Bush keeps going, going

Checks and balances for Bush

From The Statesman
ND Batra

In spite of the fact that now a majority of Americans believe that the Iraqi invasion was a mistake, George W Bush continues to believe that toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do to prevent Iraq from becoming a hub for terrorists. It’s a struggle for civilisation, Mr Bush said, not a war between civilisations.

Foreign policy, of course, cannot be run on public opinion polls, which go up and down so often that it would be politically crazy to be solely guided by them. National leaders sometimes take measures that are unpopular but necessary according to their perception of the problem the country faces and their political vision. What hurts their cause, however, is the language in which they frame their thoughts, as Pope Benedict’s recent remark equating Islam with violence and evil have shown. That the result of Iraqi invasion turned out to be much different, much bloodier than expected has not lessened the Bush administration’s resolve to bring about changes in West Asia.

Gone is the tongue-lashing optimism of defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld who said after the Iraq elections: “Just having elections in Iraq is an enormous success and a victory. Following the elections in Afghanistan and the election recently in the Palestinian Authority, the Iraqi vote will mark still another success for democracy and a defeat for pro-dictatorship and extremist elements in the region.” The future did not happen they wanted it to happen. Spreading democracy still remains the policy, but only if US forces could move beyond fighting terrorism. Mr Bush now admits that his ill-famed utterances like “Bring em on,” challenging insurgents to attack US forces in Iraq was a mistake, though he still does not realise how much damage the expression “Axis of Evil” has done to US diplomacy.Evil is, of course, everywhere and the world has become a dangerous place.

No nation is safe from evil-doers, jihadis and non-jihadis, but by characterising that evil is limited to a small axis of three countries, Mr Bush absolved others by default. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis said some time ago, “The terrorists of September 11 exposed vulnerabilities in the defences of all states,” which compelled Mr Bush to preside over “the most sweeping redesign of US grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt. The basis for Mr Bush’s grand strategy, like Roosevelt’s, comes from the shock of surprise attack and will not change. None of FDR’s successors, Democrat or Republican, could escape the lesson he drew from the events of December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor): that distance alone no longer protected Americans from assaults at the hands of hostile states.

Neither Mr Bush nor his successors, whatever their party, can ignore what the events of September 11, 2001, made clear: the deterrence against states affords insufficient protection from attacks by gangs, which can now inflict the kind of damage only states fighting wars used to be able to achieve.” The USA was not the first country to bear the brunt of terrorists. Countries like India have long been suffering terrorists’ attacks sponsored by their neighbours. But earlier the USA looked at the situation differently. Now it sees terrorism as a global threat to civilisation and it must be eliminated.

The horrific events of September 11, 2001 led to the establishment of US presence in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and destroy Al- Qaida terrorists.But US presence has been having some unintended consequence in the region, in the sense that India and Pakistan have been opening up to each other at several levels and the ceasefire is holding up on the Line of Actual Control.The settlement of disputes, including Kashmir, and long-term peace is still a possibility in spite of recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Terrorism breeds in failing states. The Bush administration needs to reframe and rephrase its policy of pre-emption in terms of international cooperation to eliminate terrorism.

Pakistani military rulers know that breeding and financing terrorists can bite back. England and other European countries too have begun to realise that Islamic terrorism is growing in their midst and must be purged whatever the cost. Prof Gaddis said: “It is a failure of both language and vision that the United States has yet to make its case for pre-emption” in terms of the self-interest and survival of each nation; and a collective security system, which could best be under the US leadership.The US leadership must have a strong moral foundation to persuade others to join in its efforts to eliminate the global scourge of jihadist terrorism.Many senior political leaders both Democrats and Republicans believe that moral leadership begins with how the USA treats the captured terrorists.

The Abu Ghraib prison abuse has been a shameful embarrassment at home and abroad. The US Supreme Court recently ruled that the President must not ignore the Common Article 3 of Geneva Conventions which prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity” or “humiliating and degrading treatment”of terrorists, who must have their day in the court with all the rights of fair trial under the criminal justice system of a civilised society.President Bush said the war against terrorism is a struggle for civilisation. True; but in the process the USA should not lose its own soul and descend into the heart of darkness.

Born to multitasking

How much information can you stand?

ND Batra

From The Statesman

Ceaseless information pollutes our minds. There was a time when production, distribution and processing of information, news and movies existed in a state of balance. We consumed and assimilated what was produced. And then there was time for silence, for conversation, and for playfulness.

But that was before computers, microwave and satellite transmission created a deluge that seems to sweep away everything else from our lives. Some of us, especially of the older generation, raised on the logic of linear thinking and writing, can’t handle what we see as an information tsunami. Others, especially of the digital generation, growing up on computer games, cell phones, instant messaging, kids born to multitasking, revel on this new culture of incessant messaging. The digital generation has not been complaining that there is too much information swirling around, albeit most of it is useless.

David Schenk called it “data smog.” Due to a ceaseless development of computer technology, information and data production has become so abundant that it clutters our minds as “a pollutant.” We produce too much information for our own good, and so fast that we our minds can’t assimilate it, he said. Of course what is a pollutant could become raw material for something new in the future, only if know what to do with it. In other words we don’t have the requisite software to turn pollutants into useful products.

According to Schenk, the phenomenon of accelerated production of data collection and information production is of recent origin, only a half century. “For nearly 100,000 years leading up to this century, information technology has been an unambiguous virtue as a means of sustaining and developing culture…Then, around the time of the first atom bomb, something strange happened. We began to produce information much faster than we could process it.” There’s no denying the fact that dropping of atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki created information explosion that could not have been handled by traditional means of information processing especially in a manner that would have created knowledge and understanding of what man could do to his fellow beings.

There were technology nay-sayers, Luddites, of the 19th century, who out of fear of loss of jobs and their traditional life styles, destroyed machinery rather than adopting and accepting it. Schenk is no Luddite but he laments, “We have quite suddenly mutated into a radical different culture, a civilization that trades in and survives on stylized communication…. The blank spaces and silent moments in life are fast disappearing. Mostly because we have asked for it, media are everywhere. Television, telephones, radios, message beepers, and an assortment of other modern communication and navigational aids are now as ubiquitous as roads and tennis shoes—anywhere humans can go, all forms of media now follow: onto trains, planes, automobiles, into hotel bathrooms, along jogging paths and mountain trails, on bikes and boats...”

The ecology of information has become overwhelming. A few seasons ago, the television sitcom “Hope and Faith” introduced a two-part episode about wife exchange, which in spite of its suggestive open marriage immorality wasn’t as naughty as it sounds. In fact “Wife Swap” is a popular reality show, where two housewives in culturally different states exchange households with children but without swapping beds, just to see how the other half of womankind lives. In a parody of the reality show, in the “Hope and Faith” episode of wife exchange, Hope left her home in Columbus, Ohio, and moved to live with a family in Manhattan, where she found that the high-tech New York family members had all the digital gadgets but they seldom talked with each other as a family.

The culprit was the work-alcoholic father, Aaron, who in a delightful mockery of “always on, always available,” was always talking to someone on his hand-free cell phone. When he looked at his Hope, his wife in exchange, at the dining table, she thought he was talking with her, but of course, no, he was talking past her, with someone else on the other side, a customer. The Manhattan man symbolised the multitasking New Yorker, always in communication, always networking, always connected, except when it came to touching someone emotionally and keeping relations on a steady keel.

The Manhattan wife-swapping cell-addicted man episode ended with Aaron deciding to give up his always-on wireless communication gear, sell his multimillion-dollar apartment and return to his family’s bosom and turn to simpler things. Ah! But that could only happen in television. Nevertheless, we have to consider the possibility that confronted with an ever rising tide of information, the human mind might evolve and adapt and learn to improve the signal-to-noise ratio; that’s, new technology might help us to see patterns in what is called noise and clutter.

History of human evolution has been a struggle to transform nothingness to zero to information, from empty cave walls to primitive carvings and murals, from rags and papyrus to manuscript writing, from zero-and-one sheep counting to decimal system to bits and bytes. I am optimistic that tools that enable us to create information would also help us to find patterns and meanings in that information, whether it is about terrorism or about the global marketplace.

Bush not giving up 'til the cows come home

Challenging times for the Unite States

ND Batra

The cowboy president is seldom caught in a reflective mood in the public, but when Kelly O’Donnell of NBC asked him in a recent meeting with reporters whether he felt frustrated, President George Bush replied with his usual equipoise that sometimes he did feel frustrated though “rarely surprised.” Rarely has an American president carried such a crushing burden on his shoulders as this man. And he is not going to give up ‘til the cows come home.
Not only has the war in Iraq mutated from the supposedly glorious war of liberation of the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein to an unending Shia-Sunni sectarian violence bordering on civil war, the rise of Iran-Hezballa-Syria crescent has been a no less shocking development. Add to it the defiance of Iran on the nuclear issue and you get a glimpse of a new Middle East rising, a region that instead of fueling global economy with its vast oil reserves might instead fuel further non-state and state-sponsored global terrorism.
Iran might have been overjoyed to see how thousands of its rockets that it clandestinely supplied to Hezballa were hitting Israel, but it could not have imagined nor did it seem to care the death and destruction the proxy war had brought to the innocent people of Lebanon. Nor did Israel and its supporter the United States. Lebanon has become a bloody chessboard of power play.
“But war is not a time of joy,” said Bush. True, though I believe that war does create hope and excitement in the theater of imagination of strategists who sit around the table and calculate advances and retreats and collateral damages and international repercussions. Unfortunately, modern wars are not winnable. The victors, if any, cannot walk away from the destruction of war as you can see in Lebanon. Iran, Hezbollah, the United States are now funneling resources to rebuild the devastated Lebanon in order to win over the minds and hearts that they destroyed to achieve their strategic goals in the region— a perverted example of creative destruction. The dead would be buried and eventually forgotten but the maimed and mangled and the living dead would be always there, in our living rooms, recycled in the global 24/7 of Al Jazeera and the CNN.
Bush nonetheless did not issue a call for giving up the struggle against terrorism, which would outlast the remainder of his days in the White House, but he acknowledged the obvious that these “are challenging times, and they’re difficult times, and they’re straining the psyche of our country.”
Next week the United States would be observing the fifth anniversary of the horrific attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon. Although the war in Afghanistan and Iraq might have to some extent drained the psychic energy of the American people, and most of them now believe that the war in Iraq was a mistake, it is rather surprising that the wars have not slowed the US economic growth. In fact the US American economy since 9/11 terrorist attacks has been steadily growing. Jack Welch, the ex-chairman of GE, who along with his wife Susie Welch writes a weekly column for BusinessWeek, stated a month ago, “Since mid-2003 the American economy has grown about 20 %. That’s more than $2.2 trillion—equal to the size of the total economy of China. Seven million jobs have been added.” The Welches were trying to ward off criticism against outsourcing; but that is equally true in the case of jihadi terrorism. New York is once again a shining city on a hill. The towers would rise again. The trains (in Mumbai) are running again, aren’t they?
Nonetheless, there is increasing pessimism in the United States whether Iraq would ever settle down as a peaceful nation. The United States cannot cut loose and run and let the devil take the hindmost. That would turn Middle East into a Shia-Sunni bloodbath, which some see as already in the making especially with the reckless ascendancy of an almost-nuclear Iran as an aggressive Middle East power. Not only has Israel reason to fear Iran whose president, Mahmoud Ahamedinejad, has publicly declared that the Jewish state should be wiped out; but Arab countries also have absolutely no reason to be celebrating the rise of a nuclear Iran establishing its hegemony in the Middle East. Nor would it be in the interest of the Indian subcontinent to see any nation controlling the energy resources of the region.
But giving up is not the character of the Bush presidency. Bush sees the war against terrorism as struggle against the ultimate evil, which must be defeated, because otherwise, as he told the American Legion convention last week, terrorists would be free “to turn back the advance of freedom, and impose a dark vision of tyranny and terror across the world.” If the United States does not fight terrorists in the streets of Baghdad, Bush said at the convention, “we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.” In order to win “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” the United States must utilize “every element of national power.”
While Bush vows to keep fighting global jihadist terrorism, he is also fighting at home to keep Congress under the Republican control as the American people go to polls in November. Democrats are in disarray. They don’t know what to do about Iraq. Nor does anyone else.

Digitally Seductive

What digital paradise makes of us

From The Statesman
ND Batra

The Internet has created a new media environment that not only enables people to communicate, discuss and exchange information, give and receive feedback, but also provides an interactive, collaborative environment in which words can become deeds and speech can become action.
Networked computers, the building blocks of the Internet, are much more than mere productivity tools and informatics systems. Unlike the traditional media, they are capable of creating a cyber-environment that can be designed to be persuasive, that can motivate people to act and change their social behaviours.
Stanford University researchers call this rhetorical concept Captology, which according to BJ Fogg: “Focuses on the planned persuasive effects of computer technologies.” It may be the next challenge for software programmers to design virtual environments to motivate people, for example, not to drink and drive, to have healthy sexual behaviour, to avoid pregnancy, to become entrepreneur.
Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School has argued the view that computer codes can be a great source of power in society for the simple reason that most of our activities are taking place in cyberspace nowadays. But the rhetoric of software design, the persuasive code that entices, builds relationships, arouses and fulfils desires and makes the users come back has not been explored in areas other than cybersex and virtual reality Internet games.
There may be a fortune in developing codes that persuade the user to change his attitude, behaviour and actions. The strength of the Internet is its interactivity, its ability to respond and give instant feedback. Feedback not only regulates the flow of communication but also gives some of the control back to the receiver of the message.
Two persons in conversation establish a dynamic relationship to create shared meanings. Human communication is essentially a transaction that takes place effectively if people have or can create a common field of experience. Islamic jehadists, for example, share one another’s mental model of the Islamic paradise, and for them suicide becomes a door to that mental image of everlasting beauty.
Persuasion works through sharing of mental models. The Internet makes it easy to share mental models whether they are of instant entrance to paradise through suicide bombing, buying and selling on a virtual platform such as e-Bay, or sharing intimacies as companies such as MySpace allow members to do.
Internet communication can transcend face-to-face communication, can be persuasive, and in certain circumstances is even more desirable. The absence of face-to-face cues such as how a person looks and sounds vocal inflections, which might arouse scepticism, are absent in Internet communication, especially in e-mail or question-answer Websites.
Selective self-presentation makes it possible for people to open themselves up to others, which they would hesitate to do in face-to-face conversation for fear of contradiction and lack of control.
Even in chatrooms and instant messaging, communication can become as what one researcher, JB Walther, called “hyperpersonal”, that is, socially more desirable than we are likely to experience face-to-face. It allows the play of fantasy partly to compensate for the absence of aural and visual information that gestures and voice create in interpersonal encounters. Fantasy lowers our guards and makes cyberspace seductively persuasive and dangerous.
So many teenagers go astray in chatrooms because cyberspace lets them assume fake identities and gives them freedom to pretend what they fancy themselves to be. Some of them become victims of conmen and predators, who too assume identities desirable for their teenage victims. The playfulness of virtual environment, an environment of “Be what you want to be”, creates a pleasurable experience, a sensuous flow, in which we feel as if we are in control of our environment, something that real life might deny us.
As the legend goes, on the Internet nobody knows whether a person is a dirty old man trying to seduce teenagers; a gender-swapping woman playing with big boys in a virtual game room; or a teenager posing as an expert. As a New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner quipped: “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”
At least for some time, that’s what a California teenager Marcus Arnold had tried to do a few years ago. Probably using his knowledge gained from television programmes such “Judge Judy”, and taking advantage of the pseudonymous freedom that a newly started knowledge sharing company had provided, Marcus turned himself into a legal expert and began to dole out free legal advice. His simple, direct, non-legalese approach to puzzling legal questions had a great appeal. Soon people began to call him at home, seeking his legal advice. But the burden of fakery became too heavy for the 15-year-old boy and one day, he said: “I am not what I have been telling you.” Real lawyers poured scorn but the public rallied around him and he continued to give his non-expert, common sense expertise on legal matters for sometime. Although the free Website (AskMe) closed a few years ago, at its height about 10 million registered visitors posted questions and answers on everything from Armageddon to Zen.
There is so much appetite for knowledge. The seductive power of the Web (and the codes that make it possible) presents one of the greatest challenges to knowledge-creating companies and venture capitalists.

A low-intensity surveillance society

Surveillance: Getting used to it?
ND Batra

From The Statesman

Search companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL and others collect and archive huge amounts of personal data from which can be profiled the behaviour of the user.

A few weeks ago, America On Line, an Internet search company inadvertently released from its archives millions of search queries done by more than 600,000 users during a three-month period. Thought their names were not released but it would not have been difficult to put together the profile of searcher 167845, for example, and what was obsessing him or her.

The questions you ask and the searches you make online or in real life reveal your mind. The American people are quietly submitting to whatever brings them a feeling of assuredness. Protests against intrusiveness by the government and businesses into our personal lives have become muted. We are slipping into a low-intensity surveillance society.

Every time there is a terrorist attack, we feel that the government might be right. Online surveillance devices are being increasingly used by businesses to track users when they surf their websites. Tracking is done unobtrusively and the user can never suspect that he is being watched; nonetheless, the practice is questionable, especially when the Website does not declare in its privacy policy.

Most of us are familiar with cookies, small software programmes the advertisers put on our hard drives to track where we surf so that they can customise the most appropriate advertising message for us to achieve target marketing, reaching the right person with the right message. But a web bug can be programmed to collect whatever data is required without the knowledge of the user. When you look at your online mutual fund statement, or a pornographic site, the web bug too could be monitoring it. Some companies do inform their visitors about the tracking devices they use and for what purposes. Yahoo!, for example, uses web beacon, a single-pixel picture, to count and identify users. A web beacon can track whether a particular message, including junk mail, has been opened and acted upon or not.

Any electronic image that is part of a web page, including a banner ad, can be programmed to act as a beacon and spy on the user. Yahoo! claims that the information enables the company to personalise the surfing experience when a frequent user visits their portal. The company uses beacons to do demographic research on behalf of their clients, but asserts that no personally identifiable information gathered from the beacon research is shared with the clients. Users can opt-out, but most of them don’t know whether the option is available, nor do many of them pay attention to the privacy statement.

Surveillance technologies are not limited to the Net. Several companies are using biometrics, face recognition, radio frequency and global positioning system (GPS) technologies, to keep a watch on their properties and track suspects. Many car rental companies in the USA use GPS to keep track of their rental cars. If a car is stolen or involved in an accident, the company would know the exact location of the car. GPS also enables them to check the speed of a rental car. About five years ago, Acme Rent-a-Car of New Haven, Connecticut charged one of its renters $400 for exceeding the speed limit, which it tracked with GPS; but the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection sided with the renter and did not allow Acme to collect the fine. It also raised an intriguing legal question whether a private company can act as a traffic policeman and penalise the offender.

Many airports have started using digital fingerprint identification technology to conduct background checks without any protest from employees. Face recognition technology is being extensively used not only in airports but also in ballparks, banks and other business establishments. If a suspect turns up, his face is digitally matched in seconds with the image database. It is not a foolproof system; for example, a man with sunglasses could not be identified with face recognition technology. So far no terrorist has been apprehended by face recognition technology, but the security business is booming in the USA.

The US Customs and some airports are using low-dose x-ray machines, such as Body Search, to electronically scan a person for drugs, bombs and contraband. Body Search electronically strips a person naked and projects the image on the screen for scrutiny without the person being asked to take her clothes off – all in the name of security. Hundreds of air travellers, including women, are randomly subjected to electronic Body Search.

An interesting security tracking technology is the radio-frequency identification tag (RFID), which is attached to a suspect’s baggage as he checks in. The tagged baggage is automatically routed to a security area where it is screened with special cameras and sensors for explosives and other hazardous materials. Along with our baggage, we too might have to wear radio-frequency ID tags so that we can be monitored as we move from one airport to another, from country to country via GPS.

Only if we could put an RFID tag on every terrorist!

The most ironic part of being under surveillance is that it has not diminished American innovativeness, creativity and productivity.

India Celebrates Freedom and Democracy

Freedom under the shadow of hope and terror

ND Batra
From The Statesman

On the occasion of India’s Independence Day observed yesterday, while the world has plunged into gloom because of the pre-emptive discovery of the terrorist plot to blow up ten transatlantic airlines ~ only a month after the horrific train attacks in Mumbai ~ I still believe the good will ultimately prevail.

The bonds between the United States and India are very strong. Terrorism will be finally beaten, if the free world continues cooperating. There is so much common between India and the United States that I can’t love one without the other. Freedom deeply rooted in secularism makes every one a productive citizen in the United States, for the simple reason that when an individual cannot assert his superiority or make a special claim on the basis of his race or religion, he has no choice but to show his natural born abilities and talents to succeed, which has turned the United States into a merit-based a society, more or less.

The idea that success, in whatever terms it is defined, is possible for any one with talent, from Wall Street to sports arena, Silicon Valley to Holly-wood, is essentially everyone’s ambition. It is a secular version of the Biblical oration: “If you knock, it shall open until unto you.” The price of not knocking at the door is that you are left in the cold. There’s no choice but to try and try again, which has made the US a highly competitive society.

Secular freedom has proved productive not only in economic terms, but in every field of human endeavor. It breeds in you a sense of equality, dignity and self-worth, and your heart cries out, Go and take the risk. Every field of activity in the United States teems with talented people drawn from various nationalities, cultures, races, and colors. Americans are so unafraid of the otherness of “others,” though it has not always been so if you recall the burning of witches to Japanese-Americans’ incarceration during WWII and the McCarthy era terrorism.

The foundation of secular freedom was laid in the United States with the Declaration of Independence, as it was done in India when Nehru evoked India’s “Tryst with Destiny” at the mid-night hour on the 15th of August 1947. It has been a long struggle to keep up with the demands of secularism, freedom and equality in the United States as it has been in India. The struggle isn’t over. It will never be over. It has been a long struggle when you consider how much it has taken for African-Americans to reach their present status. A generation ago it would have been impossible to think of an African-American woman occupying one of the most powerful diplomatic and political positions in the United States.

The rise of Condoleezza Rice as US Secretary of State demonstrates the truth that talent matters and freedom has many possibilities. So does the rise of a Muslim scientist to become the President of India; a Sikh to become the Prime Minster of India; an Italian-born Christian woman to become the leader of a major political party. The richest man in India is a Muslim. Some of the most successful and glamorous Bollywood personalities are Muslims. Christians in India run some of the best schools, colleges and hospitals. That’s what India should be celebrating. But the elevation of a few in the United States from the dungeon of invisible oppression might also give a misleading impression that all American Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans are upwardly mobile. Far from it.

The painful truth is that racial profiling is a common occurrence in the United States, which prompts the police sometime to shoot first then ask question, if the non-White person, especially if he is Black, Hispanic, or Middle-East/South Asian-looking, is not properly responsive. In India the equivalent of racial profiling is caste-and-religious profiling. A Muslim might be under suspicion for no reason except that terrorism has become associated with Islamic extremism with its hub in Pakistan. Like the United States, India has a long way to go to eliminate blind and irrational prejudice, though the most heartening aspect of it is that no one is giving up the fight. Acceptance of diversity has become a necessary condition for political survival both in India and the United States, which is another fascinating parallel between two great democracies founded on multiculturalism and secularism and now both fighting Islamic terrorism.

For me freedom has no meaning unless it breeds equality in the sense of equal opportunities for everyone, a level playing field where a person can prove his best and give his best and be rewarded for it. That’s more than a personal sentiment if you consider it from India’s national interest. You cannot have a strong market economy in upwardly perpetual motion unless the best and the brightest are allowed to come forward and compete for and expand economic opportunities.

The marketplace, howsoever Darwinian it might be at times—rather than one’s caste, gender, or religion—should determine the competition and reward the best. The government’s obligation is to build the infrastructure, maintain law and order and take care of the poor because the marketplace cannot solve these problems.

It is only through the power of the open marketplace that minorities and other left-behind-people could be integrated into the fabric of India. Hope is the best front against despair and terrorism.

On this Independence Day let’s keep our hearts and minds open, as Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru would have wanted us to do.

TV and Attention Disorder

Make TV children-friendly

From The Statesman
By ND Batra

What happens in the cradle is much more important than what is happening in the killing fields of Iraq and Lebanon.

Children’s brain undergoes rapid development in the early years and exposure to violent and sexually explicit television might interfere in the neural wiring of the brain. Research shows that apart from triggering violent behaviour in children, television may be responsible for obesity in children, because instead of playing outside and doing physical activities children become couch potatoes.

A study published in the journal of the American Academy of Paediatrics showed that early exposure to television by children increases the risk of attention disorder. The research done at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center at the University of Washington, Seattle, led by Dr Dimitri Christakis concluded that for every hour of television viewing by children in the one to three age group, the risk of attention disorder increased by nine per cent.

The study did not mention what kind of content caused attention disorder. Would slow repetitive programmes such as Sesame Street, Mr Roger’s Neighborhood, for example, have the same effect as fast moving programmes such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bugs Bunny? It is important to keep in mind that a child having attention disorder does not necessarily suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ADHD children (and adults) suffer from some chemical imbalance in the brain. They can’t stay still, chatter incessantly, get bored easily, forget things and can’t finish the work they are doing.

To some extent all children show such tendencies, therefore, parents should not jump to hasty conclusions. Attention disorder is a matter of degree. At some point it becomes a serious illness. The question is whether rapid-fire television programmes cause or aggravate the condition.

Or could some programme reverse attention disorder?
While the University of Washington study concluded that an early exposure to bad television programmes might skew brain development, another study showed the tremendous learning potential of television for toddlers. The researchers found that toddlers as young as 10 months have the potential to learn when they watch television. The right kind of television programmes promote intellectual development and could help children to learn language skills, such as matching names to the objects they represent, and do things by watching them being done on television. For example, a toddler could take apart a toy and also put it together after seeing it being done on television, researchers had found. Psychologist Dr Mabel Rice of the University of Kansas concluded from her research on language acquisition that children at a very early age have the potential to learn from television if the programmes were specially made for them, such as Sesame Street.

Infants’ television programmes that create sharp focus on an attractive object, and a friendly person who repeatedly talks about the object stimulates infants’ brain to learn. Music plays a big role in learning. To be sure, fast-paced, slam-dunk children’s cartoon programmes, which are nothing but infomercials for action toys and sugared cereals, are not going to help children anyway except to turn them into passive-aggressive consumers of the multibillion-dollar toy marketplace. What goes into the programme content is important.

Television is not the enemy of children.
Children’s programme makers driven by commercial lust are children’s enemies.

A few years ago, The American Psychological Association suggested four steps that could be taken “to mitigate, moderate and minimise” the toxic impact of violence on children: (1) Watch at least one episode of a programme the child watches to know how violent it is. (2) When viewing together, discuss the violence with the child; why the violence happened and how painful it is. Ask the child how the conflict could have been solved without violence. (3) Explain to the child how violence in entertainment is “faked” and not real. (4) Encourage children to watch programmes with characters that cooperate, help, and care for each other. APA said these programmes have been shown to influence children in a positive way and suggested making “TV violence part of the public health agenda (as with smoking and drunk driving) publicising ~ through a vigorous public information campaign in all information media ~ its perils and effects.”

Television violence in children’s programming has not gone down for the simple reason that Hollywood has passed on the responsibility to parents, expecting them to use the V (violence)-chip to block out objectionable programming. Since each television programme in the USA is rated for violence and sex and all sets have programme or channel-blocking mechanisms, it is left to the parents to protect children from bad television. But the survey shows that parents are not pro-active, partly because of the pressures of daily life. Besides, there is little choice on television.

The First Amendment freedoms have been cornered by Hollywood greed, which has left little incentive for creativity. In this war-torn world, children have become a forgotten constituency. On the minds of most American parents, there are weightier issues: job security, retirement, healthcare, and the seemingly endless Iraq, Afghanistan and now Lebanon.

A Step For India-US Friednship

Nuclear deal takes an initial step
But ND Batra says Indian diplomats still have their work cut out for them

By ND BatraAsiaMedia Contributing Writer

Tuesday, August 1, 2006

Those of us who watched last week's debate in the U.S. House of Representative over the United States and India Nuclear Cooperation Promotion Act of 2006 had very tense moments at the closing.
Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, introduced a motion to recommit the Bill to the House International Relation committee to include a provision that India must make a full commitment to U.S. efforts to isolate Iran in its nuclear ambitions. It was a daring political subterfuge that would have killed the deal.
The intensity of debate over the Markey-Upton motion, and the thin margin (235-192) by which the motion was defeated, showed not only how strongly U.S. lawmakers feel about Iran's development of nuclear weapons, but also that India has significant hurdles to face in making the nuclear deal.
The impression given by the final count, 359 votes to 68, that the House gave overwhelming support to the India-US nuclear deal is misleading. There is a strong substratum of opposition, which cuts across party lines as well as scholarly and journalistic communities, to let India bypass the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and indirectly become a member of the nuclear club.
In the coming months, Indian diplomats have their work cut out for them because some Americans have yet to be fully persuaded that an India-U.S. civil nuclear deal is good for the United States.
Of course, the nuclear deal is good for India.
By offering India "full civilian nuclear energy cooperation," President Bush made a bold act of statesmanship to establish long-term strategic and economic relations with a country that many Europeans and Americans are beginning to perceive as a reliable global partner. The pragmatic partnership to let India grow and play its rightful constructive role in global affairs is not about containing any other rising power. It is rather a partnership to let India develop as an alternative model of economic growth without compromising fundamental freedoms.
The rapid economic growth of Indian economy, which some estimate will increase 8 to 9 percent a year for the next few decades primarily through the efforts of its rising entrepreneurial class, would lift millions of Indians out of poverty. An economically dynamic India would make the military containment of any rising Asian power unnecessary. The more equal players there are on the Asian stage, the less chance there is for a single hegemonic power to rise.
The deal would remove hurdles in India's search for alternative energy sources to fuel its growing economy. In a joint statement with India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Bush administration has accepted India as a "responsible state with advanced nuclear technology," recognizing it as an exception to the rule, a country that should "acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states."
After the Senate vote in September, when Congress finally approves the deal, India will be able to buy nuclear fuel for its existing nuclear power plants and shop to build new ones. In the course of time, as trust increases and diplomatic relations further improve, a whole new world of sophisticated American technology would be open to India, enabling it to leapfrog past decades sluggish economic growth. In return India has agreed to do what other nuclear powers have been doing under the nonproliferation treaty -- to open some of its civilian nuclear power plants to International Atomic Energy Agency inspection and to continue the moratorium on nuclear testing. Its nuclear military arsenal would remain off limits.
Critics in India, particularly the Left parties, who fear that the deal would create co-dependency relations with the United States need to consider how China has benefited from its strong economic partnership without compromising its sovereignty. India must go beyond information technology outsourcing and penetrate deeply into corporate America.
An Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline -- if not a pipedream -- is only a very remote possibility; but even if it materializes, it may not be enough to meet India's gargantuan need for energy. Clean coal technology, nuclear energy and solar power are practical alternatives to which the United States has opened its doors.
Prime Minster Manmohan Singh was right when he told a joint U.S. Congress session last year, "There are partnerships based on principle, and partnership based on pragmatism. I believe we are at a juncture where we can embark on partnership that we can draw both on principle as well as pragmatism."
For the next decade, India's diplomacy should have a single-minded focus on one primary goal: speedy economic growth, which a partnership with the United States would hasten. Ironically, the opponents of the deal in the United States are banking on the Indian Left to scuttle the deal in the Indian Parliament.
The views expressed above are those of the author and are not necessarily those of AsiaMedia or the UCLA Asia Institute.
Date Posted: 8/1/2006

Battling Terrorism

Lessons for India in homeland security

CYBER AGE
by ND Batra
From The Statesman


India has much to learn how comprehensively and efficiently the United States of America goes about managing its homeland security by keeping a hawk-eye on the Islamic jihadi menace.
Last week, two men from Georgia ~ Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, a naturalised American of Pakistani origin and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, an American by birth and of Bangladeshi descent ~ were charged with planning attacks against the World Bank headquarter in Washington DC, the US Capitol and other civilians targets. Both were accused of preparing for violent jihad in the USA and abroad after undergoing “rudimentary paramilitary training”. One of them, Sadequee, was earlier charged for having gone to Toronto last year to hobnob with “like-minded Islamic extremists”.
Clearly these two Muslim young men had not actually committed any violent act but were found to be planning and conspiring to do so. Following the preemptive policy of dealing with terrorists, US Attorney David E. Nahmias said: “We no longer wait until a bomb is built and ready to explode.” Similarly, the plot to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago was at a stage “more aspirational than operational”, according to the FBI, when the plotters were apprehended in June this year. Preemption is preventing acts at the inspiration, aspiration and thinking stage before they become a concrete reality that leads to the kind of train bombings in Mumbai that killed more than 200 people and injured hundreds more on 11 July. However, when reason takes precedence over anger and dismay, it becomes possible to see with clarity that to a great extent most disasters could be anticipated and even prevented.
The concept “what’s anticipated can be prevented” would especially apply to a crucial aspect of India’s homeland security, that is Islamic militant terrorism of which the Mumbai outrage was the latest manifestation. If the worm, jihadi terrorism, has already made its home in India and could surface on any street, as was recently pointed out by a senior Indian journalist in a Wall Street Journal piece, the case for India’s homeland security to be modelled on the US system where since 9/11 not a single terrorist attack has taken place is very strong. Al-Qaida and other Islamic terrorists have not given up on the USA, and they keep trying.
Uncle Sam sleeps with one eye open. Early this year, Congress renewed what to most liberals would be a draconian anti-terrorism law, The US Patriot Act.
The Department of Homeland Security’s constantly changing red, yellow and green alerts have made life a trifle uncomfortable. Personal liberties have been affected, especially in big cities, though most of the USA is as free as ever. Airline travel security checks take longer. But on the whole, there is no fear psychosis in the USA. You wouldn’t feel afraid of walking in the streets of New York or elsewhere; living in America is safer than living anywhere else.
The US homeland security doctrine is coherent, pragmatic and ethical. And it has a simple premise: Choose the lesser evil. It is better to put a few thousand people in jail ~ yes, some of them might be innocent ~ than let terrorists strike, which might push millions and millions of people into a state of perpetual fear.
The Patriot Act, which allows intelligence and law enforcement authorities to go into places of worship, investigate the working of charities and snoop on telecommunication of suspected militants is not what a free society should do. But it is a lesser evil than letting Islamic militants take advantage of constitutional freedoms to commit mass murders.
From Pota to its successors, Indians think up marvellous schemes but lack the will to implement them. A mantra is no substitute for action.But there’s hope. Contrary to popular expectation, India showed remarkable composure in the face of the dastardly acts in Mumbai. Sure the Sensex wobbled for while but it stabilised, reinforcing the hope that economic recovery and growth is on a firm footing.
There was some tough talk by politicians but the fire did not spread. Which is no guarantee for the future, of course. Of course a similar pattern of attacks has been taking place in Pakistan too, though it is between Sunnis and Shias. If the pattern is the same, the same underlying force, Sunni Wahabisim, must be operating in both countries. In that case, India and Pakistan have a common enemy, though unfortunately they don’t see it that way. That’s why the continuation of dialogue is so important because with the course of time, perceptions would change. When terrorists’ bonds with local people become weak, it would be easy to gather intelligence, and isolate and annihilate terrorists’ networks. That’s what is being done in the USA ~ destroying the infrastructure that supports terrorists’ networks.
Simi and LeT would cease to exist if they are isolated from the local people. Indian Muslims must feel reassured that India is their country and that their children have a future. That kind of social and cultural re-education is important. India’s two-pronged strategy for fighting terrorism should be: Ruthlessly implement a no-holds-barred policy of dealing with militants. Secondly, continue pursuing peaceful settlement with Pakistan through a policy of cool and cautious engagement at multiple levels, including trade and widespread official and people-to-people contacts.
The first step necessitates widespread human and digital intelligence gathering and the rigorous enforcement of terrorism laws already in place.
The second step requires sensible diplomacy with total control over hotheaded political rhetoric. Flaming tongues can sear hearts.
Dealing with Pakistan is not easy, especially when the Pakistan government does not have full control over what is happening there. Apart from the continuous simmering rebellion in Baluchistan, some powerful sections of society in Pakistan, including the ISI, are feeding and supporting the Taliban to re-establish their hold in Afghanistan. And they are not done with Kashmir, regardless of the opening of bridges and India’s generosity in giving millions of dollars to earthquake victims.

DO NOT MESS UP WITH INDIA

Pre-emption needed, not despair

CYBER AGE by ND Batra
From The Statesman

A nation that has been gradually and steadily building up its economic and technological strength to raise a billion people to a decent standard of living and seek a rightful place in the global community cannot allow itself to be drowned in pessimism.
The quick return to normalcy of work and life in Mumbai, one of the greatest cities in the world, and a city whose creative dynamism sums up the best of India, has been so assuring that there’s a certain gut feeling ~ that India shall overcome. However, it hurts badly ~ irrespective of whether one lives in India or abroad ~ because we have become so much emotionally bonded and identified with what is India and what India ought to be. Yet, there is so little room for despair that we end up consoling ourselves with India’s resilient spirit every time there is a fresh attack. Resilience is not a substitute for action.
Terrorism is a local and global phenomenon and it must be fought at every level with imagination, intelligence and persistence, with all the available resources, as the USA has been fighting. Americans have come to believe that terrorism is preventable and must be prevented whatever the cost.
The 11 September attacks have been a kind of sourcebook for the US Homeland Security and whenever any attack occurs anywhere in the world, London, Madrid or Mumbai, the authorities redouble their vigilance, and freshen up their plans to meet any contingency. It could happen here, they acknowledge, but it must not, and that’s the steely determination writ large on their faces.
As soon as the images of wrecked trains and mutilated bodies appeared on American television screens, Homeland Security authorities shook themselves up once again and reassured the people that the New York commuter train system ~ that carries 4.5 million Americans to and from work every day ~ is well-protected and under constant watch, though there is no place for complacency. More patrolling, more bag searches, more surveillance, more inconvenience, more protests, but no letting up. Altogether 32 million Americans use trains everyday for work and leisure and protecting the vast network of transportation system is not an easy task.
Only a few days before the Mumbai train attacks, US authorities had uncovered a plot to blow up the underground tunnel system that connects New Jersey with New York City.
The discovery of the plot was not accidental or a serendipitous occurrence. The Homeland Security since the 11 September episode has been on the lookout for terrorists in order to pre-empt any kind of attack. They would not allow a failure of imagination and anticipation for America to be taken by surprise again. Apart from the Federal government, every state has a list of potential terrorist targets for which there are contingency plans.
The most common response to terrorism is to wait for the attack to occur and then swing into action; or issue a bravado statement like the one that came from the Indian Cabinet after the Mumbai attacks: “Nothing will deter us from our firm policy to fight this menace till it is wiped out. We are determined to apprehend and bring to justice all those responsible for the evil acts in Mumbai.” As if in response to this jejune statement, a BBC correspondent observed, albeit cynically, that during the last decade so many attacks have taken place in India that no one has been apprehended, no serious action has been taken and eventually nobody cares.
For a moment I thought the BBC correspondent had summed up a history of India in one sentence. Throughout the ages, India has been attacked, and attacked, and attacked… but without any response.
Islamic terrorists in India whether they belong to Students Islamic Movement of India, Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba or some other outfit know that nothing serious would happen to them even if they were apprehended. Politically and financially, they are well provided for; otherwise they would not have been in business so long. Who is protecting them in India?
In the USA and increasingly in Europe, especially after the London and Madrid bombings, there has been a paradigm shift. The policy has been not only to nip the evil in the bud but also to eliminate the evil at the conceptual stage.
The plot to blow up New Jersey-New York rail tunnel, for example, was at the most preliminary conceptual stage, when its thinking head and organiser, an Al-Qaida associate Assem Hammoud, at Lebanese International University, where he taught economics, was arrested along with other suspects in cooperation with investigators in foreign countries. “The primary emphasis has to be,” said NBC’s counter-terrorism analyst Michael Sheehan, “on the investigation and to find and detect any cell that may be plotting against the system.”
In India such plotting cells would not be found in the slums of Mumbai but in places where people think and tinker and assemble. It should not very difficult to find them. Unless India adopts and ruthlessly executes a policy of zero tolerance toward Islamic terrorists, which means using all the available means to hunt them under the law, we would be wondering ~ What after Mumbai: Kolkata, Bangalore or some place where India’s brain, wealth and creativity thrive? India needs to re-balance its priorities, freedom and domestic security.
Despair is not an option for India. Pre-emption is the key to eliminate terrorism.

It is good to be an American

A just society

ND Batra
From The Statesman

The American dream is some kind of El Dorado, a state of immense wealth and achievement which when attained, enables a person to exclaim, “Ah! It’s good to be an American.”

You can see it in the life of a man like Andy Grove who survived the Nazis and the communists and entered the USA as a refugee. He worked so hard that he had no place to go except up and up until he reached the stratosphere. He built a microchip empire that runs the information superhighway and serves America’s global interests. But he did not do it through the largesse of affirmative action and racial preferences. Nor does Intel, of which he was the CEO, hire people based on quotas, racial preferences, compensatory guilt, or the need for diversity.

Multinationals thrive on competitiveness, not on affirmative action. But do affirmative action preferences create a just society? For about 40 years, US society has been helping African-Americans and other minority groups to cross the race line by creating for them preferences for jobs, contracts and admissions to universities. In the case of higher education, the original intent was to desegregate and diversify the student population by requiring colleges and universities to lower the admission criteria for minority students. The policy might have worked in some cases.

It has been argued that the rise of Colin Powell, who reached the top in the US military with an extraordinary record of achievements and served the Bush administration as the secretary of state in a very difficult era of American diplomacy, would not have been possible without affirmative action. Affirmative action might have opened the door for Mr Powell but it did not catapult him to the top and make him one of the most esteemed Americans living today. In his book, My American Journey, he wrote, “Equal rights and equal opportunity... do not mean preferential treatment. Preferences, no matter how well intended, ultimately breed resentment among the non-preferred.”

Consider the achievements of Hollywood star Bill Cosby, pop culture’s global icon Michael Jackson, and basketball’s once supreme athlete Michael Jordan. They rose to the top on the basis of their guts and talents. Such remarkable achievements would be diminished if they were correlated with racial preferences and quotas. As Powell said: “If affirmative action means programmes that provide equal opportunities, then I am all for it. If it leads to preferential treatment or helps those who no longer need help, I am opposed.” Powell rose to the top on the strength of his character and the power of his brain. But what about those who live in ghettos, inner cities and rural poverty? “If a history of discrimination has made it difficult for certain Americans to meet standards, it is only fair to provide temporary means to help them catch up and compete on equal terms,” the General added. But there are other voices.

Race, as Prof Cornel West of Princeton says, matters a lot in America; prejudice is widely prevalent, and it is the colour of your skin, not character and merit, that determines where you live and work, and how a policeman treats you in the middle of the night when he sees you at a street corner, or when you go to the airport and you are “randomly selected” for special inspection because you look like an Asian or an Arab-Muslim. But these are the imperfections of a great society. Decades of affirmative action policy, which in reality amounted to creating preferential quotas for minorities, have not created a colour-race-gender blind society. No wonder affirmative action has been getting into disfavour as a public policy. In 1998, California voters ended preferential treatment based on race and gender for public employment, education and contracting by approving a ballot initiative.

Berkeley and other top schools of the California Higher Education System no longer admit African-Americans and Hispanics by lowering the admission standards. For a long time, the dominant mood in the country has been: end racial preferences because they create reverse discrimination. But the question still remains: does diversity of race, religion and opinion matter? Diversity is socially desirable because it engenders new ideas that enrich society and encourages tolerance and acceptance of the USA, which is increasingly becoming multicultural and multiracial.

The challenge is to use affirmative action to give some deserving people a head start without creating entitlements, to make possible the rise of people like the secretary of state, Ms Condoleeza Rice, General Powell and Andrew Grove in the future.

Ironically, millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere do not ask for affirmative action or preferential treatment. All they want is a chance to work and to build a good life for their families and in the process, to add to US wealth. Those who cannot stand the idea of the American dream want to blow up the USA as Islamic jihadists want do.

SUPREME COURT PLUCKS BUSH'S FEATHERS

From The Statesman
Cyber Age

Clipping the excesses of US power

ND Batra

The US Supreme Court majority ruling that President Bush exceeded his authority by establishing military tribunals for the trial of Al-Qaida detainees held in the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, came as a rude shock to the administration that believes and has been acting on the presumption that during war time the President is above the law.
In Hamdan v Rumsfeld, the Court said not only is the American justice system applicable to the detainees but also the Geneva Conventions, of which Article 3 enjoins that detainees be tried by “a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognised as indispensable by civilised people.” In a sharp rebuke, Justice Breyer, who concurred with the majority, said: “Congress has not issued the executive ‘a blank check’”. Along with other detainees, Salim Hamdan ~ former driver and bodyguard of Osama bin Laden ~ who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and has been held in Guantanamo Bay detention facility, the plaintiff for whose appeal case the Court gave its ruling, now would be tried in more transparent court proceedings than by a secretive military tribunal.
In the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks, the USA moved fast to “secure its liberties” by adopting draconian measures used only in war times. Some civil libertarians said at that time that President Bush had assumed dictatorial powers by issuing the executive order on 13 November 2001 that suspended the rights of enemy prisoners and non-citizens suspected of terrorism.
Captured Al-Qaida militants were to be tried in special military tribunals, where the normal rules of evidence were not applicable. “Given the danger to the safety of the USA and the nature of international terrorism,” so went the order, “it is not practicable to apply in military commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognised in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.” Trials were not open to the public or the media and could be conducted in any jurisdiction where the USA exercised control. The convicted person could be sentenced to life imprisonment or death, with no provision for appeal to a higher court.
It seemed ironic how Islamic terrorism had driven the USA closer to authoritarian regimes’ practice of speedy and summary execution of “justice”. The whole purpose of the executive order was to try captured Al-Qaida terrorists in a manner that would prevent them from taking advantages of the slowness of the American justice system. The dominant sentiment in the administration has been that the terrorists should not be allowed to enjoy the benefits of the system they so flagrantly abused. Vice-President Dick Cheney said at that time: “The basic proposition here is that somebody who comes into the USA illegally, who conducts a terrorist operation killing thousands innocent Americans… does not deserve the same guarantees and safeguards that would be used for an American citizen going through the normal judicial process.”
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected the argument and concluded that military commissions violated both US military justice system and international conventions. The prolonged detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay detention facility and the inhuman treatment meted out to them gave Al-Qaida a propaganda platform that has kept the Arab-Muslim world simmering with anger and disdain for the USA.
The administration argued this was not the first time that the USA reverted to this extraordinary method of dispensing justice. And that Franklin D Roosevelt too had done so. His military commission sentenced to death German marines who had sneaked in submarines to America’s shores to sabotage US military facilities in 1942; and again in 1946 when another commission sentenced to death a Japanese general for torture, rape and killings of citizens in the Philippines.
The Supreme Court upheld both the judgments. Abraham Lincoln too had allowed trials by military commissions during the Civil War. But those were different times. There is plenty of barbaric behaviour in every civilised society, but fortunately in the USA such bouts of collective insanity, for example, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, do not last for long. Until 11 September 2001 the American people enjoyed more civil liberties than any other people in the world. There was no distinction between citizens and non-citizens before terrorists hit the American soil. The threshold of judicial proof, when a person suspected of terrorism is tried in a military tribunal, is lowered from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to merely “preponderance of evidence” that is required in civil disputes. Unanimous jury verdict required in criminal cases is replaced by a majority verdict by a panel of judges. In a trial by a military tribunal any kind of evidence, even if it does not meet the standards of the rules of evidence, could be used against the suspect under trial.
The right of the defendant to have access to sensitive intelligence in the possession of the prosecution, which is normally respected in trials, may be denied in a trial by a military tribunal. In short, the constitutional protections are suspended in the case of enemy prisoners suspected of terrorism under trial by a military tribunal. The Supreme Court did not question the detention of enemy prisoners. Nor did it order the release of 450 enemy prisoners being held at Guantanamo. But by asking the President to go to Congress to seek a legislative solution so that detainees are given the right to defend themselves according to the law of war and international conventions, it re-established the tripartite balance of power, which had been tilted in favour of the executive after 9/11.
As Justice Kennedy said in his concurring opinion: “Concentration of power puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action of officials, an incursion the Constitution’s three-part system is designed to avoid.” In one bold stroke, the US Supreme Court has dismantled the American imperial presidency and reaffirmed the rule of law, thus making the world a safer place from the excesses of American power.

QUESTION OF THE DAY

Has Guantanamo affected American civil liberties?

There is plenty of barbaric behavior in every civilized society, but fortunately in the United States such bouts of collective insanity, for example, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, do not last for long. Until 11 September 2001 the American people enjoyed more civil liberties than any other people in the world. There was no distinction between citizens and non-citizens before terrorists hit the American soil.

Cyber adventures

Be all you want in cyberspace

ND BATRA
From The Statesman

On the Internet nobody knows whether a person is a dirty old man trying to seduce teenagers, a gender-swapping woman playing with big boys in a virtual game room, or a teenager posing as an expert. It is also true that eventually no one can hide in cyberspace. Cyber opacity is an illusion.
A few years ago, a California teenager Marcus Arnold, using his knowledge gained from television programmes such as Court TV or Judge Judy, and taking advantage of the pseudonymous freedom that a knowledge sharing company had provided, turned himself into a legal expert and began to dole out free legal advice. And he began to be noticed by people hungry for information.
Arnold’s direct and jargon-free approach to tough legal questions had a great appeal. Soon people began to call him at home seeking his legal advice. But then his conscience or may be the fear of being found out began to bother the 15-year-old boy. And one day he revealed his true self to his admirers.
Real lawyers poured scorn but the public rallied around him and he continued to give his non-expert common sense expertise on legal matters for sometime. AskMe, the online knowledge sharing outfit closed its free Website, but at its height about 10 million registered visitors posted questions and answers on everything from Armageddon to Zen mediation.
The Internet has created a new media environment that not only enables people to communicate, discuss and exchange information, give and receive feedback, but also provides an interactive collaborative environment in which words can become deeds and speech can become action.
Networked computers, the building blocks of the Internet, are much more than mere productivity tools and informatics appliances. Unlike the traditional media, they are capable of creating the cyber-environment that can be designed to be persuasive, that can motivate people to act and change their social behaviours. Stanford University researchers call this rhetorical concept as Captology, which “focuses on the planned persuasive effects of computer technologies”.
The next challenge for software programmers is to design virtual environments to motivate people, for example, not to drink and drive, to have healthy sexual behaviours, to avoid pregnancy, or to be successful corporate leaders. Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School believes that computer codes have the potential to control behaviour the way law does, that programmers in a manner of speaking could become lawmakers.
But the rhetoric of software design, the persuasive code that entices, builds relationships, arouses and fulfills desires and keeps the users coming back has not been fully explored in areas other than cybersex and virtual reality Internet games. There may be a fortune in developing codes that persuade the user to change his attitude, behaviour and actions.
One of the great strengths of the strength of the Internet is its interactivity, its ability to respond and give instant feedback. Feedback not only regulates the flow of communication but also gives some of the control back to the receiver of the message. Two persons in conversation establish a dynamic relationship to create shared meanings.
Human communication is essentially a transaction that takes place effectively if people have or can create a common field of experience.
Islamic jehadis share each other’s vision of “Paradise”, and for them suicide becomes a door to that mental image of the promised everlasting beauty, as Omar Khyyam said, “…A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou Beside me singing…”
Persuasion works through sharing of mental models. The Internet makes it easy to share mental models whether they are of instant access to Paradise through self-destruction, buying and selling on a virtual platform such as e-Bay, or sharing experiences in MySpace as millions of teenagers do.
Internet communication can transcend face-to-face communication, can be very persuasive, and in certain circumstances is even more desirable. Lack of face-to-face cues, physical appearance and vocal inflections, which might arouse scepticism, are absent in Internet communication especially when it is time delayed such as in e-mail or question-answer Websites.
Selective self-presentation makes it possible for people to open themselves up to others, which they would hesitate to do in face-to-face conversation for fear of contradiction, lack of control or sense of shame.
Even in chat rooms and instant messaging, communication can become what one researcher, JB Walther, called as “hyperpersonal”, that is, socially more desirable than we are likely to experience face-to-face. It allows the play of fantasy partly to compensate for the absence of aural and visual information that gestures and voice create in interpersonal encounters. Fantasy lowers our guards and makes cyberspace so seductively persuasive ~ and dangerous.
Many teenagers go astray in chatrooms because cyberspace lets them assume fake identities and gives them the freedom to pretend ~ 13 going on 18 ~ what they fancy themselves to be. Some of them become victims of con men and predators, who too assume identities desirable for their teenage victims.
The playfulness of virtual environment, an environment of “Be what you want to be”, creates a pleasurable experience, a sensuous flow, in which we feel control of our environment that real life might deny us. The strength of teenagers’ most popular portal MySpace is also its vulnerability, as many parents have been discovering.

Gates Giving

Bill Gates is retiring... So what?

ND BATRA
From The Statesman

The market shrugged off Mr Bill Gates’ announcement that he would give up the commanding heights of Microsoft, the digital empire he co-founded with his friend Mr Paul Allen in 1975. Gates plans to focus on philanthropy, especially global health and education work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This is not the end for Mr Gates but another chapter in the life of a most creative mind who began, like most American innovators, in his garage with an idea and transformed the world. Yes, Mr Gates helped usher in the digital civilisation. But I wonder if Mr Gates could have risen to the top in any other country except the USA, a country that brings out the best in ordinary people like Mr Gates and transforms them into extraordinary humans through the competitive ethos of the marketplace.

In his introduction to Mr David Brown’s book, Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse, Mr James Burke, a London-based television producer, commended America’s “can-do” spirit and said that the “readiness to adapt to circumstance is one of America’s most enduring characteristics and is what makes the American social environment more amenable to innovation than any other...”

Henry Ford, for example, adapted a British Royal Navy-originated assembly-line idea of production and used it to usher in an era of “democracy of possessions”. Of course, the democracy of possessions also creates social and environmental problems that demand the application of new technology, thus, feeding the inventive-entrepreneurial spiral.

What makes a scientist more inventive and innovative in the USA than back in his native country might be puzzling to some of us, especially those who do not understand the ethos of American society. Consider the case of Mr Ashok Gadgil, one of the 35 inventors profiled in the book, whose invention of a drinking water purification system might save millions of people in developing countries where diarrhoea, cholera, hepatitis and water-borne diseases are widely prevalent. The “Bengal cholera” of 1992 that spread throughout India and killed approximately 10,000 people, challenged Mr Gadgil, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, to develop an affordable and effective water purification system using ultraviolet light. Mr Gadgil’s device, the UV Waterworks, may not be an earth-shaking invention but it is extremely useful for the masses in India and other developing countries, where drinking water contamination is commonplace.

It sounds incredible but Mr Gadgil says in the book: “You could disinfect one person’s drinking supply for a full year for a couple of cents.” Could Mr Gadgil have developed this invention in India, a nation with a quotas-and-reservations mentality and a straightjacket bureaucracy? The USA is the most inventive and innovative nation today.

In 2005, US residents received 85,238 patents out of a total of 165,485 granted by the US Patent and Trademark office. Burke wrote in his book that scientists and inventors follow the two-fold rule propounded by the 17th century French rationalist philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes: Be a doubting Thomas and reduce every system to its fundamentals. You cannot sit in your bathtub and wait for “Eureka” to occur. Inventing is sweating all the way (Thomas Edison’s 99 per cent rule) until a new configuration, a new way of doing things surfaces like an irrepressible force, an answer to a prayer, when you say, yes, yes, indeed, one plus one is equal to 11.

During the last 70 years, job categories (teaching, journalism, road-building, etc.) have increased from 80 to 800 in the USA. With global e-commerce rising, the job marketplace will explode the world over and will demand massive inventiveness and innovations. What will happen to a nation that does not invent and innovate?

In his foreword to the book, Mr Lester Thurow, an MIT social scientist, wrote that most scientific and technological advances in human history have occurred slowly and sporadically in civilisations, often vanishing from the place of their origin. After the end of Roman civilisation, Europe plunged into the Dark Ages when technological leadership passed on to the Islamic world. China was more advanced in the 15th century than in the 19th century.

There are no guarantees that a nation’s technological lead will last forever. The restless and questioning spirit in Europe began with the re-invention of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany in the 15th century that unleashed simultaneously two forces, the Renaissance and the Reformation, which caused a tremendous upheaval in Europe and the rest of the world from the time of the discovery of America to that of the colonisation of Asia and Africa. One great invention led to another ~ the invention of steam engine led to electricity ~ and moved some countries to the rank of the first world and relegated many others to the third world.

But what has made scientific and technological innovation a sustainable enterprise in modern times, according to Prof Thurow, is the German idea that “systematic investments in research and development based upon academic science could lead to a much faster rate of technological progress.”

Universities have become the most important source of inventiveness and innovations in the USA and elsewhere. Great research universities, MIT, Stanford, Harvard and others, with abundant research funding resources, attract the best brains from all over the world and make the USA the most inventive and innovative society. That explains why the book celebrated Mr Gadgil as an American, not an Indian, inventor because the USA provides the socially supported scientific platform that India does not.

We know how German rocket scientists were persuaded after WWII to come to the USA to help beat the Soviet Union in the race into space. But Prof Thurow warns: “What has been gained can be lost.” Great Britain and Germany were the technological leaders since the industrial revolution began 200 years ago. So was China once, as were the Arabs.

What makes the USA so different from the past technological leaders is that it is culturally situated between the First Amendment freedoms and the awesome temptations of the open marketplace. The marketplace of goods and ideas, the Darwinian competitiveness, is fuelling the relentless pace of inventiveness and innovations in the USA which is the only place where a man like Bill Gates could rise.

THE MIGHTY HARVARD

Harvard v the Vatican

ND Batra
The Statesman

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

~ TS Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

When South Korean Scientist Dr Hwang Woo Suk admitted last December to have faked the result of his research regarding the creation of stem cell lines from cloned human embryos, it seemed a terrible setback to one of the most transformative and promising fields of medicine.
But last week’s announcement that Harvard Stem Cell Institute will begin doing research using Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer process to create specific cell lines from cloned human embryos has once again raised hopes for millions of people suffering from incurable diseases.
Harvard research will be diseases specific; for example, the nucleus of a skin cell of a diabetic patient will be inserted into an unfertilised donor egg, from which the nucleus has already been removed. The newly engineered composite egg will be nurtured on a petri dish where it will develop into an early embryo from which embryonic stem cell lines would be developed and guided into becoming healthy insulin producing pancreatic islet cells. These would replace the diseased ones, for example, in a child suffering from juvenile diabetes.
What would you not do to make your child disease free and healthy? But somewhere in the process, life begins. That has been an ethical dilemma for those who believe that human life is sacred at every stage, even on a petri dish.The late pope John Paul II, for example, admonished President George W Bush on a visit to the Vatican saying that a “free and virtuous society, which America aspires to be, must reject practices that devalue and violate human life at any stage from conception until natural death.”
The late pontiff was referring to proposals for the creation of embryonic stem cells for research purposes, which hold the promise to lead to a cure for diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, spinal cord injuries and much more. The pope himself was afflicted with Parkinson’s, one of the millions of sufferers of the debilitating disease. The promises of embryonic stem cell research for healing incurable diseases and rejuvenating life are so great that it appears inhuman to shut the door on it.
Many people wondered why the Vatican would deny the gift of stem cell miracle to the suffering humanity. Suffering is at the heart of Christianity, especially Catholicism. Suffering creates compassion and humanises us. Respect for life must begin at the beginning, and the beginning of life could be on a petri dish or the womb. Pope John Paul II warned: “how a tragic coarsening of consciences accompanies the assault on innocent human life in the womb, leading to accommodation and acquiescence in the face of other related evils such as euthanasia, infanticide…”
Would Pope John Paul II have refused the stem cell-based cure for his Parkinson’s, if it were available in his times? The Vatican, nonetheless, is not totally opposed to stem cell research; it favours the research based on adult stems cells, though the results of such a research at present are not promising. Embryonic stem cells have the potential of growing any specific stem cell, such as bone or brain stem cell, needed to heal the body. Cloning embryonic stem cells takes one more step toward creating life to heal life.
The Vatican’s view about the sanctity of life is a sharp condemnation of the practice of foeticide, especially the killing of female foetuses, a widespread practice in some parts of South Asia. It is difficult to surmise what happens to the conscience of a woman who learns upon pre-natal screening that she is carrying a female foetus and decides to abort it, especially now when abortion technology enables a woman to abort in a jiffy. That’s why many Americans have not been able to ignore the late pope’s warning that the destruction of embryos to extract stem cells, even when the purpose is to fight diseases and reduce human suffering, would dehumanise us.
Regardless of the views of the Vatican or the policy of the Bush administration to deny funding embryonic stem cell research with federal money, stem cell research, as the Harvard announcement shows, is unstoppable for the simple reason that the perceived health benefits not only in terms of fighting incurable diseases but also prolonging healthy life are immeasurable.
Stem cell revolution is as momentous as was the splitting of the atom; therefore, it needs protocols and safeguards to harness its benefits without the coarsening of our conscience.It requires a fundamental change in our thinking, a paradigm shift as significant as when Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens ~ away from the Vatican.
Now that that the mighty Harvard has put its moral authority, reputation, knowledge and wisdom at stake in pursuit of health and happiness for mankind, let us hope the marketplace, the ultimate test of everything in the USA, does not coarsen life in the process.

The Mighty Harvard

Harvard v the Vatican

ND Batra

INDIA: A JUST & MERITORIOUS SOCIETY

CYBER AGE
For a just & competitive society
ND BATRA
From The Statesman

Quotas and reservations in India are merely populist measures to win votes for the next election; they would never churn up the backward classes to the fore. Even if some people were put on the creamy surface, they would go down unless they are intellectually prepared and enabled to stay on the top in a competitive environment.
The quota and reservation system is one of the biggest frauds being committed against historically deprived classes. This is the way to keep them down forever. The best way to raise them high is through a system of challenge and response; by providing them access through merit and need-based scholarships so that backward class kids can compete in the marketplace. Let’s keep in mind that historically deprived people are not genetically deprived.
Like India, the USA is an imperfect and messy democracy. The goal of inclusiveness, not merely desegregation, has been a struggle for every generation. Time and time again, the US Supreme Court has played a critical role in bringing the American people back to the basics, the vision of the founding fathers of an integrated society.
The Supreme Court is not only the ultimate authority in the interpretation of the Constitution; it has become the supreme moral authority in the USA. “In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.”
That was the opinion of the US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor regarding the affirmative action admission policy of the University of Michigan (23 June 2003). Justice O’Connor, who occupied a middle-of-the road open-minded position on the US Supreme Court, has retired but her legacy lives on.
When the Supreme Court speaks, the question of what is right and what is wrong is settled until the next time when another crisis brings the nine justices together to ponder over and argue once again what the Constitution means, after all. Its decisions are seldom unanimous and the voice of dissenting justices is never lost.
Even a lone dissenting opinion might become the voice of the Court majority in another time when the mode of consciousness of the society changes. That’s why there is so much partisan political struggle as to who gets appointed to the Supreme Court.
But by and large the Court is both a reactive and creative institution. It listens and questions; but when it does speak everyone listens.
That’s how it bonds American society whenever it seems to be coming apart, for example, in the 2000 presidential election. On 23 June 2003, the Supreme Court spoke about the affirmative action policy of the University of Michigan and its decision has impacted every private and public institution as well as businesses in their recruitment practices. Its decision has not gone unnoticed by Indian commentators struggling with the recently proposed nationwide quota for Other Backward Classes (OBC) for admission to Central universities.
One of the US Supreme Court decisions involved the University of Michigan Law School that used a method of admission in which race was included as one of the factors. The Court upheld the practice thus affirming the 1978 (the Bakke case) decision that allowed race to be considered as one of the many factors, a “plus” factor, for admission, emphasising that diversity enriches the educational environment.
The Court did not endorse the idea of a quota for any race. The Court was, however, troubled with the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts, which used a point system that automatically granted 20 points to a minority student (Blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans) toward a minimum of 100 (on a scale of 150) required for admission. The plaintiffs had complained of reverse discrimination that disqualified otherwise qualified white students. In this case a 6-3 majority led by the late Chief Justice Rhenquest called the numerical system not good enough to enrich diversity.
An individualised admission programme would consider the whole person, including race as a factor among others. In the Law School case, Justice O’Connor wrote for the 5-4 majority: “Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civil life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realised…. Access to legal education (and thus the legal profession) must be inclusive of talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity so that all members of our heterogeneous society may participate in the educational instructions that provide the training and education necessary to succeed in America.”
Since the enactment of Civil Rights Act of 1964, Americans have been given a legal recourse to fight against discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. It has opened many doors for minorities to advance in fields that were shut on them. The United States Military wouldn’t be what it is today without affirmative action. It is the biggest field of “the American Dream” and minorities are drawn to it with the hope that service to the nation would open up opportunities for them.
Former secretary of state Colin Powell, a retired army general, exemplified what a person could achieve once affirmative action opened a door. But his successor, secretary of state Dr Condoleezza Rice, another black person, has risen to international prominence on sheer guts and merit.
American businesses, too, have embraced diversity as something good for them to succeed in a multi-cultural global environment. The Supreme Court heard myriad briefs filed in support of the University of Michigan, and the Court’s decision embodies their collective voice: Diversity is a compelling national interest. But neither corporate America nor any social group has ever advocated that diversity and social justice should be achieved through a system of quotas and reservations for historically deprived classes, as it is being done in India.