Tech savy government of the future

Here is what a tech savvy government in the future could look like:

" Estonia is a tiny country in northeastern Europe, just next to Finland. It has the territory of the Netherlands, but 13 times less people—its 1.3 million inhabitants is comparable to Hawaii’s population.  What makes this tiny country interesting in terms of governance is not just that the people can elect their parliament online or get tax overpayments back within two days of filing their returns. It is also that this level of service for citizens is not the result of the government building a few websites. Instead, Estonians started by redesigning their entire information infrastructure from the ground up with openness, privacy, security, and ‘future-proofing’ in mind.

The first building block of e-government was telling citizens apart. Estonia uses a simple, unique ID methodology across all systems, from paper passports to bank records to government offices and hospitals. For these identified citizens to transact with each other, Estonia passed the Digital Signatures Act in 2000. and a national Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which binds citizen identities to their cryptographic keys, and now doesn’t care if any Tiit and Toivo (to use common Estonian names) sign a contract in electronic form with certificates or plain ink on paper. A signature is a signature in the eyes of the law.

Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip signed an e-services agreement. As a quirky side effect, this foundational law also forced all decentralized government systems to become digital “by market demand.” No part of the Estonian government can now turn down a citizen’s digitally signed document and demand a paper copy instead.

Also to prevent this system from becoming obsolete in the future, the law did not lock in the technical nuances of digital signatures. Initially, Estonia put a microchip in the traditional ID cards issued to every citizen for identification and domestic travel inside the European Union. The chip carried two certificates: one for legal signatures and the other for authentication when using a website or service that recognizes the government's identification system (online banking, for example). Every person over 15 was required to have an ID card, and there are now over 1.2 million active cards. That’s close to 100-percent penetration of the population.

But now Estonians can get a Mobile ID-enabled SIM card from their telecommunications operator. Without installing any additional hardware or software, they can access secure systems and affix their signatures by simply typing PIN codes on their mobile phone.

Besides the now-daily usage of this technology for commercial contracts and bank transactions, the most high-profile use case has been elections. Since becoming the first country in the world to allow online voting nationwide in 2005, Estonia has used the system for both parliamentary and European Parliament elections. During parliamentary elections in 2011, online voting accounted for 24 percent of all votes. (Citizens voted from 105 countries in total).

To accelerate innovation, the state tendered building and securing the digital signature-certificate systems to private parties, namely a consortium led by local banks and telecoms. And that's not where the public-private partnerships end: Public and private players can access the same data-exchange system (dubbed X-Road), enabling truly integrated e-services.

When employers report employment taxes every month, their data entries are linked to people’s tax records . Charitable donations reported by non-profits are recorded as deductions for the giver in the same fashion. Tax deductions on mortgages are registered from data interchange with commercial banks. And so forth. Not only is the income-tax rate in the country a flat 21 percent, but Estonians get tax overpayments put back on their bank accounts (digitally transferred, of course) within two days of submitting their forms.

This liquid movement of data between systems relies on a fundamental principle to protect people’s privacy: Without question, it is always the citizen who owns his or her data and retains the right to control access to that data.  But there is also a flip-side to the fully digitized nature of the Republic of Estonia: having the bureaucratic machine of a country humming in the cloud increases the economic cost of a potential physical assault on the state. Rather than ceasing to operating in the event of an invasion, the government could boot up a backup replica of the digital state and host it in some other friendly European territory. Government officials would be quickly re-elected, important decisions made, documents issued, business and property records maintained, births and deaths registered, and even taxes filed by those citizens who still had access to the Internet.

While the Estonian story is certainly special: the country achieved re-independence after 50 unfortunate years of Soviet occupation in 1991, having missed much of the technological progress made by the Western world in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. -'80s, including checkbooks and mainframe computers. Nevertheless, the country jumped right on the mid-’90s bandwagon of TCP/IP-enabled web apps. During this social reset, Estonians also decided to throw their former communist leaders overboard and elect new leadership, often ministers in their late-20s capable of disruptive thinking.

And this is what United States, along with many other countries struggling to get the Internet, could learn from Estonia: the mindset. The willingness to get the key infrastructure right and continuously re-invent it. Before you build a health-insurance site, you need to look at what key components must exist for such a service to function optimally: signatures, transactions, legal frameworks, and the like."

Here is a path forward for India which now has an ID card ( Aadhar), reasonable internet penetration ( 137 million users), 980 million cell phones, 100,000 ATMS in many Banks with computerized records and transactions. What is needs now is an completee information infrastructure that ties all these together.

Is classical music dead?

When it comes to classical music and American culture, the fat lady hasn’t justsung. Brünnhilde has packed her bags and moved to Boca Raton.

Classical music has been circling the drain for years, of course. There’s little doubt as to the causes: the fingernail grip of old music in a culture that venerates the new; new classical music that, in the words of Kingsley Amis, has about as much chance of public acceptance as pedophilia; formats like opera that are extraordinarily expensive to stage; and an audience that remains overwhelmingly old and white in an America that’s increasingly neither. Don’t forget the attacks on arts education, the Internet-driven democratization of cultural opinion, and the classical trappings—fancy clothes, incomprehensible program notes, an omerta-caliber code of audience silence—that never sit quite right in the homeland of popular culture.

Let’s start by following the money. In 2013, total classical album sales actually rose by 5 percent, according to Nielsen. But that's hardly a robust recovery from the 21 percent decline the previous year. And consider the relative standing of classical music. Just 2.8 percent of albums sold in 2013 were categorized as classical. By comparison, rock took 35 percent; R&B 18 percent; soundtracks 4 percent. Only jazz, at 2.3 percent, is more incidental to the business of American music.

What about the airwaves? There are only a handful of commercial classical music stations left in America. Even public classical radio is in trouble. The number of noncommercial classical radio stations—on the air and online—has risen. But much of that growth is due to commercial stations switching to a public format. Actual listenership continues to decline.

And some public classical stations have ditched the music. One such station, WUIS in Illinois, added an online classical channel after switching the main station to talk and news. As the station’s manager put it, “[C]lassical radio is one of those things that's slowly going away.” Sirius XM, the satellite and online radio provider, has nine jazz channels, 20 Latino channels, and eight Canada-themed channels—but only two traditionally classical stations. One, called Symphony Hall, has 3,500 Facebook likes. Sirius’ all–Pearl Jam channel has 11,000; their D.J. Tiesto-curated channel has 89,000.

Now let’s look at classical concerts. Live classical music is less commercially viable than ever. Attendance per concert has fallen, according to Robert Flanagan, an emeritus professor at Stanford. But “even if every seat were filled, the vast majority of U.S. symphony orchestras still would face significant performance deficits.” Live orchestral music is essentially a charity case.

A Bloomberg story on the recent wave of orchestra bankruptcies (an unheard-of phenomenon outside of the U.S., says Flanagan) notes that by 2005, orchestras got more money from donations than from ticket sales. The New York City Opera, once hailed as the “people’s opera,” filed for bankruptcy in October. If the “people” want opera, they’ve got a funny way of showing it.

Which brings us to demographics. Back in 1937, the median age at orchestra concerts in Los Angeles was 28. Between 1982 and 2002, the portion of concertgoers under 30 fell from 27 percent to 9 percent; the share over age 60 rose from 16 percent to 30 percent. In 1982 the median age of a classical concertgoer was 40; by 2008 it was 49.

If classical music was merely becoming the realm of the old—an art form that many of us might grow into appreciating—that might be manageable. It seems that younger fans are not converting to classical music as they age. The last generation to broadly love classical music may simply be aging, like World War I veterans, out of existence.

What about making music? In 1992, 4.2 percent of American adults reported performing or practicing classical music at least once in the previous year. By 2012, the number had dropped to 2 percent (compared with, say, the 5 percent of Americans who reported they created “pottery, ceramics or jewelry.”)

What about music education? The story of how the ax of school funding cuts falls first on arts education, especially in poorer school districts, is an old one now. Yet despite all the studies that show the broad benefits of music education, many school systems will now have “no music specialists serving elementary schools,” notes James Catterall, a professor at UCLA. As for adult education, when the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass., decided to shutter its amateur education program, an outraged citizenry compared its importance to that of a hospital emergency room. But even the picketing, petition-signing populace of the People’s Republic couldn’t stop the program from closing.

Finally let’s look at the general cultural positioning of classical music. Many publications no longer retain full-time classical music critics. Yvonne Frindle, a music blogger, notes that Time has featured 64 classical figures on its cover—but the vast majority before 1956 (though Bach made the cover in 1968) do not. The last, featuring Vladimir Horowitz, came in 1986. Today the notion that a pianist could culturally sideline a story about aircraft carriers sounds nothing short of quaint.

Classical music does retains overtones of, well, classiness. But in contemporary America, that’s arguably its biggest problem. Classical music isn’t like broccoli—something Manny’s too young to love. Most americans are unlikely to back proposals to tax the NFL in order to fund symphonies. But are there any bright spots at all? Despite the worries over music education, instrument purchases for schools have remained fairly constant at just under one instrument for every 50 kids, each year. That’s not a lot, and instruction time and quality is another question. But at least instruments are physically in the classrooms.

And it’s not as though the classical music world isn’t trying to address its image problems. Kudos to Groupmuse, for example, which arranges informal but high-quality live classical performances in Boston-area private homes, and markets them to a young audience (“halfway between a chamber music concert and a house party … Jam out on the air-violin if that’s your thing!”). Greg Sandow also notes that America’s population growth will continue to buy time for classical music. Some strong institutions, like Tanglewood, will endure—maybe even thrive—on a declining share of a growing pie.

While classical music may not be dead yet, it is most certainly on life support, as the genre is being forced on to the rough shoulder of the information superhighway.  Who could have imagined that the evolution of the Internet and cell phones, once the exclusive domain of universities, government and business travelers, would in twenty years push aside live performances, radio broadcasts and school music programs through their instant access to pop culture and media?

Technology and the instant access to multiple media forms have accelerated the decline of classical music in ways that have yet to be fully understood or studied.  American orchestras who are struggling with managing rising operational costs against the grim backdrop of sagging subscription sales and a decrease in donations and sustaining funds are engaged in a final battle for survival as they try to defend their territory from a multiple-front assault.

The key ingredient that makes any cultural offering exciting and viable is exposure.  In order to build an audience for classical music there must be exposure at several levels.  The largest threat comes from school districts, many that are broke and forced to fund only those courses and offerings that are considered “essential” or “critical” to a student’s academic success.  Ending music and art programs for the sake of math and science may fulfill a state’s narrow definition of basic skills but when has the government ever been a bellwether in the arena of educational excellence and success?  The reality of this trend has already begun to reap disastrous effects on classical music.  Young children are no longer exposed to songs and scales and string classes, orchestra and band practices and children’s concerts.  It is an unfortunate fact that the bow and rosin have been replaced by a smart phone and a data plan.

Seismic cultural shifts in America have also broken the foundations of classical music and in the U.S. particularly there seems to have developed an ignorance-fueled disdain for anything pertaining to dead, western European white males.  While it is a historical fact that the majority of classical music was dominated (composed, performed and paid for) by white males it should be pointed out that today’s planners and artistic movers and shakers have taken the baton handed off by their western European predecessors, pushing the genre into exciting new directions, integrating music from cultures all over the world.  It still is a high art discipline; after all it takes more than a sequencing keyboard and a drum machine to create truly great classical music for live performances and recordings.  It is still an art that requires the courses in music theory, ear training, composition and orchestration, music history and counterpoint, among others.

Even the boldest attempts to reinvent classical music into something it is not has only had the temporary effect of stemming the tide of disinterest and neglect of the art form.  Being an art form also distinguishes classical music from its destructive little brother ‘pop music and video’ which is rapidly fomenting the increasingly hedonistic surrender of American culture.  Classical music takes work, it takes thought and imagination.  Aristotle wrote “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance”.  

Classical music is a socializing art form.  It brings people of all types together to write and create it, then to an audience of people to physically get up and drive to the venue to listen to it.  This process swims upstream against the de-socializing effects of modern technology.  There is nothing social about social media.  As human beings there is no more effective method of communication than face to face, social interaction.  So much more can be said with a smile, a lift of an eyebrow or a grimace than the cold, impersonal text riding in off the cell towers.  So, it should also be that so much more can be experienced by attending a live performance of classical music than by downloading a digital recording of the same works, compressed and processed into metallic, bitter tasting bits and bytes.  There is no PC or smart phone on the planet earth that can evoke the emotions more than a live performance of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony or the magnificent Saint-Saens Organ Symphony, filling a hall with sounds and vibrations that leave a lifelong, visceral impression.

Classical music will die a slow death for sure.  It will be placed on the endangered species list of dead art forms, kept alive in a few places as living museum pieces where funding still exists alongside the Dodo bird and the Latin language.  Its fate is sealed unless we have the courage to beat back the forces of the simplistic populists and maintain classical music’s place in the cultural pie. One must cling to the forlorn hope that classical music has been down for so long that it must somehow be due for a comeback. More realistically, though, what we need is for a Jeff Bezos to step in. He recently described Amazon as a symphony of people, software, and robots. Maybe he’d like a struggling orchestra to go with his newspaper.

Did you know or how people read books

Before the Internet, books were written — and published — blindly, hopefully. Sometimes they sold, usually they did not, but no one had a clue what readers did when they opened them up. Did they skip or skim? Slow down or speed up when the end was in sight? Linger over the sex scenes? Before the internet, a writer would hang at the bookstore to overhear what the customers thought of his books. Then there was the ancient Greek painter who hid behind a curtain to hear what the shoemaker thought of his painting. 

Some recent data analysis uncovers this mystery:

• The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. 

• People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. 

• They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and 

• erotica fastest of all.

• a top book is “What Women Want,” promoted as a work that “brings you inside a woman’s head so you can learn how to blow her mind.” Everyone who starts it finishes it. On the other hand, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s “The Cycles of American History” blows no minds: fewer than 1 percent of the readers who start it get to the end.

• data shows that readers are 25 percent more likely to finish books that are broken up into shorter chapters. That is an inevitable consequence of people reading in short sessions during the day on an iPhone.

An interesting challenge

A few years ago I set myself a much more modest challenge: to read a book on a subject that I knew nothing about. So over the years, I have ranged from Simon Singh's books on code breaking to Mary Roach on spooks, a book on etymology to one on Bodanis secret house.

But writer Ann Morgan set herself a much more ambitious challenge – to read a book from every country in the world in one year. She describes the experience and what she learned.

" I used to think of myself as a fairly cosmopolitan sort of person, but my bookshelves told a different story. Apart from a few Indian novels and the odd Australian and South African book, my literature collection consisted of British and American titles. Worse still, I hardly ever tackled anything in translation. My reading was confined to stories by English-speaking authors.

So, at the start of 2012, I set myself the challenge of trying to read a book from every country in a year to find out what I was missing.

With no idea how to go about this beyond a sneaking suspicion that I was unlikely to find publications from nearly 200 nations on the shelves of my local bookshop, I decided to ask the planet’s readers for help. I created a blog called A Year of Reading the World and put out an appeal for suggestions of titles that I could read in English.

The response was amazing. Before I knew it, people all over the planet were getting in touch with ideas and offers of help. Some posted me books from their home countries. Others did hours of research on my behalf. In addition, several writers, like Turkmenistan’s Ak Welsapar and Panama’s Juan David Morgan, sent me unpublished translations of their novels, giving me a rare opportunity to read works otherwise unavailable to the 62% of Brits who only speak English. Even with such an extraordinary team of bibliophiles behind me, however, sourcing books was no easy task. For a start, with translations making up only around 4.5 per cent of literary works published in the UK and Ireland, getting English versions of stories was tricky.

This was particularly true for francophone and lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) African countries. There’s precious little on offer for states such as the Comoros, Madagascar, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique – I had to rely on unpublished manuscripts for several of these. And when it came to the tiny island nation of Sao Tome & Principe, I would have been stuck without a team of volunteers in Europe and the US who translated a book of short stories by Santomean writer Olinda Beja just so that I could have something to read.

Then there were places where stories are rarely written down. If you’re after a good yarn in the Marshall Islands, for example, you’re more likely to go and ask the local iroij’s (chief’s) permission to hear one of the local storytellers than you are to pick up a book. Similarly, in Niger, legends have traditionally been the preserve of griots (expert narrators-cum-musicians trained in the nation’s lore from around the age of seven). Written versions of their fascinating performances are few and far between – and can only ever capture a small part of the experience of listening for yourself.

If that wasn’t enough, politics threw me the odd curveball too. The foundation of South Sudan on 9 July 2011 – although a joyful event for its citizens, who had lived through decades of civil war to get there – posed something of a challenge. Lacking roads, hospitals, schools or basic infrastructure, the six-month-old country seemed unlikely to have published any books since its creation. If it hadn’t been for a local contact putting me in touch with writer Julia Duany, who penned me a bespoke short story, I might have had to catch a plane to Juba and try to get someone to tell me a tale face to face.

All in all, tracking down stories like these took as much time as the reading and blogging. It was a tall order to fit it all in around work and many were the nights when I sat bleary-eyed into the small hours to make sure I stuck to my target of reading one book every 1.87 days.

But the effort was worth it. As I made my way through the planet’s literary landscapes, extraordinary things started to happen. Far from simply armchair travelling, I found I was inhabiting the mental space of the storytellers. In the company of Bhutanese writer Kunzang Choden, I wasn’t simply visiting exotic temples, but seeing them as a local Buddhist would. Transported by the imagination of Galsan Tschinag, I wandered through the preoccupations of a shepherd boy in Mongolia’s Altai Mountains.  With Nu Nu Yi as my guide, I experienced a religious festival in Myanmar from a transgender medium’s perspective. 

In the hands of gifted writers, I discovered, bookpacking offered something a physical traveller could hope to experience only rarely: it took me inside the thoughts of individuals living far away and showed me the world through their eyes. More powerful than a thousand news reports, these stories not only opened my mind to the nuts and bolts of life in other places, but opened my heart to the way people there might feel.

And that in turn changed my thinking. Through reading the stories shared with me by bookish strangers around the globe, I realised I was not an isolated person, but part of a network that stretched all over the planet.

One by one, the country names on the list that had begun as an intellectual exercise at the start of the year transformed into vital, vibrant places filled with laughter, love, anger, hope and fear. Lands that had once seemed exotic and remote became close and familiar to me – places I could identify with. At its best, I learned, fiction makes the world real."

Towards the end part 2

I recently wrote a piece titled " leaves from my diary". It was part of a short collection though it was at least partly based on my own experiences.

One kind reader was so upset, she wrote to me expressing her deep concern. Another wondered whether in my condition, I could do anything!

! True I can neither play tennis or even golf, but there are lots of things I can still do. I read copiously, write,  go out for dinner with my friends to try out new cuisines , lunch with my wife to seasons where I even tried out lobster bisque. I sometimes go shopping with her to our local Giant store where I can ride around in their scooters and select my own foods. And yes I play a mean game of solitaire!

Towards the end

Leaves from my diary

" Today my doctors gave up. It seemed they had tried everything, sometimes against all odds. But now they did not know what else to do. Dr R, my cardiologist, who had been a perennial optimist, now seemed crestfallen. He wanted to see me after three months- almost as if he did not expect to see me again. Dr S, my internist for almost two decades, called me at home early in the morning- something that was so rare that it took me aback. He did not even suggest the next meeting date.

It was a strange feeling - to be completely alone in the fight that lay ahead. And it would be a fight. My condition had rapidly deteriorated. My caregiver had described it in a short, but brutally honest,  memo:

"He has simultaneously:

1.   Chronic Heart Failure:  With an ejection Fraction of between 15 and 20, there are severe limitations on his physical movement.
2.   Diabetes 2
3.   Chronic Kidney Disease for which he needs to undergo dialysis sessions three times a week.  

He can only walk, with effort, for about half a block before needing to stop and sit. He has the use of a wheelchair, but which needs to be pushed by a caregiver, because his upper arms do not have sufficient strength to push big wheels for any length of time. He just cannot ascend or descend stairs (more than 7 or 8) without becoming breathless.

He sleeps on a hospital bed, which allows him to rest his head at a raised angle, and also enables him to raise his feet which prevents, or eases, edema. He needs a "dedicated" bathroom.  He has a commode with hand rails over the regular toilet; a seat in the shower stall, grab bars,  and because he has external access for dialysis, can only use a hand shower.

His meals have to be specially prepared since his diet entails the use of minimum salt, no sugar, and vegetables and fruits with minimum potassium and phosphorus content.  Dialysis means that certain fruits and vegetables have to be soaked in water for a minimum of two hours before eating raw or cooking them so that phosphorus can be leached out.

His condition needs constant medical monitoring.  Apart from the 3 weekly sessions of dialysis, he has an office appointment with his nephrologist each week, and a monthly appointment with his cardiologist and another with his primary physician.  So in effect he has 18 medical appointments during the month which are essential for his maintenance.”  

Last week we decided to experiment with dialysis. Or really the lack of it. The results were disappointing since the toxic levels leapt back to abnormal levels. So the experiment was abandoned and we are back to dialyis as before.

Yes, it had been a strange year. 2013 had been a tumultuous period in my life. What began as a normal year had turned by mid august into one fraught with danger and filled with pain. I spent almost six months in the grip of medical professionals and in hospitals and nursing homes.
And it had all started with a swelling of my feet-an indicator of edema increase. Mine had, it seems, gone beyond limits. So I was rushed to the hospital and then followed some of the most painful days of my life.

It had been seven years since I underwent quadruple bypass surgery at the best heart center in the US. Unfortunately that experience had left me with an ejection fraction of 15% barely adequate to pump the heart. During the past few years, three doctors had managed to skillfully redesign my life to a relative health. But now I was back again having fallen off the strict regime, which had upset the chemical balance of my body.

 I had entered the hospital in early October and soon enough found myself engulfed with various experts. During my first seven days scores of specialists visited my bedside but three standout, because each of them predicted my demise with different degrees of subtlety. One prognosed that the only solution to my condition was a heart transplant. But a few years earlier, John Hopkins, after a detailed assesment had declined to place me on the list because of old age of 70. Another suggested an LVD but in the present condition it was not possible. A third assesed that dialysis was only a temporary fix --in short, I should get my affairs in order. Another suggested I focus on Gita . In short all of them saw but a limited lifespan left for me. Fortunately my old cardiologist was there to provide a common sense path forward. And that had led to the new dialysis regime in the hope that it would rid the body of the toxins that had built up.

But now even that slim hope was rapidly fading. And I was left alone to face the uncertain future. Not completely alone for I still receive messages and calls from friends and family that are reminders that you are still loved and missed and that you may have a life, a trifle altered, still awaiting you ahead.

Their words always provide "comfort on difficult days, smiles when sadness intrudes, rainbows to follow the clouds, laughter to kiss your lips, sunsets to warm your heart, hugs when spirits sag, beauty for your eyes to see, friendships to brighten your being, faith so that you can believe, confidence for when you doubt, courage to know yourself, patience to accept the truth,  and love to complete your life". 

The Slow-Motion Lynching of President Barack Obama- a white man writes

Frank Schafer writes “I’ve watched liberal and right wing commentators alike blame the president for being lynched. They say “he’s not reaching out enough” or “he’s too cold.” It’s the equivalent of assuming that the black man being beaten by a couple of thug cops must have “done something.”

I am a white privileged well off sixty-one-year-old former Republican religious right-wing activist who changed his mind about religion and politics long ago.  The New York Times profiled my change of heart saying that to my former friends I’m considered a “traitorous prince” since my religious-right family was once thought of as “evangelical royalty.”

I’ve just spent the last 7 years writing over 200,000 words in blogs and articles in support of President Obama. My blogs on the Huffington Post alone would add up to a book in support of the President of over 300 pages. Weirdly, I just realized that through all my writing, this has been the first time in my life I’ve personally gone to bat for a black man. It just happens that he’s a president. But my emotional stake in his life is now personal.

So I’ve changed from a white guy who used to read news about some black man getting shot or beaten by cops or stand-your-ground types who assumed that the black man must have “done something,” to a white guy who figures that the black man was probably getting lynched. I’ve changed ideology but I’ve also changed my gut intuitive reactions.

I’ve changed because if this country will lynch a brilliant, civil, kind, humble, compassionate, moderate, articulate, black intellectual we’re lucky enough to have in the White House, we’ll lynch anyone. What chance does an anonymous black man pulled over in a traffic stop have of fair treatment when the former editor of theHarvard Law Review is being lynched?

One famous liberal commentator wrote a book on how Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could disagree and still be friends. Why, he asked on many a TV show promoting his book, couldn’t President Obama be like that? Because, I yelled at the screen, those two men were white Irish Americans and part of a ruling white oligarchy.

Because, I yelled, you might as well ask why Nelson Mandela didn’t talk his jailers in South Africa into seeing reason.

Because, I yelled, the President is black and anytime he’s reached out he’s pulled back a bloody stump.

Because, I yelled, liberal white commentators have been as bothered by a black man in the White House, who’s smarter than they are as much as right wing bigots have been bothered.

Because, I yelled, President Obama has been lied about, attacked, vilified, and disrespected since Day One.

Because, I yelled, this country may have passed laws so blacks can vote and eat in a white man’s world, but in our hearts we’re stuck in a place more like 1952 than 2013.

We’ve been watching a slow-motion lynching of a moderate, brilliant family man, a father, and faithful loving husband. The Republicans in Congress are so dedicated to lynching the President they’ve been willing to shut down our government and risk the future of our economy.

Evangelical “Christians” have been so stuck on putting a rope around this black man’s neck they have denied their faith and been the backbone of the lying Tea Party who spawned the so-called “birthers” and the rest of the white people driving our news cycle.

Roman Catholic bishops have denied their tradition of helping the poor and been so eager to destroy this president they aligned themselves with white Evangelical bigots and tried to stop health care reform, all because the President wants to give women a fair shake. The bishops even called him “anti-religious” because the president wants insurers to pay for contraception.

This is a slow-motion lynching of a black man who is so moderate and centrist that he favored Wall Street enough so that the Left is all over his case. He’s so “radical” and “leftist” and “hates America” so much, and “coddles our enemies” so much, that he killed bin Laden and used drones to kill our enemies. He’s such a “socialist” that he presided over the revival of our economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression, and led us to the present day stock market boom. President Obama is such a “Marxist” that he tried to give insurance – not socialized medicine – to all Americans.

President Obama never answered back to the disgusting southern right-wing rubes from the former slave states that have tried to belittle, mock and stymie his presidency shouting “You lie” in a million ways, while actually meaning “You lie, nigger!”

And did the “enlightened” Left have President Obama’s back? No. They carp about his “failure” because a website was slow to get running! The white privileged “progressive” few were too busy blaming him for getting lynched and telling him how to craft policy while a rope was put around his neck again and again and tightened with each filibuster, each lie told on the radio, each self-defeating scorched earth action to stop him from succeeding, even if it meant taking us all down too.

We don’t like to admit who we really are. So we make excuses and blame the victim. I’m ashamed for our country, a country my Marine son fought for in two stupid wars this president has been working to end. And I’m still rooting for the best, smartest and most decent man who has been president in my lifetime. I pray for his health-care reform to succeed. I pray for his immigration reform to succeed. I’m amazed he’s gotten anything done, but he has, even while the lynch mob gathers again and again to laugh, lie and spit and claim he’s “failed” while “liberal” commentators nod sagely and talk about his “mistakes” as if President Obama has been playing on a level playing field.

We have a lot to do to heal this country of the damage done by the right-wing Obama-haters and the left-wing know-it-all pundits who did not have his back because they don’t have the honesty to admit that we still live in a backward racist swamp of prejudice. Maybe in 50 years our country will be worthy of someone of President Obama’s forbearance again. For now we can just hope that the hatred of the Republican Party for our first black president doesn’t drive us to the brink of ruin again as they strip food from the mouths of the poor, and try to get people to not sign up for health care, just to get even with the black man they swore to destroy from the day that “uppity” black who is smarter than all of them put together took the oath of office.

God bless you, Mr. President. I’m praying for you. I am so very sorry. But take heart, in the long reach of history: the door you opened will stay open for the millions of Americans of all colors, genders and beliefs who will follow you. They will bless your name. So will history. “

Is modesty the "lowest of virtues"?

When one is universally lauded for a well deserved achievement, it is fascinating to observe how people close to you react. Surprisingly not all of them join the chorus of adulation and praise! Some say " ssh  don't be boastful! be quiet". My mother in law belonged to this group. She was reluctant to share her family's success even with her neighbors. This group believed in keeping " a low profile" lest someone knows of their good fortune and profit from it. Some others are innately modest and so shun the limelight. Many are genuinely conflicted. A lifetime of modesty has left them unable to revel in the success of their near and dear ones. My father was of the view that your achievements will speak for themselves and so "tom toming" them was in bad taste and so not necessary. But if a lifetime of achievement is to be treated on par with a vegetable garden, what are you to think? In the middle of these conflicting views, you may be forgiven for oftentimes wondering whether you really should have succeeded when even talking about it causes so much grief! 


So is modesty really such a virtue? 

The  nineteenth-century British essayist William Hazlitt declared modesty “the lowest of the virtues.” “He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others,” he declared. If you have exceptional talent, why should you hide your successes merely to not give others an inferiority complex?

Exceptional demonstrations of  false modesty is far more pervasive than its true counterpart, boastfulness. For genuine modesty is a virtue best practiced by the genuinely talented.

Modesty might appear to be on the decline because of its association with another supposedly decaying art: manners. Modesty is central to the cultivation of good manners, according to the inimitable Judith Martin, a.k.a. “Miss Manners.” Modesty, writes Miss Manners, “requires decently covering one’s midriff and one’s achievements when not among intimates who find them exciting.”

But modesty need not mean prudishness, either in attire or behavior. In her 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even the radical Mary Wollstonecraft deemed modesty the “sacred offspring of sensibility and reason.” What might a reasonable contemporary approach to modesty be? Consider which is more extreme – a culture that nurtures modesty and restraint, or one that glorifies hedonistic and immodest excess?

Traditionally, modesty is a virtue that has posed particular challenges for women – at least for women who flout its directives. The “gentleness, modesty, and sweetness” of Fanny Price’s character in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is judged “so essential a part of every woman’s worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent.”

Modesty is not limited to bodily propriety, however. It can encompass our approach to learning, it can inform our exercise of power, and it can even influence our understanding of artistic achievement. Genuine modesty springs from an honest assessment of the limits of one’s own knowledge, and in no field is such an awareness more important than in science, according to Robert Hazen. In delineating what we can and cannot know about the natural world, Hazen argues, science offers a useful proving ground for modesty. Scientists who ignore modesty’s boundaries fall victim to that virtue’s opposite: hubris.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued that to be effective in the world, nations need “a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom, and power available to us” and “a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities." But does that apply to individuals as well?

In academia and elsewhere, the contrast between the ideal of modesty and a reality that is frequently immodest is often stark; it is the difference between Thoreau’s humble abode on Walden Pond and Trump Tower; the contrast between the acclaim given the dedicated public servant and that offered to the debauched celebrity.

We can locate no simple recipe for reclaiming modesty for modern times. But perhaps our admittedly modest explorations of virtue in here will help close the distance between those ideals we hope to live by and the everyday world that unceasingly challenges them. As Schopenhauer has said "With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent, it is hypocrisy."
Goethe said it more bluntly: ‘Only good-for-nothings are modest.’ 

Modesty may be a virtue but an excess of it may well be a vice. So rejoice in your good fortune when it befalls you, modesty be damned!

Am I Going To Die This Year? A Mathematical Puzzle

A few years ago, physicist Brian Skinner asked himself: What are the odds I will die in the next year? He was 25. So Brian looked up the answer — there are tables for this kind of thing — and what he discovered is interesting. Very interesting. Even mysterious.

Obviously, when you're young (and past the extra-risky years of early childhood), the chances of dying in the coming year are minuscule — roughly 1 in 3,000 for 25-year-olds. (This is a group average, of course.) But eight years later, the tables said, the odds will roughly double. As Brian writes in his blog post, "When I'm 33 [the chances of my dying that year] will be about 1 in 1,500."

And eight years after that, he says, the odds double again: "It will be about 1 in 750." And eight years later, there's another doubling.  "Your probability of dying during a given year," Brian writes, "doubles every eight years." Hmmm. When you kook at the latest tables (Brian's came from 2005), he's more or less right. 

But why eight? Why the doubles?

This wasn't Brian's discovery. A British actuary, Benjamin Gompertz, noticed this pattern back in 1825, and ever since it's been called the Gompertz law of human mortality — yes, death creeps closer, but it creeps closer in orderly steps (for humans about every eight years).

Doubling of this sort, when plotted on a chart, looks scary in the later years, but every interval early in the curve is also a doubling. So the same thing keeps happening, only the effects become more pronounced. Anyone reaching the age of 100 seems to have a 1 in 2 chance of getting to 101.

Looking at his pattern, Brian writes, "I can say with 99.999999 percent certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130." (That's assuming, which one shouldn't, that we have no new, heroic medical advances.)

OK, so this happens. The pattern, says Brian, "holds across a large number of countries, time periods and even different species. While actual average lifespan changes quite a bit from country to country and from animal to animal, the same general rule that 'your probability of dying doubles every X years' holds true."

But here's the dangling question: Why the regular interval? Why eight years for humans?

Brian's answer: "It's an amazing fact, and no one understands why it's true."

Really? Shouldn't there be some obvious explanation?

It's pretty obvious that when surveying a large population, death is not really a random, sudden bolt of lightning out of the blue. If you had never seen any mortality statistics (or known very many old people), you might subscribe to what I call the “lightning bolt theory” of mortality.  In this view, death is the result of a sudden and unexpected event over which you have no control.  It’s sort of an ancient Greek perspective: there are angry gods carousing carelessly overhead, and every so often they hurl a lightning bolt toward Earth, which kills you if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  These are the “lightning bolts” of disease and cancer and car accidents, things that you can escape for a long time if you’re lucky but will eventually catch up to you. If it were, as Brian points out, the bolt would hit randomly, and in any collection of people ... the babies would be as likely to die as the oldsters, youngsters, middle-agers. But that's not how it works. Older people die more frequently than younger people (in peacetime, anyway).The problem with this theory is that it would produce mortality rates that are nothing like what we see.  Your probability of dying during a given year would be constant, and wouldn’t increase from one year to the next.

So — random, death isn't.

Couldn't the latest biological explanations for aging explain an eight-year doubling pattern? Brian considers this question in his essay. He calls it the "cops and criminals theory." (It's based on a short paper by Boris Shklovskii.) As Brian describes it:

"Imagine that within your body is an ongoing battle between cops and criminals. And, in general, the cops are winning. They patrol randomly through your body, and when they happen to come across a criminal, he is promptly removed. The cops can always defeat a criminal they come across, unless the criminal has been allowed to sit in the same spot for a long time. A criminal that remains in one place for long enough (say, one day) can build a 'fortress' which is too strong to be assailed by the police. If this happens, you die."

Lucky for you, the cops are plentiful, and on average they pass by every spot 14 times a day. ... But what happens if your internal police force starts to dwindle? Suppose that as you age the police force suffers a slight reduction, so that they can only cover every spot 12 times a day? ... The difference between 14 and 12 doesn't seem like a big deal, but the result was that your chance of dying during a given day jumped by more than seven times. And if the strength of your police force drops linearly in time, your mortality rate will rise exponentially.

This is the Gompertz law, in cartoon form: Your body is deteriorating over time at a particular rate. When its 'internal policemen' are good enough to patrol every spot that might contain a criminal 14 times a day, then you have the body of a 25-year-old, and a 0.03 percent chance of dying this year. But by the time your police force can only patrol every spot seven times per day, you have the body of a 95-year-old with only a 2 in 3 chance of making it through the year.

This sounds right, that our immune system deteriorates at a steady pace, leaving us with fewer and fewer cops to remove the troublemakers in our bodies. As a metaphor, it works. But, says Brian, "unfortunately, the full complexity of human biology does not lend itself readily to cartoons about cops and criminals." There is no biological finding that explains the eight-year pattern we find in the mortality tables. The idea is nice. But the math? It has no obvious logic, no explanation — not yet. 

We know death is approaching, but why does it like the number eight?