Dr. Venugopal
It is heartening to see Dr. Venugopal re-instated by the Supreme Court; he shouldn’t have been removed in the first place. There is still hope for India it seems and justice does exist, even if for a selected few.
The Pioneer has published a trenchant commentary on the utter lack of conscience in Ramadoss, the union (unhealthy) health minister. Ever since he joined the office all he has done is bother people with his nonsensical egotism. You won’t find even a single constructive step he has taken in the area of health.
This affair is also a statement on our public consciousness. Such an eminent cardiologist is harassed by an imbecile politician and no large-scale protests take place. It was a lone battle for the doctor, although high-profiled attorneys like Arun Jaitley fought for him. I wonder if there was even a PIL filed again the infamous ouster. Millions of people throng at the gates of AIIMS every year for treatment, and none of them spoke up for Dr. Venugopal.
Government hospitals like AIIMS and Safdarjung, although world-class, are known for their unhygienic conditions and shabby treatment to the patients. This was the right time for the patients to show that they could put up a joint front with the doctors.
Millions face death and starvation in Mayanmar
Repressive regimes never stop their games. For a long time Alka has been urging me to read "Reading Lolita in Tehran" in which the author has written how the government men used to surround the site where a bomb had dropped, during the Iran-Iraq war so that people couldn’t help each other and consequently, develop a bonding for each other and an opposition to the ongoing war.
The military junta in Mayanmar is not allowing foreign aid workers to come and help their own people. How diabolical can a government become? During natural calamities of such humongous proportions every single hour counts. The international aid that could have reached the flooded regions is being stopped by the authorities that are supposed to help their own people. These are the times when such countries should be taken over by an international agency. Just a thought, because I know realistically this is not possible.
Bush says the price of food has increased because people in India as well as in China are eating more. What does he intend to say, that it was better when people in these countries were impoverished and stayed malnourished? Some studies have claimed that 73% of food in the United States is disposed of, uneaten (read this). People simply consign the food on their plates to the garbage can as soon as they don’t feel like consuming it; and they take big portions even when they don’t intend to eat the whole thing. So much for causing food shortage by eating more by people in other countries.
I’m not denying that food habits in India have changed. In fact even at our house we eat a lot better than what we used to eat when we were kids. We were not poor back then but there was not much awareness regarding food-eating options and to be frank, not much was available. Due to overall progress and globalization people have access to a variety of comestibles, irrespective of the escalating costs.
But you cannot blame people for eating better, especially when people in your own country moronically go on wasting food and fuel despite the galling shortage. The problem is not the shortage, it is a litany of bad decisions. Currently, almost 30% of corn produce in the USA is converted into ethanol and similar trends are being observed in the EU where different governments are setting up targets for producing more and more biofuel.
In India more food rots in the godowns than is eaten. Shady marketers horde food so that they can sell it at the times of scarcity and in the process lots of it is destroyed, and the government doesn’t do much about this, and this must be happening in many countries. In fact numerous countries are experiencing food riots already.
Or rather one country-centric. The e-mail services of Hotmail and Yahoo have been stopped in Iran and this means you cannot use these e-mail services even if you have got nothing to do with nuclear or Islamic politics. Of course one may argue that very often you have to pay for living in a specific region or a particular country; but that is not the argument. It’s really stupid that just because America does not agree with Iran’s nuclear policy the citizens of Iran cannot use Hotmail and Yahoo (not that they are greatly e-mail services but they are quite prevalent). This means if one day the American government has some differences with the Indian government all the Hotmail and Yahoo users won’t be able to access their e-mail and I think that is pretty shady.
I think the Internet is too America-centric and the other countries should develop ways to access the Internet in case the American government decides to block those countries. Regarding e-mail, it is better to use either a private domain or you should take regular backups and also have an alternative ready.
I understand that international restrictions and embargoes are meant to force the citizens to speak up against the policies of their respective governments but only those people suffer who have got nothing to do with the problem — the real troublemakers are anyway not affected because they can easily avail alternative means.
Says this report. I think there is nothing surprising in it because theories of human evolution change as our living-style alters. The report says there will be different species, but there will be no race. Anthropologists often wonder why there aren’t different human species as there are different species in every form of life on earth. For instance there are different types of cats, there are different types of wasps, different types of birds, etc. so why don’t humans have different species? This is quite an interesting question.
Different races evolved due to the isolation of hundreds of thousands of years. Until a few thousand years ago we all lived on different continents, totally cut off from each other. As we started traveling and moving to the other parts of the world we intermixed but the fundamental race features survived. For instance many people in north India have race features of the Europeans, the Orientals, and of course the Asians.
The report says the human species will peak in about 1000 years when we’ll live for 120 years and grow up to 6 to 7 feet tall. Then we’ll start altering drastically, for the worse. Advances in medicine and technology will turn us baby-like in about 10000 years (if we don’t kill ourselves by then or aren’t hit by something from space).
Aside from this, the two species will consist of highly intelligent and strong people and not very intelligent and weak people. This can actually happen because if we depend too much on technology we don’t overcome our weaknesses. For instance, people who cannot calculate more eagerly use the computers or the calculators rather than sharpening their calculation skills. Similarly, people who don’t like to walk use mechanical vehicles more than people who love walking. There are people who use technology for simple tasks and mindless fun and there are people who either develop technologies or put them to better use by doing something more productive. Take for instance the Internet: some people use it to access porn or play online games and some use it to spread awareness regarding various social, political and environmental issues, or at least use it for professional purposes.
I’ve often said that the world is run by only a select few people, and the rest just live like pests. It’s a pure indication of two evolving species.
This is strange, it never crossed my mind. Isn’t he one of the greatest peace symbols the history of the world ever known? Here’s a nice, analytical essay on why the Mahatma might have not been awarded the Nobel peace prize. I could relate to the following extract:
The committee’s adviser, professor Jacob Worm-Müller, who wrote a report on Gandhi, was much more critical. On the one hand, he fully understood the general admiration for Gandhi as a person: “He is, undoubtedly, a good, noble and ascetic person – a prominent man who is deservedly honoured and loved by the masses of India.” On the other hand, when considering Gandhi as a political leader, the Norwegian professor’s description was less favourable. There are, he wrote, “sharp turns in his policies, which can hardly be satisfactorily explained by his followers. (…) He is a freedom fighter and a dictator, an idealist and a nationalist. He is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician.”
This reminded me of my principal in the special school. There was a time when I idolized her: had she started a gang or a cult at that time I would have certainly joined it as an ardent member or follower. Although our principals ran in opposite directions, I respected her for the sense of fairness and dignity she possessed. Then, all of a sudden she would take a 180-degree turn and metamorphose into this heavily authoritarian, biased and fanatically religious person who only knew how to preach to you and castigate you for thinking different. Mahatma Gandhi too was like that. He disliked people who didn’t tow his line. He was dictatorially peaceful and encouraged a coterie of devotees around him. As a personality I think he was too big for the Nobel and it is good that he never got it, but had I been in the committee and had I access to his true thinking I’d have never recommended him.
Technorati Tags: gandhi, mahatma, nobel prize, peace
Police said Bobby Brewster raped Williams, forced her to lick blood and drink from a toilet, and told his mother to kill Williams if she tried to escape.
Authorities previously said Williams was also forced to eat rat and dog feces.
According to criminal complaints filed in the county, Williams was assaulted, stabbed in the left leg, choked with cords and beaten for at least a week. When she was found, big parts of her hair had also been torn off of her scalp.
Williams says that Alisha Burton 22 cut her ankle with a knife while saying, “That’s what we do to Niggers around here,” police records show. [ the Facebook link ]
This reminds of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre movie. In that movie too they had a similar family that abducted their victims and then tortured them to death.
Sometimes the world becomes such a scary place, and we often wonder how to teach our children to be wary of such psychopaths. Incidentally, the mainstream media in the US has been playing down the incident because it’s a crime against a Black, not a crime by a Black.
A while ago I was reading Alka’s post on a racist remark by a Radio FM RJ. I don’t think the RJ would like to physically torture the Gurkhas (whom the RJ considers only good for guards) but even such small feelings, when not attended to in time, eventually turn into race and class based hate crimes.
Technorati Tags: racism in america, brutality, blacks
Kenji Nagai of APF tries to take photographs as he lies injured after police and military officials fired upon and then charged at protesters in Yangon’s city centre September 27, 2007. Kenji, 52, a Japanese photographer, was shot by soldiers as they fired to disperse the crowd. Kenji later died.
Source: Reuters (you can see more images on this link).
And this is the video of the same incident:
Some relevant links on how blogging and the Internet is playing a crucial role in exposing the atrocities in Burma:
Technorati Tags: junta, burma, burma protests
That component, called Writeprint, helps combat the Web’s anonymity by studying thousands of lingual, structural and semantic features in online postings. With 95 percent certainty, it can attribute multiple postings to a single author.
From there, Dark Web has the ability to track a single person over time as his views become radicalized.
The project analyzes which types of individuals might be more susceptible to recruitment by extremist groups, and which messages or rhetoric are more effective in radicalizing people. [ link ]
This is a great way of showing a contrast. A nice way to drive in a point.
Source.
Technorati Tags: bush, iraq war
Isn’t it tragic? And the US and its allies say they are there to avoid such large-scale deaths.
When those responsible for the American war in Iraq face a public reckoning for their colossal crimes, the weekend of September 15-16, 2007 will be an important piece of evidence against them. On Friday, September 14 there were brief press reports of a scientific survey by the British polling organization ORB, which resulted in an estimate of 1.2 million violent deaths in Iraq since the US invasion.
This staggering figure demonstrates two political facts: 1) the American war in Iraq has produced a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions, with a death total already higher than that in Rwanda in 1994; 2) those arguing against a US withdrawal on the grounds that this would lead to civil war, even genocide, are deliberately concealing the fact that such a bloodbath is already taking place, with the US military in control.
…
The real motivation for the war was spelled out by former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan in a newly published book of memoirs, in which he wrote, “Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in an area that harbors a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Read the whole story.
Technorati Tags: iraq war, american aggression
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