Category Archives: Politics

Purple is for Freedom

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Giving Jindal the finger

As you may recall from a past post, during Iraq’s first election earlier this year, Congressman Bobby Jindal sent an email out to his fellow Republican lawmakers: paint your fingers purple in solidarity with the Iraqis. It was a great political stunt. Now it seems that some bratty little ten year old girl from Montana has stolen Jindal’s idea and gone national with the Purple Finger for Freedom campaign:

If Shelby Dangerfield were an adult in Iraq today, she would risk her life for the chance to vote.

Because she is a 10-year-old Billings girl, Shelby won’t be going to the polls. But she will be will be showing her support by wearing ink on her finger – just like those Iraqis who have voted.

“It will symbolize our support if we wear ink on our fingers,” Shelby said. “We’re not forcing them to vote, but they have a chance to do it and they should take that chance.”

Shelby said Saturday afternoon she hoped to set up a stand at Rimrock Mall today where people could sign their names and roll their fingers on a stamp pad, but her plans were not yet inked.

She’d love to wake up Monday morning and see people around the United States with blue index fingers.

“Do you have your blue ink?” she asked. “It’s food for thought.” [Link]

Well isn’t that precious? It makes me sick! How can ideas just be stolen in a law-fearing and God-fearing country like the U.S.? Does this little girl have no shame? Has anyone seen people with purple fingers over the last three days? The only fingers I see in L.A. are while I am driving, and none of them have been purple. There are some folks participating I’m sure. I wonder what it would take to get a “Sepia finger” campaign going. I’d need a good cause of course. Continue reading →

Movement Without Immigration

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desitech.jpg Most of H.R. 4437, the “Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005” discussed in Abhi’s post, looks like the trainwreck that he deems it. Still, I think that the part that amends Section 274A of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1324a) to increase penalties on employers for hiring undocumented workers is a step in the right direction. The United States needs a more honest immigration policy, one that includes neither support for law-breaking nor animus toward immigrants, and as long as employers win on the cost benefit analysis — F x P < S, where F= cost of fines, P= probability of getting caught, and S= saved money from using undocumented labor — we never will have such reforms. Supporting illegal immigration is at best a short term help to such aliens, as they deal with the longterm problems of having to remain invisible and lack access to the safety net for the elderly, i.e. Social Security and Medicare. Whose sympathy for the undocumented cab driver extends far enough to pay for his prescriptions when he’s too old to drive anymore? Continue reading →

Makes me want to buy lots of gear

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Since I am both an outdoor enthusiast and a lover of outdoor “gear,” I subscribe to the Adventure 16 newsletter. Adventure 16 is a Southern California outdoor equipment retailer. A couple times a month the local store holds an informal seminar or slideshow about some kick-ass expedition or nature trip that has taken place or soon will. In theory, you’ll be so amped after the presentation that you will buy lots of gear from the store, hoping someday to emulate the feat that you have just heard about. My most recent newsletter featured a blurb about an upcoming event that will relate details about an adventure that I had surprisingly never heard of:

In the 1960’s, the CIA and the Indian Government attempted to deploy a plutonium-powered spy device on Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot in the Indian Himalayas. While Nanda Kot’s device was successfully deployed, Nada Devi rejected all attempts to place the device on her summit and the plutonium was lost and never recovered. In August 2005, Pete Takeda and his crew retraced the spy route on Nanda Kot, visiting the camps used to stage the 1936 first ascent and the spy missions of the 1960’s. Don’t miss this amazing journey! FREE!

San Diego Store: Mon., Jan. 9
West Los Angeles Store: Tues., Jan. 10

This sounds like the beginning to a Tom Clancy novel. I am intrigued. Must-learn-more. As you may have expected, there is in fact an entire book written on this subject: Spy On The Roof Of The World : Espionage and Survival in the Himalayas.

In this cross between a travel adventure story and an espionage novel, Sydney Wignall tells how he became an ad hoc spy for a renegade faction of Indian intelligence operatives in 1955. Wignall had set out to climb the highest mountain in Tibet, but was recruited to investigate Chinese military activity in the region. After being caught, he spent months in a rat-infested, sub-freezing cell as he underwent interrogation. When international pressure forced his release, his captors “released” him and two companions in a nearly impenetrable wintertime wilderness and said “Go home.” Yet Wignall survived–and managed to smuggle out vital information. It is an exhilarating story that only now can be told. [Link]
  • Renegade faction of Indian intelligence
  • Months in a rat-infested cell
  • Interrogation
  • Impenetrable wintertime

If that list isn’t enough to get me to open my wallet and drop some money on new gear at Adventure 16, then frankly I’m not much of a man.

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Office politics

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Asok corrects the boss

In the latest Dilbert, Asok the intern puts the pointy-haired boss in his place.

I’ve often heard from uncle types that desis don’t advance up the U.S. corporate ladder because they’re bad at office politics. But business in the motherland is highly political. I think it’s partly that they’re unfamiliar with American office politics, and partly that many of the straight-arrow types emigrated precisely to get away from it.

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Selling race

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Hong Kong: make your teeth as white as black people’s.

This is apparently widely sold as Black Man Toothpaste in Cantonese:

Darlie toothpaste is a popular brand in much of Asia… it used to be called Darkie, complete with a stereotyped logo of a minstrel man. Apparently its founder had come to the US in the 1920s and seen Al Jolson in his blackface show, and had been impressed with how white Jolson’s teeth looked…

… its racist name and logo were still intact in 1985 when Colgate bought the brand… only the English was changed. The Cantonese name (“Haak Yahn Nga Gou”) still stayed the same, and the Chinese-language ads reassured users that, despite a cosmetic change to placate those inscrutable Westerners, “Black Man Toothpaste is still Black Man Toothpaste.” [Link, via Big White Guy]

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The cost of progress

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Anti-development protest in China last week: at least 20 people gunned down by authorities, total news blackout.

403 Forbidden: You don’t have permission to speak freely in this country

… the police violently suppressed a demonstration against the construction of a power plant in China… the stories told by villagers… insisted that 20 or more people had been killed by automatic weapons fire and that at least 40 were still missing…

In the wake of the biggest use of armed force against civilians since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, Chinese officials have used a variety of techniques – from barring reports in most newspapers outside the immediate region to banning place names and other keywords associated with the event from major Internet search engines, like Google – to prevent news of the deaths from spreading… an overwhelming majority of the Chinese public still knows nothing of the event…

… Fang Sanwen, the news director of Netease.com, one of China’s three major Internet portals and news providers [said], “I can’t speak. I hope you can understand.” Li Shanyou, editor in chief of Sohu.com, another of the leading portals, said: “… It’s not very convenient to comment on this…” “I started searching with Baidu, and Baidu went out of service at once. I could open their site, but couldn’t do any searches.”

“I don’t dare to talk,” another blogger wrote. “There are sensitive words everywhere…” [Link]

Anti-development protest in India a few years ago: nobody killed, lots of celebrity distractivism all over TV.

A group of activists led by best-selling Indian author Arundhati Roy is on its way back to Delhi at the end of a six-day rally to protest against a controversial dam project [Narmada Dam]… The group [was] made up of some 500 activists, artists and celebrities… [Link]

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Immigration smokescreen

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Last Tuesday Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner introduced legislation on the House floor that will greatly impact the South Asian American community as well as many other immigrant populations. The legislation is up for vote on Dec. 15th. The San Jose Mercury News reports on the bill:

Sensenbrenner’s measure combines the border security bill by homeland security chairman Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. with several other enforcement provisions. The key non-border enforcement measure is patterned after a bill by Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., to require employers to verify the Social Security numbers of their employees. Such a program is now voluntary.

Sensenbrenner’s bill would give employers six years to use a federal data base to verify that all their employees are legally entitled to work here. Calvert’s bill would have applied only to new hires and phased in compliance.

Sensenbrenner’s bill also increases the penalties for employers found to hire illegal immigrants, with the minimum fine going from $250 per illegal worker to $5,000. Small business would have lower fines.

“If we do just this,” Calvert said Tuesday, “we’ll pick up about 95 percent of those who are using false documents” to get their jobs.

In reality though this bill will have the same effect as chasing a fly around the house with a baseball bat. The bill, if enacted into law, would not only punish illegal immigrants, but it would also punish almost everyone that they come into contact with (possibly even social service workers). This is pure politics. House Republicans need some issue to rally behind that appeals to their conservative base and will serve to take people’s minds off the war in Iraq. By allowing the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party to take center stage they have found their issue. For the final touch they pretend that this is also about helping to keep terrorists out of the country. As a bonus, Republican congressman uneasily eyeing elections next year, can put some space between themselves and President Bush who is partially on the other side of the fence (pun intended) from his own party on this issue, as he supports a guest worker program. Earlier today SAALT put out an alert asking the South Asian American community to immediately write their representative and senators and urge them to vote this down:

If passed, the bill threatens to have a harmful impact on non-citizens, legal residents, and citizens. If enacted, this bill will be the harshest immigration policy in 80 years. The bill was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee late last week. It is expected to be voted on by the entire House as early as Thursday of this week. The day to call your representative in the House is WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14th.

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Why isn’t gold farming big in India?

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Maybe get a blister on your little finger,
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
That ain’t workin’, that’s the way to do it

For some time I’ve been keeping an eye on gold farming, the business of paying kids to build up loot in online games and then selling it for real money to Western marks. Although some entrepreneurs use automated scripts, most use humans: 100,000 kids in China, South Korea and Indonesia supposedly work in the industry. In a recent crossover into real life, someone in Shanghai murdered his buddy for selling a virtual sword he wasn’t supposed to sell.

Most of the players here actually make less than a quarter an hour, but they often get room, board and free computer game play in these “virtual sweatshops…” “They say that in some of these popular games, 40 or 50 percent of the players are actually Chinese farmers.” [Link]

The economist Edward Castranova has calculated that if you took the real dollars spent within EverQuest as an index, its game world… would be the 77th richest nation on the planet, while annual player earnings [per capita] surpass those of citizens of Bulgaria, India or China. [Link]

Most stories I’ve read treat gold farming as a curiosity, which is a bit of a paradox. One, journalists think of valuable property in games as an oxymoron, even though they earn their own living from intellectual property. Two, many journalists are non-technical, even though their work is often published online:

The idea that sums of money are being paid for what appears to be an unproductive economic activity will cheese off traditionalists who believe that unless a job is located in an industrial factory, it serves no good purpose. [Link]
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The cultural implications of Questiongate (updated)

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As Abhi posted, several Indian members of Parliament were caught taking bribes to ask questions on the Parliament floor. Because some of the journalists involved are also bloggers, one of the questions asked included the name of our blog.

Abhi has the summary of events. What interests me are the cultural implications:

  • Sepia Mutiny is now on the floor record of the Indian Parliament (thanks, Aaj Tak and Cobra Post!) Ahhh, to be a footnote in Indian political history.
  • Sepia Mutiny is now, apparently, British
  • You can now legitimately mention Sepia Mutiny in your poli sci classes
  • Ennis says:

    Often statements are read into the record for constituents and donors, and these are usually not checked over. Causes embarassment when the “freedom fighters” mentioned are later reclassified by the US govt as terrorist groups, but nobody really cares.
    But has there ever been a U.S. political scandal where prima facia nonsensical questions were purchased for the Congressional record?

The sting was called ‘Operation Duryodhana,’ which has some interesting connotations from the Mahabharata. This one is a pun on Cobra Post and ‘sting operation’:

[Duryodhana’s] chariot bore a flag depicting a hooded cobra… [Link]

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The Mutiny claims its first victims- (updated)

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The Indian blogosphere and the Indian political system were rocked today. The tipsters have started to flood our tipline with the hilarious news. Members of India’s Parliament were bribed by a fictitious organization created by a group of Indian bloggers and journalists to introduce statements on the record, without having any idea what they were saying. This was a sting operation to expose the corruption in Indian government. One of those written statements included a reference to Sepia Mutiny. First the background:

If used rightly, tiny, lens bearing aperatures, can empower a citizenry by exposing democracy’s toxic acreage. Operation Duryodhana, a COBRAPOST-AAJ TAK investigation lasting nearly eight months succeeded in capturing the acts of 10 Lok Sabha and one Rajya Sabha members as they accepted money from representatives of a fictitious body called the North Indian Small Manufacturers’ Assosciation (NISMA) for asking questions in the Indian Parliament. In all more than 60 questions were submitted by 11 MPs of which 25 questions (at last count) were tabled in the Parliament…

The MPs submitted questions on NISMA’s behalf and some of them were selected–and their answers given–in the Parliament’s rigorous balloting system that reduces chances of questions being taken up to something akin to a raffle. Some of the questions were rewritten by the middlemen taking us to the MPs concerned before being put in Parliament, some came nearly verbatim and only certain sections of some were picked up by the Parliament staff. The COBRAPOST team also has in its possession many, original signed forms of MPs, blank as well as filled up, which weren’t submitted but set aside as evidence.

From the start it was my assessment that in order for a reportorial team to remain undercover for a long duration it would be prudent to have a woman reporter as the primary asset on the field. Their biggest advantage in undercover situations is that even in an extreme atmosphere of suspicion they have greater chances to evade a search for hidden camera equipment then men and for all the right reasons. Besides Suhasini Raj, the reporter, who was inserted in the field with an alias of “Namita Gokhale”, had a past selling insurance and was a fast talker. Never at a loss for words, she ended up doing an extraordinary job on the field, surviving several anxious moments when many middlemen and even MPs got their antennae up. The fictitious front under whose umbrella the COBRAPOST team operated was NISMA, ostensibly an organization out of Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh, that lobbied and worked for the interests and welfare of Small Scale Industries (SSIs). That was, in a nutshell, our story. Even though on several occasions I was tempted to enter the field much earlier than I actually did, I held back realizing that it wouldn’t be prudent for there was a chance of somebody recognizing me. When I did eventually take the field with an alias of “Navratan Malhotra”, executive director of the ‘fictitious’ NISMA, I was armed with a ludicrous wig and even more ludicrous glasses. [Link]

How was Sepia Mutiny involved? One of the MPs was paid to submit the following to Parliament, and apparently did so without a clue in the world as to what he was saying:

“Is it true that while NRI firms such as India Uncut of USA, Sepia Mutiny of Britain and AnarCap Lib of Netherlands have been allowed to invest in Indian SSIs, the reputed German investment firm Desipundit has been denied permission? If so, the reasons thereof? Is the Union Government of India planning to make automatic the long procedure of permission for SSIs to import new technologies such as Trackbacks, Pingbacks, Blogrolls, Splogs and Hitcounters?”

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