On the danger of glorifying martyrdom

Rajiv Malhotra.

Ray Lynch: Celestial Soda Pop

or

Jon Stewart on Fox News

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Old but Good

Jethro Tull's Weathercock:

Can the United States remain united?

An interesting post at The Washington Note.

A Real Bargain

The Triumph of Wall Street and the Decline of America

Paul Krugman reviews "Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present" by Jeff Madrick at the New York Review of Books.

The US has a recurring pattern since the 1970s, of banks getting into a crisis, getting bailed out by the government, and then bashing government and regulation when the situation stabilizes. The bank busts keep getting bigger.

Civil Liberties - the current situation

Nick Baumann writes that in the debate over whether people arrested on charges of terrorism have the usual constitutional protections, the civil libertarians have lost:

Civil libertarians have lost that argument. The defeat is total: in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the courts, and, crucially, in the court of public opinion. Indefinite detention of non-citizen terrorist suspects without charge or trial remains the official policy of the United States, and none of the most infamous non-citizen terrorist suspects will be tried in federal court.

Battlefield 2011

2008 Battle of Monmouth reenactment here.
2011: click here. Many of the photographs are heavy crops.

Lytro

Lytro is a company with an exciting new camera technology.

Don Juan

Gotipua

Via V., a Gotipua performance:

Acne Cure Reaches the Sun

From RealClimate.org: before and after:

The Sun might enter an extended period of low sunspot activity - a "grand minimum" similar to the Maunder Minimum in the 17th century.  Unfortunately, it does not offer us much respite in the matter of reducing climate change.

Greece Isn't Pakistan

David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy points out that Greece is in a mess because it is not Pakistan:

The problem isn't the Greek finance ministry. The problem isn't the Greek legislature. The problem isn't the Europeans who are being dragged kicking and screaming toward helping Greece. The problem isn't even Goldman Sachs and the other banks who lent Greece more money than they could afford and even helped them hide a bunch of the financings off the books.

Nope, the problem is Greek nuclear scientists and radical terror groups affiliated with the Greek intelligence services -- or rather, the lack thereof.

Because if Greece had nuclear weapons and crazed terrorists hiding in every luxury housing development, you can bet we wouldn't be going through this long drawn-out process of figuring out whether the country was going to default or not.

We know this because of Pakistan. Pakistan is an absolute financial basket case. It is in many respects in as bad a shape as Greece -- and in some it is even much worse off. But do you hear anyone talking about Pakistan's financial problems? Heck no.

Of course, talking about Pakistan's financial problems is like talking about whether Anthony Weiner's socks match. It's not exactly the first issue that comes to mind. Having said that, the reason we are not sweating the meltdown of Pakistan's financial markets is that there is no way the United States or the world would let it happen. Because a financial collapse could trigger the kind of unrest that would put Pakistani nukes at risk, and that's just not tolerable. So the United States pumps billions into Pakistan knowing full well that it is this aid that helps keep the ship of state afloat. (And, money being fungible, if it also pays for expanding Pakistan's nuclear arsenal … well, apparently we're willing to look the other way. Again.)

Once again, one of the main messages of modern international affairs comes through loud and clear: Nukes pay. From Pyongyang to Tehran, enterprising leaders know that the easiest way to boost your country's profile, gain political leverage, and win cash and prizes is to toss a little enriched uranium in the old Cuisinart, let the satellites take a few snaps, and start rattling your radioactive saber.

The problem with Greece is that if the economy collapsed, if the government collapsed, if the country descended into chaos, no one is worried that a nuclear catastrophe would follow. An ouzo-induced hangover maybe -- which can be a pretty horrific thing -- but it's the specter of a mushroom cloud that really is the attention grabber.

Alcohol and murder

Alcohol played a role in the year-ago murder of Diyyendu Sinha of Old Bridge.
Here:

"The five Old Bridge High School students first convinced someone to buy 10 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor for them and they went to a gathering of other students behind Grissom School, a defendant in a murder case told investigators after the beating death of Divyendu Sinha last June.....After an hour of drinking the teenagers got back into Contreras’ Honda Civic....“They were just trying to get into a fight,” Steven K. Contreras, 18, told investigators from the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office during a taped interview.

They encountered Sinha and family, who weer out for a walk, and beat Sinha up with fatal consequences.

Another set of lives ruined possibly by judgement impaired by intoxicants.

B Street Band

One of the "Thursdays by the Sea" concerts at Pier Village, Long Branch, NJ.

Vegetarian Dilemma

If one is a vegetarian, not out of habit or tradition, or religious conviction, but for reasons of dharma [1],  then one cannot eat mass-grown American tomatoes, it appears.

Bridges

Another shot from that room with a view:

A Room With A View

From the twenty-first floor of an apartment building in Brooklyn:


Pannable version below the fold.
PS: Not sure how to make it work on the iPad.  On a PC, you can drag the picture around seeing detail in full resolution.

Hitchens on Pakistan

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately connected. The self-righteousness comes from the claim to represent a religion: the very name “Pakistan” is an acronym of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and so forth, the resulting word in the Urdu language meaning “Land of the Pure.” The self-pity derives from the sad fact that the country has almost nothing else to be proud of: virtually barren of achievements and historically based on the amputation and mutilation of India in 1947 and its own self-mutilation in Bangladesh. The self-hatred is the consequence of being pathetically, permanently mendicant: an abject begging-bowl country that is nonetheless run by a super-rich and hyper-corrupt Punjabi elite. As for paranoia: This not so hypothetical Pakistani would also be a hardened anti-Semite, moaning with pleasure at the butchery of Daniel Pearl and addicted to blaming his self-inflicted woes on the all-powerful Jews.

Garden pics

Clematis at full bloom (more photos after "Read more")

Javed Akhtar and Two-Nation Theory

A delightful interview of Javed Akhtar: (it is in English, btw.)

Second of two on Pakistan

Dhruva Jaishankar in The Indian Express:

Finally, there are those elements that Washington continues to give credence to, or at least leave unquestioned: Pakistan’s insecurities are legitimately propelled by fears of encirclement, India’s growing resource base, its nuclear weapons programme, and its reported “Cold Start” doctrine, thus adequately justify Pakistan’s inordinate military spending, greater investments in its nuclear and missile programmes, and support for terror groups targeting India and Afghanistan. That lasting peace between India and Pakistan and the settlement of the Kashmir dispute to Pakistan’s satisfaction will almost entirely eliminate its insecurities. That the army remains the only secular institution in Pakistan that “works” and is therefore deserving of support. And that Pakistan’s top military and intelligence officials bear little or no responsibility for the actions of their subordinates and affiliates, a claim even less credible given revelations from the ongoing trial of Tahawwur Rana and the testimony of David Coleman Headley. The erroneous conclusion drawn by the Obama administration from such questionable assumptions is that demonstrations of Indian magnanimity will allow Pakistan’s misguided, but not necessarily malevolent, security forces to reallocate resources towards improving the country’s security and economy. 

Responding to Pakistan’s narrative requires an important cognitive leap, one that most in Washington are still reluctant to take: Pakistan’s purported obsessions and insecurities are self-inflicted, created and consistently advanced to serve important private interests, almost always to the detriment of the country and its people. This applies equally to all the challenges commonly associated with Pakistan, be it the military’s political preponderance, the proliferation of nuclear technology and materials, the cultivation and use of terrorist proxies against both adversaries and nominal allies, the growing radicalisation of the body politic, and periodic India-Pakistan crises. There is also little clarity regarding Pakistani pleas for a long-term strategic relationship, which it professes to desire as a symbol of legitimacy, but also works to undermine through its transactional demands and poorly concealed enthusiasm for a hasty US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

First of two on Pakistan

Sushant Shareen writes in Tehelka: (excerpt, but read the whole thing)

PAKISTAN IS not so much a victim of terrorism as it is a victim of the stupendous success of the indoctrination programme that has replaced the innate pragmatism of the people. Islamism doubles up as nationalism and validates substantially, if not entirely, the concept of Islamofascism. It is this phenomenon that leads a newspaper owner, who is an ideal candidate for a lunatic asylum but in today’s Pakistan is a leading flagbearer of the ‘ideology of Pakistan’, to demand a nuclear strike on India because after a nuclear exchange Pakistan will be able to progress like Japan did after Hiroshima! It is this thinking that leads a top general under Pervez Musharraf, and a man who at one point was touted as a possible successor to Musharraf, to advocate firing “a nuclear warning shot in the Bay of Bengal, across India, demonstrating our circular range capacity” in order to send the message that “you don’t mess with a nuclear power and get away with it”. It is this thinking that makes a former information minister declare that “Pakistan has made nuclear weapons not to keep them in the cupboard but to use them against its enemies”. It is this mindset that makes the so-called ‘civil society’ — news anchors, lawyers, activists — defend the action of the assassin of Punjab governor, Salman Taseer. And it is precisely this mindset that prevents the Pakistan army (its ranks filled with the oxymoronic ‘moderate Taliban’) from ending its double-game in the war on terror. 

Today, it is not the nukes that protect Pakistan but Pakistan that protects its nukes. 

This then is the terrible reality of Pakistan. Unfortunately, just as the Pakistanis are in denial, so too are the Indians, or at least the Indian establishment, about the ground reality in Pakistan. India’s Pakistan policy (if at all there is such a thing) is predicated on interactions with what is a fringe group of liberal, moderate, modern, and sensible Pakistanis who are excellent advocates of their country but whose words don’t count for anything in terms of setting their country’s policy or direction. This is a class that doesn’t number more than a couple of thousand.

Water on the Moon

The New York Times reports that apart from the surface water detected by NASA and Indian space probes,

Now, scientists analyzing tiny fragments of hardened lava from long-ago lunar eruptions report that the fragments contain about as much water as similar magmas on Earth, meaning there is plenty of water inside the Moon too.

Einstein, Feynman, Hopper visit AT&T Labs

Famed Scientists Richard Feynman, Grace Hopper and Albert Eistein explore AT&T Labs during a mid-2011 visit.

Originally presented as part of the 2011 AT&T Cyber Security Conference. A complete replay of this video, as well as a live panel session including the scientists and AT&T Chief Security Officer Ed Amoroso, will be available at http://www.att.com/securityconference

India and Organic Farming

This is a post in 3 parts.

My point is that we in India seem to recognize the value of our old practices and traditions only when it is blessed by westerners.   Far better that we record our old practices and traditions while they are still extant, and then go through them looking for value, than to lose them altogether, except for fragments recorded by Westerners, because we consider them to be superstition, unscientific, etc., etc.

An illustration of this point follows:

1. For context, I'm reproducing part of one of my posts from January 2009:

Fruitless Fall : The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis

Rowan Jacobsen examines the recently emerged phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder - the mysterious death of honey bee hives, almost all over the world. Science has unable to pin it on any one cause; so there may be a systemic problem and a combination of stresses on honey bees may have crossed a threshold. This is a scientific whodunit narrated in a very engaging style. I'm ordering my own copy as I return this to the library. I strongly recommend it, five stars out of five.

2. I point you to an excerpt of Rowan Jacobsen's book that I had posted previously, about Kirk Webster, a beekeeper in Vermont.   It is not necessary to read this to understand the third point, except that Webster's bees do not suffer from colony collapse disorder.

3. Another excerpt from the book:

Central to Webster's worldview was the work of Sir Albert Howard, the father of the organic farming movement.  Howard, Britain's imperial economic botanist in India in the early 1900s, studied the farming practices of India's peasants and wrote two books based on his observations: An Agricultural Testament and The Soil and Health.   He was knighted for his work in 1935.

----

PS: Now in the years to come,  we will take organic farming as a western innovation, and seek to transplant it back to India, when it arose from traditional knowledge in India in the first place.  How much better to instead study, validate or invalidate our practices and then educate the farmer accordingly.  Why is imported knowledge given a place of privilege?  The same argument holds for Ayurveda.   The problem is that most of  past knowledge is in a million mouldering manuscripts that won't last a generation, or in the heads of people whose children scorn their knowledge, and so it won't last a generation either.

Richard Clarke on Pakistan

Richard Clarke on Pakistan: They are such pathological liars they even don't know when they are lying any more.

At the very end of this clip from Bill Maher's show:

OBL cartoons

http://rlindia.blogspot.com/2011/05/blog-post_11.html
and
http://rlindia.blogspot.com/2011/05/blog-post.html

Perkovich on Pakistan

In the NY Times, George Perkovich writes that

...aid combined with these other U.S. policies clearly has not changed the Pakistani military’s obsession with contesting India. There is nothing India or the United States can realistically do that will change this self-destructive obsession because the problem is India’s existence itself.

Prof. Walter Russell Mead on US-Pakistan relations

This is a must-read.

We are going to have to get tough.  The Pakistani security establishment lives to a very large degree in what, to American eyes, looks like a dangerous and delusional imaginary world.  As I’ve written before, Americans (and virtually everyone else in the world who looks at this question) sees Pakistan locked into a profoundly dysfunctional combination of misguided security ideas and comprehensive domestic failure.  Pakistani strategists embrace these seemingly destructive policies out of some very deeply-held beliefs and in response to what they see as existential questions of national identity and cohesion.  They will not be lightly diverted from this long-established and cherished course, however suicidal, and as is often the case with people whose goals are unrealistic, they are accustomed to very high risk strategies and brinkmanship.  Defeat after defeat by India, progressive deterioration of the domestic security climate and the utter collapse of political morality in what passes for the governing class in Pakistan have not forced a reevaluation.  Charm and appeals to sweet reason by American officials and emissaries won’t do it either.  Neither will humanitarian aid: the suffering of ordinary Pakistanis has little impact on the elite, and in the short to medium term public opinion in Pakistan is so anti-American and so politically marginal that we could die of old age waiting for spending however generous to change our image in Pakistan enough to change the politics of the relationship.

MJ Akbar on Pakistan's Army

Worth a read.

One story is too priceless to be ignored. Former Afghanistan intelligence chief A. Saleh recalls that when, four years ago, he told Musharraf that Osama was hiding in or around Abbotabad, Musharraf exploded, "Am I President of the Republic of Banana?"

A Sigh of Relief

We were sitting in the left side of the plane; but the winds were from the south west. So our flight from Dallas approached the Newark airport from the north, and I was treated to a view of the magnificent Manhattan skyline.  I shed my usual tear at the absence of the Twin Towers.

At home, I had had left the radio on, as a thief-deterrent.  As we entered the house, I heard President Obama saying that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.  I normally don't think of any death as an occasion for celebration; but as much joy as is possible on hearing that someone has been killed, I felt.    I think that  the world (a large part of it, anyway) heaves a sigh of relief that such a useless but dangerous man is no more.

The Big Story - how true?

T. N. Ninan in the Business Standard

.... people have tended to forget that the big story in India, the truly exciting story, remains rapid economic growth. That was underlined by the Planning Commission formally adopting on Thursday a 9-9.5 per cent annual growth target for the five years beginning next April — building on the average of 7.8 per cent in the preceding 10 years.

The last days of Kasturba

Controversy is often raised about the fact that Gandhiji disallowed the new drug pencillin to be used on Kasturba when she was in her deathbed. Here is some additional information.

Bhangra Blowout 18

Here is a photograph from Bhangra Blowout 18:

Arundhati Roy Parody

I know, it is hard to parody a parody, but Great Bong does just that!

Vive La Difference!

 Shahid Afridi, Pakistan cricket captain on Indians:

To recap, here’s an English translation of what Mr. Afridi told Samaa TV, a Pakistani channel, in Urdu at the weekend:


“If I speak truthfully, they just can’t have the kind of heart a Muslim has or a Pakistani has. I think they don’t have the sort of big hearts, pure hearts, Allah has given us. It is a very difficult thing for us to be together or to have a long-term relationship.”

Capitalism and Slavery

This, from the Disunion series on the NY Times, argues that capitalism wasn't incompatible with slavery and that the economic causes of the American Civil War are greatly exaggerated.  Because the Northern and Southern economies were so linked, people expected economic disaster as a result of secession.

Of course, the dire predictions did not come to pass. The northern economy did not collapse without access to Southern markets, a monopoly on cotton did not make the Confederacy invulnerable and economic self-interest did not forestall a bloody conflict. Yet by reminding us of slavery’s importance to the nation as a whole, these prognostications suggest that the Civil War was hardly the result of the inherent hostility of capitalism to slavery.

The Beleaguered Revolutionary

Courtesy Cafe Pyala:  (if you can't follow the whine-fest, Cafe Pyala also has a translation)
An excerpt:  Sir, look our own police is beating us, how can we bring about a revolution? You tell me, you're from the media. If you're with us, only then will the revolution come about. If the police don't beat us up, only then will the revolution come about.

1.21 billion Indians, and counting

Good news is that the growth is slowing, but there are 1.21 billion Indians. The really bad news is that the gender ratio continues to get worse.

A gender breakdown among children showed fewer girls than boys are being born or surviving, with 914 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6, compared to 927 for every 1,000 in the last census.

Sudarshan Patnaik - Official Site

The sand art of Sudarshan Patnaik is celebrated in the official site.

2011 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Theory of Everything

Happy Holi!

But

Police rained on the parade of Hindus in Queens when they seized colored powder central to their religious celebration Sunday, community leaders said.

For some 25 years, Hindus in Richmond Hill have held a parade to celebrate the ancient religious holiday Holi - the Festival of Colors. Participants traditionally throw colored powder at one another, but Sunday cops seized loads of the powder from paradegoers. "They walked around and started grabbing from anyone they saw," said parade organizer Vishnu Mahadeo, 50, president of the Richmond Hill Economic Development Council. "They said the law said you can't have powder.

"What law is that?" Mahadeo said the powder was harmless talcum powder. The Police Department declined to comment.

The Richmond Hill parade is one of the largest Holi celebrations in the country, attracting up to 25,000 people. Held during the last full moon of winter, the holiday celebrates good luck for the spring.

Civil War Scrap Book

Want to keep a reference to this from the NYTimes, from the American Civil War.

Messenger to Mercury

Nasa's Messenger spacecraft has successfully entered into orbit around the planet Mercury - the first probe to do so.

Balu: Introduction to Dharma and Ethics

Part I:


Part II:


Part III:


Part IV:

Song

Sometimes a song infects the brain.  One such for me.  Then too, I love the sound of Shreya Ghoshal.
This song is supposed to be from the movie "Black and White".  Here's the version I found on youtube.

PS: The male version is apparently what appears in the movie:

Weaknesses leading to systemic failure

From Systemic failures: Challenges and opportunities in risk management in complex systems, Venkat Venkatasubramanian  (emphasis added)

Table 2. Some Typical Examples of Failures at Various Levels in a Systemic Failure
Individuals

•  Poor operator training or inexperienced operators leading to human errors
•  Not enough personnel due to downsizing

Equipment

• Poor maintenance and wear-and-tear leading to equipment failure
• Wrong material, capacity, or equipment

Procedures

• Standard operating procedures not followed, workers make up their own or perform short cuts
• Past mini-accidents and warnings ignored
• Process hazards analysis (PHA) not conducted thoroughly
• Poor emergency planning and training

Safety Systems

• Safety systems not tested and maintained properly
• Back-up and/or emergency systems not on automatic but on manual

Management • Failure in communication between ranks

• Safety is not made priority #1, cost cutting is
• Senior management lacking the background to appreciate the risks inherent in complex process plants – too much emphasis on financial spreadsheets and not enough on process flowsheets
• “Performance at all costs” culture encouraging excessive risk taking and unethical behavior among its employees

Corporate Board

• Rewarding short term performance instead of long term
• Setting up perverse incentives that are detrimental to the long term survival of the company

Government: Policies and Regulators

• Laissez-faire regulatory policies, reliance on self policing
• Policies not strictly enforced due to limited resources or inherent conflict of interests of the regulatory bodies (as seen in SEC and MMS)

National: Political

• Anti-government or anti-regulations sentiment dominant
• Sustainability warnings ignored
• Celebration of greed

You are being lied to. What's new?

The story about the pensions of state employees causing states to go bankrupt, etc., is a bit overblown.

Most of the pension shortfall using the current methodology is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today. This is by far the major cause of pension funding shortfalls. While there are certainly cases of pensions that had been under- funded even before the market plunge, prior years of under-funding is not the main reason that pensions face difficulties now. Another $80 billion of the shortfall is the result of the fact that states have cutback their contributions as a result of the downturn.

Strange deformation in rail in New Zealand earthquake

http://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2010/11/02/the-canterbury-earthquake-images-of-the-distorted-railway-line/



Another:

The Republicans' Crony Capitalism on Display

The Wisconsin bill that seeks to eliminate unions of public sector employees also has stuff like this:

“Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).”

As Paul Krugman explains:

What’s that about? The state of Wisconsin owns a number of plants supplying heating, cooling, and electricity to state-run facilities (like the University of Wisconsin). The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim. Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.”

Thunderbolt

This blog had mentioned Light Peak, a new computer peripheral/electronics interconnect technology from Intel and the speculation that Apple would leapfrog USB 3.0 and go for this technology.

Well, it did, under the tradename of "Thunderbolt". Here is the Intel page and the Apple page.

The promise is of 10 Gpbs of throughput in both directions, daisy chaining, 10 watts of power for peripherals, simple (cheap???) adapters to connect Thunderbolt to USB and Firewire devices and general joy and salvation for the world.

On the Raymond Davis affair

Praveen Swami has a nice theory of what happened in Lahore with the shooting of two Pakistanis by a CIA contractor.

However, I quote it here, because a worried-by-deficit US needs to heed Prof. Christine Fair:

“The bottom line,” says C Christine Fair, a scholar at Georgetown University, “is that the Pakistanis do not want a strategic relationship with the US. Washington needs to get over the idea that throwing more money at Pakistan will make it see its own interests differently.”

Amazing Example of Leadership Skills

This is from Donald Rumsfeld, G.W. Bush's Secy. of Defence. (PDF file)

April 7, 2003    11:46 AM

TO:              Doug Feith
FROM:        Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT:  Issues w/Various Countries

We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Syria and Libya, and we need it fast. If they mess up Iraq, it will delay bringing our troops home.

We also need to solve the Pakistan problem.

And Korea doesn’t seem to be going well.

Are you coming up with proposals for me to send around?

Thanks.

For pixel peepers

The full frame:

Majorly Profound

Added "Major Bearls Oph Wisdom" to the Blog List.

Major and his fourth cousin thrice removed (twice by ISI and once by CIA) express a widespread opinion about Pakistan in a very humorous way.

E.g.,

South Asian

Indians are Indians and Pakistanis when caught in tight situations (like in Airports) are Indians too. In other circumstances they are South Asians. Being "South Asian" offers many advantages. Such as an overwhelming numerical advantage.

Example: When faced with the question “Is radicalization a problem”? South Asians can reply with a straight face "Only 170 million, or less than 10% of the South Asians are radicalized". Which sounds entirely reasonable.

or

A round of applause for AK-facilitated egalitarianism!!

So what of this elusive little-understood animal (like the Yeti and “Silent Majority” of Pakistan) called Liberalism? More importantly what is and why Liberalism? Liberalism wimmens and gentlemards, among other things, is to ensure social mobility and equal participation in governance. And social mobility in yesteryears depended on access to capital producing goods. Like Land. Ergo, if Liberalism had existed before Salman Taseer’s assasination, Land reforms would have been implmented. Pray tell me how did that go? As you would have guessed:

Fantastically!! We had the Provincial Tenancy Act of 1950!! 

Since yours sachly fancies himself as a story teller more than a lawyer (and is allergic to the word “WHEREAS” in all caps that every legal document seems to have) instead of describing the law, let me tell you a story. There are 1.7 million landless agricultural workers  in Pakistan and in January 2002 The honorable High court of Sindh dismissed petitions for the release of bonded laborers citing this very same act and declaring bonded laborers to be a “dispute” between Landlords and peasants. Covered by the Tenancy act. So much for equal rights and social mobility based on capital producing goods. So, did the “liberalism” enabled by tenancy act die with Salman Taseer’s assassination?

No!

Did the egalitarianism of the threat of a few peasants banding together, declaring their landlord to be a blasphemer and shooting him in the head become a real possibility after Salman Taseer’s assasination?

Emphatic yes!!

So wimmens and gentlemards, I submit that egalitarianism has taken birth!!

Contaminated Genomes

I wonder whether all those studies of the genetic distance between various human groups is affected by this kind of problem. 

Nearly 20 percent of the nonhuman genomes held in computer databases are contaminated with human DNA, presumably from the researchers who prepared the samples, say scientists who chanced upon the finding while looking for a human virus.

A cheap way to mathematical immortality?

From here.  Pay your fee and you get to name a mathematical theorem!

The Anthrax Attacks - case not closed

The 2001 anthrax attacks helped raise the fear level in the US of A, and propelled it to war.  The perpetrator(s) have not been found.  The FBI pinned the blame on a scientist, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide;  but its case was not convincing to a lot of people.  Now the FBI's case has been further weakened.  The perpetrator(s) remain at large.

Libertarians and Asteroid Defence

The Libertarian Argument:

1. The sole moral purpose of government is to protect people's rights.
2. An asteroid crashing into the earth does not violate anyone's rights.
3. Therefore, it is immoral for the government to tax people to build a defence against asteroids.

Pakistan demands to suck at the US taxpayers' teat

Reminder from 2009:

"A company at the verge of failure is quite clearly able to get a bigger bailout than a nation that has been accused of failure," Ambassador Husain Haqqani said in remarks at a Washington think tank.

"That's something that in this town needs a review," he said, calling for investments in schools and infrastructure to help nuclear-armed Pakistan fight al Qaeda and home-grown extremists battling the civilian government in Islamabad.

Pakistan and Afghanistan deserve more resources than "some failed insurance company or some car company whose achievement is that they couldn't make cars that they could sell," said Haqqani.

Bad Governance could trip up India

Sadananda Dhume explains, in the Wall Street Journal.

Falling Apart?

Pakistan.

Giving the Pakistani government more money because it is "too big to fail" is a doomed policy in every way except one: it allows us to believe (for the time being) that nuclear weapons will not fall into the hands of people who would like to detonate those weapons in Long Beach or Baltimore Harbor.

This belief will be true until it is no longer true. The day when it is no longer true will be the day that a gaggle of pundits assembles on TV to say: "how could this have happened?" Everyone will express shock at the turn of events.  But this turn of events is inevitable.  Pakistan's government will fall.  Whether it falls this year or next or in 2014, no one at the highest levels of the United States government doubts that Pakistan's current government will fall.  What happens after that is anyone's guess.

Corruption in India

Forwarded to me.   If India was not so corrupt, why should anyone in India be poor?

FYI: 1 lakh = 100,000,   1 crore = 10,000,000

Egypt - 2

From The Friday Times:

Also, read M.J. Akbar.

Jawaharlal Nehru once said that Gandhi's greatest contribution was not the liberation of India from the British but the liberation of Indians from fear. The second had to precede the first. Fear of the Raj disappeared, Nehru said, during the great Non-Cooperation, or Khilafat, Movement between 1919 and February 1922. Fear finally began to retreat in Egypt when a 26-year-old woman, Asmaa Mahfouz, posted a video of herself on the Net with a simple message: "Do not be afraid."

Egypt

Blow up the topmast???

What does "blow up the topmast" mean?

I looked for possible phrases with "top mast" and "top sail", to no avail.

Veena Malik's fiery self-defense

The aspiring Pakistani showbiz/actress, Veena Malik, issues a spirited defense of herself, standing up to the beards. Given what Pakistan is today, you have to salute her courage. It is in Hindu/Urdu, sorry, no translation. You can get a sense of the controversy here.

Standing Up to the Bullies

For the record, I do support people's right to wear anything, just subject to the limitations of public safety. (So e.g., a burqa-wearer must still have a recognizable face photograph on her driver's license, and must, if necessary, show her face.)

But I also support people's right to say what they think. Here is an example:

A SYDNEY artist whose anti-burka mural has infuriated left-wing and Islamic activists is vowing that the provocative artwork will stay in place despite death threats, abuse, a string of vandalism attacks, a violent weekend protest and a police request to remove it.

The people who threaten to firebomb Sergio Redegalli's mural are the threat to public safety. If instead, we convert the mural into a threat to public safety (because someone might turn violent) then we've given in the bullies.

To remind you - back in 1927, the British Indian government decided it could ban some speech because various groups threatened to be violent otherwise. Both India and Pakistan haven't gotten that law (IPC 295A) off their books, and are still plagued by the bad law.

PTI reports:

A case was filed against former Test cricketer Ravi Shastri in a local court here for allegedly hurting the religious feelings of Hindus by reportedly eating beef during the India-South Africa Test match in Johannesburg.

[...]

The complainant alleged that Shastri has hurt the feelings of Hindus by reportedly eating beef in full knowledge and by commenting, "though I know that I am a Brahmin, I can't stop myself from eating the dish (billtang)."

The law applied was 295A. My being offended by something cannot turn that something into a crime. 295A in essence said - if you're offended by something enough to become violent, that something is a crime.

PS: The right way to deal with it - Sadhvi Ritambhara was due to speak at a Hindu temple in Mahwah, NJ. She is notorious for some rather bloodthirsty anti-Muslim rabble-rousing in India; a local Muslim organization pointed this out to the temple managers; and the temple cancelled her appearance at the temple. S.R.'s meeting was held at a nearby hotel; but I am told that the temple did not permit even a "redirect" sign on their property, to send people to the new venue. This is the appropriate use of the right of private property. ("Say what you like, but on your own dime." - I need to say this for those who ask - what about Ritambhara's freedom of speech?)

Suppose the temple management did not respond gracefully, then violence is not the answer. You make your case, and educate the community. Even just keeping a cool dignity will win some people over.

The Interview with Dr Devi Shetty

This is very worth listening to.

This article provides some background. Dr. Devi Shetty has a new model of health care delivery. But you'll understand it only if you listen to the interview.

So essentially I am sitting here and telling the parents, ok, your child has a hole in the heart and it costs sixty thousand rupees which they don't have. So essentially I'm putting a price tag on human life. And that is what we do in all the developing countries. Our only job is putting a price tag on human life. That is unacceptable. So we have to come up with a solution. We can't let people die. I strongly believe India will become the first country in the world to disassociate health care from your bank balance.

The Pride of the National Zoo

A lion, 2 lionesses, 7 cubs.  For the zoo-goer, a bundle of fun.

The season past

Winter

Both the grayness and the brightness of winter.

Five myths about Southern Secession

With the American Civil War a hundred and fifty years behind us,  it is bound to be fought once again in speeches and essays.  Here is a good one, in my opinion, James Loewen in the Washington Post.

The five myths Loewen explodes are:

1. The South seceded over states' rights.

In fact, Confederates opposed states' rights -- that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.

2. Secession was about tariffs and taxes.
   

Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.

3. Most white Southerners didn't own slaves, so they wouldn't secede for slavery.

[S]ecession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well.

4. Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.

[T]he North initially went to war to hold the nation together. Abolition came later.

5. The South couldn't have made it long as a slave society.

Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily.

Andromeda

You should see this.  Our nearest galaxy in glorious detail.

Pakistan slips past the Event Horizon

In my opinion, Pakistan has slid past the point of no return to the blackhole of its Islamist future.  I don't think there is anything that can deflect it from the trajectory that it is on.  Read the following and see if you agree.

(Rediff)

A group of over 500 Pakistani scholars and clerics have described the policeman who gunned down Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer as a Ghazi (an Islamic warrior) and have warned against any expression of sympathy for the slain Pakistan People's Party leader, saying it would tantamount to an act of blasphemy.

Warning the people against offering funeral prayers for Taseer, 66, the clerics of Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat Pakistan, a grouping representing the moderate Barelvi sect of Sunni Muslims, praised Elite Force policeman Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri and called him a Ghazi.
....
The clerics said in a statement issued on Tuesday night, "There should be no expression of grief or sympathy on the death of the governor, as those who support blasphemy of the Prophet Mohammed are themselves indulging in blasphemy."

Hailing Malik, the clerics said he had killed Taseer for calling the blasphemy law a 'black law'.

Hailing the 'courage and zeal' of Qadri, the clerics and scholars said his action had made all Muslims proud.

...
The statement issued by the Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat Pakistan was endorsed by the grouping's 'ameer' or chief Syed Mazhar Saeed Shah Kazmi. It was also endorsed by over 500 scholars and clerics like Allama Syed Riaz Hussain Shah, Shah Turab-ul-Haq Qadri and Pir Ghulam Siddiq Naqshbandi.

Those 'favouring the person who indulged in blasphemy are themselves blasphemous', the scholars and clerics said in the statement.

Paying tribute to Taseer's assassin and his courage, the statement described Qadri as a lover of the Prophet Mohammed and a Ghazi or Islamic warrior.

Qadri had "revived the 14-century-old traditions of Islam" and made Muslims around the world proud, it said.

The clerics and scholars asked intellectuals, ministers, politicians and media personalities who oppose the blasphemy law to learn a lesson from Taseer's death.

These personalities should "save their faith by announcing that they would desist from attempting to amend the blasphemy law," they said.

Further:

A leader of the ruling Pakistan People's Party's 'ulema' or clerics wing led Taseer's funeral prayer on Wednesday afternoon after several leading clerics of Lahore, including the imams of the Data Darbar shrine and the Shahi Masjid, refused to do so.

The cleric of the mosque at the Governor's House, who is a Barelvi, refused to lead the prayer, sources said.

(from Yahoo News)

ISLAMABAD – Lawyers showered the suspected assassin of a liberal Pakistani governor with rose petals as he entered court. Some 170 miles away, the prime minister joined thousands to mourn the loss of the politician, who dared to challenge the demands of Islamic extremists.....Even so-called moderate Muslim scholars praised 26-year-old Mumtaz Qadri for allegedly killing Punjab province Gov. Salman Taseer on Tuesday in a hail of gunfire while he was supposed to be protecting him as a bodyguard. Qadri later told authorities he acted because of Taseer's vocal opposition to blasphemy laws that order death for those who insult Islam.

Last Man Standing

The darkness descending on Pakistan was easily foreseen. Still, when it arrives it is a shock.

One of the beginnings of the story is thus, with Asia Bibi, a poor mother of five, a Christian - (wiki):

In June 2009, Asia Bibi, a farm hand from the village of Ittan Wali in Sheikhpura District, was asked to fetch water; she complied, but some of her fellow Muslim workers refused to drink the water as they considered Christians to be "unclean".

There was an altercation. There were words. Asia Bibi was accused of blasphemy and thrown into jail. As per Pakistan's blasphemy law, even repeating the words constitutes further blasphemy. As per one publication, Asia might have said, Jesus is alive and Muhammad is dead. We do not know. Asia was held in jail for an year, after which she was pronounced guilty of blasphemy with no mitigating circumstances, and sentenced to death by hanging.

Blasphemy laws are bad, and Pakistan's is particularly so. Some point out that no one has yet been executed for blasphemy. Asia Bibi might be the first. The law is such that it is used by people to harass and destroy their enemies. Just a few days ago, a doctor, Dr Noushad Ali Valliani, chucked the visiting card of a medical rep into the trashcan. The medical rep. was Mr Muhammad Faizan. Dr Valliani had dishonored the name of the Prophet, and formally charged with blasphemy. Such is the law.

Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistani Punjab, thought that injustice had been done to Asia Bibi.

“She is a woman who has been incarcerated for a year-and-a half on a charge trumped up against her five days after an incident where people who gave evidence against her were not even present. So this is a blatant violation against a member of a minority community. I, like a lot of right-minded people, was outraged, and all I did was to show my solidarity. It is the first time in the history of the Punjab that a governor has gone inside a district jail, held a press conference and stated clearly that this is a blatant miscarriage of justice and that the sentence that has been passed is cruel and inhumane. I wanted to take a mercy petition to the president, and he agreed, saying he would pardon Aasiya Bibi if there had indeed been a miscarriage of justice.”

There were howls of protest from Pakistani Islamists. Effigies of Taseer and of Sherry Rehman, a legislator who said that the blasphemy laws must be amended, were burnt at rallies. More ominously:

At a seminar titled ‘Protection of the blasphemy law and its importance’, Justice (r) Mian Nazeer Akhtar said Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was also a blasphemer for he was protecting those who indulged in blasphemy.

Another religious outfit declared Taseer an apostate. (Traditionally, historically, the maximum penalty for apostasy and for blasphemy in Muslim-ruled societies has been death, definitely if the offender doesn't repent. Moreover, the mullahs pronounce such persons to be "Wajib ul Katl" - "obligatory to be killed". If the state doesn't execute the person, any one else can and thereby gain religious merit.)

Taseer stood firm. According to one of his tweets

I was under huge pressure sure 2 cow down b4 rightest pressure on blasphemy.Refused. Even if I'm the last man standing

On the afternoon of January 4, Salman Taseer was gunned down by one of his guards.

The guard, Mumtaz Qadri of the Punjab Elite Force, yelled out ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ and emptied two magazines of an SMG on the governor in the Kohsar Market before surrendering himself.

He later explained that he had killed Mr Taseer because of his recent criticism of the blasphemy law.

The killing of Taseer has provoked a lot of protest; but also a lot of support for the killer. At one time there were supposedly **three** Facebook pages up felicitating Qadri. {I should point out that an Internet user in Pakistan is hardly likely to be one of those "poor, illiterates misled by the mullahs".} I have no doubt that Qadri thinks he will enjoy the fame of "Martyr" Ilm-ud-Din.
______

The story of the blasphemy laws has other beginnings. In 1927, the "Rangila Rasul" case (which made Ilm-ud-Din famous) roiled Punjab, and was making its way into the rest of India. The publisher of a scurrilous pamphlet ridiculing the Prophet, was acquitted under existing law of offending religious sentiment, and the Mohammedans were restive. The British Indian government needed a new instrument, and shamefully, Indian nationalists aided them in the Central Legislature in giving them one. The few really liberal members of legislature argued in vain that such a law was not needed; that religion did not need the protection of legislature. The threat though, was of violence - riots - if the government did not act. Then these members argued, again in vain, that the law should have an expiry date of 1930. But what ensued was section 295 of the British Indian Penal Code. After independence, in Pakistan, it was augmented with sections 295B, C, 298, to give the current mess.

The point here is that yield once to intimidation and you are headed down a slippery slope. Now the intimidation is thus (NYT)

A crippling strike by Islamist parties brought Pakistan to a standstill on Friday as thousands of people took to the streets, and forced businesses to close, to head off any change in the country’s blasphemy law, which rights groups say has been used to persecute minorities, especially Christians.

The law was introduced in the 1980s under the military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq as part of a policy of promoting Islam to unite this deeply fractious society. Many attempts to revise the law have since been thwarted by the strong opposition of religious forces, which continue to gather strength.

The British section 295 is in force in India, and as far as I know, it is used for intimidation; or government uses it to avert the threat of riots.
______

I'd like to point out that Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris is in hiding with a changed identity, because she too "blasphemed" with her quickly withdrawn endorsement of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day".

Free speech advocates of the leftist type don't take her plight seriously, because they see her as needlessly offending a beleaguered Muslim minority in the US of A. What these people do not understand is that it hardly matters that it is a minority of a minority, that is going to take e.g., mullah Anwar al-Aulaki's fatwa seriously - this is a threat deadlier than government efforts to squash inconvenient speech. You don't know when and wherefrom you are going to be attacked. As an SFGate article put it:

While WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is celebrating his $1 million-plus book deal on a 600-acre estate and enjoying his status as a lefty fringe hero, former cartoonist Molly Norris is in hiding.

The moral of this column is that in today's world, cartoons, if they target Islam, can be more hazardous to your health than crossing the mighty U.S. government and its allies.

I think free speech advocates forget that it is offensive speech that need protection; and that protection is needed more than from just the government. If they don't wake up, perhaps one day Salman Taseer will be seen to have been the last man standing.

What a Muslim liberal sounds like

See this interview with Tarek Fatah. He is either speaking the truth, or else confirming all my prejudices :) -- or both!  (Compare and contrast with Imam Faisal Rauf of Ground-Zero Mosque fame; IMO, Rauf is not a liberal, at a minimum Rauf belongs to the class of people Fatah mentions here (emphasis added):

"In the ten years that I spent researching the subject and the 45 years I have spent fighting the forces of medieval darkness that wish to drag the world’s Muslims into the past as a path to the future, it dawned on me that even those who knew the truth about the fraudulent nature of the Islamic State, were not prepared to say so, guilt-ridden in their minds, thinking this would be an act of betrayal of the Muslim community."

)

To pick a passage:

In the book I make the distinction between three sets of comparisons:

1. Islam vs. Islamism
2. Muslim vs. Islamist, and
3. Islamic State vs. State of Islam

In brief, whereas Islam is a religion based on the five pillars of our faith, Islamism (al-Islamiyah as the Ikhwan claims) is the use of the religion of Islam as a political tool and doctrine, whose logical end is Islamofascism (or Islamoanarchism in the words of Tariq Ali).

The difference between a Muslim and an Islamist is along the same lines. Whereas a Muslim follows Islam, an Islamist sticks to the political doctrine of Islamism. This makes it possible for even non-Muslims and atheists to be Islamists. For example, George Galloway is an Islamist as is Ken Livingstone (former mayor of London) and even Noam Chomsky who I am told addressed a large gathering of the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba in Punjab University.

Lastly, while the Islamic State is the political entity and state where Islamists would exercise their authoritarian and fascist rule over the population (as in Gaza and Iran) the State of Islam is the condition every Muslim must aspire to live in where he and she can embrace the ethics of Prophet Muhammad and live by the principle of the Quran as an individual.

US Botanic Garden Christmas Display

The US Botanic Garden in D.C. had a Christmas display that included replicas of landmark buildings and toy trains.

The replica of the garden greenhouse itself:

Peace!

More Toy Train

Oh, Happy New Year!
Image:

Pannable version below the fold.

Pakistan and Afghanistan

Anyone who buys into the Pakistani line "America abandoned us and left us holding the baby" with regard to Afghanistan, should read this Ejaz Haider essay.

ProPublica on ISI-LeT ties

Read it here:

Pakistan's powerful intelligence service has been accused for years of playing a "double game:" acting as a front-line U.S. ally in the fight against terror while supporting selected terrorist groups which serve Pakistani interests.

Now, for the first time, there is a detailed inside account of how that game is played. The U.S. investigation of the 2008 Mumbai attacks [1] has built a strong case that officers in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) collaborated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group in the plot that killed 166 people, six of them Americans. U.S. and Indian investigators say their understanding of the ISI-Lashkar alliance is drawn from the confessions of David Coleman Headley, an American convicted of participating in the Mumbai plot, as well as documents, phone records and electronic eavesdropping.

Test

Image:


Try panning around (drag the photo below)

The Humbug Assembly Line

Paul Krugman points out:

When discussing the alleged huge expansion of government under Mr. Obama, I’ve repeatedly found that people just won’t believe me when I try to point out that it never happened. They assume that I’m lying, or somehow cherry-picking the data. After all, they’ve heard over and over again about that surge in government spending and employment, and they don’t realize that everything they’ve heard was a special delivery from the Humbug Express.

The Humbug Express, as Krugman terms it, turned a temporary increase in government employment because of the Census, into a huge increase in government, when the government payrolls are actually shrinking.

Light Peak and USB 3.0

Light Peak is the name of the new Intel optical interconnect for computers and consumer devices.  Using thin optical cable, Light Peak will begin at a speed of 10 Gbps, and move to 100 Gbps.   In comparison, the newly emerging USB 3.0 reaches a theoretical maximum of 3.2 Gbps.

Out of the gates, USB 3.0 has the advantage of backward compatability of a huge installed base.  But it is also a technology that has passed the middle age of its lifecycle. 

There is considerable speculation that Apple will bypass USB 3.0 in favor of Light Peak (e.g., here and  here).

I imagine that along with a copper pair for power, and the long cable lengths allowed by Light Peak, we may be closer to my longstanding wish for a daisy chain of my audio, video and computer components, replacing the current dense mess of cables.

Government Overreach

The government wants to intrude itself everywhere.
The US of A.
India.

Terrorism has been a boon for the security state.

Seditious Eyes

In this context, seditious must mean "causing incitement to public disorder".  See below for an example.

Women unveiling their eyes in public in Saudi Arabia will be forced to fully cover up their faces if their eyes are found to be seditious, according to the Gulf Kingdom’s most feared Islamic law-enforcement group.
....
“The Commission members have orders to tell any women in public to cover up her face if they find that her eyes are seditious,” the paper said, quoting Sheikh Mutlaq Al Nabit, a Commission spokesman in Hael.
...
Nabit did not explain how the Commission members determine that a woman’s eyes are seditious.

Panda-2

Outdoors shot. Heavy crop - about 1/18th of the whole frame.  Apart from the crop and regular Lightroom no other processing.  Shows for the web what overkill a 5D2 is. Or from another point of view, how convenient!  From the EXIF, this was a 200mm, f/4.0, ISO 800, 1/1600 second shot, with the subject 23.8 meters away.  One can only revel in the quality of the glass.  Yes, the bright side of the panda's face is slightly blown.

Panda

Indoors, through glass. National Zoo, DC.

Red Panda

Red Panda.
Crop.

Telling!

From here:

New Delhi, Dec 14 (IANS) A Pakistani patient, owned up as a "suicide" attacker and an operative of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) by his country's army, was indeed treated in Delhi's Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, where he died three years ago, enquiries by IANS have revealed.

According to hospital sources, a Pakistani patient named Zulfiqar Ahmed was admitted in the multi-speciality private medical facility in November 2007.

"He died of renal failure," an official at the hospital told IANS, requesting anonymity because "our legal section is digging deeper into the case before coming on record".

The sources said that the hospital was looking into the records to find more about the patient, who according to the Pakistan Army website was on a "suicide attack" operation.

"It is a three-year-old record and it will take time to examine," another official said, as the hospital administration refused to say another more.

The Pakistani Army's website - www.pakistanarmy.gov.pk - claimed that an ISI operative who was on a "suicide attack" operation died in a New Delhi hospital Nov 16, 2007.

The posting was in the "Shuhada's (martyrs') corner" of the website, which had previously revealed the list of Pakistan's dead in the 1999 Kargil operation.

It named the operative as Zulfiqar Ahmed, his army number as 1726016 and his rank as naik.

The operative, the website claims, died of kidney failure and acute respiratory infection at New Delhi's Ganga Ram Hospital.

The website however doesn't mention where the operation was to be conducted as there was no suicide attack in Delhi or in nearby areas in or around November 2007.

The major terror attack in India before November 2007 were the Lumbini Park and Gokul Chat bombings in Hyderabad Aug 25 that year, in which 42 people were killed.

The martyr's section lists 25 ISI operatives, with varying causes of death. Besides Ahmed, one more ISI agent who died in India in May 1973 is identified as Lance Naik Abdul Ghani.

Indian Army chief General V.K. Singh, reacting to the postings, said it has exposed the Pakistan Army's "intentions".

"I have nothing to say on what they (the Pakistan Army) have put up on its website. But if it has, then it clearly show what their intentions and ways are and what their next move will be," Singh told reporters here when asked about the Pakistan Army's website posting.

The army chief also said that India needed to be "more alert".

"All I can say is we have to be more alert and only then we can protect the people and our troops," he said.

Scimitar-horned Oryx

National Zoo, Washington DC.

On this chilly December morning, the oryx was probably maximizing his exposure to the sun.  So it was not in a particularly favorable position for a shot.  The full frame is below - the oryx occupies about 5% of the frame even at 200mm.

Eying with malicious intent...

National Zoo, Washington DC. Heavy crop from the original photo.
This tiger was actually quite entertaining.

Rangoli 2010

I did not participate in the 2010 Diwali Rangoli, even in planning or design.  Even so, here it is, courtesy my niece N.


Previous Diwalis: here or here.

Yielding to the bullies results in this

I have the (British) India Legislature debates from 1927 that introduced section 295A of the Indian Criminal Code, and will publish them some time.  This law is still on the books in India and in Pakistan.  In Pakistan it has been further enhanced; but if you do a search on google, you'll find 295A is misused in India.  Well, how can it not be misused, it is a horrible law, as the dissenters in that debate pointed out.  The wording of the law is:

"Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of ²[citizens of India], ³[by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise], insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ⁴[three years], or with fine, or with both.]"

The reason for the introduction of this law was the Rajpal case or (Rangila Rasul case).  Rajpal was the publisher, (not the author) of a pamphlet in an ongoing war of pamphlets between Hindus and Muslims  in the Punjab of the 1920s, in which they attacked each other and also other sects within their own camps.   This particular pamphlet (the title would roughly translate to "Playboy Prophet"), which made many sarcastic comments about the Prophet of Islam  particularly raised the ire of the Muslims, and there was the threat of not just Punjab-wide but supposedly nationwide violence. {Aside, it is funny, isn't it, that to a certain mentality, India is not and never was a nation except when it is time to protest?}

Well, Rajpal was tried under existing law for offending religious sentiment {section 153A of Indian Penal Code}, but the Punjab High Court under Justice Dilip Singh acquitted him. { Later the government tried Rajpal again, and obtained a conviction, but Rajpal was murdered by a Muslim, Ilim Din.  Ilim Din was convicted of the murder and executed - his funeral procession is said to have been the largest procession seen in Lahore till then, and for many years thence.  His anniversary of "martyrdom" is still marked in Pakistan.}    The inadequacy of the existing law to convict Rajpal was the motivation to introduce 295A.

The reasoning, from the British government point of view, was that if some religious group threatens violence because its feeling had been "hurt", the government could step in and prosecute the person(s) who committed the hurt.   The dissenters pointed out any number of instances where the insulted party was a minority who never threatened violence and therefore never received such consideration from the government.

In effect, the government bowed to the bullies.  If you are capable of widespread violence, your sentiments have to be "respected", otherwise not.

Incidentally, Rajpal is said to have apologized:

Mr Gaya Prasad Singh (non-Muhammadan member representing Muzaffarpur and Champaran), on Sept 19, 1927, read in the (British Indian) Legislative Assembly

“Sir, I should also like to refer to the statement which was made by Rajpal when he came to know that the feelings of our Muhammadan friends had been greatly outraged by his pamphlet. This is what he said:
“If any words of mine can soothe the feelings of my Moslem brethren, I assure them that I respect their sentiments no less than I do mine. I have no idea of bringing out another edition of Rangila Rasul, even though the law does not stand in the way of my doing so. In fact I stopped selling it as soon as I was told that some Moslems felt offended by its publication. This was done before any action was taken or even contemplated by the Government.”

I should add that the nationalists in the assembly supported the law because they wanted to avoid any Hindu-Muslim friction.  There was some who opposed the law on the grounds that religion did not need such defense, and such a law was an abridgement of the freedom of speech.

Well, in Pakistan, the blasphemy law is the full Islamic expression of section 295A.  And now it has come to this (AFP link, might be temporary)

KARACHI — A doctor has been arrested for insulting the Prophet Mohammed in Pakistan, police said on Sunday, in a second high profile case throwing the spotlight on the country's controversial anti-blasphemy laws.

Naushad Valiyani was detained on Friday following a complaint by a medical representative who visited the doctor in the city of Hyderabad.

"The arrest was made after the complainant told the police that Valiyani threw his business card, which had his full name, Muhammad Faizan, in a dustbin during a visit to his clinic," regional police chief Mushtaq Shah told AFP.

"Faizan accused Valiyani of committing blasphemy and asked police to register a case against the doctor."

Shah said the issue had been resolved after Valiyani, a member of Pakistan's Ismaili community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, apologised but local religious leaders intervened and pressed for action.
"Valiyani had assured Faizan that he did not mean to insult the Prophet Mohammed by throwing the visiting card in the dustbin," Shah said, adding that the police had registered a case under the Blasphemy Act.

PS:  The Rajpal pamphlet is available on the Internet.  In my opinion, it is available precisely because Rajpal was murdered, and because the whole thing became such a big issue.  Otherwise, it would have vanished like most of the other pamphlets from that war of words in the 1920s. The action of the "prosecute blasphemy" crowd have made this trash immortal.

MJ Akbar on Wikileaks

M.J Akbar:

PS: I just can't understand why Americans are persecuting Wikileaks' Assange; they should give him a hero's medal. Wikileaks prove what some of us suspected but no one could confirm - that American diplomats are clear, concise, cogent and informed. Only the stupid and the prejudiced accuse them of being dumb. They know precisely what is going on in the world even if their government's policy is built within a maze of spiderwebs hung across Chinese walls. Their analysis of Pakistan is perfect; it has an unintelligent government run by the intelligence service. Why on earth don't they do anything about a nation which is going to obliterate itself and us as well? One of these days I must leak our tapes of American diplomats in Delhi to the Wall Street Journal.

The Well Groomed Gorilla

There was a certain elegance to the creature. National Zoo, Washington DC. Shot through glass, so post-processing was necessary to increase the contrast.

Turnabout is Fair Play

According to one of the eminent Muslim political leaders of the 20th century, Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founding father of Pakistan, the nation of Pakistan with 75% Muslims and 25% Hindus {the proportion would have been something like this in a non-"motheaten" Pakistan} could live as a united secular democratic nation where "Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State".  

However, according to Jinnah, a nation of 75% of Hindus and 25% of Muslims (as would have been an undivided India) could not be such a nation.  This was the foundational argument for Pakistan.

Jinnah was essentially saying that Hindus are not suited for secular democracy.  Leftist and Pakistani liberal historians nevertheless try to present Jinnah as secular minded and unbigoted.  But today, if we make statements like "Arabs are not suited for democracy" or "Islam is not suited for democracy" we would be excoriated for it, especially by Leftists and by Pakistani liberals.

Why the double-standard?