Mr. Brown Goes Around

Mini-Review: My Life in Hawai'i

2012-02-11T02:00:00.000-08:00

I wanted to put together a quick blog just to high light what today was like with the hopes that most of the coming days will look a lot like this now that everything has fallen into place from work hours, living arrangements, ID validations to bus schedules.

Today's mini-review:

Up at 4AM, reviewed the Southeast Asian news, Twittered the Southeast Asian news (and got a really nice message from a Khmer American telling me I was the best single source for news from the “homeland), had a Skype (online telephone) conversation, talked to my wife in Cambodia. My "first breakfast" is a banana, a tall glass of water, and two cups of local coffee with milk.
Out the door by 5:30: Ran two miles.
In the UH gym from 6-6:45AM for the first time since I got here. I couldn't get my university ID validated until Tuesday of this week because of a long story having to do with my scholarship I won't go into.
At home working 7:15AM-12:30PM. I had my "second breakfast" which was basically another banana, some yogurt and a glass of milk. Around noon I made lunch--a half serving of buckwheat soba with a dipping sauce, local kim chi, a local salad of greens and baby carrots, and a red bell pepper, and a half a serving of cottage cheese. And, I also made a new batch of Greek yogurt. It is very simple. First, make your own yogurt. Then, strain it with cheese cloth. For about $2.50 you can make 16 ounces of Greek yogurt yourself rather than paying $10.99 here in Honolulu. And if you start with organic milk . . . well, there you go. Don't pay to be lazy.
Then, off to campus to read the New York Review for about 45 minutes while waiting for a philosophy lecture by a visiting philosopher. Then, attending the lecture on a posteriori necessary truths. Nice stuff, but this is all in Wittgenstein already. I didn't have time to say that as I had to leave as soon as the lecture was over—no time for Q&A.

Swimming down there. The white waves are breaking over the reef.
However, it is most fun to swim over it--you see more fish, and you have to
be careful in your navigation skills, looking both on top of and under water!

By 4PM, I was swimming over the reef at Diamond Head--it was high tide. At low tide you will get pummeled into the reef (see the picture)

Then, I got dropped off by Times Supermarket so I could buy a couple of lemons. I'm making falafel with toum, a Lebanese garlic sauce (and will have it with a salad-stuffed pita) and forgot I'd used all my lemons to make gin and tonics. Anyway, those are for lunch tomorrow!
By 5:15PM I was back home and made (warmed up) dinner. I reheated jasmine brown rice, swai (a Southeast Asian shark catfish) Khmer amok curry (recipe to follow someday), Bihari style greens (recipe below), with another local greens and carrot salad.
In the shower by 6PM.
6:30 and I had a shot of tequila and a light beer to warm my head for the evening performance. It is freezing here in Honolulu. It is 22° here. Of course, that is in Celsius. It is about 70° Fahrenheit. But hey—the trade winds are blowing, and that means in Jarrod-Degrees it is in the low 20s.
I left at 6:45 to catch the bus to go to a Mingakabau rendai performance called "The Genteel Sabai." A couple was resting at the bus stop. Her name was Sue—she was 82. Her husband was 87. They were farmers here on Oahu and could remember not having electricity here and cooking on open flames. They walk every evening and I hope to see them again soon. I really do have to have new business cards made to give to people I meet. They live nearby—who knows, maybe they will need something sometime. I got off at the wrong bus stop and was lost for about 5 minutes before figuring out where I was.
I watched "The Genteel Sabai." It was so good I may go again Sunday. Here is a link to a very short (and poorly shot) video preview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsV7Fxr5gN0.
I chatted in Indonesian with some of the workers/supporters and got two pieces of tempura as a snack on the way home (I walked). I was back home by 11PM and I called Peou, my wife, and we talked for about 10 minutes. She was busy with her new business venture.
In bed by 12:00AM. I have to be up at 5AM to go for a walk around Diamond Head and then go to the Farmer's Market to buy my local produce for the week. The rest of tomorrow will be reading and relaxation—maybe at Ala Moana Beach—a swim and a run, and finally dinner with a friend.

Bihari-Style Greens Recipe

1 1/2 pounds of fresh spinach (or you can make this with mustard greens)

1 teaspoon fresh ground ginger (at least--I'm more generous)

1 Red or Green Chili (at least--I'm more generous)

1-2 Cloves Garlic (at least--I'm more generous)

Either 1 generous teaspoon of ground mustard, 1/2 pound of mustard greens, or 2-3 tablespoons of mustard oil

1 tablespoon of corn meal

First, wilt all the greens in hot water--maybe 2-3 minutes in boiling water, strain and immediately rinse with cold water (this helps preserve the color). Remove, squeeze our any remaining water that you can. Next, put these in your food processor (or blender or mortar and pestle) with the chili, ginger and garlic and coarsely blend, then set aside.

If you are using ground mustard instead of mustard greens or mustard oil, take some of the hot water from your spinach and mix with your mustard powder--enough to make a thin paste.

Next, heat at least 2 tablespoons of oil in your pan, and when hot, add your cornmeal and stir. Don't get the oil so hot as to cause your cornmeal to blacken--if it gets to brown, pour it out and try again. Stir continuously for ONE MINUTE.

Turn down the heat medium low. Then, immediately add your greens--be careful, the oil will start popping--and then your mustard paste if using ground mustard. Stir thoroughly. Cook for 3-5 minutes, just long enough to cook through the other blended ingredients. That's it. You can eat hot or cold--it is great either way!

Postscript: In bed by 3AM, and I missed the Farmer's Market today. Too bad!

Le bonheur de vivre

2012-01-28T22:26:00.000-08:00

Henri Matisse's Le Bonheur de Vivre

Today, as was yesterday and as tomorrow promises to be, was exquisite.

I went to bed last night at 11:30PM after a day of work, a long swim in the ocean, a meal at a Taiwanese hot pot restaurant, and more work. Unfortunately, my roommate (I am living with a roommate here in Honolulu for the semester, until I return to Asia in late May) brought guests home at 1:30AM this morning. I did not sleep again after their laughter awoke me. When they left at three I tried to sleep until four, and then got up. It was okay, and I was nonplussed. I spent the next two hours lingering over two cups of coffee and reading a few articles from the book, Most Learned of the Shi'a : The Institution of the Marja' Taqlid (edited by Linda Walbridge), and reading the Southeast Asia news.

At six, my friend Bob, the former United States' cultural attaché to India, picked me up and we walked around Diamond Head, the landmark volcano crater that thrusts itself into the Pacific, pausing to watch the sunrise over the vast expanse of the limitless ocean. When our walk recommenced, so did our conversation, dancing over the influence of various classical schools of Islamic law on what was happening in the world today to the travesty of justice and monument to incompetence the Khmer Rouge trials have devolved into. Normally our friend Demeris accompanies us on these morning walks. She was in charge of public diplomacy for the United States Embassy in Phnom Pehn previously (she did not join us today as she is helping coordinate the Fulbright program in Indonesia on a short-term assignment)--I am sure she could have added much to that last conversation.

Then, we went to the Kapiolani Community College Farmer's Market where I bought all fresh and organic produce: Russian red kale, a greens with mint and Thai basil salad mix, and a Thai red (bird's eye) chili plant. It was a crowd, with four pairs of lion dancers going from stall to stall to bless the vendors with good luck (and looking for a donation, as well--it's still Chinese New Year's season) as well as the usual Japanese tourists, filming and photographing with phones, cameras, and video equipment. We paused to admire the orchids. I know I won't be here for three months this year, or more; it is not the time for me to become some Raymond Burr.

From there, we went to Chinatown to Mai Sum where we had dim sum for breakfast. Turnip cakes, black mushrooms, and choi sum with oyster sauce were the fare of the day, washed down with plum tea. After breakfast, we wondered through Chinatown as I gathered the ingredients I still did not have in order to make phở, a Vietnamese beef broth noodle dish (and pronounced "fah").

My rationale was if my half-Vietnamese wife cannot be with me, at least I can make her recipes. The key ingredient I could not find in the supermarkets was the sort of beef bones I needed--knuckle bones. Knuckle bones are the best for making broth from, but the supermarkets had only meat cuts and the like.

I quickly found my knuckles, and I waited and watched as the Chinese butcher cut into pieces for me with his bandsaw. At another butcher's I bought a quarter pound of flower tripe for my soup. Next it was to a Filipino green grocer where I bought a bundle of mint. My next stop was at a Thai stall where I picked up fresh kaffir lime leaves, turmeric root, and Thai basil. The lime leaves and fresh turmeric is for making amok, a traditional Cambodian food, on Monday. Then I wondered over to a Vietnamese vendor's stall to pick up the spices I would need for my broth--cinnamon sticks, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, whole star anise, cardamom pods, and whole cloves. As I have just been in my new place, I am restocking my pantry. Friday, I was at the Indian market, buying dals, curries, powdered turmerics, masalas and achar. In an eclectic Asian shop where, as the sellers don't speak English the cash register tells you the price in its electronic voice, I picked up my beef tendon balls and a bottle of chili oil, the latter for a peanut noodle dish I am fond of making. Finally, I popped my head into the one of the three Lao markets I know of on the island just to puruse and found Saigon cinnamon for just a dollar for a small bag.

Once home, I read a final article in the Shi'a book and then took an hour and a half nap. Two or less hours of sleep was not enough. But once I woke up, I immediately began making my beef broth, a process that would take four hours from charring the onion and ginger to finally straining the broth for my phở recipe. I substituted the beef tendon balls for the sliced beef, added garlic and two bird's eye chilies, and I will be adding the tripe and half a sliced onion when I reheat the broth tomorrow. After putting that on, I made a miso-vinegarette dressing and tried the greens mix with mint and Thai basil salad I had gotten at the farmer's market along with some fresh carrots and mairaymo soba with green onions and marten soba tsuyu (Japanese buckwheat noodles and dipping sauce) with my homemade jasmine tea-local O'ahu honey-basil seed drink. The local honey helps me re-acclimate to the local pollens more quickly. If only there was honey for the occasional vog . . . . Then, I had a nice cup of coffe, a Laotian one I brought back from Cambodia from the Bolovens Plateau.

After the first two hours, with nothing left to do but keep watch and adjust the taste the broth, I settled down with a glass of wine and began catching up with my periodicals, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and a couple foreign affairs publications, reading about topics as diverse as Balzac's food experiences and opinions to the current state of Egypt and apocalypticism in American right wing politics while the smell of Vietnamese beef broth pervaded the air and the vapors of the wine pervaded my brain.

Tomorrow, I will actually make (and eat!) my phở--I made enough for four servings, and bought enough rice noodles for the same. I'll also make a short trip for a few more groceries--mostly for coconut milk--so I am make my Khmer amok on Monday. Of course, tomorrow will mostly be preoccupied with reviewing Sanskrit and reading contemporary analytic Indian philosophy related to the self versus no-self debate that existed between primarily the Hindu and Buddhist schools of philosophy. Part of that reading will be done, however, at Waikiki Beach, punctuated, as it were, by a few long swims in the ocean as try to make the best of my somewhat reluctant tenure in paradise.

Aarrhhh! The Frustrations of Moving

2012-01-03T01:05:00.000-08:00

Aarrhhh!

So, from the "philosophy of packing" to the "frustrations of moving" . . . yeah, I think this is what could be called a "bitch blog."

The final days before a move are always, at least for me, saturated by frustration. It isn't from waiting for the last minute. I had my bags pretty much packed a week ago. Instead, it is just dealing with those final tasks and more than anything else with the minutia of moving.

So, my last few days have been trying to get my Asus Netbook to work properly so I can leave it with Peou, but no luck. I've re-imaged it, but still it either boots up slow or not at all. Unfortunately, that means it is probably a motherboard problem (but I am no hardware guy myself). However, hours have went into doing every thing I know how from a software side to fix the problem--to no avail. I will leave it behind but as a dead machine, not as the communication tool I'd hoped it to be. We bought another one, but I returned it after two hours of troubleshooting--not what you want from an out-of-the-box computer.

And then there is getting the last of our visa paperwork finished so when and if we get our next petition approved it can be sent to the Embassy in Phnom Penh ASAP. Really, I had no idea this would be such a complete pain in the a$$ or a multi-year process . . . and she'll have to have all her medical documentation redone since it has been more than a year now since her last interview. Too bad . . .

Next, it is making sure everything is charged and where it should be. I'll be stashing my carry on in the luggage storage in Incheon and spending a day in Seoul on the way back, and while not at long as a transpacific flight, it is still quite a few hours on an airplane. Mp3 Player? Check. Camera? Check. Kindle? Check. Cellphone for when I arrive? Um, is this even going to work with my AT&T SIM? Swim shorts? Check. Hey, if I am going to have to bum around without a home, I'm going to the beach.

And unfortunately both my laptop and now non-functioning netbook have battery death, so there is nothing I can do about them. And of a woodcarving I am carrying in my carry-on, for the first time I'm flying without a change of clothes with me--there is no room for anything else! But I do have the essential upon-landing requirements . . . my student ID, driver's license (but now won't be renting a car when I arrive--see below), credit cards and check book.

I'm getting stuff taken care of while it is cheaper here, too. I got some new clothes, but not much, and two new pair of glasses. They are stronger than my current prescription, so I'll have to get used to wearing them--putting them on right after taking my other glasses off is a little dizzying. And tomorrow I will go and get a haircut . . .

And then there is getting those last bites you want--so, last night I went out and got passion fruits, part of a jackfruit, salaccas and green mangoes. This morning I got a big bag of rambutans. While we can get some of this sort of stuff in Honolulu that means a trip to Chinatown and right now I don't even know when I will be able to move into my new place or if I'll be able to before classes start. You see, I am still waiting for the potential roommate to fix a date so we can rendezvous with my potential landlord and then possibly move in before classes start.

It looks like I'll come back, stay at a friend's/hotel while my stuff sits in storage and I live out of my suitcases for another week or so while I wait for that meeting. I sort of hoped to rent a car, pick it up at the airport, spend a night with a friend or at a hotel, meet the landlord, sign the lease, grab a carload of essential items--like clothes and my Japanese futon--and be "moved in." But I'll have to figure out when and how to do all of that later on.

Unfortunately, it isn't just local concerns and my trip or moving in I am having to worry about. The Financial Aid Office has un-enrolled me from all of my courses for non-payment despite the fact (or because) I am on a full tuition scholarship. My bill was not paid in time--because Financial Aid had not sent the necessary paperwork to my scholarship foundation after it was requested. Personally, I think a few years in India is an excellent primer to dealing with the bureaucracy of the University of Hawai'i because it is only there I've ever encountered it with such magnitude. So, I get to stay up late to night to make a scratchy call to their office in when it opens in the hope someone can get it straightened out in time from me to re-enroll and hopefully get into the two classes I really, really hope to . . .

So, I think that I may just step away from everything, drink a nice, cold Black Panther (that is a local stout) and read a little bit . . . since I need to stay up until the break of dawn to call the Financial Aid Office, I have lots of time . . . I think I'll unplug everything and make sure the laptop fits in my bag . . .

. . . and a quiet voice says, "Better have just one Black Panther, Jarrod . . . you still got a lot to do!"

Postscript: ARG! And I just realized I cannot find my journal . . . the last time I had it was in a resturant about five days ago . . . my Kindle made it home that day . . . have I lost 500 pages and two years of documentation of my life. ARRRRG! I think this deserves beer #2.

Post Postscript: It pays to be a regular. My journal was there, kept for me since 12/28/11. They were very sorry they forgot to give it to me--we spent New Year's Eve there. Giant sigh of relief.

The Philosophy of Packing

2011-12-30T08:03:00.000-08:00

There are two things I really hate that I deal with a lot--maybe even more than taxes. Booking plane tickets and packing. And unfortunately, they usually come together.

This time, the plane ticket was booked long again and was simple--although I'll be breaking up my trip and spending a day in South Korea, I can check my bags all the way through. There was no flying to Kuala Lumpur and storing things for two weeks while I ventured on to Bangalore or Chennai, no airline switch or clearing customs just to pick up my bags from Delta and check them into Bangkok Airways. But packing remained: it is a struggle, simultaneously an action and reflection, an event in which values come to the fore and one of the rare occasions in most of our lives where it is really a "take it or leave it" decision, and like death one time where often we are confronted with the fact we can't take it with us.

Packing confronts us with both what is meaningful to our lives as well as the detritus of living.

There are the big decisions to make and the small decisions to make, and there are some decisions you find that life (and the airline) has already made for you.

There are the things that have to come with you. There is the copy of your taxes, your checkbooks, your laptop and external hard drives, your best working suit, your cell phone and razor.

Then there are the things you don't want to take. That shirt that you really like but has that big stain gets left behind without much regret except that it got stained. The receipts that have been piling up in your desk drawer get a cursory glance; you keep those expensive business shipping ones, and the rest get discarded. You wonder why you kept them in the first place. There is that pair of trunks you bought for that trip to the ocean but that don't really fit right or that pair of shoes that keeps rubbing a place raw on your ankle. They all get left behind without much more than a thought.

Have to take it

Then there are the things you certainly want to take, that you just can't stand to leave behind. There is that hand-cast bronze Buddha you bought in Chennai. That has to come. And then there is that beautiful lacquerware set that you bought in Vietnam—you have to bring that. There are the sandals you bought that you know aren't going to last long, but you like and figure “why not?”

Then there are the things you want to take but hesitate. There is that design book you bought that you really love—but it is awfully heavy. And what about your cologne, that nice bottle of Hugo Boss you've been using for what, six or seven years now, that is still a quarter full (men should spray their cologne into the air and walk through the mist—you want a scent, not a stench)? These are the items that you set aside as you pack your bag. As you occasionally stop, zip up the bag and lift it, trying to gauge “Does this weigh 50 pounds yet?” you eye that pile of “possibles” wondering if there will be room (and weight) to to take them.

Cannot take it

And then, there are the things you want to take but simply cannot—like that three foot long, fifteen pound wooden carved clock you could not resist in Thailand but that won't fit into any of your suitcases and you can't take as carry-on because you already have another delicate carving you'll carry with you.

Finally, there are the tactical decisions. You have a day scheduled to break up your trip. Will it be cold? Do you need a change of clothes? Will you need to use your laptop, with its bum battery, along the way (meaning, do you need to pack a universal adapter in your carry-on?).

And while there are always difficult decisions, at least I know I will be back. Perhaps in May, perhaps earlier if only for a couple of days. So, that Thai clock or carved Khmer panel of apsara dancers will still make it “home" . . . eventually.

But as I look at these three big bags, the last year of my life stuffed into suitcases, I go knowing “home” is only to last five months before it in turn gets stuffed into bags and boxes again, and once more I am eying a pile of “possibles” and wondering what I have to have, want to have, might have and can't have as I begin another sojourn.

போன்ற வாழ்க்கை உள்ளது . . . c'est la vie

Year In Review, 2011

2011-12-29T05:25:00.000-08:00

Mr. Brown in South Korea

I felt pretty ambitious a few days ago about writing my year in review blog. I feel less ambitious now, you will probably be thankful for that.

Of course, the year began with me partying on Pub Street as it did for the previous year, in Siem Reap, Cambodia. And that is also where it will end.

I was in . . . let me see, eight different countries this year: Cambodia, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea and the United States. It was my first visit to South Korea, and I am going back on my way back to Honolulu.

Peou and I had a great "working vacation" in Singapore. I'd never been to the aquarium before, and we spent a full day and it and another at the zoo, eating char kway teow and basically having a great time while staying in the district I know best, Little India. Spending that time with Peou as she saw new things reminded me why I love her.

Mr & Mrs Brown in Singapore

And speaking of India, I got to see some places I had long hoped to see but had never had the chance to see. For example, I finally got to visit the Taj Mahal so I will finally be able to answer that question I often am asked when people found out I lived in India on and off for years: "Have you ever seen the Taj Mahal?" I also got to visit Halabidu and Belur that were at least as high up there on my list as the Taj Mahal. And of course, more important than site seeing was getting to spend time with my other family in Chennai, the Mukherjees, as well as seeing all my friends in Bangalore.

Halebidu & Belur Temples

Of course, it was wonderful spending a full ten months with my wife, broken up only by a few weeks in India and of course two months in Kentucky--my first time being back there since a three day visit in February, 2010 when I was nearly snowed in.

Of course, there was the wonderful roughly annual event, Sharkey Shake the Earth, which was celebrated for the third time since 2007. While I don't have any pictures of that actual event, there are parts of it burned into my memory forever. And by the way, everyone--I was very good that night, and as always the next day is pretty fun, too, spent on the lake and in the woods despite how rough some of us no doubt felt.

Southeast Asia Floods
of 2011

There were the floods I came back to September through October and literally weeks of not having power. That was mostly fine because I read a lot since I couldn't work!

Water Puppets in Saigon

We "escaped" for a few weeks to Vietnam, first to Long Khanh where our family has a house, and then later to Ho Chi Minh City (ahem, Saigon) for great food, an incredible night life, "weasel coffee" and more. One of the highlights was finally seeing the famous Golden Dragon Water Puppet Theatre. My wife had been doubtful she'd enjoy a puppet show, but I think she might have had a better time than I did.

That ended the travel except for a trip or two to Phnom Penh, the last of which we just made about two weeks ago or so in order for me to buy some suits and clothes before going back to Honolulu where no doubt the prices will shock me in miserdom--it is always a shock coming back to American prices, and nowhere more than in Honolulu.

The first start-up I was involved in sold with an evaluation of nearly $220 million dollars. Professionally, things could not have been better really. And while not a money making venture, the newest project that isn't for a client (like my Flash-based training programs) is the Popular Philosophy Today Web portal/publication is really exciting me and I look forward to making it a successful effort.

One of my many acquisitions this year

I acquired some nice possessions as well, additions to my growing collection of Asian art. As many folks know, woodcarvings are a real passion of mine and have been for many years (my research in Southeast Asia back in the day was split between aboriginal woodcarvings and Islamic law). I managed to get several beautiful ones, including finally getting one from India. Some of them, like the beautiful Thai clock, delicately and intricately carved, will remain here in Cambodia until my wife is ready to join me in the United States. Others, like some of the wooden masks I bought in Vietnam as well as the beautiful Durga [see photo] I got in India (that is what happens when you go shopping with a Bong *wink*) will be traveling back to HNL with me.

There are some unfinished items of business, still. My novel is still waiting for the last 10-15k words, and I fell short of my goal of reading 10,000 pages of philosophy (although in the last month alone I've read 3000 pages of Russian history!). But still, I've learned a lot from things like how to make SCORM packages work for me to more metaphysics than I think I ever knew before (I did read more than a thousand pages of metaphysics in the last three months). There were some places and some things I wanted to do, like finish my Rescue Diver Certification (thank you, dengue fever, for interrupting that) and go trekking in Laos (timing issues) that didn't happen. But, I console myself there is plenty of great trekking in Honolulu and I can do my RDC there (using in part equipment that was gifted to me by Dr. Amy Donahue).

The only real regret is that Peou won't be able to join me until at least May, so I am heading to an "interim" apartment and then in May, as soon as my academic obligations end for the spring, it is off again . . . to Cambodia and beyond . . . although hopefully a long visit to Kentucky will be in that sojourn.

I hope everyone has a wonderful and happy New Year, and may 2012 be one of the best and most adventurous to date!

Popular Philosophy Today

2011-12-20T01:31:00.000-08:00

So, I've got a project underway at the moment that is pretty ambitious. Luckily, I am not going at it alone but have a team of talented individuals who are going to work to help make it happen, and it has actually been in the works for more than four months now. Finally, it is moving towards "launch" (now on March 1, and then the 1st each month thereafter). Right now, myself, Mr. Nan Chen (of Gavagai! fame) and Mr. Shannon Pugh are the folks behind it.

It will be a Web-based publication and community that focuses on both academic and popular philosophy with an emphasis on contemporary events and comparative philosophical approaches.

Each issue will feature two academic philosophical articles of journal quality with at least one employing comparative or non-Western approaches. Additionally, each issue will feature three or more popular philosophy articles aimed at a more general audiences. In a marriage of theory and praxis, Popular Philosophy Today will illustrate why philosophy matters in society, politics, and daily life by offering insightful analysis of contemporary events, regular columnists, bloggers, philosophical book reviews, movie and media reviews, and commentary on a monthly basis. It won't just be a publication, though, but also a community. With robust user profiles (avatars, photo sharing, and more), a commenting systems, a "fan" and friend system (so users can become fans of authors/philosophers and connect with other users) and a philosophy forum it will be pretty phucking awesome. Our vision is to become The New Yorker + Facebook of philosophical circles.

Of course, any Web endeavor is challenging, and each phase of development offers its own set of unique challenges. Primarily, at least in the beginning, our focus will be twofold: building content and attracting contributors who can write articles people will want to read, and second, ensuring our Website architecture is intuitive and appealing. We've been testing content management systems (decided on Drupal), conducting research on market, click-through flows, competing sites and lots of different avenues that would make it self-supporting rather than our own pet-project financial black hole. We are nearing completion of the research phase and getting ready to move forward with development. Right now, we are at popularphilosophytoday.com, but before long we'd like to move that to a premium and expense domain like philosophy today dot com. Unfortunately, I don't want to spend $2K on a domain name right at this moment.

There are a lot of moving parts, and a lot of work in front of us. Part of it is grunt work like formatting literally hundreds of pages of content for SEO. In basically two months we will build a Web site with hundred of pages, unique, high-quality content, a bookstore, media from around the Web, a forum . . . and I couldn't be more excited about it.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in getting involved from submitting an article to helping to format content, just let me know. And if you know a witty artist who would be interested in creating a couple of philosophy comics a month gratis, send them my way!

Postscript: I've also decided to bring out a translation of selected chapters (the war and politics chapters) of the Arthasastra within the next two years. I'm working on solidifying the first three translated chapters to submit to publishing houses. Wish me luck.

Drinking Chai and Remembering Winter in the Tropics

2011-12-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

This blog has little to do with anything. So, you might want to come back at a later post.

I made chai out of all local ingredients—local palm sugar, local cardamon, local cinnamon, local cumin, local cloves, local milk, and local teas. It was the best chai I've had in my entire life. And while I am sure customs will shake me down once I come back to the USA, I think I'm going to have to bring all the makin's back with me (sans milk, of course).

Your reward for reading this far is my chai recipe.

2 1/2 Cups Whole or Half Milk

1 ½ Cups Water

16-18 Cardamons (roughly crush in your hands, and you really can't have too many)

16-20 Whole Cloves

8-10 Whole Black Peppercorns

¼- ½ Teaspoon Whole Cumin Seeds

1 3” Stick Cinnamon

Unperfumed Black or Green Tea

3 Tablespoons Palm, Brown, or White Sugar

Combine milk and all spices and bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer stirring so the milk doesn't boil over or form a skin on top. Simmer for 20-30 minutes until the milk has a strong spiced flavor. If it begins to taste too much like cinnamon, remove the cinnamon stick. After the milk has a strong spice flavor, add your sugar, stir until dissolved, and remove from heat.

Separately, brew your tea (with the water) at twice or three times your normal strength. Combine with your spiced milk. This is great hot or cold. This makes about three small servings.

Traditionally, you'd reuse your spices at least once.

Maybe it is the hot chai and smell of cloves and cinnamon, maybe it is the occasional Christmas jingle when I go to the Western market, or the Christmas shopping that has been wrapped up already thanks to Amazon, but I've been thinking about winter and cold weather. Getting the latest issues of The New York Review, Current History, Foreign Affairs and The New Yorker (just one issue of the latter to “shake things up a bit”) made today feel a lot like Christmas, too. But it isn't Christmas that I am thinking of.

It is the cold. It is white landscapes and dead trees, their branches like gnarled fingers arthriticly reaching for the crisp blue skies. It is winterscapes, sparkling like a world wrapped in crystal, embraced in ice. It isn't, surprisingly, home that I miss. Kentucky is dark, wet and miserable in winter. It is mired in mud and discomfort. No, this sudden desire for winter, for the cold, for furs and boots, is the desire for somewhere else. It is a desire for Amarillo, Texas with its wide open spaces and white as far as the eye can see. It is the vapor of breath from reindeer and hot glögg in a country cabin, or the tracks of a wolverine across the snow. It is the Rocky Mountains or Siberia, it is Tibet or Alaska. Rice paddy and jungle is beautiful as is the blue ocean . . . but I'm ready for something else. Maybe the desert?

I miss you old apartment, but have I outgrown you,
contemporary modern couch so lovingly imported from Japan?

When I wasn't making chai, I was looking at winter clothes . . . fur coats and ushanka hats and leather leggings. Then, thinking about furs, I started looking at bearskin rugs and then cougar-skin rugs, and then taxidermy mounts and found myself daydreaming of an eclectic mix of a room, dripping with Byzantine excess, animal skins and Asian wood carvings, Persian rugs, Russian crystal and Tiffany lamps. And then I realized I pretty much have all of that, just not on one continent. After my rug buying craze last year (and now sort of glad of that since if I'd gotten a car instead where would it be right now?), I realized I'd have to have a pretty big apartment in Honolulu just to have the floor space for another rug. And that led me to look at O'ahu homes, but no way I'm tying myself down to a property--I was just thinking about longing for ice and desert expanses, not more palm trees and tropical beaches (grass is always greener, huh?).

Home will have to wait.

C'est la vie.

Music for the Christmas Relief Effort

2011-12-05T01:26:00.000-08:00

I've put together a mix for your Christmas relief. "Jingle Bells" playing everywhere you go? "Silent Night" eating you up from the inside out? I've got the salve for you right here.

There isn't much Christmas-ness about any of these songs about ending wars, screwing society, running cocaine, getting thrown out of the house for being gay, contemplating or committing suicide, pornography, addiction, getting high, but in a nod to the season it ends with a song about New Year's Eve. However, I was thinking about what I thought people should be thinking about as the end draws to a close . . . war, social change, good times, death, tolerance, and religion.

Uplifting, huh?

Unlike my mixes from early in the year, this doesn't have much new music. In fact, most of what is on this mix is what I happened to be listening to in 1997-1998 and 2007-2008 and quite a bit of it comes from the 70s. And, if you were exchanging music with me a few years ago, you probably have some of these--as you probably do anyway. And I figured some old favorites would combat the old favorites of the Christmas season. This mix isn't about giving you some new music . . . it is about a retreat from "Deck the Halls" and some time to think about more than holly and jolly.

As with all my mixes, it is in a zipped file with hopefully an accurate .m3u playlist file. Click on the title to download.

XMAS4U2011, or Ho Ho Ho from Borneo

Unity--Operation Ivy
Tear the Whole Thing Down--The Higsons
Leviticus: Faggot--Me'Shell Ndegeocello
Superfly--Curtis Mayfield
My Ice is Cold--Sports
Hanging High--Lykke Li
Terrible Angels--Cocorosia
Sweet Jane--The Cowboy Junkies
Candy Says (Closet Mix)--The Velvet Underground
White Daisies Passing--Rocky Votolato
For You--Sharon Van Etten
Sleep--The Dandy Warhols
I Want to Take You Higher--Googaush
Life During War (Live)--The Talking Heads
Rick James--Jude
Wrong--Morphine
New Year's Eve--Dengue Fever

Just in case you didn't get earlier mixes, I've linked back to the blogs that also contain mixes. The April Indie Mix blog I took down, but the link to download below. About a thousand folks have downloaded these mixes.

July's Jazzation Mix

May's Mostly Indie Mix

World Funk Gems
and the direct link to download the C&W infused April Indie Mix as the blog entry has been deleted but the mix can still be downloaded--
I'm not sure if the playlist for it works, but it is as follows (song titles only):
Down Beside Em, No Nostalgia, Peace In The Valley, Tuesday Moon, You're Going To Cry, Born On The Cusp, I Buried a Bone, Because Of The Blood, Leonard Woolf, End Of Me, Neat Little Rows, I Follow Rivers, Speed of Light, Blackout, Cheerleader, Land Of Living Skies Pt. 2- The Living Skies

Merry Christmas!

Cambodian Cashew Plantation & Eating Ants

2011-12-01T06:24:00.000-08:00

Unripe cashew fruits & nuts

We had a lovely outing to Seyha's cashew plantation today and got to do some nice walking. It was about 80 kilometers--about 50 miles--with the last four or five miles up a sandy road that we'd call a "logging trail" in Kentucky. The floods, though, have made the "Siem Reap Bypass" nearly as bad.

Unfortunately the jungle areas outside the plantation are land mined, so we were "contained" within the farm itself, but with 40 hectares--that is almost 100 acres--there was plenty of room to move about and stretch our legs. They were beautiful.

We bought a couple of ducks and left them with the staff to kill, clean and cool while we all (Seyha, Ilain, Poeu and myself) went for a long walk. The "staff" is an old war veteran who fought with Lon Nol against the Khmer Rouge and also the Viet Cong, then to the jungles and continued to fight the "damned Reds" once the country fell. He re-enlisted once Hun Sen launched his invasion. He proudly showed me his battle scars--a left arm that had nearly been lost, three bullet wounds and a machete scar. The bullet wounds were all from "Viet Cong" he told me. Of course, Khmer history is always shadowy . . . there were massive Vietnamese pogroms during Lon Nol when Vietnamese were machined gunned down and dumped into the Mekong so the waters could "take them back to Vietnam." Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Khmer-Vietnamese, including my own in-laws' family, fled to Vietnam during that time.

Walking around, one could forget about such a horrific past--except that one had to remember that those wooded hills that called out to me so much were off limits due to land mines. The land, which had belonged to Seyha's family before the war, was planted just to stop encroachment. The area is near the Thai border and a major former Khmer Rouge stronghold area. The result was after the war, many former soldiers simply settled on the land that was there. Planting the plantation was one way of demonstrating it was already owned.

There were not a lot of cashews on yet. The cashew has two parts. What initially looks like just a part of the stem ripens into a fruit, while the bottom part--that looks like a giant cashew--is actually the nut. The fruit grows to be about the size of one's fist or larger. It is the fruit that is used to make the Indian Goan liquor fenny (or fini, which is also made from coconut). It took me a while to figure that out because I didn't know cashew trees had fruit until I saw my first one at the Tarun's farm outside the Kollar Goldmines in India. However, you can't have your cake and eat it, too. For the nut to mature, the fruit has to fall from the tree--already past its prime--so the fruit is lost in harvesting the nut. Seyha hopes to get 1-1.5 tons per hectare (again, a hectare is about 2.5 acres in Americanese).


A ripening cashew

We snack on a ripe cashew fruit--notice the nut "on top"--actually, the bottom

The duck was interestingly prepared. One was roasted on an open fire, and was marvelous. The other (or perhaps just the bits and pieces--I wasn't too attentive) was prepared with ants and . . . lemongrass? At first, I hadn't paid attention and then I noticed an ant stuck on my spoon. As I put it to the side I took a closer look and realized that what I'd taken to be some minced leaves were actually ants--a whole pot of them. They and the duck cooked with them were wonderful, just another example of excellent Cambodian culinary inventiveness.

Bearing Fruit

2011-11-30T02:15:00.000-08:00

I just came back from an exhausting bike ride followed by push-ups. I'm slowly trying to get myself back to “peak.” Coming home, feeling like I was walking on air, I did my pushups and took a shower—and by the end of my shower I felt like I had to sit down or I'd fall over. It is a very good feeling, though. I'm back in the fight to be fit. Diner tonight is bitter hot cocoa with milk and local sapodillas, salaccas and passion fruit.

Sapodillas

Salacca

Passion Fruit

In addition to trying to get back into physical shape a lot of my time has also gone into getting mentally back in shape. I am really having something of a personal intellectual renaissance, I think, after more than six months of very little intellectual effort. In part, I think, I was simply burned out. I'd been working sometimes 60 hours a week and going to graduate school full time, trying to learn two languages, and ending each night with a six pack just to quiet the ceaseless “must do” thoughts of work, school, finances and the State Department as I worked on trying to get Peou's visa stuff ready and together. The result was a complete mental and physical fatigue—I was absolutely frayed. I spent the days before Christmas cleaning and moving out of my apartment, and Christmas day, having moved out of my apartment on Christmas eve, I spent alone with a bottle of port wine and was in the airport heading to Seoul the next morning.

Awesome Khmer masks--you can really see the
pan-Southeast Asia Hindu/Bali influence,
can't you?

The first six months after coming to Cambodia I barely did any reading at all, finishing the Routledge edition of Metaphysics: A Contemporary, some history books on Cambodia and Zulberman's disappointing Analogy in Indian and Western Philosophical Thought, the latter a fairly short text. While in Kentucky Bernard Lewis's The Arabs in History and the report on the Southern Thailand “insurgency” were all the texts I consumed despite having lugged Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment home with me.

However, since I returned from a two month trip to my old pastures of Kentucky I have intellectually been on fire, consuming lots of philosophy and history (as well as a several books on digital photography). I just completed the first 850-page volume of the The Cambridge History of Russia and began the 800-page second volume, which the editor writes in the introduction that “Few readers will read this complete volume, and almost none in a “single setting,” but I know by the end of next week I'll be reading volume three. I'd read in quick succession two histories of Alexander the Great's campaigns, a novel my Stefan Themerson, two books on house construction and design, books about Dubai and more and of course Greek and Roman history every night. I've been devouring twenty or thirty pages of philosophy—about an article or chapter everyday of mostly hardcore contemporary metaphysics. And of course, as always I read New York Review Of Books and Foreign Affairs religiously and just added Current History to my monthly readings. That means I'm averaging a thousand pages a week of intellectual consumption. Now my days are spent with long chunks drinking milk coffee or bitter hot cocoa (yes, pure ground cocoa beans, water and milk), Sanskrit and Khmer, a lot of reading, bike rides, exercise, and of course, work. And in between it all, I get to spend time with my wife and family, trips to the Old Market and more.

I also wanted to share some of the completely awesome masks (above) that Peou has gotten me. I also got a pretty cool one in Vietnam when we were last there, but it is already wrapped and packed!

Life really is glorious, and it seems too bad that returning to grad school might seem like an interruption to my nearly full-time pursuit of arete.

Oh, The Places You Will Go . . .

2011-11-22T06:28:00.000-08:00

This is my map of my Asian travels over the last several years. As I tried to gather my thoughts about where I've been, this was the best way I could think of since I do not have my journals from all my travels with me. Where I can, I've attached links to photos, videos, and blogs of my from each of these locations, but many of these places I visited before I ever kept such things, traveling with only my journal--not even a camera.

China sure looks like a big empty space there, doesn't it . . .

POSTSCRIPT:
So, I have this magnificent five year plan--within five years, I've completed my Ph.D. and have plenty of money in my pocket to boot. Then, I hit the road for two years. Those two years will take me the through Southeast Asia again, Indonesia and Indochina, mostly, the South Pacific, China, Mongolia, Nepal, India, Russia, and the Mediterranean. Wish me luck, and the hundreds of thousands of miles I will log between now and then . . . that is child's play.

Stop USA Internet Censorship

2011-11-17T05:20:00.000-08:00

Stop American plans to censor the Internet.

Dengue Fever (and this Time the Band)

2011-11-15T19:07:00.000-08:00

I discovered the band Dengue Fever for myself in early 2006 right after they released "Escape From Dragon House" because I'd earlier discovered Sinn Sisamouth and the incredible sounds of Khmer Rock (Sisamouth died during the Khmer Rouge regime). If you have listened to any of my earlier Southeast Asia Funk mixes, then you have heard Sinn Sisamouth. If not, you should check out that link for a special mix I made for Southeast Asia Travel Advice. I have a pretty large collection of Southeast Asia 60s-early 80s funk, rock and soul. Dengue Fever is a LA band (Long Beach, I think) that has a Khmer lead singer and are heavily influenced by the psychedelic sounds of Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth.

Anyway, I wasn't going to get to see Dengue Fever because I thought I had to travel before they were in Siem Reap, but I did, and it was totally awesome. It was in the cafe of a hotel--small, intimate environment, and just everything one would have hoped for. Also, all the proceeds went towards the Cambodian Living Arts project, which I love, and the Green Gecko Foundation for Siem Reap street kids. You may remember I shared the movie "The Flute Player" a long time ago about the Cambodian Living Arts founder.

It was Dengue Fever's first show ever in Siem Reap, and I was glad to be there. Peou and I are also taking this traditional Khmer medicine right now--it is tea of a bark of some tree, and tastes like of cinnamon--but we have to drink this twice or three times a day for three weeks. It is suppose to be the "real deal" but we can't drink while we use it. Even sober, though, I could totally trip out on Dengue Fever. They played some of my favorite tunes like "Sleepwalking Through the Mekong" and "One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula" (totally tripadelic), "Tiger Phone Card" (which has special significance to me and wife's long distance relationship), and "Laugh Track." "Sni Bong" is the only think I would have really liked to hear that they didn't play. They played quite a few things from their new album, Cannibal Courtship. I took a photo and put my camera away. It was just too much fun to try to capture.

Just to give you a sample of Dengue Fever. If you like it, buy an album!

I got home after a delicious Indian meal--finally found a good Indian place in Siem Reap--and discovered a water leak--coming out of our (concrete) walls, so that was sort of a bummer. People are coming to look at it later today but I probably have the dismal prospect of workers having to knock out part of a wall to get to a leaking pipe or something. I hope they can get it done in a day.

The Oprichniks, The Secret Police of
Ivan "The Terrible"

I read Armstrong's Islam: A Short History yesterday. I wasn't too impressed. You can read my Amazon book reviews (all of them, in fact) here, but the fact she did not mention Indonesia once--the world's most populous Muslim nation--was a shortcoming that was just too epic for my approval. She falls into the "Sheiks, Pashas, Emirs, and Sultans" school that thinks of Islam as a North Africa-Middle East-South Asia phenomena. Now I'm moving on to some Russian history in preparation of renewing my knowledge of European history. I have a special love for Russia--it is probably the one place I really desire to go and have not yet been. The first volume is 800+ pages, and there are three volumes, but we'll see.

Reading List

Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Bayamus & Cardinal Polatuo: Two Novels by Stefan Themerson
Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later edited by Vesselin Petkov
David Busch's Mastering Digital SLR Photography by David Busch
Beginning The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 1 (of three) edited by Mareen Perrie
Began and finished Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong

A Primer of Modern Terrorism

2011-11-10T03:37:00.000-08:00

Carlos the Jackal in his prime

Today I was reflecting on the second trial of “Carlos the Jackal.” And of course very recently, in just the past week or so, Alfonso Cano, the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was killed. And of course also that Demigod of Terrorism, Muammar Qaddafi, lost his life recently. That made me reflect about the “pre-Islamic history of terrorism” and the slow demise of that “old guard” and truly “radical politics” in the Western world at least. What are we to think?

I think most people who did not grow up listening to the news in the 1970s and early 1980s probably have no idea or have forgotten the advent of “global terror,” something that was by far leftist and nationalistic rather than Islamic. I certainly would not know much except for my own interest. In fact, I think that the argument could easily be made that emerged from the leftist/Palestinian liberation nexus--so easily I don't think that anyone can deny it. The real tragedy is few ever bother to make it.

Countries like Libya, the enemy in so many 1980s television series, were not religious radicals. Qaddafi seemed to be a revolutionary for revolution's sake, supporting the left-leaning Irish Republican Army, the Basque terrorist movement in Spain, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was well as the far-right Moro National Liberation Front of the Philippines. Of the latter its splinter groups, Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Abu Sayyaf, are very active and in just the past weeks the Philippine government launched a series of air strikes against MILF strongholds with nearly 20,000 civilians being evacuated. It was Qaddafi who helped broker the first peace plan with MILF and the Philippines' government in 1976.

Yassar Arafat visiting East Berlin

I am not sure how familiar anyone is with European terrorism, often interwoven with Palestinian terrorism, but it is an extremely complex and amazingly fascinating field of radical groups and shadowy figures. The Palestinian liberation movement was a secular movement, and too many people ignore this. It was not about the primacy of Islamic or establishing a theocratic state in the style of Iran or Saudi Arabia (which is not technically a theocracy). It is easy to forget that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the second largest member group of the Palestinian Liberation Organization—the PLO—is actually a Marxist-Leninist organization that was founded by Dr. George Habash, a Palestinian Christian. Only Yasser Arafat's Fatah, itself an organization devoted to a free, secular and democratic socialist Palestine, is larger.

Then there are the far left groups in Europe and South America. There was the West German Red Army Faction, or RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group. This left-wing terror organization was active up to 1993 when they bombed a new prison being constructed and had a shoot-out with police. There was the Italian Red Brigade whose exploits included the kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, and, in 2002 the murder of one of current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's economic advisers (Berlusconi has served as Italy's prime minister three times, but he won't be much longer—he has announced he will resign after his economic reforms are implemented) . There is the Revolutionary Organization 17 November of Greece that was active until 2002 when all its members were finally captured. Then there was the Maoist group, the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups of Spain, an organization that carried out a series of bomb and terror attacks across Spain from the 1970s onwards and which only disbanded in 2006.

The feeling of that time in radical Europe is captured to some extent in the wonderful film Cet Obscur Objet Du Désir, That Obscure Object of Desire, directed by Luis Buñuel and released in 1977. The frequent announcements we overhear about the bomb attacks and threats by leftist groups and potential counterattacks by right wing groups give us at least a sense of life within those troubled times. These groups, these radicals and militants and their terror attacks, form a backdrop, always present if rarely in the foreground. And the film suddenly ends, of course, with just such an attack at a Parisian mall.

Alfonso Cano

Too few people realize the Communist "rebels" or "terrorists" continue to operate in South America, but Alfonso Cano's death, as leader of FARC, has surely made some sit up and take note. It has had a number of "set-backs" in recent years including the successful Colombian military attack on a FARC camp inside Ecuador's territory as part of a targeted killing directed at Raúl Reyes, the killing of one of its Secretariat members, Ivan Rios, by his bodyguard a week later, and then later that month the death of Manuel Marulanda Vélez, it supremo.

Most probably are not aware that Marxist-Leninist Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, is still an active organization in Peru. Most thought after Alberto Fujimori's coup essentially removed rule of law and allowed for a ruthless crackdown on the organization that it has all but disappeared. On September 12, 1992, Abimael Guzmán, the head of Shining Path, was captured and imprisoned, destroying the group's chain of command. He is currently serving a life sentence at San Lorenzo Island naval base, in Callao, the port of Lima. After this, the insurgency did diminish. However, in August 2008, the Peruvian military launched a operation against Shining Path, which resulted in several counterattacks, including an October 2008 ambush that killed at least a dozen soldiers. Sendero Luminoso continues attacks against soldiers and "soft targets," even criminal targeting of tourists in which "rebels . . . ordered them to hand over their food, cameras and other equipment" about three months ago. It was known for its massacres of peasants who failed to support its "people's war," most notably in the Lucanamarca and Marcas massacres, its Khmer Rouge-style cocoa labor camps for "dissidents" and its aggressive and often times indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

Michael Collins

It would be a great injustice not to look at the terrorist organization that along with the PLO defined most Americans' sense of “terrorism” through the 1970s and 1980s—The Irish Republican Army (actually, the Provisional Irish Republican Army). If anyone “invented” modern terrorism most would agree the IRA's early member and director, Michael Collins, is the one. Backed largely by Libya and organizations in the United States (which, after all, has more Irish than Ireland), from 1971 until 2005 it carried out a systematic campaign of bombings and killings. More than 10,000 bomb attacks were carried out during those years. I can remember the Ballygawley bus bombing of 1988 being reported in the news and the London Stock Exchange bombing in 1990. Other spectacular attacks including firing three mortars at 10 Downing Street in 1991. While the IRA officially ceased its armed conflict in 2005, earlier this year a group of former members vowed to continue the IRA's campaign of violence until "British occupation" ended and Irish unity occurred.

Terrorism has always be acclimated to its environment, but has also been an adaptive practice. There have been “terrorist organizations” that are well-ordered militias, like FARC or Fatah (no longer listed as a terrorist organization), ones that have controlled states or quasi-states like Hamas and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, some that are the arms of the state, like North Korea and its agent's airline bombings, and there are others that are small groups like the Greek Revolutionary Organization 17 November group that can be wiped out in a single orchestrated raid, and others that are more ideas or banners to gather under like al-Queada increasingly seems to be as its actual structure and leadership continues to erode. There are those fighting for social change, control over the narcotics trade, religious domination, nationalistic aspirations, or ethno-nationalistic aspirations. What is clear though is that they learn from each other while adapting their techniques to their own aims and environment (and some fight for the environment, like the the Earth Liberation Front, also known as "Elves"--a eco-terrorist organization on the US's State Department list of terrorist organizations).

Founder the the LTTE,
Velupillai Prabhakaran

It was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) that developed the hijacking of airplanes as a tactic, their first hijacking occurring in 1968. Many such hijackings followed with many carried out by PLO-associated organizations or Islamic groups, like the infamous Indian Airlines Flight 814, hijacked on Friday, December 24, 1999 and eventually forced to land in Afganistan. They released their hostages, except for a young man they stabbed to death, in return for the release by Pakistan of three Islamic terrorists, including Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a man who would go on to help plan the 9/11 attacks on the United States and other acts of terror and is mentioned again below.

Suicide bombers were developed to an art by the Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE), a terrorist organization or “liberation movement” I know much about, having followed them very closely since 1994 and having conducted fairly exhaustive research about them. You can read my history of their formation in my earlier entry, a brief entry from a planned extensive look at war in the Theravada Buddhist world (sympathetic, up the point that they actually emerge as a military-fascist cult of personality). The Tigers, known for suicide attacks and carrying cyanide capsules in case they are captured (as much to avoid a painful death at the hands of Sri Lankan security forces as to conceal secrets) also have the notoriety for being the only terror organization to successfully kill two world leaders--Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993 and former Indian Prime Minister and then Congress President Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Airline bombings are much trickier. The first airline bombings were murders or insurance schemes, like Jack Gilbert Graham who killed 44 people by planting a dynamite bomb in his mother's suitcase that was subsequently loaded aboard United Airlines Flight 629 on November 1, 1955. The November 22,1966 bombing of a Douglas DC-3 crashed on its way to Khormaksar from the hill town of Maifa’ah in what was then Wahidi (now in present day Yeman) is often attributed to “Islamic fundamentalists” (such as on the anti-Islamic Wen site Prophet of Doom, a variable wealth of misinformation). Actually, it was another case of parricide. 'Ali, the son of Amir Mohammed bin Said, who wanted to prematurely succeed him as Amir. It seems that the first airline bombing by a terrorist organization (successful—two bombings occurred on this same day) was probably that of Swissair Flight SR330, scheduled flight from Zürich International Airport in Kloten, Switzerland to Tel Aviv, Israel on February 21, 1970. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, a Syrian-backed splinter group the the aforementioned PFLP, was likely the culprit although at one point they denied they were involved. Like its parent, though, this was a secular, not Islamic, group.

A Young Qaddafi

The next airline bombing was carried out by, guess who, CIA-backed or known operatives. Cubana Flight 455 was destroyed on October 6, 1976, killing all 78 on board. Evidence implicated several CIA-linked anti-Castro Cuban exiles. CIA documents released in 2005 indicate that the agency "had concrete advance intelligence, as early as June 1976, on plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bomb a Cubana airliner” and Cuba accused the US of being behind the attack. Two of the men behind the bombings fled to the USA, and one was granted a full presidential pardon (but for immigration violation) by George Bush, Godfather of the War on Terror. The US also denied Venezuelan and Cuban requests to extradite the terrorist for fear "they could be tortured." You can read the excellent Salon article, “The Coddled “terrorists” of South Florida” for yourself or dive into GWU's National Security Archive and see the released FBI and CIA documents yourself.

The next major successful airline bombing was by Sikh separatist supporting Khalistan, a Sikh homeland. Their method—of packing explosives with electric music equipment—was adopted by Libyan operatives for the famous Lockerbie bombing In fact, the first "Islamic" terror attack on an airline was the 1994 bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434 by al-Queda. Only one passenger was killed.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has said he personally beheaded Pearl
& also played a leading role in planning numerous terrorist
attacks including the World Trade Center 1993 bombings,
the Bali nightclub bombing, and the 9/11 attacks on the USA

Kidnapping has always been a part of terror campaigns, but beheadings have become more common. Decapitation is a method of capital punishment in Islam, and its use in terror, while in vogue, is not new. British reported that Pashtun tribesman would behead non-Muslim captives during the Anglo-Afgan War. Abu Sayyaf have been known to behead their captives such as American Guillermo Sobrero, who was kidnapped from a Philippines resort and killed after being held hostage for several months 2001. Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street journalist, was kidnapped and killed in Karachi, Pakistan by beheading on February 1, 2002 by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh--the same man who helped plan 9/11 and was released to the Taliban in exchange for hostages from the hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814. Will the Basque separatists now start beheading people? Certainly the Mexican drug narco-terrorists, such as Zetas, have. Fifteen people were beheaded in scenic Acapulco, Mexico in a single weekend earlier this year and four in San Fernando, near the USA border, that same month.

Today news and information about terror has been hijacked by radical Islam, it seems, with al-Qaeda being the name of such violence (although, for an South-Southeast Asianist like myself you read about Islamic terror in Southern Thailand and the Philippines daily, but also communist Naxilites in India, Nagaland and Assamese separatist in India, and more communist insurgencies in the Philippines). Terrorist today fight not only to put their nations under the sway of shari'ah and imams, but many fight to change society in other ways; to eliminate economic disparities, to protect their communities from encroachment, to realize nationalistic aspirations or even revenge injustices of the past, or just to continue to make money controlling the narcotics trade.

It is important to remember that Islam didn't invent modern terrorism. If we must assign that mantel to someone it probably goes to the Irish. It isn't limited to Iraq or South Asia. It is happening all over the world. And, if we really want to think about terror, how about unseen, unmanned crafts, hovering above the clouds that might mistake your wedding party for a Taliban gathering, your funeral procession for marching troops, and rain fire and bombs down on you?

There is nothing that is simple; there is nothing that comes ex nihilo. Violence, though, is rarely the answer to any question.

"This One Eating Me!!!", or, When Creepy-Crawlies Head to Higher Ground

2011-11-08T21:58:00.000-08:00

Luckily, the flooding has receded here. In fact, for two weeks or more we've not had to wade to the market. There are some after-effects that I've written about earlier, like our water stopping dozens of time each day and the destruction to roads and bridges. There are a few lingering after-effects as well . . .


Water buffalo don't care about no floods. He likes the mud.

For the past week or so we've been dealing with another of those effects--the influx of creepy crawlies.

Earlier in the week, I had to remove a 40cm (that is about 16 inches in Americanese) lizard from our house that my wife swears is poisonous. However, I know that it is a gecko of the Family Gekkonidae and that just a handful of lizard species have been identified as poisonous (members of the monitor Superfamily, Varanoidea, some ignanas Family Iguanidae, and, of course, the Gila Monster and Beaded Lizard)--none in the Gekkonidae family. So, it stands to reason that she is wrong. I easily removed him (or her), but not before taking a picture. It was really an attractive creature. I've seen one much larger and flatter, but that could have been another species. Of course, we have all sorts of small geckos in the house--jinja in Khmer.

Then, there were the toads. I have taken nearly a half dozen different toads outside, including another one that my wife in her nearly hyperbolic fear of nature and systematic miseducation claims will "latch onto your throat and not let go until you shlap." Shlap is Khmer for "die" or "kill." More disturbing than killer toads or poisonous geckos (to me) are rats. I found a rat downstairs about five days ago. While I did not manage to schlap it, I did chase it out a door.

Night before last, however--the same night my wife warned me about the throat-crunching killer toads--I had a rude awakening. Suddenly, I am jarred out of sleep by my wife crying,

"जरद्, जरद्, THIS ONE EATING ME!!!!"

(And just FYI, I avoid using my first name in my blog--at least not in English)

So, of course I leap out of bed and turn on the light. And there is nothing there. So I assume that it is perhaps her overactive imagination or fears stoked by all the reptiles I'd removed over the past week. I diligently searched the room for any sign of something but to no avail.

So, we settled back in (my wife holding me very tightly). However, as I was able to drift off I heard something, and looking across the room in the dark I made out something scurrying across the floor. I leaped up, turned on the light, and found that there was a rat in the room. THAT is what had gotten in the bed. My wife was not actually bitten--perhaps it had scurried over her hand--but the thoughts of a rat getting in my bed or biting my wife was too much for me to handle. Soon, all the furniture was pulled away from the wall as I tried to trap it in a corner to bludgeon it to death. It was not to be, however, as the critter escaped by what I could only say was an instance of slight of paw--suddenly it was gone. It must have escaped under the door (an incredible feat) as there was nowhere else for it to go. I've been pulling things out from walls and stalking around like some horror movie villain, waiting to wreck rodentcide, but without success.

So, I did not sleep entirely soundly last night even after a 12 hour work day wrestling with SCORM stuff. I'm hoping he is gone. Be better be if he doesn't want to shlap.

Floods bring not only critters to houses, but also fish to paddy fields

Reading List

Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Bayamus & Cardinal Polatuo: Two Novels by Stefan Themerson
Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later edited by Vesselin Petkov
David Busch's Mastering Digital SLR Photography by David Busch

Alexander the Great, Minkowski Spacetime, and Metaphysics

2011-11-05T03:37:00.000-07:00

I am certainly blogging more often these days.

I am not sure if that is a good thing or not, but I seriously doubt that it is. I was getting ready to head to a cafe, but sat down at the computer and then found myself compelled to write.

So, the past few days have been sort of strange, mainly because of the mix of pursuits. I've been studying Sanskrit, reading about Alexander the Great, reading about Minkowski spacetime, and, of course, metaphysics. That with working on the online training material, working out revenue models, researching Islamic finance programs, and reading the latest issue of the New York Review of Books pretty much rounds out most of my time. Of course, much of this has been going on as my niece and nephew crawl over me or play at my feet. Next week, they will begin school--a blessing, to be sure.

In the past 36 hours I've managed to read both Waldemar Heckel's The Conquests of Alexander the Great and Agnes Savill's Alexander the Great and His Time. Luckily two years of reading Greek and Roman history almost nightly gave me a very good historical context--Alexander falls between the empire of Athens and that of Rome--and also a better understanding of the geography. I must admit, though, my knowledge of the Roman republic and the rise of Ceasar is dismal. All in good time, all in good time.

I have the idea that I'd like to write a piece of historical fiction about Alexander, but I still need to finish the last 20K words of my novel that I've been neglecting for the past two weeks or so as I focus on other things, like reading metaphysics and Alexander history. If you are interested in what I am writing, you can visit The Philosophy Murders site I set up and even read the first chapter.

Savill's slavish defense of Alexander was really almost too much to stomach, but it would be helpful for constructing a fictional version of him just because she really is such an apologist. However, at times--particularly when she goes far beyond her sources and assigns thoughts to Alexander--I really want to whack her. While true to history, her defense of him, particularly her anachronistic readings and constant disparagement of "our times" (meaning our contemporary times) really disgust me. A return to a world without penicillin, with mutilation an acceptable form of punishment, and savage wars of conquest is not any more desirable in my eyes than contemporary times with its contemporary problems. I don't find Alexander's a "Golden Age" in any way. Nor do I agree with her that "Alexander" is a corrective model for us to follow in "our times."

Heckel's book is pointedly about his military campaigns, not a biography, and her focus is on reconstructing the tactical strategies for different engagements. As such, it isn't helpful in understanding (to what extent that is possible more than two thousand years later) Alexander, but at least it provided a very clear arch of his political and military career. I also have Alexander the Great Makers of History which is more of a juvenile history book and far out of date, but it was free (Gutenberg Project). And I will have to read the source for most of what we know about Alexander, The Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian, modeled after the earlier text by Xenophon on The Ten Thousand, a group of Greeks that invaded Persia long before Alexander.

Reading these works has made my feet itch, however, and I am thinking what trip can be arranged, or where can I go, or what can I in the coming weeks that will bring a sense of that adventure to my life. My time here in Cambodia has become too complacent. I drink coffee and read philosophy, visit cafes and scorn ex-pats and backpackers alike, write in my journals, tend to my Web sites, talk with my wife, listen to Ravel and Puccini pieces and do what work must be done. I think I'm ready for some more adventure . . . not the conquests of Alexander, but the exploration of new landscapes, new places. I feel drawn to the Middle East and Central Asia, to the great Islamic civilizations, the Arab emirates and sultanates or the descendants of Tamerlane. Unfortunately, while I might get to see some of those parts of the world before I return to Hawai'i in January, I won't get to see them all. They will have to wait for following years, it seems, insha'Allah.

Minkowski spacetime, the other subject occupying me for these last few days, is actually pretty easy to grasp (but of course, the devil is in the details as they say). It is simply the idea that in addition to the three spacelike dimensions of Euclidean geometry there is also a fourth timelike dimension. His insight, following on Poincare, was that recent works in electromagnatism and relativity could be best expressed in a a four-dimensional real vector space. What is more, using it as a basis, he was able to show that both mechanics and aspects of relativity, like the Lorenz Transformations, could all be preserved and expressed within such a space.

He writes in "Raum und Zeit," ("Space and Time") "In der dem Weltpostulate gemäß reformierten Mechanik fallen die Disharmonien, die zwischen der Newtonschen Mechanik und der modernen Elektrodynamik gestört haben, von selbst aus." That is, "In the mechanics reformed according to the world-postulate, the disharmonies which have disturbed the relations between Newtonian mechanics and modern electrodynamics automatically disappear." How? Because of the world-postulate, where the world is defined as a four dimensional space with spacelike and timelike axises, composed of "world-lines." I'll quote from some length where he outlines the basic structure of spacetime in a fairly accessible way (just think of a three dimensional Cartesian space with a fourth axis that is time):

We wish to picture to ourselves the whole relation graphically. Let x, y, z be the rectangular coordinates of space, and t denote the time. Subjects of our perception are always places and times connected. No one has observed a place except at a particular time, or has observed a time except at a particular place. Yet I still respect the dogma that time and space have independent existences each. I will call a space-point at a time-point, i.e., a system of values x, y, z, t, as a world-point. The manifold of all possible value systems of x, y, z, t, shall be denoted as the world. I boldly could draw four world-axes with a chalk upon a table. Even one axis drawn consists of nothing but quickly vibrating molecules, and besides, takes part in all the journeys of the earth in the universe; and therefore gives us plenty occasions for abstractions. The greater abstraction connected with the number of 4 does not cause the mathematician any trouble. In order not to allow any yawning gap to exist, we shall suppose that at every place and time, something perceptible exists. In order not to say either matter or electricity, we shall simply use the word substance for this something. We direct our attention to the substantial point located at world-point x, y, z, t, and suppose that we are in a position to recognize this substantial point at any other time. Let dt be the time element corresponding to the changes dx, dy, dz of space coordinates of this substantial point. Then we obtain (as a picture, so to speak, of the perennial life-career of the substantial point), a curve in the world, the world-line, whose points can unambiguously be connected to the parameter t from to . The whole world appears to be resolved in such world-lines, and I may just anticipate, that according to my opinion the physical laws would find their most perfect expression as mutual relations among these world-lines.

The Lorenz Transformations correspond to a rotation of axes in spacetime, while the Newtonian transformations correspond to rotations only on the time axis without the rotation of the spacelike axes. Of course, my math is not good enough to deal with the differential equations he introduces to demonstrate how such translations are possible, but his ability to use the model to derive other physical laws (like the conservation of matter, the laws of inertia, and the limit of the speed of light) are what have made it such an enduring physical theory (hence the title of the book, Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later). The article I just finished proposes that Hilbert's program of axiomatization probably paved the way for Minkowski, his student. Hilbert himself is probably most famous for what he failed to do--the axiomatization of mathematics, which, like Frege and Russell, he hoped to make rest on purely logical principles. Kurt Gödel, that inscrutable genius, with his incompleteness theorem demonstrated, of course, that this program was impossible. Minkowski, though, working perhaps in a similar vein, did provide the model that still remains popular although not the only model of spacetime.

Well, I should probably send my world-line elsewhere.

Reading List

Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Bayamus & Cardinal Polatuo: Two Novels by Stefan Themerson
Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later edited by Vesselin Petkov
Began and finished Waldemar Heckel's The Conquests of Alexander the Great
Began and finished Agnes Savill's Alexander the Great and His Time

Glögg & SCORM

2011-11-03T03:07:00.000-07:00

I try not to be a “daily blogger.”

I try to restrain myself from just posting the minutia of my life, limiting myself to notes about recent trips or adventures, philosophical musings or even topical essays. One has to be aware of the “audience factor” that makes you want to broadcast the most mundane details of your life to the world that no one, even those who love you most, can possibly care about. I have a journal for that stuff. However, this is one of those mundane blogs, and all I can offer you in return for subjecting you, if you don't navigate away now, is a recipe for a cold-curing alcoholic drink.

You have been warned. Although, I am offering you the cure for the common cold, so . . . .

I think I may just be getting a cold, or possibly allergies to something in the air. I've been miserably congested, a nose-blowing miserable mess. And yesterday turned into a day where I worked all day with only a few precious minutes to Sanskrit and reading. To make matters worst, a phone call from the States about some Web hosting rubbish woke me up at 4AM. As the saleswoman launched into her spiel I quickly cut her off.

“I am overseas at the moment, and it is 4AM in the morning. If you would like to discuss any business matters with me, please do what everyone else does and schedule an appointment with me via e-mail. If you do not have my e-mail, then there is no reason for you to be calling me. Goodbye.” Click.

Unfortunately, I could not fall back asleep, so I drug myself out of bed after laying there for 30 minutes and got to work. First, I had to do considerable heavy lifting and work out quite a few mathematical models (but nothing too complex) for a project. It wasn't hard, but it was just time consuming. I use OpenOffice Calc (yea open source!), similar to MS Excel, but even using the functions to do all the calculations it took so long. But, when you finally have a spreadsheet that is set up to do all you want, there is quite a sense of accomplishment and even something slightly beautiful about something so purely functional.

One of Caryl Joan Estrosas's images--kakanin

Next, I had the pretty fun job of putting an article submitted by Filipino food blogger extraordinaire, Caryl Joan Estrosas, onto SoutheastAsiaTravelAdvice.Com. She had written an article for the site about Filipino street food. It is always fun reading what someone has written, especially when it is about eating adventures! She had also included some nice pictures, and we even added a simple recipe to her article. The SEATA site has picked up quite a bit more traffic--nothing like a top site, but for the effort we are making it is okay.

There is also one work accomplishment today that I am ecstatic about!

I've been trying to move towards the creation of a Flash-based SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model)-compliant learning system. SCORM is the LMS object compatibility that was determined as the standard for USA educational entities during Clinton's administration.

As most of you may know, one big part of my business is the generation of training—primarily cross-cultural, communication, and online educator training. What I have wanted to do for some time is try to generate more scalable training solutions. That is, I want to generate training solutions that don't require me or one of my staff to deliver each and every training session. I've accomplished this in the past primarily through train-the-trainer training, where we take a trainer within the business we are working with and then train them on how to administer the training program. That also means, though, that after the initial set up and delivery, our revenues stop since training is now delivered in house. I want a way to extend our reach and expertise, reduce face-time, and maintain a revenue flow. Proprietary online training seemed like the way to go.

My first project is just a basic cross-cultural communication model, something that is more of a proof of concept model than something to actually deploy. Basically, the idea is you have a lot of interactive learning videos that include quizzes and assessments, and when registered users go through these, their results on the assessments are captured by the LMS's database. This is then combined with live, interactive online training is a Web conferencing platform like WebEx, WizIQ or one of the scores of other platforms (I recently did a professional evaluation of BigMarker.Com . . . looks okay, but some serious concerns for business users). But, there was a learning curve because I needed to learn just how to embed SCORM objects into a Learning Management System—that is, Moodle, at least to begin with. So, I had installed Moodle onto a test site so I could begin working with it, and then I had to figure out what a good Moodle guide to begin with was to give me a broad view of its LMS capabilities before I moved on to the specifics of embedded these SCORM objects. Turns out, it was pretty simple given the other software goodies at my disposal, and the result was impressive.

I was EXTREMELY pleased with my first results. To start with, I uploaded a short “Who is the Philosopher?” quiz and was able not only to create an interactive Flash video with the embedded quizzes, but was able to capture the results in a Moodle gradebook. To me, this is a great advance as I try to develop more scalable training solutions and opens up many other avenues. It means potentially hundreds of individuals could go through training or certification processes with minimum face time, and that live training sessions could be focused not on information downloads but practice and application.

That made me feel so good, that this morning I felt up to going out and getting the makings for glögg, a not so pleasant sounding Scandinavian mulled wine beverage that is also a sworn cold cure by many.

I've had glögg before that I made with a friend. My friend had made it as a cold remedy. That was my primary purpose, too. My most distinct memory of it was is started out with a whole lot of liquid and was reduced down to a few cups--reduced red wine with vodka added.

When I made glögg today myself I followed a different recipe, which I built on myself. But still, it reduced down to one wine bottle full of liquid. Also, I did not use vodka, but brandy (if you know me, you know I am a cognac/brandy/port/vin santo man) or add any sugar to mine since I wasn't making it for a nice, warming wintery drink. It is probably 35 degrees here (that is about 95 in Americanese). I wanted it to cut through this cold, not make me sicker (sugar compromises your immune system). And boy, did it ever cut through my ailments! My sinuses are now completely clear, although like any . . . medicine . . . it made me a bit drowsy. So, I relaxed by finishing up a 500+ page user guide to a dSLR I don't own and completed Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law, so this evening, once I am feeling better, I'm just hitting the books for a couple of hours, relaxing and recovering. Anyway, here is my glögg recipe.

Glögg Recipe

Juice of two or three oranges, fresh squeezed
¼ of an orange, whole (peel and all)
Juice of one lime
¼ of a lime, whole (peel and all)
1 ½ inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and sliced thin
2 cinnamon sticks
10 whole cloves
1 (750-ml) bottle red wine, such as Burgundy
6 fingers (about three shots) of brandy
½ cup unsweetened Concord grade juice

Everything except the brandy and grape juice goes into a pot and is simmered about 20-30 minutes or so, but never comes to a boil. It is very important it not boil. If you had whole allspice or cardamon, that would be nice to add, too, but I didn't. Also note that most of the alcohol from the wine will evaporate as well, so it isn't as potent as you might think. After it has simmered 20-30 minutes, remove from the heat, pour in the brandy and grade juice, and drink while hot. Oh course, it is pretty stout. It is best to warm it again up before drinking it. It really seems to cut through congestion quite well.

Well, congratulations. You just got subjected to the most inane blog I think I have written in quite a while (if Sanskrit Panic doesn't count). I promise not to do this again for at least a month. I mean, after all, if you want to know what I had to eat, you can read my Facebook status updates, right ;)

Reading List

Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Bayamus & Cardinal Polatuo: Two Novels by Stefan Themerson
Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later edited by Vesselin Petkov
Finished David Busch's Nikon D7000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography by David Busch ... 500+ pages and I don't even own a D7000
Finished Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law by Muhammad Khalid Masud

I Dream of Sharmaji, or, Sanskrit Panic

2011-10-31T18:11:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last night . . . and it fit me like a glove.

No, really. I had a dream about being back in school, but I was at my dream campus. My sleeping life is occupied by several dreamscapes that are fairly regular. There is a Bangalore dreamscape, a Morehead dreamscape, and a Campus Dreamscape.

In the first part of my dream, I was in an European history class. The professor was blind, and class was spread out into two small rooms, so he had to make his way from room to room as he lectured about the revolts and invasions of the Germanic tribes during the principate of Marcus Aurelius. Anyway, I won't bore you with the details. As it turns out, my home--and more of the way I remember it in the late 80s, with its textured gold carpet and couch with cigarette burns in the arm because--I know this is hard to believe--one of our neighbors, Cheryl McClurg, would actually put her cigarettes out in the arm of the couch. I'm not sure why someone didn't slap her silly for that. ANYWAY, I meant to say as it turns out my home was on/adjacent to campus, so I was able to go there to get my Sanskrit book as I was off to Sanskrit class.

I get home and who is sitting on the carport with my sister?

You guessed it--Rama Sharma, my Sanskrit guru and Panini grammarian extraordinaire, reading to my sister Tonya.

I am thinking, "It is time for Sanskrit already!"

You see, I haven't studied Sanskrit very much for the past 10 months, and I should have. I'm rusty.

I rushed into my old bedroom, grabbed my list of Sanskrit consonants--but I'd forgotten them all! Not to even mention forms like the middle tenses of the periphrastic future! Before, while in the history class, I had thought it was the middle of the semester, but seeing Sharma made me realize it was the beginning of the semester, and despite my months of pouring through metaphysics, I've not really been very attentive to Sanskrit except in starts and fits. So, I couldn't remember any Sanskrit.

I longed to somehow send a message to my sister to tell Sharmaji that I'm not at home, that I won't be coming today, that I am ill. But there was no way to get out of it. Where are all the others, I thought, thinking of my classmates? Why are we having class at my house? But nothing can be done.

I looked at my papers before me, but the vowels seem to swim across the page . . .

In the meantime, my sister had moved Sharmaji into the house, out of the sun. I was going to have to reluctantly come in and suggest we "review."

Then I woke up as he was saying, "Let's get started, shall we?"

It is November 1 here (I am 13 hours ahead of East Coast time). So, I got out of bed--it was about 6AM--got on the computer, did two hours of work to get the most critical things I needed to do out of the way--and now I am taking my Sanskrit Primer to task (I had a bit of a false start about three weeks ago). And now I'm going to get cracking enough that I don't have dreams of dread of Sharmaji, and instead they can be dreams of delight.

He's a great guy--like a genie of genius, but you have to do a little more than just wish to get his gift.

POSTSCRIPT: I found scrubbing the bathroom and trying to catch a rat that has been stalking about downstairs to be excellent mental relaxation from a disappointing day of reviewing declensions and paradigms that I should already have internalized . . . but the bathroom is clean and the rat has been trapped and put outside. I've set a pretty high goal for myself . . . the mastery of a chapter per day of Sanskrit, including declensions, paradigms and vocabulary. Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

Reading List

Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law by Muhammad Khalid Masud
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Bayamus & Cardinal Polatuo: Two Novels by Stefan Themerson
Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later edited by Vesselin Petkov
David Busch's Nikon D7000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography by (guess!) David Busch
Finished Rick Sammon's Digital Photography Secrets by (guess!) Rick Sammon

I also enabled Amazon previews in this posting for all the books listed. If you find it annoying, let me know. Otherwise, I'll continue to do so for my reading list at least.

An Exchange: Why Is My Tuition So High?

2011-10-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

At Berea College, all students receive
a full tuition scholarship

Berea College is my alma mater. Recently, I received this Facebook response to the essay, "Why Is My Tuition So High," from The "Non Censored Berea College Alumni Page."

A bit impetuously, I moved our exchange here. I thank them for the thoughtful response to the issues that I raised.

The Non Censored Berea College Alumni Page writes:

(1) I think the shifting model reflects our divestment from affordable higher education for all as well, but I still find institutions to be at fault, probably even more than “voting” citizens. We don't even talk about education, it's not a priority that comes up even in presidential debates. I think universities, as sites of education and places where political actions tend to originate historically, and (as a social collection of the bourgeois and professional) the “middle class” most certainly act as liaisons, diplomats, and moderators between the poor and those with the most political or financial power in our societies. Our higher education institutions have failed us as political representatives, formally and informally. If there is a disconnect in the formula (go in debt for school, you will get a job to pay for it) it reveals that as a society there are political and economics forces outside of education that complicate this, but what role has the university played? Your conclusion is simply that universities are benign, inactive, and even passive victims of a barbaric citizenry. Are you really going to let them get off that easily? Colleges have a bigger voice, power, and more insight in how to expand education as a social good, not just make the individual institutions look more like corporations. For-profit colleges are grievous examples, but so are private and public institutions. Public institutions have serious spending problems in terms of athletics alone, and have all the same issues with loans and degree worth in the market, though in less graphic terms than for-profits.

Colleges intentionally shape institutional policy and public policy by their decisions, and in the case of Berea, they invest more in private funding than public funding. I found that Berea spends less on lobbying (I can only hope and assume it's for protecting public funding) than on hiring hedge fund mangers to handle the endowment. The only time I have seen Berea act politically in terms of public funding is when the pell grant was almost cut, then they put out an article to have people sign a petition. Also recently, Dean Berry was quoted as discouraging students from going to NYC to Occupy Wall St. because he did not think the principles of Berea's financial model should be challenged. This is short sighted.

(2) In terms of political voice, I have been doing an internship with the recent KY race to see “how bad it is,” and now I know without a shadow of a doubt how much the parties are literally voting machines. There is no real concern with policy at all. And, in terms of relationships between colleges and elected officials, they have very close relationships. While we were told only the Board of Trustees, faculty, and a selected group of students would have access to the candidates identities, I was told voluntarily by a current, high ranking official at my internship who one of the candidates was. To me, this shows how there are insiders, at least in terms of gossip, that maintain the status quo. Anytime an institution signs a contract with a vendor, loan company, etc. they are making a political choice in how their university will proceed. Universal higher education policy (form elementary school on) was created in light of private education, not the other way around, so we must actively work to make it that way. There are a few other issues that I am researching which may affect our issues with scalability and cost, such as having a large influx of women into the university and workplace after the feminist movement. The G.I. Bill probably affected that college/work formula too, and of course technology that lowers jobs, and a recent boom of global capitalism that has sent lesser skilled jobs overseas. One thing we don't consider is that education in the past has been applied to manual labor jobs to make them better with inventions (within the capitalist narrative) , and it could be possible that we are sending jobs overseas where less educated people just submit to the job without the means of applying creativity. In return, a lot of our education and creativity here is going towards service industries, I don't know what that means exactly, but just questions I'm asking. And of course, we can't forget the basic fact of groups of people are actively hoarding large amounts of money. Universities are doing this as well with the endowments, and there was a legislative move recently that would require all universities to spend at least 5% of their endowment each year. One reason politicians in power do not feel sympathy for colleges is the endowment, and colleges, in turn choose to put the cost on students in terms of tuition because they do have a for-profit attitude. Larry Shinn was against this legislation, citing our endowments as the main funding for tuition. He argues that on average, Berea does actually spend about 5% of the endowment, so you can see from that the state of all the other colleges which charge tuition. Regardless, Berea spends a lot while saying students are a burden. But the fact remains, most students in the US have to take out loans, (that's why it's a problem, no one can pay) so the issue of debt is something that affects everyone not just the poor. The BC administrative restructuring was supposed to streamline to save money, but a recent Pinnacle article said it won't really save that much $ . That, coupled with increasing the student body so much (400-600) so we will have to build another dorm, tells me Berea uses students for money not the other way around. Why expand, build, when you will just have to subsidize tuition, room, and board more? If 1500 students were a burden, how is expanding the school going to make it more sustainable, and in terms of public vs. private, what is going to happen to our model when public funding is being stripped from us? Berea is going to slowly turn to the for-profit model where it must “protect” the endowment at all costs, by using cheap labor, increasing student work hour from 10 to 15, freezing wages, asking for further wage garnishing for “donations” all the while cutting into education for students who need extra time, tutoring, and help to get them back on track. Against the wall of Fee Glade, one not yet graduated student has apparently donated their “estate” to get on the wall. What kind of culture is this?

From what I have read, the one surefire way to get people out of poverty is with stressing reproductive rights. In all developed countries, women have more power over their choice in having children. The population crisis isn't an issue of resources, but management in ensuring quality of life. Reproductive rights addresses the scalability concept of quality of life and effective management starting at the first degree with the simple relationship of mother/child or the family unit. This is education of course, and it could be something that we get out of school. The position of conservatives on this matter, abstinence only then moral denigration of welfare, speaks to their inability to imagine the significance of the problem outside of religious beliefs. In this regard, where Berea stands, the more I research the more I find them to be part of the problem.

My Reply:

I'd like to address your two part response also in two parts. First, I will defend my thesis that the public is to blame for the beyond-institutional-inflation in higher education tuition. Then, I'll add just some thinking points about your current thoughts and research. I'm not entirely sure I follow all your arguments, but you make several claims I feel I can address.

First, you say we don't even talk about education. I am the founder of what is now a $300 million dollar private education company. I am also a graduate student in a large, public university (50K+ students), having come from a small private one (Berea). Now I work as a professional education consultant with companies on three continents. I talk about (and think about) education and education policy a lot.

That education isn't a central issue in the presidential debates I think supports what my central claim is--higher education funding is hostage to a public that apparently doesn't care about it, or more specifically, that doesn't care about trying to make it affordable and accessible by offsetting its rising costs.

You suggest that (I suggest) institutions are politically passive organizations.

I do not think that higher education is politically passive. The Higher Education lobby spent $69,937,131 in 2010, while Labor (mostly in the form of Labor unions) spent $37,004,973. In terms of lobbying politicians, Higher Education outspends organized labor nearly two times, and the majority of that amount is from public universities. I would not call that passive. A scan of the 2011 database shows that 124 institutions lobbied specifically on Pell Grants. Forty-five lobbied specifically about Perkins Loans.

Unlike Labor, however most institutions, and all public institutions that I know of, are barred from making political campaign contributions. I add the caveat because this is a result of state law, so it may be that there is an outlier here. However, if you have ever attended a public university you will have probably received an e-mail around election time in your institutional mailbox letting you know that it is illegal for you to use your institutional e-mail for political purposes related to the election--most states forbid the use of state property for political campaigning, and the use of state e-mail communications is considered to fall under that umbrella. Likewise with a 501(c)(3) organization, which Berea College is. Federal law prohibits these organizations from “attempting to influence legislation as a substantial part of their activities and they may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.”

That means that an high education institution cannot put someone in office in the same way that a private corporate institution can. Just to contrast this, so the implications are clear, agribusiness, for example, made a $271,059 campaign contribution to Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and a total of $10,468,621 direct campaign contributions in addition to $92,259,363 in lobbying. (In case you are curious, you can see Stabenow's voting record on agricultural issues). Most states prevent public employees from promoting or oppose election petitions, candidates, political committee, ballot measures or advocate a political position while at work, meaning a public college president could not address faculty during a meeting to urge them to go home and call their Congress person to save the Pell Grant. Writing a letter as a private citizen when off the clock is another matter. You can retrieve all of the lobbying facts and figures above from the Center for Responsive Politics database, which is excellent.

Given that higher education is very active in lobbying, it would be misleading to say universities are politically passive. However, in all fairness our public institutions (and their leaders) do not have the same ability to manipulate and involve themselves in politics as do individuals and private corporations. They are not politically empowered in the same way that private organizations of their size are.

Having said that, these public institutions are at the mercy of state and Federal governments. In 2009, the University of Hawai'i had a $154 million dollar state budget cut as the Hawai'i tried to balance its budget. There was very clear political agitation on the part of faculty, staff and students as private individuals to try to have this cut reduced as well as to contain the fall-out (the University of Hawai'i's professors are unionized) as well as contracted meetings between state officials and university leadership to try to rescue what funds could be saved. The institution and the individuals who were a part of it were clearly not passive, but as public employees that had to act as private citizens.

You claim that our higher education institutions have failed us. If you mean that their lobbyists have failed to convince our elected political representatives to continue to support affordable and accessible education, that seems absolutely true. However, public institutions are not responsible for the removal of politicians who do not accurately reflect the political desires of their constituency; the public is. As Betrand Russell said, the point of democracy isn't necessarily the election of the best individual for the job, but the power to remove someone doing a poor job.

You say "Colleges have a bigger voice, power, and more insight in how to expand education as a social good, not just make the individual institutions look more like corporations." I'm not entirely sure what point is being made here about making individual institutions look more like corporations, or how you are using corporation. So, I'm not sure what you mean by "making institutions look more like corporations" except that is seems like, whatever it is, you don't like it. I think if may relate to what you have to say about endowments, which I address below. But endowments are largely an issue of private institutions. If higher education is to be made accessible and affordable, it must be primarily through our public institutions. And while I have a particular investment in my alma mater, what private education does with private funds is, for me, largely a private matter. And while I don't want to open up the proverbial "can of worms," I think that the privatization of education is not the solution. That is, though, another five thousand words for some other time.

You also say something I hardily agree with. “Public institutions have serious spending problems in terms of athletics alone." Your point about the athletic program budget is a good example, and I would agree it is money misspent. While the University of Kentucky athletics programs is self-financing, it is a rarity. Many sports programs at universities across the country are being discontinued, and I agree that they should be. The argument put forward in Hawai'i is that the Warriors and the sporting events of the college make a contribution to “the community” and are a source of civic pride. But, if they are not self-sustaining or profitable, then I think they should be cut. That sounds dangerously close to “corporate thinking.” My perspective is, though, that if the community likes them so much that they should attend the events in sufficient numbers to support such events, but rather than subsidize athletics it is education that should be subsidized. My justification is that just having a football (even though not so many attend the games) is less beneficial to the community that the ameliorating effect access to higher education can have on poverty and all the social goods that come with poverty reduction (and when I speak about poverty reduction, I mean within developed countries, America specifically).

Ultimately, though, I do agree with your ultimate accusation of me. I think that our public institutions of higher education, those with the greatest mandate to provide affordable and accessible education, are at the prey of political representatives that are not liable to them but are liable instead to the voters. And, whether it be "American Tea Party individualism" or merely the apathy of the voting public, I think it is society that is responsible for failing to defray the cost of education. Institutions can lobby, but they can't vote. They cannot hold politicians accountable, and therefore the ultimate responsibility is upon those who can hold politicians accountable, and that is the citizenship.

Now, to address your thoughts in your second comments, albeit not in full.

Most people everywhere are politically passive. They don't write letters, they don't know how to find the number to their state or federal representatives even if they know their names, and they vote along mass, rhetoric-induced party lines. Unfortunately, that is a truism nowadays. That does not mean it is an excuse.

College endowments are very important, and it is naïve to think otherwise, or that were they eliminated politicians would suddenly begin crusading for higher taxes to fund education. Instead, historically politicians have seen them as a tax revenue source. The Delta Project clearly shows that private institutions with endowments were able to absorb the lack of government revenue better, increase student spending, and require smaller actual tuition increases. Bottom line: their students faced fewer increased cost and continued to receive higher per-student spending. Community colleges, the most dependent on public funds, saw tuition increases as well as per-student spending cuts. While Berea's attitude towards its endowment may have left a bad taste in your mouth, they provide an important financial cushion for the institutions that have them, and by in large it is the students who benefit from that cushion.

The budget cuts the the University of Hawai'i suffered ($184 million) was $20 million more than its endowment's value at that point. The operational budget of the Manoa campus alone was $554,812,265 for 2010—its endowment was around $164 million in 2010. I think Berea was trying to keep its budget within $34 million for the 2011-2012 year. When you are looking at that sort of exposure, an endowment is critical—particularly ones like the University of Hawai'i Foundation that helps provide scholarships to at-need students and can continue to do so in the face of such budget cuts (an endowment, by definition, can only be spent in certain stipulated areas). And endowments must be invested in something unless they are to depreciate. Once an endowment has hit some sort of critical mass, maybe the mission to continue to grow it through contributions is no longer so important or should not be prioritized. Berea's endowment is at $950 million, I read, with an pay out of about 3.7% each year. That means it needs to earn about 7-7.5% interest a year to make up for inflation and its annual pay out. Less than 7% and it would begin to shrink. Achieving that sort of growth in today's market (or nearly anytime) is not easy—hence, a smart (and expensive) hedge fund manager is needed. And just to note, at current funding levels, given HEPI estimates, college tuition will double in 15 years simply because of inflation. Whether that cost will be defrayed or not is the critical question.

I think that likely some poor decisions were made at Berea College. I have some serious concerns about the restructuring. Time will tell. I think that the College is in a position that it could subsidize more of students' tuition provided it maintains and meets its development goals as well as keeps its endowment healthy. Student wages could be adjusted for inflation. I think that the crisis triggered a knee-jerk response, one that didn't consider that more than likely the markets would rebound, even if after several years, and the endowment would near its previous levels. And I agree when an institution spends (or invests) its money, be in contracting a vendor or purchasing services, it exercises financial power, and financial power is always complicit with political power. Buying stocks in Big Tobacco or Big Pharmacy is acting politically, albeit it in an indirect way.

In some ways, Berea represents a microcosm in what happened across higher education from 2008 until now but in a very particular way. It showed how private institutions were potentially financially vulnerable. However, the larger lesson from that period, the one that affects most students in American who do not attend private colleges on scholarships, is just how politically vulnerable access to higher education is in the United States. To address that, a political solution is required.

You are right—higher education has failed. It has failed to protect itself. Unless society is willing to protect it, then tuition inflation will continue to rise at triple the rate of consumer inflation and instead of tuition doubling in fifteen years, it will have doubled in seven.

And if it does, we will have only ourselves to blame.

Metaphysical Considerations: Properties, Objects and Change Over Time

2011-10-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

I've been reading and thinking quite a bit, which for me usually translates into writing quite a bit, usually in my journal, but often on the computer or on the blog. My reading has been metaphysics, actual physics, and photography outside my usual bedtime dose of Greek and Roman history. This blog entry will just be tossing out just some philosophical ideas and directions I am thinking in. I reach no conclusions, or even endorse a view. It is mostly just thinking "on screen" so to speak.

The thought I am pursuing here is that our ability to identify the same object throughout time is analogous to our ability to identify the same property in different objects, and that any explanation for the former should bear upon on the later and vice versa.

First, I should note that my use of the “same object” is a bit misleading, for herein I will accept the thesis of temporal parts, that is that a whole is composed not only of spacial parts but also of temporal parts. Thus, just as my hand is a part of जरद्, so was yesterday a part of जरद्, and all of my spacial and temporal parts taken together represent the whole of जरद्.

One reason for accepting that there are temporal parts is that we identify जरद् yesterday as just a part of the same object that is जरद् today, albeit a different part. And right now, I am sitting at my computer, but just a moment ago I was laying down. It would seem that now I have the property of “being sat down” but previously I had the property of “being laid down,” or to paraphrase these, at t₂ I have the property of “being bent” whereas before at t₁I had the property of “being flat.”

However, most of us would assent to Leibniz's Law, that is, objects x and y are identical if and only if any property possessed by x is also possessed by y and vice versa. Given that I had different properties at t₁ and t₂, then, ipso facto, there were two different objects at t₁ and t₂. There is a “Bent-जरद्” and a “Flat-जरद्” and they are distinct entities. While we want to preserve Leibniz's Law (motivations for doing so include wanting to explain identity), we also want to reject that my act of moving from a laying to sitting position caused a new object to go into existence and another object going out of existence.

In order to preserve my identity throughout these modifications, and hopefully salvage Leibniz's Law. David Lewis suggested we do this by distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic properties. Intrinsic properties are those properties which an object has itself, while extrinsic properties are properties that an object has in relation to another object. Being a circle is an example of an intrinsic property while being a aunt is an extrinsic property. A circle is a circle in virtue of it being a circle, but you are an aunt in virtue of having a niece or nephew. Being a certain shape is what we might say is a property, but being an aunt is what we might say is having a relation. A solution has been proposed that suggests that intrinsic properties can be time indexed. That is, rather than saying जरद्-Whole is both flat and bent, a contradiction, we say that जरद्-Part at t₁ is bent and जरद्-Part at t₂ is flat (notice also when we index in this manner we move from tensed sentences to the “eternal is” as in “two plus two is four”).जरद् -Whole then differs in the property of his temporal parts just like जरद्-Whole differs in his spacial parts, like “being hairy” on the top of his head but “not being hairy” on the sole of his feet.

Of course, Lewis's solution is not the only one, and we have a wide variety of paths we could choose from. We could be nihilist about properties or objects, for example. However, it is in this vein I was to continue.

This is basically where I just point the way towards what really interests me here without actually taking it up. It is the recognition of the similarity in parts between जरद्-Part at t₁ and जरद्-Part at t₂ at allows us to preserve identify him as existing across time albeit in different temporal parts.

We may be faced with the onus of several explanations. First, we may need to give an account of how wholeness is directed, and that will lead us into what is essentially the epistemology of mereological sums, provided we want to grant that there are any. Next, we will want to give an explanation of how we determine that an object is still the same object after some modification—the epistemology of mereological sums over time—and how we know (or when) something has changed enough as not to be what it was before (leading us into a discussion of essentialism). All this rests, though, given we are talking about different parts having different properties, on how we identify properties. If this last question is answered, then that answer has to work not only across temporal parts but also across objects—how do we identify the same property across objects as well as across the same parts of one object across time?

The question itself strongly suggests against trope theory—that each red is an individual instantiation unique of redness—because the object then “flickers” across temporal parts. In fact, all its properties “flicker” and that leaves the question of how we identify it as the same object over time when it loses all its properties it had before. It seems temporal parts and trope theory together may commit us to some Heraclitean view that we might well wish to clear steer of. While we wanted to preserve identify across some changes in order to keep Leibniz's Law, there seems no way to preserve Leibniz Law's if we agree x and y can be the same object but have no properties in common. One might point to the sameness of material--substance--but it really seems that the case for nominalism has some motivation, or the argument that there are not properties. Universalism has some answers to offer, the most Platonic of which would be that the same property can inhere in different parts throughout time and even with the modification of the substance--in fact, across substances (if we accept they can be discreet)--and, since Platonic Ideas are eternal, possibly outside of time, there is not problem in them inhering across temporal parts and hence no "flickering" occurs.

Coming back to nominalism, though, I think that there may be a metaphysically sound way to answer many of these questions (and some other very important ones, too, like metaphysical and linguistic vagueness). What I'd like to do is develop a clear, working thesis about temporal parts of resemblance nominalism. I want to be sure that my metaphysics are consistent, and that means of course exporting answers to different questions, like “Are there abstract objects?”, "What is the nature of time?," “Do objects endure or perdure?” and “Are their mereological sums?” However, when you are trying to work across questions like these it really becomes dizzying . . . particularly when you finally come to the point where you stop considering and try to elaborate what you have come to think yourself, even if there remains some a healthy sense of fallibilism (a sense of which I think is sorely needed by too many of this world).

Reading List

Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law by Muhammad Khalid Masud
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Bayamus & Cardinal Polatuo: Two Novels by Stefan Themerson
Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later edited by Vesselin Petkov
Rick Sammon's Digital Photography Secrets by (guess!) Rick Sammon
Began and Finished A Letter to a Hindu by Leo Tolstoy

So Why Is My Tuition So High?

2011-10-28T04:54:00.000-07:00

UH announced a 5 year 35%
tuition increase

I read in the news today that the University of Hawai'i is getting ready to ratchet up tuition—in fact, 35% in the next five years. One student expressed her concern:

Pre-nursing sophomore Lynelle Acosta, 19, of Kalihi, said she worries about her parents' ability to pay her tuition, but she feared that without an increase, her program would suffer budget cutbacks, which could result in fewer courses available.

Unfortunately, Lynelle may be faced with both higher tuition and budget cuts to her program

Of course, inflation isn't expected to rise at that rate. According to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation has not broken 6% annually since 1982. Of course, like interest, inflation in cumulative. However, if we look at any given five year period since 1982, we never find a five year period in which inflation even came close to 35%. In fact, since 1982 the highest five year period of inflation was from 1985-1990. The total cumulative inflation from January 1985 to December 1990 was 26.82%. For approximately that same period tuition inflation was 48.37%, nearly twice the rate of consumer inflation.

YEAR	TUITION INFLATIONS	CONSUMER INFLATION	RATIO
1990	8.09%	4.81%	1.5
1989	7.93%	4.99%	1.65
1988	7.60%	4.16%	1.84
1987	7.56%	3.90%	2.07
1986	8.09%	1.61%	4.35
1985	9.10%	3.55%	2.56

In fact, historically tuition inflation has outpaced consumer inflation by about 100%--that is, higher education costs increase twice as fast as everything else.

The basic question is, “Why is that?”

To answer this question, we can first turn our attention to the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI) which is now managed by the investment company CommonFund. CommonFund took over the index, the only index specifically related to higher education, sometime in 2005. The index focuses on eight core costs of university campuses. These include faculty, administrative, clerical, and service employees’ salaries and fringe benefits; miscellaneous services (such as computer programmers and auditors); supplies and materials (such as office supplies); and utilities (such as fuel and electricity). What the HEPI reflects is that these eight areas faced inflation rates higher than the CPI average. For example, it reports the price of goods and services purchased by colleges and universities from 1980 to 2000 rose 154%, according to HEPI measurements, while inflation measured by the CPI increased 118%.¹

The HEPI isn't without some question. For example, its reporting conflicts with some other research and indexing of higher education. For example, the HEPI reports that since 1961 there have been nine years in which the CPI reported inflation was higher than higher education. The College Board's study of higher education inflation identifies only three years during same time period (1978, 1979, and 1980) that consumer inflation outpaced the rising cost of higher education. The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates the same. So why does the HEPI report the inflation index for higher education as lower than other indexes? It is simple, really. The HEPI focuses on the costs to institutions, while the the CPI (and the College Board's study) focuses on the cost to the consumer—that is, the tuition paid by students. The HEPI's “tuition” is really more like a “cost per student” increase to the institution.

The HEPI reports that inflation for institutional costs increased 154% from 1980 to 2000. This is all and good. The cost for students during that same time frame, however, increased by 170.68%. And, by focusing on institutional costs rather than consumer costs, the HEPI has indicated that this century the inflation of the cost of higher education is actually outstripping the CPI's calculations of tuition inflation. The principle claim one can make, vis-à-vis the HEPI, is that compared to costs (of institutions), tuition is actually getting less expensive as demonstrated below (this chart is taken from FinAid.Org).

Year	Tuition Inflation (HEPI)	Tuition Inflation (CPI)
2006-2007	3.40%	2.70%
2005-2006	5.00%	4.30%
2004-2005	3.60%	2.50%
2003-2004	4.60%	3.30%
2002-2003	2.90%	2.10%
2001-2002	4.10%	1.10%

What the above chart seemingly indicated is that the inflation for institutions increased (uncompounded) by 23.6% from June 2001 to June 2007 while consumer inflation increased (uncompounded) by 16%². So costs for institutions actually increased 67.8% more than the CPI. This is extremely misleading, though, as the chart above uses not tuition inflation from the CPI but the CPI overall consumer inflation index (shame on FinAid.Org!). When we look the CPI's actual numbers for tuition from the same period, we get a very different take. Inflation for the eight core areas the HEPI measures increased by 23.6% but the cost of tuition for students increased by 49.8% (all uncompounded).

Year	Jun
2001	4.2
2002	6.8
2003	7.4
2004	10.1
2005	8.1
2006	6.4
2007	6.3
Total Inflation (% uncompounded)	49.8

We can conclude this comparison with some data points by comparing the CPI average, the CPI tuition inflation reporting, and institutional inflation from the HEPI from June 2001 to June 2007. Again, the inflation figures below are uncompounded (they would increase by slightly more than 1% if compounded—see footnote 2).

During this period average inflation increased by 16%.
During this period inflation for institutional costs increased by 23.6%.
During this period inflation for tuition (students' cost) increased by 49.8%.
Student's cost for inflation increased more than three times average inflation and more that twice the rate of inflation for institutions.

So where did that extra 50% increase in tuition go over and above inflation costs?

In the for-profit market, the answer is easy to find. Bloomberg reported earlier this year:

Strayer Education Inc., a chain of for-profit colleges that receives three-quarters of its revenue from U.S. taxpayers, paid Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Silberman $41.9 million last year. That’s 26 times the compensation of the highest-paid president of a traditional university. ³ ⁴

One needs merely survey the earning of for-profit education groups like Apollo Group, the parent group for Phoenix University, to see they are making record profits. The extra money went to pay executives and stock holders with most of that money coming from taxpayers' pockets and student loans. But what about our non-profit and state institutions? Why has tuition outpaced inflation and even institutional costs' inflation?

To help answer that question, I turned my attention away from the investment-fund managed HEPI to the Delta Project, a non-profit analyst group focused on post-secondary education costs, productivity, and accountability. Just last month they released their findings in the report, “Trends in College Spending, 1999 – 2009.” Their findings are telling.

For the majority of institutions, increases in tuition do not translate into increases in spending. In fact, at most public institutions, tuition increases attempt to compensate for lost revenues from state and local budget reductions, but actual tuition increases are less than half of the actual reduction in state and local appropriations.
Among public community colleges, revenues from state and local appropriations declined an average of $488 per student between 2008 and 2009, whereas tuition increases generated new net tuition revenues of only $113 per student. Spending declined overall by -$254/student – again, showing evidence of cost cutting, but in a sector without other revenue sources to cushion against cuts.
Education and related spending in private research universities increased considerably more than increases in tuition revenue ($907 in spending per student compared to $293 in tuition revenue per student), suggesting that reserves still allow for increased spending despite losses in endowments and gifts.

2008 – 2009: One-year change in revenues per student from tuition/state appropriations compared to changes in spending
Sector	One-year change in net tuition revenue per student	One-year change in state and local appropriations per student	One-year change in education and related spending per student
Public Research	$369.00	-$751.00	$92.00
Public Masters’	$225.00	-$590.00	$26.00
Public Community Colleges	$113.00	-$488.00	-$254.00
Private Research	$293.00	NA	$907.00
Private Masters’	$536.00	NA	$352.00
Private Bachelors’	$381.00	NA	$298.00

Information from http://www.deltacostproject.org/resources/pdf/trendsissuehighlights.pdf

So tuition is increasing faster than inflation because the costs for institutions are higher than inflation and education is increasingly unsubsidized, putting more financial burden on the students (vis-a-vis tuition increases) rather than spreading it out among society in general.

This essentially means tuition is increasing because of a philosophical stance by politicians, policy makers, and the public (but to what extent to public subscribes to this view is questionable, Tea Partiers aside). Americans will not support accessible and affordable higher education for all. Those seeking higher education have the burden of financing it on their own, but they cannot expect the costs to be defrayed by the general public.

Why might we have this attitude? I think there are a number of reasons we can potentially identify. First, there is a general attitude that most degrees only benefit the degree holder. That is largely reflected in the choice of undergraduate degrees pursued today: Of the 1,601,000 bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2008–09, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of business (348,000) and the social sciences and history (169,000).⁵ Very few citizens have the perspective that more business majors are going to help improve society, and few think that taxpayer money ought to go to help a kid realize his Wall Street dreams. Bachelors degrees in areas like history are largely viewed as a sort of “vanity degree” and rather frivolous. While many will passionately argue the need to fund higher education in the humanities, there is a certain skepticism that churning out young adults who were philosophy majors is worth the taxpayers' investment. “Leave the humanities to the bourgeois,” goes the argument, “who have the means and leisure for such pursuits.” A similar attitude affects the sciences, particularly the medical sciences. “They will make enough money as doctors to pay back their student loans,” runs this justification.

A more damning indictment against the public might be a feeling of complacency, that of subscribing to the American sense of superiority. “We don't need to subsidize education,” it so thinks, “as we already are the best in the world.” Try to tell that to your computer engineer who can't find employment because just as qualified and far less expensive expertise are available in India where, although not subsided so heavily, education is much cheaper and all in all more vocationally aimed.⁶ Making education more affordable simply has no traction when there is an attitude that we “have enough of that already.”

Another attitude potentially affecting public willingness to subsidize education goes into the value of education itself. As I wrote earlier, the bachelor's degree has simply supplanted a high school diploma. A survey of waiters in your favorite restaurant will satisfy you that outside of a few years of teaching, a bachelor's degree in English literature or history will not take you significantly farther in terms of a career than a high school diploma, so this argument runs. If we fund education at all, this school seems to advocate, it should be graduate degrees and preferably (as in above) in the sciences or other innovate areas of "practical utility."

I think that there are very compelling counterarguments to all of these attitudes. The most powerful comes from longitudinal studies about the lifetime increase in income that comes from a higher education degree. While that survey of waiters may reveal the odd Asian studies graduate, that individual is still very likely to have a mean lifetime earning that is nearly twice that of her peers with only a high school diploma. Education is simply the most effective way to raise an individual's standard of living and combat poverty (in the developed world).

From Julian, Tiffancy and Robert Kominski. Education and Synthetic Work-Life Earnings Estimates. U.S. Department of Commerce,Economics and Statistics Administration, and U.S. Census Bureau. September 2011.

Consider this: the most predictive factor in a child's K-12 success is household income.⁷ Education becomes a self perpetuating cycle of poverty elimination. The story is easy to tell. Someone gets a degree. Their lifetime earnings increase. This improves the chances of their offspring for academic success, paving the way for them to also seek higher education as well as giving them access to resources to support the early childhood development of their own offspring, an opportunity they may not have had.⁸ By this third generation, with adequate income and adequate nutrition, statistically the chances for this generation to be “solidly middle class” are much higher and increase with subsequent generations.

It then doesn't matter that a philosophy degree seems more frivolous than a chemistry degree. The result is largely the same—a reduction of poverty, which in turn leads to less dependence on social welfare programs and increases lifetime tax contributions . . . there is no better return on investment than the investment in higher education, fiscally or socially. In these times when austerity plans and tax cuts are the banner so many are gathering under, it is critical to realize that some government subsidy programs, like that in education, are not handouts—they are investments. And, like any good banker knows, when you cut successful investments you reduce future capital gains.

So, while I cringe to think of an increase of 35% in tuition, one has to pardon the institution. It isn't that the administration is vastly overpaid, as is the case in the for-profit sector (speaking of cutting investments that don't pay off . . .). It isn't that institutions are spending more, as the Delta Project revealed. It is the fact that as a society we are not making good investments, ones that will ultimately bring the greatest net benefits to us all, not only those who take advantage of higher education. A political solution is needed, one that provides adequate support to institutions, that takes into account that institutional costs do actually outpace consumer inflation, and one that emphasizes the power of education to bring about powerfully positive transformations to society as a whole.

Quick note: some information is not cited in the footnotes but merely hyper-linked to in-text.

1 There is an anomaly in the HEPI's reporting of the CPI. The average inflation for consumers over that same period (January 1980-January 2000) was actually 116.97%.

2 Actual accumulative inflation for this period is 17.05%.

3 Hechinger, John and John Lauerman. "Executives Collect $2 Billion Running U.S. For-Profit Colleges." Bloomberg. Nov. 10 2010.

4 According to the Student Right to Know Act reporting information, 13% of 2003 incoming students to Strayer graduated within 6 years. (see https://icampus.strayer.edu/student-services/student-consumer-information/student-right-to-know). The nationwide average in 2003, according to the US News and World Reports, was 40% graduation within four years. Hopkins, Katy. "10 Colleges With Highest Four-Year Graduation Rates." US News & World Report. May 3, 2011.

5 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2011) Digest of Education Statistics, 2010 (NCES 2010-015), Chapter 3.

6 That is not to say they are more effective. See Geeta Anand's "India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to Hire" in the Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2011.

7 Michael T. Nettles, Preface, in Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley, The Black–White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped (Education Testing Service, 2010), p. 2, available at www.ets.org.
Also see K. White, “The Relation between Socio-Economic Status and Academic Achievement.” Psychological Bulletin 91 (1982).
For research that demonstrates that intelligence is also not as reliable an indicator of academic success as household income see J. VanTassel-Baska, Gifted Youth at Risk: A Report of a National Study. Reston, VA: Council for Exceptional Children, 1991.
Also see J. VanTassel-Baska, and T. Stambaugh, Eds. Overlooked Gems: A National Perspective on Low-Income Promising Learners. Proceedings from the National Leadership Conference on Low-Income Promising Learners. Washington, DC: National Association for Gifted Children, 2006.
8 See Diane Ravitch's "School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade," New York Review of Books, September 29, 2011, for a powerful defense of how nutrition during pregnancy and early childhood is a powerful link in improving overall lifetime development. For more on this, see also Robert Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong's The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Also Referenced:

From Julian, Tiffancy and Robert Kominski. Education and Synthetic Work-Life Earnings Estimates. U.S. Department Commerce,Economics and Statistics Administration, and U.S. Census Bureau. September 2011.

**The Delta Project. Trends in College Spending 1999-2009. September 2011.**

When I'm Not Eating Dogs

2011-10-28T00:15:00.000-07:00

Quick question: should I jazz up my blog's appearance?

It has been a great few weeks. Lowell asked me in a recent message how I was keeping busy. Here is what I had to say:

I'm reading TONS of analytic metaphysics and classic fiction, some photography books, the news and the New York Review of Books, reading Greek and Roman history each night before bed, working on trying to wind down my novel, building a few Web sites to play around with, trying to catch back up with my Sanskrit before returning to Honolulu, riding my bicycle, taking photographs, writing the occasional blog, listening to the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal recording of Marice Ravel's orchestral pieces (I'd never listened to him before . . . great program music), doing lots of journal writing and sketches out preliminary thoughts for my Ph.D. dissertation (some intersection of analogical reasoning and its metaphysical implications, probably through the lens of resemblance nominalism), trying to improve my Khmer, drinking coffee in cafes, hanging out and talking with my wife, visiting with family (my in-laws have been staying with us the past week or more), drinking coffee at home, figuring out the best way to ship a number of things from here to the USA, and having a bottle of wine every now and then. I think that about sums up everything I am doing!

Add the ocassional trip to the disco for a night of dancing, heading outstation every now and then, and working everyday, and that pretty much is the totality of my life!

My mother-in-law, sister-in-law and three kids are getting ready to move in with me--in just a few days. I am looking forward to it for a lot of reasons. First of all, where we live is much nicer. Second, it is likely I will be gone soon, and I may not actually live with my wife again for six months or more. I like her having her family with her. I pretty much support the extended family anyway, so I won't have to pay a second rent each month. Also, it helps me see just a little bit better--at least for now--that the kids, Senny and Apinyah, are going to school every day.

Proper schooling is my condition for letting the family move in--that in less than a week of them coming, the kids are in school and they stay in school. If the family wants to go to Phnom Penh for a week, then someone has to stay here, with the kids, because they are not missing a week of school on a whim. It is frustrating because the cycle of poverty the family is trapped in will be perpetuated in these sweet little kids unless priority is given to their education. You know that book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? One of the basic premise is Asian kids try to please their parents, parents don't try to please their kids. This is absolutely true in Cambodia, but at least in my family that doesn't mean the parents drive the kids to succeed. It largely means that the kids get ignored as the parents do what they want, and then when the kids can, they start working and handing their money over to their parents.

Well, I've got to get back to work as well as work on a short essay that will probably be my next posting here on exactly why college tuition inflation outpaces consumer inflation, triggered by the recent announcement by the University of Hawai'i that in the next five years it will increase its tuition by 35%.

By the way, I'd love for folks to check out some of my other Web endeavors, most recently Intrepid Philosophy Photography, just a Web site with some of my photos. I used WordPress and some redirect magic to make it cling together since I'm not so great at HTML. Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

Reading List

Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law by Muhammad Khalid Masud
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Bayamus & Cardinal Polatuo: Two Novels by Stefan Themerson
Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later edited by Vesselin Petkov

Bizarre Foods You Have Eaten

2011-10-24T02:32:00.000-07:00

Cooking Dogs in Cambodia

Update: Because so many people had trouble with the poll, I got rid of it. Instead, I just made a list of "bizarre foods" I have eaten and hope you will add your own in comments.

So, I was just reflecting on a recent trip to a dog restaurant and that led me to consider what foods I have and have not eaten, and if there is anything really I would not eat that I know would not kill me.

That made me wonder about what other people would or would not eat, so I decided to ask.

What Would You Eat?

I'll note that I've never eaten cat, earthworm, nor horse. I've never had "maggot cheese" but I have had Japanese funazushi (follow the link for a great article on this dish) while living in Minamihama. Wiki says:

Eating water beetles
Funazushi is a rare type of nare-zushi still prepared near Lake Biwa, Shiga Prefecture (which is where I had it). Fresh funa (crucian carp from the lake) are scaled and gutted through their gills keeping the body (and often the roe) of the fish intact. The fish are then packed with salt and aged for a year before being repacked annually in rice for up to four years. The resulting fermented dish may be served sliced thin or used as an ingredient in other dishes.

So, while I haven't had lion, I think it is pretty tame compared to four year old fish. But maybe I am brave enough to try some of the other fermented fish dishes of the world, like Icelandic hákarl.

So while I am sure I'd eat just about anything out there ("Here kitty, kitty, kitty!"), I'm still pretty fascinated about the things I haven't tried and what led someone to eat such a thing. The first time I ate dog, for example, it is because I mentioned I'd like to try it to my wife. The next time we came visiting my in-laws, my father-in-law put one of his dogs on the chopping block and I had Fido for dinner. If you have eaten rat, was it because you went to a Saigon rat restaurant just to eat rat, or what? I want to hear about it (and descriptions of the gustatory experience would be great!).

Some of these things are not so bizarre--I mean, foie gras is not really bizarre, but I thought I'd put a few things on the list that most people could say, "Yes, I've eaten that!" And if you grew up in the south, you've probably eaten tripe--the stomach lining of cows or pigs--or you may have had headcheese, which is pig's brain, so . . . don't bash it until you bite into it.

Eating a quail embryo

I'm really interested in hearing about people's own eating adventures or reactions to some of the items on the list of in the comments. If you'd like to elaborate on your strange eating experiences beyond the poll, tell me about it in a comment . . . like a night out eating basushi--raw horse--or perhaps you were given a raw sheep's eye as the guest of honor at a Mongolian home?

My Bizarre Food List

Funazushi
Hairy tarantula is pretty good--especially the legs.
Umm, crispy!
It is just that first bite that is hard to take . . .
Dog
Rat
Camel
Mice
Snake
Turtle
Alligator
Pig's Eye
Pig's Ear
Pig's Intestines, Brain, Face, Tripe . . . I've pretty much eaten most of a pig
Water beetles
Grasshoppers
Crickets
Frogs
Tarantulas
Foie Gras (fattened duck liver)
Duck Liver (foie gras is better)
Bull's Penis ("Torpedo Soup")
Fish Heads
Fish Eyes
Fish Eggs (I mean, it's caviar, baby!)

Chicken Feet: It's What's For Dinner.

Chicken Feet
One Hundred Year Old Egg
Quail Embryos

So, tell me about your adventure eating list . . . lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Just in case you really just want to take the poll, you can go here: http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/539309 You can visit the results here in a few days after a couple of folks have taken the quiz: http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/539309/results.

After the Rains

2011-10-23T03:55:00.000-07:00

First, any contemporary fiction reading suggestions are appreciated. I've got my classics, but contemporary fiction is not something I hear lots about.

The destruction was incredible. Today, I rode our moped along my usual bike route. Three bridges have been washed out, and the roads . . . stones where sealed roads once were. There were holes at least 30 cm deep (that is a foot in Americanese). Huge sections of the sealed roads are just gone--highways that remind you of the Benton place road.

I didn't think to take any pictures of the washed away roads. My youngest nephew went with me. I think that I've imprinted as his father--as you know, my brother-in-law passed away in the spring. Now he is telling his mother he is "kohn Jar**d"--that is, Jar**d's baby--not her's. There is a tenderness to this and then a terrible vein of tragedy branching all through it--the pain his mother must feel, both in the childish rejection and in the reminder of her loss. He has been trying to sleep with me at nights, but each night, he is removed, although a couple we've let him fall asleep in my bed before moving him to his mother's.

Today I have not done much. I stayed up late reading the New York Review of Books and reading about lobbying laws in the United States. I woke up early to see my mother-in-law, Bihua, her father, and Bihua's brother off to Poipet where they are going to visit more family. I gave Mama $50 and Bihua and his brother $20 each in Vietnamese dong, but they will be back for a night or two before they go on to Sihanoukville--Bihua is visiting the children he hasn't seen in 39 years. I want to go to Sihanouk too. It would be nice to have a beach holiday before work becomes getting much more intensive. On that note, I found a rather nasty photo of my jellyfish sting from my last trip there. I'm undecided. Going there is always expensive because I am expected to buy all the food for all the family the entire time I am there, as well as sponsor whatever we do and it gets very expensive even from a Honolulu perspective. However, we will make a trip to Phnom Penh in the next week or so in order for me to buy gold and tailored suits . . . so, I guess it is all relative.

Jellyfish sting that was so bad I limped for days . . . nasty, eh?

Reading List

Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law by Muhammad Khalid Masud
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Finished Parmenides by Plato
Finished The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
Finished Twilight in Italy by D.H. Lawrence
Finished HDR Photography Photo Workshop by Pete Carr and Robert Correll

PS: Exterminate all the Brutes!

2011-10-21T05:51:00.001-07:00

Rains have stopped (for the moment) but I'll keep reading

2011-10-20T02:54:00.000-07:00

It has stopped raining here in Siem Reap, and we've had power for a full three days. We had power two of our first seven days back, so this is quite a relief. The waters have also greatly receded. The Psar Chaa area still has quite a bit of water, and last night the road running to Tonle Sap, my usual bike route, was still under water. I planned on going out this evening and take some photographs if the way was still passable, but right before 3PM while I was sitting in a cafe having a "Red Skin"--a red cabbage, pineapple and green lime juice--and a latte, it began to pour the rain. I rode home on our pink moto with the rain stinging my face.

Bihua, my mother-in-law's long lost father and his brother, along with my sister and mother-in-law, have been staying with us for about four nights now, with the youngest baby, too. It was pretty miserable those first two nights, with the temperature in the mid-nineties (about 34 degrees Celsius) and humidity at 100% and mosquitoes buzzing around and no power for a fan (we have AC in our bedroom, but of course that needs power as well). There is just no escaping The Mosquito. We did put up mosquito nets in the upstairs TV room and that is where five us us--all but Bihua and his brother who stay in the second story bedroom--slept.

Back to the world of lights, electricity and Internet access, I have to admit I feel an absolute rage at what I feel is the incompetence of the Occupy Wall Street protests as I can resume reading about them. They've managed to gather a huge crowd, have the potential to incorporate at least a solid platform for social change, but so far I see nothing. Demand criminal prosecution or at least investigation into individuals who may have brought down Wall Street, try Bush and Cheney for war crimes and ruining our economy by fighting two wars with borrowed money, demand that Obama grow some balls, ensure the House and Senate get stacked with Democrats so he can do something with those balls he grew, something besides just express the malaise that America's youth feels and has felt for the last twelve years (I've felt it--have you?). The world is watching, waiting, sympathizing, but still wondering . . . will anything become of it? Anything at all? Or just an expression of our outrage at American society that is, I might add, totally screwed up on so many different levels but particularly in terms of political economy. Okay, that was my rant.

With the lights out and flooding just outside the door with the rain coming down, I've been reading at home a lot. I've been reading some great philosophy. Of course, the articles in Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics are great. I didn't find the ones on causation so hot, although I think it is a hot topic. But the ones on abstract entities and modality were just spectacular and very thought provoking. And, since it will be part of my canonical exam, I thought it would also be a good time to read Plato's Parmenides, which I got on my Kindle, as it fits in with the general thrust of my reading. Here is a great quote from Gill's introduction to that edition:

"In an unmetaphysical age there is probably more metaphysics in the common sense (i.e. more a priori assumption) than in any other, because there is more complete unconsciousness that we are resting on our own ideas, while we please ourselves with the conviction that we are resting on facts."

However, what I have been most excited about is Rodrigues-Pereyra's book, Resemblance Nominalism. It is providing an extremely helpful framework for my own thoughts about the "problem of universals" and my research and work into similarity and analogous reasoning. I may try to write a very short review here later on, although it has been around a while--it was published in 2002. I'm trying hard to whittle down this huge topic into something manageable for a Ph.D. dissertation. Anyway, it is an expensive book (I think $120 new), but if you can get it from a library or through ILL, it is well worth the read. I'm just about 1/5 of the way through because it is exciting enough that after reading a section I have to write a reflection on it in my journals. While not everyone may be as mad about metaphysics as I am, I think it is a great read for philosophers interested in realism vs. nominalism vs. trope theory. It has a clarity and simplicity of language I greatly hope to model my own too prosaic prose after.

I've also been relaxing with some fiction reading. It is so hard to know what contemporary fiction is worth reading, and since I don't hang out with English speakers/readers I don't get many recommendations. So, I go to the classics. As part of my effort to read through the remaining books by Joseph Conrad I've yet to read (there are at least a dozen more), I began and finished Under Western Eyes, a novel about what might be called the "human politics of revolutionary Russia," although that might not quite fit. I love Conrad largely because of his writing about places I know, like Indonesia, from times I do not know or experiences of being "the other" that I am so familiar with. And, I love stories of the sea (perhaps I should have just been a sailor). So, this story, set in St. Petersburg and Geneva, is not what I am used to from him. The storyline was a bit more simple and straightforward than many of his stories, but it was a good read. And The Island of Dr. Moreau is as light reading as a comic book.

"An Afternoon in Bangkok" by (and copyright) Trey Ratcliff
--click on the photo to find his Flickr.
See what I mean!?

Finally, and perhaps dangerously (at least for my wallet), I've just about finished a book on HDR photography and already made the mental preparations to drop a load of cash on cameras, lenses, and software at the end of the year to pursue this. I ran across the work of Trey Ratcliff and fell in love with it in an envious, "I wanna do that!" sort of way. I got books by other photographers on the technique and process to learn about it, just wanting to learn all I can without actually doing it first. I've also been pouring over dSLR camera reviews, et cetera, trying to find the best one that fits my potential budget (the best one is undoubtedly the Nikon D3x, but it comes with a $7500+ price tag). It looks like the Nikon D700 is probably the very best digital camera on the market outside of Nikon's D3 series, but I guess the Canon EOS 1D Mark IV is a close competitor. And, thanks to my friend Amy that BCD and regulator I was planning on buying has been gifted to me (big thanks to her!), so most of that other hobby expense I was planning on dropping money on is already in hand (and a thanks to Josh, too, for keeping it for me for like six months). I am really disappointed that I haven't been able to complete my rescue diver training as yet, too, but perhaps before the end of the year or once I am back in Honolulu. That also means that at the end of next year, I should be ready to purchase the JVC ProHD GY-HM100 video camera in time for a summer in India followed by a summer traveling with my nephew in Southeast Asia. Rock on for technology and the money to buy it with!

Well, enough of what has probably been a boring read for those you of with the stamina and patience to slug through it. I think I am going to have an afternoon glass of pinot noir, put on my glasses, and read until my conference calls start this evening (two hours of listening and talking).

Reading List

Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
Parmenides by Plato
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law by Muhammad Khalid Masud
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
HDR Photography Photo Workshop by Pete Carr and Robert Correll
Began and finished Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes

It's Not Only the Environment: The Poison of Rhetoric in American Discourse

2011-10-14T03:36:00.000-07:00

The largest problem confronting the United States today is its seduction by rhetoric to such a degree that huge swaths of the population are willing to turn their eyes away from and shun facts because they “not feel right” or don't accord with their “intuitions,” be they political, religious, or otherwise. The consequence is strife that becomes strictly ideological not in terms of the predictive powers of the ideology but rather in the appeal of its rhetoric—it in fact ceases to be ideological at all but something closer to imaginary. The facts no longer matter—it is just the feelings or what the facts are imagined to be, not what they actually are. It is what those feelings reflect that causes me to say that this is the “largest problem confronting the United States today.”

To illustrate the difference between predictive and rhetorical consequences, global warming provides an excellent example. Scientific theories provide models that explain something, and global warming is such a theory. Scientific theories' power and appeal is captured in several criteria. To elaborate a few, coherence, maximal coverage, ontological spareness, and predictive powers. First, are they coherent (do not involve holding a contradiction). This is the logical constraint. Second, that offer maximal coverage—meaning, the best theory is that the explains the maximal cases it is meant to apply to with the fewest outliers. This is the explanatory constraint. Third, they are as ontologically sparse as possible. This is the metaphysical constraint and what has come to be known as Occam's Razor—don't have unnecessary entities. Finally, they offer predictive powers. That is, they not only explain the information we have before us, but are helpful in explaining what that information tells us is going to happen. Almost all “theories” share this last constraint—the constraint of testing.

I am no climatologist. Therefore, I am not familiar with the detailed data that the community of climatologists use to justify theories about climate and climate change.¹ However, there are several elements of the theory that are quite easy for the layperson to grasp. The theory of human-caused climate change, the theory of the climatologist I'll consider, says this:

Human activity releases greenhouse gases (climatologist depend on others—notably petroleum chemists and environmental scientists, as well as other sources of information like the financial and sales data that helps us know just how much greenhouse producing activities are taking place. These pieces of information, not necessarily in the purview of climatologists, is a necessary part of the theory).
Greenhouse gases retard the release of solar heat. Again, this knowledge comes not merely from climatologists. It is again chemists and physicists that tell us about the behavior of chemical compounds.
Finally, the theory suggests that the human caused greenhouses are significant enough to increase the Earth's temperature.

It is this last claim of the human-caused climate change theory that is in debate. The theory is attractive. It explains something—global warming—in predictable, testable ways (the warming of the world's ocean considered among many climatologists are the key predictable change). It doesn't posit any new entities, but rather works within undebated facts about the elements we know to exist. And finally, it gives maximal coverage to the data it is meant to explain: why is the Earth getting warmer. It is important to recognize that it isn't this fact—that the Earth is getting warmer—that is debated by the scientific community. There is no doubt to that. The debate is whether this is “natural” or “human caused.”

Just what “natural” is or means, and what something natural entails, is not a simple answer. Jan Sapp (1999) in his What Is Natural: Coral Reef Crisis² treats this question considerably in his examination of the crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks that were cast by some in then still fledgling field of marine biology as a “crisis” that, unless resolved, could destroy the Great Barrier Reef itself. As Sapp rightly points out,

Ecological processes may be operating on temporal and spatial scales that far exceed the scope of most ecological studies. And all this makes studying the causes and effects of large-scale environmental changes, distinguishing between what is natural and what is anthropogenic, and deciding upon what action to take, all the more difficult. (vx, italics added)

It is this last thought, of what action to take, that it itself what should be the critical item in the political conversation about our national response to the fact that the Earth is getting warmer. In the case of the star-of-thorns outbreak, natural or not, many communities still thought it was important to take action to protect the their coral reefs from destruction by the crown-of-thorns starfish even if such population explosions were part of a natural cycle. Likewise, even if it is natural that the Earth will warm, and is not caused by human activity, does not mean that human activity could retard such natural warming process and the benefits of activity aimed at slowing or reversing climate change are not worth pursuing. Just because humans are not causing global warming alone doesn't mean they could not potentially counteract it, or that they should. These is the critical question, but because it does not suit the rhetorical prefiguring of debate in America it is hardly even considered worthy of addressing.

It is a matter of debate among scientists that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity. Politicians, it seems, also think this is critical—not that global warming is clearly happening. Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Republican presidential hopeful made the news by reaffirmed his view:

. . . that global warming is an “unproven scientific theory” that has been advanced, at least in part, by scientists who have "manipulated data," and he argued that programs intended to limit climate change are costing the nation "billions if not trillions" of dollars that he believes could be better spent elsewhere.³

This, however, sidesteps the value of a theory, ignoring any of the considerations of attractive scientific theories. What constitutes “a proven theory” is also a wonderful question, but that would lead us to perilous non-man's land where all theories can shown to be “unproven.” We've already seen some of what makes a scientific theory attractive. And isn't it the climatologist who have the best access to the information, and the most resources, to test and evaluate such theories about climate change? The fact that a politician is being asked to weigh in on whether the theory is attractive or not invites rhetoric, and answers to such questions often fatally become shaped by such rhetoric rather than the facts supporting such theory. But even if the theory that humans are causing global warming is incorrect, a political solution is needed to what global warming theorist predict, including those who do think it is a human activities: the predictable outcome theories, the warming of the Earth's oceans.

Major commissioned studies largely agree that the Earth will continue to get warmer—as it has on average every month since the middle of the 1980s. In every major predictive model by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change study in 1990, temperatures of the oceans were predicted to increase, and as a result the oceans will rise due to melting icecaps. This central warning of the rising of Earth's sea-level has been echoed many, many times by communities of scientists since then. These climatic changes will bring with them massive ecological, economic, and humanitarian consequences, and these changes must be dealt with on a national scale regardless of if they are caused by human activities are not.

See http://bit.ly/reIU7N for details and documentation from IPCC for the above graphic

However, in America's climate of rhetoric, whether from the right or the left, the facts are often left aside. Instead, someone like Perry denying global warming is not just reflective not of his expertise on global climate change: he has none. Perry graduated in 1972 with a degree in animal science with a 2.5 GPA.⁴ Instead, it matters because it is illustrative of what side he is on: ostensibly Christian, pro big business, and pro carbon fuels and it is just these audiences that his message (read: rhetoric) is meant to resonate with.

It doesn't matter that global warming is a documented fact regardless of whether its cause is debatable. Every scientific model with currency predicts that millions of coastal-dwelling people, including some of the largest urban areas on Earth, will be displaced—not only the “exotic” Pacific Islanders who have, in some cases, already negotiated their resettlement once their homes are under water. Oxfam estimates 75 million Pacific Islanders alone will be displaced by rising sea levels by 2050.⁵ However, all coastal cities--as most megalopolis are--will be impacted. Instead of offering solutions to these known and predictable problems, it is enough for politicians in the United States with C+ college averages to simply declare the party line, ignore the facts, and avoid the central question that Sapp draws our attention to: natural or not, what are we going to do about it given it is a fact?

I find that political dialogue in the United States, more than ever, is shaped and defined by “what side” you are on. Political discourse has moved from generating solutions to problems to defending “the team” and the conviction that no matter what the “other side” says, it must be opposed. Even when solutions offered by the “other side” meet the purported ideological goals of "the team" they must ruthlessly be opposed. This is as true when it comes to discussions of foreign or fiscal policy as much as climate policy or gay rights. Obstructionism and blame becomes more valued than solving problems as discourse becomes more virulent and less dependent on reality and as "the teams" become increasingly polarized by pure rhetoric rather than on substances

When action, political or otherwise, becomes motivated primarily by rhetoric and not by reality, a very dangerous situation is created, one that history has seen and humanity has suffered from time and time again. It is just this situation I find the United States of America to be in now, and this is why I find the reliance on rhetoric to be the largest problem confronting this great nation today.

1992 Words

1 Instead, I am reliant on texts by climate experts for the layperson such as the very excellent and concise survey by Mark Maslin, Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2005, or the reports by such panels of experts such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Core Writing Team R.K. Pachauri's A Reisinger's Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report: Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland or, interestingly enough, Chevron.Com, the oil company, which states:
"The use of fossil fuels to meet the world's energy needs is a contributor to an increase in greenhouse gases (GHGs)—mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane—in the Earth's atmosphere . . . We believe that a successful climate policy will be one in which the reduction of GHGs is accomplished equitably by the top emitting countries of the world through long-term and coordinated national frameworks." (http://bit.ly/pPLoGg)

2 Sapp, Jan. What is Natural: Coral Reef Crisis. New York, New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

3 Reston, Maeve. Presidential candidate Perry says climate change is only an unproven theory. McClatchy-Tribune News Service. August 18, 2011

4 Hooks, Chris. "Texas A&M Years Launched Perry — and a Rivalry". The Texas Tribune. August 2, 2011.

5 Bonnie Malkin. “Climate change to force 75 million Pacific Islanders from their homes.” The Telegraph. July 27, 2009

Also, M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds). Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

A Day [and Night] in Saigon Part 2: The Night

2011-10-14T01:32:00.000-07:00

As you may or may not have noticed, I've been offline for a while. That is what happens when it floods—things get turned off. So, for the second time in a month I've missed several days of work due to lacking power. At least my Kindle holds a charge.

I am writing to resume my description about my night in Saigon, but that already seems far away, and if it wasn't for the promise of the night in Saigon, I wouldn't even bother. Instead, I've gotten preoccupied on a short essay about how rhetoric and not information is motivating American politics. I guess I am dreaming of myself as something of the essayist. So, my description is brief, in part because it is “old news” and in part because I have a lot of work to catch up with.

After our sumptuous meal, we then headed to Nam Bo, a Saigon hookah bar with what I was told was belly dancing. As it turned out, it was pole dancing by two ladyboys and a guy. They were spectacular dancers. But what was perhaps more surprising was getting pulled into a Jagermeister photo shoot while I was there. Peou was a bit displeased with scantily clad models hanging all over me while holding up bottles and shots of Jagermeister, all with someone in a moose costume behind us. Who knows what will become of those photos! Then the models got on stage, danced, and as they left so did we.

After smoking a hookah and lemon and mint flavored tobacco, we hit a club whose name I didn't know. Peou's cousin got us in for free so we escaped the $18 a piece cover charge (I can't imagine anywhere in Cambodia charging that kind of cover). It was very full of old expats with their very young "wive"s while the geriatric gentleman next to us was enjoying the company of three ladyboys who each looked like they could have picked him up and threw him across the room. I had a couple of beers that cost $8 each and we danced, danced, danced, and it was really great fun. However, the night was not over yet. Our next stop was another club that was packed to the gills: Lush. It was literally wall-to-wall young Vietnamese, dressed to the nines. This wasn't full of farangs and hookers, but instead represented what felt like a very authentically hot Vietnamese stop. Here, there wasn't really room to dance. Instead, the purpose it to just to look as cool as you possibly can . . .

Our night petered out about then. Peou was tired, and although I still felt like I had the energy to go, I'm glad we stopped when we did as otherwise I am sure I would have had another drink or two and probably felt worst for it in the morning. And given we had another big day in Ho Chi Minh City planned, it was a good decision. And it is probably a good decision for me to stop here and turn my attention back to work. Floods are still a risk, and while I've got power I better get done what I can!

Oh, and below some video of Cambodia under water. This is the reason why we've lost power three times in the last month. You can read more about Southeast Asia Flood Warnings here. Rest assured, I am safe as can be but . . . inconvenienced. We are very lucky given the hundreds who have died and the fact that 3 million acres are underwater.

A Day [and Night] in Saigon Part 1: The Day

2011-10-10T02:11:00.000-07:00

There is only so much you can write about given the time that you have. And, given the time that I've had, there isn't time to write about it all. Rest assured, it was captured in page after page of tiny, tight script written between the grid lines of my red journal that has been the record of my existence for nearly three years now (also a sad testament to how little I journaled in the last year). So, I decided that I would blog just about a single day (and night) in Saigon. But, enough with this preamble.

Bihua, My Grandfather-in-Law Rediscovered After 39 Years

First, my mother-in-law was reunited with the father that she had not seen in THIRTY NINE YEARS. That is right. I don't have the time to recount how our recent trip to Vietnam entailed this, but it turns out he was living less than 30 minutes from where the house I built my in-laws sits. It was a tearful reunion, as you can imagine. I could spent the rest of this entry in telling about it, talking about him—he is a very nice, joyful old man, more than 80 years old and still rides his bicycle everywhere and seems addicted to Siang Pure Oil as he puts a little bit in his nostrils, across his forehead and the back of his neck every twenty minutes or so. It is remarkable stuff, and I almost always have a bottle of it in my pocket. And he was very fond of me, and speaks to me in the sweetness Khmer and really rejoices in my answers.

Saigon was . . . incredible. We stayed with family of my mother-in-law all but the last night, when we stayed in the Spring Hotel in Pham Ngu Lao, the backpackers' district. But let me describe only one day in Saigon.

I woke up early and checked my mail. Then, we walked maybe 20 minutes to a place that served an excellent noodle soup for breakfast—just a small stand, outside a house. The woman there sells 60 pounds of white noodles every morning, and runs out by noon each day. That is quite the cottage industry. It was very good, but another little stand we had walked to for soup the previous day took the prize from my perspective—a delicious white noodle and pork soup in a fiery beef broth. After that, we walked to a nearby market and Peou and bong srei looked at clothes and bought some shirts and night gowns.

We went back home, got the rest of the family—Papa, Mama, and the three babies (Mama's Papa was staying with brothers he had living in HCM)--and went to the “central market” or Ben Thanh Market. Its periphery is mainly aimed at tourist with a lot of kitsch souvenirs like ceramic women with the typical conical Vietnamese hats and the same Mekong scene painting. Inside, though, is a typical Vietnamese market. I went looking for two things: wood carvings and coffee.

A Durga idol from India

I have an incredible collection of woodcarvings (now spread across the world—I am a man of many homes). I have an intricately carved nat from Burma I bought over a decade ago, a whole collection of Toba Batak carvings including a rain stick and a chess set collected on multiple trips to Sumatra, an astoundingly beautiful Durga idol from India, a Ma'betsek carving from Malaysian aboriginal groups, wall panels from Cambodia, an intricately carved clock from Thailand, masks given to me as gifts from Haiti and Mexico and others acquired from Malaysia and Java (and I have my eye on a very expensive one from Cambodia), Kentucky canes . . . and, if I collect anything, it is woodcarvings and primarily from places I go. So, I wanted something from Vietnam. I found one—a rather simple mask, but attractive, and given my large collection of such masks, appropriate. I also bought a beautiful lacquered place setting for eight. When the five year plan is complete, and I build my first house somewhere, it will really be astonishing.

Coffee I also found, and coffee galore. Just behind Brazil as the world's largest exporter of coffee, Vietnamese coffee is unique. You may have heard me disparage the mass-produced floral-tasting stuff that passes as coffee here in Cambodia. And a quick disclaimer—I am so accustom to saying “café ” rather than “coffee” that the later sounds completely unnatural (and overly German) to me, but to avoid the display of pretensions we all know I have (otherwise, why mention it--and any use of a word that requires dicretic marks to write is a sign of pretension especially in America's anti-intellectual culture, but I will come to that in some later rant) . . . sooo, I will stick to "coffee." I went looking for coffee not just for me. Oh yes, I did buy 200 grams of an excellent highland arabica for myself. It is sitting to my left right now, begging to be brewed. But it was a more unusual variety I was going for, one to share with friends as something of a delicious novelty: “weasel coffee.”

This is the famous eaten-by-civets-and-pooped coffee. When I first heard about this—maybe six or seven years ago—I was disgusted. That was before I ate my first baby mice curry or fried tarantula. Now I have no gustatory limits. To “make” this coffee, coffee cherries are eaten by the civet for their fruit pulp, and about 36 hours later are passed out. That's right—cat scat. Research by food scientist Massimo Marcone at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada showed that digestive secretions seep into the beans.¹ These secretions carry enzymes which break down the beans' proteins. The beans are harvested from the scat, then thoroughly washed, sun dried and given only a light roast so not to overwhelm those delicately imparted flavors.

All that being said, authentic kopi luwak, as it is known in Indonesian, or cà phê Chồn as it is known in Vietnamese, is not only rare but extremely expensive—between $100-$600 per pound or more (a high end “free range” Vietnamese variety sells for more than $3000 per pound). However, there have been several processes developed that mimic the process of the civet's digestive secretions. This is what is commonly sold as “weasel coffee” in Vietnam. You will be hard pressed to find authentic weasel coffee. I bought three bags of the best imitation I could find. This is something I can share once I am back around folks, and you can enjoy all the benefits of cat-scat-café without having to imagine these fine beans actually coming out of a civet's ass. I will get my hands on the real thing in the coming months, though, so I can do a comparison. Care to join me?

Once we returned to the market, Peou had to run an errand, and one that you will learn about in due time (oh, devoted reader!). While she did this, I worked once again, but to be honest my present job is growing tiresome. But, that is neither here nor there.

A nearly fully formed (and very delicious) quail chick
ready to be eaten straight out of the egg

Once she returned the whole group of us—13 of us, total—went to eat in a banquet hall. We had a whole piglet, pig's ear with coconut palm, embryonic quails' eggs, and choy sum with garlic. Adventure eating highlights were me eating a pig's tail (crunchy) and a pig's eye (chewy). I'd eaten quail's egg with a nearly fully formed chick earlier while we stayed at our house in Long Thanh. It was a sumptuous meal, but I regret letting Peou's cousin order. I would have gotten a mouse deer, too. Then, the family departed and with Peou's cousin for a night on Saigon.

And because I have other matters to attend to—where did the day go?—I will have to continue “A Day [and Night] in Saigon” later on and let you know about the night Uncle Ho never dreamed about . . .

1 http://www.uoguelph.ca/news/archives/002065.html

Intrepid Philosopher versus The Writer

2011-10-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

At this very moment, I am sitting somewhere in the Mekong Delta region, underneath a mosquito blanket and dreaming of short stories. I am writing. It is just that right now I feel more like thinking about writing than actually writing (but जरद्, aren't you writing this?). What I mean, is that I need to get to my writing projects. I have a long short story to finish, another to revise, my novel to complete (it has languished at 40K words), and one academic article half finished (the one on Islamic inheritance law).

The problem is that sometimes—like now--I feel like I am my novel. At times (and this is ego speaking), I feel it should be left up to someone else to put it to paper if it indeed should be. And (this is not ego speaking) it should probably be left to someone else to figure out if it should be.

Writing in my journal; Tawau Airport, Borneo,
Malaysia, 2008

I have thousands of pages of journals, and certainly most of it isn't of any interest. The struggle of the hypersexuality of being a teen, discovering Western philosophy, pining for distant love, to-do lists that never got done, notes about thoughts and reading, business plans, budget notes, and more. I spent the day catching up on my journal. But that is something so transparent, so intimate, that I will never share it except in selected and often sanitized bits and pieces. More than a decade ago, when I began keeping a journal on my first trip to Malaysia, I vowed I would never self-censor it. It would be a raw record of my inner life. But maybe, just maybe, I can pull from it and put together something later on, when I feel like twilight is approaching and it is time to reflect rather than act, think about what is in those pages rather than continuing to fill them.

I've been reading, and reading always makes me want to write. I just finished an excellent article on Lewisian possible world theory. I look forward to having more time to write. I don't know when that will be. I sort of have this roughly five year plan (very communist of me, yeah?) that in about five years I'll be finished with my Ph.D., have secured my fortune, or at least enough to quit working full time.

My Ph.D. dissertation will be, of course, sustained and enjoyable writing (although I dread the whole committee part). Maybe then I'll just teach a few courses online or do some consulting work, and travel and pursue more activism, and finally get around to seriously writing. I was reading an article about Roberto Bolaño last night, and it said something that makes a lot of sense: for him, being a poet was more about an outlook, a way of living, than writing poems.

There is part of this thought I despise: I meet “artists” who don't create art, or “poets” who don't bother writing. And, for the most part, I find them to be charlatans, more enamored with the idea of being a "creative genius" than displaying much creativity, much less genius. I think I escape from this conundrum, though, as I don't identify as a “writer.” I identify as an intrepid philosopher. And I don't think that necessarily means putting pen to paper. My duty isn't to the world out there, to share all my knowledge and experience: it is about trying to figure out something for me. The person that I am, how I approach life—in short, what I do is form of sharing. I enrich the world, if at all, just by doing the things I find myself driven to do and trying to share them with the people around me.

I suppose that is what this blog is for.

Where is Mr. Brown Today?

2011-10-02T20:05:00.000-07:00

Roughly . . . here!

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

Saigon to Long Khanh: Vietnam, My Unknown

2011-09-27T22:04:00.000-07:00

Vietnam is not familiar ground to me, although I know the village—a little nowhere close to Long Khanh (but not the one, evidently, that turns up on Google Maps--I looked) and Long Binh, not too far from Hong Ngu. Vietnam isn't the Southeast Asia I am so familiar with. I can tell you where to get a good laksa in Kuala Lumpur, what dirt road outside Siem Reap makes for the best bike ride, where to find live jazz on a Tuesday night in Singapore—but even the city I know best, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh), I don't know at all. And the same with the language—comfortable in Bahasa, able to get around in Khmer, and enough to be polite in Thai, my Vietnamese vocabulary is limited to “Hello,” “Good-bye,” “Thank you,” and “I'll kill you.” (The last may deserve explanation, but I'll try to remain mysterious).

Vietnam is inscrutable to me. I think really it comes to the Chinese as opposed to Indian influence, but it seems so much more foreign to me than, say, the hinterlands of Cambodia or the heart of Bangkok. The fact I don't understand anything being said creates a wall between me and the world outside of me. My Khmer is good enough I can understand the gist of a conversation, or at least many times. But Vietnamese is, as they say, all Greek to me. The profusion of Chinese and local deities, too, adds a level of confusion for me. The North is more more heavily influenced by Chinese religion, with Confucian temples abounding. The South much less so, but even then there is some unknown (to me) Vietnamese saint's picture on our walls here (the inscription reads Đức Huỳnh Giáo Chủ Phật giáo Hòa Hảo). Here is what Wikipedia says about him:

Huỳnh Phú Sổ; this picture
is also on our wall
Hòa Hảo ( pronunciation, Chữ Nôm: 道和好, Chinese: 和好, Hé Hǎo) is a religious tradition, based on Buddhism, founded in 1939 by Huỳnh Phú Sổ, a native of the Mekong River Delta region of southern Vietnam. Adherents consider Sổ to be a prophet, and Hòa Hảo a continuation of a 19th-century Buddhist ministry known as Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương ("Strange Perfume from Precious Mountains," referring to the Thất Sơn range on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border). The founders of these traditions are regarded by Hòa Hảo followers as living Buddhas—destined to save mankind from suffering and to protect the Vietnamese nation.

So my family are members of a somewhat obscure southern Vietnamese Buddhist cult? Actually, it isn't so obscure, it seems, as Wikipedia goes on to claim:

Hòa Hảo claims approximately two million followers throughout Vietnam; in some provinces near its Delta birthplace [like here--I am in the Mekong Delta area as I type this entry], as many as 90 percent of the population practice this tradition. An important characteristic of this movement is its emphasis on peasant farmers, exemplified by the old slogan, "Practicing Buddhism While Farming Your Land." Farm life is considered to be the most conducive to religious practice and self-improvement. Patriotism and willingness to defend the homeland are valued.

Also, there is an authoritarian feel to Vietnam as well (Voice of America and Facebook are both blocked here, for example; there is no such censorship in Cambodia, perhaps from lack of ability than lack of desire, but still . . . ). Anyway, despite being surrounded by my family, there is no sense of being "home" in Vietnam like other places. Underscoring this was the fact that two old men showed up this morning to very literally look at me--they had never seen a live foreigner in their life. They spoke admiringly, I was told, of my nose.

Sunset over the Mekong River from Long Khanh

We left Siem Reap two days ago—still no power there and still flooded. Without being able to even charge my phone or check my e-mail, we decided to hit the road—why not—and go somewhere that I could work, that we wouldn't have to wade to the market, and kill a few birds with one stone.

We spent one night in Phnom Pehn at the Hometown Hotel, where we pretty much always stay (nice rooms, central location, and only $15 per night). For some reason, I could not get my computer to connect to the wi-fi there, but luckily I could get my Kindle connected and download the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Bereft of technology, I've written a lot in my journal, and one of my goals upon coming back to Cambodia from Kentucky was to write everyday. I've not quite hit that goal, but have certainly written more in the past month than I have the previous six months combined.

Let me tell you—Cambodia is under water. I took video of some of the flooding. There are literally thousands of acres underwater. It is amazing and appalling. The economic (= rice) lost is devastating, and right now 97 people are reported dead since it started September 10^th. Unfortunately, I cannot share my video or photos as I did not bring my camera adapter in my rush to leave Siem Reap. So, those will have to wait. (You can see my YouTube video, however, of the flooding in Siem Reap taken on the 12^th). The photos here are from last year's trip. I'll add more once we return home.

Crossing the Bavet border into Vietnam is always a pain because tour buses with hordes of passengers cross, meaning it is chaotic, not to mention a long wait. It had been about two years since I crossed this border, but it was just the same but a little speedier since the last time H1N1 was a big concern. There is a previous post, I think, about how I sneaked out of the health quarantine where I was being held because of a high body temperature (caused by standing in the Southeast Asian sun with a 50 pound backpack on). No such problems last time--the body heat monitors were not even turned on--and I just stood around and waited for our name to be called.

We spent the night in Ho Chi Minh, but wi-fi hasn't caught on like it has in Cambodia where even hair salons tout that they have wi-fi. So, I didn't have access there, but I did buy a data card so that I have a connection now. We found a private car to drive us here. We could have taken a bus to Binh Long, and then to Lanh Coa, and then from there gotten a bus to Hong Ngu, and from there taken motorbikes from there across the ferry and on to here. However, since my wife, not the backpacker, brought a suitcase with enough clothes to change three times a day for our entire anticipated stay and weighing more than she does, the thought of lugging it off one local bus and onto another all day was disheartening. So, while we paid much more, the luxury of just getting in a car and (thinking) we'd arrive at the door of our destination was worth the extra expense. Turns out that about 2km from our destination, after taking the ferry to the island where the village is, the road became impassable and we had to take a couple of motorcycles to finish the trip after all.

So, made it "home" safe and sound . . . we'll be here for three or four nights, I think, and then on to Ho Chi Mihn for some business I have to take care of that only a modern(esque) city like HCM can handle, and, providing the water is down and the power is on, it will be back to Cambodia for at least a few more weeks. I will write again from Ho Chi Minh if I find wi-fi!

Reading List

Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law by Muhammad Khalid Masud
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal
Began and finished Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands (excellent, as anything by Conrad I've read has been)
Began and finished Getting Started With WordPress by Todd Kelsey (way too introductory)

And since blogging last finished The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams and Building an Affordable House by Fernando Pages Ruiz.

The Mosquito

2011-09-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

I didn't sleep well last night despite reading the less than gripping chapter, "Literature from the Death of Tiberius to Trajan (37-117 A.D.)."

As most of you know, it is now a habit of mine for several years to read Greek and Roman history before bed. It isn't that I am a Greckophile or fascinated with the Roman Empire. It is simply that it is boring enough to dull the racing of my thoughts and lull me enough into sleep. As such, I've read Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Strabo, Livy, Tacitus, as well as the Western classics like Bury's Student History of the Roman Empire in Two Volumes and A History of Greece To the Death of Alexander the Great and of course Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. I read and reread these texts, not retaining much--just the broad contours of history, and I think I can repeat the names of the Roman Empires to Marcus Aurelius. What--the first sixteen (I can, unless I am forgetting someone)? I laid down to try to sleep while listening to a recording of Betrand Russell's chapter on the "Cosmogony of Plato." Finally, still unable to sleep, I got out the reading light and read the New York Review of Books for a few hours. When I finally did sleep, it was fitfull, waking for long, long minutes, waiting for the heaviness of sleep to return and snuff out the immediate stream of thoughts that seem to always accompany my consciousness, the streetlights seeming exceptionally bright or the noise of lone motorcycles bumping down our half-paved road seeming particulary loud and whiny.

And when I awoke, earlier than I would have liked, it was because of a familiar buzzing in my ear.

Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Diptera, Suborder: Nematocera, Infraorder: Culicomorpha, Superfamily: Culicoidea, Family: Culicidae. The Mosquito.

Each evening, we have a ritual. Before we turn out the lights, but often after Levi or Gibbon is in my hands, we comb the room for these insidious women. We shake the curtains, wave our hands over the doors, over the pictures on the wall, rustle the laundry basket in the corner. We scan the room, looking to commit insecticide before retiring to sleep. These hematophagous creatures hide; they land on dark colored objects that camouflage them. Most mosquitoes are crepuscular animals, meaning they feed at dawn or dusk. During the day, they hide in these dark places where they are hard to see, and, as we find during our murderous ritual, they are maddeningly good at finding such hiding places. Often we will disturb one, see it framed against the light-colored walls, and before we can bring our anthropic justice to bear on it, we will lose it as The Mosquito finds some dark background to obscure itself with. We complete our rounds each night, but justice is, after all, an imperfect science even for death squads.

All so often, the morning brings something new--a new itch where one's big toe was exposed sometime during the night, a bump on the arm, a red spot on a finger. Our preemptive strikes sometimes fail to make us safer.

And this morning, as I opened eyes that were still weary onto a room already bright and hot, seeped in the monsoon heat and humidity, one of the survivors from the night's abattoir was here, buzzing insolently in my ear. She, audaciously dumb, was shaking me out of the few hours slumber I had with that hungry buzz.

I had once read that these females emit this buzz to let males know they are ready to mate. Only females are hematophagous--blood eating. Males eat only nectar (ah, these ugly and despised butterflies!), as females can, too. However, blood--or the protein it yields--is essential for many species to produce their eggs. But these ladies, with their abdomens filled with blood--often times, their own weight over and again--are in no mood for an amorous liaison with one of their sweet-lipped nectar-sipping men. They actually bred soon after emerging from some stagnant watery womb where they lived out the first stages of their lives, and taking wing would have been swarmed by a cloud of demoniac male suitors that would be hanging over the water waiting to insert their seed in whatever virgin maidens they might be able to wrestle away from the rest of the swarm. Most females will live only through this mating. It is rare that they breed more than once, but they can--they live four times longer than the males whose only purpose is, after all, this pernicious insect version of romance. The buzz they make simply comes from the movement of their wings, although that of the female is thought to be more pronounced and gender-specific as the males antennae contain auditory receptors to detect the whine of the females, a feature lacking in their feminine counterparts whose much more complex antennae contain numerous structures for identifying warm-blooded meals and the sweet scent of cesspools into which they lay their eggs and, if so lucky, find a stag to be bred by once more.

Of course, there is the famous African story, "Why Do Mosquitoes Buzz in Our Ears." As I remember, it went something like this. A beautiful creature, a woman, was to marry. Because she was such a beauty, all the creatures of earth came to seek her hand, including The Mosquito. She mocked his proposal however, pointing out his spindly legs (although I imagine there were other minute areas of his anatomy that made him a less than desirable bridegroom), and the fact that in just a week of marriage she would find herself a widow. The Mosquito takes offense at this, and so now he comes to buzz in our ears to let us know he is still around. Of course, I doubt the African originators of this story realized it was rare that HE would come-a-buzzin' but a story with the gender roles reversed would be more true to fact. Handsome man turns down female mosquito who turns out to be a vengeful (potential) lover scorned who now not only goes on buzzing around but also tries to bleed him dry. I suppose, though, such a telling could also sound misogynistic. However, I will come out and say it:

"I am a mosquito misogynist."

One of the fun little conversation starters we often asked, much more so when we were children than now when we have matured in sullied-looking adults with careers and families and no time for such things such as dreams, was "If you had three wishes, what would they be?"

Of course, one has to be saved for something humanitarian, such as "World Peace" or "A cure for cancer" (the extinction of life would result in both of these, I think, but that is the cynical thinking of a sullied adult). The other two are prone to be selfish and fanciful, like a Malibu beachhouse or a billion dollars. My first and foremost, even before the end of humanity --er, I mean world peace--is that any bloodsucking insect that even touched me, that came within a hundred meters of me, that was within a mile of me, would instantly die. My wish is that some insecticidal miasma would envelop me, and as I strolled through the fields, trudged through the jungles or dined outside in an evening, urban cafe there would be a veritable holocaust of countless mites, ticks, chiggers, bedbugs, lice, mosquitoes, fleas and other such cruor-consuming vermin. I'd tour the malarial parts of the world, cutting wide swaths of death for the little beggars without mercy or remorse, and I'd never have to hear that buzzing in my ear again--at least by a female. The poor males, who are not bloodsuckers, would be spared my miraculous powers of murder and would have to resort to swarms of buggery if they were to again find the sweet release of copulation. It is those that bite that would not be spared my wishful wrath. You see, all known blood eating insects' saliva contain at least one anticlotting, one anti-platelet, and one vasodilatory (artery/vein widening) substance, and almost all cause inflammation and that damned itching.

As it was, though, there was that buzzing in my ear. So, unhappy as I was to be pulled out of my slumber, albeit a fitful one, I shooed her away and sat up, my eyes following her as she continued to dance around in my vicinity, hoping no doubt to spear me, to pierce me with her female proboscis, and drink of my own sanguine fluids for the sake of her own line of consanguinity. It was really a moment rich with metaphor--the female here with the piecing sword, a reversal of roles (the word "vagina" comes from the Latin vagina "sheath, scabbard" (pl. vaginae), from Proto-Indo-European *wag-ina- (for example, Lithuanian voziu "to cover with a hollow thing"), from base *wag- "to break, split, bite"), the need to take my fluid, my lifeblood, as food for seeds of seeds resting inside of her but unable to develop without that much-needed protein.


Sign at hospital annoucing dengue epidemic and calling from blood donations

I rose from the bed and tracked her with my eyes. As I said before, she was driven by hunger, and the fact she was feeding during this heat, with the day now having fully dawned, was disturbing. Nasty things lurk in the guts of The Mosquito; pestilence lives on her stained lips.

Southeast Asia provides a list of horrors to choose from, terrors out of proportion with her annoying buzzing, the irritating itch you find on your big toe, and her spindly legs. Dengue, which I know too well, which turns your eyes red with blood and can, like the dread hemorrhagic diseases lurking in Africa, turn your organs to mush and literally cause you to bleed out from the inside. It is the "Tiger Mosquito," Aedes aegypti, that is the vector for dengue, and unlike most of its brethren, it is a day feeder. It is called the "Tiger Mosquito" because of its distinctive white-on-black stripes. It is also the reason for the sign at the Jayavarman VII Hospital here in Siem Reap: "Severe Epidemic of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever: Blood Donations Needed." Aedes aegypti is also the carrier of Yellow Fever, one of the few tropical reasons for malaise that isn't too be found in Southeast Asia. To make up for this mephitic lack, there is Japanese encephalitis, the symptoms described as " headache, high fever, neck stiffness, stupor, disorientation, coma, tremors, occasional convulsions and spastic (but rarely flaccid) paralysis." Its fatality rate is near 60% when it is symptomatic, and most survivors suffer permanent brain damage. And of course, the specter of malaria continues to lurk here, that infamous "bad air" (Malaria was first coined in Italian, mal'aria, from mala aria, literally "bad air," from mala "bad" + aria "air").

The life of Plasmodium, the eukaryotic protist that causes the dread disease malaria, reads like science fiction horror. A mosquito picks up the pestiferous parasite from an infected human. The protist then begins "dividing" within the blood meal inside the mosquito, creating gametocytes, "germ cells," that begin to differentiate themselves into "male" and "female" packages: male gametocytes are called spermatocytes, and female gametocytes are called oocytes. These then fuse into the gut of the mosquito and here a process known as merogony (or schizogony) occurs and a ookinete is produced--basically, a fertilized cell much like the process by which sperm and egg comes together to create a zygote. Using the "male" and "female" gamates within a cell in the mosquito's gut it begins producing new nuclei and organelles--the "brain" and "organs" of this apicomplexan (the word for such intracellular parasites). Eventually, the mosquito cell (now called an oocyst) becomes so full of Plasmodium parts, it ruptures, filling the mosquito with sporozoites, the cell form that infects new hosts. These sporizoites in turn make their way to the salvia glands of the mosquito where it waits for it to bite another host. Once inside the other host, it transforms again into what is called a merozoite. These infect red blood cells and liver and then rapidly reproduce asexually--no need for the processes of "male" and "female" gametocytes here. It fills up the host cells with these merozoites until they burst, flooding the bloodstream with more which then infect, breed within, and destroy more blood cells in a process that is responsible for more than 2% of the world's deaths each year.

It was thoughts just as these that I was was thinking as I watched The Mosquito while putting my feet onto the tile floor, still cool from the night unlike the air of the room. A trickle of sweat ran down my temple. I lost her for a moment, and then there she was, dumbly, happily, flying towards my thigh. My two hands came together with a loud clap that echoed through the empty room, my wife having already woken up and left for the morning shopping at the market. I opened my hands to see if I'd been successful in my intended execution.

The dark bloody smear in my palm proved that I was. I looked intently at that blood, mostly likely my own, or my wife's, or both of ours. The crushed body of the mosquito (not the suspected Tiger) was there, pitiful in its frailness. I felt no mercy, though, because as I continued to gain the awareness of consciousness (and again that stream of thoughts), I felt a growing itch on my left shoulder. As I stepped into the bathroom to rinse my hands I hoped within that blood-clotted abdomen, crushed in my hands, there did not lurk the stuff of death, and I felt an anger that something so terrible, so devastating, could be waiting there on the lips of this femme fatale. And, thinking this, determined to repeat our nightly ritual slaughter with added rigor, I recalled a quote from Ethel Waters (before going on stage with The Supremes) I'd read in the Review the night before.

"I'll show those bitches."

Phnom Kulen Video Guide

2011-09-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

So, I hope some of you will take the 10 minutes or so to watch this, my inaugural video, about Phnom Kulen. It was flooding pretty badly here in Siem Reap, so I figured the waterfall would be really spectacular, so the entire family packed up (my in-laws, sister-in-law, niece and nephews, mother-in-law's sister, husband and grandchild are all here). It was really practice in using Camtasia, a software I plan on using to create training videos (I can embed quizzed and tie it to a learning management system to track performance--haven't figured all that out yet). It took about two hours per five minutes, mostly because it was the first time I've used more of the bells and whistles Camtasia as to offer, and also I had to watch the different shots I'd taken, et cetera. It was lots of fun, and I am hoping to make at least two more like this. I'm not sure how much longer I will be in Cambodia, though. If you keep reading, you will find out where the winds will take me.

Destination: Phnom Kulen

Flooding in Siem Reap

2011-09-12T02:33:00.000-07:00

It is still dry at our house (we're a few hundred meters from this area), but the rain keeps coming down--it is monsoon season, so what do you expect. Anyway, we are not expecting any problems outside the inconvenience of wading to the market. My primary concern is possible power cuts that might affect me working. Anyway, no need to worry, but really--doesn't think look fun!

Our Cultural Eclecticism

2011-09-11T00:21:00.000-07:00

I thought that a meal at the Touch-Brown House was a testament to our cultural eclecticism, and I think reflects on both of us--myself and Peou--as people.

First, a Cambodian curried chicken.
Second, a Vietnamese egg drop soup.
Third, Southern style greens with a splash of vinegar.
Fourth, Indian egg curry.
Fifth, lime achar, or spicy Indian pickled lime.
Sixth, fresh dahi, or curd, or yogurt--whatever you want to call it.
Seventh, fresh raw carrot sticks.
Finally, local Cambodian rice.

God, we are going to have some cool kids . . .

Back to the Grind (Almost)

2011-09-06T15:19:00.000-07:00

Well, so far the day has gotten off to a good start. I tried connecting with my data card last night and found
the SIM does not work now—I guess after a few months of non-use, it expired. So, I am composing this offline and waiting for it to be a decent enough hour for me to go get another SIM card or have this one reactivated (and as you see, it now has been).

I ended up sleeping all afternoon yesterday, waking up in the evening for just a few hours to eat, and I was up again today by 3AM. I am hoping the process has played out, that I won't sleep today, and that I will be back on track. I was happy to see it is just Monday in the United States, albeit Monday evening, and so I actually am not planning on returning to work until Wednesday USA time. That works out well, but I do plan to do a little catching up today or tomorrow.

I got up this morning, showered, and warmed up some sup rice for breakfast. They made it last night—it is full of shitake and straw mushrooms and they used frog for the meat. It was great. That and a cup of coffee that is not nearly up to par got me started.

I read for an hour or more on the Proto-Indo-Europeans, reading about the reconstructed vocabulary (and therefore cognates from across the the IE languages) of body parts, diseases, death, and kinship terms. For those who might not know what this is, let me give you a really quick run-down. The Celtic (Irish, Welsh, …), Italic (Latin, French, Italian …), Germanic (English, German …), Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian . .. ), Slavic (Russian, Bulgarian), Albanian, Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Aryan (Persian—that is what they speak in Iran, as well as Sanskrit, the mother-language of Indian languages like Hindi, and even the national language of Afganistran, Pashto) all are descended from a single “mother language.” It is termed “Proto-Indo-European” (shorthand PIE here). Historic linguists spend a lot of time figuring out when these separate language groups formed as well as trying to understand the relationships between these languages to help “reconstruct” the proto-language. What this also means is that if you are of Western European descent, then you share a common cultural (and genetic) ancestry with the Iranians, most of the Afghans, and a fair amount of the Indians. Anyway . . .

It is really amazing, though, having the morphological changes mapped out in such a way that allows me to identify all of these hidden English/German/Sanskrit cognates (as these are the only IE languages I know, but it is also neat seeing some of these as loanwords in Bahasa and Khmer). It is also amazing to see the sort of . . . ontological connections that were made . . . our English word “tongs” is a descendant of “bite” (Sanskrit dáśati, Greek dánknō, Albanian darē, and so on) (makes sense, right?), “wart” and “frog” have been semantically related since before Sanskrit, Old Greek and Proto-German diverged.

Charles Joseph Natoire:
The Expulsion from Paradise, 1740

Our word from “paradise” and “dough” have a common PIE root word. This relationship was actually one of the most bizarre I learned about so far—the root word actually refers to an “enclosing wall.” The root is *dhiĝhs; it relates to “paradise” as “paradise” (pairi-daēza) literally meant “enclosure,” being from Avestan (the ancient Persian language we know primarily from the Zoroastrian religious texts). It was borrowed and transformed by the Greeks into “garden” (parádeisos) and then borrowed into New English and thus we have “paradise” which we have given a meaning beyond just a garden but the relationship is clear (Garden of Eden, yada yada yada). “Dough” is descended from the same root, related to enclosures, perhaps through clay, as they may have been mudded/caulked and/or earthen enclosures. You've got to admit—that is some pretty cool stuff even if it is the most trivial of trivia.

After that, I finished an article by Cian Dorr titled, “There Are No Abstract Objects” that I was not very impressed by. However, it did get me thinking about Resemblance Nominalism, and I found and read a review of Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra's Resemblance Nominalism: A Solution to the Problem of Universals, and I think that is something I will have to read once I

The stuff paradise is made of . . .

am back in Honolulu. I had been reading Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal before leaving Cambodia, carried it home and didn't open it once while there. I began to pick it back up this morning. I'd read about half of it, but unfortunately I had to backtrack to the beginning of the second chapter there. So, it now finds itself onto the current reading list that I'd hoped to see shrink (?) rather than expand. Oh, well. What a great morning, though, of just staying curled up and reading!

I woke up this morning at 3:30AM, worked out, had coffee, posted blogs, scanned the headlines, and am now getting ready to tackle e-mail and the work that has piled up since last Thursday. In the meantime, I am backing up my music, or navigating it, I should say. My music collection has exceeded 150 GB by a pretty considerable sum, meaning it no longer fits onto my “music harddrive” even after I went through and cleared out nearly 2000 duplicate songs earlier in the year. Once that finishes—computer says in another 54 minutes and 40 seconds—I will back up my laptop. And once that finishes, or perhaps tomorrow, I will backup the 1 TB hard drive that all of this is going on. After having two external hard drives fail in the last 11 months, losing 45,000 words of my novel and all my Magnum PI episodes, I decided to be much, much more redundant.

The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom
Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law by Muhammad Khalid Masud
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman
Building an Affordable House by Fernando Pages Ruiz
Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis by Bimal Krishna Matilal

Oh, and here is even a word of the day for you:

Pleonastic (adj. from pleonastism, n.)—The quality of having used more words than necessary to express meaning (e.g. “He saw it with his own eyes." "It was a true fact." )

Well, I am sure I have a ton of e-mails to catch up with now that I am online. Wish me luck!

Back to the Kingdom

2011-09-04T14:57:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Cambodia, and in the new house. I will go an Internet cafe in a few days to post the video I've shot of the house. I have to admit—it is pretty swanky, much, much better than our one bedroom tiny apartment that we've been living in. Until I get a leased line into the house, though, uploading and downloading large files will be a royal pain.

The trip back was thankfully uneventful. When flying, “excitement” is exactly what I am not looking forward to. And just a note for Chad—it was 12 hours and 25 minutes to fly between Detroit and Tokyo, a trip that is over 6000 miles. It was another six and a half hours on to Thailand. That means in call my time in the air was just about 22 hours or so. This also puts my miles logged since beginning this blog in 2009 to over 100,000. The highlight of returning was going through Customs and Immigration without speaking a word of English but being understood, a testament that even though I've been learning informally by Khmer has really come a long way.

It is great being back home in Cambodia. We didn't go anywhere the first day I was back. My sister-in-law had come from Phnom Penh to fetch me with Peou from the airport, but I suspect there was some ulterior motive to this. I am guessing in a few days I might learn something is going on.

This morning, we woke up about 3AM and I decided to go ahead and get up. I slept about four hours during the day when I arrived, and I am eager to reset my circadian rhythm and overcome jet lag. Three in the morning is not too different than what I am used to here. That is about an hour early for me here—I usually get up at about 4AM, although the last month I was here that was more like 9AM.

We went to the market this morning at 7AM, and I had a fiery bowl of sup mee for breakfast, filled with chilies—and it was so nice. Nothing beats (or ever could) my Dad's gravy and biscuits, but it was good coming back to another of my comfort foods that I think is as rare in Kentucky as gravy and biscuits are in Siem Reap (and not that any gravy I've ever eaten outside comes close to matching my Dad's).

Peou bought some pig intestines, beef from the Cham meat sellers, and other makings, and I got spinach—I've a continual hankering for greens. We came back home and she began making a big batch of kimchi and I began unpacking, cleaning out the drawers of my new wardrobe and trying to get my suitcases out of the way. I dreamed last night that I'd gone, for some reason, to the workplace of Mr. Gregory, my parent's neighbor. I have no idea where he works, but in my dream it was some strange office. Everyone had made pickles—there were rows of pickled vegetables in open trays, jars of pickled fruits from limes to pomegranates, and I was sampling everything on their insistence. And then Mr. Gregory took me to Farmers to try more pickles. What this dream about pickles portents I do not know (perhaps we'll be having a baby soon?), but it was probably triggered by having pickled green beans as well as lime achar last night, and knowing Peou was going to make kimchi this morning. I also brought a bottle of pickled red peppers that Tony Jones made here (thanks, Tony!).

Me and my mother have both been talking about how we both really need to get into a routine, and that is certainly true for me as well as her. Part of my routine will be waking up absurdly early. I always liked having early mornings to myself. And it isn't just about doing things—some of it has to be limiting the time I spend on things. It is nothing for me to spend a couple hours doing nothing but reading the news each day, or spend a couple hours developing content or tweeking a Web site, things that I enjoy but aren't necessarily the best use of my time. Some of my routine commitments, outside of regular working hours, are to be:

Journal everyday (something I have been sadly neglecting for most of the past two years). Also, the more I journal the less my blog gets filled with this sort of minutia.
Devote at least one hour everyday, and two most days, to reading and research.
Continue to read, but for no more than one hour, the major South and Southeast Asian online papers—The Nation, The Bangkok Post, The Phnom Pehn Post, Malaysia Kini, The Star, The New Straights Times, The Irrawaddy, The Jakarta Post, The Times of India and The Hindu—and then see what Google News headlines there are for the USA, Hawai'i and Kentucky. My other leisure periodical reading—namely, The New York Review of Books, has to come out of this time as well. Also, my education research has to fall within this time as well.
Devote at least one hour to languages, with a minimum of 30 minutes on Sanskrit each day. The balance is to be spend on German, Tamil, Bahasa and Khmer.
Ride my bike one hour everyday, weather permitting. The monsoons will last here until into October, and right now Peou says they are rolling in during the late afternoons.
Work out every day.
Spend at least four hours a week writing on the novel until it is completed.
Spend no more than three hours a week maintaining my Web sites and social media. Lucky for me, Shannon Pugh is going to begin lending a bit of hand there so that will be more doable.
Sundays and Mondays (local time) are my weekends, so no need to follow my routine on those days.

The means, along with work, about fourteen hours, of being fairly “on task” most days. It might be a little too ambitious, but of course,reading the news, my research, keeping my journal, riding my bike, writing on my novel, working out, and even languages—are all really “productive leisure” activities. I'm trying to rope Peou into working out with me, but we'll see. She has a Cambodian's “conservation of calories” attitude that, given our relative prosperity, probably has to be adjusted if she doesn't want to become a little rolly-polly. Anyway, I figure that in the coming week I'll ease into this and see if it is actually doable and doesn't just look good on paper.

I also decided to “add” a section to my blog at the end of each entry to share what I am currently reading. At first, this was going to be a “big deal” as I was going to track my progress. I wanted to do this for a couple reasons—one, to share what I am reading since that certainly reflects my interests, and if people share them or can make a suggestion based on them, that would be great. Also, I thought it would make me feel more accountable (to myself? There is something about putting things in public that motivates me, it seems), especially if Brandom stays on 10% week after week (as it has). One feature I love on the Kindle is it tells you what percentage you have completed in what you are reading (although of my current reading only one item is on the Kindle). However, I decided that was just too much work—calculating percentages and what-not, not that anyone cares. So, while I did do this (already) for this blog, I won't keep it up. But I will continue to keep a current reading list. While home I didn't do too much reading. I read The Arabs in History by Bernard Lewis, Buddhist Warfare, a collection of texts, and Confronting Ghosts: Thailand's Shapeless Southern Insurgency and made small dents into what I am still reading.

One worth mentioning, that I read on the flight from Tokyo to Bangkok, was Masters at Arms (Rescue Me). It came recommended—I know the author—and it was page-turning, fast reading, fun and very sexy: it is the back story of how three ex-Marines come to own and operate a BDSM club with a fair amount of pretty steamy sex scenes. It was surprising—as I said, I know the author—but it was well written, and while I suppose it might fall under the erotic genre, because of the character development it didn't seem like reading erotica. I guess “romance novel” is more like it, and I'd say if you like Harlequins plus some extra kink, this is for you. Anyway, it is just a buck five on Amazon for the e-book, and I think it was well worth that—and by the way, Kaly, if you are reading this—great work, and I'll be buying the other books in the series as they come out.

Current Readings:

The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, 21% of its 756 pages (this is really cool, by the way, and I feel actually really helps me make connections in Sanskrit I'd not made before)
Making it Explicit by Robert Brandom, 19% of its 741 pages
Shatibi's Philosophy of Islamic Law by Muhammad Khalid Masud, 48% of its 294 pages
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Edited by Ted Sider, John Hawthorne and Dean Zimmerman, 16% of its 404 pages
Building an Affordable House by Fernando Pages Ruiz, 50% of its 202 pages

Mama

2011-09-01T04:52:00.000-07:00

Mama at Phnom Kulen . . .