On Monday night Dinesh D’Souza will be speaking on campus. His talk will be about Christianity, Islam, and the War on Terror. It will be related to his new book, What’s so great about Christianity It starts at 7PM in 2060 VLSB and will include a question and answer time. The talk is being hosted by the Berkeley College Republicans with support from the Young America’s Foundation.

I have heard him speak and read his Letters to a Young Conservative. D’Souza is a smart and well researched speaker. Even if you disagree with him, he is worth hearing.

As the facebook event says:

Dinesh D’Souza
Monday, April 28, 2008
7:00pm - 8:00pm
2060 VLSB

At around 8:20 this morning I went to the third floor of Le Conte Hall. When I got there about 15 students were sitting on the floor waiting for 9:00. As time progressed the line I was in got longer, stretching from 368 east down the hallway all the way to the door to Old Le Conte. Among the 50 people I could see there was a GSI for Physics H7B holding office hours in one of the lines. What would bring all these people here this early in the morning? Why would I ditch my 8 AM class for the first time this semester?

Stephen Hawking

He is possibly the greatest living theoretical physicist. Hawking definitely has the best publicity of any physicist I know. He is also coming to campus next week.

Part of a new program, On the Same Page, the College of Letters & Science encourages incoming freshman to read good books. They sent a copy of Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time to incoming freshman. I wish they had this kind of program when I was a freshman, but knowing my luck I probably would have been unexcited by the author they found.

While the talk in Zellerbach is sold out, Hawking is giving a special talk about his life in physics just for Physics and Astronomy majors and faculty. I learned about this last night from the Physics majors email list.

There are three points I want to make:
1) Students who are truly interested in a field are out there and just need to be given opportunities.
2) Declaring your major has benefits. You get to do stuff open only to majors and get emails about work opportunities and internships.
3) Physics is awesome!

From the Chronicle:

Cody’s Books, the venerable independent bookstore that has served generations of UC Berkeley students, has announced that it will close its flagship store on the south side of campus because of declining sales and competition from chain stores and the Internet.

The store, on Telegraph Avenue, will close its doors on July 10 after 43 years…

Ross said the store had been losing money for 15 years and that pressure from chain stores and the Internet had contributed to an “economic concentration in bookselling” that was forcing out independent stores like Cody’s.

I personally have never been to the place. Never had a reason to. Amazon and other online booksellers take care of most of my needs (immense selection, reviews, new & used books easily available). Barnes & Noble and other chains are there if I just can’t wait for shipping or if I have money to burn. Can’t see where an independent bookseller like Cody’s would be needed.

I’m sure some people will miss them though. However, let’s not forget how arrogant and elitist some people can be. Take, for instance, this Daily Cal article from 2000:

The Berkeley City Council’s passage this week of a measure calling for Internet sales taxation has sparked debate among city officials and local residents.

“All I want is for the actual stores to be on a level playing field with the Internet companies,” [then mayor Shirley Dean] said. “Cody’s bookstore offers book sales through the Internet, but they cannot compete with the bigger companies because these companies undersell them. There is no reason why Cody’s has to pay sales tax and Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com does not.”

According to Dean, Moe’s Bookstore, Cody’s Books and Amoeba Music, all of which are located in Worthington’s district, have spoken out against the tax exemption enjoyed by Internet companies.

“The Wall Street-driven propaganda in favor of the Internet has resulted in numerous unfair advantages over main street retailers in the U.S.,” said Marc Weinstein, the owner of Amoeba Music. “All of (these) will serve to rip the heart and soul out of many American communities - including Berkeley. As far as we’re concerned, the tax-exempt status that Internet companies enjoy is a complete hoax promoted by computer industry lobbyists in Washington.”

And suddenly sympathy diminishes. Someone tell that guy to quit being a douchebag. The world’s changing, community is constantly being redefined, and you can’t stop progress. These guys need to get their desperate paws off of our online shopping. Speaking of which, I’ll need to check out Amazon for some of the books you guys recommended earlier. Doesn’t get any better than that.

The university just released their Summer Reading List for incoming freshmen. The theme is “Books for Future Presidents.” Among the listed are The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman, Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky, and How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff.

This wasn’t their original plan, however:

This year, Tollefson and Dupuis had originally aimed for a counterpoint to the National Conservative Weekly’s list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” which had included “The Feminine Mystique,” “Silent Spring” and Darwin’s “Origin of the Species.”

But the theme became too complicated - should it be “Best Books,” “Beneficial Books” or “Importantly Good Books“? They couldn’t decide. And so they drew their inspiration from UC Berkeley astrophysicist Richard Muller’s “Physics for Future Presidents,” which covers physical concepts that Muller considers necessary prerequisites for living in today’s complex world.

They couldn’t do it, so maybe we can. What are some “Importantly Good Books” that we all simply must read?

I read blink by Malcolm Gladwell over the weekend. It was interesting and easy enough to read that I finished it in two sittings (one in which I was buzzed from Raleigh’s pear cider and cheap vodka shots… drinking and reading is a surprisingly effective combo). I remember the book receiving all kinds of accolades when it was first released. I didn’t think that it was that mind-blowingly awesome, but it was pretty good.

I’ll spare you all from my amateur book review and move on to something that hit me while I was reading.

In one chapter, Gladwell writes about how sometimes our impressions of things are totally off. He tells the story behind a revolutionary new office chair. This chair was more comfortable than any other chair on the market, but it looked so strange that it received terrible marks in aesthetics. Going forward with the product would be risky. The company took a chance, released it, and, to everyone’s surprise, it sold very well. Customers praised both its comfort and design while competitors raced to imitate what had been seen as ugly up until then. Gladwell explains:

The problem is that buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us some time to understand that we actually like them.

I think we sometimes face the same situation when it comes to politics. Our culture and media condition us to believe that there are only liberal Democratic blue staters and conservative Republican red staters. Tell someone that you’re a Republican and they instantly have a profile of what you supposedly stand for. And in our unfortunately polarized world, you’re going to get a reaction that you really don’t deserve.

I lived in the dorms my freshman year. I’m not the kind of person who advertises their political beliefs. In fact, it’s pretty hard to get anything political out of me (besides on this blog, of course). But somehow, some of my floormates were successful in extracting that I was a Republican and I worked on the Patriot. They were dead set in seeing me as the stereotypical Republican, so I had to put up with the usual mocking (thankfully not mean-spirited). I tried to explain multiple times that I was a libertarian, but they still considered me the typical Republican and continued with the typical anti-Republican talking points. It wasn’t until many months later that they finally realized that their judgement of me was way off. In the end, they even admitted that they shared some of my views and that they wished all Republicans were like me.

It took almost a year to get those guys to move beyond their first impressions. I’ve been less successful with some of my other friends. I mean, even after explaining time and time again what I believe in, they still think I’m some kind of hardcore Bush-backer. I’m sure I’ll be able to enlighten them in the end, but it’ll take some time and effort.

We have the same problem on the national level. Our political offices are mostly filled with run-of-the-mill Republicans and Democrats, George Bushes and John Kerrys. Every now and then, someone comes around who breaks the mold, however slightly. We have the John McCains and Howard Deans of the world. The media correctly labels them “mavericks” since they really are, relatively speaking. The public has come to genuinely like these politicians.

We need more “mavericks,” especially ones that are even further from the political mainstream. We need candidates that make the voters uncomfortable. We need candidates that aren’t afraid to go down in flames. They aren’t going to win on their first tries, but they lay the groundwork for future victories. The voters like these politicians, they just don’t know it yet. The voters like these ideas, they just don’t realize it yet.

I’m doing my small part on this blog to get such “strange and uncomfortable” ideas out there. I’d like to see more actual candidates doing the same. Losing sucks, but not getting the message out is even worse. So go on and spread the word: they’ll hate you now, but they’ll thank you in the end.

A fairly interesting article about the legacy of Mao Zedong in the latest issue of the California Monthly, the official mag of Cal’s Alumni Association.

For starters, let’s recall what Mao did:

During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, Red Guards sent millions to reeducation camps in the countryside to spend their days doing hard labor and learning the teachings of Mao. Others were jailed and executed. In a new biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday use previously unreleased material to show in detail how Mao concocted his reputation as a peasant hero in a tyrannical quest for absolute power. Mao sacrificed armies to foil Communist rivals and sold food for arms during one of China’s most devastating famines. According to the authors, Mao said he was willing for half of China to die for the country to become a global military and nuclear power. They estimate that Mao is responsible for more than 70 million deaths.

So what is this article about? How people still defend this bastard:

Yun Shi M.A. ’99, a 31-year-old graduate of Berkeley’s Asian Studies program, is one of the restaurant’s patrons. She grew up in the Shandong province singing songs about Mao and studying his teachings. Like her mother, Shi feels strongly about Mao’s contribution to modern China, particularly his programs to redistribute land. While acknowledging Mao’s crimes, she still stands by his goals and recites his famous declaration in 1949, when communists prevailed in China’s civil war, that “the Chinese have stood up.”

On Shi’s trip to China last year, her 80-year-old great-aunt gathered several family members and revealed a secret she’d carried for more than 50 years. She and her husband had once owned land in the province. “People just showed up at their door one day and demanded that they leave immediately,” Shi says. “My aunt stood under a tree and watched villagers carry their stuff away. They found a woodshed and lived there for a year eating whatever they found, at times resorting to begging.” […]

But among some Chinese here and in China, Mao’s status as a hero and liberator, and as a symbol of the country’s rising international power, remains potent. The new biography has provoked defensive reactions on Chinese-language Internet message boards. A typical post read, “Mao did what he set out to do and freed China from foreign humiliation once and for all.” Although Shi was moved by her great-aunt’s story, she says, “It never crossed my mind to feel guilty about how I feel about Mao. While I don’t like the way it was done, I still support an idea of a fair society.”

Disgusting. Also of interest is how some Chinese restaurants offer dishes such as “Chairman Mao’s Red Cooked Pork Pot.” I wonder if German restaurants have a “Hitler dish” or Russian places have a “Stalin dish” on their menus… The other part that I want to point out is when L. Ling-chi Wang, of Berkeley’s “ethnic studies” department, asks: “Why are Americans still forgiving of Nixon for what he has done?” I agree, I don’t like Nixon for many reasons and the rest of America shouldn’t either. But is Mr. Wang equating the crimes of Nixon with those of Mao!? I’m sorry, but I’ll take a couple of Watergates over millions of deaths any day of the year.

Here’s a post where I agree with liberal Berkeley econ professor Brad DeLong. Professor DeLong is passing along word that Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein is going out of print:

Can this be? There are hundreds of thousands of people serious and interested in politics–on the left and the right–who have not read and do not own Before the Storm.

Buy one. Buy ten, and give them to your friends.

If you don’t know, the book is about Barry Goldwater’s failed presidential campaign in 1964. It’s about the behind the scenes politics, the dirty tricks, the cunning strategies, the dueling ideologies, all the exciting stuff. It’s about the father of the conservative movement, whose failure would lead directly to Reagan’s success. Great stuff.

I read the book during high school, not because it was assigned or anything. It definitely influenced my political growth toward the right. Though that probably wasn’t the goal, since Perlstein is a liberal and all. But what can I say? It’s a very well written book, and it almost reads like a novel. Not boring at all. Please check it out sometime.

Here’s an interesting article from the AP detailing a new book and how it’s been adopted by Berkeley High:

The latest turn in the national conversation is toward a more intimate look into the lives of slaves, led by a novel that revisits Mark Twain’s classic and racially charged tale, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

My Jim is the first-person story of Sadie, the wife of Huck’s enslaved traveling companion. The aim of its author, Nancy Rawles, was to reimagine Jim as more than a runaway drifting down the Mississippi River with a delinquent youth, more than the gullible victim and moral father figure to Huck that Twain portrays. Rawles wanted to consider the familiar tale from the perspective of the family Jim left behind - and to consider the shattered families of many slaves.

During high school, I always made it a point not to read “classic” works of literature. Thank you SparkNotes. But I generally think this type of project is pretty cool: same story, different perspective. If I were into this stuff, I would probably check it out…

Rawles, a Seattle-based writer and amateur historian, spent months researching the personal histories of slaves, traveling to Twain’s home town of Hannibal, Missouri, and reading oral histories, before writing My Jim. The book was published in January and is already in its third printing, with about 20,000 copies in print. While writing, she hoped her book would be taught alongside Huck Finn in classrooms.

An educator at Berkeley High School quickly fulfilled that wish. Veteran literature teacher Alan Miller heard about My Jim and was delighted to assign it to his 11th-grade students - so he could “teach ‘Huck’ right,” he said. He also persuaded two colleagues on campus to include it in their classes. Berkeley High is the only school in the United States in which students study “Huck Finn” and “My Jim” together, according to Rawles’ publisher, Random House, Inc. Education experts also say that Berkeley is believed to be the only high school in the nation with an African American studies department.

“‘Huck’ is a book that needs a great deal of context and sensitivity to Jim’s motive and Jim’s depiction,” Miller said. “It’s very easy to focus on Huck, but if you focus on Huck you’re missing a key component of the book.”

So for a hundred years, anyone who has been teaching it, hasn’t been teaching it right? That’s the only minor issue that I have. Oh, besides the usual “why have an African American studies department in high school” problem. But we’ve gone over that already.

Since the 1950s, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, many parents and community leaders - particularly blacks - have tried to evict the book from library shelves and seek court orders barring its use in classrooms, including in Berkeley several years ago, Miller said. Courts have consistently resisted, citing free speech issues. As recently as last year in Renton, Washington, a Seattle suburb, a black family tried unsuccessfully to have the book removed from school reading lists.

In recent years, many scholars, including Rawles, have argued that Huck Finn is an anti-slavery book that was as progressive as could be expected, given the blatant racial hostility rampant in the United States when Twain wrote it.

Unfortunately, some people refuse to look beyond the superficial. And we still see this in similar cases, even when we know better.

Black Issues’ Dodson agreed. “I didn’t think Huck Finn was a bad book, but I do see it (My Jim) basically as filling out the story, making him more human,” she said.

Brian Holbert, a senior at Berkeley High, and other black students said they were not bothered by Twain’s derogatory language - Holbert’s classmates often use such words as “nigger” in casual conversation and hear the term repeatedly in popular music. But he disliked “Huck Finn” when he read it last year because it didn’t address slavery more directly. “I don’t think there’s really a good example of literature we can use that really teaches about slavery,” he said. Now, though, My Jim has tweaked his interest and he plans to read the book.

David Singer-Vine, a student in Miller’s class, criticized My Jim for not allowing Huck Finn to stand on its own. “I don’t know that (Twain) would want to distort his work this way,” Singer-Vine said. “She (Rawles) didn’t know anything about what he wanted.”

Well, I don’t know either. But I do know that it’s harder to find study guides for books this new. Good luck and good reading guys.

Beatrice Stuart has something to complain about in today’s exciting issue of the Berkeley (Library) Daily Planet:

I am a longtime resident of Berkeley and a longtime library lover. What I love most besides the books and movies I check out regularly are the interactions I have with the friendly staff at my local branch. Now the director wants to spend our limited money on automating the checkout and replacing the workers with machines? Why should I trust her when she couldn’t even get Berkeley to pass the tax measure? Why don’t they replace the director with a machine instead?

For the past few weeks, it seems like all they write about is some lame library scandal. Anyway, why shouldn’t they replace the workers with machines? She acknowledges the “limited money,” but she can’t see that automation would save money in the long run? Apparently, she wants the residents of Berkeley to pay more taxes so she can continue to have her beloved “interactions.” Sorry, but I don’t think the government should be in the business of providing you a social club.

For responses to the other lame letters about the library, check out Beetle Beat.

I just finished reading The Pentagon’s New Map by Thomas P.M. Barnett. Actually, I finished it a week ago, but I haven’t had a chance to do a writeup until now.

Here’s a brief summary: The world is divided into two camps: the Functioning Core (which includes the US, Europe, and is slowly welcoming China and India into the club) and the Nonintegrating Gap (Basically the Middle East, Africa, most of South America, and anyplace where Compton looks good in comparison). The major difference between the two groups is the degree to which they are integrated into the global economy and the connectivity that comes with it: Whether the leaders of these nations choose to embrace or reject the rest of the world. Barnett has shown that the majority of US military operations in the last decade or so have occured in this Gap. We can either watch this Gap grow larger and be pulled into the ensuing chaos, or we can lead the world in preemptive action to bring Gap states into the Core and enter a new era of global peace and prosperity. Only America can initate the process, and unless we act now, we will have to accept the former option by default.

Barnett is not a neoconservative, and I believe he voted for Kerry last election. He also has some controversial proposals such as allowing Iran to possess nuclear weapons and giving up our defense pact with Taiwan. But he recognizes that Bush at least understands what needs to happen more than most and is making some of the right moves. As an example, here is an excerpt from Bush’s speech in Europe today:

“The nations in our great alliance have many advantages and blessings. We also have a call beyond our comfort: we must raise our sights to the wider world. Our ideals and our interests lead in the same direction: By bringing progress and hope to nations in need, we can improve many lives, and lift up failing states, and remove the causes and sanctuaries of terror. . . .”

“Our alliance is determined to promote development, and integrate developing nations into the world economy. . . . ”

“Our alliance is determined to encourage commerce among nations, because open markets create jobs, and lift incomes, and draw whole nations into an expanding circle of freedom and opportunity. . . .”

I personally agree with much of what Barnett (and Bush) have to say on this topic. I think people around the world should get to experience the freedom, democracy, and capitalism that we cherish. Our military (and others) will be absolutely necessary in this task. Yet it is also in our national security interest to proceed. As long as the Gap exists, we will always be threatened. We need the rest of the Core to understand that they too have a stake in this all.

You’ll need to read his writing for yourselves to greater understand his ideas. I recommend his blog, which links to great articles and offers insightful commentary. Barnett has a piece in a recent Esquire entitled: “Dear Mr. President, Here’s How to Make Sense of Your Second Term, Secure Your Legacy, and, oh yeah, Create a Future Worth Living.” He also gave a good interview to Front Page Magazine. And here’s a good article from Tech Central Station. But I strongly encourage you to read his book.

Book Rating: 5/5