I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. – Stephen Jay Gould
The criminal neglect of education, in my considered opinion, is the most important charge upon which the policy makers of India stand indicted. An entire generations of Indians have lived and died since independence—a reasonable estimate would place the number around 500 million humans—about half of whom were illiterate, not just uneducated. The lost potential …

Only humans are capable of free speech, and those who value free speech have freedom. The rest are slaves. They may be slaves to a religious authority or a political authority, but slaves none the less. The whoremasters who try to take away the right to free speech under the pretext that it may be offensive to some are the worst enemies of human dignity and freedom.

A friend at Harvard MIT conveys this deep lesson. Go learn.

Shortages and Nehruvian socialism go hand in hand. Just take scooters, for instance. You could not just take scooters some years ago, actually, thanks to the quota permit license control raj. You had to wait for years before you could lay your hands on one. You could jump the queue if you paid with “hard currency” or paid a premium (black money) to someone who had the foresight to book one years in advance with a view to capture some of the rent that arises out of shortages.
The situation today …

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was at Harvard’s Kennedy School on May 9th. A brief biography of Ms. Ali from the Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership announcement reads:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 13 November 1969 in Mogadishu, Somalia) is a Dutch human rights leader, feminist, and a member of the Dutch Parliament for the liberal party. She is a prominent and often controversial spokesperson, author, film maker and critic of Islamism. Her movie “Submission” on abuse of women in Islam, directly led to the murder of the director Theo Van Gogh in November …

The BBC reports that Indian Catholics want the movie, The Da Vinci Code, banned.
“Catholic Secular Forum (CSF) activists will go on a fast unto death if the government fails to take action against anti-Christian movies,” CSF general secretary Joseph Dias told the BBC.
Mr Dias is quoted as saying, ” . . . Tempers are already running quite high and there’s no way of saying what could happen if the movie is released.”
I guess the Catholics would go on a rampage and burn down theatres. Eric Hoffer had noted …

From the “Don’t Know What’s the Point Department,” the new release is I am India on Google Video. A collage of images–a field of wind power generators, a soaring jet in the blue skies above a lush green field, the majestic fall of water from a dam–introduce words of ersatz wisdom: “A man’s karma is to forever turn the wheel of life towards a better future for all.”
Wow. How absolutely majestically profound-sounding. Of course, I paused the video to ponder it for a bit and gave up after the screen …

On Saturday afternoons in Berkeley, California, I would to listen to Michael Feldsman’s show What Do You Know? on KALW 91.7 which starts off with the question “What do you know?” and the audience responds “Not much! And you?”
I like that sort of stuff. Opening lines and closing lines, I mean.
For instance, on Garrison Keillor’s radio show

George Bernard Shaw with characteristic cynicism noted that a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. Regardless of their specific stripes, all Indian governments, because they are “democratically” elected, naturally solve the problem of identifying the Peters and the Pauls by a numbers game: Pauls must outnumber the Peters. So it should come as no surprise that yet another idiotic scheme is hatched by the party in power to gain the support of a large underclass by promising them something that will …