Kenya - Meddle and Muddle

Under British colonialism, the world learned how to divide and conquer. Now, with the American hegemony at hand, that has been replaced by a 'policy' of meddling and muddling. The resulting confusion is very destructive to nations and economies. Kicking off the 21st century, Iraq stands as the sentinel example . Pakistan, with Mushy (the U.S. backed dictator) now creating an unholy antidemocratic mess, is another case in point.

Kenya is an unlikely place to suspect an American hand but the signs have been there for quite some time now. Mwai Kibaki, the previous president, is a typical example of one who seems well intentioned, urbane, well educated, soft spoken, and yet is firmly in the U.S.'s back pocket. The secret is money, though that's hardly a great secret, is it?

Unfortunately for the U.S., even the Kenyan government's official map that purports to explain the strange result of Kibaki's 'win' shows, to anyone who knows how tribes and populations are actually distributed in Kenya that the 'official result' is a farce.

Bush, in the face of an obviously rigged election, wants power to be shared in Kenya. Shared? Did he offer to share his presidency when John Kerry won the popular vote in his own questionable 'win' in his own 'democratic' country? In other words, by whatever means, Mwai should retain the semblance of power, for Raila Odinga is an unknown quantity and looks (from what we can tell of his public persona) to be much less likely to slip quietly into the CIA's silky hands.

Kofi Annan's attempts to help sort things out in Kenya must have really alarmed the Bush administration. Kofi has been a quiet but powerful force in opposition to the American attempts at hegemony. That fight almost destroyed the U.N. itself as the U.S. used its money power to choke the U.N. into submission. Rice is now sent to butt herself in to the delicate situation in Kenya to see to it that Mwai doesn't cave in. The fact that then thousands more may die in the face of a ham-handed attempt to subvert real live democracy, is immaterial.

Also immaterial, it seems, is the fact that perhaps for the very first time in Africa, a country has voted without regards to tribal allegiance. That is the only way for Odinga, a non-Kikuyu to have popularly and decisively ousted Mwai who is a Kikuyu. Kikuyus themselves, and a lot of them too, voted for someone from another tribe - unheard of in Africa, till a couple months ago!

Kenya is a land of vast potential. It has excellent agricultural prospects, good water, regular rains and has a wide range of habitats. The people are intelligent, relatively well educated, hard working, honest, sincere, friendly and very politically active.

Let's not do things the Cheney-me-to-a-Rice Bush way just this once. Enough of this meddling and muddling! Let's give Kenya a chance.

In the meantime, as Kenyans struggle for their independence and their right to decide their own future, let them know that there are many around the world praying for their success and peace and progress.

For the land of my birth, right now though, I am much reminded of the title of a book by a South African writer, Alan Paton:

CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY

Haunting Echoes of 'Health' Insurance

Way back in June of 2006, I had done a post ("Money or Medicine" - click the title link) on the shenanigans of health insurers and particularly a group called United Health (at that time hiding behind a quiet buyout of Oxford) who had earned a rather rich write-up in the NY Times. I was therefore less than surprised to see this heading at NPR today on my Google Homepage: "N.Y. Attorney General Accuses Insurers of Fraud".

Part of the answer must be that it's a bit like life insurance - you don't really know much about what you've actually got for your investment till it is (far) too late to make any changes. Folks that get really sick and then get shafted are already in such bad shape both financially and personally that their feeble voices are well below our threshold.

We will insist on believing the slick sales talk, and continue to be awed by the shiny brochures and the oh-so-well-designed websites that we forget that all that cosmetic costs real money and its coming out of the premium that so quietly gets deducted from your paycheck every month. Effective cosmetic cover is only really needed when there is no intrinsic beauty to reveal. Individual horror stories are a dime a dozen, but few seem to be aware that their fates are a result of careful planning and cleverly hidden execution. The return on investment for the shareholders is the permanent goal. Shafting and systematically cheating a few thousand here or there is the acceptable collateral damage along the path to that ROI.

Granted that the present U.S. government is more concerned about protecting the turf of such big businesses than overly worried about the healthcare that the general populace does or does not get. Still, I wonder how such corporations can continue to convince people to pay the dues that keep them raking in the money even when their primary aim is to take folks for a cheap but royal sounding ride?

We are so proud to be among 'the protected' and we will continue to be proud until it's too late and we are too far gone to be able to do anything about it but cry.

Thanks to Peter Kuper for the wonderfully apt illustration.

Out of Sight but right at our feet

Please click on the image and enjoy it full size. It is AMAZING!

What will Be?

You who are on the road Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

As a teenager, anytime mom and I would have a knock down, drag out fight over any matters of cultural evolution or generation gap stuff - important stuff too, like having the FREEDOM to grow one's hair long - I would eventually get round to playing this song, just a bit too loud, and after ensuring that she had indeed won the argument, mummy would laugh.

I look around at the youth of today, with a postgrad daughter and a son in college, and I wonder. When I was a teen, the issues seemed clear. We were against war and for peace, we were for love and against hypocrisy, we distrusted the establishment and wanted to be allowed to learn from making our own mistakes, and we loved the music that spoke and felt of these issues.

And you, of tender years, Can't know the fears that your elders grew by, And so please help them with your youth, They seek the truth before they can die.

Teach your parents well, Their children's hell will slowly go by, And feed them on your dreams The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.
 
("Teach Your Children" written by Graham Nash and performed by CSNY)

Whether it is TV, or popular books, what is taught in schools or even what we read on the most popular internet sites, today no definite positions are ever taken. We've been worn smooth.

Avoidance of discussion seems preferable to fighting it out. The truth is a non-sequitur, and the activities of daily living have taken precedence over thought, belief, and principle, or perhaps we have lost the confidence to really believe in anything.

I would much rather that the youth do not follow in such nondescript footsteps.

While the amalgam of the strange ideas of the sixties-seventies may not provide answers for today's dilemmas, in many ways there are now much bigger challenges than any we faced 'back then'.

The paths that our youth choose to take, their beliefs, and their 'code of the road', will determine much for the future of what mankind is to become.

Choose wisely!

MERRY CHRISTMAS 2007

Enjoy this playlist from PROJECT PLAYLIST, a new song sharing site that's in its beta release:

How Do the RIGHT and LEFT Differ?

ON
Greg Mankiw's Blog: How do the right and left differ?

I really enjoyed this clear and accurate summary of where 'right' and 'left' are currently facing off.

With the right and especially the libertarian right I would agree that big government is bad. But then who guarantees civil rights and justice? can it all be left to locally constituted bodies and to voluntarism?

A completely free (unregulated) market has its attractions and it also has its dangers. Especially, who protects the little fish from the bigger ones, or should we just let what happens happen and may the fittest survive?

Within academia it is felt that the left leaners outnumber (and also look down on) the more rightwardly oriented scholars. What do you think of this, and does it accurately reflect your own perception of our institutions of higher learning?

Lots to ponder indeed!

Thanks to Michael Kruse for posting this up on his own excellent blog: Kruse Kronicle and that’s also a link to his excellent new series on “Living Simply in Abundance”.

On how to be a Better Lemming

'Tis the season to be jolly... would be quite frivolous if it were not at the same time also so profoundly real.The Christmas season in the West is a time especially set aside for spending, purchasing, buying, gifting, and generally being very, very, jolly.
In the U.S. the spending season kicks off with a bang at Thanksgiving, but all over the world, common sense will lead us to suspect that the jolliest of traditional seasons will begin soon after the annual harvest. Give a couple weeks or a month for all that excess to start getting distributed, and then them holidays, and that spending will ensue - it makes good sense.
In India we have that grand 'festival of lights', Diwali, that is strategically placed after the first harvest in October or November and then, in the South of India, there is a second celebration (Pongal) that comes right after the second monsoon season in mid-January and that forms the very exciting and satisfying climax to our times of splurging.
Economies and spending cycles that keep them vibrant have to be based on the presence of excess, and most times that excess is only available for a short while right after the harvest. Holidays are also timed to help to distribute all that 'excess' and just as efficiently as possible! Any great delay between when the excess arrives and the application of peak marketing pressure to get people to spend may result in that excess getting channeled into savings accounts - economists don't like that at all. When we have plenty, and so much that we can even think in terms of excess, the purse strings will be at their loosest. Marketing has to strike while the iron is hottest but that is not the end of the story. We too help out by apparently just temporarily choosing to collectively forget that the upcoming year may hard and long.
Marketing the world over, is geared to maximise its hype just at these times. Spend - buy - purchase - CHARGE IT - or the ubiquitous EMI with 0% interest!
This year, the absolutely essential gadget is...
Everybody simply HAS to have this!
The teaser SAAALE! drags you out, 'pushes' you over that last little hump of caution, and then...
Insidiously, we also might not notice that we will really have to shell-out just a bit more this year than we did last year to get that 'absolutely essential' something. Economic cycles rely on the feeding frenzy to slip into the inflation mode too, for this is the one time of year that folks will be blithely unaware that the essentials just got a bit dearer. The small incremental adjustments will slip quietly into place in the corners of our subconscious even before we have time to register them, for there is so much else of an exciting nature to capture and hold our collective consciousness in thrall.
Value addition is one culprit, but the yen for bigger profits is certainly another. For the corporates, turnover should increase, and so too should the return on investment, the profit margin. Balance sheets will be anxiously prepared as the financial year draws to a close. At stake is the size of the share price pie for that depends on 'the figures'.
To the economist, inflation is a godsend. Deflation, when prices actually drop, (do you see red in the diagram above?) is an absolute disaster and must come straight out of hell. Modern economies rely on inflation to create the space in which value addition creates levels of work both in manufacturing/marketing and in services/marketing. More jobs, more earning, more spending, more money - MORE
Those little entries on corporate balance sheets called profit (net after taxes) quietly also rely on inflation. The trend is paradoxically opposed by innovation and new technologies! The whole complex process works together to keep standards of living on a slow rise that is slightly worse than what the actual inflation level would lead us to expect.
At some point people do question whether this all adds up. Of course it doesn't, not nearly, but it sure looks good while it's flowing along. Pension plans will be the most obvious harbingers of the bad news that eventually inflation catches up with you. Other painful reminders include the cost of health-care, health insurance, and medicines. Long term savings plans and incremental investments will yield something but much less than they should when compared to the damage that inflation has quietly been inflicting.
Money and easy credit are the end of a very long road that has separated our spending from the realities of our actual contributions to life. Think about it, as it is you're just the last stop between the ATM and the corporation that owns the store that you're heading to with the plastique in hand!
What would happen if inflation were to stop? What would happen if our governments printed just enough notes to maintain a fixed amount of money in circulation? What would happen if value addition were to be replaced by true value? What would happen if the purchasing power of a dollar or of a rupee were to become rock steady?
Have you thought about it this year-before you start (or at least finish) spending that bonus?
What will this Christmas/Pongal bring I wonder? Is it perhaps even possible to have fun and fellowship with friends and without money? Will anyone believe that you love them anyway even though you didn't push your plastic a few thousand more over its already strained limit?
GOLD > Coins > Bills of exchange > CREDIT Þ Transactions

Originally published by Sam at http://bartramia.wordpress.com

Invincible! Immortal? Soldiering (dys) Functionally

Not so long ago we had taken a peek at stuff like PTSD and the psychological costs of sending our young people to war. John Doyle, over at Ktismatics has actually been working with Veterans and their unique problems for quite some time despite the VA's refusal to allow outside psychologists in.

Now, new research indicates that there is also a very significant amount of actual brain damage being found in returning soldiers and recent Vets. The figures indicate that this happens FIVE TIMES more frequently than the army has been willing to admit to.

Listen to the NPRs interview (title link) with USA Today reporter Gregg Zoroya on his findings on the presence of brain trauma in soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. The army had reported only 4,000 so affected, but this study indicates that the numbers are 20,000 (so far), and that the vast majority of war returnees have not even been screened yet!

Another startling 'statistic' on veterans indicates that 1/3 of all the homeless in the U.S. A. are veterans. A rough estimate puts that at nearly a million vets (estimates range from 780,000 to 970,000 depending on who-take a look at some typical stats here, here and on Oldtimer.). A rough conservative calculation indicates that there are over 30 million Americans who could be classified as poor and of all of these about 1 in 10 is homeless. Another horrifying fact is that another one third of the homeless are children! One can expect that these stats will only get worse as the Iraq war returnees have experienced much longer tours of duty (than their Vietnam Vet friends) and will probably reach the crash out points that much faster. Add to that the spate of failed mortgages and the effects on families of losing their homes and their savings and you have a recipe for disaster.

I am not surprised that war veterans have suffered injuries that are both physically debilitating and mentally incapacitating. The chances of these sacrificial lambs successfully making it back into 'normal' life is always slim. What is surprising, very surprising, is that the army loudly touts it's ability to "take care of its own", but very obviously does not.

Soldiering has thus become just one more functionality in postmodern America. The lack of ideology is not as horrifying as the show of absolute callousness. It is quite impossible to believe that our armed forces do not know, did not anticipate, the sort of damage that our kids would be facing. Certainly, over four years into the war, they cannot only now be 'discovering' brain damage in returned vets. One naturally wonders how many of those in-service now are already suffering from such brain damage and either do not know it or are afraid to have it found out? The scenario is likely very similar to what is still the case for PTSD - denial.

Typically, the Neocon response has been to laugh it all off, with the Democrats not far behind, for this is a scandal of betrayal on a massive scale and it has been perpetrated in a singularly nonpartisan manner.

People, we are not talking about spin!

This is something much more like an information black hole - And with an election coming up too!

FARMING CONCRETE - India at 50/50

We, the people of India, always seem to be at the crossroads.

For a country that is thought to be developing fast, a lot of the time we are quite uncertain as to our direction, and even more confused about our ultimate destination. Instead we are very busy doing what Yogi Berra once advised : "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."



Everyone seems to silently assume that our goal in 'development' is to become a clone of 'developed' economies as much like the U.S. or Britain, or Japan, and to transform into this heavenly vision just as soon as possible.

Having traditionally been socialist in spirit but officially non-aligned, India has largely come out of 'the socialist trap', and now appears to be leaning towards a capitalist, 'free market' economy, somewhat to the delight of those who like possessing, and using, Capital. Or, so goes the assumption at present, but do we really wish to become 'more developed' in this limited and warped sense?

What are we turning ourselves into? What are we to become? We have indeed emerged, but to what? At present we Indians seems to me to be in the grip of a particularly thick fog. We are incapable of seeing our own noses, let alone tackling any bigger questions. And one of the biggest questions revolves around what we are going to do with agriculture.

Here is today's biggest fork in the Indian Road: 50% (yes, one half) of India's 1.1 billion population is now urban. The growing urbanisation of rural populations is driven by the death of small farming as a viable way to make a living. As making a livelihood out of farming becomes less attractive to families and (by design) much more attractive to corporates, the trend will be that smaller farms will be abandoned to be consolidated by larger, capital rich, corporates who will then complete the mechanisation of agriculture (in the name of efficiency) and try to completely eliminate rural labour.

What are we going to do to employ the up-coming flood of ex-farmers? The number of farmer suicides is growing (though we seem to hardly notice) by leaps and bounds every year. Do we just let them quietly continue to commit suicide? What a convenient solution...

The problem of course, is more general than just agriculture. In a comment on a previous post, Mahil had alluded to the increasing drive for specialisation in our developing world. As the machine, aided by intelligent computerised control, takes over both production and process, where will human-performed jobs come from? From a different angle, another tough question to answer now is : How will our nation's wealth eventually be distributed? Do justice, and fairness, and honesty, and openness have a say in our direction into the future?

Admittedly, our problems in India are not small ones. With a population of well over a billion people, somewhat scarce natural resources, limitations on arable land, and weather that always seems intent on either starving us with drought or starving us with deluges, it's perhaps not surprising that we seem fixated on wondering mostly about the when and the where of the next meal.

The pundits tell us that now, security is the name of the game. Do you own a house? Have you financially planned for your children's educations, and more worryingly, their marriages? have you got a couple of credit cards? Are you keeping up with the Krishnans?

The idea of planning, beyond the matter of the family's survival, is not something that includes our neighbors, our rural cousins and our nation at large.

Being shortsighted produces a situation that is rife for those who do have longer term agendas to quietly set their plans in train. Our politicians seem sometimes to be hand-in-glove and sometimes (rarely) simply dupes. Eventually, when the truth of massive sell offs does emerge, all will perhaps claim to have been too easily fooled! This is not in any sense a 'conspiracy theory'. I refuse to believe that folks that are so good at ingeniously lining their own pockets are as dumb as they wish us to believe on the questions of development and overall direction.

In theory, we have something called a 'planning commission'. The only problem is that this too is a 'socialist' leftover and as such this commission now does little of substance. The current head is someone who explicitly believes in deregulating everything. The resultant "Five Year Plans" have become manifestos of what to dismantle first, and of how fast the markets can be 'liberated'.

Our politicians are just as intent on survival (in the narrowest sense) as anyone else, but they are far-sighted enough to ensure that their monetary genealogies will survive for at least a few generations of their own profligate progenies.

In other words, motive and opportunity are known to be present in all developing economies. These are the ingredients of economic murder. Our economic c(r)ooks are particularly intent on making them coincident TODAY in India.

So, what are we going to do about it? Are we prepared to continue to be myopically concerned with our own little selves? Are you prepared to let your child's nation's future be quietly sold off to the highest
bidder?


Thanks to http://www.jillandjohn.net.nz for the lovely pics from Tibet

The Value of Adding Value

As mechanisation has been a staple reality world over for the last couple of centuries, it has shaped our societies and cultures.

In honour of the industrial revolution, engineering became one of the most sought after professions that only the most brilliant could aspire to. Courses in civil and mechanical engineering initially held pride of place, but then gave way to electronics and electrical engineering, and now even these have become less popular than communications and software 'engineering' - courses that are now even found in the ubiquitous 'Arts College'. The professions have tried to keep pace with cultural developments.

The agricultural revolution and rapid advances in medicine have also combined to make the world's huge population explosion just barely manageable. Of course, out of 6.6 billion people only 1 billion live well. Of the rest, around 25% are in abject poverty and in danger of starving (that's about 1.65 billion people). In absolute terms compared to a century ago, the percentage of poor has declined by half but the absolute number of the very very poor has gone up by about 40 million!

It is argued quite successfully (on paper) that the way to deal with poverty is not to give handouts but to give a hand-up. In other words, bring the poor of the world into the mainstream of production, and poverty will be licked. Is this realistic? Is it even possible? What jobs can we envision creating for the billions of poor?

In 2006, it was calculated that if a real U.S. dollar value were to be placed on the per person share of the entire world's economy (per capita on the world's GDP), it would work out to about $6,600 each. Such figures are heavily disputed by economists, mostly depending on where the economist hails from and what turf they are seeking to protect, so I take this as merely illustrative. The plain fact is that this is well below what an American or a European would consider the barest minimum subsistence level. In other words, if one were to pay an American $6,600 a year, they would starve to death. The poverty level cutoff in the U.S. last year was over $13,000 per annum. On the other hand, in India or China or in Africa six and a half thousand dollars would support a whole family of four at a 'middle class' level for a whole year.

Another little illustration that might illustrate the difference is that a good Medical Transcriptionist (MT) in the U.S. would earn about 65 cents a line. An average MT may pull in about 45 cents a line. The same work, when outsourced to the Philippines or India will earn the MT there, anywhere from 2 cents to 3 cents a line. In both types of economies this would constitute a middle class occupation.



The difference lies in the ways in which "value" has been added to products and services in these developed economies. People eat, they wear clothes, pay rent, they go to and from work, their kids get educated... all over the world. But in the 'developed economies', it costs a heck of a lot more to live even in this basic-needs sort of way.

Marketing and management have become the most honoured professions. The highest paid of all professionals in the world are the managers of large corporations. Now knowledge is the key to money and power. The knowledge that is most valued is the alchemical secret of value addition. It has to be done insidiously and so effectively that the consumer will consume both the product and the mythical value and feel pleased. Now, that's MAGIC !

Is it all worth it? The corporations think so and to tell the truth the answer is that without the layers upon layers of value addition, these developed economies would collapse.

Big business absolutely relies on the inflationary effects of exploitable, value addition, in order to pump profit margins up to a level where there remains little connection between what a goods or service costs to perform/produce and what the end user ends up paying for it. The value addition is self justifying also because it is the primary means of distributing "wealth" or more accurately earnings in the strictly trickle down economy.

Now, these economies want the developing world also to faithfully follow the same route. Everyone should buy-in to the concept of breaking the connection between the real value and what we collectively end up paying for anything after value addition.

Is Mass Production Ethical? What's A Droid World like?

Successful and well developed economies in today's world are mostly of the 'free market' design. These are economies where a modicum of free enterprise is only slightly limited by government regulation (except in agriculture, but we are not taking that topic up today). The alternative of top down control and no private ownership (communism) has died a natural death.

Both systems were outgrowths of the industrial revolution of the 19C. When looked at from an individual standpoint, by relieving the individual or family unit of the need to accomplish all basic tasks pretty much for themselves, and by introducing the incredible efficiencies of mechanisation, the individual is freed up to do other things, and these things necessarily, will now involve specialisation if one is to fit in to the overall framework. The economy mass produces stuff by mechanised processes that are increasingly automated with as few people as possible controlling as much process as possible.

Work, for an individual, is defined as the specialised, narrow, thing that that individual has been trained to do. The individual has to fit into whatever slots are available in the economy of the day.

So, the training of the individual, education also has to become specialised. Now, in India, there is no more point in getting an 'arts degree'. There is no utility in it. Job requirements do not include something as impractical and unspecialised as an 'arts degree'. Furthermore, if one wants to change lines of work, say after five or ten years of experience, one finds that one is starting the new job at the bottom of the ladder- the earnings ladder! The only thing that counts is a proven ability to perform and that comes only with experience.

We know all of these things and they don't overly disturb us for we are fairly confident that the whole thing hangs together and works pretty durn well. After all, what we need is a job, and some job security, and for prices to remain affordable, and for there to be opportunities and time for recreation and the family. What else does one want from a healthy, sound economy?



A new Renaissance? No one works (except the robots) but everyone earns and enjoys. That would be a utopian future and it's about the biggest lie we've been asked to swallow so far...

I would suggest that we have blinded ourselves to who and what we really are. We are blind too to where the trend will eventually take us and our world. We allow ourselves to be duped because it is the easiest thing to do. We are comfortable enough, our families are pretty much taken care of, so what could really be wrong?

What we have perhaps gained is security.
What we have certainly lost is ...

What happens to human beings that become redundant? What happens to machines that become redundant? The human has become nothing more than a machine, filling a slot in the endless cycle of mass production. And when we are not even a cog anymore?

Mass production is good. Mass production runs the economy. Without mass production there would be no economy and there would be no prosperity.

We may have gained the whole world-
But, we have lost ourSELVES.

Andrew McAfee (Jan 2013) gives us an update: A Droid World is Potentially a Utopia not a Dystopia.



What do you think???

War Games - Musharraf goes the "Cheney me to a Rice Bush" Route

India has been toying with doing things in 'The New American Way' for some time now. Our present almost misadventures with the 1-2-3 Nuclear Power Treaty have clearly indicated our own Junta's leanings. We too seem to be actively seeking ways to democratically subvert our democracy, but thankfully have so far failed.

Still the Dickied Rice Bush has had some measure of success with our neighbour Pakistan.

America kept insisting that this Mushy stuff was the closest that the Pakistani people could get to democracy. Instead, what was all along a dictatorship in democratic guise has now reverted to form and proved that it was indeed a full blown military dictatorship all along.

Musharraf is a suave, smooth, polite, educated, and eminently reasonable dictator, but a dictator and a ruthless and brutal one nonetheless. He is photogenic and charismatic (wonder where I've heard that before) and an ideal stooge for the U.S. State Department's deeper Neocononial designs in this part of the world.
The last time Musharraf needed to consolidate his power he engineered a war (the '99 Kargil War) with India. The then democratically elected Pak. leader (Nawaz Sharrif) had to flee for his life.

This time Mushy has been concentrating on his Afghany front, and let's hope that he stays focussed there. The chances are that as long as the current U.S. administration is wooing India, Mushy will have to bite his tongue and wait, but nothing is certain in todays global village.

Who knows, perhaps in international parlance this is just one more way of delivering a hidden ultimatum? An openly militaristic Pakistan should certainly fuel the the local arms race and that itself would have made Dickey & Co. very happy. Every cloud should have a silver and gold lining, as should every pocket...

It's too much to hope that India would have learned anything substantial from this, except that there're always ways to make a quick buck. The depth of the pocket is actually what drives politics in India anyway.

Statesmanship is a thing of the rather distant past - a blurry, fading, black and white memory of what was always something of a hazy backlit dream.

"Do, you know that the U.S. tried ever so strongly to dissuade Mushy from such a drastic step?" At least that's the current spin, being disseminated through the hidden alleyways of a 'leaky' State Department.

Everyone does know that Musharraf would never have dared unless he was offered tacit U.S. support.

• We have blown it on Myanmar. We are supporting a brutal military junta.
• We have blown it with Tibet. We have shamed the Dalai Lama.

It is not too late to change tack.

Let us try to realise the reality of our own proud constitution.
Let us once more try to stand for FREEDOM,
to truly uphold DEMOCRACY, and
to be the champions of JUSTICE
that we once thought that we could be,
and that we would be.


UPDATE 1 (Nov. 5) The headlines about 6 months down the road after a bit of NYT investigative journalism:

RENDERING (justice to) THE COURTS:

Gen. Pervez Mussharaf had exported Pakistan's supreme court justices to the U.S. under the Democracy re-education program sponsored by the US Department of State. Now we are pleased to report that waterboarding and other assorted recreationally educational nontortures at Guantanamo for the recalcitrant Pakistani Supreme Court justices has finally resulted in signed confessions of connections to terrorism from all the judges who had originally refused to swear allegiance to General Musharraf after he imposed martial law in order to save Pakistani democracy. They unanimously support the continuation of Mr. Mussharaf as he is clearly now 'the only dictator capable of restoring true democracy.' The Secretary of State is very pleased that the U.S. has been able to further promote democracy in the world."

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

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.

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"