The Rolleiflex 2.8D
17 hours ago
Partly collected thoughts.
Alcohol abuse is likely the most common driver of crime. Alcohol was involved in more than half of the domestic violence cases I tried as an attorney.It would seem that the traditional cultures of India and of the Islamic world that had strong cultural taboos and even legal sanctions around the use of alcohol had it right. Why does a Western cultural norm become a global cultural norm? But put that aside for now.
The US Embassy in Indonesia said it was still studying an order by the Supreme Court issued in April last year, related to the dismissal of Indra Taufiq, a former driver of the US Consulate in Medan, North Sumatra, after ruling that diplomatic immunity did not apply in the case.The court ordered the embassy to pay Indra severance in accordance with Indonesian labor law — which states a worker is entitled to a year’s salary plus a month for every year’s service — after he was allegedly fired without proper cause.
The embassy said it would study the case in accordance with international law.
“We are still studying the case from the perspective of international law, and we will work with related Indonesian institutions,” US Embassy spokesman Troy Pederson was quoted as saying by Majalah Detik on Monday.
Indra had worked at the consulate for 11 years before he lost his job on July 26, 2011. But the embassy did not pay Indra severance as required by Indonesian law when an employer cuts ties with an employee.
Indra subsequently filed a lawsuit against the US missions in Medan and Jakarta at the Medan Industrial Relations Court (PHI) and eventually won the case in the Supreme Court.
Indra said since the court ruled in his favor on April 2 last year, he had gone to the consulate three times to claim what is due to him, but the consulate refused to comply with the ruling.
“I’m just going to wait. Maybe God has not shown the way,” Indra said.
In Germany, all convicts are allowed to vote while in prison unless the loss of the right to vote is part of the sentence; courts can only apply this sentence for specific "political" crimes (treason, high treason, electoral fraud, intimidation of voters, etc.) and for a duration of two to five years.As an aside, the Republican/Democratic duopoly have made the rules very difficult for an independent or third party to get onto the ballot. (It is a patchwork of laws over the fifty states.)
Britain wasn’t a democracy at the time either: until the Fourth Reform Act of 1918, 40% of adult males didn’t have the vote, in contrast to Germany, where every adult man had the right to go to the ballot box in national elections.Some digging into Wiki provided this:
The Act also increased the number of individuals entitled to vote, increasing the size of the electorate from about 500,000 to 813,000, and allowing a total of one out of six adult males to vote, in a population of some 14 million.2. The Second Reform Act of 1867:
Before the Act, only one million of the five million adult males in England and Wales could vote; the Act immediately doubled that number. Moreover, by the end of 1868 all male heads of household were enfranchised as a result of the end of compounding of rents.3. The Third Reform Act of 1884:
The act extended the 1867 concessions from the boroughs to the countryside. All men paying an annual rental of £10 or all those holding land valued at £10 now had the vote. The British electorate now totalled over 5,500,000....The 1884 Reform Act did not establish universal suffrage: although the size of the electorate was widened considerably, all women and 40% of adult males were still without the vote at the time. Male suffrage varied throughout the kingdom, too: in England and Wales, 2 in 3 adult males had the vote; in Scotland, 3 in 5 did; and in Ireland, the figure was only 1 in 2.4. The Fourth Reform Act of 1918:
.....It is worth noting that had women been enfranchised based upon the same requirements as men, they would have been in the majority because of the loss of men in the war.5. The Fifth Reform Act of 1928:
It widened suffrage by giving women electoral equality with men.
Ida: The ‘idiot’ to whom you refer…what is your beef with him?
Aatish: I disapprove of him. That’s all.
Ida: Disapprove of him? That’s a bit imperious…
Aatish: I saw him at one of his book launches, a grotesque figure, a man become obese on the affections of Indians! He lay on a stage, this great whale of a man, dressed in a mirrorwork kaftan, if you please, his dirty feet hanging off. And all about him, like little pixies, Baul singers skittered around…
Ida: Baul singers?
Aatish: They’re Bengali bards of a kind. And to complete this awful scene was an audience of embassy trash. They sat among bolsters and fountains, sipping white wine. You’ve never seen anything more hideous in your life. But we mustn’t blame him alone; the fault is as much India’s; it is India who makes giants of these mediocrities, fattening them up till they’re as corrupt as Kurtz.
Ida: That’s a bit harsh…
Aatish: In this respect, one cannot be harsh enough. In a more confident country—like Russia, say, in the 19th century; or, even China today—a man like that would have been booted out. He would have been a figure of fun and contempt. He would not have been able to position himself as a gatekeeper to intellectual life. But in India, he can; we love a man like that!
After acquiring Sprint, I delivered a speech urging all employees and managers at the company to join forces with our Japanese unit and work as a single entity.For the de-Macaulayization, this:
I made the speech because I did not want to repeat the mistakes I had made running previously acquired companies in the U.S. When I took over the company that runs Comdex (Computer Dealer's Exhibition) and U.S. publisher Ziff Davis, I allowed American executives to run them at their discretion. This decision was based on my belief that Japanese owners should not interfere too much with the U.S. executives' business management. That belief was wrong.
By leaving American executives to their own devices, I was acting as an investor and not as a business leader. This hands-off approach would never enable me to reform management of companies I acquire overseas. It doesn't matter how well a company is run, there is always room for improvement. A hands-on approach allows me to make profitable businesses more profitable.
A Japanese SoftBank executive recently made a presentation in English in Silicon Valley. His spoken English was terrible, but who cares? He was able to make himself understood. In the past, I would probably have told Japanese executives at SoftBank to focus on Japanese operations if their English was not at a high level. Not anymore.
Journalist Gabriel Sherman: Fox News is a political operation that hires journalists.
........university professor and researcher Erica Chenoweth explains in the following TED video…
She finds (through her research) that when an average 3.5 percent of any given population engages in non-violent (civil) resistance on a sustained basis, “no single campaign failed.” She also finds that “every single campaign that surpassed that 3.5 percent was a non-violent one.” She goes on to say that “In fact, the non-violent campaigns were on average four times larger than the average violent campaign, and they were often much more inclusive and representative in terms of gender, age, race, political party, class, and the urban role distinction. Civil resistance allows people of all different levels of physical ability to participate. This could include the elderly, people with disabilities, women, children, and anyone else who wants to. If you think about it, everyone is born with a natural physical ability to resist non-violently…”
According to many accounts, World War I started by escalation of a global game of chicken in which each side let itself be sucked further into the vortex in response to escalating threats to their "national honor. In order to avoid loss of face each side managed to lose millions of lives, destroy its economy, and lose empires.
As we approach the centennial of World War I, we will read much of the blunders that produced that tragedy of Western civilization. Among them will be the "blank check" Kaiser Wilhelm II gave to Vienna after the assassination by a Serb terrorist of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand.If you decide to punish the Serbs, said the Kaiser, we are with you.After dithering for weeks, Austria shelled Belgrade. Within a week, Germany and Austria were at war with Russia, France and Great Britain.Today the Senate is about to vote Israel a virtual blank check — for war on Iran. Reads Senate bill S.1881:.....
Sense of Congress.--It is the sense of Congress that--....(5) if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran's nuclear weapon program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with the law of the United States and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence;
Back to our story: Turns out that the consumer’s assumption is not valid: that the LED bulb is just another upgrade like the CFL. As noted, folks assumed that anywhere you had the 40W or 60W incandescent, you could screw in the CFL. This is not at all the case for a 40 or 60 watt-equivalent.
Within an LED bulb the internal generation and distribution of heat is such that it “desperately” needs access to cool surrounding air. The fact that it has that metallic housing is irrelevant in restricted air.
That 60 watt Wal-Mart bulb, when operating base down in open air and not even using a shade, has its internal LED case at 85°C, the absolute upper end of what is considered “safe” for full life expectancy. The same deal is true for competitive bulbs. Put a shade around it... and it’s a little warmer. Put it into any kind of base-up socket and it gets a lot hotter and all life expectancy numbers are off the table. Put it into any kind of porch or post light fixture, and it can fry, with its internal power supply components at the cliff edge of failure. Put the lamp in a ceiling-mounted fully enclosed fixture and set the timer for when failure will occur.
In other words, totally unlike incandescent and substantially unlike a CFL, reliability and life expectancy go down hill sharply as soon as you install it anywhere that air is restricted. Guess what? A large percentage of places for LED best value is in those place where access is difficult and air is restricted. LEDs do not target a “table-lamp-only” marketplace.
I was looking forward to a Christie presidency. We might have had a Republican majority in the House (and maybe even the Senate), with a bitter, smug, angry and insecure Republican man-child as president. It would have been an amusing way to bring this country's story to a close. Now it looks like it's going to drag on and on with (possibly) another Clinton at the helm, who might actually encourage us feel hopeful again, making the ultimate collapse that much more painful. With Christie, it would have been quick, like pulling off a band-aid. Now it's going to be slow, like a trip across the George Washington Bridge.
QUESTION: Marie, you said that there were no U.S. observers there?
MS. HARF: There were not.
QUESTION: Not even the Embassy? I mean, what are you basing your statement on if you didn’t have anyone on the ground?
MS. HARF: Let me see. I don’t believe there were any observers. Let me double-check on that.
QUESTION: Well, how do you know, then, that it was a bad election?
MS. HARF: Well, I think when we say observers, that’s people like at polling stations. What I base the statement on was that more than half of the seats were uncontested, and most of the remainder offered only token opposition. Obviously, you don’t need to have an observer at a polling place to see that.
QUESTION: Okay, so – right, but you’re referring to the – not necessarily the conduct of election day itself, but the overall --
MS. HARF: But there was also quite a bit of violence too, which obviously you don’t need observers at a polling station to see.
QUESTION: Well, yeah, I know, but usually you would play that off as “Oh, those are just press reports. We don’t have any independent confirmation here to -- ” Do you – can you check to see whether there were people from the Embassy who were out and about who actually saw some of this stuff, or are you just basing --
MS. HARF: I’m sure that is true. When I say “observers,” I mean not official folks at polling stations as election observers, but I’m happy to get some more details.
QUESTION: Thank you.
How would closing the toll lanes at the George Washington Bridge possibly harm Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich, the alleged target of the plot?The answer, apparently, is (thanks, dailykos)
Via Business Insider, it turns out that Sokolich was told back on September 12 that officers from the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) were telling commuters that Sokolich himself was responsible for the lane closures. The revelation was contained within an email Sokolich sent to the former Port Authority Deputy Executive Director Bill Baroni. Baroni resigned last month.Business Insider :
Fort Lee, N.J. Mayor Mark Sokolich (D) wrote a letter to a top Port Authority official on Sept. 12 complaining that the agency's police officers were telling commuters it was the mayor's fault that lanes were closed on the George Washington Bridge, causing massive traffic jams.........Here's the relevant excerpt: {my transcription from an image}
Our emergency service vehicles are experiencing tremendous response time delays and my office is overwhelmed with complaints. Unquestionably, this decision has negatively impacted public safety here in Fort Lee. Adding insult to injury, many members of the public have indicated to me that the Port Authority Police Officers are advising commuters in response to their complaints that this recent traffic debacle is the result of a decision that I, as the Mayor, recently made. The basis, reason, or genesis of the decision is of no consequence to me; however, its profound and adverse impact on our community is of paramount importance to me.
a. The problem with current law are the sentences disproportionate to the crime of carrying pot - I fully sympathise.
b. My point was not received with sympathy, that the dailykos-type liberal would support all kinds of regulations on companies selling a product one-tenth as dangerous as pot - say, Monsanto with GMO foods, or fast-food companies selling sugar- and fat- laden obesity-promoting products.
a. I believe any definition of freedom requires balancing the individual and society.
b. I do not claim to know where that balance lies; I just know that it is necessary.
c. The notion of freedom mentioned above is trivially shown to be mistaken.
Any ecological system has a "carrying capacity" - it can sustain indefinitely a certain level of some type of human activity. But once that level is exceeded, human activity requires regulation. Hence, e.g., automobiles are required to have catalytic converters. The Los Angeles air quality management district put restrictions on wood-burning fires. Fishing and hunting are largely regulated. The action of no one individual causes harm; the action of individuals below a certain total threshold causes no harm; it is the collective action of a large number of individuals that causes harm.
a. Far too many traditional societies go unbalanced opposite to the American way - society has too much primacy over the individual.
a. Grameen Bank and such micro-lending schemes have found a way to monetize a poor person's social capital - the borrower's social standing falls if they do not repay the loan.
b. Such mechanisms require that one acknowledge society exists and gives it some importance. This is seemingly difficult in the atomized American urban culture - though, on the other hand, everyone cites "peer pressure" among the young. Growing up in India, I feel that my peers were quite accepting of differences - but I do not know if this is vanishing in India too.
One contra-indication is very evident - corporate profits are at an all-time high, yet corporations apparently do not see sufficient profitable opportunities to invest in. The level of American business investment is "pathetic".Well, maybe American corporations are investing their record profits in low-tax countries overseas? I'm not so sure. I'm no economist and don't know what time-series to look at, but this is what I was able to produce at FRED (the US Federal Reserve web-site).
Falluja and Ramadi (Iraq) which were in US control are now firmly in control of Al-Qaeda. It was here in Sunni Anbar Province where most US soldiers died. The Iraqi-Army lost many soldiers in a major push to evict Al-Qaeda last week. The main roads between Syria and Baghdad run through Sunni Anbar. The civil war in neighboring Syria has attracted foreign fighters and strengthened al-Qaeda in the region.
This victory enabled AQ to forge a territorial chain of control stretching from Ramadi in central in Iraq, 110 km west of Baghdad, all the way to the northern Syrian town of Al-Raqqah, 160 km from Aleppo. It also brought the Iraqi military offensive to a standstill. Soldiers downed arms and fled and units still intact started falling back toward Baghdad, dumping their heavy weapons to hasten their retreat.
The leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has openly declared they will establish an Islamic caliphate and threatened Israel, Jordan. The Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, has acquired strategic depth in Iraq. Its leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani (Golani) is expected to announce that his movement will join the new Islamist state.
All these events add up to Al Qaeda-Iraq, Al Qaeda-Syria and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades having come together for a mighty push to seize footholds in a vast swathe of Middle East territory, along a line running between three Arab capitals - Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut.
US wants an alliance with Iran to counter the gain of AQ in Iraq and Syria. Obama has been clear on this. The Geneva accord is only stage-1 of the rapprochement between US and Iran.
It is learnt that in several meetings between South Block and US interlocutors — at one stage the US ambassador to Bangladesh came here for talks — the main point of difference has been over the right wing Jamaat-e-Islami, a BNP ally.
US officials, sources said, have been more positive about the Jamaat, even conveying that it had begun to emerge as a legitimate Islamic party. But for India, the Jamaat is a security issue and its radical elements constitute a serious terror threat to Bangladesh and India.
In fact, for the past month or so, Indian interlocutors have been in touch with Bangladesh National Party leader Khaleda Zia urging her to participate in the elections and even assuring full Indian support as long as she moved away from the Jamaat.
However, Zia never agreed, largely because the Jamaat provides significant cadre support to the BNP.
With Hasina deciding to take on any opposition after the hanging of Jamaat's Abdul Qader Mollah for war crimes during the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, the lines for India were clearly drawn. Since then, it has been an effort to engage other countries and explain the Indian position but in a quiet way so that India does not become an election issue.
But after Sunday, India is likely to take the initiative in the international arena. While dialogue with the US will hold the key, the other forum issues such as these play out is the Commonwealth. India is currently a member of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group, which puts it in a position to intervene in case there is a move to censure Bangladesh by terming these elections undemocratic.
National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon had discussed this issue some time back with his British counterpart and the Indian side returned with the impression that London may be more accommodating than expected.Incidentally, the first breach of diplomatic protocol regarding Indian diplomat Ms. Khobragade occurred, when the Foreign Secy. Singh was not informed of the intended action, which occurred just as she left the US for India. One cannot but wonder if disagreement over Bangladesh and other issues did not precipitate this.
But it is Washington from where New Delhi is expecting retaliation as this issue figured prominently during Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh's first visit there. It is learnt that there was significant divergence of views, one which reflected the concerns being voiced by the US post in Dhaka.
Fully eliminating the corporate income tax and replacing any loss in revenues with somewhat higher personal income tax rates leads to a huge short-run inflow of capital, raising the United States’ capital stock (machines and buildings) by 23 percent, output by 8 percent and the real wages of unskilled and skilled workers by 12 percent. Lowering the corporate rate tax to 9 percent while also closing loopholes is roughly revenue neutral and also produces very rapid increases in capital (by 17 percent), output (by 6 percent) and real wages (by 8 percent).What comes to mind is Reinhart-Rogoff, whose findings that a country's economic growth falls off a cliff when its debt-to-GDP ratio approaches 90%, dominated the policy discussions for a few years after the recent financial collapse. Their data was only in an Excel spreadsheet, and used simple regression; nothing as complicated as a computer simulation. Yet they got it wrong. Their errors included "data omissions, questionable methods of weighting, and elementary coding errors".
(Wiki) Some AEI scholars are considered to be some of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy. More than twenty AEI scholars and fellows served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions.The Bush decade is America's lost decade, economically speaking - the poorest performance of the American economy in six decades. Of course, the past record is no guarantee of future performance; but one should hesitate before placing our collective future in these hands yet again.
And while it may be a good idea to reduce the corporate tax rate as part of a tax reform package, the idea that this will jump-start growth is nonsense.
The US ambassador {to India} Nancy Powell, who was all set to spend her Christmas in Nepal, was forced to cancel a scheduled trip there after the {Indian} foreign ministry refused to extend her special privileges that usually come with the job.Meanwhile, relations between the US Department of Defense and the Indian Defense Ministry continue to be excellent.
Powell had notified the foreign ministry about her trip and asked for the use of the protocol lounge and other privileges like security and immigration assistance, but she was curtly reminded that all of these had been withdrawn as India had decided to deal with the US on the basis of reciprocity.
Indian Ambassadors to the US never got such privileges, but for many years India decided to allow the US these and many other perks to signal that these were accorded to a special friend.
U.S. | ||||
Average annual share of GDP (percent) | Consumer expenditure | Investment | Net exports | Government expenditures |
1961-70 | 61.8 | 20.5 | 0.6 | 17.1 |
1971-80 | 62.5 | 20.6 | –0.3 | 17.2 |
1981-90 | 64.6 | 20.3 | –1.9 | 17.0 |
1991-2000 | 67.3 | 18.9 | –1.5 | 15.3 |
2001-10 | 70.0 | 18.6 | –4.5 | 15.9 |
Canada | ||||
Average annual share of GDP (percent) | Consumer expenditure | Investment | Net exports | Government expenditures |
1961-70 | 58.8 | 23.3 | 0.7 | 17.1 |
1971-80 | 54.4 | 23.8 | 0.5 | 21.2 |
1981-90 | 54.9 | 21.5 | 1.7 | 21.7 |
1991-2000 | 57.6 | 19.2 | 2.1 | 21.2 |
2001-10 | 56.4 | 21.4 | 2.4 | 19.8 |
Differences: U.S. minus Canada | ||||
Average annual share of GDP (percent) | Consumer expenditure | Investment | Net exports | Government expenditures |
1961-70 | 3.0 | –2.8 | –0.1 | 0.0 |
1971-80 | 8.1 | –3.2 | –0.7 | –4.0 |
1981-90 | 9.7 | –1.2 | –3.6 | –4.8 |
1991-2000 | 9.7 | –0.2 | –3.6 | –5.8 |
2001-10 | 13.6 | –2.8 | –6.9 | –3.9 |
...Ironically, before we became more international, I used to be much more impressed by someone who could speak the Queen's English than, say, a chartered accountant from Jodhpur whose spoken English required some effort to understand. Now when I look across all our operations in places like Brazil or Egypt or Thailand, I see a whole host of people who aren't comfortable in English, who need interpreters, but who are very, very good at what they do. Sadly, it took that experience for me to respect an accountant from Rajasthan—my home state—as much as a graduate of St. Stephen's in Delhi. At one time we even wanted to run English classes for some of our employees! Now it's not an issue in my mind. If you can get your point across, if you are adding value, if you are competent, then bloody hell to your English.Birla out-grew what is a common malady of Anglicized Indians.
The dynamics of Indian freedom movement under the Gandhian leadership emanated from its ability and willingness to connect with disparate constituencies in a bid to develop a programmatic unity, so that by 1947 “Congress had helped delimit an Indian nation, establish its egalitarian character, and broadly popularise nationalism in the consciousness in a broad swath of colonial Indian society…” The Muslim League as the ‘institutional incarnation of Pakistani nationalism’ was “anti-democratic in the sense that it rejected a defining process of democracy.” Its social and political alliances were weak, it had no economic programmes to project and was driven only by its anti-Hindu rhetoric and the Pied Piper charisma of Jinnah. If Congress was able to hammer out coherent coalitions with class groups with conflicting interests, the Muslim League merely cobbled together “a relatively incoherent distributive coalition” eschewing the need to build regional and local party organisations.and
The jacket of the book carries two photographs: One, of the bare-headed Mahatma addressing a disparate but attentive crowd of khadi-clad women and men in the open, and the other of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, - imperious, cigarette between his lips and under a parasol held by a liveried servant, holding court. Together they offer a fine example of visual semiotics.
If middle- and upper-class American communities were policed in the same manner working-class and working-poor communities are—that is, if standard operating procedures, applicable criminal codes, and the U.S. Constitution were applied equally, at both the arrest and prosecution stages, against citizens of all socioeconomic classes—a substantial percentage of our nation’s criminal statutes would soon be appealed, repealed, or dramatically amended.Also, part of Truth #4:
Given how overbroad most criminal statutes are, most Americans probably have, at some point, technically committed a misdemeanor-level crime, such as simple assault, theft, a driving offense, a trespass, an act of vandalism, or a more esoteric malfeasance such as unsworn falsification, hindering prosecution, or misconduct after a car accident. But most of us live in lightly policed neighborhoods and are therefore never caught or punished for our misdeeds. That doesn’t change the fact that nearly every American is, at least by the language of the statutes their own elected representatives enacted, most likely a criminal.