K. Kumar's Blog, page 18

Letters from the World II

I came across this letter in Brazil:

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I recently finished The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. It is an excellent book in all the ways that make books excellent. (Here is a good site to get a selection of quotes from the book.) It starts from the basic, yet often overlooked, premise that human beings are omnivores and thus have the freedom and challenge of having to make choices about what to eat in order to survive. Each choice we make has varying consequences, some seen and others not seen. It is thus that we are fac...

A Terra Vista do Céu

I recently came across A Terra Vista do Céu. This was an exhibition of photos in Brazil. See video below:

These are some examples of the photos:


You can see the pictures here. Overall, I was deeply impressed by the exhibition. I have never seen a collection of photos that show the depth of the natural landscape and the confluence of human involvement. The photos are visceral, inspiring, and confounding.

The Dilemma

I have been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. The book provides a rather sobering view on the way we eat food in America. Indeed, the industrial food system in America has found a way to turn humans into consumers of corn. They have tricked us to ignore our own sense of what is good for us and instead adopt a steady diet of corn-based products that are both unnatural and unhealthy. The ingenious trick is that we are largely unaware of what we are eating because it seems too hard to make sense o...

Movie Review: Interstellar

I saw Interstellar about a month ago and I was very impressed with the scope and ambition of the film. It was so much more realistic and smarter than any other film about space that I can remember seeing. What this movie is able to do successfully is not force the viewer to actively and purposely suspend disbelief in order to buy into the premise. The characters are not contrived and do not behave with super human capabilities or strengths. It is not worth it to give much away, I'll just say...

Brasilia: The Planned City

I recently had an opportunity to travel to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil and observe a planned city:
Source: Google MapsBrasilia became the capital of Brazil in 1960 as part of an effort to recognize the need to balance the allocation of resources in the country away from Rio and Sao Paulo. But if you talk to people in Rio they will tell you that the purpose was to weaken the power of the activist groups that could shut down the government of Brazil at will by protesting in the streets of Rio. ...

Letters from the World

This is a letter I came across, left on the ground somewhere... 

The Artist III

He narrated to me as follows:

We were together after college and then I took leave of the university and set off on a path that I hoped would be fruitful. I left this place and took a position at a grocery store. I took this job for the sole purpose of humility, I wanted to do something that I felt strongly went against every inclination I had about what meaningful work was. I had always thought that to be meaningful, you had to be in control, making decisions and affecting change. You had to...

America and Counterinsurgency III

Waging a counterinsurgency in America can be expensive. It adds a new twist to this recent story:
Source: Washington PostAgain, without trying to sound self-righteous, this is precisely what decaying freedom and liberty look like. It is a slow, grinding process, driven by almost unseen forces, working to dehumanize the population by devising new laws and proclamations in order to legitimize criminal acts. Capitalism, at its best can foster imagination and cooperation and improve the stati...

America and Counterinsurgency II

Piggybacking off the last post, I wonder if it is as sobering to others, as it is to me, that the U.S. having waged (and paid for) counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now paying for a burgeoning counterinsurgency in it's own country.
I am not the self-righteous type (at least I try not to be), but if you accept the premise that there is an active counterinsurgency campaign in America, it begs another question: What is the purpose?
In the Afghanistan and Iraq counterinsurgenc...