Category Archives: Politics

Bang bang, you’re alive

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A new theory in cosmology sounds much like the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist concepts of cyclical creation and mind-boggling timescales. I don’t mean to sound like Religious Uncle, rather to evoke a neat coincidence (via Slashdot):

The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thoughtThe universe may be 986 billion years older than previously thought, and creation may be cyclical and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory. The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago…

The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs and big crunches – where every particle of matter collapses together…

“I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though,” said Prof Turok. “There doesn’t have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large…” [Link]

… According to Steinhardt and Turok, today’s universe is part of an endless cycle of big bangs and big crunches, with each cycle lasting about a trillion years. At every big bang, the amount of matter and radiation in the universe is reset, but the cosmological constant is not. Instead, the cosmological constant gradually diminishes over many cycles to the small value observed today… the cosmological constant decreases in steps, through a series of quantum transitions. [Link]

As I’ve noted before, the Hindu concept of time is so over-the-top that it beats even the Chinese long view quoted sanctimoniously by bestsellers on the business shelves:

… the life cycle of Brahma is… 311 trillion years. We are currently in the 51st year of the present Brahma and so about 155 trillion years have elapsed… [Link]
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Pramod Mahajan RIP (and India’s Cell-phone Boom)

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pramod mahajan bbc.jpgMany people have probably heard that BJP leader Pramod Mahajan passed away yesterday after being shot by his brother in a family dispute. From the obituaries I’ve been reading and from the Wikipedia page, an image of Mahajan as a very complex and interesting figure emerges — an icon both for some positive shifts in the Indian political system as well as of some of the problems that have come with it. Rather than dwell on the negative, in this post I’m going to talk a little about Mahajan’s role as the architect in the deregulation of India’s mobile phone industry in the early 2000s. I view this as something positive Mahajan did that may actually have been against the law at the time he did it.

Mahajan’s political record is somewhat mixed. Widely acclaimed as a brilliant campaign organizer, Mahajan was credited with helping the BJP rise to power in 1998, and with the consolidation of its power in state elections in 2003. But Mahajan is also blamed for the BJP’s shocking electoral loss in 2004, and indeed, he publicly accepted the blame for making strategic mistakes in that campaign.

In December, the BBC suggested that he was one of a handful of people being considered to take over the reigns of the BJP party. But the same article describes him as part of a new breed of “technocrat leaders who lack a grassroots base,” suggesting that Mahajan perhaps wasn’t quite of the stature of people like Vajpayee or Advani. Continue reading →

Losing sucks when you are the more qualified candidate

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In Ohio’s statewide primaries yesterday, Democratic attorney general candidate Subodh Chandra of Cleveland, lost to Ohio state Sen. Marc Dann. He didn’t just lose by a little, but by a lot (3-1 margin). It is enough to make me wonder why it ended up being such a lopsided contest. First, let’s go to a pre-election article to explain my surprise at the ultimate results:

Dann has been endorsed by the Ohio Democratic Party and labor unions, while Chandra has received the majority of major Ohio newspaper endorsements and is supported by a long list of elected Democrats and former officeholders.

Their match-up has not been exactly friendly. Chandra has attacked Dann’s legal skills, pointing out a reprimand Dann received from the Ohio Supreme Court for mishandling a divorce case, plus a criminal case in Warren in which one of Dann’s clients pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor no longer on the books, spent four months in jail and later sued Dann. [Link]

On election day the Cleveland Enquirer told its readers:

Subodh Chandra, a former Cleveland law director, is our recommendation for the Democratic nomination for attorney general. Chandra ran Cleveland’s legal office efficiently and aggressively, going after fraud and waste, using a management style that fostered communication and motivation. Also on his resume are stints as a federal prosecutor and as a legal ethics professor at Case Western Reserve University. [Link]

At a debate two weeks ago Chandra scored some points with the following:

The debate turned contentious after Chandra claimed that Dann would have failed the FBI background check that Chandra passed.

“I say this with regret because as a Democrat, I don’t like to say anything ill of a fellow Democrat, but we’d better have an honest conversation right now,” Chandra said. “My primary opponent could not become an entry federal-level attorney with a Supreme Court reprimand [and] with a case in which somebody went to jail for four months for a nonexistent crime…” [Link]

Here is one take on why Chandra got thumped so badly:

A political newcomer, Chandra, 38, impressed audiences with his legal acumen, rhetorical skills and the humorous and disarming manner with which he addressed questions about his Indian-American heritage.

He repeatedly criticized Dann’s legal work but ultimately suffered from a lack of name recognition outside of Cuyahoga County, where he spent most of his time campaigning. [Link]

So was it due to a lack of name recognition or due to a hard to pronounce name? I guess only Ohio voters know for sure.

See previous post: Ohio’s newest puppetmaster

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Meet the asio

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A ToI editorial today bemoans the instability of the U.S. dollar and suggests creating a unified Asian currency as an alternative to the euro. Several years ago, Asiaweek suggested the same:

… it took Europe 10 years to produce the euro, building on three decades of efforts at economic integration. An Asian currency would probably have to be grounded in the yen, while China, because of the socialist foundations of its economy, might need to stay on the sidelines for some time. And the political, economic and cultural differences among Asian nations are greater than those within Western Europe. [Link]

I think the asio is a wonderful idea. Here’s how we’ll get there:

  • India and Pakistan agree to merge economies
  • Japan decides it’s willing to merge the yen with the rupee
  • China and India drop all vestiges of socialist economic intervention
  • Japan, China, India, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and so on get their economies into the same narrow band of inflation, debt and other key economic indicators
  • China, Korea and Japan allow an Asian Economic Zone common passport and migration without work permits
  • The asio countries choose a bland, centrally-located capital and characterless symbols for the currency which evoke no sense of history or nationalism
  • A new pan-Asian parliament and central bank are created
  • The parliament is held hostage to petty provincial issues by a nation deeply convinced of its innate cultural superiority
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Pistachio Shells at Camp Echo

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Mahvish Khan has spent a lot of time at Guantanamo Bay lately. Born in 1978, Mahvish is the daughter of Pashtun Pakistani parents who met while in medical school in Peshawar. Mahvish is a US citizen, speaks Pashto, practices Islam, and studies law at the University of Miami.

It’s clearly been a heavy few years for the sister, and in response, she took a remarkably deep, courageous course of action. She found out which law firms were representing Guantanamo detainees, and pestered them to take her on as an assistant and interpreter. She found an interested firm and underwent a 6-month security check.

She’s now been to Guantanamo nine times. Her first-person account of visiting the detainees, published in Sunday’s Washington Post, is a beautiful, powerful piece of testimony, made all the more so by the poignancy of her cultural connection to the diminished men she found.

At 80, Haji Nusrat — detainee No. 1009 — is Guantanamo Bay’s oldest prisoner. A stroke 15 years ago left him partly paralyzed. He cannot stand up without assistance and hobbles to the bathroom behind a walker. Despite his paralysis, his swollen legs and feet are tightly cuffed and shackled to the floor. (…)
In the middle of our meeting, he says to me: ” Bachay .” My child. “Look at my white beard. They have brought me here with a white beard. I have done nothing at all. I have not said a single word against the Americans.” (…)
The old man looks at me. “You are a daughter to me,” he says. “Think of me as a father.” I nod, aligning and realigning pistachio shells on the table as I interpret.
As the meeting ends and we collect our things to go, the old man opens his arms to me and I embrace him. For several moments, he prays for me as Peter watches: “Insha’allah, God willing, you will find a home that makes you happy. Insha’allah, you will be a mother one day. . . . “

The sister is no romantic. She states her belief that the fifteen men her firm is representing are guilty of no wrong-doing, but she limits her claim to those men. She paints a subtle picture of life on the base, in which the U.S. soldiers are pleasant and welcoming. It’s a fascinating account of a place out of space and time, deliberately established and kept that way, sad, tragic and in no small measure absurd. Continue reading →

Quota killers

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A NYT report on the recent murders of 35 Hindus in Kashmir draws parallels to an infamous massacre of Sikh men six years ago:

Thirty five Hindus were killed in recent days in two separate incidents in the Indian-administered portion of the disputed Kashmir province… They are particularly worrisome because they are so plainly designed to fuel Hindu-Muslim tensions…

Killings targeting Hindu and Sikh villagers had become a routine form of terror some years ago when relations between India and Pakistan were at their worst. The most infamous of these massacres came in March 2000, on the eve of President Bill Clinton’s state visit to India, when 37 Sikhs were murdered in Chattisinghpora village… killings, blamed on both security forces and militants, have hardly vanished. [Link]

But it doesn’t get into the horrific fact that the perps are sometimes from the Indian army. An Indian government report issued last week says that after the Chattisinghpora massacre, Indian army personnel allegedly killed five innocent people in a fake encounter because they were trying to meet a quota for dead militants:

After three years of probe into the killing of innocent civilians on suspicion of being involved in Chattisinghpora massacre of 36 Sikhs in Jammu and Kashmir, the CBI indicted five army personnel for staging a fake encounter to kill the civilians…

The 18-page CBI chargesheet said that after the gunning down of Sikh community members, the army unit operating in the area was under “tremendous [psychological] pressure” to show results because there was allegation of inefficiency and ineffectiveness on their part.

The CBI alleged the army personnel entered into a criminal conspiracy to pick up the some innocent persons and stage-manage an encounter to create the impression that the militants responsible for the Chittisinghpora killings had been neutralised. The accused army men also showed fake recovery of arms and ammunition from the five deceased after obtaining signatures of two witnesses on blank papers. [Link]

And in a protest after these staged killings, nine more civilians were killed by live fire. There’s an old saying in business: be careful in choosing what to measure. In the former USSR, numerical quotas alone led to shoddy quality. In this case, a poorly-thought-out work quota, combined with other, more significant factors, may have contributed to egregious civilian murders by the state.

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LGBT Asian Americans enter immigration debate

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At first I wondered why the Asian American LGBT community would be speaking out as a group against the House’s immigration bill. Surely individuals in the Asian American LGBT will have a diversity of opinions on this issue since it doesn’t seem to be related to discrimination or a denial of rights based on one’s sexual identity. They have written a letter to President Bush, Dennis Hastert, and Bill Frist however, which explains their opposition to the bill:

(1) We urge you to address the detention and deportation of immigrants. Many Muslim, South Asian, and Southeast Asian Americans have been improperly racially profiled and have not been afforded constitutional due process protections.

(2) We urge you undo the requirement that local police enforce complicated immigration laws. LGBTs have already encountered many problems with police misconduct and police brutality. There are insufficient assurances and resources to make this workable.

(3) We urge you to support the reunification of immigrant families and binational same-sex couples and ease the highly restrictive process to apply for political asylum.

We hope you will show compassion and will take our views into your consideration. [Link]

I support members of the LGBT community and their right to speak out on any issue. I also agree that the House’s immigration bill is just plain wrong and should be scrapped. I can’t however understand the intent behind this statement or how they think it will increase any kind of political pressure. In fact, it seems kind of opportunistic to me (especially point 3). Are they conflating separate issues just to get noticed? A joint statement by the group also contained the following as a possible explanation to my question:

…the House bill makes being an undocumented immigrant a felony. The same was true for LGBTs. Sexual relations between same-sex couples were criminal until the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws. So they wrote, ‘To love and show compassion should never be criminal.'” [Link]

Still seems like a weak connection to me. I am pointing this out because I often see various organizations (e.g. non-profits, non-partisan PACs, etc.) advocating for idealogies peripheral to their apparent mission, which results in an ultimately less effective/powerful organization. In this case I agree with their stance but I feel that by taking a position as a group they may be pigeonholing themselves into irrelevance for future debates.

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Kaavya is Innocent, Until Proven Otherwise

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Dear Kaavya,

This is your Akka writing. The fact that you have never met me is immaterial; we are brown and we don’t live in the land our parents were born in—that alone means that you probably have relatives you’ve never met, just like I do, so Akka it easily is.

Paavum Kaavya (letÂ’s call you PK for short), there is something I want you to know, but before I disclose that, I have to admit a fault of which I am rather ashamed, a fault which I hope youÂ’ll forgive your imperfect Akka for.

I was jealous of you.

Just a bissel, but it was enough to make me loathe myself for a few minutes. Green looks fabulous on me, but envy surely does not flatter. Wait, don’t frown—I promise that once I was aware that I was being a twat, I earnestly called myself out on it and owned my jealousy. Long before I admitted that my “unlikely-fantasy-if-wishes-came-true” job was acting, I cherished what to me seemed an even more far-fetched aspiration: to write. Getting a book deal seemed like the greatest thing which could possibly happen to someone. To get paid to write? Wow. And that you did, with a stunning advance, which everyone bandies about ad nauseum, since it makes your “fall” all the more violent.

Sigh. How I wished that my parents had been savvy enough to enroll me in an Ivy-League-Prep-Camp-Thing. Where my counselor, who just happened to be a published author, would discover me as if I were some naïve starlet in a ‘40s era soda shop and then pluck me out of the sweaty, freaked-out ranks of cloned overachievers and marvel at my genuine uniqueness. My parents made me turn down Columbia for U.C. Davis. My parents are SO not your parents. Your parents gave you everything, including an inadvertent star-making opp that made me want to howl. You’re nearly half my age. It’s like watching your little sister get married before you do. It’s a little humiliating to endure, in this obsessed with chronological-milestones culture we share.

So, whenever this group blog of mine did a post about you, I’d look down and notice that my skin suddenly looked wayyy more olive than usual. Then I’d take a deep breath and tell myself that you deserved it. That you had hustled for it, working on your writing when in comparison, 17-year old me probably would’ve been brooding over which Smiths or Ultravox LP to spin next. My skin would go back to the shade my mother calls “irrantharam” and I’d exhale with relief. It felt good to be silently proud of you.

Here’s the thing my little PK: I still am. And I’m a little appalled at how many people are crowing elatedly about your alleged toppling. The first thing I thought of when I read the “Crimson” writing on the blog was that tragically accurate, snarktastic story about the pet shop with international crabs. You’re looking at me blankly. I’m sure you haven’t slept. Tut-tut. That won’t do. You know brown girls are predisposed to developing those nasty under eye circles. Take a benadryl, bachi. Your skin and, well, everything will thank you. Hell, take a nap right now. I’ll dispel your probably non-existent curiosity about crabs for you, like a wee bedtime story.

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Where the Muslims are

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Earlier, I blogged about some maps of the number of religious houses of worship by state – 702 Mandirs, 89 Jain temples, 236 Sikh gurdwaras, 2039 Buddhist temples, and 1855 Islamic masjids / mosques. In response readers asked for maps of the numbers of religious adherents as a percentage of the population. I thought this would be tough, so I told the monkeys in the basement of our bunker that they wouldn’t eat until they brought me such information. I was worried that I would have a bunch of starving monkeys on our hands, but lo and behold – they came through. Below the fold is a map of Muslims as a percentage of residents by county across the entire USAA map of Muslims as a percentage of residents by county across the entire USA. Click on it if you want a larger version.

There are only a handful of counties with between 2 and 10% muslims – Queens (obviously), but also one in Michigan, one in Ohio, one in Delaware, one in Virginia and a few in Georgia. Not at all where I expected them to be. None of them are in California at all, but both CA and upstate NY have a number of counties with between .8 – 2.1% muslim populations, as do Michigan, Jersey, Texas, and several other states. Heck, even Wyoming and Colorado meet that threshold in a few places!

Unfortunately, no such maps are readily available for Hindus, Jains, Sikhs or Buddhists, probably because they’re too small a section of the population, and too dispersed, to readily show up.

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Ignorance of the Law is no Defense unless…

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…unless you’re a Bangladeshi Muslim Woman in the UK. Then it’s all good –

A BANGLADESHI woman who shook a baby boy so violently that he suffered brain damage walked free from court yesterday because a judge conceded that she did not know how to behave in the West.

Rahella Khanom, 24, caused the five-month-old boy in her care to suffer fractures to his breast bone and ribs as she tried to rid him of evil spirits, Southwark Crown Court was told.

The injuries inflicted on the child over several weeks had caused one side of his brain to shrink. It was believed that the boy would have been screaming in agony for eight weeks because his injuries went untreated.

…The court was told that Khanom, a Muslim, did not understand that shaking a helpless baby would not exorcise an evil spirit.

The judge issued a verdict which is almost its own caricature of a relativist, multiculturalist world gone astray –

the judge said that Khanom’s strong cultural and religious beliefs, and the fact that she had been forced by her husband to live in isolation since coming to Britain from Bangladesh, meant that there were exceptional circumstances in her case.

One can only imagine other, future defenses inspired by the socio-cultural isolation tank argument.

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