Academics From Canada

"[ Proposition 13 ] would precipitate a revolutionary reform—one long overdue—in California state and local finance… People’s incomes are not closely related to their ownership or use of housing. Hence, the present tax system unjustly burdens the young family with large housing needs and the older couple who want to live in their family home or their retirement pensions. Stability of home or apartment occupancy is an important social goal. The present tax system weakens our society by threatening to force people out of their homes."

"The growth of the British company population was not interrupted, as it was in the United States, by the economic depression of the 1930’s and World War II. By the middle 1960’s, the United Kingdom was more densely populated with companies in relation to its human population than was the United States, although the reverse had been true in 1935."

"The American credo is one of faith in institutional pluralism and of mistrust of large size and concentrated power, political or economic. The growth of giant institutions has always been viewed with apprehension, even though it has been for the most part the natural product of rising populations and income, and of technological changes that created economies of larger scale."

"In assessing business performance, we must keep in mind that ours is a pluralistic society. Indeed, the maintenance of pluralism by the diffusion of power among diverse institutions is itself a national goal. In such a society, each institution tends to specialize in the performance of those tasks in which it has a comparative advantage. The society is a highly complex system of interacting subsystems and institutions, in which the performance of each is affected by that of others. Hence, the business corporation should be assessed primarily with reference to the performance of its unique function of production, taking into account the effects of other institutions, such as governments and labor unions, upon its performance; no institution in a pluralistic society should be evaluated in isolation."

"At the end of 1968, the United States contained about 1.6 million active, profit-seeking corporations and about 200 million people—one corporation for each 126 persons."

"A fourth factor underlying the merger wave of the 1960’s was the steep rise in the load of corporate income taxation since World War II. In 1940, the effective federal corporate income-tax rate was 27 percent; in 1968, it was 50 percent. Rates of state and local taxes on business incomes have risen commensurately."

"Property tax bills are rising much faster than family incomes…. They threaten to erode away that foundation of American society: the American-owned home…. We must deliver an unmistakable message to our elected representatives that no longer will we permit misuse of the property tax to finance welfare, health, educational and other governmental services that serve all people in our state. Such government spending programs should be paid for by revenues collected from all the people."

"Because some conglomerate, and other, mergers have proved to be unsound and failed. It has been proposed that government should prohibit such mergers. But there is no feasible way to identify bad mergers in advanced; only time and the test of market competition reveal them."

"Although the Marxist antithesis to the capitalist thesis has been vigorously advanced for more than a century, it has never gained significant support in the United States. Marxist voices have, during recent years, been drowned out by the complaints of the Reformers, on the one hand, and of the Utopian critics, on the other."

"The American tendency to equate economic efficiency with moral virtue has deep roots in our history. It helps to explain why Americans so widely embraced the ideology of Adam Smith… Competition in open markets was seen as the most efficient way to allocate limited human resources and to maximize the satisfaction of human wants. Interference with market processes by government officials—whether lawful or illicit—was interpreted as not only inefficient but immoral."

"But beginning in the 1960’s, an adverse tide of public opinion began to rise against business… Frustration over the Vietnam War added fuel to the fires of discontent. Suddenly, consumerism, stock-holderism, racial equalitarianism, antimilitarism, environmentalism, and feminism became forces to be reckoned with by corporate managements. For the most part, they replaced the classical ‘isms’—[[w:Socialism | socialism, Communism, syndicalism, fascism—as the main driving forces seeking the reform of the American business system."

"Reformist critics comprise the majority of contemporary critics of American business. To a considerable extent, their demand is not for new or stricter governmental controls, but for attitudes and policies on the part of corporate leaders that are more responsive to public needs. Our society needs reformist critics and the author counts himself among them."

"Utopian critics reject both capitalism and authoritarian socialism and seek to establish new social orders based upon different human values.They believe that human nature can be radically changed. Individualistic striving for material gain is to be replaced by cooperative efforts to elevate the moral and cultural character of society. Wealth and income are to be shared according to need rather than according to productivity—an ideal not yet realized in any of the socialist countries. American-style capitalism and Soviet-style socialism equally err, they contend, in having hierarchical structures and in stressing material rewards; the difference between them are not significant."

"An institution is likely to be more searchingly appraised if attention is focused at the outset upon its faults rather than its virtues."

"The Hippies are nonviolent anarchists who withdraw from the mainstream of society into their own communes. They are apolitical, libertarian, anti-industrialist, and essentially parasitic upon society. They have a nostalgic yearning for the smaller, simpler social orders of the past… Feeling and intuition are claimed as the source of their attitudes rather than reason and intellect."

"The central them of Humanistic Marxism is the replacement, in the economy, of authoritarian penalties and material incentives with democratic processes and moral incentives…Great stress is laid upon an egalitarian distribution of income and wealth. Everyone is expected to perform some physical work… Corporations are maintained as state-owned facilities under joint government-worker control. Market competition and profit motivation are blunted or obliterated. Authoritarian political methods, officially shunned, are used in some degree to stifle dissent and to enforce industrial discipline provided by market competition in the United States."

"The in property disputes moved slowly if that was the wish, as it often was, of the . He was allowed three formal (always accepted) s, excuses why he could not appear before his case was declared forfeit."

"Whatever the was—or continues to be—it still remains with us in its original form. Since the advent of s in the 1940s bubonic plague is very rare in the U.S.A., although there are still substantial outbreaks in eastern Asia, especially India. But in the 1980s there were three documented cases in the hill country of eastern California. One woman came down with the bubonic plague after she ran over a squirrel with a power mower. It is likely that the disease entered California at some port on a traveling on a ship from eastern Asia."

"Is historical writing to be addressed to a small group of academics or is it to be communicated to the educated world at large? I stand with the latter proposition, that history books are communicable to and accessible by the educated public at large. The ultimate task and obligation of a historian is to bring this kind of illumination to as wide an audience as possible."

"In 1302 Dante left in exile, accused of graft, embezzlement, opposition to the pope, and disturbance of the peace of Florence. Dante's two greatest works, ' and the Divine Comedy, were both written during his exile. The shock of expulsion from his native city and his bitterness and disappointment forced Dante to reconsider his views on the individual and society, and these two works exhibit a maturity and profundity that is lacking in his early lyric poetry."

"Despite its s and popes and kings, tenth-century Europe had a patrimonial, nucleated society based on the domination by great aristocratic families over everything (even the church) within their own territorial domains. Bastard sons and younger brothers of the local lords became s or s of local churches and . Religion, as well as government and economy and law, was dominated by the great families. Everything belonged to the lords, who became more greedy and aggressive—particularly on their own estates—as the years went by."

"[The separate electorates led enfranchised Muslims and members of other sections to] vote communally, think communally, listen only to communal election speeches, judge the delegates communally, look for constitutional and other reforms only in terms of more relative communal power, and express their grievances communally."

"Each takes the long view , dealing in millennia , and the cultural view , dealing in values and ideas and their historical outworking . The first flees from Indian - ness , and would extraterritorialize even Mohenjodaro ( linking the ancient Indus - valley civilization with Sumer and Elam ) as well as the Tāj ( ' Yet though left in India , the monuments and buildings of Agra and Delhi are entirely outside the " Indian ” tradition and are an essential heritage and part of Pakistani culture ' — and omits from consideration altogether quite major matters less easily disposed of (such as Asoka’s reign, and the whole of East Pakistan)…” The other two , on the other hand , seek for the meaning of Muslim culture within the complex of Indian ‘unity in diversity’ as an integral component.”"

"Battles require courage. You cannot go to war while being assured that nothing dire will befall you. That’s the reality; there’s no way to mitigate the risk. Now, you don’t have to be a frivolous martyr! You could be strategic as to when to intervene, when not to intervene, how to frame it. In that sense, you can be strategic. But there’s no avoiding it."

"It is that unique constellation of genes that makes my personhood, that allows me to say ‘I don’t care what the costs may or may not be; I cannot go to sleep tonight knowing that I could have said something, but didn’t.‘"

"There is no better way to box stupidity than to satirize it."

"To be against evolutionary psychology is about as intelligent as to be against physics or against chemistry. It’s such a breathtakingly idiotic position."

"“...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional “victims” who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.”"

"Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing. By that logic, I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate - to stop breathing."

"The magnitude of Fundy tides may be seen as having been reached by a balance between a dissipative mechanism, with assumed quadratic frictional forces, and an energy imparting mechanism in the deep ocean where work done by the tide raising force is proportional to distance travelled and hence to the first power of amplitude. Further, it now appears that the second and third North Atlantic modes are those primarily stimulated by the Fundian resonance. To represent these processes within one model both the continental shelf shallows and oceanic areas must be included, as well as their zone of interaction across the continental shelf."

"The mathematical theory of the Navier-Stokes equations has centered upon basic questions of the existence, uniqueness, and regularity of solutions of the initial value problem for fluid motions in all of space or in a subdomain of finite or infinite extent. Such solutions, when they can be constructed or shown to exist, represent flows of a viscous incompressible fluid. In two space dimensions the theorem of existence, uniqueness and regularity was essentially completed thirty years ago by the work of Leray ..., Lions ... and Ladyzhenskaya ... who showed that a smooth solution of the initial value problem exists for arbitrary square-integrable initial data. For viscous, incompressible fluid motions in three space dimensions, ... the theorem of existence uniqueness and regularity has been proved only for sufficiently small initial data or in special cases such as cylindrical symmetry that essentially reduce the problem to two space dimensions in some sense."

"The theory of harmonic forms in Riemannian manifolds may be regarded as a generalization of potential theory. It is therefore natural that the boundary value problems of this theory which generalize the classical Dirichlet and Neumann problems should play an important role in the theory."

"The propagation of elastic waves in a homogeneous solid is governed by a hyperbolic system of three linear second-order partial differential equations with constant coefficients. When the solid is also isotropic, the form of these equations is well known and provides the foundation of the conventional theory of elasticity (Love 1944). The explicit solution of the initial value, or Cauchy, problem for the isotropic case was found by Poisson, and in a different way by Stokes (1883). If the initial disturbance is sharp and concentrated, the resulting disturbance at a field point will consist of an initial sharp pressure wave, a continuous wave for a certain period, and a final sharp shear wave. The disturbance then ceases."

"I had never seen Gundul threaten or assault a woman, although he frequently charged male assistants. The cook was screaming hysterically. I thought, 'He's trying to kill her.' I began to realize that Gundul did not intend to harm the cook, but had something else in mind. The cook stopped struggling. 'It's all right,' she murmured. She lay back in my arms, with Gundul on top of her. Gundul was very calm and deliberate. He raped the cook. As he moved rhythmically back and forth, his eyes rolled upward to the heavens. I was in shock. Gundul let the cook go, stood up, and soundlessly, moved off the feeding platform into the trees. It was over just like that."

"... visitor to take the dugout back to Camp Leakey for help. My repeated blows had no effect on Gundul; but neither did he fight back very aggressively. I began to realize that Gundul did not intend to harm the cook, but had something else in mind. The cook stopped struggling. "It's all right," she murmured. She lay back in my arms, with Gundul on top of her. Gundul was very calm and deliberate. He raped the cook. As he moved rhythmically back and forth, his eyes rolled upward to the heavens. I was in shock. I felt as though this were happening to other people somewhere else, and I was watching from a distance. I have no idea how much time passed."

"A handful of scholars try for the more ambitious option, viz. identifying a common origin of Chinese and IE, a kind of “Sino-European” stage in linguistic development from which Chinese and IE went their separate ways. Pulleyblank (1993:106-107) upholds “the possibility of a genetic connection between Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European” all while admitting that it is “inconsistent with a European or Anatolian homeland for the Indo-Europeans but it is much less so with the Kurgan theory”, esp. considering that the Kurgan (“grave-hill”) culture of the steppe “was not the result of local evolution in that region but had its source in an intrusion from an earlier culture farther east”. But his and other tentative hypotheses of a deep kinship of Chinese with Indo-European, as also with North-Caucasian and Austronesian, have been refuted in sufficient measure by Vovin (1997) and will not detain us here. Of course at a time depth of Nostratic or whichever prehistoric kinship, many connections can be thought up, but to the same extent, geographical movements of populations may have taken place over the same millennia. Therefore, even plausible or proven linguistic connections at such time-depth cannot decide the geographical land of origin that interests us here."

"Edwin Pulleyblank claims to have reconstructed a number of rather abstract similarities in the phonetics and morphology of PIE and Sino-Tibetan. Though he fails to back this structural similarity up with any (even a single) lexical similarity, he confidently dismisses as a “prejudice” the phenomenon that “for a variety of reasons, the possibility, of a genetic relationship between these two language families strikes most people as inherently most improbable.” He believes that “there is no compelling reason from the point of view of either linguistics or archaeology to rule out the possibility of a genetic connection between Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European. Such a connection is certainly inconsistent with a European or Anatolian homeland for the Indo-Europeans but it is much less so with the Kurgan theory”, esp. considering that the Kurgan culture “was not the result of local evolution in that region but had its source in an intrusion from an earlier culture farther east”. This is of course very interesting, (and it deserves being repeated that the Kurgan culture came from farther east), but: “It will be necessary to demonstrate the existence of a considerable number of cognates linked by regular sound correspondences. To do so in a way that will convince the doubters on both sides of the equation will be a formidable task.”"

"While all governments, in varying degrees, try to muzzle free speech or physically intimidate journalists, what is radically different under the Modi dispensation is the wider climate of intolerance fostered by the combustible combination of religion and nationalism aided by state power. This has led to unprecedented attacks against religious minorities on accusations like possessing/eating beef or the killings of those who are critics of the government. Dissent and criticism of government has been construed as an anti-national activity clearly demonstrated by the 40 sedition cases filed in 2016."

"Jokes making fun of Mr. Modi, or Facebook posts of lay citizens, and films criticizing his government are met with police complaints, legal cases, and threats by the ruling party and its larger ideological family. BJP-led state governments have also introduced draconian bills to curb free speech. India’s democracy is at a critical juncture. After the Emergency declared by the Congress government in 1975 which legally curbed press freedoms, we have not witnessed such levels of abnegation of free speech. (The otherwise-activist Indian judiciary too has maintained a deafening silence on the judge’s death.) It would not be wrong to consider this present conjuncture as marking a deterioration in that regard."

"When the largest democracy in the world, and the oldest one in the Global South, displays authoritarian tendencies betraying the promise of its founding fathers, it has implications beyond India."

"But the more damaging development has been the role of the mainstream media in the face of government attempts to muzzle it. Just as in the judge story, there was silence about the corruption story in the media. Even when there was coverage, it was more about the defamation case filed by Mr. Shah rather than the merits of story itself. The rare television channel that has sometimes been critical of the Modi government and faced its wrath for doing so, succumbed, pulling down reportage about the Shah story. This is an extraordinary level of submissiveness displayed by the media. This must also be read in the context of the largest democracy’s abysmal ranking in the World . Last year, India ranked 133 out of 18 countries. And this year, it has declined to 136. Recently, the main mode of against journalists doing investigative stories has been through Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation (SLAPPs), like the one filed by Mr. Shah. Journalists face severe challenges, including physical violence and threat to life, in carrying out their work."

"All the fantastical claims are coupled with the fact that Mr Modi has not given a single press conference, or an unscripted interview. This makes it impossible to question the PM on critical policy matters, and his grasp of them. [...] Ultimately, I see this as a part of the greatest exercise in anti-intellectualism, propaganda/fake news seen in Independent India, in which it is normal to defend the most absurd statement, and in which it has become impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood."

"Much of Narendra Modi's legitimacy among the Indian public comes from the perception that, unlike most of the political class, he is personally beyond reproach when it comes to financial corruption. Moreover, it was he who declared a war on corruption, the most emphatic example of which, the government claims, is the demonetization exercise. But Mr. Modi's silence on the corruption story finally exposed the hollowness of the government’s crusade against corruption, which in any case, has so far amounted to nothing more than targeted attacks against rival politicians. In politics, perceptions play a huge role. This is the first time that Mr. Modi's carefully crafted image as incorruptible and as a crusader against corruption has taken a considerable beating. WhatsApp messages, tweets and Facebook posts were rife with jokes about Mr. Shah’s businesses, and Mr. Modi’s silence."

"So, the emerging “manufacture of consent” in favor of the ruling government does not happen only through active participation, or on criticism by the media, but also as a result of the egregious threats that the media personnel face."

"There could not be a more grisly method, even when it involves no violence, to cover up ghastly crimes committed by a people than to indulge in the fallacy of false equivalence. In this fallacy, two incomparable things are compared and declared to be equal because there are always two sides to the story. What is going on in the aftermath of the worst in Delhi since 1984, in which 34 Muslims and 15 Hindus have died, is precisely this fallacy. Thus, here, both Hindus and Muslims are at fault for the violence; hence the refusal to call it a or state-backed violence against Muslims despite all the evidence. completely obscures the root causes of a problem. It instead focuses on the immediate and the superficial, and is employed by well-intentioned observers as well as supporters when on the defensive. Thus, six years of relentless hate-mongering against Muslims is seen to be of no consequence in creating an absolutely inflammable social sphere."

"These are the times when on the most watched primetime television news debates every night, it is absolutely normal for the anchors and BJP spokespersons to call Muslim panelists terrorists and anti-nationals. [...] These are the times when a Union minister can declare that Rahul Gandhi is the son of a Muslim. Of course, the insinuation is that being a Muslim is a crime – plain and simple. To focus only on the Kapil Mishras, s, and the Parvesh Vermas, as if they are some elements which have gone rogue, is to miss that they are totally in sync with the discourse authored and sanctioned by none less than the prime minister of the Indian republic. Whenever confronted with this stark reality, Hindutva supporters respond with whataboutery."

"Other than these, the list of Mr Modi's gaffes is quite long. But again, what is crucial to note is that there has not been any scrutiny of this at all by the mainstream media. In this case, the biggest question to be asked is whether the PM actually ordered the Balakot air strike on the basis of his knowledge of radars, overriding military experts? In that case, it is shocking, and dangerous, for it is a national security issue."

"Generally, the death of a judge, in what seem to be mysterious circumstances, while presiding over a case against the second most powerful person in the country, and the closest associate of the head of the government, would be make prime-time television in a democracy. Similarly, the allegations of corruption against the family of the same person would have garnered media attention. But recent events in India prove otherwise. [...] Despite the explosive nature of the story and its potentially unprecedented implications for Indian democracy (in independent India's history, to my knowledge, there is no instance of a judge being assassinated) there was a stunned silence in the mainstream and big media, especially, the English-language television channels that have a disproportionate influence in the setting of the political ."

"As examples from history show, when jokes start circulating about a powerful leader, cracks in political legitimacy begin to appear."

"To place the responsibility of violence on the illiterate, poor and unemployed mobs is to completely miss the pathologies amongst us, the privileged and the powerful, which are the greatest enablers of violence."