Part 1

In an ideal world the status quo in Taiwan would be maintained indefinitely and nobody would make any provocative moves, there would be no war in Ukraine, the Scots and Catalan would amicably negotiate their independence, and the indigenous peoples of North America would exercise meaningful sovereignty over their ancestral lands. There's a long way to go between where we are and that ideal world, and lots of obstacles and problems in between. It's complicated, and I don't have any good ideas for how to get from here to there. To conclude that we should give up on the ideal, though, seems like just learned helplessness and defeatism. 

I understand better now the bit about the parent saying their child should be a communist as a youth, but not when they get older. It's not a matter of right or wrong, the parent is just exasperated that their child, after decades of living through the world as it is and maybe frustration that it's not changing nearly as quickly or as much as they want, still believes that we should or can try to seriously change things. 

But these are all matters of [differences of] opinion.

Grad school in 2017: an absolute riot.

Gloom, schmoom

The storm clouds may be gathering

But blithely shall we fly by them

And soar as we always have

Surely and swiftly through even the darkest night

2017 January 4-7, Singapore and Ann Arbor (i.e. home and home)

Danke schön Österreich

Now we can keep going for a little longer. 

Resolved

1. I am rubber, you are glue. Any nonsense coming my way will bounce off me so fast ...
2. If need be, I will be a bystander intervention ninja (although hopefully I will never need to.)
3. Even as I remain safe in my bubble (or not), I will give all aid to those who fight the good fight.
4. Knowledge is power. The battle against ignorance and bigotry starts today.
5. I've lost enough sleep and productivity. Going back to work and life now (with adjustments as necessary.)

I could sit around and wallow in despair for a while

But, well, let's not. The next time you feel like doing that (i.e., probably every hour or so for the next two weeks [years?]): take a deep breath, remember that you're not quite going to bear the brunt of it, look forward and think of what you can do to change things, look around you and listen and offer support to those who need it more, and act. And remember that in the shitstorm of rhetoric that's still flying around you, the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the hazy unarticulated middle, and that you would do well to listen carefully and discern the inside voices and subtle overtones hiding in the cacophony. (Of course, all of this will be moot if nuclear winter actually happens.)

Oh well. What the hell.

NATE SILVER 2:10 AM

Something to remember: Whatever your feelings about the state of the country right now, it’s fundamentally not that different a place whether the final call is that Clinton has narrowly won or narrowly lost. Add just 1 percent to Clinton’s vote share and take 1 percent away from Trump’s, and she would have won Florida and Pennsylvania, therefore would probably have been on her way to a narrow Electoral College victory.

Qu'elle est belle, la devise de Paris

Depuis des siècles, des amoreux de la mort ont tenté de nous faire perde le goût de vivre. Ils n'y sont jamais parvenu. Ceux qui aiment. Ceux qui aiment la vie. À la fin, c'est toujours eux qui gagnent.
...
Les gens qui sont morts ce soir étaient dehors pour vivre, boire, chanter. Ils ne saviaent pas qu'on leur avait declaré la guerre. Au lieu de nous diviser, vous nous rappelez comme tout cela est précieux: notre mode de vie. Amoreux de la mort, si Dieu existe, il vous exécre. Et vous avez déjà perdu, sur la terre comme aux cieux. 

Fluctuat nec mergitur: ça signifie merde à la mort. 

---Johann Sfar 

Biggest non-story of the year

“I’ve seen the accumulation of powers that Orwell could not have imagined, and not only that, but, in the hands of a relatively small number of people, this stunning capacity to track you,” he said.

And yet nobody even seems to notice anymore. Bah humbug. 

Almost two years now but no less true

When more and more people around you start learning your language---just out of interest, or because they feel "they'll need it" in the future---; when whole provinces of neighboring countries start making it compulsory in schools ... you know something is afoot.
About time, you could almost hear so many say.
But even as we bask in the newly-(re?)found glow of attention, we should take care not to become arrogant and short-sighted once again. We should be careful not to repeat the mistakes of times past, and shrink back into a conceited cocoon. 

时势造英雄

Aitzaz Hasan is a brave man. I have nothing but respect for him.
More than once I've wished I could be like him ... but then I'm ashamed I could make such a perverse wish. For it would imply putting everyone else around in grave danger, and creating much disruption and grief ...

How Much a Truth, and How Much a Thin Fantasy

If human beings were angels, we would cheerfully focus on long-term goods. We would invest enthusiastically in schools and colleges for our own children and for everybody else’s children, so that they could become productive, engaged citizens in the future. We would happily support speculative research projects so that we could reap the benefits of discovery and innovation. We would gladly nurture humanistic inquiry because it provides an essential foundation for understanding what makes life meaningful and sustains the wellsprings of civil society. 

Indeed, we need not be angels to do these things. We would do them if we were perfectly rational investors, because economists like Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have shown convincingly that education and research are powerful drivers of economic prosperity. 

But we are not perfectly rational any more than we are angels. We live embodied in the present, sensitive to short-term pleasures and pains. Notions of the common good and promises about future returns feel abstract and feeble by comparison to the intensity of immediate experience.       

This bias seems especially fierce in America today. Our world features a non-stop news cycle, continuous political campaigns and an obsession with quarterly earnings statements. We demand that messaging be instant, and we talk in tweets. 

... 

In so doing, we risk squandering a national treasure. America’s colleges and universities are a beacon to the world. Parents around the globe dream of sending their children here, scholars dream of landing a place here, and nations dream of creating universities like America’s. Yet, here at home, we see a parade of reporters, politicians and pundits asking whether a college education is worth it — even though the economic evidence for the value of a college education is utterly overwhelming.

-- from Eisgruber's installation speech 

Boom

Is it bad that my first thought upon reading the details of the Boston explosions was "it doesn't look that bad"? But in any case. To those who lost life or limb, or loved ones, my thoughts are with you. 

They said, we said

This afternoon Mom related an incident that happened in Hotan, Xinjiang (新疆和田) a few days ago. The way she described it, a few Uyghurs, claiming disability, had boarded a commercial flight carrying heavy metal implements—purportedly crutches. Right after take-off, they disassembled these into metal sticks and start making their way to the cockpit, apparently making threatening voices in Uyghur along the way to the effect that they intended to hijack the flight, and, allegedly, that they had a bomb. As they made their way through business class, however, they were held up by the business class passengers (“一些干部和大学教授”) and then by a number of police travelling on a training tour. After a serious, extended brawl (“二十多分钟”) the hijackers were restrained, and the plane landed safely. The fighting must have been quite heavy, because two of the hijackers later died.
The Western press had a slightly different version of it. Or, they had the abbreviated official version, followed by the "German-based World Uyghur Congress" version, which states that "the plane turned back after Uyghurs and Hans began fighting after a disagreement over seat assignments", and an account of Han-Uyghur tensions in the region. The way it was put certainly seemed to give more credence to the second version of events. It didn't help that "the phone listed for Hotan police rang unanswered Friday."
Then again, you may say that the way I put it seems to be giving, or at least trying to give, more credence to the first version. That's really the whole point, isn't it: how do you know who's telling the truth? I don't really trust Chinese officialdom to tell the whole truth, especially in such a sensitive region, but I wouldn't trust a Uyghur exile group based in Europe to tell the whole truth either. Both sides would probably try to portray events in the light most favorable to them or supportive of their cause, ignoring or retouching any inconvenient details along the way. Everyone does this to some extent, maybe. But clearly, when the two accounts differ so radically, someone is just plain wrong here. 
Maybe the official version is right and the World Uyghur Congress is simply parroting their stage line, which they can plausibly claim not to have any firm evidence against yet. Or maybe it was just an extraordinarily bad linguistic misunderstanding and the "hijackers" were really just shouting things to the effect that they wanted their actual seats back.
But maybe it doesn't matter, because the [masses of] people whose opinions do matter will decide based on their prejudices, on which of the two sides they distrust or mistrust more, rather than on anything remotely resembling a cool, objective assessment. (Or in Staff Sergeant Dignam's words, "Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe fuck yourself.")
Which is very unfortunate, especially when things end up the way they did. There was probably police mistreatment involved. But I do think it was indeed a hijack attempt, and that injuries sustained during the brawl on the plane contributed substantially to the subsequent deaths. But then again, could be completely wrong. And I concede that. I don't claim to actually know what happened, before seeing more convincing evidence either way.
Sometimes I really wish I could look every one of those people in the eye, and confront them with both versions of the story, and of how they could come about. And remind them that words can tell such lies, that only those who were on the plane could have known what actually happened, that nobody should take drastic action based on hearsay alone, that the truth is usually somewhere in between ...

It's called ... wait, what?

yeah shouldn't be that bad
but its known to be late
since there are no other flights coming in
usually
...
yep
thats india for u
haha
i am actually serious
there are no flights usually when the international flights arrive
cause its like 2 am
and they still make all the flights circle around
for 30 mins
yep
...
we have different ways of operating in india buddy
its called
chaos

Entrenchment

Why does this sound so much like that other thing that happened 22 years ago? Let us hope, for the sake of everyone involved, that things will turn out much more peacefully this time ...

I am impressed.

Or actually, on second thought, not that surprising.

A Question of Economics

Yes, everything is larger here. Not just the cars and the highways and the stores, but also the breadth of spirit. People take the time to greet and ask after one another--even if it may only be a superficial gesture--; shopkeepers and passing strangers on the street are more willing to take you at your word; and--New York City excepted--a sense of space pervades over the sense of agitated rush and scramble that is the rule in densely-populated, (over)crowded East Asia.
How ironic, then, that the whole concept is so much more concisely expressed in Chinese: 大气. I guess it was never a want of magnanimity, but rather a lack of resources to express magnanimity. If there weren't all these people around bearing down on one, if there were resources enough so that the competition wasn't so intense---it would be so much easier to be gracious and generous.
Maybe that is simply not to be. With globalization, the field of competition has opened to all 6.8 billion (and counting) for West and East alike. As questions of ecological sustainability come into increasingly sharper focus, it may very well turn out to be the case that nobody on Earth really has such a wealth of resources after all. America's generosity might well have been possible only on borrowed time.
Yet it would be a pity if these habits disappeared altogether, and humanity were reduced (once again?) to a mere state of perpetual fierce, petty competition.
We should step up the conversation. So that you might re-learn the habits of prudence, and we the habits of generosity, and that new and unexpected solutions might emerge in the discourse. So that we might both then become better, yet also fitter, people.

Oy vey

Clearly you still have some way to go. But I'm sure you'll find your way there somehow, someday.
What then? Will you thrive in a strange land, surrounded by loud individuals who do not speak your native tongue? Or will you shut yourself up and go through four intensely cold years of isolation? I have faith in your strong personalities, that everything will turn out fine in the end. But I am also convinced that the current system is not at all preparing you well for what it says it is preparing you for. The shock of independence in a strange land---independence in such a large dose, in so many ways at once---something fundamentally challenging and inevitable, but also something which I didn't hear discussed once during my three months with you. Maybe it's the best that can be done with the limited resources at your disposal. Maybe the management needs to buck up and do a better job. Either way, I wish you all the best on the arduous journey ahead.