Russia-gate in perspective

Russia-gate Is No Watergate or Iran-Contra by Robert Parry:
 "By contrast, Russia-gate has been a “scandal” in search of a specific crime."

A short film by Satyajit Ray

Two a film fable

Different perspectives on Syria

Dispatch From the Middle East: U.S. Buildup All About Iran from The American Conservative
U.S. Retreats From Al-Tanf - Gives Up On Occupying South East Syria from Moon of Alabama
Syria: Russians alarmed, Washington Befuddled, by White House threats from Juan Cole
Check also the Links before about oil vs gas.
P.S. Another Trump courts war riskst with Iran by Paul R. Pillar

Polish refugees in India 1942-48

Several links here Polish refugees in India 1942-48

Nivedita Majumdar's analysis some writers on subaltern resistance

In Silencing the Subaltern Resistance & Gender in Postcolonial Theory seems quite incisive. But I am not too sure about her conclusions about going back to class conflict more clearly formulated in Why We're Marxists.Both worth reading I think though I have problems with analyses using classes. Here is a speech by her https://youtu.be/u2i583cJs9M One can find classes and class conflicts small big in many places throughout history. But it seems more amorphous and not that generally applicable all the time and keeps changing with the same person. The analysis by Nivedita seems to ignore human nature ( but Marx does not), qualities like status seeking, how the same person can be a worker at one stage and capitalist next.And then conspicuous consumption from those who cannot afford it because it happens all the time. It happens both in the east and in the west, for example wedding expenses. What she outlines covers a large swathe of what is happening but the actors keep shifting to different classes even if we ignore the multiple identity scenario. Are there any solutions? Bhaskar Sunkara suggests "Some broad outlines should already be clear: Worker-owned cooperatives, still competing in a regulated market; government services coordinated with the aid of citizen planning; and the provision of the basics necessary to live a good life (education, housing and health care) guaranteed as social rights. In other words, a world where people have the freedom to reach their potentials, whatever the circumstances of their birth." in Socialism's future may be its past. These days when one disruption on one corner of the world can affect many other corners, I think that we need this kind of local protection schemes to survive global onslaughts.
P.S.A discussion of Why libertarians should read Marx by Chris Dillow. I would add that at least indirectly, one should try to get an idea of what Marx said and tried to say and changes in his thinking. There may be short cuts which I tried to follow, reading articles and short books like 'Why read. Arc today?' By Jonathan Wolff and various posts in the blog 'Understanding Society' of Dan Little.

Perala Ratnam

Around 1970 (+-), I met Bharati Ashok Ratnam in TIFR, Bombay. He actually met me because he was friend with Nagisetti V, Rao who was classmate of mine from 1954-56. Bharati Ratnam's mother Kamala came from an influential family in U.P. He was very Hindu oriented and wanted Hindus to rule India and also said that he would soon be the director of TIFR. He said his father Perala Ratnam was from Perala, not too far from my native place and expected that his father to have ancestral properties which he hoped to repossess but the family has been out of touch with relatives in Perala. I said that the name suggested Christian background, that he probably came from poor Dalit background and may be that is why he never went back. Yesterday I met a Christian school teacher from Andhra in Melbourne. He remembered the name since it was the name of one of the few Christians who made it from that area.
The Wikipedia in French Perala Ratnam gives some information on him. He was the Indian ambassador to a few countries and it also leads to a list of books written or edited by him  Here. He seems to be a very talented man who wrote on diverse topics sadly unknown in the place of his worth. Curiously, there is also a mathematics article Algebraic Functions from 1949 published in 1949 in Tokyo attributed him. The Wikipedia page says that he was in Tokyo during that period. Perhaps, it was done by him as some sort of hobby.
I could not find about any more about him or his family. His son married a lady working in the library of TIFR and they migrated to USA. He passed away in 2015 at the age of 70. I met his father in Bombay as well as Delhi. He had one sister. I do not know whether Perala Ratnam is alive now, if he is he would be around 105. I do not know about his wife though at one time I heard she had a brother who was film actor.
So that is the little bit I know about a talented man who was an inspiration to a few young poor Christians in Andhra long ago. If I get to know any thing more about him, I will post again.

P.S. I contacted Rao Nagisetty who met Perala Ratnam several times in Moscow, that was where he was friends with the son Bharati Asok Ratnam. Rao tells me that it is the same Perala Ratnam who wrote the mathematics article mentioned above.

Recent news about Gobekli Tepe

Dead heads: Turkish site reveals more evidence of neolithic 'skull cult' :"The grooves and holes cut purposefully into skulls are far less ornate than the beautiful carvings of people and animals that decorate limestone pillars at the site, leading scientists to suspect that they were not for show, but instead helped others to string the skulls up with cord. 

Those who spent time at the site – there is little evidence people lived there – may have commemorated their ancestors by suspending their skulls, or displayed the skulls of their enemies. “They think the power from the dead is going to the living,” said Gresky."

Chance encounters

A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World "June Huh thought he had no talent for math until a chance meeting with a legendary mind. A decade later, his unorthodox approach to mathematical thinking has led to major breakthroughs."
Excerpt:
"When Huh was 24 and in his last year of college, the famed Japanese mathematician Heisuke Hironaka came to Seoul National as a visiting professor. Hironaka was in his mid-70s at the time and was a full-fledged celebrity in Japan and South Korea. He’d won the Fields Medal in 1970 and later wrote a best-selling memoir called The Joy of Learning, which a generation of Korean and Japanese parents had given their kids in the hope of nurturing the next great mathematician. At Seoul National, he taught a yearlong lecture course in a broad area of mathematics called algebraic geometry. Huh attended, thinking Hironaka might become his first subject as a journalist.

Initially Huh was among more than 100 students, including many math majors, but within a few weeks enrollment had dwindled to a handful. Huh imagines other students quit because they found Hironaka’s lectures incomprehensible. He says he persisted because he had different expectations about what he might get out of the course.

“The math students dropped out because they could not understand anything. Of course, I didn’t understand anything either, but non-math students have a different standard of what it means to understand something,” Huh said. “I did understand some of the simple examples he showed in classes, and that was good enough for me.”

After class Huh would make a point of talking to Hironaka, and the two soon began having lunch together. Hironaka remembers Huh’s initiative. “I didn’t reject students, but I didn’t always look for students, and he was just coming to me,” Hironaka recalled."

Huh tried to use these lunches to ask Hironaka questions about himself, but the conversation kept coming back to math. When it did, Huh tried not to give away how little he knew. “Somehow I was very good at pretending to understand what he was saying,” Huh said. Indeed, Hironaka doesn’t remember ever being aware of his would-be pupil’s lack of formal training. “It’s not anything I have a strong memory of. He was quite impressive to me,” he said.

Continuation of oil wars

: F. William Engdahl Has Washington Lost the Middle East After Qatar?:"There is a hidden thin red thread connecting the recent US Congress’ sanctions against Iran and now the Russian Federation, with the decision of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies to sanction Qatar. That red thread has nothing to do with a fight against terrorism and everything to do with who will control the largest natural gas reserves in the world as well as who will dominate the world market for that gas."
Check also Daniel Yergin's work on oil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Yergin and Not all fossil fuels are going extinct.

Blindsight

What triggers that feeling of being watched?

Advice about reading scientific papers for non-scientists

How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists from LSE. Difficult to follow on more than one topic. Sometimes, the article comes attached with comments by other experts and responses by the author like this Agricultural Deskilling and the Spread of Genetically Modified Cotton in Warangal
But over time, I found it difficult even to read such paper. Now a days, I seem to be generally following some experts and follow their work on a trial basis. Off and on I read long reports like this by David Andow on BT brinjal http://gmwatch.org/files/Andow_Report_Bt_Brinjal.pdf

UP police woman Shrestha Thakur

http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/up-police-woman-officer-stands-up-against-angry-bjp-workers-like-a-true-dabang-324579.html

Peculiar hotel rules

New addition to peculiar Indian hotel rules: Hyderabad hotel won't take single ladies as customers
Some of her writings here and here.

A smidgen of hope

"...history is not stained with blood spilled by animosities between partisans for broccoli versus cauliflower." from
Why your brain hates other people? By Robert Sapolsky with the subheading 'And how to make it think differently'.
But These boys got the same haircut so their teacher 'wouldn't be able to tell them apart.'

Tyler Cowan interview of Raj Chetty

Here. An excerpt:
"COWEN: If I’m trying to model the Raj Chetty production function and I described it as such, it’s a multiplicative model, so there is getting the data, but that’s not the key point.

CHETTY: That’s not the key point.

COWEN: There’s then some conceptual advance that allows you to see the data can test something that other people hadn’t seen, and then there are numerous stages of execution, and then there’s also recruiting and managing the team. There’s a whole bunch of different steps, and you’re trying to do well at each of them and very few other people can do well at each and every one, and maybe that’s the way to think about your moat. Is that fair to say?

CHETTY: That is our strategy. I think the other thing that’s extremely important is, we spend a lot of time on trying to achieve clarity. There are ways to write papers in economics that are more accessible to the public and thereby have greater impact, and there are ways to write papers that are more technically oriented and narrow the set of readers."

P.S. I thought it was me who gave Raj his first computer. He seems to have forgotten. From an interview with his father, it was a Sinclair and he was three at that time.

Empowerment for the relatively privileged.

The poem 'Chopping Onions' is making rounds and drawing praise from other relatively privileged and successful people. It is one of the poems here. Recitation around 21:00 Here, may give an idea of the groups interested in such things.
The choice for the less privileged "Cut to the the 21st century. The latest census figures list only 32.8 per cent women formally as primary workers in the agricultural sector, in contrast to 81.1 per cent men. But the undeniable fact remains that India’s agricultural industry, which employs 80 to 100 million women, cannot survive without their labour. From preparing the land, selecting seeds, preparing and sowing to transplanting the seedlings, applying manure/fertilisers/pesticides and then harvesting, winnowing and threshing, women work harder and longer than male farmers.

Maintaining the ancillary branches in this sector, like animal husbandry, fisheries and vegetable cultivation, depends almost solely on women. So where are these women while the male farmers and their kakas furiously debate the future of farming, loans, subsidies and irrigation matters? Men get more than their share of visibility on TV, in governmental publicity material and within the banking sectors but millions of women farmers have no spokesperson from their ranks." from

The invisible women farmers

Another on the long term effects in development

“THE DEVELOPMENT EFFECTS OF THE EXTRACTIVE COLONIAL ECONOMY,” M. DELL & B. OLKEN:
"Are you surprised by these results? They fascinate me, honestly. Think through the logic: forced labor (in the surrounding villages) and extractive capital (rail and factories built solely to export a crop in little use domestically) both have positive long-run local effects! They do so by affecting institutions – whether villages have the ability to produce public goods like education – and by affecting incentives – the production of capital used up- and downstream. One can easily imagine cases where forced labor and extractive capital have negative long-run effects, and we have great papers by Daron Acemoglu, Nathan Nunn, Sara Lowes and others on precisely this point. But it is also very easy for societies to get trapped in bad path dependent equilibria, for which outside intervention, even ethically shameful ones, can (perhaps inadvertently) cause useful shifts in incentives and institutions!"

Another quote "But it is also very easy for societies to get trapped in bad path dependent equilibria, for which outside intervention, even ethically shameful ones, can (perhaps inadvertently) cause useful shifts in incentives and institutions! "

From facebok feed

Robin Hanson feels his age

I turn 58 soon, and I’m starting to realize that I may not live long enough to finish many of my great life projects. 
His Home page : And I'm not a joiner; I rebel against groups with "our beliefs", especially when members must keep criticisms private, so as not to give ammunition to "them".
Next book The elephant in the brain, its detailed outline 

On religious extremism

Religious extremism: the good, the bad, and the deadly by Lawrence R Iannaccone
  and Eli Berman from 2005-2006

 Abstract: This paper challenges conventional views of violent religious extremism, particularly those that emphasize militant theology. We offer an alternative analysis that helps explain the persistent demand for religion, the different types of religious that naturally arise, and the special attributes of the “sectarian” type. Sects are adept at producing club goods – both spiritual and material. Where governments and economies function poorly, sects often become major suppliers of social services, political action, and coercive force. Their success as providers is much more due to the advantages of their organizational structure than it is to their theology. Religious militancy is most effectively controlled through a combination of policies that raise the direct costs of violence, foster religious competition, improve social services, and encourage private enterprise.

 A recent discussion about British politics which partly uses the above paper
Irrational politics: is it about signalling?

Check also Eli Berman