated grievances or forge common ground, a place where we focus on what drives us apart or what brings us together, a place where we indulge tyranny or a source of moral authority.

In short, the United Nations can be an institution that is disconnected from what matters in the lives of our citizens or it can be an indispensable factor in advancing the interests of the people we serve.

We have reached a pivotal moment. The United States stands ready to begin a new chapter of international cooperation, one that recognizes the rights and responsibilities of all nations. So with confidence in our cause and with a commitment to our values, we call on all nations to join us in building the future that our people so richly deserve.

Thank you very much, everyone.

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Greatly written. Some of his pieces were from older speeches, but the speech was finely made. This is a welcome development for collective consciousness.

Bouncing checks as a crime

2009-09-12T17:46:00.001-07:00

Robert F. Worth in the New York Times writes about the injustice that a Dubai law may bring:

Bouncing a check is a criminal offense here. That fact has begun raising questions about the fairness of Dubai’s laws, especially among the foreigners who make up about 90 percent of the population.

Consider the tale of Ali Fariq, a 33-year-old Iraqi real estate agent now serving a three-year jail term. Mr. Fariq says his ordeal in the Dubai legal system began last year when he was kidnapped and beaten by a diplomat who blamed him for an investment deal gone sour.

The diplomat, an Iraqi named Birhan al-Yacoubi, then forced Mr. Fariq — and later, his brother — to sign checks totaling $600,000, he said. She did not want the money; she knew they did not have it. Instead, she drove the men to a police station, where she presented the freshly signed checks as evidence of fraud, court records show.

Full article here.

In the Philippines, bouncing checks are covered by special penal laws, specifically Batas Pambansa Blg. No. 22.

The law, specifically provides that:

AN ACT PENALIZING THE MAKING OR DRAWING AND ISSUANCE OF A CHECK WITHOUT SUFFICIENT FUNDS OR CREDIT AND FOR OTIHER PURPOSES

Be it enacted by the Batasang Pambansa in Session Assembled:

SECTION 1. Checks without sufficient funds. —

Any person who makes or draws and issues any check to apply on account or for value, knowing at the time of issue that he does not have sufficient funds in or credit with the draws bank for the payment of such check in full upon its presentment, which check is subsequently dishonored for the same reason had not the drawer, without any valid reason, ordered the bank to stop payment, shall be punished by imprisonment of not less than thirty days but not more than one (1) year or by a fine of not less than but not more than double the amount of the check which fine of not less than but not more than double the amount of check which fine shall in no case exceed Two Hundred Thousand Pesos, or both such find and imprisonment at the discretion of the court. The same penalty shall be imposed upon any person who, having sufficient funds in or credit with the drawer bank when he makes or draws and issues a check, shall fail to keep sufficient funds or to maintain a credit to cover the full amount of the check if presented within a period of ninety (90) days from the date appearing thereon, for which reason it is dishonored by the drawee bank. Where the check is drawn by a corporation, company or entity, the person or persons who actually signed the check in behalf of such drawer shall be liable under this Act.

What is a bounced or bad check?

A bad check is a check that is not honored because the account either contains insufficient funds or does not exist. It is also called a hot check, worthless check, rubber check, worthless check, bounced check, cold check, false check, or dry check.

There are two distinct acts penalized in the Bouncing Checks Law: (1) making or drawing and issuing any check to apply on account or for value, knowing at the time of issue that the drawer does not have sufficient funds in or credit with the drawee bank; and (2) having sufficient funds in or credit with the drawee bank shall fail to keel) sufficient funds or to maintain a credit to cover the full amount of the check if presented within a period of ninety (90) clays from the date appearing thereon, for which reason it is dishonored by the drawee bank.

According to Mr. Justice Quisumbing

“The Bouncing Checks Law was devised to safeguard the interest of the banking system and legitimate public checking account user. It was not designed to favor or encourage those who seek to enrich themselves through manipulation and circumventing the purpose of the law.” (Magno v. Court of Appeals, G.R. No. 96132, 210 SCRA 471, 478 (1992)).

That may be so, but as the article mentioned, "...some financial analysts say the risk of arrest for debt could also drive away potential new investors and businesspeople..." Perhaps the coercion that the criminal law imposes outweigh the potential business protection it promises.

Economics and finance aside, legally speaking, is the Bouncing checks law not resting on infirm constitutional premises. After all, is it not unconstitutional to imprison someone out of debt? What statutory construction theory can we use to justify criminalizing non-payment through a bounced check to say that it is not a promise to pay an amount of money certain upon demand?

State intervention in business under regulation theory necessitates a gentle yet firm hand. Not a solid iron grip. Perhaps it's time we review our special penal laws regarding bouncing checks.

Economics and Being Wrong

2009-09-08T09:09:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman in the New York Times asks the hard question: How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.

Last year, everything came apart.
Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.

Full article here.

In a related article, Douglas Rushkoff at Edge, argues that it's probably time we realize that Economics is Not a Natural Science and hence stop treating its mainstream theories as dogma:

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.

Full article here.

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Currently reading, Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market. Good book, interesting arguments.

Game Theory and International Relations

2009-08-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

Clive Thompson from the NYT asks: Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?

Bueno de Mesquita is one of the world’s most prominent applied game theorists. A professor at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he is well known academically for his work on “political survival,” or how leaders build coalitions to stay in power. But among national-security types and corporate decision makers, he is even better known for his prognostications. For 29 years, Bueno de Mesquita has been developing and honing a computer model that predicts the outcome of any situation in which parties can be described as trying to persuade or coerce one another. Since the early 1980s, C.I.A. officials have hired him to perform more than a thousand predictions; a study by the C.I.A., now declassified, found that Bueno de Mesquita’s predictions “hit the bull’s-eye” twice as often as its own analysts did.

Last year, Bueno de Mesquita decided to forecast whether Iran would build a nuclear bomb. With the help of his undergraduate class at N.Y.U., he researched the primary power brokers inside and outside the country — anyone with a stake in Iran’s nuclear future. Once he had the information he needed, he fed it into his computer model and had an answer in a few minutes.

For the full article, click here.

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I wonder if we can do something ala-Asimov's Psychohistory concept of charting and mapping out the actions of every member of the society resulting in the predictability of a social phenomena.

Feynman on Social Sciences

2009-08-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

Richard Feynman talks about the "pseudo" nature of social sciences. In an essay on The Problem of Unity Amid Diversity, John Gerring tackled the difficulty of deigning science from social science. I agree with Gerring's argument there: "If we have no way of adjudicating between conflicting visions--if dissensus reigns supreme amoung academics who study [social science] -- then we have little to offer policymakers or the general public." I would not go as far as affirming Carl Hempel's General Law theories (that sounds like Psychohistory to me) but a deductive-nomological method seems necessary to craft general theories that are susceptible of operationalization. Social sciences, at the least, should be able to support policy conceptualizations. After all, as Gerring argued, "Citizens are rightfully loath to surrender their earnings in order to pay for programs that cannot demonstrate workability, a judgment we rely on experts [be they policy analysts, economists, or lawyers] to provide."

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Feynman said "not yet." If only we could advance social science to the level of natural science.

Is a smarter world, a better one?

2009-08-06T21:20:00.001-07:00

John Gray reviews Amartya Sen's new book, Idea of Justice, and writes:

In a letter written to a friend in 1917 Ludwig Wittgenstein reported: 'I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.' The notion that being a smarter human being and a better person are in the end the same thing is one that Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist who has made fundamental advances in welfare economics and the theory of social choice, finds appealing. Citing Wittgenstein's assertion at the start of the first chapter of The Idea of Justice and referring to it at several points in the book, Sen suggests that reason can do more than help people to achieve their goals. It can also enable them to criticise their goals, and in this way make them better people. In Sen's view, a smarter world is sure to be a better world. Unlike some rationalists in the past, however, he does not think we need a conception of an ideal world in order to improve the one we live in. One of the recurring themes of The Idea of Justice is to contest the assumption that a theory of ideal justice is either necessary or desirable. Much of the book is a critique of the work of the late twentieth-century American liberal philosopher John Rawls. While Rawls's work has shaped academic discussion for over thirty years, it has had a negligible impact on political practice, and one of the reasons may be that his theory leaves so little room for politics. For Rawls, justice is a unique set of principles that reasonable people would choose from an imaginary initial position that ensures impartiality. Once these principles have been chosen all that remains is to set the right institutions in place. Conflicts about the scope of basic liberties and the distribution of resources will then be settled by applying the theory, which is a legal rather than political process.

Full article here.

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Image of Amartya Sen taken from from Harvard's Photo Archive. Used for academic purposes only.

Obama and Arroyo Press Briefing

2009-07-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

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Obama to Arroyo: "You don't have to read GDP numbers in order to see that, all you have to do is talk to the ... people who are losing jobs, losing homes, and worried about their ability to keep their healthcare, and finance the child's college education...."

I found that bit funny.

In the Cloud Computing and Its Dangers

2009-07-21T19:18:00.000-07:00

The following commentary by HLS Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 on Google’s new operating system, Chrome, appeared in The New York Times on July 19 and in Newsweek on July 9. Zittrain is the author of “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.”

The New York Times: Lost in the Cloud
Jonathan Zittrain

July 19, 2009

EARLIER this month Google announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing our information on our own PCs toward doing everything online — also known as in “the cloud” — using whatever device is at hand.

Many people consider this development to be as sensible and inevitable as the move from answering machines to voicemail. With your stuff in the cloud, it’s not a catastrophe to lose your laptop, any more than losing your glasses would permanently destroy your vision. In addition, as more and more of our information is gathered from and shared with others — through Facebook, MySpace or Twitter — having it all online can make a lot of sense.

The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.

Some are in plain view. If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you. For example, if your favorite music is rented or authorized from an online subscription service rather than freely in your custody as a compact disc or an MP3 file on your hard drive, you can lose your music if you fall behind on your payments — or if the vendor goes bankrupt or loses interest in the service. Last week Amazon apparently conveyed a publisher’s change-of-heart to owners of its Kindle e-book reader: some purchasers of Orwell’s “1984” found it removed from their devices, with nothing to show for their purchase other than a refund. (Orwell would be amused.)

Worse, data stored online has less privacy protection both in practice and under the law. A hacker recently guessed the password to the personal e-mail account of a Twitter employee, and was thus able to extract the employee’s Google password. That in turn compromised a trove of Twitter’s corporate documents stored too conveniently in the cloud. Before, the bad guys usually needed to get their hands on people’s computers to see their secrets; in today’s cloud all you need is a password.

Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers — and not to tell you about it. There have been thousands of such requests lodged since the law was passed, and the F.B.I.’s own audits have shown that there can be plenty of overreach — perhaps wholly inadvertent — in requests like these.

The cloud can be even more dangerous abroad, as it makes it much easier for authoritarian regimes to spy on their citizens. The Chinese government has used the Chinese version of Skype instant messaging software to monitor text conversations and block undesirable words and phrases. It and other authoritarian regimes routinely monitor all Internet traffic — which, except for e-commerce and banking transactions, is rarely encrypted against prying eyes.

With a little effort and political will, we could solve these problems. Companies could be required under fair practices law to allow your data to be released back to you with just a click so that you can erase your digital footprints or simply take your business (and data) elsewhere. They could also be held to the promises they make about content sold through the cloud: If they sell you an e-book, they can’t take it back or make it less functional later. To increase security, companies that keep their data in the cloud could adopt safer Internet communications and password practices, including the use of biometrics like fingerprints to validate identity.

And some governments can be persuaded — or perhaps required by their independent judiciaries — to treat data entrusted to the cloud with the same level of privacy protection as data held personally. The Supreme Court declared in 1961 that a police search of a rented house for a whiskey still was a violation of the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of the tenant, even though the landlord had given permission for the search. Information stored in the cloud deserves similar safeguards.

But the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice orFirefox.

Promoting competition is only the tip of the iceberg — there are also the thousands of applications so novel that they don’t yet compete with anything. These tend to be produced by tinkerers and hackers. Instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing and the Web itself all exist thanks to people out in left field, often writing for fun rather than money, who are able to tempt the rest of us to try out what they’ve done.

This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software. Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don’t like. The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.

The market is churning through these issues. Amazon is offering a generic cloud-computing infrastructure so anyone can set up new software on a new Web site without gatekeeping by the likes of Facebook. Google’s Android platform is being used in a new generation of mobile phones with fewer restrictions on outside code. But the dynamics here are complicated. When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.

If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents.

We’ve only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That’s not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.

Original article can be found here.

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Illustration of The Panopticon. I wonder, if the "Cloud" will bring us closer to a panoptical society. Do we want that?

Should nature be able to sue you in courts?

2009-07-19T20:54:00.000-07:00

From the Boston Globe:

Last February, the town of Shapleigh, Maine, population 2,326, passed an unusual ordinance. Like nearby towns, Shapleigh sought to protect its aquifers from the Nestle Corporation, which draws heavily on the region for its Poland Spring bottled water. Some Maine towns had acquiesced, others had protested, and one was locked in a protracted legal battle. Shapleigh tried something new - a move at once humble in its method and audacious in its ambition. At a town meeting, residents voted, 114-66, to endow all of the town’s natural assets with legal rights: “Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve within the Town of Shapleigh.” It further decreed that any town resident had “standing” to seek relief for damages caused to nature - permitting, for example, a lawsuit on behalf of a stream.

Shapleigh is one of about a dozen US municipalities to have passed measures declaring that nature itself has rights under the law. And in 2008, when Ecuador adopted a new constitution, it recognized nature’s “right to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions and its evolutionary processes.” A campaign is also underway in Europe for a UN Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights, which would attempt to enshrine such principles in international law, following the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

For the full article, click here.

Gates Puts Feynman Lectures Online

2009-07-16T01:01:00.001-07:00

Up over at The New York Times, a great news caught my eye at the TierneyLab (Tech Blog). John Markoff writes:

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates believes that if he had been able to watch physicist Richard Feynman lecture on physics in 1964 his life might have played out differently.

Mr. Gates, of course, is legendary as a Harvard University dropout who went on to create the world’s most successful software firm. He has told associates that if had watched the lectures earlier in his life he might have become a physicist instead of a software entrepreneur.

However, Mr. Gates, who is also well known for his sharp and varied intellectual interests and his philanthropic commitment to education, said this week that he had purchased the rights to videos of seven lectures that Dr. Feynman gave at Cornell University called “The Character of Physical Law,” in an effort to make them broadly available via the Internet.

Microsoft Research announced on Wednesday that Mr. Gates, who purchased the rights to the videos privately from the Feynman estate, BBC and from Cornell University, in cooperation with Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher, has created a Web site that is intended to enhance the videos by annotating them with related digital content.

For the full article, click here.

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Richard Feynman is my favorite physicist.

Shangri La (anime)

2009-07-13T21:25:00.001-07:00

A new anime I came across researching on international environmental law--the things one finds over the internet.

In mid-21st century, the international committee decided to forcefully reduce CO2 emission levels to mitigate the global warming crisis. As a result, the economic market was transferred mainly into the trade of carbon. A great earthquake destroys much of Japan, yet the carbon tax placed on the country is not lifted, so Tokyo is turned into the world’s largest “jungle-polis” that absorbs carbon dioxide. Project Atlas is commenced to plan the rebuilding of Tokyo and oversee the government organization, which the Metal Age group opposes due to its oppressive nature. However, Atlas is only built with enough room for 3,500,000 people and most people are not allowed to migrate into the city. The disparity between the elite within Atlas and the refugees living in the jungles outside of its walls set up the background of the story.

More here.

The revolutionary environmental economics theory behind the anime interests me. What happens when the supercapitalists and the capitalistic regimes of the world decide to capitalize on environmentalism? Now we have another market and another form of economic trade. But the same ingredients still apply: profit maximization, corporate greed, weak states bowing before international financial institutions etc.

Interesting watching. Head on over to crunchyroll.com for the anime.

My favorite Rachmaninov piece

2009-07-12T22:49:00.001-07:00

Rakhmaninov: Concerto for piano and orchestra No.2 op.18, 1 mov.

Piano by Erika Handa.

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"And if it were said of us that we're almost romantics, that we are incorrigible idealists, that we think the impossible: then a thousand and one times we have to answer that yes, we are." -- Ernesto Guevara

In God's Name: Freedom of Speech v. Defamation of Religions

2009-07-12T22:34:00.000-07:00

Miklós Haraszti in Eurozine:

On 26 March, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning 'defamation of religions' as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech. The Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of the Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favour and 11 against, with 13 abstentions. The resolution "Combating Defamation of Religions" has been passed, revised and passed again every year since 1999, except in 2006, in the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission. It is promoted by the persistent sponsorship of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference with the acknowledged objective of getting it codified as a crime in as many countries as possible, or at least promoting it into a universal anathema. Alongside this campaign, there is a global undercurrent of violence and ready-made self-censorship that has surrounded all secular and artistic depictions of Islamic subjects since the Rushdie fatwa.

This year's resolution, unlike previous versions, no longer ignores Article 19, the right to free expression. That crucial human right has now received a mention, albeit in a context which misleadingly equates defamation of religions with incitement to hatred and violence against religious people, and on that basis denies it the protection of free speech. It also attempts to bracket criticism of religion with racism.

On the other hand, the vague parameters of possible defamation cases have now grown to include the "targeting" of symbols and venerated leaders of religion by the media and the Internet. What we are witnessing may be an effort at diplomacy, but it is also a declaration of war on twenty-first century media freedoms by a coalition of latter-day authoritarians.

For the full article, click here.

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"Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences." - Vladimir Nabokov

Che and His Afterlife Image

2009-07-08T22:44:00.000-07:00

Maurice Isserman in The Nation, writes:

In Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, Michael Casey reports that local peasant women who paraded by Che's corpse on October 9 with the permission of triumphant Bolivian officers "surreptitiously clipped locks of hair from Che's head, saving themselves a future talisman." A few weeks later, the journalist and novelist Jose Yglesias, reporting on Che's death for The Nation, indulged his readers with a different sort of memorabilia. Yglesias wrote that like the relics of St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun and mystic, Che's hands "may well be with us for a long time to strengthen the nonreligious but barefoot Order--like Saint Teresa's stoical Carmelites--of the guerrillas of South America." The mythic appeal of the slain revolutionary, known to many today in Latin America as "San Ernesto," has only grown in subsequent years. "Unwittingly, the Bolivian military delivered the world a lasting and sympathetic picture of the man they'd hunted down," Casey writes. "They gave it a crucified Che." Indeed, John Berger and other art critics have argued that Freddy Alborta's photo of Che's corpse bears a startling resemblance to Renaissance depictions of Jesus Christ at the moment he was brought down from the cross by the Romans.

Che hardly ever sat for a bad photo--even in death. But of all surviving photographs of him, one in particular stands out: the head-and-shoulders portrait of a bearded, longhaired, 31-year-old Che, wearing a bomber jacket and his trademark beret emblazoned with the comandante star. Casey makes this image the central concern of Che's Afterlife, and in the book's opening chapter he offers a vivid re-creation of the "frozen millisecond" when the photo was taken. The date was March 5, 1960; the location a spot near Havana's Colón cemetery; the occasion a public funeral sponsored by the revolutionary government. The previous day a French munitions ship delivering arms to Cuba had mysteriously blown up in Havana harbor, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds. CIA involvement was suspected but never proven. Che, who had been at a meeting nearby in downtown Havana when the ship exploded, rushed to the docks and helped provide medical aid to the wounded and the dying.

For the full article, click here.

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Another way of seeing. See John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

This post is dedicated to Em--who adores Che. Thanks for the bomber jacket. Hasta la vista victoria siempre.

Blending Philosophy and Natural Science

2009-07-08T22:41:00.000-07:00

Hasok Chang sees a new role for the history and philosophy of science. He writes:

What is the use of philosophy? That is a challenging question to answer in the modern intellectual landscape dominated by empirical science. There is a common impression that philosophers just sit around and engage in idle talk, while scientists make real investigations and deliver results that are useful as well as truthful. Even professional philosophers feel the pressure of the success of science and often respond with a subservient naturalism, which would reduce philosophy of mind to neurophysiology, epistemology to cognitive psychology, and metaphysics to the latest fashion in physics. A completion of such a naturalist project would be the end of philosophy as we know it; if philosophy’s subject matter is really science, then it would be best to leave it to scientists. It is absurd conceit to think that we philosophers can “think” better than anyone, so that we can step in and draw some wise conclusions from the scientific material, which scientists themselves are missing because they are sloppy or limited in their thinking.

I wish to resist this self-denigrating naturalism in philosophy, fashionable as it is these days. The relation between philosophy and science needs to be seen in a new light. A look back at the long-term history of scholarship will help us re-orientate ourselves here. There was a time when nearly all academic inquiry was called “philosophy”. But various scientific disciplines (and other practices such as law and medicine) gradually carved themselves out and left the realm of philosophy. After the departure of astronomy, mechanics, experimental physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and so on, what is left in philosophy proper seems an empty shell. Our current academic discipline called “philosophy” became restricted and defined, as it were, against its own will.

This history goes some way to explain the origin of the common notion that philosophy should deal with “deep” questions, that its discourse has to be general, abstract and systematic. This is a reaction against all the specialisms declaring their independence from philosophy. The defining feature of what remains as philosophy must be that it is not specialist but general, aspiring to universality. Transcending the vagaries of specialist disciplines also means dealing with questions that are immutable, as we go on a quest for an eternal truth.

In articulating my own conception of philosophy, I want to propose a different contrast, a different way of being counter-specialist. Philosophical questions are not deeper than scientific questions, only different. Here I take a clue from Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science, though perhaps not in a way that he would have envisaged himself. In Kuhnian terms, science does not emerge from “pre-science” until the field of legitimate questions gets narrowed down with clearly recognized boundaries. Historically this was a slow and gradual process. For a long time it was common for one and the same treatise to contain tangled discussions of metaphysics, methodology, and what we would now identify as the proper “content” of science. Philosophy once aspired to encompass all knowledge, but what is now left under the rubric of philosophy is not the all-encompassing scholarship it once was. Philosophy as practised now does not and cannot include science. But in my view that is just where its most important function now lies: to address what science and other specialisms neglect.

For the full article, click here.

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"The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. ... No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it." - Richard Feynman

To Become An Extremist, Hang Around With People You Agree With

2009-07-05T22:45:00.000-07:00

Cass Sunstein argues that:

Some years ago, a number of citizens of France were assembled into small groups to exchange views about their president and about the intentions of the United States with respect to foreign aid. Before they started to talk, the participants tended to like their president and to distrust the intentions of the United States. After they talked, some strange things happened. Those who began by liking their president ended up liking their president significantly more. And those who expressed mild distrust toward the United States moved in the direction of far greater distrust. The small groups of French citizens became more extreme. As a result of their discussions, they were more enthusiastic about their leader, and far more sceptical of the United States, than similar people in France who had not been brought together to speak with one another.

This tale reveals a general fact of social life: much of the time groups of people end up thinking and doing things that group members would never think or do on their own. This is true for groups of teenagers, who are willing to run risks that individuals would avoid. It is certainly true for those prone to violence, including terrorists and those who commit genocide. It is true for investors and corporate executives. It is true for government officials, neighbourhood groups, social reformers, political protestors, police officers, student organisations, labour unions and juries. Some of the best and worst developments in social life are a product of group dynamics, in which members of organisations, both small and large, move one another in new directions.

For the full article, click here.

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Interestingly, if you do hang out with people you agree with--and you have a tendency to want to outdo the rest--you're bound to end up being the most extreme of your group. This is a viable thesis for the functional creation of a fundamentalist, an extreme rightist--or even something as mundane as the "one-upper" ("wala ka sa lolo ko").

IF

2009-06-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

-- Rudyard Kipling

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Another year, a new chapter in my life.

looking at systemic flaws

2009-05-11T19:03:00.000-07:00

Conrado de Quiros writes about "Systems," in his latest column in the Inquirer.

These are questions we’ve always answered with: Because of the system.

There’s nothing innately wrong with the Filipino. There is nothing in his genes that prevents him from accomplishing big things. There is nothing in his physical or mental endowments that obstructs his capacity to do great things.

But there is everything wrong with his system. It’s his system that robs him of his discipline, his direction, his drive. It’s his system that prevents him from envisioning grand things. It’s his system that stops him from accomplishing great things.

Elsewhere in the world, the system rewards the upright and punishes the wicked. Elsewhere in the world, the system praises the worthy and damns the rotten. Elsewhere in the world, the system applies the law to everyone, jailing bank robbers and Bernie Madoffs alike, jailing common criminals and uncommon criminals alike. Elsewhere in the world, the system allows merit to thrive and demerit to perish. Elsewhere in the world, the system pushes the promising to excel and the corrupt to rot away. Elsewhere in the world, the system provides the foundation or the support or the ground for talent to blossom into genius.

That is how Filipinos do great things when they’re abroad. The system allows them to.

In the end, we don’t really need to go abroad to be able to do grand things, we don’t really need American coaches to bag the gold in sports or in life. We need only to do one thing:

Change our system.

Originally posted at: http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20090512-204471/Systems

I wonder what kind of systemic changes we should have. Should we opt for governmental systemic change in terms of political institutions? Should we assail the legal system, the judicial system, the administration and all that?

A few days ago, Dean Pangalangan wrote about the need for a Kuhnian paradigmatic shift... a revolution, in a scientific and socio-political sense. I somehow agree.

What we need is a revolution. But one that begins with the internal. With the sense of self, as Mabini would say.

Kudos to Mr. De Quiros for his righteous anger.

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"So I start a revolution from my bed... cause you said that all the brains I have went to my head." - Oasis, Don't Look Back in Anger

Summer in Kanji

2009-05-03T02:31:00.001-07:00

I found the Kanji off the net from The Tokyo Traveler.

Here comes summer, here comes summer

There goes summer, there goes summer.

Remembering Desmond Tutu's Prayer

2009-05-03T02:11:00.000-07:00

Disturb us, O Lord

when we are too well-pleased with ourselves
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little, because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, O Lord

when with the abundance of things we possess,
we have lost our thirst for the water of life
when, having fallen in love with time,
we have ceased to dream of eternity
and in our efforts to build a new earth,
we have allowed our vision of Heaven to grow dim.

Stir us, O Lord

to dare more boldly, to venture into wider seas
where storms show Thy mastery,
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.

In the name of Him who pushed back the horizons of our hopes
and invited the brave to follow.

Amen.

A Constitution of Many Minds

2009-04-10T02:03:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite legal scholars of today, Cass Sunstein, published a new book entitled, “A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn’t Mean What It Meant Before”.

In the book, Sunstein noted that scholars have long differed on the Constitution’s role as a "blueprint for democracy." Some interpret it as they would the Bible or the Quoran, its text holy and devastatingly at times, to be followed literally. Others say that the Constitution must be interpreted more generally in order to apply its principles to current times.

In this new book, Sunstein argues that these interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The manner in which the Constitution is interpreted is not as important as whether or not the interpretation is the product of a proper consensus.

An interesting paragraph in the book argued, for example:

Thomas Jefferson had an altogether different view. Indeed, he believed that Madison’s approach badly disserved the aspirations for which the American Revolution had been fought. Jefferson insisted that “the dead have no rights."He thought that past generations should not be permitted to bind the present. In his view, the founders should be respected but not revered, and their work ought not to be taken as any kind of fixed background. In a revealing letter, Jefferson contended that those who wrote the document “were very much like the present, but without the experience of the present.”In other words, the present knows more than the past, if only because it is, in a sense, older. For these reasons, Jefferson urged that the Constitution should be rethought by the many minds of every generation, as the nature of self-government becomes newly conceived in light of changing circumstances. We the People should rule ourselves, not simply through day-to-day governance under a fixed charter, but also by rethinking the basic terms of political and social life.

See the review at Harvard Law's website, here.

See a pdf snippet of the book here.

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One thing I remember while in law school, when I read a case that mentioned the concept of "intergenerational responsibility" is how it made me think how the law should not serve the old generations and the dead kings of yesteryears. The law belongs to the kings of tomorrow.

for everyone

2009-04-08T08:45:00.000-07:00

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Watch and learn.

...

2009-04-05T06:27:00.001-07:00

Today, I fall on my knees and think of the days when I could still dream.

How Rawls' Political Philosophy was Influenced by His Religion

2009-03-29T20:01:00.000-07:00

Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel in the TSL posted:

The recognition that political life presents a distinct moral problem is therefore a decisive break in Rawls’s development, and it would be interesting to know when and how it occurred. Rawls says in the Introduction to Political Liberalism (1993) that A Theory of Justice (1971) did not draw a distinction “between moral and political philosophy”. He was, however, concerned from early on with the special moral problems of political society. As early as his doctoral dissertation (submitted in 1950, and addressed to the role of reason in ethical argument), his philosophical work was animated by a sense of the political that is not evident in the undergraduate thesis. Thus he says in the dissertation that a “democratic conception of government . . . views the law as the outcome of public discussions as to what rules can be voluntarily consented to as binding upon the government and the citizens”. For this reason, he continues, “rational discussion . . . constitutes an essential precondition of reasonable law”, and an investigation of the “rational foundation of ethical principles” serves as “an addition to democratic theory, as well as to ethical philosophy”. The close association here of issues of philosophical ethics with concerns about public argument in a democracy marks a sharp departure from the view in the thesis, and anticipates the idea that justice as fairness is “the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society”. Yet while Rawls came to see that a just society could not be a community “integrated in faith under God”, his personal knowledge and experience of religion were important for the formation of his later view, in particular his views about the kind of public reasoning that we could reasonably expect in a democratic society. Rawls’s liberalism, unlike that of many liberals who know very little about religion, is founded on a vivid sense of the importance of religious faith and an understanding of the difference between genuine and merely conventional religion. He knows what he is talking about when he says in Political Liberalism that the Reformation “introduces into people’s conceptions of their good a transcendent element not admitting of compromise”, that “this element forces either mortal conflict moderated only by circumstance and exhaustion, or equal liberty of conscience and freedom of thought”; and that political thought needs to understand “the absolute depth of that irreconcilable latent conflict”. By insisting on the importance of a terrain of political justification that is consistent with such ultimate commitments but does not depend on them, Rawls was not devaluing religion. On the contrary. The importance of liberty and of separating the state from religion is that they make possible the commitment of all members of a pluralistic society to common political institutions and a shared enterprise of public justification, despite their ultimate disagreements about the nature of the world, the ends of life, and the path to salvation. Such disagreement, he emphasizes, is not a disaster, but the natural consequence of reason’s exercise under free conditions.

For the full article, click here.

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"We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them." - Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Earth Hour

2009-03-28T06:08:00.000-07:00

8.30PM, Manila, Philippines.

Switched off the lights. Nawa ay maging ilaw sa kinabukasan ang pagkakaisa ng lahat sa pagpatay ng ilaw ngayong oras na ito.

China calls for World Currency

2009-03-24T17:47:00.000-07:00

Joe MacDonald writes for the Associated Press:

China is calling for a new global currency controlled by the International Monetary Fund, stepping up pressure ahead of a London summit of global leaders for changes to a financial system dominated by the U.S. dollar and Western governments.

The comments, in an essay by the Chinese central bank governor released late Monday, reflect Beijing's growing assertiveness in economic affairs. China is expected to press for developing countries to have a bigger say in finance when leaders of the Group of 20 major economies meet April 2 in London to discuss the global crisis.

Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan's essay did not mention the dollar by name but said the crisis showed the dangers of relying on one nation's currency for international payments. In an unusual step, the essay was published in both Chinese and English, making clear it was meant for an international audience.

"The crisis called again for creative reform of the existing international monetary system towards an international reserve currency," Zhou wrote.

A reserve currency is the unit in which a government holds its reserves. But Zhou said the proposed new currency also should be used for trade, investment, pricing commodities and corporate bookkeeping.

For the full article, click here.

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I somehow, find it disturbing, that I find myself nodding to this. The one thing that united Europe was economics. Perhaps, it's time we unite the world through trade as well. In peace, business flourish, except those whose business is war.

I just remember one thing though, "Finance is a gun, politics is knowing when to pull the trigger." And it was Chairman Mao who said, that "Power comes from the barrel of the gun."

karen armstrong on God, compassion, secularism, fundamentalism and dialogue

2009-03-16T21:45:00.000-07:00

Bill Moyers interviews Karen Armstrong:

KAREN ARMSTRONG: Let me say this. In our discourse, it is not enough for us in the western democratic tradition simply to seek the truth. We also have to defeat and humiliate our opponents. And that happens in politics. It happens in the law courts. It happens in religious discourse. It happens in the media. It happens in academia. Very different from Socrates, the founder of the rationalist tradition, who when you had dialogues with Socrates, you came thinking that you knew what you were talking about.

Half an hour later, with Socrates, you realized you didn't know anything at all. And at that moment, says Socrates, your-- quest can begin. You can become a philosopher, a lover of wisdom because you know you don't have wisdom. You love it. You seek it. And you had to go into a dialogue prepared to change, not to bludgeon your conversation partner into accepting your point of view. And every single point in a Socratic dialogue, you offer your opinion kindly to the other, and the other accepts it with kindness.

BILL MOYERS: But you can't have a dialogue with people who don't want to have-

KAREN ARMSTRONG: No.

BILL MOYERS: -a dialogue.

KAREN ARMSTRONG: But that doesn't mean we should give up altogether. Because I think the so called liberals can also be just as hard lined in their own way.

For the full interview with the video, click here. Here's the transcript.

is capitalism dying?

2009-03-09T20:16:00.000-07:00

Amartya Sen mulls over the thought in line with the new paradigm that governments must intervene (i.e. "bailouts") for the financial system to survive:

Capitalism Beyond the Crisis
Amartya Sen

x x x

What are the special characteristics that make a system indubitably capitalist—old or new? If the present capitalist economic system is to be reformed, what would make the end result a new capitalism, rather than something else? It seems to be generally assumed that relying on markets for economic transactions is a necessary condition for an economy to be identified as capitalist. In a similar way, dependence on the profit motive and on individual rewards based on private ownership are seen as archetypal features of capitalism. However, if these are necessary requirements, are the economic systems we currently have, for example, in Europe and America, genuinely capitalist?

All affluent countries in the world—those in Europe, as well as the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and others—have, for quite some time now, depended partly on transactions and other payments that occur largely outside markets. These include unemployment benefits, public pensions, other features of social security, and the provision of education, health care, and a variety of other services distributed through nonmarket arrangements. The economic entitlements connected with such services are not based on private ownership and property rights.

Also, the market economy has depended for its own working not only on maximizing profits but also on many other activities, such as maintaining public security and supplying public services—some of which have taken people well beyond an economy driven only by profit. The creditable performance of the so-called capitalist system, when things moved forward, drew on a combination of institutions—publicly funded education, medical care, and mass transportation are just a few of many—that went much beyond relying only on a profit-maximizing market economy and on personal entitlements confined to private ownership.

Underlying this issue is a more basic question: whether capitalism is a term that is of particular use today. The idea of capitalism did in fact have an important role historically, but by now that usefulness may well be fairly exhausted.

For example, the pioneering works of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century showed the usefulness and dynamism of the market economy, and why—and particularly how—that dynamism worked. Smith's investigation provided an illuminating diagnosis of the workings of the market just when that dynamism was powerfully emerging. The contribution that The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, made to the understanding of what came to be called capitalism was monumental. Smith showed how the freeing of trade can very often be extremely helpful in generating economic prosperity through specialization in production and division of labor and in making good use of economies of large scale.

x x x

Even though people seek trade because of self-interest (nothing more than self-interest is needed, as Smith famously put it, in explaining why bakers, brewers, butchers, and consumers seek trade), nevertheless an economy can operate effectively only on the basis of trust among different parties. When business activities, including those of banks and other financial institutions, generate the confidence that they can and will do the things they pledge, then relations among lenders and borrowers can go smoothly in a mutually supportive way. As Adam Smith wrote:

When the people of any particular country have such confidence in the fortune, probity, and prudence of a particular banker, as to believe that he is always ready to pay upon demand such of his promissory notes as are likely to be at any time presented to him; those notes come to have the same currency as gold and silver money, from the confidence that such money can at any time be had for them.[1]

Smith explained why sometimes this did not happen, and he would not have found anything particularly puzzling, I would suggest, in the difficulties faced today by businesses and banks thanks to the widespread fear and mistrust that is keeping credit markets frozen and preventing a coordinated expansion of credit.

It is also worth mentioning in this context, especially since the "welfare state" emerged long after Smith's own time, that in his various writings, his overwhelming concern—and worry—about the fate of the poor and the disadvantaged are strikingly prominent. The most immediate failure of the market mechanism lies in the things that the market leaves undone. Smith's economic analysis went well beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education, and in poverty relief (along with demanding greater freedom for the indigents who received support than the Poor Laws of his day provided), he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy.

Lack of clarity about the distinction between the necessity and sufficiency of the market has been responsible for some misunderstandings of Smith's assessment of the market mechanism by many who would claim to be his followers. For example, Smith's defense of the food market and his criticism of restrictions by the state on the private trade in food grains have often been interpreted as arguing that any state interference would necessarily make hunger and starvation worse.

For the full article, click here.

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I wonder what my Ayn Rand-reading, capitalism purist American friends are thinking now that their government had to do that whole "bailout" thing.

Filmosophy

2009-03-05T06:54:00.000-08:00

Comic books are no longer the flimsy non-literature print they once used to be. What I once argued to a high school professor, is now part of reality and pop culture. Comic books are serious treasure mines for movies and deep plots. And now, some of the better books are turning filmography into a foray into Philosophy. Say for example, The Watchmen.

Reuters reports how The Watchmen has become a treasure trove for philosophy:

Superheroes don't just make fun characters for comic books and movies.

Their powers, and how they choose to use them, are philosophical treasure troves , and few are as rich and complicated as the protagonists in " Watchmen ," which opens in movie theaters around the world this week.

"'Watchmen' is an embarrassment of riches to the comics-obsessed philosopher," said Mark D. White, editor of the book "Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test ."

The book is one of a series that uses pop culture as an entry point to the sometimes abstract subject of philosophy.

Years in the making, "Watchmen" is the big-screen adaptation of the acclaimed 12-issue comic book series by Britons Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons published between 1986 and 1987.

Like the books, the movie is set in an alternative 1985 when the United States and the Soviet Union are on the brink of nuclear war. It features costumed vigilantes who have become so unpopular they are now outlawed.

But "Watchmen" is far from just popcorn entertainment. Its twisted superhero archetypes, like the tortured do-gooder Rorschach and brainy businessman Ozymandias , take time out from performing death-defying acts to muse on subjects like free will, savior figures and the politics of fear.

"In 'Watchmen,' the philosophy is so explicit that you don't have to dig very hard to find it," said White, an associate professor in the department of political science, economics and philosophy at the College of Staten Island.

For the full article click here.

On a related news, I have to thank my friend Philip all the way from Boston, MA for sending me this link. Fathom + Megan Fox = Me drooling.

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Rorschach rocks! Go watch The Watchmen people!

intelligence services and human rights

2009-03-01T00:35:00.000-08:00

Up over the legal site at JURIST,

UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism Martin Scheinin has called for greater protection of individual rights and increased oversight of intelligence agencies in a report to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council. The report... is critical of the weak supervision of intelligence agencies by national governments after the agencies were given increased power in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Scheinin's report particularly criticizes joint counterterrorism operations organized by the United States, the presence of foreign intelligence agents during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, and the use of non-traditional and extra-statutory powers to arrest, detain, and interrogate terrorism suspects. Scheinin concludes:

The increased powers of intelligence services to conduct measures that seriously interfere with individuals’ rights, as well as the increasing relevance of intelligence for legal and administrative actions, make it essential that adequate accountability mechanisms are put in place to prevent human rights abuses. Under international human rights law, States are under a positive obligation to conduct independent investigations into alleged violations of the right to life, freedom from torture or other inhuman treatment, enforced disappearances or arbitrary detention, to bring to justice those responsible for such acts, and to provide reparations where they have participated in such violations. States retain this positive obligation to protect human rights where they grant privileges within their national territory to another State, including to intelligence services.

The report recommends creating legislative intelligence oversight committees with wide-ranging investigative powers, increased transparency for the actions of intelligence agencies, and the creation and adoption by the UN High Commission for Human Rights of guidelines for human rights compliance and best practices for intelligence agencies.

Scheinin has been a vocal proponent of greater limits on the power of intelligence agencies to act with limited safeguards under the justification of national security. In October 2008, he urged the UN to restructure or eliminate the existing terrorist "blacklisting" system. In June 2008, he called on the US to set a concrete deadline for closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, a task accomplished in January 2009 by President Barack Obama. In May 2008, he urged Spain to reform its legal standards for the treatment of suspected terrorists.

Click here for the full report.

You may also be interested to know about U.S. law on Foreign Intelligence Gathering, here, and a recent case in the US Circuit Appellate Court on the issue of intelligence/state secrets privilege here.

In the case just mentioned, JURIST also reported that:

...a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied an appeal by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking to stop a lawsuit brought by an Islamic charity alleging it was the subject of an illegal wiretap by the National Security Agency (NSA). The denial upholds last month's ruling by US District Judge Vaughn Walker allowing the case brought by the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation to go forward. At the heart of the appeal was the Obama administration's fight to keep a classified document, a call log which allegedly shows the foundation had been wiretapped, secret. The call log had been deemed a state secret but Vaughn's decision had ordered the government to allow the foundation to view the document. The DOJ had argued that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would jeopardize national security. While the denial of the appeal appears to grant al-Haramain's lawyers access, the DOJ argued in a filing just hours after the appeals court ruling that the original order has no authority.

The document was accidentally released to Al-Haramain in 2004 during the DOJ's investigation which ultimately lead to the foundation being classified as a terrorist organization. The original lawsuit, filed by the foundation in February 2006, alleged that the NSA illegally taped several conversations between the charity and its lawyers. Walker had previously dismissed the suit, finding that Al-Haramain lacked a cause of action because the state secrets privilege trumped procedural requirements under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Full article here.

And on a related matter, in the OSI Forum, an audio recording was posted on a recent event hosted by The Open Society Institute and Asia Society that explored the changing landscape of Internet censorship. Special attention was given to the techniques employed by governments to co-opt and steer online discussions in ideologically convenient directions. Focusing on the specific cases of Russia and China, the panelists discussed how the strategies and tools of control, manipulation, and censorship have evolved in both countries.

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Intelligence, no State can exist without it. Human rights, no human community can survive without it.

I will side with the egg...

2009-02-22T22:58:00.000-08:00

Haruki Murakami, delivers a powerful speech in Israel:

I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.

Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

Click here for the full text.

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What if the egg, was Humpty Dumpty?

Are Academics Different?

2009-02-19T00:14:00.000-08:00

Stanley Fish in The New York Times:

That of course is the key question. Are academics different, and if so, in what ways, and to what extent do the differences legitimate a degree of freedom not enjoyed by the members of other professions? These and related questions were debated in Urofsky v. Gilmore (2000). In that case professors from a number of state colleges and universities in Virginia contended that their right of academic freedom was infringed by a law requiring state employers to gain permission from a supervisor before accessing sexually explicit materials on state-owned computers. Judge Wilkins, writing for the majority, treated the complaining professors as employees rather than as possessors of a special right, and observed that “It cannot be doubted that in order to pursue its legitimate goals effectively, the state must have the ability to control the manner in which its employees discharge their duties.” The professors had anticipated this reasoning and maintained that even if the law was “valid as to the majority of state employees, it violates the First Amendment freedom rights of professors at state colleges and universities.” Or, in other words, we understand the legal point, but it doesn’t apply to us, for we’re different.

For the full article, click here.

The Last Lecture

2009-02-11T21:13:00.000-08:00

Randy Pausch learned that he was terminally ill in September of 2006. He gave an upbeat and adage-laden lecture entitled "The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon, which became this popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture along the same theme, which became a New York Times best-seller.

He passed away last year, July 25, 2008.

Here's a transcript.

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"Make me earn it."

Religion and Human Rights

2009-02-10T21:40:00.000-08:00

Emanuel L. Paparella contemplates in Ovid magazine, the roots of inalienable human rights. In an article entitled, "The Religious Roots of Inalienable Human Rights: Universalism vs. Pluralism?," Paparella confronts the issue of where did human rights come from.

In fact, most ethical issues, including those of human rights, require a synthetic judgment, one in which we must join normative first principles to the concrete matrices of experience by which we know events and read the existing ethos of our lives – that concrete network of events, traditions, relationships, commitments and specific blends of connectedness and alienation which shape the "values" of daily experience and our senses of obligation. It is not a case of “either or” but one of “both and.” The classic traditions of case-study, as well as the modern strictures of court procedure, exemplify this joining: they require both a finding of law, which involves the critical reflection on juristic first principles behind the law, and a finding of "fact," which requires reliance on the experience-gained wisdom, often having to argue before a jury of peers. Moreover, they require an anticipatory assessment of the various consequences of various courses of action implied by a judgment about the interaction of principle and fact. Indeed, it is theologically paradigmatic that following the accounts of the Decalogue in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, surely prime example of universalistic abstract principles, the next several chapters are repositories of the casuistic results of the blending of the implications of those principles with the situations that people experienced concretely in their ethos. That joining rendered judgments that are held to contribute to the well-being of the common life and to the development of a morally righteous people. Similarly, much in the prophetic tradition makes the case against the infidelities of the people and/or the people in power by identifying the enduring principles in the covenants of old, the experience of social history in the present, and the prospects for a bleak, or a redeemed, future according to human deserts and divine mercy. And, for Christians specifically, to deny that any absolute universal can be connected to the realities of concrete historical experience in ways that lead to a redeemed future, is in fact a denial of the deepest insight of their faith: that Christ was both fully God and fully human, and that his life both fulfilled the commands of God, was concretely lived in the midst of a specific ethos, and nevertheless pointed to an ultimate future that we could not otherwise obtain.

For the full article, click here.

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On a related issue, a scientist, Mario Livio, asks: is God a mathematician? A Boston Globe author asks quite fundamental and skeptical questions: what is math? Why should its abstract concepts be so uncannily good at explaining reality? And more importantly, is math the language of the Universe... and of God?

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"I wonder if we could somehow have Max Weber discuss his notion of The Protestant Ethos and how it relates to the spirit of capitalism and then have Amartya Sen talk about Development as Freedom. We can almost expect Karl Marx to gate crash the party and turn the discussion upside down."

Dred Scott's Fight for Freedom

2009-02-08T00:31:00.000-08:00

Rights have to be fought for. Remembering Dred Scott:

Dred Scott first went to trial to sue for his freedom in 1847. Ten years later, after a decade of appeals and court reversals, his case was finally brought before the United States Supreme Court. In what is perhaps the most infamous case in its history, the court decided that all people of African ancestry -- slaves as well as those who were free -- could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit slavery in its territories. Scott, needless to say, remained a slave.

Born around 1800, Scott migrated westward with his master, Peter Blow. They travelled from Scott's home state of Virginia to Alabama and then, in 1830, to St. Louis, Missouri. Two years later Peter Blow died; Scott was subsequently bought by army surgeon Dr. John Emerson, who later took Scott to the free state of Illinois. In the spring of 1836, after a stay of two and a half years, Emerson moved to a fort in the Wisconsin Territory, taking Scott along. While there, Scott met and married Harriet Robinson, a slave owned by a local justice of the peace. Ownership of Harriet was transferred to Emerson.

Scott's extended stay in Illinois, a free state, gave him the legal standing to make a claim for freedom, as did his extended stay in Wisconsin, where slavery was also prohibited. But Scott never made the claim while living in the free lands -- perhaps because he was unaware of his rights at the time, or perhaps because he was content with his master. After two years, the army transferred Emerson to the south: first to St Louis, then to Louisiana. A little over a year later, a recently-married Emerson summoned his slave couple. Instead of staying in the free territory of Wisconsin, or going to the free state of Illinois, the two travelled over a thousand miles, apparently unaccompanied, down the Mississippi River to meet their master. Only after Emerson's death in 1843, after Emerson's widow hired Scott out to an army captain, did Scott seek freedom for himself and his wife. First he offered to buy his freedom from Mrs. Emerson -- then living in St. Louis -- for $300. The offer was refused. Scott then sought freedom through the courts.

Scott went to trial in June of 1847, but lost on a technicality -- he couldn't prove that he and Harriet were owned by Emerson's widow. The following year the Missouri Supreme Court decided that case should be retried. In an 1850 retrial, the the St Louis circuit court ruled that Scott and his family were free. Two years later the Missouri Supreme Court stepped in again, reversing the decision of the lower court. Scott and his lawyers then brought his case to a federal court, the United States Circuit Court in Missouri. In 1854, the Circuit Court upheld the decision of the Missouri Supreme Court. There was now only one other place to go. Scott appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court.

The nine justices of the Supreme Court of 1856 certainly had biases regarding slavery. Seven had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents from the South, and of these, five were from slave-holding families. Still, if the case had gone directly from the state supreme court to the federal supreme court, the federal court probably would have upheld the state's ruling, citing a previously established decision that gave states the authority to determine the status of its inhabitants. But, in his attempt to bring his case to the federal courts, Scott had claimed that he and the case's defendant (Mrs. Emerson's brother, John Sanford, who lived in New York) were citizens from different states. The main issues for the Supreme Court, therefore, were whether it had jurisdiction to try the case and whether Scott was indeed a citizen.

The decision of the court was read in March of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney -- a staunch supporter of slavery -- wrote the "majority opinion" for the court. It stated that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.

Full article up at PBS, here.

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Revaluation of values is a must in democratic experiment.

paperless newspaper

2009-02-04T19:36:00.000-08:00

Conrado de Quiros at Inquirer.net writes about the possibility of reading "newspapers" without the "paper." Well, this has been argued at least a minimum of 7 years ago. But Quiros makes it, in his seemingly Vitriol-induced style, compelling and persuasive to the immaculately insensitive Filipino crowd:

American newspapers are fighting back. Faced with falling revenues and failing readership, they’re pitching aggressively to get Americans reading newspapers again. In a full-page ad in The New York Times, Washington Post and other newspapers, a group called the “Newspaper Project” said: “More people will read a newspaper today than watched yesterday’s big game” — “big game” being a reference to last Sunday’s Super Bowl. It added: “With 100 million daily readers, newspapers are a tremendous scoring opportunity.”

“We acknowledge the challenges facing the newspaper industry in today’s rapidly changing media world,” says Donna Barrett, a member of Newspaper Project. “However, we reject the notion that newspapers — and the valuable content that newspaper journalists provide — have no future.”

The group has launched the website “to support a constructive exchange of information and ideas about the future of newspapers…. This website will be devoted to insightful articles, commentary and research that provide a more balanced perspective on what newspaper companies can do to survive and thrive in the years ahead.”

My first reaction when I read this was: Weren’t they struck by the irony of arguing for the cause of newspapers through a website? I myself think the days of newspapers are numbered, though I can’t say exactly when they will breathe their last. But if so, why should that be such a tragedy? Newspapers may go, but not so news and not so reading.

The problem really has to do more with companies than with the public. I caught a glimpse of this problem at the turn of the new century in a conference in Japan where editors of newspapers around the world complained of dwindling revenues because of competition from online news. Online news was cutting into their readership, which they could only expect to grow exponentially over the years. They themselves had their own online version out of necessity; the competition had it, so they had to have it too. The problem was that the online version did not yield ample advertising revenue, at least not yet. How long before it did, they did not know.

That is a problem, however, that has nothing to do with reading, as Newspaper Project tacitly acknowledges by maintaining a website where they can get readers to read their debates. Nor has it anything to do with the valuable content that journalists provide; the content remains just as valuable online as in print. The only difference between a newspaper and news online is the word “paper.” You can just as much read a “newspaper” in cyberspace as on pulp.

Of course, you hear arguments like there being nothing to compare with the feel and convenience of a newspaper. Like it is sheer pleasure holding a newspaper — or book — in your hands and smelling the sweet scent of fresh print. Also, you can read the newspaper in the john, you can’t read online there — unless you have a laptop, and that can get pretty messy. The same argument applies to books: You can read a book lying down, you can’t read a PC doing so.

Well, I suspect that was the same sensation felt by those who used the first books produced by Guttenberg. It was a letdown compared to the manuscripts produced by the monks, with the delicate parchments holding elaborate handwriting. Yet Guttenberg did not just revolutionize reading, he also revolutionized religion, his invention helping immensely to spread Protestantism through the publication of the Bible, the word of God thereto literally accessible only to priests. Today, books have become such a staple we cannot imagine reading without them. But we can, as books themselves proved.

For the full article, click here.

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I hope there comes a time when voters realize that they no longer need "representatives" in Congress to vote on a bill. They can do it by voting online on a bill. Direct democracy is possible through technology. Heck, they proved it possible through American Idol.

The First Liberal

2009-02-03T18:54:00.000-08:00

Having early morning coffee table discussions with Kat this morning, we turned towards the political and the religious. She was reading an essay from Mildred saying how the recipe she prepared tasted "As good as hell!" I said, there seems to be something wrong with that statement. How can it be good when it's correlated with "hell"? Long discussion ensued involving aphorisms, metaphors and idiomatic expressions. And I thought, that perhaps there's something right in that statement--perhaps in hell there are more beautiful people and in heaven more ugly ones. Being downright stereotypical and annoying, I was generalizing that most people who are nice are ugly and those who are beautiful not so nice. And so perhaps, there's more beautiful people in hell, and hell, that sounds like a good place. And hey, come to think of it--Lucifer, the famed ruler of hell, was never described as a horned reptilian creature, but was in fact, described as the most beautiful creature ever crafted by God, hence the moniker, "Morning Star." Another long discussion and we turned to the political side of the Fall-From-Heaven literature. I described how Lucifer was the first liberal. And Kat googled, "Lucifer" and "Lberal."

And this article came up as a top hit.

Lucifer, The First Liberal
The Wanderer ^ | March 6, 2002 | Dr. Arthur M. Hippler
Posted on Thursday, May 01, 2003 12:23:02 PM by Forgiven_Sinner

In his encyclical on The Nature of True Liberty (Libertas Praestantissimum), Leo XIII makes the remarkable claim that liberalism is diabolic in its origins. "But many there are who follow in the footsteps of Lucifer, and adopt as their own his rebellious cry, I will not serve; and consequently substitute for true liberty what is sheer and most foolish license. Such, for instance, are the men belonging to that widely spread and powerful organization, who, usurping the name of liberty, style themselves liberals" (Libertas Praestantissimum, n.14). Although the Holy Father’s comparison may seem hyperbolic, nonetheless the principles of liberalism mirror the Devil’s original revolt.

While many political opinions and projects are lumped together under the name of liberalism, we should remind ourselves of its most fundamental basis. As Leo XIII explains, liberalism begins with the rejection of both natural and divine law; the "followers of liberalism deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is the law to himself; from which arises that ethical system which they style independent morality" (LP, n.15). Morality comes neither from God nor human nature.

For the liberal, morality is created by the free choice of society. Whether one studies Hobbes or Rousseau, one finds no law higher than the human law. In the words of Pope Leo, "just as every man’s individual reason is his only rule of life, so the collective reason of the community should be the supreme guide in the management of all public affairs" (ibid.). This divorce of the moral law from politics affects our understanding of democracy up to the present day, as Pope John Paul notes in Evangelium Vitae (n. 70).

This rejection of God’s rule through the moral law is the sin of Lucifer. As St. Thomas explains, the Devil rejected the law of God for a disordered form of freedom: "The end of the Devil is the aversion of the rational creature from God; hence from the beginning he has endeavored to lead man from obeying the divine precept. But aversion from God has the nature of an end, inasmuch as it is sought for under the appearance of liberty, according to Jer. 2:20: ‘Of old time thou hast broken my yoke, thou hast burst my bands, and thou saidst, I will not serve’" (IIIa, Q.8, art.7).

This rebellion was imitated by our first parents, when they decided to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of God and Evil, and "be like God." While sharing in the divine image and likeness is part of our perfection, St. Thomas teaches that man desired this divine likeness in a disordered way by eating of the forbidden fruit: "The first man sinned chiefly by coveting God’s likeness as regards knowledge of good and evil, according to the serpent’s instigation, namely that by his own natural power he might decide what was good, and what was evil for him to do" (IIaIIae, Q.163, a.2). Here is the liberal principle in its first expression: Man alone should decide good and evil apart from God.

While many understand liberalism as a freedom for certain political equality and civil rights, more fundamentally liberalism is a freedom from the moral law and the teaching authority of the Church. One cannot speak of "Catholic liberals" without contradiction, or at the very least, equivocation. Liberalism, like socialism and Communism, has been condemned by Pope after Pope in the social encyclicals. If we are tempted to minimize the evils of this error, we would do well to remind ourselves that Pope Leo XIII presents Lucifer to us as the original liberal.

Originally posted here.

So there goes my early morning coffee. Back to work.

Oh. And going back to the topic, there's a book I read in college written by Erich Fromm, entitled "You Shall Be As Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition." Interesting read.

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Lucifer: "I shall not serve."

Narrator: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!"

Lucifer: [looks up at heaven]

Narrator: "For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: / I will ascend above the heights of the clouds..."

Lucifer: "...I will be like the most High."

Science and Democracy

2009-01-27T17:27:00.000-08:00

Dennis Overbye at The New York Times writes:

Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy

All right, I was weeping too.

To be honest, the restoration of science was the least of it, but when Barack Obama proclaimed during his Inaugural Address that he would “restore science to its rightful place,” you could feel a dark cloud lifting like a sigh from the shoulders of the scientific community in this country.

When the new president went on vowing to harness the sun, the wind and the soil, and to “wield technology’s wonders,” I felt the glow of a spring sunrise washing my cheeks, and I could almost imagine I heard the music of swords being hammered into plowshares.

Wow. My first reaction was to worry that scientists were now in the awkward position of being expected to save the world. As they say, be careful what you wish for.

My second reaction was to wonder what the “rightful place” of science in our society really is.

The answer, I would argue, is On a Pedestal — but not for the reasons you might think.

Forget about penicillin, digital computers and even the Big Bang, passing fads all of them.

The knock on science from its cultural and religious critics is that it is arrogant and materialistic. It tells us wondrous things about nature and how to manipulate it, but not what we should do with this knowledge and power. The Big Bang doesn’t tell us how to live, or whether God loves us, or whether there is any God at all. It provides scant counsel on same-sex marriage or eating meat. It is silent on the desirability of mutual assured destruction as a strategy for deterring nuclear war.

Einstein seemed to echo this thought when he said, “I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.” Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.

Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.

So the story goes.

But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

For the full essay, click here.

"Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend."

for the love of reading...

2009-01-24T20:17:00.000-08:00

Up and over at The Guardian, Virginia Woolf is given a space on her ruminations on reading:

At this late hour of the world's history books are to be found in every room of the house - in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. And in some houses they have collected so that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, valuable books in leather, cheap books in paper - one stops sometimes before them and asks in a transient amazement what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create, from passing my eyes up and down these innumerable lines of print? Reading is a very complex art - the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it.

One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.

The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly.

Full article, here.

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Reading is a sport. Is the next best thing to traveling. Is a process of communicating to persons long gone, of an era gone by. Is a way to live vicarious lives. When it's because of the job, it gets boring. When it's because you're a law student, it's frustrating.

the speechwriter

2009-01-21T22:34:00.000-08:00

Ed Pilkington in The Guardian:

When Barack Obama steps up to the podium to deliver his inaugural address, one man standing anonymously in the crowd will be paying especially close attention. With his cropped hair, five o'clock shadow and boyish face, he might look out of place among the dignitaries, though as co-author of the speech this man has more claim than most to be a witness to this moment of history.

Jon Favreau, 27, is, as Obama himself puts it, the president's mind reader. He is the youngest chief speechwriter on record in the White House, and, despite such youth, was at the centre of discussions of the content of today's speech, one which has so much riding on it.

For a politician whose rise to prominence was largely built upon his powers as an orator, Obama is well versed in the arts of speech-making. But today's effort will tower over all previous ones.

Read the full article here.

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Speechwriting for Obama: Cool.

President Barack Obama

2009-01-20T17:12:00.001-08:00

Barack Obama became President last night (+8, GMT) after winning over John McCain in last year's election. I was up until 3AM watching the Inauguration ceremony courtesy of cable tv and CNN. All the news channels, all the world, are monitoring. All eyes are on Obama. And when he spoke, all ears too, were on him. I have had been reading his speeches ever since I finished reading his book, Audacity of Hope.

The United States has had a lot of presidents, but as it has been said, they have never had an Obama. What the future holds, we can only make intelligent guesses and honest surmises--but one thing is certain--last night, I saw America shining with hope again. Because politics felt as it should be--a call for leadership and a process of selecting leaders who, hopefully, can cultivate hope, faith and love for a common goal. And politics, as it is the force that shape law, should be infused with the values that justify better social ends than purely individualistic pursuits.

Filled with constitutional theory jargon, social movement rhetoric, phrases and words of elevation, and more importantly, of genuinely arguing for the audacity of hope, here's what the new US President had to say during his Inauguration as the 44th President of the United States of America:

My fellow citizens:

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land – a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America – they will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.

The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions – that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions – who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them – that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works – whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control – and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart – not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.

And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more. Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort – even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment – a moment that will define a generation – it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence – the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed – why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

“Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Thank you. God bless you and God bless the United States of America. [End]

(Emphasis supplied).

Good luck, Mr. President Obama. May the force be with you.

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As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects man.

--Proverbs 27:19

slumdog millionaire

2009-01-19T17:09:00.000-08:00

I hate to admit it. But I watched a pirated copy of Slumdog Millionaire. The movie's not going to be shown here in the Philippines and the DVD will not be released anytime soon. Thankfully, there are ways available for Third World people to partake of the globalized opiate that is Hollywood, or in this case, Bollywood. If Hollywood is the high grade cocaine, then Bollywood's offer in Slumdog beat that high grade class. No wonder awards poured in favor of Slumdog.*

I just have to say it. This is the BEST MOVIE I have ever seen.** Well, maybe not the best in my lifetime. But enough to give me tearjerker moments and keep my nose glued to my laptop's screen.

I could almost feel Mumbai and I could relate seeing my Mumbai in Manila.

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* - Don't you just love it when art transcends and moves people? Sometimes I wonder if journal articles and scholarly work can ever have as much impact as movies in the society. Perhaps scholars and professors should study pop culture as a medium of instruction.

** - I agree with the movie's byline, this is the FEEL GOOD movie of the decade.

listen to the kids

2009-01-18T17:16:00.000-08:00

Scholars and journalists are having a writing frenzy trying to cover, explain and detail the Obama presidency. Some have even dubbed it as the Obama phenomenon. One writer explored What Obama Means. Jabari Asim thought Obama is the latest and most inspiring of a long line of "dedicated champions of black advancement." Because of Obama "it's becoming cool to be thoughtful, temperate and monogamous," writes Asim, and Americans "may come to associate blackness with brilliance, thoughtfulness, confidence, and radical optimism."

But in the middle of the noise and the thundering crowd, it may well be worth the new US President's time to listen to the children.

New York Times printed a cute and insightful report on letters written by kids aged 6 up to the new President.

The children... the best moral force old people can find.

ex libris et causa humanis

2009-01-12T23:26:00.001-08:00

There is much to be had by reading. I myself have found solace and freedom through books. The future of this country and the regions around us also long for the same freedom. This year’s Nobel Prize laureate for literature, the French-Mauritian novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, whom I must admit I’d never heard of before, until I chanced upon Butch Dalisay's blog, spoke of how books are ideal tools and a cause for optimism in human kind. If only they were read more, we'll have more writers. If only they can be made more affordable or publicly accessible--they can be tools for revolutions and liberation. They can reshape cultures and create better generations.

“Culture on a global scale concerns us all. But it is above all the responsibility of readers—of publishers, in other words. True, it is unjust that an Indian from the far north of Canada, if he wishes to be heard, must write in the language of the conquerors—in French, or in English. True, it is an illusion to expect that the Creole language of Mauritius or the West Indies might be heard as easily around the world as the five or six languages that reign today as absolute monarchs over the media. But if, through translation, their voices can be heard, then something new is happening, a cause for optimism. Culture, as I have said, belongs to us all, to all humankind. But in order for this to be true, everyone must be given equal access to culture. The book, however old-fashioned it may be, is the ideal tool. It is practical, easy to handle, economical. It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate. Its only flaw—and this is where I would like to address publishers in particular—is that in a great number of countries it is still very difficult to gain access to books. In Mauritius the price of a novel or a collection of poetry is equivalent to a sizeable portion of the family budget. In Africa, Southeast Asia, Mexico, or the South Sea Islands, books remain an inaccessible luxury. And yet remedies to this situation do exist. Joint publication with the developing countries, the establishment of funds for lending libraries and bookmobiles, and, overall, greater attention to requests from and works in so-called minority languages—which are often clearly in the majority—would enable literature to continue to be this wonderful tool for self-knowledge, for the discovery of others, and for listening to the concert of humankind, in all the rich variety of its themes and modulations.”

For the full lecture, click here.

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What was the last good book you read?

Watching the Court

2009-01-08T18:49:00.000-08:00

My friend Mildred Solis from Boston, MA, posted this article from US News and Reports.

Who Writes Decisions of the Supreme Court?
By William H. Rehnquist
This story originally appeared in the December 13, 1957, issue of U.S. News & World Report.

Each year some 18 young men who recently graduated from law school serve as clerks to the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Some of the mystery and rumor which shroud their work so far as the general public is concerned must necessarily remain. The clerk is primarily a trusted subordinate. Not only information as to how or why a particular decision came to be made—which by Court tradition is confidential—but much else by way of conversations and expressions of opinion on the part of the Justice ought not to be revealed on the initiative of the subordinate.

In addition, each clerk is in a position to offer only a worm's-eye view of the Justice-clerk relation. He will know well the system used by the Justice for whom he works, but his knowledge about the use to which other Justices put their clerks will necessarily be sketchy. I commit my limited knowledge of the nonconfidentialaspects of the system to public print because recent controversy about the Court's decisions may make it of general interest.

For the full article, click here.

Mildred also pointed out a DePaul Law Review article arguing along the same lines as C.J. Rehnquist. Here is the link to the DePaul Law Review article.

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It is admirable what Chief Justice William Rehnquist did in 1957, writing about the way things are, and calling a spade a spade. However, criticism may be leveled at him for humanizing the institution--something which has its advantages and disadvantages, and for bringing to light the Law Clerk institution.

Kill the Bill(ables)

2009-01-06T17:20:00.000-08:00

My mentor, the great NY lawyer Paolo Boado forwarded a very interesting essay from the Presiding Partner of Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP.

Evan R. Chesler writes at Forbes:

Kill the Billable Hour
Evan R. Chesler

I'm a trial lawyer. I bill by the hour. So do the associates who work for me. I have lots of clients, so I can pretty much work, and bill, as much as I want. This needs to be fixed. Yes, you read that correctly.

Clients have long hated the billable hour, and I understand why. The hours seem to pile up to fill the available space. The clients feel they have no control, that there is no correlation between cost and quality.

In truth, most of the lawyers I know don't like the billable hour either. For one thing, it is a subject of debate with clients. Because it's the most tangible metric they have of their lawyer's efforts, clients spend a lot of time analyzing, evaluating and even auditing it. Those efforts remind me of the old joke about the guy who looked for his missing keys under the street lamp, even though he dropped them across the street, because the light was better under the lamp.

The billable hour makes no sense, not even for lawyers. If you are successful and win a case early on, you put yourself out of work. If you get bogged down in a land war in Asia, you make more money. That is frankly nuts.

How much do I bill per hour? We don't make numbers public at Cravath, but you can assume I'm not cheap.

Contractors bill a lot, too. Last year my wife and I decided to put in a new kitchen. We called in a contractor (let's call him Joe). Joe arrived with a clipboard, measuring tape and calculator. We told him what cabinets and appliances we wanted. He measured and calculated. A few days later he came back with a price. We thought the price was fair and agreed to it. We didn't care how many hours Joe, or his electrician or his plumber, would be running their meters. That was Joe's problem; we had our price.

Now, I like to think that the kinds of cases I handle are more complex and more unpredictable than remodeling a kitchen. They may be. I'm sure Joe encounters his share of surprises, like unexpected pipes in inconvenient places and ancient electrical wires. He likely builds contingencies into his estimates, or at least he should. While it's still probably true that my cases are more likely to take longer and require more unexpected work than Joe's kitchens, that doesn't mean that my clients and I should be exiled to billable-hour purgatory.

So what am I proposing? For reasonable periods of time during the life of a lawsuit, say three months at a time, I should do what Joe does: identify the client's objectives, measure, calculate, build in a contingency and come back with a price. Once the price has been agreed upon, the billable hour should be irrelevant. The client will no longer be surprised by a whopper bill and met by the standard (albeit true) explanation that "litigation is unpredictable."

But because litigation is, in fact, unpredictable and usually takes longer to resolve than it does to remodel a kitchen, we should periodically revisit the price. The point should not be to achieve a "gotcha" for me or the client. The point is to devise a rational system that puts the incentives where they should be.

This does leave one big issue. How does the client know that I won't cut my efforts to the bone in order to avoid losing money (or, for that matter, to avoid an early victory)? The first answer is that clients should hire lawyers they trust. If they believe their lawyer will take a fall to make a buck, they should get another lawyer. But clients really do need something more tangible than trust.

Quality insurance should come in the form of a success fee. If I win, I should be rewarded. That's not only fair, it places the incentive where it belongs. It doesn't suffer from the soft idea that effort, even unsuccessful effort, should get an A. Winning is what deserves an A. I gave Joe a bonus for finishing our kitchen three weeks ahead of schedule.

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My current law practice does not involve billable hours, but back when I was in underbar practice and in my internship at a law firm, I had to do billable hours. I had to record my daily hours and for what case/account/client did I spend my hours (down to the minutes). It was unnerving and to some extent, I felt the whole brunt of Marx's critique of the free market system. I was a cog in a great legal machine. And I felt dispensable. I don't know how a change in legal fees would affect the legal system, but I surely would feel better. Might even entice me to work for a law firm.

debt and deficit for 2009

2009-01-04T21:49:00.000-08:00

For those of you who are optimistic about the country's future, think again.

Clarissa Batino reports over at Bloomberg, for all the world to see, how the Philippines is in need of more overseas money.

Philippines Considers Overseas Bond Sale for Deficit
By Clarissa Batino

Jan. 5 (Bloomberg) -- The Philippines is considering selling overseas bonds to finance increased government spending and a widening budget deficit, Treasurer Roberto Tan said.

The government received offers from seven banks including Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG, Tan said in a phone interview today in Manila. “We’re still evaluating the proposals and haven’t decided on the amount, tenor, pricing and timing,” Tan said.

The Southeast Asian nation in September announced plans to sell $1.5 billion in debt abroad in 2009, three times as much as last year, to fund economic stimulus spending and increase the supply of dollars during a global credit crunch. The government predicts the budget deficit will widen to the most in four years as revenue collection faltered because of slowing growth.

“If you need to borrow, now is the best time when the market is optimistic,” said Jonathan Ravelas, a Manila-based strategist at Banco de Oro Unibank Inc., which has more than $6 billion in assets under management. “Although it’s a bit expensive to borrow internationally, they’re making sure they have enough funds for the year.”

The yield on the benchmark 25-year dollar-denominated bonds has fallen four percentage points to 6.72 percent, after rising to a record 10.73 percent in October, according to ING.

The government predicts its budget deficit to rise to 102 billion pesos ($2.2 billion) this year from an estimated 75 billion pesos in 2008, when it only sold $500 million in debt overseas. The Philippines also aims to maximize loans from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank this year, Tan said in October.

Last year, Credit Suisse Group and Deutsche Bank AG helped the government sell $500 million, the Philippines’ smallest overseas bond issuance in a decade.

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Ninoy is just plain sad probably thinking about that Jon Bon Jovi song that aptly sums up what's on my mind right now: Say it isn't so.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung

2009-01-04T21:18:00.000-08:00

It's a German word coined during the counterculture dilemma faced by German scholars after the dreaded dark historical events were, well, painted as dark by the rest of the world. It means, "coming to terms with the past." And for me, this word has a very special meaning. Especially this year. As January's god, Janus had two-face, one to look at the past, the other to look forward, I hope to see through the eyes of the present looking forward.

Happy new year, everyone.

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Painting of Janus by Salamanderlich.

Anistonian Philosophizing

2008-12-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

Up over at 3quarksdaily, Jeff Strabone writes a philosophical essay using Jennifer Aniston as a focal point.

The Jennifer Aniston in All of Us

It would be easy to laugh off Jennifer Aniston's problems. She's rich, famous, and able to have her pick of nearly all the men of the world and all the scripts of Hollywood. And what she's famous for is being funny. Her television sitcom ran for ten years, her movie comedies are big money-makers, and, for what it's worth, there was even a hairstyle named after one of her characters. But something about her disturbs me deeply. To put it simply, Jennifer Aniston represents one of the worst traits of the human race: the inability to forget.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wrote important statements on forgetting, but I prefer the simplicity of Rodgers and Hart's 1935 classic 'It's Easy to Remember'. Imagine it in Frank Sinatra's 1957 recording on his Close to You LP, arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle:

Your sweet expression,
The smile you gave me,
The way you looked when we met,
It's easy to remember, but so hard to forget.

I hear you whisper,
'I'll always love you.'
I know it's over and yet,
It's easy to remember, but so hard to forget.

It is hard to forget, and all the more so when we fight it. Who wants to forget the way a lover's skin tastes, or the sounds she made, once the relationship ends and those sensations are no longer possible? Perhaps one reason we resist forgetting lovers, the special ones at least, is that we come to believe that we were better people with that person than we could be otherwise. It's not so much about losing them as it is about losing all that we were when we loved them. Without that special object of our affection, we fear lapsing into a heap of selfishness again.

But what if we had stayed together? Wouldn't we change anyway? Wouldn't we eventually forget, to paraphrase another great song from the 30's, why we ever tolerated the way he held his knife or the way she insisted on dancing 'til three? Love, unlike television, should not go out on a high note. When it does, it creates the illusion that one's bliss would have known no vicissitudes and that it can never be matched. Only by forgetting can we make ourselves available to what may come next and what, however inconceivable, may be even better.

...

What is really uncool is clinging to heartbreak and suffering, but can we help it? Kierkegaard said in Either/Or that forgetting is an 'art that must be practiced beforehand'. On the same subject, Nietzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals that

it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration.

The case of Jennifer Aniston shows us the shortcomings of both statements, for no matter how much we practice Kierkegaard's 'art' and no matter how universal Nietzsche's 'ability' or 'capacity' may be, we may not have that capacity when we need it most. And if that happens, we will be helpless.

There seems to be little rhyme or reason to what we can forget and what we can't. What accounts for the difference? There are cases all around us, and in our own experience perhaps, of the things we most needed to forget and simply could not. Some people have walked away from the horrors of war with hardly a mental scratch while others have collapsed irrecoverably from a dashed romantic hope, and vice versa. As much as we need to forget some things and as hard as we try, there is no telling which things any one individual will be utterly unable to forget.

Who has more opportunity and resources to aid forgetting than Jennifer Aniston? Yet she is the case par excellence of the inability to forget. It's depressing to know that, when we need that capacity or art or whatever it is, it may not be there. Does each of us have a peculiar susceptibility that only wants the proper event to break us for good?

...

The spectacle of Aniston's suffering raises all of these questions. We miss a valuable opportunity to reflect on our nature by mistaking her drama for a common tabloid row. Her case poses important questions, possibly unanswerable, that remind us of our own helplessness in the face of the unforgettable, however peculiar it may be.

For the full article, click here.

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This essay piqued my interest. I'm on my second season of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. (watching it on DVD, I got a boxed set as a gift from an officemate) and I can't believe I missed this series way back. But hey, I get to appreciate it more with my present age. I finally see the reason why Jennifer Aniston became popular. In this series she is funny and light. She's a nice girl all in all. Bad break ups notwithstanding.

Anyhow, this is my new year's resolution: to not be too serious and start living seriously. Overanalysis equates to paralysis.

It's the season for looking forward to the future and welcoming the new year with an embrace. Hope everyone's warm tonight.

tech on the table

2008-12-30T02:13:00.000-08:00

This table is Microsoft's Surface. I can't wait for this tech to become available in the market. Hopefully they come at a price consumers, of all classes, would be able to afford, so I can be assured of getting myself one. I can't wait to play with pics and stuff over the table.

Meantime, I can settle for this tabletop technology (see below) called the "iBar." It's simply a bartop where you can put your drinks and see glittery lights. Perfect for that apple mojito.

Happy and pleasant something everyone!

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Currently reading: Steve Berry, The Venetian Betrayal (2008).
Quote for the day: "Toil and risk are the price of glory, but it is a lovely thing to live with courage and die leaving an everlasting fame." -- Alexander the Great, Address at the Beas, cited in Alexander Chugg's The Quest for the Tomb of Alexander the Great (2004), p. 187.
Currently watching: DVDs of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Watching the series for the first time. Am now on second season, don't tell me about the "Ross and Rachel thing," it's discombobulating. Will move on to My Sassy Girl (the korean movie version) after season 2. I am getting my secondary degree education on the funnies.

samuel huntington dies

2008-12-28T15:40:00.000-08:00

Harvard Gazette reports the death of Samuel Huntington.

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I read his works intensely during my undergrad days, most particularly Clash of Civilizations. He was an influence in international relations theory. I unearthed him again during my graduate studies and remained amazed at how true his thoughts on world politics were.

feeling like a lone wolf...

2008-12-17T22:32:00.000-08:00

It's the season for merry making and I feel like living in a mountain. The drawing is randomly picked off from the net. I wish I could draw like that... I used to be able to do some line art but now, I have nothing to show.

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Happy something everybody.

paul krugman's nobel lecture

2008-12-14T18:45:00.000-08:00

View the video here and the slideshow here.

education and success

2008-12-14T18:27:00.000-08:00

It's the teacher, not the school. Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.

It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Full article here.

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I remember a professor of mine who once remarked: "There are two ways by which we measure a law school: one, we look at the faculty list, and two, we look at their law journal." How true.

But I would think that the greater problem in educational system would be the challenge of infrastructure. I could be wrong. Perhaps we can make do with the shade under the trees, as long as we have Socratic professors--in the noblest sense of being Socrates--one who loved to teach the student to teach himself. Ah, but it is the era of the political sophists and moneyed education.

Picture of a Philippine elementary public school, (c)Sidney Snoeck.

i has a hot dog

2008-12-11T00:22:00.000-08:00

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Point your browsers to: http://ihasahotdog.com like your life depended on it.

I guarantee you. You will love it.

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I just love dogs.

so the Pacman won

2008-12-07T19:10:00.001-08:00

On Inquirer.net, Pacquiao's winning over Dela Hoya topbills the headlines.

I somehow feel an undefined aftertaste as to how this match ended (it was analyzed by BBC to be either a Dream Match or a circus act). All I know for certain is that Pacquiao was declared a winner--and the future of the economy remains bleak. And that the Vice-President (who may become President of the Philippines, should GMA qualify for "constructive resignation") looked wrong being in the same crowd as Pacquiao's sweat, cut and towel managers.

Pacquiao will most certainly get a nudge-nudge, from politicians. Ah, politics and pugilism. Bloody. If there was any advice that these politicans should take a cue from, it would be from Dela Hoya: Quit at it.

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I would like to congratulate Mr. and Mrs. Kelvin Lester Lee for their marriage yesterday. I hope that last night, Kelvin outdid Dela Hoya, who lasted only until the 8th round.

number crunching decision making

2008-12-07T18:47:00.000-08:00

Larry Solum on the Legal Theory blog pointed me to an article by Brian Tamanaha (whose book, Law as Means to an End, is something I recommend for lawyers and critical social science scholars as a must) on the distorting slant of quantitative studies of judging.

Tamanaha argues that:

One of the hottest areas of legal scholarship today involves quantitative studies of judging. This article will attempt to shift the current orientation of this work by making two basic points. The first point is that the field was born in a collection of false beliefs and misunderstandings about the formalists and the realists which has distorted how political scientists have modeled judging and how they have designed and interpreted their studies. Rather than conduct an open inquiry into the nature of judging, political scientists set out to debunk formalism by proving that judging is infused with politics, a mission that warped the development of the field.

The second point is that the results of their studies below the Supreme Court strongly confirm what judges have been saying for many decades - that their judicial decisions are substantially determined by the law. Political scientists have tended to repress this finding, however, by focusing on the wrong point: repeating time and again that their studies show that politics matters without also emphasizing that it matters very little. A balanced realism about judging accepts that - owing to the uncertainty of law and the inherent limitations of human decision makers - it is inevitable that there will be a certain (minimal) degree of political influence in judicial decision making, but this does not detract from the broader claim that judges can and usually do rule in accordance with the law.

Recognition of these points will help nudge quantitative studies in a direction that promises to produce more accurate and valuable information about judicial decision making.

Tamanaha, Brian Z.,The Distorting Slant of Quantitative Studies of Judging(October 30, 2008). Boston College Law Review, Vol. 50, 2009; St. John's Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-0159. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1292459

For the full article, click here.

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I find it very interesting to view law and judicial decision making (of which business I am knowledgeable of) from the eyes of political scientists. Perhaps someday, judicial decisions ought to be studied from the perspective of emotive poets. I think they will offer better, more colorful, explanations.

when you smile, the world smiles with you

2008-12-05T23:56:00.000-08:00

Social network analysis, one of my favorite sociological methods have been developing quite fairly well.

In an interesting study done by Nicholas A. Christakis and James Fowler, it was found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. What it means is that a person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. It seems that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. Interestingly, they found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%. Hence, if you wanna be happy, hang out with happy people. (This should win an award for scientifically mapping out the obvious.)

Anyhow, here's what they both have to say in Edge:

SOCIAL NETWORKS and HAPPINESS

Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon...that when you smile, the world smiles with you.

Happiness is a fundamental object of human existence. To the extent that it is synonymous with pleasure, it could even be said to be one of the "two sovereign masters" that, Jeremy Bentham argued, govern our lives. The other master, lest we forget, is pain.

Our happiness is determined by a complex set of voluntary and involuntary factors, ranging from our genes to our health to our wealth. Alas, one determinant of our own happiness that has not received the attention it deserves is the happiness of others. Yet we know that emotions can spread over short periods of time from person to person, in a process known as "emotional contagion." If someone smiles at you, it is instinctive to smile back. If your partner or roommate is depressed, it is common for you to become depressed.

But might emotions spread more widely than this in social networks—from person to person to person, and beyond? Might an individual's location within a social network influence their future happiness? And might social network processes—by a diverse set of mechanisms—influence happiness not just fleetingly, but also over longer periods of time?

We recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal that addressed these questions. We studied 4,739 people followed from 1983 to 2003 as part of the famous Framingham Heart Study. These individuals were embedded in a larger network of 12,067 people; they had an average of 11 connections to others in the social network (including to friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors); and their happiness was assessed every few years using a standard measure.

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.

Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon...that when you smile, the world smiles with you.

Click here for the full article.

For the medically inclined and the sociological scholar, you may want to read the boring but educational full journal article in the British Medical Journal here.

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I used to think of networks as power conduits in realistic political theory as well as circuitry of accumulation in political economy, well, it has me smiling thinking of its health benefits and its proof that there are reasons why human beings need other human beings.