Wednesday, October 31, 2007

AUTISM, the latest in the LD series at PONNVANDU


The latest article in the series on Learning Disabilities is up at Ponnvandu. Click on this link:

LD-4 Autism,

Earlier posts in the series are :

DYSLEXIA
DYSGRAPHIA
DYSPRAXIA
NUTRITION FOR KIDS WITH LD
DEVELOPMENTALLY CHALLENGED KIDS - TIPS FOR PARENTS

Monday, October 29, 2007

Freedom dies, dying, dead.

Our world has lost the desire for justice. We are now losing our desire for freedom. Our politicians have become slaves of power and thus slaves of money, for they believe that without money there is no power.

Let me illustrate with two different examples:

The NHS, (National Health Service) and indeed the very practice of English Medicine itself, is being steadily dismantled (read 'redefined' or 'efficientised') in the "Formerly Great" Britain.
  • All medical super-specialties are being segregated to a very limited number of treatment facilities that also happen to be as far apart as possible.
  • The FRCS is soon to follow the MRCP to becoming just an empty qualification. It already requires a Training Completion certificate to get the proud owner any respect at all!
  • Most hospitals will be turned into Primary Health Centers where only routine medical procedures will be performed by doctors who have no additional qualifications - in other words "doctor" = "glorified technician".
The government will (of course) save tremendously on salaries, facilities, maintenance, equipment and training expenditures. But that's not all - the current Labour government is now actively looking for ways to quietly privatise as many of the facilities as possible and to then back that up with private health insurance.

In other words, healthcare will turn into the same sort of disastrous mess that now prevails in the U.S. with the average human simply being denied even basic healthcare...

The first step to getting the public behind these moves is to castrate the existing system. Create a demand and then let the privatisers move in for the kill!

Secondly, look at what's happening in Darfur, Uzbekistan (see title link) and Myanmar... In all these instances, we see tremendous oppression. It is selective homicide and extreme oppression against members of one's own nation being perpetrated by dictator style governments.

The world is silent!

YET, this same international community was happy enough to attack an Iraq that had already been decimated by sanctions. Do you know that a very conservative estimate of unnecessary child death (due to sanctions) puts the Iraqi toll at over 2,000,000? Did you know?

But try to get anything more forceful than pious declarations of commiseration about the really nasty stuff that's going on, that every single person knows is going on, and you are met with a deafening silence!

There was a British ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan who dared to raise a voice of protest against the tacit support that both Britain and the U.S. were giving to the dictator there. He was promptly recalled, criticised and then canned from the Foreign Service. The issue appears to also have something to do with the Uzbek's huge gas deposits which are being tapped by MNCs and their parent governments (see this fascinating fax linking Bush, Enron and Uzbekistan). There is also a suspicion that the American base in Uzbekistan was one of the primary holding grounds for the detention and torture of the victims of America's Renditions.

On Myanmar, my own Indian government, democratically elected and the upholders of one of the worlds best constitutions has chosen to sell itself down the river of looting the helpless.

I am particularly and utterly amazed, and very deeply pained, that there has not been even so much as a whimper of protest in India's press against the ridiculous moral - material support that our democratically elected junta is supplying openly to their brothers in Myanmar.

This same junta granted a high civilian honour to Aung San Suu Kyi just a short while ago! Obviously the two juntas are not strange bedfellows at all!

The only difference between then and now is that now our Indian corporates and their MNC friends have figured out how to make very substantial money from the misfortunes of the ineptly pacifistic Burmese monks.

PRIME PRINCIPLE : Good sources of ROI are not to be scoffed at;

And the easiest way to silence criticism is to enlist the help of our postmodern world's ubiquitous Master of Spin - the POLITICIAN, whose only real agenda is to stay in power for as long as possible, in order to make their pockets as well lined as absolutely possible, while duping the dupable populace that only conscientiously good governance is the goal.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Guns N Roses

It used to be that the worst we could do was to kill off a few of our own species by instigating nasty but localized disasters...


think: Chernobyl, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Cambodia's Killing Fields, Bhopal, WW1, Iraq...

with a little minor 'collateral damage' thrown in such as loss of habitats and some consequent reduction in biodiversity.

Global evils are a relatively new creation of mankind.

It all started somewhere in the 1950s when we created enough nuclear firepower to completely destroy all life on earth.

Now, that's definitely global!

Of course, TODAY the United States of America can be proud of having the ABILITY, and all on their lonesome, to destroy a hundred earths.

Russia may have more, or less and China? Then there's Israel, India, South Africa, Great Britain, France, Germany, Ukraine and now Brazil too and maybe a few others.

So, let's say, for the sake of argument, that's another few hundred worlds worth... and now we know why the forward thinking astronomers are so excitedly looking for habitable earthlike planets. We have to do something with all this 'globalicidal' firepower, something extra-terrestrial.

Well, when we do get started, (on using all of that lovely firepower) but hold on a minute, what if we don't majestically unleash?

It's six of one to a half a dozen odds on that the other global reality that we have produced will get us later if not sooner. That's the reality where we pressed an anonymous red button a while back and without ever realizing it.

We never had intended any such harm, nonetheless, we are well on our way to warming our own little globe so much that it will destroy all of life - at least life as we now know it.


The exciting part of that is that it does give evolution a fresh start, and maybe (just maybe) something as purely self destructive as humankind will not result the next time round. But then, it is nature, "red in tooth and claw"(1) that we are talking about! Heaven forbid, It could even be worse - maybe, we're not so bad after all?

So, this is not ultimately about survival. It looks like sooner (odds on), or later (also odds on), we will most certainly cease to exist, by our own hands desist forever.


So, it certainly is now about what we are going to be doing in the meantime.

I think it would be nice if we could go out in a blaze of glory. I really do think that here is something that despite our dark side we can perhaps manage. What I suggest is that knowing we're going to go, if only for a few short instants, let's try for a change not to do any more harm to any others for whatever little time we have left.

Now, is that such a big deal?

Think of posterity.

Think of what some species in the year 3,000 is going to find as they sift through the archaeological dust. Era after era of nastiness, wars, destruction, one-upmanship, weapons of destruction and then weapons of mass destruction and then wars based on spin about WMD that never existed, and then... peace.

Peace,

did I hear someone say

PEACE????

And the Ngobel Prize in History for the year 3,001 goes to - #$(*&%)@@*!!!, for the discovoverery of "Peace"...

"The History of Peace"

A richly and horrifyingly illustrated guide to the heroic end of what can only be termed as the most unimaginably uncivilized species to have ever gained intelligence.

It all began in the year 2007, when the species Humanus selfdestructivus realised that they were soon to no longer exist.

#$(*&%)@@*!!! finally succeeded in translating the digital data after almost 300 years of deciphering in base 2, and the result is the publication of a truly remarkable document that has been miraculously preserved. The story recounts how, when this realisation of imminent and irrevocable demise suddenly spread on the WWW, the entire Humanus selfdestructivus decided, mysteriously, and courageously, to spend their last years alive on the planet Ge, in PEACE...



(1) Canto LVI, Alfred Lord Tennnyson, "In Memoriam"

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Good for you, Jimmy Carter!

Something about this article on Jimmy Carter taking on a hostile bunch of cops in the Sudan [title link] reminded me powerfully of my dad (H.A. Carr). When he got the bit between his teeth he was going to get wherever he had determined to go, and no one, nothing, was going to stop him.

Where questions of human rights, and more basically human lives, are concerned it's about time we stopped letting the democracies, juntas, and dictatorships give us the royal runaround.

We all need a bit of the Jimmy Carter spirit to start getting things done.

Myanmar, Darfur, Egypt, Palestine, Uzbekistan, DR Congo, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Guantanamo, Kosovo, North Korea, Saudi Arabia (and much of the M.E.) , and then the almost complete blind spots like Indonesia's Papua and Borneo...

Places like DR Congo, Myanmar, and the Indonesian islands, are kept under wraps quite actively by the MNCs that quietly operate there. We have posted about the timber mafias before and this recent TIME article shows how the MNCs, backed solidly by their hypocritical countries of origin, have gone so far as to subvert critically important international aid organizations like the Wold Bank to help them to quietly do their dirty work.

The World Bank is actually governed by government representatives, so without the involvement of the various governments...

It isn't just a matter of quietly making money with a bit of biosphere rape thrown in. The MNCs-govt. nexus always results in human rights abuses. The countries involved will also end up being permanently crippled by the corruption and unequal distribution of wealth and power that the MNCs have encouraged.

Such then is the hidden nexus in today's world, where supposedly democratic and freedom-oriented, nations are actually actively subverting the world's poor (and raping their hapless environments) through their corporations and just for a bit of quick 'filthy lucre'!

Monday, October 01, 2007

Tangled Rights

At issue across the world today is the question of basic human rights. The most endangered right is the right to freedom of speech, but freedom of opinion/religious belief, the right to a fair trial, and rights of habeas Corpus have also been shot full of holes.

The world's political will to uphold human rights has been severely compromised by a number of factors.

First and foremost has been the change that has taken place in the West since the start of the 1970s drive to globalise.

Globalisation has primarily spawned massive international corporations that are not answerable to anyone. The bottom line is profit. And how one gets it, simply doesn't matter. MNCs are designed to ensure their own survival and growth, while sharing a pittance of their ill gotten gains with their shareholders to keep them happy.

Secondly, the swing to right wing politics has had a disastrous effect. Bush Jr. in the U.S.A. led the way followed very closely by Blair and Great Britain. The world's most prosperous nations, those whose corporations are reaping immense benefits from their MNC fostering and spawning neocononialism, have lost sight entirely of human rights. The open support to tyranny, backed by massive monetary support to any type of cooperating petty dictatorships has ensured hat human rights have no importance at all.

The idea of development is much touted as being the one and only route to economic prosperity for the 'developing' nation. In this model the involvement of MNCs is a basic requirement. The MNC brings in the technology, the knowhow, the foreign markets, and the working business models, that are together the key ingredients of success. The MNC is also well capitalised and can afford to wait until all the pieces fall into place to generate its profits. In the process, jobs are created, infrastructure is developed and a nation's economy is supposed to 'develop'. But that's all a pie in the sky theory. It sounds plausible. It sounds good and so we choose to believe that this is what development means, that this is the win-win formula that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are all trying to promote - this holistic and positive model that will bring prosperity to poor 'underdeveloped' nations.

What really happens is that the absolute minimum of infrastructure is put in place to allow the MNC to remove the resources, finished/semi-finished goods that it has come there for. Technology will not be transferred. A few jobs, as few as possible, will be created. the jobs will be mostly menial and manual in nature with a lean and mean administration to extract the most for the least.

The government will be corrupted as environmental and developmental norms are given the go bye. The population will suffer as their natural resources are sucked out. There will be little to even trickle down as the majority of the earning is realised in international markets and the MNC pockets the huge profits. Local market systems that have functioned and self regulated for centuries will be shut down or subverted overnight. And when there are complaints, as there must be,

HUMAN RIGHTS WILL BE THE FIRST TO GO.

Aside: I often wonder if places like Zimbabwe are not encouraged and paid to go down the tubes to frighten the unwary. "This is exactly what will happen to you too if you don't do exactly as the WB-IMF consultants advise you."


I was struck by the incisive and pointed analysis in a not o recent Slavoj Žižek commentary

Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?

Does "we were all living in a state of emergency because of the worldwide struggle between freedom and Communism, the full implementation of the Constitution was forever postponed and a permanent state of emergency obtained. This state of emergency was suspended every four years for one day only, election day, to legitimise the rule" somehow sound familiar?

in The LRB of May 23, 2002.

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