A Good Read

Just finished reading a book on the Iran Hostage crisis - "Guests of the Ayatullah" by Mark Bowden. An excellent read.

Apart from the suffering of the hostages, what comes across in the book, is the fact these hostages where nothing but pawns in the bigger picture. They were used as bait by Khomeini and his cronies to get a control on power in Iran. Here they not only used the hostages but also the students who took the hostages. In a sense the students were hostages in their own country.

The other thing that comes across is how helpless the Carter Administration was. Carter lost his re-election bid because of the hostage crisis. The media and the opposition kept hounding him for inaction but no-one offered any credible solution. When he dared to take the risk of sending in a rescue mission fraught with risks up the wazoo... and failed; he was taken to task for it as well. After reading the book I felt the Carter administration was unfairly judged for their role in the Iran hostage crisis. As a matter of fact, you come away thinking they demonstrated extremely good judgement in the way it was handled.

24hr news cycles had just begun at the time. The medias desire to feed the news put enormous amounts of pressure on the administration. It gave the students a medium to make their revolution larger than it deserved credit for. This 24hr news cycles continue to this day. There seems to be a desire to discuss and report every minuscule dramatic event happening in the world. But no conclusions are derived... no lessons learned. The news channels use catchy phrases to describe the news ... "War on Terror!" is such an ambiguous phrase and is liberally applied to everything.

Then they move on to the next big thing.... We will never solve this terrorism issue until we stay on the subject and identify the underlying causes and give enough time to our policy makers to debate the issue and come up with appropriate solutions which will inevitably be much longer term implementation plans that will not suit the 24hr news cycles......

On Terms and Conditions

We just got back from a trip where we had some bad experiences with the Airline and our travel company. For every screwup they just kept pointing to their terms and conditions. Seat assignments not honored.... there is a term&condition (t&c) which says there is no guarantee that your seat requests will be honored. Meal requests not met there is a t&c for that.

Have you ever read any of these t&cs before signing up for a trip or a purchase in detail. You are told it is just legal stuff... cya for the companies till you are affected by it. These t&cs only get longer and longer.

So it got me wondering why can't I as a consumer have my own term and conditions under which I accept their service. For example: if I make a seat request and the airline cannot honor it I am notified about this right away & not at the airport. Else they bump me up to business class (free of charge of course!) or give me a partial refund.

I wonder why lawyers out there are not promoting consumer terms and conditions. We can also have boiler plate t&cs for the consumers which if not honored by these companies will not have the privilage of serving me :-)

Energy Independence

So Mr Bush finally is saying those magical words about Energy Independence with some vigor; at least in rhetoric. His state of the union spent some time discussing this. Some sections of the press have attribute this to mean that White House is finally agreeing to the public opinion on Global Warming. However I think White House policy on Energy Independence has nothing to do with Global Warming.

If one looks at the pressure on oil, it is clear that it is on the rise. China and India are competing with US for this. Though China and India consume significantly less than US, their rates of increase are significant. Also new oil finds are becoming fewer by the year. And last if one looks at the nations with any significant oil reserves, apart from Saudi Arabia and Iraq (long term relations of Iraq with US are uncertain), none of the other nations (including Iran, Russia, Venezuela) have anything like a friendly relationship with US. Also China is on the move where the US dreads to thread in places like Sudan, where China is building relations with these countries; completely ignoring their human rights record.

So it makes perfect sense for the US to start thinking Energy Independence. However the emphasis is on Bio-Diesel rather than other natural resources. I am not sure how this pans out. This would mean that US may start becoming more dependent on corn and soy imports from places like Brazil and Mexico and guess what; this would mean bringing more land under cultivation in places like Brazil, as growing soy becomes more lucrative, putting more pressure on already dwindling rain forests.

Therefore I think energy independence while good doesnot necessarily mean supportive policies on global warming. One needs to be careful at arriving at these conclusions. While the carbon footprint may reduce by switching from Oil to Bio-diesel I wonder if this takes land usage into account if one replaces Oil. There has to be a balance between Bio-Diesel and other forms of energy (Solar, Wind etc). Also what about policies in China and India, and how will US influence their policies, for if the US is serious about Global Warming then it needs to take a leadership role and influence policies in those countries for measures against Global Warming to be truely effective.