Peace is War: Intention, Intentionality and Ardhanareshwar.

The speeches made on the Nobel Peace Prize night are, by all accounts on the web, of the typein which every body tried to identify the main significance of the award to Obama. It did not help if Obama’s peace prize justified war efforts in Afghanistan as "Peace is war".

Obama’s speech showed good intentions. Ask the Dalai Lama! The Dalai Lama seems to have said “... some of his (Obama’s) policies have been a disaster” and “… it doesn’t matter. I know Obama is a very able person.”

I think I will agree with the Dalai Lama on that.

“Poor Obama” a lama (with a single “L”) said. “His father is dead you know. His mother is also dead. He is a little boy. He is only 40 years old. He is only half the Dalai Lama’s age. At that age everybody thinks he knows! As he grows up and gets better advice he will surely deserve the prize. But he has good intentions. He is not like Cleopatra, you know. Custom does stale his finite wit and age does wither his inertial looks.

But one thing I must say… his English is good. It is much better than that of George Bush! It is even better than mine even though English is not my language.

The Nobel Committee also has good intentions. They are also young and it has too many ladies. The chairman of the Nobel committee clearly said in front of Obama that they had good intentions. They pushed Obama to do peaceful things! What can they do if Obama thought peace requires war? As you know somebody said that the road to hell is full of good intentions. It’s perfectly true! I have been to Tibet so many times!”

Thus finished the unusual lama from Tibet; if we are to believe him, he once carried a Lama (with a capital “L”).

Obama’s peace prize makes the transition from giving a prize for past performance to giving a prize for future intentions.

How does one get to understand the nature of intentions? As somebody said on the internet “Has he (Obama) no internal gyroscope to center himself on morality and ethics?”

The Nobel Committee and Obama and the world may have been better off if they had a physical or mathematical principle to understand the nature of intentions.


Intentionality

I once had the good fortune of conversing a few times over the dinner table with a South African astrophysicist/cosmologist. He had Stephen Hawking among his fellow students and the two had written the definitive work on “The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time”. The dinner table chats were not because of my science, but because of my wife’s yoga contacts with his wife Mary Ellis.

George Ellis was looking (this was in Trieste around the 1990s) for scientists to teach science in schools in South Africa. He wanted to know that if they were to teach, what they would teach. I don’t know if it was in response to something I mumbled, but I think he said something like “… if it is not directly relevant to the daily life of the local people it need not be taught in their schools, the first levels of their awareness of their environment.” It is not how you teach or do science that is important but the intent with which you do it shapes your science.

Description and quantification of intention is important in our day to day life.

Many years later I happened to read Ellis’s essay on “Physics, complexity and causality” in Nature (435, 743 , 2005). George Ellis gave a hierarchy of complexity (I guess he meant mathematical complexity) in their structure with chemistry < quantum theory < molecular biology < neuro-physics. As a physicist he, of course, then makes the statement that “… in a reductionist point of view, physics is all there is.” and “Particle physics is the foundational subject underlying … all the others.”

The feature phrase in Ellis’ article (for the purposes of this blog) is “Even if we had a satisfactory fundamental physics ‘theory of everything’ … physics would still fail to explain the outcomes of human purpose…” and thereby provides an incomplete description of the world. “Physics has nothing to say about the intentionality…” behind the objects that dominate our environment such as “… football matches, tea-pots, or jumbo-jet aircraft” or “… beaver dam building and the dance of bees.” Ellis concludes that the “… challenge to physics is to develop a realistic description of causality in truly complex hierarchical structures…”

This concern about physics and human development is probably of importance to physicists and a future development of humans perhaps. It may not be of concern to the average humans per se, especially when these theories are not in their consciousness (their subconscious intuition could still be important).

Bertrand Russell famously said (in his book “Our knowledge of the external world”) on the discovery of amoeba “A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress – though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.”

What we will be (not seriously, I hope) worried about in this blog is the way one may qualitatively understand the physics of Ellis’ “intentionality” through known principles of present day physics in a manner which I present as a matter of physics.

Social sciences and psychology have already taken the art to an important level with the creation of the phrase “spin doctor”. This phrase is applied to people around political personages who devise strategies to make palatable responses for hard political situations.

Spin doctoring is now a powerful tool and profession meant to guide people away as far away from the truth as they know it to the way they should know it; this is for the greater good of the world (the bourses) that provides food and security for the ordinary man. Morals have nothing to do with it. You only have to spin it around so that it does not look amoral.

The spin in spin doctoring stems from the phrase “spinning a yarn” as, say, Mark Twain would. The “spin” of spinning a yarn or the spin doctor has nothing to do with the spin of physics once one discounts the element of twist to a story that changes the perspective or direction.

We will be spinning a yarn on the way a spin of physics can be used to understand the dynamics of intentionality.

There may not be as yet a discussion that puts a spin on intentionality from one’s understanding the physics of the Universe. Without being deliberately irreverent to the gods, this blog will spin a yarn that would lead to the Ardhanareshwar (half man, half woman) aspect of Shiva, the creator as well destructor of the Universe.

Wheel of Intentionality – I-chakhra

WARNING: MAY BE NECESSARY TO HAVE A PINCH OF SALT NEARBY.

During my rather discouraging career in science I have often worried (pre-Ellis) about its relevance in the scale of complexity in life; it must now (post-Ellis, 2005) include intentionality of science. We would discuss human intentionality making the assumption that given a chance other animals can be as bad as humans. They are already good.

We take a long-time view of the universe when, as we may have learnt from others, that there is a cycle of change.

I have shown in Fig 1 my version of the chakra (wheel) which I have cooked up now and quite happily display since it could be trivial to find me wrong. It is possible that the property of the axis out of the plane is intentionality. As usual, the cycle (in events) would go one notch higher or lower, each time it completes a cycle. I do not know whether we can have a left-hand or right-hand rule as they have in electro-magnetism, but see later.

The colours blue and red should correspond to (roughly) opposite nature of the complexities. The colour blue should be an unquantifiable state of the mind which is more an expression of intention arising from (subconscious?) experience. The colour red involves properties which can usually be expressed in terms of falsifiable (in the Karl Popper sense; don’t prove, just find a false aspect to criticize a statement) and quantifiable equations (mathematical as well as chemical).

Apocalypse is here used as a special access of a disclosure to few privileged people; in modern terms this would be insider trading. Apocalypse is not a post-knowledge empirical quality that characterizes chemistry, but a prior knowledge of the outcome of an experience.

There are (curved) spokes connecting these opposites in Fig 1 because, I think, that’s the Yin and the Yang that keeps the world going.

One does not know which way the cycle goes, clockwise or anticlockwise. It is likely that the direction of the cycle depends on the rate of change of intentionality with time. I suspect it could even reverse at philosophy or need. Taking US, for example, going clockwise from philosophy would probably result from changes in intentionality in US science policies (the rest of the world would be following, at least at present). It encourages defense spending such as in the policies of Reagan and Bush. The direction could reverse at “need” because of a change in intentionality with a change in government --- say from Bush to Obama especially since Obama is saddled with a peace prize which one expects him to use destructively in shaping the climate policy using the profits of war.

The (only?) positive aspect of this representation is that it is intuitive. We don’t really know why the “hub” is there except that it may be needed for the vishnuchakra.

We may call the whole intentionality wheel as I-chakra and the spokes of the chakra as I-strings. The advantage of I-strings is that one may be able to quantify events in blue from the quantification of events in red --- if one knows how to map from blue to red.

“… and the central decussation, the wondrous connection of the several faculties conjointly in one substance.”

One is not sure what the value system is for quantifying the magnitude of intentionality. One may, however, allot a positive or negative sign to the value of intentionality. One may take the sign of intentionality to be positive if it is consistent with some internal moral standard of the people concerned (such as the Ten Commandments of Christians(?)).For example, in the present value system of most religions, going clockwise or anticlockwise from philosophy to need in Fig 1 would be in the negative direction (hypocrisy does not come in here). This would be a problem.

Value of Intentionality

One lobe of his brain wants to study facts and test hypotheses on the basis of them, the other is fascinated by mystic symbols and analogies.
Thomas Browne in “Psedodoxia Epidemica” (1646)

Physics cannot define intentionality. As my catholic catechism master impressed upon us in my Roman Catholic school, we require moral science which gives a value system to our intentions except that even a morality has its intentionality (if that makes any sense). We could use moral values, although I suspect that these values are a bit archaic in these hip-hop and rapper days --- even (or especially?) when you are, say, Tiger Woods. I guess the intentionality in physics could (for the naïve, at least) correspond to much of the standards or ethics in science.

The problem may be resolved if one could borrow from the language of dielectrics in physics. There would be positive and negative dielectric constant space. In real materials of positive dielectric constant, opposite charges attract each other. In meta-materials of negative dielectric constant like charges attract.

One may consider the left hand rule in electromagnetism and its mirror image.

If we consider a clock-wise intentionality “current” the sign of intentionality would be one direction in the blue region (say, left-hand direction to the right), and in the opposite direction, say right-hand direction in red to the left, for the same “intentionality” direction of the current.

We may consider the blue and red properties to be value systems which are opposite in character in some way. For instance the red space may be considered to be the real physics space while the blue space would correspond to the metaphysics space. Thus Intentionality is positive on going clockwise from materials to philosophy in physics space it changes sign on going from physics (red) to metaphysics space (blue). There could then be a mapping to the change in sign of dielectric constant in the space in Fig 1 as well. We don’t know whether there is a singularity at the cross-over (“going mad” as they say, for instance)

Even if everything in the universe stems from a primordial energy (most people see blue light) a proper analysis of this energy is sometimes simplified by splitting this energy in a matter-antimatter relationship which annihilates each other to give the energy.

Our positive and negative world now could as well be one of destruction and creation.

This is where Shiva is likely to come in as Creator and Destructor. In human relationships it could as well be man and woman or as left-and right-brain activity. Shiva appears as half-man and half-woman in his form of Ardhanareshwar where the feminine and masculine energies are merged into one (represented in real space as in the madhubani painting in the inset of Fig 2) with Shiva as the male forming the right half and Parvathi as the left half. Actually, Shiva and Parvathi (as shakti) take their form when Ardhanareshwar is split apart. In this sense Ardhanareshwar is the energy or photon and Shiva and Parvathi could represent virtual quasiparticle aspects of this reality.

PS
Google search did not find the phrase “quasiparticle aspects of reality” which means the phrase does not exist in real space? Hence it is not true? Will it become true if this blog is published and Google Search finds it?

A Tale of Two Nobel Promises. Part I: Peace at Speeds faster than Light

For some reason the Nobel Prizes for Peace as well as Chemistry struck similar if different chords in my social awareness syndrome. Both instilled the feelings that arise when one is not prepared for the occasion simply because there was not a kind of déjà vu feeling that comes from experiencing an event that has been anticipated or a sort of “previous experience” satisfyingly fulfilled.

The Nobel Prize for peace has always been known as an award that serves a greater political purpose and has been distinguished by those who did not receive it (Gandhi, for example). Nevertheless, the recipient of the Nobel Peace prize has usually been prévenu even if many times sufficiently maladroit. (We sometimes use French to make sure we may not mean what we say).

I have written two blogs on the Nobel Prizes for Peace and Chemistry, to emphasize the way promises are made and problems in keeping them.

It seems to me that this is the general nature of appreciation of problems. There is the perception, looking at a seemingly vital part of complex machinery, that it holds the key to its functioning --- mal or dys ---simply from its looks.

I am reminded of the man whose pendulum clock had stopped. He took the most visible part of his clock, the pendulum, to have it repaired.


Peace as a Contrast.

One of my father’s constant refrains that has stuck in my mind is the lines from Rabindranath Tagore which goes something like
“I asked for sadness in my life so that I could experience joy
You gave me joy, and now I can only experience sadness.”
In the final analysis, never mind Gandhi, or Tolstoy or Thoreau, our perception of peace is the way we perceive war as the absence of peace. In this thoroughly materialized world, peace is the absence of greed, even if it is sometimes a seemingly innocuous thing as, say, a lady love. Remember the legend of “the not terribly manly” Paris of Troy who wanted as his own the face of Helen of Sparta and launched a thousand ships. This is implied in Tagore’s words
“I would ask for still more,
if I had the sky with all its star
and the world with all its endless riches;
But I would be content
with the smallest corner of the earth
if only she were mine.”
In the case of Obama we have no idea about what is small and innocuous for him. He and his wife have looked gracious and elegant and have caught the approving attention of the fashion industry. As columnist Walter Russell Mead wrote “He (Obama) is at least as smart as Carter, as good on a podium as Reagan, and as good at press wranglings as JFK. But all this and more would not bring him from an Illinois Senate seat to the White House in five years without lady luck.” What one means by “lady luck” is the ability to look convincing on the “idiot box”..

Obama did have considerable luck! Because of his limited public record, he had no negative political record that he could be dragged down with, unlike his main democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Nobody can understand why Hillary did not batter her husband and his cigar habits with White House interns.

Obama, the good looking unknown, did not have to do anything positive to have a positive record. He just had to look like one who could be given the benefit of doubt for a positive record. “Positive with respect to what?” George Bush? Easy! He had such a negative impression! It has been often said that the Nobel Peace Prize for Barrack Obama is because the Nobel Committee acted on the European wish that they could vote in the American election. A piece in our local Pune Mirror of Oct 11 2009 with the by line Veda, Yada! expresses it best perhaps.

All said and done, young Obama should have said no to the Peace Prize.

Obama has not given any inkling of being innocent of the Bush-like manipulation in the months he has been in office. He has worked for everything without working for anything. He has not got Burma’s pro-independence leader Aung San Suu Kyi released nor helped in establishing the identity of the American swimmer that put her back into confinement; the closure of Guantanomo Bay prison ordered on the second day of his presidential term is yet to close. The Gitmo issue is not politically important now for the voters in USA who are more worried about healthcare; Gitmo is surely a positive issue for the peace prize should some Arab influence matter. Nobel prizes require lobbying and an American President could require some Saudi lobbying.

One may even suspect that Obama chaired the 2009 UN nations sessions on global peace to enhance his credentials for the imminent decision on the Peace Prize. There are some who have joked that Obama used the money meant for lobbying for Chicago for the 2016 Olympics to lobby for the Nobel Peace Prize for himself.

It is clear that Obama’s performance as an individual would not have got him the Peace Prize or any other prize, if he did not have the power of an American President. It seems also plausible that it would not have happened with another committee or, at least, another chairman of the Nobel Peace Committee.

The Nobel Peace Committee is headed by one Thorbjørn Jagland, President of the Netherland Storting, an MP from the Labour Party, and, for a brief while, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. He has been for the last ten years a Vice President of Socialist International advocating far-left policies, has been chairman of the Oslo Center that works with the (Jimmy) Carter Center which intervenes in conflicts and initiate peace talks. He is now elected as the 13th Secretary General of the Council of Europe. The Peace Committee has four other ladies with considerably less public import.

Jagland (Fig 2, top right) is born of working class parents and his family name was changed from Johansen (the same name as the boxer, Ingemar Johansson, Fig 2 bottom right, who knocked out my boxing hero of that time, Floyd Patterson) to hide his background. One of his pictures, seen frequently on the internet (Fig 2, top right) resembles that of a tough scrapper. He also looks like Johansson, the boxer, as well as Daniel Craig (Fig 2 top left) the current James Bond.

Daniel Craig is supposed to have said “The question I keep asking myself while playing the role is, ‘Am I the good guy or just a bad guy who works for the good side?’ Bond’s role, after all, is that of an assassin when you come down to it. …” This is the question all Presidents, US or not, must be asking themselves.

Jagland is also known for his gaffe involving the Norwegian TV Hostess Synnöve Svabö shown on Norwegian Television, NRK, in 1998. The picture was taken while Jagland was serving as Prime Minister. This picture would have knocked an American President out. In Scandinavia it is probably just laughed off. It is said that Svabö 'trapped' the Prime Minister. How unfair! Still we may be provoked to ask: How willingly was he trapped? What are the other kind of “traps” he may prefer?

One wonders what it would take for a Nobel Committee to be influenced the promise of power and of influence of an American President who is still in Office. The earlier American-President Nobel Laureate who got the Peace Prize for the work they did while in office, Theodore Roosevelt (President at 43 years of age, 1901-1909) and Woodrow Wilson (the only President with a Ph. D.), were the head of a country at a time when Europe was at the centre of Power and many countries were in direct conflict with another while jockeying for strategic geopolitical positioning and power.

Theodore Roosevelt, who was an early conservationist, took initiative in opening the International Court of Arbitration at The Hague, which helped in settling many international disputes by arbitration including that between USA and Mexico on California; he directly mediated between Russia and Japan.

It took Roosevelt only one year to get the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his work on the Russian-Japanese peace treaty in 1905.

Woodrow Wilson’s Nobel Prize in 1919 took less than a year since forming in 1919 the League of Nations.

Ninety years later, Obama’s Nobel Prize seems to have come earlier than his Nobel work. In this sense his Nobel Prize may be thought to have come faster than the speed of light.

I remember Professor S. Ramaseshan of Bangalore, commenting on the rate of growth of journals in the library, saying that there would be no violation of laws of Physics if the rate exceeded the speed of light, as no information is being conveyed. The signal from Obama’s Peace Prize has the danger of dissipating into cacophonous noise.

Now that we are letting a Time Machine scenario of a future action determining the basis for a past Nobel Prize, we have an opportunity to suggest a recipe for the Nobel Prize to Obama. Actually we may make as many recipes and eventually hope that a collective wisdom will prevail. It is, of course, not clear, whether we require making it before the next Nobel Peace Prize.

What is the peace we seek? Theodore Roosevelt has written that “peace is generally good in itself … it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism and anarchy …”

I have jotted down a few aspects that could contribute to a good thing by itself. These ideas are based on the distribution of the early Nobel Peace Prizes mopre than a hundred years ago. They were given to founders of societies with various peaceful aims. They were the Red Cross, or the French society for peace between nations, secretaries of International Peace Bureau, secretary of International Arbitration League, President of Permanent International Peace Bureau, President Lombard League of Peace, Founder of Swedish Peace and Arbitration League, and so on.

He could allow Holbrooke to stir up an India-Pakistan conflict (preferably nuclear) before bringing peace and Obama get a Peace Prize (á la Roosevelt) for bringing peace during a nuclear war between the remnant Indo-Pak populations.

Alternatively, Obama could start something, say, on the lines of Foundations for Elimination of International Terror or a Society for the Psychological Dissipation of Suicide Bombers and get his prize á la Wilson.

Times have, however, changed. The more visible threats are those from population increase, global warming and so on besides discounting a large continent splitting asteroid impact. The new, paradigm-shifting proposals could include the following:-

i) Forming a Society for the Banning of Exotic Goods. This will reduce the energy cost of wrappings and packaging and transportation and export-import of non-local food and consumer products born out of advertising.

ii) Forming a Society for Supporting the Predictions of Gaia hypothesis as proposed by James Eprahim Lovelock now 90 years old and looking 60. If he does it fast enough, Obama may have to share the Nobel Prize with Lovelock in Medicine or Chemistry? Lovelock had said “…natural world would welcome nuclear waste as the perfect guardian against greedy developers…” or “radiation … is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets… nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste carbon dioxide”.

iii) Create a Society for Natural Living and Death. No mass entertainment, no recorded music, no virtual anything, no flying machines on land or air, no synthesized medicine, no cooking, no lung and heart machine, no ventilator.

From such a viewpoint, the promise (see Wikapaedia) of a future Nobel work for a past Nobel Laureate (who is the vital part of the prize) is that he “… undertakes in the future to render some service, gift or assurance to the others…”. Amen. ! ?

There is also the Jewish Asmachta, which is a conditional promise made with no actual intention of keeping it. It’s not that simple for Jews (see Torah101.blogspot.com, May 19 2006).
“If the people who are meant to use the asmachtas
are already so well versed in halacha
as to be able to use the asmachtas,
why would they need the asmachtas
as reminders..”
Yes, indeed!

What it means is that once you have the Nobel Prize, do you need the actual Nobel work?

Obama! Obama! Obama Mama Mia!

There is a song from my high school days (late fifties) from the film Parvarish with Raj Kapoor and Mehmood and sung by Mohammed Rafi and Manna Dey. Freely translated, the song goes (mama being mother’s brother or any male guest) something like this:

“O mama! O mama! O mama-mama-mama!
Yahoo! Yahoo! Yahoo-yahoo-yahoo
The household is in a spin
Because of us and our din
Don’t get lost in the racket within.”

Now we yahoo for Obama’s win! As they say: Maan! He is Kewl! But what about the spin and the din and the racket within?

The Obamania confronting us every evening at prime time is becoming a little difficult to bear, what with the Saas-Bahu serial being withdrawn, and the ever-controversial Ganguly retiring from the cricket team.

It is good to see Bush off. What are we getting in turn? Does anybody know?

Obama has promised CHANGE. What CHANGE for what malaise?

As we all know subconsciously, the world is too complex for any single world leader to run it wisely and independently. Decisions are made for world leaders by smaller and smaller groups which are more and more dependent on computer projections from necessarily incomplete/untested computer programs. Scholarship, in any case, is a hindrance in making quick decisions regarding corporate profits as all governments must now do in this age of globalization.

Considerable faith has been put on Obama’s ability to deliver because of his colour and not because of his spoken record. He is in danger of being regarded as a Methodist hymn-singing Uncle Tom; as well-behaved (WASP-ish) African-Americans, such as Colin Powell or Condolezza Rice has been.

Times may have changed since the time (1852) when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written. The attitude of the colour-independent masters towards colour-independent salaried slaves in various ways from workshops to HR to IT to research may some times still be described as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (chapter 19):
… I may steal all he has, and keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy. Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable, for me, I may set Quashy to do it. Because I don’t like work, Quashy shall work. Because the sun burns me, Quashy stall stay in the sun. Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that I may walk over dry shod …all the days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at last, as I find convenient. This, I take to be what slavery is.

Independent of our colour and social status many of us have the plight of slaves (Quashy). When one is governing to consolidate monetary profits the justification of slavery is dressed in various languages of show business (Let’s Party!). The mission of Obama may just be the delivery of slaves of all colours. He may also as well say as St. Clare did in Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
… what can a man of honorable and humane feelings do, but shut his eyes all he can, and harden his heart? … … I can’t turn knight errant and undertake to redress every individual case I see.

How did Obama win? There could be two views.

The first is that the Republicans lost deliberately. In real terms the victory of Obama is more a reflection of the disenchantment with Bush than an approval of Obama’s persona.

It is difficult, however, to imagine that Bush’s Republican Party, with its army of advisers, could have willingly brought itself to such a sorry state, that a Democratic candidate could have won with so little record of public service. The Republican Party leaders backed out of the nomination race early. There was no visible support from their party to the non-Washington Candidates!

On the other hand, Bush could claim to have achieved most of his stated American objectives. He has consolidated hold on oil in Iraq; Iran is afraid to posture; he has subsumed India’s non-alignment; he has silenced the entire Arab world’s voice on Israel.

Giving the “devil his due” Bush and his cronies may even have engineered the financial crisis to mop up profits on the stock market, which has been allowed to be driven to crazy heights. Who cares about winning or losing an election when you can manage a 700 billion dollar bailout. They could have known (say, in 2006) that a financial crisis was looming. Just hindsight the way our Tatas, and Mallya and HCL were seduced into buying up big companies!

The second view point available on the net is that the Obama campaign was properly crafted using a methodology that evolved on the way to the 2004 election. At that time an Aziz Poonawalla started a blog called Deans Nation that developed for the first time a strong a network through the net (netroot) that got the net-savvy younger generation in support for Howard Dean. It made a strong impression and Dean was an early front runner with strong anti-Bush sentiments. Dean lost media support once he (loudly) sounded anti-establishment. But Dean had got the message.

Dean saw to it that he became part of the Democratic Party Establishment as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee when he used his netroot experience to raise funds from millions of small donors of different hues (the rainbow coalition). He developed a “50-state” strategy to introduce Democratic policies to voters in Republican states. His strategy to get Barrack Obama elected as a candidate for the Democratic party using the Internet surprised and ambushed Hillary and Bill Clinton’s advisers.

So who will be running the country? Obama? or Dean’s Internet? Howard Dean sounded ominously self-congratulatory on CNN after the election. Obama’s men have started taking the credit without mentioning Howard Dean.

Who really gets the credit for the happy Democratic tunes? Will it be Obama or Howard Dean?

It reminds me of that lovely song “Sam’s Song” sung (Italian) Dean Martin and (Afro-American) Sammy Davies Jr. (I never found out who Sammy Davis Sr was). The lyrics of that song can perhaps be (writing Obam instead of Sam)

Dean: Here’s a Happy tune they call it Dean’s song
Obama: I’m saying, Dean, this is Obam’s song
Dean: Obam, you’re just a ham:
Obama: But Dean, here’s the scam
The song is named after Obam
Dean: Obam who?
Obama: Obama Hussein
Dean: Oh
May I say with pride where I reside
They call it Dean’s song
Obama: And that’s quite a group you have going for you.
Dean: There’s no bigger choir that you could hire for singing Dean’s song.

The saving grace is that Obama is handsome (watchable) with a good voice (hearable) and Gandhi’s Mickey Mouse ears (see picture on top) --- he cannot be evil. He has a little bit of many nations and many religions.

Other than that there is little we know of Obama. As his wife, Michelle, says “It helps that he is cute”. Like Ronald Reagan?! Is he going to be just a coloured WASP finally?

It is what exists between the ears that will matter. Between Mickey Mouse and Gandhi, Obama will have a tough choice.

Obama has not spoken Kennedy-lines such as “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for the country” as yet. What will the inauguration-day-one-liner be? Out-of-Africa as all learned mono-theists believe about evolution?