American Bling

The Smart Set carries an article on bling:

Larry Hart got the idea to decorate his mansion with spackle squeezed out of cake-frosting tubes from a book on Versailles. “As I looked at those pictures,” he said, “it just struck me that it [Versailles] looked like a giant wedding cake.” As Joyce Wadler recently described it in The New York Times, ornate plasterwork swirls throughout the Hartland Mansion, slathered on the ceilings, mirrors, pillars and angels.

Wadler gives us a tour of the mansion, all the while sporting an ironic New York attitude:

A house with 32 chandeliers, twin spiral staircases and so much rococo plasterwork that Marie Antoinette, were she planning a weekend in Vegas, would say, “The heck with the Bellagio, I want to stay with the Hart family in that rundown neighborhood where Liberace used to live,” may not be for you. That’s understandable.

“Understandable,” I suppose, because any tasteful New Yorker could only snicker at the Hartland Mansion, and implicitly, this unfortunate “other” side of the American aesthetic. “The entrance hall has a dramatic black-and-white checkerboard floor and a 35-foot dome. Stair rails are swagged with stiffly wired gold lamé, white silk roses and ivory velvet. The living room measures 33 by 57 feet.” Here, you see the 34-pound velvet bedspread decorated with cabochon pearls. There, the gold-leafed armchairs, hand-leafed by Larry, who designed and built most of the mansion’s decor. The writer ponders a dollar-store wineglass on which a little glass slipper had been hot-glued. Above her, more glass shoes had been glued onto a 6-foot silver-and-faux-candle candelabra. “Shoe-delier.”
…
I like to think of L.C. Tiffany as the Wizard of Oz of American design. Though a trained artist, he faked his way through art, ignoring what people were trying to teach him, in the name of his greater vision. He wanted to doll up dreary, turn-of-the-century America with splashes of Technicolor, to bring Kansas into a world of talking trees and hot air balloons and midget parades. Like Oz, Tiffany stained glass is makeshift and crazy but it works because, like the Wizard, Tiffany made people believe it did. Pull the curtain aside and embedded in every grandiose Tiffany mural are elements forged from cheap jelly jars and bottles at his factory in Queens. Tiffany delighted in the imperfections that traditional glassmakers would have deemed defects. His distinctive hodgepodge style was often made from recycled leftovers. He was a lover of the exotic and, though he greatly admired the British AAcers, his eclectic tastes — ranging from Byzantine to Romanesque, Japanese to underwater — would have given them migraines. The historical-sounding name he came up with for his signature iridescent glass — “favrile” — is historical only in effect. (Tiffany said the original name of this glass — “febrile” — came from the Old English meaning “handwrought,” but he later decided that he liked “favrile” better, which sounded more French. To me, the name also conjures the anti-naturalist, expressionist art movement of the time, Fauvre, and could have been made with one of those fantasy name generators on online gaming sites). Favrile colors had grandiloquent and equally made-up-sounding names like Gold Lustre, Samian Red, Mazarin Blue, and Tel-al-amana. Tiffany didn’t just make pretty stained glass mosaics; he created an ersatz dreamworld for America, an Oz. In every Tiffany work are the lasting aesthetic traces of the Gilded Age: boldness, exuberance, pastiche, conspicuous consumption. These are all the seeds of the American bling aesthetic, the seeds of the Hartland Mansion.

More on nuclear power

The Telegraph (Kolkata) reports:

The US state department announced this morning that India and the US have taken an “important step” towards implementing their nuclear deal following the finalisation of “arrangements and procedures” for reprocessing US-origin spent fuel from nuclear plants in India.

The procedures fall far short of India’s similar arrangements with France and Russia, which have imposed no restrictions on transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technology in their nuclear deals with New Delhi.

The US will not provide any technology for reprocessing, but will allow India to use its own technology to do reprocessing of US spent fuel from plants to be set by American companies in India.

The reprocessing will have to be done under safeguards from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in dedicated facilities to be set up for this purpose.

There will be more than one such facility. That was one of the last sticking points in the protracted negotiations which began between the two sides after then foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon wrote to the Americans in February last year seeking talks on reprocessing under the terms of the nuclear deal.

The successful conclusion of the reprocessing talks increases pressure on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to push through in Parliament a controversial bill on civil nuclear liabilities in case of accidents at atomic power plants.

American companies will not sell nuclear power plants to India unless this bill limiting the liabilities of US companies becomes law.

The legislation was to have been introduced in Parliament last fortnight, but it was put off on account of all-round opposition to a provision capping the liability of these companies at a mere $450 million in cases of accidents.

There was also opposition to a provision that would make the operator of the plant and not the supplier liable for damages.

Hindu adds:

France on Monday said the proposed Civil Nuclear Liability Bill would be an “important element” in enabling foreign companies to work in India’s nuclear power sector.

With the Bill in limbo, France and India were working out the modalities for setting up two reactors at the Jaitapur nuclear park in Maharashtra, allocated to the French company Areva, French Ambassador Jerome Bonnafont told journalists here.

France’s approach contrasts with that of the U.S. companies, which are wary of initiating talks till the Bill is passed in Parliament.

“It will be [a] very important protection for American companies who are seeking to do more business in the civil nuclear area in India,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake had said in a recent interview.

Speaking on the occasion of France’s renewed thrust to seek investments from European and emerging countries, including India, Mr. Bonnafont described the progress of the Bill as an “internal” issue.

He said negotiations for setting up reprocessing facilities to further utilise the spent fuel were “proceeding well.”

Something is Rotten in the State of Iceland

Julian Assange reports in Guernica:

Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been subject to a number of actions around the world by public and private security organizations. They range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March and an armed attack on my compound in 2007, to, in the West, an ambush by an apparent British intelligence agent in a Luxembourg car park, which merely ended with “we think it would be in your interest to…”

Developing world violence aside, we’ve become used to the level of security service interest in us and have established procedures to deal with that interest.

But the escalation of surveillance activities over the last month, most of which appears to be the result of U.S. “interests”, although some may be unrelated, deserves comment. These actions include many attempts at covert following, hidden photography and the detention and questioning of a WikiLeaks volunteer in Iceland on Monday night.

WikiLeaks’ staff have been in Iceland to advise Icelandic parliamentarians on a package of laws, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, designed to protect investigative journalists and internet services from spying and censorship.

Possible triggers for the surveillance actions are (1) our release of a classified U.S. intelligence report on how to fatally marginalize WikiLeaks (expose our sources, destroy our reputation for integrity, hack us), (2) our release of a classified cable from the U.S. embassy in Reykjavik reporting on contact between the U.S. and the U.K. over billions of Euros in claimed loan guarantees and, most significantly, (3) our ongoing work on a classified film revealing civilian casualties occurring under the command of the U.S. general, David Petraeus. U.S. sources told Icelandic state media’s deputy head of news, that the U.S. State Department was aggressively investigating the leak from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik. I was seen at a private U.S Embassy party at the Ambassador’s house, late last year.

Then on Thursday March 18, 2010, I was followed on the 2.15 p.m. flight out of Reykjavik to Copenhagen—on the way to speak at the SKUP investigative journalism conference in Norway. According to airline records, two individuals, brandishing diplomatic credentials and registered under the name of “U.S. State Department”, collected boarding passes for the same flight within three minutes of each other. They are not recorded as having checked in any luggage.

Read on…

Alois Alzheimer and his work

American Scientist has a nice history of the circumstances in which Alzheimer’s disease was identified:

Over time, Auguste D.’s speech became unintelligible. She eventually stopped talking completely, only humming or shouting wildly, often for hours on end. In her final year, her body weakened. She ate only at irregular intervals, often having to be fed. She spent most of her time in bed, hunched up and apathetic. Finally, early in 1906, Auguste D. contracted pneumonia. On April 8 that year, just short of her 56th birthday, she died.

The case of Auguste D., as described by Alzheimer, accurately summarizes the range of progressive changes observed in many Alzheimer’s patients today: her deteriorating memory, especially her inability to remember recent events; her disorientation; her decreased ability to speak coherently; her problems understanding and judging situations; and her restless and erratic behavior. Once, when trying and failing to write her name, Auguste D. remarked, “I have, so to say, lost myself.” This simple statement is a fitting description of the way many Alzheimer’s disease patients experience the disease.

By the time Auguste D. died, Alzheimer was no longer working in Frankfurt. In 1903, after 14 years at the institution for the mentally ill, he had accepted a position as a scientific assistant to Emil Kraepelin in Heidelberg. This was a phenomenal opportunity. Kraepelin was one of the most eminent psychiatrists of his time. Among other important contributions, he was among those promoting the idea that psychiatric diseases have a biological basis, something acknowledged for many diseases in his day but not yet widely accepted for mental illness. By introducing experimental approaches to understanding mental afflictions, Kraepelin helped transform psychiatry into an empirical science. He developed an innovative system to classify mental disorders, which took into account not only symptoms at any given stage but also changes over time. Kraepelin’s system proved so successful that today’s classification of psychiatric disorders remains largely based on it. Alzheimer knew that working with Kraepelin would open up possibilities he could only dream of in Frankfurt. Moreover, Franz Nissl, a close friend and colleague of Alzheimer’s in Frankfurt, had also moved to Heidelberg. Alzheimer hoped that together they could substantially advance their studies into the anatomical causes of mental disorders.

Khap panchayat brought to court

IE reports on the culmination of one woman’s determined effort to get justice for her murdered son and his wife:

In what is being hailed as the “first ever honour killing conviction” in Haryana, the Karnal Sessions Court on March 25 held six residents of Karora village guilty of a gruesome double murder. The sentencing will take place tomorrow.

In April 2007, Manoj, 24, and Babli, 18, had drawn the ire of Karora’s khap panchayat for eloping to Chandigarh and getting married. They belonged to the same gotra, Berwal, and in the eyes of the khap there is no sin greater than that.
…
On March 25 this year, the court held Babli’s brother, Suresh, her uncles, Rajender and Baru Ram, her cousins, Gurdev and Satish, and village strongman, Ganga Raj, who had called the khap panchayat, guilty of the murders.

Chandrapati Berwal — a 55-year-old widow and mother of four — says she did not realise till 10 days later that her son and daughter-in-law had been killed. “I went to Chandigarh, to Karnal, to Kaithal to look for them, but could not find them anywhere. It was only 10 days later that my sister’s son found out that Manoj had been murdered,” she says. “I had no idea that they had called a panchayat after my son got married…”
…
While she is happy at the conviction, Chandrapati fears the real culprits may get away. “Only the man who called the panchayat has been arrested. What about the other khap panchayat members?” she asks.

Karora’s Pradhan Dharamveer, who controls the local panchayat, refused to entertain any questions from The Indian Express.

However, Chandrapati hopes the court order will encourage the authorities to take aggressive action and end the system of khap panchayats. “They do not mete out justice anymore, as khaps were supposed to,” she says. “Instead they go around killing our children.”

Mar 31

HIndu gives the follow-up news:

In a landmark judgment, a Haryana court on Tuesday awarded the death penalty to five persons and life sentence to one for murdering a couple on the diktats of a ‘khap panchayat’ (caste-based council) for marrying against societal norms in 2007.

Karnal Additional District and Sessions Judge Vani Gopal Sharma, who had reserved the judgment on Thursday, pronounced the quantum of punishment for the six persons found guilty of killing Manoj and Babli, who married outside their gotra (sub-caste).

All five who have been given the death sentence are relatives of the girl. They include her brother Suresh, cousins Gurdev and Satish, and uncles Baru Ram and Rajender. Khap panchayat leader Ganga Ram was awarded the life sentence, while the driver, held guilty of kidnapping, was given a jail term of seven years.

West-philia

Der Spiegel reports:

Delegates from right-wing populist parties from across Europe are descending on Germany this weekend for a conference looking into the possibility of an EU-wide minaret ban. The hosts, an anti-Muslim German group, hope to use the gathering as a springboard to success in local elections.

What could be more European than a castle? The Continent is dotted with them, often menacingly perched on forested hilltops overlooking rivers or ancient trading routes — important bastions necessary for the defense of what developed into Europe’s long and rich cultural tradition.

These days, of course, European castles tend to be little more than bucolic tourist attractions. But it is perhaps no accident that a small palace in western Germany’s former industrial heart has been chosen to host a convention ostensibly aimed at defending European culture. The castle in question is the centuries-old Horst Palace, a Renaissance structure in the Ruhr Valley city of Gelsenkirchen. The gathering is called, pointedly, the Anti-Minaret Conference.

This Saturday, politicians representing right-wing conservative parties from across Europe will descend on the Horst Palace to discuss the dangers of Islam. Delegates from the Belgian nationalists Vlaams Belang will be there as will politicians from Geert Wilders’s Dutch Party for Freedom, Pia Kjaersgaard’s Danish People’s Party and the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Others from Sweden, Austria and Eastern Europe are also on the invite list.
…
The hosts are a relatively new group of German right-wing conservatives called Pro-NRW (an abbreviation of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia) and the goal of the conference is clear: to follow in Switzerland’s footsteps and ban minarets across Europe. And they want to use a provision of the European Union’s new Lisbon Treaty to do it.

Gelsenkirchen is not far from the towns of Osnabrueck and Muenster, the two towns which hosted the peace conferences that brought to an end the European religious wars called the Thirty Years’ war. The treaty of Westphalia, concluded in 1648, are said to have laid the foundations of modern secular states in Europe.

Could irony be the organizing principle of history?

Mortality rates drop

TOI reports:

A success story that reduced neonatal mortality in the heart of Uttar Pradesh by 54% in just 18 months – by simply educating pregnant mothers and their in-laws against high risk birth practices – will now spearhead Africa’s fight against infant mortality.
…
“In UP, we found that `kangaroo’ caring and early breastfeeding reduced infant mortality by 54%. We will now spread these practices in Malawi,” Melinda [Gates] who arrived in India on Tuesday for a four-day visit, said.

“We need cultural change. We found that in UP, most mothers delivered squatting. The babies therefore fell on the ground. Instead of wiping the baby, many women scrubbed it with clay or soap, causing abrasion leading to injury related infections. Instead of introducing the baby to mother’s milk, many were given tea, or goat’s mild and sometimes water,” she said.

“We told women and their in-laws that simple practices like allowing the mother to hold her child close to her chest, breast-feeding from the first day and wiping not washing the newborn dramatically increased the baby’s chances to live. Once these women got on board, the message spread like a virus,” Melinda, who spent two days in UP and also met chief minister Mayawati, said.

The Saksham pilot study was conducted in 39 gram sabhas and 300 hamlets.

Neonatal death rate fell from 81 per 1,000 births to 40 per 1,000 births in just 18 months after mothers started following these simple rules. “We published the data in medical journal Lancet. Interestingly, we have now found that by following risk free birth methods, maternal mortality rate also fell by 34% – a finding which has been sent to Lancet now,” said Vishwajeet Kumar, an alumnus of Johns Hopkins University and head of the Saksham project.

End of the road for the old buggy?

ET reports:

The world’s most-used internet browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, is on a steady decline in India, reveals a study by Irish metrics firm StatCounter. IE, as it’s known, has lost almost 20% market share in India in the past two years, even as Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox make great strides.

According to StatCounter, the percentage of PCs running Internet Explorer in India dropped from close to 70% in 2008 to about 51%, currently . The drop was despite an absence of any regulation by a trade commission , unlike that mandated by European Union on Microsoft, this year.

One looks forward to the day when you don’t have to have two versions of every web software: one for buggy old IE and the other for standards compliant (almost) everything else.

New Moore Island no more

Bangladesh's map of the New Moore Island, also known as South Talpatti, in the Sunderbans, now completely submerged

PTI reports:

About 90 per cent of the New Moore Island that surfaced in the Bay of Bengal in the aftermath of Bhola cyclone in 1970 have submerged as per satellite images collected by the Jadavpur University.

“Satellite images have confirmed that about 90 per cent of the Island, about three km long and 3.5 km wide, have submerged,” sources in the School of Oceanography Studies of the University said here today.

Local fishermen had also confirmed the disappearance of a major part of the Island, they said.

A study team will shortly visit the remaining part of the Island to physically assess the situation.

A major portion of the Island, that emerged on the confluence of the rivers Ichhamati and Rai Mangal, has disappeared because of rising sea level, coastal erosion, spate of cyclones and global warming, they said.

TOI adds a crucial piece of information:

Till the early 1980s, New Moore Island was claimed by both India and Bangladesh. Dhaka called it South Talpatti island. With the 3-km long and 3.5-km wide island disappearing, an irritant in Indo-Bangladeshi ties may have gone.

Global warming leads to thaw in India-Bangladesh relations?

Ha Jin on writing

Paris Review interviews Ha Jin:

INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide to write in English?

JIN: I wanted to separate myself from Chinese state power. The Chinese language has a lot of political jargon. You can talk at length without saying much, because these pieces of jargon become like formulas for public speech. And those expressions become a part of people’s consciousness. Very often people don’t question the meaning of what they’re saying.

When I first began writing in English, I’d written poetry in Chinese, and one or two short stories, but I hadn’t been published. And if I continued to write in Chinese, where would I have been published? I’d have to be published in mainland China and propaganda officials would censor my writing. I’d send in a manuscript, and I wouldn’t be able to interfere with the editing process. I would be completely at the mercy of censorship.

INTERVIEWER: What are the main differences between the two languages?

JIN: English has more flexibility. It’s a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural. The Chinese language is less natural. Written Chinese is not supposed to represent natural speech, and there are many different spoken dialects that correspond to the single written language. The written word will be the same in all dialects, but in speech it is a hundred different words. The written language is like Latin in that sense; it doesn’t have a natural rhythm. The way people talk—you can’t represent that. The accents and the nongrammatical units, you can’t do it. You can’t write in dialect, like you can in English, using a character to represent a certain sound, because each character has a fixed meaning.

When the first emperor wanted to unify the country, one of the major policies was to create one system of written signs. By force, brutal force, he eliminated all the other scripts. One script became the official script. All the others were banned. And those who used other scripts were punished severely. And then the meanings of all the characters, over the centuries, had to be kept uniform as a part of the political apparatus. So from the very beginning the written word was a powerful political tool.