In fact, the whole offensive has bipartisan support. So it’s fair to say that there are very few within the government (including the opposition party of ‘no’) who do not support the action. The major reason for this offensive is that Gaddafi did not heed to the demands of the international community which were [source]:

Gadhafi must stop his troops from advancing on Benghazi, pull them back from Ajdabiya, Misurata, and Zawiyah, and establish water, electricity and gas supplies to all areas. Humanitarian assistance must be allowed to reach the people of Libya. Let me be clear, these terms are not negotiable.

The fear is that if the unrest in Libya is left unchecked, then the entire nation will descend into a civil war and there will be human-rights violation which is something the US is very protective of. Interestingly, doesn’t that argument make a stronger case for intervention in Darfur, Sudan? Of course it does! Then I wonder why the US refuses to intervene in what is arguably the worst abuses of human rights since Pol Pot’s regime.

We all know what’s going on. Libya has oil and Gaddafi is not a US puppet. Currently Gaddafi is struggling to maintain complete control over Libya. So US has both the motive and the opportunity to change the status quo. To place a figurehead in an oil-rich country so as to serve US interests. Lately, the US is being increasingly candid about its intentions. I suppose it is a good thing in some ways. For example, the US intentions are now common knowledge, instead of being mutual knowledge.

The most blatant admission of America’s abandonment a moral compass came from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen. Given that the rulers in Bahrain and Yemen have used force against anti-government demonstrators, and yet, the US has intervened only Libya and not Bahrain or Yemen, Admiral Mullen argued [source]:

“We haven’t had a relationship with Libya for a long, long time. The Bahrainis and that country has been a critical ally for decades. So we’re working very hard to support a peaceful resolution there, as tragic as it has been, and we certainly decry the violence which has occurred in Bahrain. I just think the approach there needs to be different”

Translation: We don’t like Gaddafi, and so it’s ok to attack Libya under this pretext. We like the rulers of Bahrain and Yemen. They serve US interests. So we don’t care enough to ensure that the citizens of those countries actually enjoy any of the freedoms that we constantly exalt. All that matters is that US is better off in the end. Everything else is just a puppet show anyway.

One is forced to wonder: why is Pat Robertson saying such things knowing fully well that he is hurting people through his statements and hate? There has to be a logical explanation for it, and I think I have found one. My explanation is based on three important assumptions: (a) Pat Robertson believes that Jesus died for everyone’s sins, (b) he believes that the end times is near ^[1], and (c) he is a capitalist^[2].

Now, given that Pat Robertson is a capitalist, he must believe that the capitalist economic principles can be applied everything in life, including sin. So according to him, there must be some smallest unit of sin (arguably the smallest unit corresponds to the quality of sin in the ‘original sin‘), and also that Jesus’s death is worth only so many (finite) units of sin. Given that the end times are around the corner — being a shrewd capitalist one needs to get the best ‘bang for the buck’, so to speak — Pat Robertson probably wants to make Jesus’s death more worthwhile by sinning as much as he can so that the quota of sins for which Jesus died may be used up.

After all, every ‘true’ Christian’s goal is to make Jesus’s death worthwhile (in that Jesus’s death should not be in vain). So, it turns out that Pat Robertson is actually out sinning to make Jesus’s death count for something! Now he also knows that you sin then you will probably go to hell, and yet he pursues this path of validate Jesus’s crucifixion. Could there possibly be a greater sacrifice?

^[1]In fact, in the 70s Pat Robertson has predicted that the world would end in 1982!

^[2]This is more of an inference, than an assumption, based on the fact that Pat Robertson is a businessman, owns a broadcasting station, and sells books for money.

The resolution essentially says that the US Justice Systems are too irrepairably broken to admit a fair and just death penalty. In its own words:

.. more fundamentally Section 210.6 is simply inadequate to address the endemic flaws of the current system. Section 210.6, which in many respects provided the template for contemporary state capital schemes, represents a failed attempt to rationalize the administration of the death penalty and, for the reasons we discuss in greater detail below, its adoption rested on the false assumption that carefully-worded guidance to capital sentencers would meaningfully limit arbitrariness and discrimination in the administration of the American death penalty.

It lays out six important reasons for such disrepair [sourced from the actual text of the resolution (in PDF)]:

1. Section 210.6 advocates for an individualized determination of a crime (specifically murder, under certain circumstances) to be considered for death penalty as appropriate sentencing. However, several states have statutory identification of which murders should command the death penalty, and furthermore, such statuary discretion leaves the jury with a ‘formula’ to award the death sentence (rather than individualized determination).
2. Furthermore, the wide scope of murders/crimes that are currently eligible to extract the death sentence, under various state laws, is antithetical to the “spirit” and gravity of the punishment. The problem is that no state has successfully confined the death penalty to a narrow band of the most aggravated cases. Death eligibility in prevailing statutes remains breathtakingly broad, as aggravating
   factors or their functional equivalent often cover the spectrum of many if not most murders.
3. There is an almost unforgivable racial bias in the ratio of the number of minorities sentenced to death compared to the total number. Persistent efforts by various groups to address this issue has yielded little fruitful results in terms of a legal remedy to this issue.
4. The cost of administering the death-penalty is extremely high, and combined with the ineptitude of the defendants’ legal representation, the state incurs high costs in putting people to death who, arguably, do not deserve the punishment in the first place. The resolution noted: “Despite the fact that “effective assistance of counsel” is a recognized constitutional right, the scope of the right and the nature of the remedy have precluded the courts from being able to ensure the adequacy of representation in capital cases.”
5. In light of DNA evidence and upcoming forensic technologies, the acceptable risk of having some persons sentenced to death later, and perhaps too late, be shown to not have committed the crime for which they were sentenced. This issues is highlighted in House v. Bell, in which, the petitioner sought federal review with substantial new evidence challenging the accuracy of his murder conviction, including DNA evidence conclusively establishing that semen recovered from the victim’s body actually came from the victim’s husband, as well as evidence of a confession to the murder by the husbandthe Tennessee Supreme Court refused to consider whether new DNA evidence presented during death penalty appeals necessitates a new trial, and declined to answer other questions posed.
6. The politicization of judicial and gubernatorial elections has made death penalty a campaign issue, which leads to populist-style administration of the death penalty. Additionally, the politicization of the issue of capital punishment in the legislative sphere limits the capacity of legislatures to promote and maintain statutory reform. The kind of statutory reform that many regard as the most promising for ameliorating arbitrariness and discrimination in the application of the death penalty is strict narrowing of the category of those eligible for capital crimes.

In light of these observations, the resolution concludes: “these conditions strongly suggest that the Institute recognize that the preconditions for an adequately administered regime of capital punishment do not currently exist and cannot reasonably be expected to be achieved.”

“I figured out size does matter in the canine brain. Bill – golden retriever – very smart animal. When he was a puppy and I had to potty train him, if he pooped on the living room carpet, I stuck his nose in it. Three time later, he figured out ‘Oh, I am not supposed to crap here!’. Next two dogs, the same thing.

Now the little brain-dead Chihuahua comes along. She poops on the living room carpet, I stick her nose in it; three times later she thinks ‘Oh, I am not supposed to crap ever!’….. And that’s why they shake.”

The TSA did pretty much the same thing. On December 26th 2009, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane as it was preparing to land in Detroit. The usual noises followed ranging from blaming Obama for the incident to demanding that all Muslims be made to go through special security checks.

This incident could have been prevented if Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was not allowed to board the plane in the first place. All the warning signs were there: Umar’s father had warned the CIA about Umar,  anti-terror chiefs were warned five months ago that an al-Qaeda cell in Yemen was plotting a deadly attack using “The Nigerian”. Disregarding both these (vital) pieces of information, here is someone who bought one-way tickets from Nigeria to Yemen to the USA paying only cash and with no baggages to check-in. This should have raised suspicions, and he should have been singled out for additional security and through additional scanners.

Metaphorically speaking, TSA pooped on the living room carpet and the Nigerian stuck their nose into it! One would expect a rational response to be better mechanisms to profile passengers, not according to race or religion (which seems to be what all the rage is about), but according to passenger behavior. In this case, someone on the “alert list”, paying cash for a one-way transcontinental flight, with no check-in baggage would qualify as suspicious behavior. That would be saying “Oh, I am not supposed to crap here!”.

Instead, the TSA chooses to think “I am not supposed to crap ever!” and decides to put ALL passengers through additional security increasing [Bangkok Post, EUObserver, NY Times].

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b84cDbZrFIk

By his own admission, it took over nearly 40 seconds to do his research on this matter! Must be a new personal record for him!

Now if you looking for an article from a bunch of losers who have spend more than 40 seconds to get their facts and analysis right (like anyone cares about that!), I recommend the article that was published in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 25th, 2009 [link].

They even have boring bar graphs to present the data related to heart surgeries in Narayana Hrudayalaya (in Bangalore, India) vs. the US (national averages):

image source: The Wall Street Journal http://www.wsj.com/

Enough said. If it wasn’t for Glenn Beck, I would have never known the truth!

• You (the aspiring student) have decided to go for a PhD in your respective discipline.
• You have some idea of what your field of research is going to be
• Based on your own guidelines you have come up with a list of 15-20 schools that you could potentially apply to.
  • If you need help is coming up with this initial list of schools, http://graduate-school.phds.org/ is a great resource for that.
• You are looking to narrow this number down to handful/manageable list such that upon being accepted at one of these schools, you will be able to actually do research in the area of your choice and will actually enjoy it.

I am very aware that every discipline is unique in many ways and what applies to one may not apply to another. Given that my ‘expertise’ is in only one field, namely computer science (simply because that is my area of research), this guide  reads more like a fictional case study.

Like I said before, you have a list of schools (in the US) that you might considering applying to for your PhD, but which ones are right for you? For that, first you have to know the kind of faculty you work well with. Here are a few questions you have to ask yourself to be able to determine that:

1. How narrow/specific is your field of interest? Do you already have your dissertation problem picked out?
   • If are in a very narrow field (with potentially a problem already picked out), then the odds are that there are very few faculty working in this field. Contact them individually and not all at once, until one of them agrees to be your advisor. If no one agrees to it, then pick a different (less narrow) field and read on.
2. How independent is your work style? Do you work efficiently on your own and need an advisor only if you happen to be “stuck”, or do you need a moderate supervisor with weekly status meetings so that the advisor can ensure that you are on track, or are you a complete flake and need constant supervision and micromanagement to get things done?
   • The answer to this question will determine the kind of advisor who works for you, and by extension you should consider applying to the institutions that employ such faculty members.So if you work well will minimal supervision, then you might want to consider working with tenured faculty members who have a relatively large group of students working for them. The larger the group, the less is the amount of time the faculty member can devote to each student. Often, such groups also have a hierarchical structure with post-doctoral researchers having a great amount of interaction with the primary faculty member, and post-docs mentoring senior graduate students, and senior graduate students mentoring the rest.On the other hand, if you work well with moderate supervision, then consider working with a (preferably) tenured faculty member with a moderate size group.If you think you need constant supervision, but are willing to work hard, then consider working with tenure-track faculty members. Tenure-track faculty members are under a constant pressure to publish (or perish) until they get tenure. So they have a lot at stake if you do not publish, so they will ensure that you will be sufficiently motivated, managed, and worked so as to publish research.
3. What kind of a research career are you looking for? Would you publish quickly and publish a lot, or would you rather publish at a pace comfortable to you, but publish really high-quality research? Note that the two choices are often in competition (very few like Erdos managed to do both).
   • This goes to the heart of the kind of faculty you should work with. If you are looking for a lot of publications, then look at tenure/tenure-track faculty who publish in the double digits each year (more on how to determine that coming up). Otherwise, look to tenured faculty whose publication list is not 20 pages long, but their work has been cited time and again (more on how to determine this is coming up as well).

Based on the answer to the above questions you should get have an idea of what kind of faculty you want to work with. Now keep that in mind when browsing through the list of faculty at each school on your list.

The next step is look at each school on your list and determine whether or not the school is worth considering for a PhD application. Here is where the process for each discipline varies. I will proceed ahead like this is a (fictional) case study for the discipline of Computer Science. Say, the field of research interest is Theoretical Computer Science, and the school I am looking at is Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Note that you will have to repeat the following process for each school on that list.

First, open up with department website to get to the list of faculty who are working in your field of research interest. In the specific example of Theoretical Computer Science at MIT, it is http://theory.csail.mit.edu/people.html. Note that in some (smaller) schools/departments they simply have a list of faculty for the entire department and you will have to scour through the research interests of each faulty member before you can figure out what is you pool of potential advisors.

Now begins the painful task of actually, reviewing each individual faculty member to see whether or not they are the right one for you. First, separate the list of faculty into tenure-track faculty and tenured faculty. Typically, assistant professors are tenure-track faculty, and associate professors and professors are tenured faculty. Go to the personal website for each faculty and see if you can find information on the following:

1. The list of students currently in their research group
2. The list of publications from the past five years (don’t go beyond five; faculty research interests tend to migrate). If you cannot find their list of publications on their website then look for this information in other publication aggregation and indexing  sites (like DBLP for publications in Computer Science and Engineering). For instance, the list of publications by Prof. Rivest (of the RSA fame) is http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/r/Rivest:Ronald_L=.html
   In order to determine if the research that the faculty does is of high quality, an imperfect test is to figure out how much their work is cited. On way to do it is to see the venues (journals) where the faculty has published, and what the impact factor of that journal is. For instance, Prof. Rivest’s paper “Translucent Cryptography—An Alternative to Key Escrow, and Its Implementation via Fractional Oblivious Transfer” is published in the Journal of Cryptography whose impact factor (According to http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/impact.html) is 1.97 (top 3.03%). This suggests that the his work is of greater impact than most.

Depending on the answers to the questions asked earlier and the information gained from the faculty website and the internet, shrink the faculty pool to the list of 3 or so faculty that you would consider to be your advisor.

Now repeat this process for each university on your list and then sort your list based the number of eligible faculty per school and the ranking of the school/program itself (The ranking can be obtained from either the department website, wikipedia, or an internet search).

Now divide the list into three categories: top 1/3rd, middle 1/3rd, and bottom 1/3rd in the sorted list. Apply to at least one school in each category to maximize your chances of an acceptance.

I hope this helps some in making the rather opaque job to selecting a school for your PhD easier.

The answer is actually “No”! The US has a noteworthy history of socialistic policies:

1. Agricultural subsidy: Since 1933, the US government has been subsidizing its agriculture. Even though it marginalizes small farmers and mostly serves the agri-business gaints [source], has adverse impact on developing nations economy [source], and many economists see it as a waste of resources [source]. The subsidy still remains, and is still antithetical to free-market capitalism.
2. Social security: Social security was introduced in the US in the 1930s to help recover from the great depression (yet another spectacular collapse of free-market economy). On a side note, it is interesting to see how every time free-market economy falters, the government steps in with a socialist solution and yet feels insulted when called out on it. Its a program that is still in practice, and is arguably one of the largest socialist program in existence in the world. Despite several criticisms of the program, the White House is steadfast in its commitment to this socialistic program, and will not have anyone saying anything otherwise.
3. S&L Crisis: The Savings and Loans Crisis of the 80s and 90s demonstrated the socialist tendencies of the US yet again. The of the chief causes for this crisis, among others, was the rampant deregulation of the economy (allowing greater influence of free-market forces). When the fit hit the shan, guess what the US government did? Yup, it bailed the parties out, much like Freddie mac and Fanny May. In fact of the total loss of about $160 Billion, the US government, and hence the tax payers, paid for over $124 Billion! They just couldn’t let the market heal itself, a socialist relief simply had to be provided. On a side note, its ironic that the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) of 1989 which was enacted in response to the S&L crisis put Freddie Mac and Fanny May in charge of supporting mortgages for low- and moderate-income families. Guess who needs saving in the new free-market precipitated crisis now? That’s right! Freddie Mac and Fanny May!
4. Public Education: Yet another (expensive) example of socialism in the US is that public education system. This includes federal (soft) loans, education grants, the public school system, etc. With the US spending over $11,000 per student per year, the public school system in the US is one of the most expensive in the world, and with a 100% of it being provided for free to the students out of the tax payers pocket, this is yet another example of America’s socialist policies.
5. Unemployment benefits: Uncle Sam pays any unemployed citizen a fixed amount as.. well… a hand out, a give-away. Its called unemployment benefit. There are similar welfare programs for other disadvantaged demographic in the society to equalize the opportunities available to them. Now if that isn’t socialist, I don’t know what is.
6. The Arts: The US government support for the arts through the National Endowment for Arts is yet another use of the tax payers money to fund a ‘greater social good’. And not everyone is happy about it. be anything other than a socialist program. Why? Because if free-market were to drive arts, then you’d have private buyers/parties funding the arts, and not the government, as simple as that.

There probably are many more such examples, but I cant think of any more off the top of my head. But I guess six are sufficient to make my point. Despite all the rhetoric of the glories of capitalism, free-market, and the spiteful opposition to socialism, there are many US policies that are strictly socialist, and yeah, Freddie Mac and Fanny may bailout is not in the least bit unprecedented (remember the S&L crisis bailouts), or a marked jump towards socialism. Its simply business as usual in the US of A. So the next time someone says US was always capitalistic and socialism is an evil that needs to be uprooted, you’ll know better than to waste your time arguing with them.

Image Source: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/wbeal/images/socialism.gif

Last week, the US government took control over Freddie Mac and Fanny May, the financial gaints of the US martage industry (and the crisis). Now this puts the US government in control of nearly half of the $12tn mortgage debt in the US (The two companies have lent or underwritten about $5.3 trillion mortgage debt in the United States). There have been several justifications for why such a bail out was necessary, and how it will keep the US economy from collapse, blah, blah, blah…This is not what this post is about. This post is about personal and ideological consequences of this action.

Just to put things in perspective, the $5.3tn bailout has effectively doubled the US national debt over a weekend! Worse, the actual cost of the bailout is yet to be ascertained, simply because nobody knows how much of the $5.3tn debt will be defaulted and/or foreclosed, and not to mention that ensuing expense for when the companies dispose off the foreclosed property. If the actions of the Republican VP pick — Sarah Palin — with respect to selling off state property is any indication of government attitude towards it, then looks like the US government will be losing a lot of money in the near future.

Now the question is, where is all this money going to come from? Answer: the tax payers. So suddenly some third party’s unwise decision to give a sub-prime loan to thousands of unqualified individuals, a decision that I had no control over, is now going to cost ME money?!?! And again, I have no control over that decision! Am I the only one who thinks its a wee bit backwards?

Personal gripe aside, this decision does have other implications which may seem too ‘theoretical’, but should be of significant concern. The decision has implications on social and personal responsibility, ideological fidelity, and designed failure of free market economics.

• Social and personal responsibility:The bailout decision is essentially sending the following message: “If you screw up, no worries, we will try to fix it at no cost to you!”. So essentially we are divorcing people from the responsibility of their actions. The bigger the screw up, the better are chances of the the government fixing it for you. So if you are going to screw up, make sure your screw up big, really big. Once people start hurting from it, then you will be taken care of. In the end, there is nothing to dissuade you from doing it all over again. This is effectively rewarding bad behavior! And this will come back to bite you in the back eventually.
• Ideological Fidelity: The environment for such reckless lending as set up by the continual deregulation of the economy since the 1980s. Such deregulation was in the ‘spirit’ of capitalism and free market economics. If the over arching idea is that a free market will correct itself, then why is the government messing with it by bailing Freddie and Fanny out? If such an intervention is necessary, then what does that say of the capitalistic and/or free market ideology? So is free-market capitalism a flawed concept, which when allowed to run its course will only serve to destabilize the economy? If that’s the case, then would the US come out and say it? Of course not! Its the free market and the pursuit of the ‘American dream’ that makes US so special, so different, so un-Russian, so un-commie. Yet, when it comes down to it, this bailout is largest nationalization in the history of mankind! Now people want to have the cake and eat it too. They want a deregulated economy because free market is where progress is at, and every time it fails (which it inevitably does), either no one wants to suffer through the market’s natural correction process (which is painful at the least), or the system itself is too flawed to correct itself and hence requires an socialistic style intervention. Despite that its still free market. What kind of the ticking time bomb is this? Eventually, US’s debt with catch up with the economy, and then what? There wont be any more money for bailouts. So are we looking at a spectacular collapse in the future? Mostly because all the stake holders are opportunistic hypocritical prostitutes of their ideology?
• Failure of the free market: Is this bailout a slam-dunk argument against free market economy? That’s a tough question to answer. It is quite possible that a free-market system is sufficiently robust and self-stabilizing to a point where it can recover from any jolt it might receive. However, the stakeholders in the economy are not willing to labor through the painful transitional period when the economy is healing itself. In fact, such acute volatility may be a part of growth, maturation, and robustness of the economy (much like a human body learning from experience, diseases, and vaccinations). Such intervention, however, has effectively thwarted the healing that the economy must naturally go through in order to be more robust in the future. So effectively, this bailout is building a near-fatal design flaw into the free market operations to where such bailouts are going to be an infinitely often deal, or there will be more economic crashes and collapses to look forward to in the future.

So either way you look at it, the bailout is at best a short term relief which addresses the symptoms but exacerbates that root cause making the economy even more vulnerable that before to such volatility.

Image source: allposters.com

The best reaction that US could give was that it was ‘disappointed’ (that is was ‘deeply disturbed’ and ‘urges’ Pakistan to return to democracy). Disappointed!? Is that it? Whatever happened to all the rhetoric about being pro-democracy and restoring democracy in the world one botched fiasco (translation: Iraq) at a time? But wait, isn’t Pakistan (translation: Musharraf) an ally in the American war of terror? So I guess anything that Musharraf does is pro-democracy, given that Bush and Mushrraf are bosom buddies and all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Washington tows Musharraf’s line on this one, viz. that he did it for democracy!