4/27/1822: President Ulysses S. Grant's birthday. He would appoint four
Justices to the Supreme Court: Chief Justice Waite, Justice Strong, Justice
Bradley...
Who Needs Tony Blair for British P M Any Way?
In the olden days, not so long ago, heads of states used to look older, wiser, indomitable and even formidable. These days a G8 summit photo has many baby faces of leaders who don't have a clue of not only how to deal with the Euro crisis but even of the price of milk they still drink. Gone are the days when the British voices of Churchill, Wilson and Thatcher were carried along as far as the waves of Britannia reached.
If France's Sarkozy shuns extending a hand or Germany's Angela Merkel throws a disapproving glance, at a British Prime Minister, only we, the voters who put too much confidence in young blood, disregarding the need for time and experience for human development, are to be blamed.
Unfortunately, the British don't have much of a choice. All they have to show the world is another dour young face which shows no intention to put on a smile in the near future. The poor taste the leader of the Labour party has shown in challenging his brother didn't hold much promise as no one needs a potential sibling rivalry in the Downing Street, hurting national interest. By failing to disprove the skeptics by pulling out any signs of a spectacular leadership, the Labour leader has already lost hismagic.
The recent candid admission of Tony Blair, that he will accept the post of the Prime Minister again if offered, raises the question if the British don't have an alternative. However, judging from the avalanche of abusive comments and reactions Tony receives to his posts in the Huff post, one would agree with him that he has only fat hopes of that ever happening.
Our memory is getting easier to erase and rewrite than the fastest micro chip, especially when instant self gratification is the only thing everyone seems to want anymore. Who does bother to reflect on a decade which passed by in which the British pride came across as tolerable to the rest of the world because it was backed by an appearance of leadership, stability, achievement and a feel good factor in the British Isles ?
For example, we have forgotten the Euphoria of winning the rights to hold the 2012 Olympics making the French very sore indeed and how Tony Blair, David Beckham and Prince Charles and others won that for us. If we failed in translating the hard won victory in to a much bigger fame, prosperity and throbbing flow of enthusiastic tourists to London, we can of course blame the British weather.
No one remembers how the bombs of Omagh were doused slowly but surely thanks to the determination of a British Prime Minister and parliament aided by a helping hand of a U.S. president. Thankfully those who had to fight the war on terror no longer had to face a pointing finger at them and a decade later hands could be held out to forgive and forget.
When we whisk through the widened motor ways and newly built bridges from Land's End to John o' Groats, we tend to forget the long road works and delays which took a decade and meant nothing but investment and employment under stable and equitable governance.
When we drive in to the suburbs more and more towns all over the United Kingdom and reminded of London with big signs of prosperity like the bill boards of supermarkets and other commercial outlets, we know wealth and development indeed has arrived in the remote corners during the last decade.
Lying on a hospital bed waiting for a heart procedure in modern Heart Lung centres and other advanced facilities across the country, many people wonder how lucky they are to receive the type of care they get, but forget where it came from.
For those who left the country in the middle of the miner's strike and returned, a decade without strikes and disruptions must have made the UK an unreal land. With happier, nurses, teachers and police men and women and numerous other public sector staff, no wonder life in the UK appeared better and easier with a smashing housing boom as poof of the pudding.
Who can forget the Spice Girls, David Beckham and Manchester united and many other feel good contributions all of which add to the icing on the cake of three labour governments, which in many ways turned the eyes of the world on the UK with the respect it deserved.
Not that all of these were achieved by Tony Blair alone, but he was the Prime Minister and leader, despite the unfortunate circumstances he had to turn away from a fourth term.
For those who believe he let us down in his decision to go after WMD, what are we to do with another dictator in another country who flaunts another pile of those after a decade?
Tony Blair may never be elected again to become the leader and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but with Hollande of France, Merkel of Germany, and Obama of the United States, who are going to lead the world in this decade, there will be a gaping hole in the British chair around the table.
Article first published as Who Needs Tony Blair for British PM Any Way? on Technorati.
If France's Sarkozy shuns extending a hand or Germany's Angela Merkel throws a disapproving glance, at a British Prime Minister, only we, the voters who put too much confidence in young blood, disregarding the need for time and experience for human development, are to be blamed.
Unfortunately, the British don't have much of a choice. All they have to show the world is another dour young face which shows no intention to put on a smile in the near future. The poor taste the leader of the Labour party has shown in challenging his brother didn't hold much promise as no one needs a potential sibling rivalry in the Downing Street, hurting national interest. By failing to disprove the skeptics by pulling out any signs of a spectacular leadership, the Labour leader has already lost hismagic.
The recent candid admission of Tony Blair, that he will accept the post of the Prime Minister again if offered, raises the question if the British don't have an alternative. However, judging from the avalanche of abusive comments and reactions Tony receives to his posts in the Huff post, one would agree with him that he has only fat hopes of that ever happening.
Our memory is getting easier to erase and rewrite than the fastest micro chip, especially when instant self gratification is the only thing everyone seems to want anymore. Who does bother to reflect on a decade which passed by in which the British pride came across as tolerable to the rest of the world because it was backed by an appearance of leadership, stability, achievement and a feel good factor in the British Isles ?
For example, we have forgotten the Euphoria of winning the rights to hold the 2012 Olympics making the French very sore indeed and how Tony Blair, David Beckham and Prince Charles and others won that for us. If we failed in translating the hard won victory in to a much bigger fame, prosperity and throbbing flow of enthusiastic tourists to London, we can of course blame the British weather.
No one remembers how the bombs of Omagh were doused slowly but surely thanks to the determination of a British Prime Minister and parliament aided by a helping hand of a U.S. president. Thankfully those who had to fight the war on terror no longer had to face a pointing finger at them and a decade later hands could be held out to forgive and forget.
When we whisk through the widened motor ways and newly built bridges from Land's End to John o' Groats, we tend to forget the long road works and delays which took a decade and meant nothing but investment and employment under stable and equitable governance.
When we drive in to the suburbs more and more towns all over the United Kingdom and reminded of London with big signs of prosperity like the bill boards of supermarkets and other commercial outlets, we know wealth and development indeed has arrived in the remote corners during the last decade.
Lying on a hospital bed waiting for a heart procedure in modern Heart Lung centres and other advanced facilities across the country, many people wonder how lucky they are to receive the type of care they get, but forget where it came from.
For those who left the country in the middle of the miner's strike and returned, a decade without strikes and disruptions must have made the UK an unreal land. With happier, nurses, teachers and police men and women and numerous other public sector staff, no wonder life in the UK appeared better and easier with a smashing housing boom as poof of the pudding.
Who can forget the Spice Girls, David Beckham and Manchester united and many other feel good contributions all of which add to the icing on the cake of three labour governments, which in many ways turned the eyes of the world on the UK with the respect it deserved.
Not that all of these were achieved by Tony Blair alone, but he was the Prime Minister and leader, despite the unfortunate circumstances he had to turn away from a fourth term.
For those who believe he let us down in his decision to go after WMD, what are we to do with another dictator in another country who flaunts another pile of those after a decade?
Tony Blair may never be elected again to become the leader and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but with Hollande of France, Merkel of Germany, and Obama of the United States, who are going to lead the world in this decade, there will be a gaping hole in the British chair around the table.
Article first published as Who Needs Tony Blair for British PM Any Way? on Technorati.
Was Satyendranath Bose Merely Lucky to Have the Bosons Named After Him?
Do you know who discovered Oxygen? Even though you know Oxygen is all around you and that you will die without it, you probably would have died without ever knowing who discovered it. That's because no one bothered to name the gas 'Scheelgen' after the Swedish Pharmacist Scheele, who is widely credited with its discovery. (The credit is usually shared between the Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and the British clergyman Joseph Priestly.)
However, with a week which passed by, in which the world media was inflated with Higg's Boson, you are more likely to know the Scottish Professor who predicted the existence of the 'God Particle' which was named after him and that Boson itself is named after Satyendranath Bose of India, who predicted, nearly a century back, the existence of a group of sub atomic particles called Bosons.
While much of the media focus itself was on the 'God Particle', very little has been mentioned about the work of Satyendranath Bose, which had far reaching implications on the advancement of particle physics which has lead up to the investigation to find the Higg's Boson. If Bose hadn't postulated on this group of sub atomic particles, we might have been, in all possibility still a long way from finding the God particle.
Was Satyendranath Bose Merely Lucky to Have the Bosons Named After Him?
Though India and the Indian Government had recognised his greatness by awarding him various honours and positions while he was alive when the Nobel Committee itself had failed to acknowledge it, Bose remained a forgotten name, unknown to the new generation Indians and to the world at large, until the discovery of the God particle, announced last week.
In fact, after his death in 1974, the Indians and most of the world outside scientific community weren't aware of his contribution or achievement. A couple of generations have never heard of him. This was mainly due to the very esoteric nature of his work and contributions to science, which not everyone can understand.
It took a Genius like Albert Einstein to recognise the Genius in Bose and eventually jointly produce scientific contributions like Bose - Einstein Condensate in particle physics. Perhaps the most important of all work of Satyendranath Bose is his short paper with statistical postulations on Max Planck's quantum Mechanics, which Einstein recognised as explaining a gaping hole in the theory and which predicted the existence of sub atomic particles called Bosons, later named after him, in recognition.
Respected Sir, I have ventured to send you the accompanying article for your perusal and opinion. You will see that I have tried to deduce the coefficient .. in Planck's law independent of classical electrodynamics.What makes Satyendranath Bose the greatest scientist India has produced is his mathematical prowess, a record not broken in the University of Kolkota where he did most of his work, which he applied to postulate his theories about the nature of a set of sub atomic particles, no one had ever seen, until after several years. His greatness, like that of Einstein and many other eminent scientists of the past, lies in the fact that most of his work was done in his own god given faculties, in a world which had no computers, software or internet, and in a country far away from Europe, where the mainstream scientific advancement was taking place.
Part of the reasons, other than the implicit difficulty to explain his work to the people, why Bose was not universally recognised or given a Nobel Prize might have been his nationality, like in the case of Mahatma Gandhi, who was never awarded the prestigious price.
Not that Satyendranath Bose and his work would have gone in to oblivion even if the Bosons weren't named after him or no one really would have searched and found the God particle. His work was undoubtedly a corner stone of modern Physics and one way or the other, if not now sometime in the future would have revealed and shown itself as future scientists would have strived for answers to the secrets of the universe.
Now that God Particle has reinvented his greatness for the world, it has become all the more important that a modern and emerging India do everything to unearth the greatness and increase the awareness of its immortal scientist to instil ambition and purpose in its youth and future generations. That only can atone a grate scientist who had the misfortune of being born an the wrong place at the wrong time.
A thousand years from now, like Oxygen, Bosons will still be around reminding everyone about Satyendranath Bose and his contribution to science, while Professor Higgs, credited with the prediction of Higg's Boson itself, the God particle everyone went gaga about, might be forgotten as it will be broken down, dissected and analysed, extending the frontiers of human knowledge.
But that is not why Bose will be remembered. His name will stand out because, if greatness is to be judged by the contribution to the advancement of scientific knowledge, Satyendranath Bose is undoubtedly, the greatest scientists India has produced in recent times.
Article first published as Was Satyendranath Bose Merely Lucky to Have the Bosons Named After Him? on Technorati.
Does Obamacare Make The Americans Mere Third World Citizens?
Americans may not see it because they may not want to. But when it comes to basic human rights at least, the world is coming to see little to differentiate the U.S. from the Taliban it wants to get rid of in Afghanistan. The Taliban thinks women shouldn't go to school; the Americans think 32 million of them shouldn't have a mandatory health cover. What is the difference?
The United States of America may be the richest country in the world without universal healthcare for all, a situation Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) will certainly change. For the rest of the world, with no easy access to facts and figures to compare and who is unaware of the historical U.S reticence towards human rights, the United States of America, which wants to challenge and repeal Obamacare is looking more like a third world country.
That is the take away from the recent Obamacare judgement by the U.S. Supreme court, the dissentand the ensuing political battle cries, all of which have brought the U.S politics and the legal system to world focus, with some disbelief. Hey, is this the America everyone looks up to?
To many foreigners, thanks to its legal system, the U.S. had been the "Never Never Land" which gives shudders down your spine, nearly the same feelings an American family, who is offered a free holiday in Iran, gets in the guts at the thought of a trip.
The general apprehension about the U.S. attitude towards human rights might not be entirely without justification:
• When an Australian citizen seeks asylum in a third world country's embassy out of fear of incrimination and death penalty from a U.S. court if extradited to the U.S.?
• When an ex president of a "friendly" nation with a population of 1.3 billion can be stopped andfrisked at the airport because of his name and racial profiling?
• When a president of the World Bank is handcuffed and thrown in the prison cell overnight withoutrecourse to any legal aid because an illegal immigrant cried foul?
• When recent cases of miscarriage of justice have sent innocent people to the death row which all civilised countries have abolished by now?
• When Guantanamo and stories of renditions are still a reality?
That is to say that there is certainly a 'disconnect' between how the Americans see their justice system from a lot of other people around the world, who are apprehensive, or at least can't understand the way Americans think.
It was not surprising that the entire world, like the President himself, had resigned to the reality and waited for the U.S. Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, to throw the Obamacare, proposed by a democratic administration, in to the bin. That would have been treated as an internal matter and the fate of the U.S citizens.
However, how one judge decided to change history by passing the law has brought the issue to the attention of the world and its scrutiny. Whether Judge Roberts acted to avoid the Supreme Court verses elected representative controversy or out of conscience and a desire to bring the United States of America in synch with the social values the rest of the developed has long since taken for granted has become immaterial.
What gives credence to the question whether the U.S. has really evolved in its human rights view is the vehement and destroying fury of the dissent by the four judges, who have chosen to ignore the human rights implication, in their fervour to uphold the U.S. constitution and the free market.
But what is even more shocking and raises the question if the U.S. indeed cares a toss to be viewed as a third world country is the intransigent politics which has turned the Obamacare, which brings the Americans closer to civilised societies, in to the bone of contention of the next presidential election, with the GOP and its candidate Romney wowing to destroy it at any cost.
Twenty five years back as an immigrant from India in France, I was shocked by a scene when a nearly paralysed lady arrived in a supermarket for her weekly shopping, flat on her back, in a stretcher, being carried by two attendants. That day I had realised what universal healthcare really means in a caring society.
Today, I wonder what would have happened to that person if she lived in the richest country after the next presidential election of the U.S.A.
| Article first published as Does Obamacare Make Americans Third World Citizens? on Technorati. |
6 Reasons Why Mamta Banerjee OF India Will Support Pranab Mukherjee For President.
The election for the next president of India is over even before it is due to be held next month. The result is already known. India's Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee will be the next President.
In the Indian democratic system the President is a mereconstitutional head of the country like the Queen of Great Britain and is often unanimously nominated. Only the elected representatives, who are obliged to go by their party's choice, have the power to vote if an election is required. All major parties, except the Trinmool Congress of the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee, have declared their support for the Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee who is clearly is headed for victory.
Why is then the vote of Mamta, who has so far opposed Pranab Mukherjee, a fellow Bengalee, is important to the UPA and why she will eventually support his Presidency? There are plenty of reasons.
Taking a cue from the world cup, Pranab Mukherjee, a political veteran of the congress party, would be a better "defensive" Prime Minister to take the UPA to the next elections and possibly win it; a crucial political decision the manager in Sonia Gandhi missed but what Mamta has inadvertently suggested, in her fury against Pranab Mukherjee.
There is no doubt her respect for the PM was behind her suggestion which many couldn't see but not missed by the P.M himself as is clear from his accommodating gestures towards her party. Mamta must be glad about the growing mutual respect and can't ignore.
Can Mamta or any leader for that matter afford to hit her vote bank on a sweet spot? You don't have to remind Mamta of all people, herself an artist and personification of Bengalee pride, that she can come across as a spoil sport and deny the simple joy of having a Bengalee President of the country, at her own peril.
In the Indian democratic system the President is a mereconstitutional head of the country like the Queen of Great Britain and is often unanimously nominated. Only the elected representatives, who are obliged to go by their party's choice, have the power to vote if an election is required. All major parties, except the Trinmool Congress of the West Bengal Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee, have declared their support for the Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee who is clearly is headed for victory.
Why is then the vote of Mamta, who has so far opposed Pranab Mukherjee, a fellow Bengalee, is important to the UPA and why she will eventually support his Presidency? There are plenty of reasons.
1 Mamta Banerjee is No Body's Fool.
Despite the sycophantic coterie of men without brains Mamta seems to surround herself with, Mamta Banerjee is a lady of substance. Her courage of conviction to fight for her ideals and her ability to not lose those on the way, like Mayavati of Uttar Pradesh, are reasons why Mamta is her own boss. Mamta and the political coalition of UPA she supports surely knows how far she can take her populism without testing the patience or insulting the intelligence of the rest of the country.2 Mamta Banerjee Is Right about the Prime Minister and the PM Knows It.
In fact, the nomination by Mamta Banerjee of Man Mohan Singh, the current Prime Minister for the post of president, though met with universal ridicule, is the right solution for India. The P.M., in stature and the view of the world, will no doubt be a better a president of India.Taking a cue from the world cup, Pranab Mukherjee, a political veteran of the congress party, would be a better "defensive" Prime Minister to take the UPA to the next elections and possibly win it; a crucial political decision the manager in Sonia Gandhi missed but what Mamta has inadvertently suggested, in her fury against Pranab Mukherjee.
There is no doubt her respect for the PM was behind her suggestion which many couldn't see but not missed by the P.M himself as is clear from his accommodating gestures towards her party. Mamta must be glad about the growing mutual respect and can't ignore.
3 Mamta Banerjee Knows West Bengal is the 'Greece' of the Indian Union.
Mamta is well aware of the political "hot Potato" of a financially broke West Bengal she is holding and can't drop. She tried her best to get a fellow Bengalee finance Minister to help her juggle around and can't be blamed for being miffed when no help came forth. But Mamta knows Man Mohan Singh's financial wizardry, which he can render without incurring the blemish of favouritism, is her last hope. Mamta Banerjee is intelligent enough to realise why she still needs to politically support the UPA which is the only way forward.4 Mamta Banerjee Knows Throwing Tantrums Can't Work All the Time.
Mamta sure knows how to throw a tantrum, which may be out of her control. Mamta also knows how to turn those in to political drama to her advantage. But like children learn soon, tantrums have a perishable nature and can be overdone. So Mamta shuts up and sulks like everyone else, which is good because now Mamta and others can talk business and find some realistic solutions.5 Mamta Banerjee Knows Political Alienation is a Painful Business.
India which is so prone for opportunistic politics without principles is growing politically intolerant to such vagaries of its politicians. A mandate for performance and governance is becoming more and more the pattern. With her ill conceived efforts to forge a new regional power base falling flat on its face, Mamta Banerjee is brutally reminded of the need to keep friends in politics, a lesson why she can't afford to leave the UPA.6 Mamta Banerjee Knows How To Make and Serve Rasgollas.
Rasgollas, a local dessert made of milk and sugar, is the sweet spot and national weakness of Bengal. Mamta Banerjee surely knows how to make and dish them out, or at least the political version of it, in large quantities. It is the Bengalee national pride both Mamta and Pranab counts on for political survival.Can Mamta or any leader for that matter afford to hit her vote bank on a sweet spot? You don't have to remind Mamta of all people, herself an artist and personification of Bengalee pride, that she can come across as a spoil sport and deny the simple joy of having a Bengalee President of the country, at her own peril.
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