Category Archives: Politics

Not so Intelligent Designing

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I really wanted to write a post about the U.S. Federal Court slapping down “Intelligent Design” in Dover, Pennsylvania today:

A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled today that it is unconstitutional to compel teachers there to present “intelligent design” as an alternative explanation to evolution because it amounts to establishing religion in public schools.

I couldn’t find a strong Desi-angle beyond what we’ve already blogged about though. So instead, I’ve decided to write a post about “Un-intelligent Design.” Most people know that Hitler’s Third Reich was fascinated by the occult and was always looking for mystical weapons and methods in order to defeat the Allies. Essentially, that is what the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark is about. He is also thought to have been fascinated by Eastern religions. After reading the following article out today in the Scotsman, I wondered if the brutal dictator Joseph Stalin might have been reading up on his Hindu mythology when he came up with this VERY unintelligent design idea:

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia’s top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior…

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat…”

Mr Ivanov’s experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail. [Link]

Sick, sick, sick. Nothing is going to convince me that they were really “volunteers.” I wondered if Stalin may have been inspired by Hanuman’s story. He is after all the mightiest of warriors and proved himself during the Ramayana War. He was conceived more naturally…well sort of.

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An American cannibal amongst the Aghori

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Last week Bong Breaker contended that if there is a post on Sepia Mutiny about “Raw meat” then chances are that it may be one written by me. I hate to be predictable but I hate to disappoint even more. An SM tipster sends us the following article about cannibalism in India from Student Newspaper.org:

As we shared a bumpy auto-rickshaw journey between two North Indian villages, I began to realise that the frail old man I was rubbing thighs with was in fact a cannibal who claimed that babies taste “fresh” whereas the corpses of older people have a “stringy texture like wood”. Gary Stevenson (the name he used to introduce himself) then proceeded to illustrate and justify his preference for younger human flesh through the comparison of superior-tasting lamb over mutton…

Once we were sitting comfortably, Stevenson eagerly whipped out the skull of a young girl that he “dragged out of the Ganges” and carries with him at all times, proudly stroking the smooth bone and proclaiming the cranium to be the finest from his expansive collection. Licking his lips, my congenial cannibal enthusiastically described the sensation of eating his own species: “Human flesh smells like rawhide and tastes like pork. The fingers are the most succulent part,” declaring the practice of devouring corpse meat to be a sacred primordial ritual which still occurs amongst radical Hindu Aghoris in certain parts of India.

Houston-born Stevenson [a.k.a. Kapal Nath], who has come to be known as the “American Aghori”, told me of how he has roamed India for years in search of enlightenment, feasting on the remains of the Hindu dead “as often as possible…” [Link]

I didn’t know that there were any Hindu cannibals. It seems like such a contradiction in terms at its face. At first the only thing I could find was that National Geographic once featured a segment about them and that Wikipedia has a short entry about their ways:

A sect who them selves relates to the order of lord Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. Aghori means non-terrifying in Sanskrit. The sect is peculiar with its rituals and way of life. This extremely shy and secretive community is known to live in the graveyards, wearing the ash from the pyre, use human bone from the graveyards for the rituals.

The sect dates back to around 1000 A.D., and practices cannibalism in the belief that eating human flesh confers spiritual and physical benefits, such as prevention of aging.

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The Miseducation of Fareed Zakaria

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Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria is a favorite subject on Sepia Mutiny and the man is rapidly achieving prominence as one of the top foreign policy pundits in the World (desi or otherwise). Surfing around, I came across a pretty interesting profile of Zakaria in NY Metro magazine from back in April of 2003.

Of particular interest was the Desi-inspired origin of Zakaria’s politics (views which apparently run against the “prescribed’ Asian American grain) –

Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian state. “People often say, ‘How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?’ Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don’t understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed.

“The second,” he continues, “is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.”

Few examples out there demonstrate the degree to which certain high minded political ideals can utterly fail to mesh with reality than the lost 40 years of post-independence Indian development.

Fareed has raised the ire of many desi liberals (check out the comments on this thread, for ex) for, among other things, his (equivocal) support of the polarizing Iraq war. Serious detractors may attack his conclusions but most acknowledge the intellectual weight of his arguments (well, with the exception of anonymous ones who dismiss him as an “Uncle Tom“)

For more of Fareed’s musings, his eponymous website can be found here. SM’ers might be interested in a summary / review of his book The Future of Freedom on my personal blog here.

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Freedom Of, Freedom From

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A conservative friend and I spotted the Onion’s headline “Activist Judge Cancels Christmas,” and — unsurprisingly for all of you who have put up with my ranting on this subject — proceeded to have a disagreement. He predicted that there would be an instance of “life imitating art,” and I found the notion of a judge’s interfering with non-governmental celebration of Christmas as ridiculous as the Onion did. (The parody is not about state-sponsored Nativity scenes, which are likely to be found unconstitutional.) I said that I wouldn’t want the government to attempt to represent Hinduism, as they’d probably make as much a muck of it as non-Hindu retailers do, and continued to be puzzled as to why Christians and the occasional Jew did. He replied that this was only because I was living in a country where the government was unlikely to do such a thing, and that I’d be less likely to protest it in India.

My understanding was that India’s Constitution had requirements similar to those of the U.S. First Amendment, requiring that the government neither establish religion nor constrain the exercise of it. But a closer look shows that in this, as with so many things, the American Founders valued brevity over the locquacious explanation dear to desi hearts, and I hope that some Mutineers can help me understand how the difference works out in practice. Continue reading →

The 101st Fighting Narcissists

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Actors have long been reluctant to fess up to their early roles, and one in particular stands out as making minimal use of any actor’s talents: the stiff.

Plan B: a gig as a dead terrorist

Playing a corpse on CSI is exactly the kind of thing you might put on your résumé, but avoid expanding upon at a casting call.

Never fear, dear unemployed desi actor. The U.S. military has created a new entry-level role for those of brown persuasion that’s one step up from stiff and one step below TV terrorist: mock jihadi at a military training camp.

The assailants… come in two forms: al-Qaeda terrorists, based in an off-limits bit of the wood called Pakistan, and Taliban insurgents living in 18 mock villages. Another 800 role-players live with them, acting as western aid workers, journalists, peacekeepers, Afghan mayors, mullahs, policemen, doctors and opium farmers, all with fake names, histories and characters. Some 200 bored-looking Afghan-Americans are augmented by local Louisianans in Afghan garb…

… then we blow ourselves up. The first blast, in a yellow flash, lights up a guard-tower and the anxious face of a young GI. The second… is much bigger–a hollow boom and an explosion of orange fire that soars 100 feet into the night sky… “Go tell your buddies, you’re all dead…”

Attacks with simulated roadside bombs (known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs), rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and small arms, using special effects and lasers, are unrelenting… Two Hollywood companies have been hired to improve the army’s flashes and bangs, and to give acting classes to the role-players… [Link]

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A Killer but not a Terrorist

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Sepia Mutiny has been covering the case of Biswanath Halder – a man with an interesting on-line trail – for a few months. In the latest development, while he may be an attempted mass murderer, he’s not quite a terrorist –

A US court has tossed out terrorism charge against an Indian accused of a seven-hour university shooting rampage in 2003, but retained 201 other charges against him, including aggravated murder.

Biswanath Halder’s attack against a “small, random” group of people in Case Western Reserve University’s business school building did not constitute a terrorist attack on the civil population as defined by Ohio law, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Peggy Foley ruled on Wednesday.

If convicted of the aggravated murder charge, 65-year-old Halder, who hails from Kolkata, could get death penalty.

Prosecuting him as a terrorist is a bit extreme although I can see both sides of the case – there’s probably a DA in this mix who’s been instructed to go “Timothy McVeigh” on his ass and throw the book at him – including marginal claims. On the flip side, the defense just gave a basic “c’mon, the dude was acting alone for dubious motives – he’s certainly not Al Qaeda linked.” At the limit, it does raise important questions about when an act is a loony acting on his own and when it’s part of a larger terrorist agenda (I suppose, given the tone of SM of late, that many folks here would argue that “terrorist = brown dude that a white cop / DA doesn’t like.”).

Whatever the case, it’s not like Halder’s getting off scot free although perhaps if he writes a few children’s books he might be more successful at travelling down the Tookie Williams path. And just what set off our 65 yr old defendant?

Halder went to the University’s Business School with more than 1000 rounds of ammunition because he thought that a computer lab employee had hacked into his website which was set up to help people from India form businesses.

1000 rounds – this guy ain’t f*ckin’ around. An hour of solid shooting at the range is probably no more than 200 rounds. Homey was loading up for a 5 hr shootathon. Moral of the story – be careful when you step between a desi dude, his computer, and his business.

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The Good Book

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Canadian PM Pauljinder Martin pays his respects before a Guru Granth Sahib at a gurdwara (via Ash Singh). I’m not sure of the date on this photo, but his government is facing a new election in January after a loss of confidence vote, so maybe he should’ve stuffed a few more rupees into the donation box

I’m straining in vain to imagine Dubya doing a courtesy bow in front of a Koran or Torah, or a Hindu or Buddhist scripture. If you have a photo, do share.

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California, here I come (updated)

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California, here I come
Right back where I started from [Link]

John Yoo, professor of law at my alma mater, UC Berkeley, became infamous last year for writing a memo justifying torture by the CIA.

As Abhi posted, the NYT just reported that Yoo also wrote a legal opinion claiming Dubya could break U.S. law and let the NSA, a Defense Department agency which intercepts and decrypts overseas sigint, spy domestically on U.S. citizens.

The NSA activities were justified by a classified Justice Department legal opinion authored by John C. Yoo, a former deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel who argued that congressional approval of the war on al Qaeda gave broad authority to the president… That legal argument was similar to another 2002 memo authored primarily by Yoo, which outlined an extremely narrow definition of torture. That opinion, which was signed by another Justice official, was formally disavowed after it was disclosed by the Washington Post. [Link]

On one hand we’ve got Manmohan Singh’s daughter Amrit Singh fighting CIA torture and open-ended detentions in Guantánamo Bay. On the other, we’ve got Professor Yoo on the side of virtually unlimited police powers and Ass’t Attorney General Viet Dinh co-authoring large portions of the Fascist Act.

At first glance, Yoo might seem a political soldier willing to write whatever tissue-thin legal justifications his superiors order. But what if he’s sincere in his belief that torture, locking people up without charge and domestic spying by the NSA is legitimate rather than prima facia illegal and unconstitutional?

Mario Savio

I get the sense that first-gen Asian Americans tend to be socially conservative and more pro-law and order (vs. civil rights and privacy) than the mainstream. It’s the whole idea put forth by GOP recruiters that many first-gen Asian-Americans, including desis, ought to be ‘natural conservatives’ because they tend to hold traditional social views, value family and own small businesses:

Grover Norquist, a Republican anti-tax campaigner with influential friends in the White House, claims that “Indian-Americans are natural Republicans and natural conservatives.” They are on the whole well-educated and well-to-do; they respect family values, and like working for themselves. [Link]

In this case, however, it doesn’t really apply. Yoo was born in Seoul, but he grew up and went to undergrad in the U.S. What’s perhaps most symbolically striking is how involved Asian-Americans are in this administration in crafting key antiterror laws which disproportionately affect minorities. We’ve truly arrived.

Even more ironic, UC Berkeley is best known for its role in the Free Speech Movement. Now one of its most highly-placed professors is working hard to undermine those very same ideals. Mario Savio, meet John Yoo.

Update: The NYT reports Yoo’s conservatism was in fact influenced by his parents’ generation, specifically their revulsion towards North Korea’s communism. It parallels the Reagan conservatism of Cuban-Americans:

By then, Mr. Yoo already thought of himself as solidly conservative. He had grown up with anticommunist parents who left their native South Korea for Philadelphia shortly after Mr. Yoo was born in 1967, and had honed his political views while an undergraduate at Harvard. [Link]

Update 2: (thanks, Siddharth):

Yoo traces his convictions in no small part to his parents, and Ronald Reagan. His father and mother are psychiatrists who grew up in Korea during the Japanese occupation and the Korean War. They emigrated in 1967, when Yoo was 3 months old… Coming of age in an anti-communist household, Yoo said, he associated strong opposition to communist rule with the Republican Party and was himself “attracted to Reagan’s message.” [Link]

Update 3: A review of Yoo’s book in the NY Review of Books.

He was merely a mid-level attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel with little supervisory authority and no power to enforce laws. Yet by all accounts, Yoo had a hand in virtually every major legal decision involving the US response to the attacks of September 11, and at every point, so far as we know, his advice was virtually always the same– the president can do whatever the president wants…

In short, the flexibility Yoo advocates allows the administration to lock up human beings indefinitely without charges or hearings, to subject them to brutally coercive interrogation tactics, to send them to other countries with a record of doing worse, to assassinate persons it describes as the enemy without trial, and to keep the courts from interfering with all such actions. Has such flexibility actually aided the US in dealing with terrorism? In all likelihood, the policies and attitudes Yoo has advanced have made the country less secure. [Link]

Related posts: Hullo. Hullo. Who’s that clicking?, Escape from Draconia, Every little helps, Cabbie hartal in Naya York, Reappeared, Brimful of Amrit, Indian PM’s daughter says Bush personally authorized torture

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Hullo. Hullo. What’s that clicking?

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I am very paranoid when on the phone. I always listen for the little clicks and clacks. I have nothing to hide but my parents think that blogging will draw unnecessary attention to me. Perhaps they are right. I know that when I speak to Manish on the phone about some blog-related matter I should not be using the word “mutiny.” After a while though you just become complacent and let words like “mutiny” and phrases like “overthrow the establishment” drip from your mouth like honey into a cup of green tea. I’ve also been using a calling card (from what may be a shady NSA front company) to call my parents who are vacationing in India. I should think twice about what I say because the big news of the day is that the New York Times is confirming what many of us already suspected. Big Brother might be listening to your mutinous conversations. He can hear you.

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

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Crisp or Not

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One of my college buddies was mired in a highbrow Ph.D. program for many long years. The next time I saw him, he’d put the degree on hold and gone into business with a mutual friend, and they seemed to be doing well. ‘What happened?’ I asked. And Jim and James told me the story behind Hot or Not.

As you know, that site inspired has lots of imitators, some parodies, some not. From fertile brown minds came RateDesi. Now there’s a new contender to help you winnow your beard-sniffing dreams. It’s called Rate My Turban (via Ash Singh).

I don’t think I give anything away when I say that the top-ranked specimen perches atop the cranium of a Nihang Sikh:


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