Category Archives: global

Happy Deepavali

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Thoth - India Festival Of Light

A float in the Krewe of Thoth parade - Mardi Gras 2008

Apropos of the reason for this Hindu festival: Questions Lit Up, in which Pratap Bhanu Mehta takes on the Delhi University ban on teaching A.K. Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana and chides the Indian left and right for hijacking the culture for political gain.

… The Right commits the mistake of assimilating all tradition to one single glob, undifferentiated, where nuances don’t matter. But equally, the so-called Left has created intellectual divisions and categories of understanding that bear no relation to the texts at hand.

Now Showing At Homeland Insecurity Theater

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Remember when TSA had this program and then cancelled it? Yeah, they’re resurrecting it. I would say Hallelujah but who knows whether it will make it out of the (second) trial?

Pilot Starts at Select Airports to Further Enhance Security

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) [on October 4th, 2011] announced that it began testing a limited, voluntary passenger pre-screening initiative with a small known traveler population at four U.S. airports.

… During this pilot, TSA will use pre-screening capabilities to make intelligence-based risk assessments on passengers who voluntarily participate in the TSA PreCheck program and are flying domestically from one of the four pilot sites: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County, Dallas/Fort Worth International and Miami International airports. Eligible participants include certain frequent flyers from American Airlines and Delta Air Lines as well as members of the Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP’s) Trusted Traveler programs, including Global Entry, SENTRI, and NEXUS, who are U.S. citizens and are flying on participating airlines. If successful, TSA plans to expand the pilot to include additional airlines, as well as other airports that participate in CBP’s Global Entry program, once operationally ready.

As a Global Entry customer, I cannot say enough good things about how efficiently the program gets you into the country after international trips. No standing in an hour-long line for a CBP/INS agent to stamp you through – just scan your passport, have your fingerprints and picture taken and off you go. It saved me from missing a crucial, cross-country connecting flight once.

Once you get to the domestic terminal, however, the system falls apart. All that Trusted Traveler stuff is out the window and, if you opt out of the millimeter-wave scanner as I often do, you are ripe for non-standard groping and explosive checks by a domestic TSA agent. The program that lets you into your own country doesn’t work in your country. The Department of Homeland Security was formed to reduce departmental redundancy and waste, merge databases and increase cross-organizational cooperation and overall efficiency. So, why in the name of “eliminating government waste” don’t CBP and TSA processes talk to one another? And why am I treated like a pariah in my own country, and especially after I went through the pains and paid to be pre-approved as a low-risk traveler?

All of this went through my mind in Hobby airport last week when, for the very first time in all my years of flying and patdowns, my nether region was rather unprofessionally and vigorously probed and patted down by a burly, female TSA agent before I got on a routine flight to Dallas. (Which incidentally was grounded and cancelled due to inclement weather in the north – figures.)

But, what really gets me comes from this last sentence in Mominem’s latest post on this same topic: “I don’t expect any airline to be able to block anyone from using government services we all pay for.” Mominem is a preferred AirTran customer and he was kept from the PreCheck line by a Delta gate agent who gave access to that line to preferred Delta customers. Leaving aside for a minute the defeat of purpose in allowing airline gate agents to have anything to do with security pre-screening, that entire barrier between the passenger and the flight gate was made possible by the taxpayer. Security priority and better treatment given to those who have flown more miles with a private airline and/or have had to pay extra to become a trusted traveler seems cross purposes when the intent and follow-through should be standard, courteous and timely service for all, regardless of race, age, gender, number of frequent flyer miles. Anything less makes me wonder how seriously our government-security complex takes this whole business.

My question is quickly answered when O’Hare TSA pulls aside a passenger for wearing this Pardon My Hindi tshirt.

A Hindu Iyengar uncle in hipster glasses and fedora? Too suspicious, yaar!

Hack Your Town

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“If guns are about power, then hacking is about secret knowledge, and knowledge is also power.” – Charlie Stross in The Fear Factory

“Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.” – H. Jackson Brown

Chicago Trib news app developer leaves Chicago and moves to small town of Tyler, Texas to be a responsible parent. Instead of mostly moaning about life in the boondocks (and, unlike D and me, who used to simply leave Smalltown Ohio for other actual cities), said developer uses his experience to “improve the things [he doesn't] like, either through application of will or technology or both.” Enter Hack Tyler.

Tyler has information that could be freed. Tyler has government that could be opened. Tyler has news that could be hacked. Moreover, Tyler has an almost completely unexploited market. There are no hackers there. The small number of high-tech businesses that exist in the region are either web development shops serving local businesses or robotics companies.

… Is this all going to go off without a hitch? Not a chance. I expect to spend many nights being painfully underwhelmed with the place and with myself, but this is the best way I know how to deal with it.

So far, Christopher Groskopf (@onyxfish) has changed Tyler’s bus transit system from an online PDF to Tyler On Time. And then the city announced they are overhauling the system and routes with it. While (I guess) that project is on hold, Groskopf is now looking at what to do with the city’s demographic and other data.

To be honest, what grabs me about Hack Tyler is not at all Future Boy Brings Fire To Australopithecus And Amuses Himself In Process, but this guy’s surrender to his circumstances as a divorced father. Once you make that decision to be present in your reality and your child’s life, keeping yourself occupied, going and useful comes with the territory, I suppose. And he admits that it is terribly hard. Good parents have always been a heartening puzzle to me – they selfishly procreate and then spend the rest of their lives willing to give those very lives for their children if necessary. When the aliens come and ask why we must be spared, I will point towards parents. That will keep them busy.

What also tickles me is this statement from the O’Reilly Radar interview: “Texas has a history of transparency projects that I was unaware of.” We’re working on cool projects NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT. Solid. Also, no one tell Rick Perry.

I’m A Dirty, Dark Tamilian

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Oh, she actually meant dirty. From IndiaTV:

A US diplomat was caught in a row after her remarks of “dirty and dark” Tamilians, prompting the American consulate [in Chennai] to term them as “inappropriate”.

“I was on a 24-hour train trip from Delhi to Orissa. But, after 72 hours, the train still did not reach the destination… and my skin became dirty and dark like the Tamilians,” US Vice-Consul Maureen Chao said, going down the memory lane two decades ago when she was a student.

So, of course, that IndiaTV article shows a rare picture of many dark-skinned Tamilians getting dusty while traveling by foot in the hot sun.

Why would Maureen Chao, who otherwise seems like a fairly decent person say those words and in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, for cripes sake? And what the hell was she thinking saying this in a country in which self-loathing about skin color is #1 pastime after cricket pathology? (Has anyone made a bar chart of Fair And Lovely sales by Indian state yet?)

Kuzhali Manickavel puts it the best. [Inserting reminder to self to get her new short story.]

… I am also very much louing the illustrious people who are taking the high road on this one, kindly educating the rest of us on how us Indians should consider that an apology has been issued so that makes everything ok, it was ‘just a joke’ and most importantly, we should remember that all of us want to study in America and then live there forever and ever and that is FAR more important than some diplomat saying something about Tamilians being dark and dirty. You’ll never get that green card honey if you upbraid US consulate peeps. Come on now, eyes on the prize.

Meanwhile, in England, rioting “whites have become black” and The Help is screened at the White House.

Better get on making those mixed-race babies and quick.

“Honest Debate”

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Juan Williams was on the Bob Edwards show yesterday promoting his new book. He stated again that people in Muslim garb in airports do frighten him (without any caveat this time) and that his saying this is part of Honest Debate.

If you’re truly interested in such debate, the first rule is to question the validity of your premise beforehand.

The Muslims who conducted the 9/11/2001 attacks were wearing button-downs and khakis, while the people who held Mumbai hostage in November of 2008 wore jeans and tshirts. Unless you’re actually in, say, Basra or the Swat valley, your chances of being attacked by a person in a dishdash or chador are slim to none. Not only is this a horribly inefficient method of profiling, the attitude is also extremely silly. My aunt had “dothead” yelled at her in New Jersey by a man tattooed with a German Iron Cross, while a fellow geophysicist of Indian origin was recently beaten up in London by a bunch of punk thugs wearing Union Jack tshirts and bandanas as they referred to him as a “Paki.” These are attacks that occur almost everyday in the western world. At the gym the other day, I saw a guy with a giant iron cross tattooed on his right leg. A colleague put up the British flag in his office. By all rights, I should be frightened by these outward symbols of identity, correct? If I had then gone on the Rachel Maddow show and freaked out about it, I would have been laughed off the set.

The best way to fight fundamentalism is to get rid of it in yourself first. Each time I hear paranoid squawks about the growing Islamization of the West, I don’t fear Muslims. All I think is, “Hey, these guys sound exactly like those old mullahs in Kuwait who fumed and incited their young over the growing Westernization of the East.” Don’t sound like a fanatical mullah, for starters.

Next time: “Collective guilt” for you, but not for me.

Québec City Was Founded On A High Cape Of Utica Shale

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Map of French Québec City's fortifications on bedrock relief (North is conveniently to the bottom right)

Québec City sits between the Laurentian highlands of the southeastern Grenville Province of the Canadian Shield and the Appalachian Mountains that were formed during the Taconic and Acadian orogenies. Bedrock here is the Upper Ordovician Utica shale that “overlies the predominantly shallow marine carbonate facies of the Cambrian-Ordovician St. Lawrence Platform” (or St. Lawrence lowlands).The adjacent St. Lawrence River, which I gather formed post-Pleistocene glaciation by cutting into the relatively less-resistant sedimentary rocks sandwiched between the Laurentians and the Appalachians, is part of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Seaway system.

As a sign by one of the many higher-up river outlooks explains, the land beneath Quebec City was not chosen by the French because of the overwhelming tectonics over an equally stupefying period of time that created it but purely for defense strategic reasons. To each their own time scale.

In a time-traveling nutshell: Canadian Shield forms the core of the North American continent –> happy passive margin forms with the buildup of a carbonate platform and the transgression of the sea –> BAM BAM Taconic and Acadian continental collision events creating the Appalachian mountains –> some quiet time as the Atlantic Ocean forms to the east –> glaciation from the north –> glacial retreat –> uplifted Québec City and associated river –> some French dude named Samuel de Champlain surveys the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence area, claims the high cape of Québec City and territory all the way from north of Minnesota down to and including Louisiana for New France in 1608 and his people put up a bunch of ramparts against, well, everyone –> the Brits take over in 1763 –> Canada forms in 1868 and tells everyone to sod off in exchange for putting limey monarchs on its currency –> Canadian geologists find economic natural gas in the Utica shale. (Someone call They Might Be Giants and set this to music.)

Related reading:

Texan Whiplash

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Yesterday’s Houston Chronicle:

Texas’ main electric grid operator is warning customers to reduce their usage during the peak power demand hours of 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. today as high temperatures and unexpected power plant outages will stretch supplies.

Today on Capitol Hill:

An amendment from Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) defunding the Energy Department’s standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs to be 30 percent more energy efficient starting next year was approved rather anticlimactically by voice vote.

Cut off nose, meet spited face.

Mumbai Bombed Again

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There’s a very high probability that all of you who read this blog know about the IED blasts across Mumbai yesterday that claimed 18 lives, injured many others and has understandably increased the stress levels of an already put-upon city. Just imagining a surviving Mumbaikar thinking “It could have been me or someone I love” and “When will it happen again?” makes me want to turn off this computer and go hide in a cellar for the rest of my days. They’ve been through five bombings in the last fifteen years and could just as easily flip out like we have and would. But, the resilience and the way they’ve come together in the last 24 hours. It’s humbling.

I am so glad my fellow Vatul, Harini, and hers are safe. She writes:

Near my house – a little shop open. Most businesses were. Even those that didn’t need to be. When terror strikes – and I have been back in Mumbai since 1994 and have lived through quite a few – there is this really inexplicable sentiment that kicks in – I won’t let the Bastards cow me down. It is not just me – every one I knew was out and about. And not strangely, not many of us got too much work done. The turning up was the symbolic F*** U – both to the terrorists and the system.

Sepia Mutiny has a collection of reactions to the blasts. Here are some that stand out and give Americans perspective, especially considering that happenings east of here are more crucial to our future than our all-Casey-Anthony-all-the-time “news” cycle provides. Some of it also sounds remarkably familiar in terms of how the government-public safety apparatus of some American cities work.

… Now that the USA and the west have come to their senses with regard to the reality of Pakistan, now that the USA will not pour more and more billions into Pakistan, now that the USA will no longer cover Pakistan’s back at the United Nations, now there is hope that slowly but surely the world, and India, can take action against Pakistan without having to worry about the reaction of the USA, the great protector of Pakistan for the last 50 years and more. The pusher to Pakistan the addict.

… Please remember that India has more than 140 million Muslims. For a Muslim population of that size, India is remarkably free of terrorist attacks.

… A lot of it has to do with the underworld take-over of Mumbai politics and even the police … Summary: a non-functional police and intelligence operation, mostly focused on extracting rent from real estate transactions, which are otherwise all “illegal” due to various bizarre rules and laws.

… the point is unless people get to know that region better, they are in no position to judge our 2012 [candidates'] readiness in combating foreign problems.

Also read: The online samaritan who tried to help Mumbai