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Some more news to the uneducated (me!) from Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives by Sunil Khilnani… India was not always populated by today’s Indians.

From the profile of Birsa Munda:

Who owns India? Who owns the forests and rivers, the farmlands eyed by industry, the slums coveted by real estate developers and airport authorities, the hills and plateaus desired by mining barons?

The nationalists of the twentieth century had a simple answer to who owned the land: Indians did. The British did not. Yet when the nationalists assembled the jigsaw puzzle of diversities to define the Indian nation, some pieces got left out of consideration. Among those were the original tribal inhabitants of the country, who are now called Adivasis. The Adivasis, taken together, match in size the population of Germany or Vietnam, but they are so various and widely dispersed across the subcontinent that it is nonsensical to speak of them as a single group. One experience many Adivasis do share, however, is the overriding of their rights in the name of development and in the interests of other Indians, especially those with more money. “It’s as if middle and upper classes and castes have seceded into outer space,” the writer and political activist Arundhati Roy says. “They look down and say, ‘What’s our bauxite doing in their mountains, what’s our water doing in their rivers?’”

Matters did not improve when the European missionaries came:

“They say in Africa, when the colonizers—the white colonizers—came, ‘We had the land and they had the Bibles. Now we have the Bibles and they have the land.’”

Wikipedia says “Adivasi make up 8.6% of India’s population, or 104 million people, according to the 2011 census.” Where does everyone else in India come from? William Jones, also profiled in the book, figured out that the dominant languages came from the same place as had European languages:

This insight—that Sanskrit and the European classical languages were all branches of a single, lost linguistic river—helped to challenge prejudice and reconnect the world. Jones was arguing that Sanskrit was a “beautiful sister” of Greek and Latin.

Genomics has enabled 21st century folks to look at traces of the physical migrations, e.g., in “The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia” (March 31, 2018, Narasimham, et al.). The genetic data seem to be consistent with what the language scholars have been saying for centuries (see Wikipedia for the standard migration theory of Indo-European). So this isn’t exactly news, but it is a different way of thinking about India for me. I think about North America as having been conquered by European migrants, thus depriving the natives of what had been their birthright. But I hadn’t reflected that there were likely surviving tribes in India who had originally been in possession of the entire subcontinent.

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“Replace Richard Russell’s Name With McCain’s? Senate Debates a Segregationist’s Legacy” (nytimes) concerns an unfortunate situation:

The Russell Senate Building was named after him in 1972, a year after his death, at the suggestion of Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who had joined Mr. Russell’s filibuster before becoming an advocate of civil rights. Mr. Byrd proposed naming the two buildings — then known as the new and old Senate office buildings — after Mr. Russell and Mr. Dirksen, both of whom had recently died. … But Mr. Russell’s legacy is marked by his deeply rooted belief in racial segregation in the name of maintaining the social order of “the Old South.”

Now they want to name the building after John McCain, a member of the Keating Five (senators who were investigated for their role in wiping out $3.4 billion in taxpayer funds back in 1989 ($7.1 billion in today’s mini-dollars)).

Since it is harder to earn money than to spend it, what about a break in tradition? If we must rename the building to honor someone more virtuous than Russell, why not name it after whoever paid the most taxes in 2017? Go down the list of the people who paid the most and ask each one “Would you like to be recognized for your contributions to the Treasury?

[Also, why is it okay to have stuff named after Jefferson and Washington? They actually owned slaves! Abraham Lincoln said “I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; … And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Do we take his name off the Lincoln Memorial in favor of a more enlightened modern politician?]

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Thanks to the deficient American public school system, which taught me all kinds of useless facts about now-moribund Europe, I’m learning a lot from Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives by Sunil Khilnani.

The profile of Ram Mohan Roy is relevant to our current political and cultural climate. With U.S. federal, state, and local governments now controlling or directing between one third and one half of the U.S. economy (depending on whether you consider the health care industry part of the private sector or part of the government-directed sector), how is that politicians are increasingly likely to tell us that the country is full of victims? See Andrew Cuomo, for example, on ABC:

we’re not going to make America great again, it was never that great.” … America “…will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women, 51 percent of our population, is gone. And every woman’s full potential is realized and unleashed and every woman is making her full contribution.”

If the government is running half of the economy and the government’s actions are just (unlike the unjust market segment of the economy), how is it that so many Americans are victimized? Shouldn’t at least half of us be safe from victimization?

Let’s look at this 19th century Indian guy…

By the time of his death in Bristol in 1833, the Bengali scholar Rammohun Roy had become a worldwide intellectual celebrity. An English contemporary called him a “lion of the season,” and he was sufficiently dashing that a lock of his luxuriant hair has been preserved at the Bristol Museum. “He was a man of charisma and he was a man of determination,” Carla Contractor, a historian who has documented the three years Roy spent in Britain, says, He was six feet tall, a towering figure, and he made sure he dressed in flowing muslin robes, but with spats and European shoes. He wowed people, and they half-expected to be overwhelmed by this man. Whichever party he was invited to go to, he went. And he made sure that he spoke to the people that he wanted to. He was a networker of the first order.

“Roy was part of an international set of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century radicals and reformers who attacked established religion and ruling despots, including the East India Company. He corresponded with Thomas Paine, author of Rights of Man, and with the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who wanted him to sit in the Westminster House of Commons. In Spain, liberals dedicated the country’s 1812 Constitution to him. In America, the young Ralph Waldo Emerson read him avidly. Roy celebrated Latin American revolutions and dined with the king of France.”

What gained Roy renown in the West, above all, was his advocacy to improve the status of women in India, and to abolish the practice of sati (or “suttee,” as it was then known), the Hindu rite in which widows immolated themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres.

Until the nineteenth century, British officials had largely tolerated sati, unwilling to intervene in their subjects’ religious customs. But Roy’s campaign converged with the birth of an international concern with human rights. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, movements to abolish slavery and capital punishment, to promote the rights of women, and to articulate and uphold humanitarian values became the first global moral crusades.

Sati fitted into this larger discourse, though it was probably not the most pernicious social ill inflicted on Indian women. In most parts of the country, it was exceptionally rare and, if anything, on the decline.

The campaign against sati was useful to Roy, enabling him to promote himself as a native moral conscience in tune with international norms. Yet he was not the only one for whom it was a boon, and reform ultimately came not from within India, but with a government ban, in 1829. The ruling marked a major shift in how the British saw their place in the country. Henceforth, part of their justification for ruling over Indians was the need to civilize them and educate them away from barbaric practices. Sati was a ready way of foregrounding the primitive bloodthirstiness of the Hindus, and of justifying the corrective despotism that the British now saw themselves as dispensing to India’s benefit.

In other words, India needed a big central government, which only the British could provide, so that victims (women, in the above case) could be protected.

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My Facebook friends are solemnly mourning the death of John McCain, a man whose presidential bid they opposed in 2008 (they cheered when Madonna compared McCain to Hitler (US News)). Here’s an example post (from a woman who is not in her “first youth”):

Greatest human being of all mankind. Thank you for many years of service. Rest in peace, Senator McCain.

Much of this seems to be based on McCain voting against an advertised “repeal” of Obamacare. Yet this vote to continue pouring tax dollars into the health care industry did not cost McCain anything personally. Most of his wealth was based on the $350 million beer distributorship founded by his second wife’s father. The profits from this corporation are distributed directly to owners and don’t go through the Obamacare 3.8 percent tax on dividends (see this 2008 nytimes article, which notes that the distributorship is an S Corp (also that Wife #2 for McCain got a prenup to guard against paying a Wife #3)). So McCain had nothing at stake personally and voted to spend other folks’ tax dollars on an arguably worthy program. If that qualifies him for “greatest human being of all mankind” then plainly there is no hope for a fiscal conservative in our national pantheon!

[McCain did vote for the Trump 2017 corporate tax bill (nytimes), which cut McCain’s personal tax rate on pass-through income.]

This seems to be a bipartisan phenomenon, as evidenced by “The Forgotten Man, Ted Kennedy, and Warren Buffett“:

I thought about this the other day when a friend’s wife was praising Ted Kennedy as a paragon of charity and good will towards America’s young and unfortunate. It occurred to me that voting to spend other folks’ tax dollars is not necessarily an indication of personal virtue. A politician in a liberal state such as Massachusetts might do that merely in order to get votes and not out of any sympathy for the common man. As Ted Kennedy has spent virtually all of his personal wealth on personal consumption of mansions, private jets, women, booze, etc., any help that he has provided to Americans has come at the expense of the “forgotten man” paying taxes. Ted’s own contributions to charity have been minimal (source).

Calvin Coolidge was never called a hero for vetoing an expensive farm subsidy bill. Grover Cleveland (a Democrat) was not a hero for vetoing dozens of spending programs.

Are we pretty much doomed to deficit spending if the American public swoons with grief at every death of a politician who voted to bury our country a little deeper in debt? Homer chronicled how ancient Greeks were motivated to fight and die for kleos. When earning kleos is as simple as voting to spend money that someone else earns, who could resist that?

Related:

• “Why do women love John McCain?” (“Why would these women celebrate a guy who divorced his crippled-by-a-car-accident wife to marry a rich woman 18 years his junior?”)
• “Can we congratulate ourselves for U.S. Government aid to Haiti?” (“If I borrow your car and donate it to charity, does that make me a charitable person?”)
• “Wile E. Coyote tax and tariff policy” (“How about McCain? His [2008 Presidential Campaign] economic plan starts off with a section by Wile E. Coyote. He is going to cut gas taxes. He wants to tax renters to help homeowners. He wants to put more money into student loans (most of which ends up inflating the cost of attending college). He wants to tax people who suffer from infertility to give big tax credits to parents blessed with a bunch of children (combined with the gas tax holiday, that family of six can finally help boost the economy by buying a 7-passenger SUV). Buried after a couple of pages is a section that Ronald Reagan might have written, proposing to cut taxes in order to generate economic growth. The apparent schizophrenia is not addressed.”)

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My Facebook friends are super excited about media attention around Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation establishing that payments were made to various (non-Russian?) women in exchange for them not talking about the men with whom they allegedly had sex back in 2006. Supposedly this violates Federal campaign finance laws.

Two questions…

Prostitution is illegal in most U.S. jurisdictions. But the women have not said that they were working as prostitutes or that Donald Trump hired them as prostitutes. From what I have read, the women say that they were affiliating with a rich old married guy because they had an inner fondness for rich old married guys. Therefore, whatever happened between them and a rich old married guy (if anything did actually happen) was perfectly legal. I can see why it would be illegal to use cash to cover up evidence of a crime, but why would it be illegal to pay women to keep quiet about an embarrassing, but legal, event? If a political candiate had once ordered a Ford Pinto in a 1970s orange color, would it be illegal to pay a car salesman to keep quiet about that unfortunate lapse of taste?

Why do my Democrat-voting friends want Trump impeached? Wouldn’t that elevate Mike Pence, currently a non-entity, to Presidential status and therefore make it easy for him to win the next two elections as an incumbent (Americans are always fearful of change)?

[Rolling back the clock a bit, why did Republicans want Bill Clinton impeached back in the 1990s? Woudn’t that just have made it easy for Al Gore to win the following elections?]

Separately, if these women had not been paid to keep quiet back in 2016, what would the news media have done with their stories? A big headline: “Candidate had sex back in 2006”? Wouldn’t the New York Times need some corroboration for a story like that? Without paperwork around a payment, what corroboration would there have been? No photo or video evidence of the events described seems to have been uncovered. In the Ford Pinto hypothetical above there would be a signed order for the embarrassing car, but did Stormy Daniels issue cash register receipts for her work in 2006? Even with corroboration, what would be the relevance to an election? We’re not supposed to judge peoples’ legal lifestyle choices in our society, are we? The NYT does not take the position that the American who is faithful to his or her spouse is a superior human being to the American who has sex with various neighbors and sues his or her spouse for divorce, alimony, and child support, right? If there is no official position that stable and faithful marriage is evidence of superior morality, why would it be news that someone was having sex outside of marriage 10 years previously?

Related:

• “STORMY DANIELS’ DIVORCE Since She’s the Breadwinner … PAY CHILD SUPPORT!!” (TMZ)

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More lessons from my sojourn among the medical students…

As they gather more data, the insurance companies are getting smarter every year about kicking incompetent providers out of their networks. Eventually your private insurance company’s network will include only doctors with reasonably low rates of complications.

What about the doctors who are no longer in any private insurance company’s network. The good news for them is that Medicare/Medicaid can’t kick out anyone. They pay anyone who is licensed and legal to treat patients. When they do work with private insurers they make them sign contracts forbidding them from steering patients away from bad providers.

Big Data will thus inevitably create doctors, hospitals, etc. who see only Medicare/Medicaid patients? And these will be the worst providers in the U.S.?

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As a mail-order customer of the Trump Winery (nothing starts a conversation faster in Massachusetts than bringing Trump-brand sparkling wine to a party!), I get periodic emails from the enterprise. Today they picked a holiday to celebrate. August 26 is National Dog Day and Women’s Equality Day (celebrating the 1920 19th Amendment). Possibly due to the fact that the winery offers leashes and collars, the marketeers decided to pick National Dog Day. (But maybe Eric Schneiderman and his ladyfriends were customers for these Trump logo items?)

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I recently visited a family in Boulder, Colorado whose 8-year-old son has figured out which way the political winds blow in that town: “I hate Trump.” Mom was in full accord with the child, but the father was unwilling to devote a large amount of brain space to righteous hatred. “Our neighbors find out that we’ve gone to Colorado Springs and they’ll say ‘How could you do that? I would never spend any time with people there.’ But if aliens visited Boulder and Colorado Springs they would say that people lived in exactly the same way in the two towns. They drive SUVs. They shop at Whole Foods. Hardly anyone walks or bikes. Maybe the Colorado Springs SUV has a ‘Focus on the Family’ bumper sticker and the Boulder SUV has a ‘Free Tibet,’ bumper sticker, but there is no practical difference in lifestyle.”

What about folks in Boulder? Don’t they spend more time and money helping the vulnerable? “No,” the father said. “Probably the Colorado Springs residents do more because they work through their churches instead of just posting on Facebook.”

How about the climate change alarmists at NCAR? Do they practice what they preach regarding CO2 reduction, at least when they’re not jetting off to climate change conferences? “I bike up that hill all the time for exercise. Most of the traffic on that road is SUVs occupied by one person.”

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“Asia Argento, a #MeToo Leader, Made a Deal With Her Own Accuser” (nytimes):

The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault … Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

… the 2013 hotel-room encounter was a betrayal that precipitated a spiral of emotional problems, according to the documents.

Mr. Bennett’s notice of intent asked for $3.5 million in damages for the intentional infliction of emotional distress, lost wages, assault and battery. Mr. Bennett made more than $2.7 million in the five years before the 2013 meeting with Ms. Argento, but his income has since dropped to an average of $60,000 a year, which he attributes to the trauma that followed the sexual encounter with Ms. Argento, his lawyer wrote.

Ms. Argento asked the family member to leave so she could be alone with the actor. She gave him alcohol to drink…

For my late-1970s high school classmates, drinking alcohol and having sex were popular after-school activities (albeit not with movie stars). Today, however, it seems that an afternoon of consented-to sex can result in millions of dollars of harm to a teenager. Assuming that sexual activity among the young tracks the age of consent, I wonder if we should be able to see a correlation between age of consent and economic output. European countries have different ages of consent (Wikipedia), typically within a range of 14-16. Most U.S. states set the age at 16 (Wikipedia), but there are a substantial number at 17 or 18.

[Separately, I wonder if Donald Trump is running a time machine. When the New York Times accuses him of having encounters ]with various paid women back in 2006, these are reported as recent event. Yet for Ms. Argento, sex in 2013 is “years earlier” when viewed from the perspective of 2017. Does time move at a different pace for Donald Trump than for other people?]

Readers: Could teenage sexual activity explain the U.S.’s lackluster GDP per capita growth rate?

Related:

• “Judge awards $1MILLION to Oklahoma boy who had sex with his eighth-grade English teacher in her classroom” (Daily Mail): The judge wrote in her opinion that the child ‘reported feelings of depression, isolation and self-blame,’ and that he felt humiliated after news of his sexual relationship with the teacher spread. [The school district paid out $125,000 as well.]

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A friend’s 17-year-old asserts a male gender ID (I refrained from pointing out that a room packed with cosmetics is not traditionally part of the male teenager lifestyle). The incomplete and non-surgical/non-hormonal transition is from heterosexual female to homosexual male.

Given that this gender-fluid person will soon be applying to colleges, I’m wondering if the new gender ID will be helpful. Except for elite schools, I think that admissions standards are lower for students identifying as “men” (the majority of college students identify as “women” and schools seek to avoid a gender ID imbalance).

Readers: What do you think? Is this 17-year-old best-off applying as (1) simply male, (2) transgender, or (3) gay male? College admission forms are heavy on race-related questions, but do they even ask if someone falls into an unusual gender or sexual-preference category?

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