Category Archives: Politics

Another election, another loss

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Another racist election, another heartbreakingly close loss: Jay Aiyer lost to Sue Lovell for Houston city council by the whopping margin of… 1.6%.

Lesson? Allegedly calling your desi opponent a terrorist probably works. With these kinds of margins (18 votes against Tom Abraham, 1.6% here), it can’t hurt.

In the closest and most heavily voted contest, Sue Lovell beat opponent Jay Aiyer by one percentSue Lovell beat opponent Jay Aiyer by one percent…

Calling your desi opponent a terrorist works for the At-Large Position 2 on City Council. [Link]

In the race for Houston City Council at-large Position 2, Jay Aiyer has raised more money than Sue Lovell. Since the Nov. 8 general election, when the two emerged from a field of five to make the runoff, Aiyer has raised $89,000 and Lovell $56,000…

But Lovell has had outside help. The Service Employees International Union contributed $10,000 to Lovell’s campaign and sent three mailings on her behalf during the campaign leading to the Nov. 8 election. It sent two more during the runoff campaign. Aiyer said the mailings by SEIU violate a city ordinance prohibiting “coordinated campaign expenditures” — direct work on behalf of a candidate by an organization whose expenditures aren’t listed on the candidate’s campaign finance reports. [Link]

One long-time Aiyer supporter wrote:

It is difficult for me to believe that a Council seat can be bought by one of the largest labor unions in the country. Shame on you voters of Houston. Shame on you Democratic Party of Houston. I expected more of you. It is so transparent that Sue did not spend any money on direct mail and she herself admitted that SEIU was going to do an Independent Expenditure. [Link]

Related posts: Teach racists a lesson for five bucks (updated), Today is Jay Day, It’s over

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Today is Jay Day- VOTE

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jay aiyer.jpg
Attention Houston-area Mutineers: Today, Saturday December 10th is the day– get out and VOTE for Jay Aiyer. Donating money is fantastic, and I’m thrilled we inspired many of you to do so, but at the end of election day, the only thing which counts is VOTES. So move it. I know, it’s out of your way, it’s not what you had planned for your Saturday, you need more time to peruse their platforms, you don’t think you should vote when you haven’t…save the excuses for another, less important day.

Today you take a stand against ignorant, pathetic, politics-as-usual. We are not dot-headed terrorists and we do not fly planes in to buildings. When people cravenly suggest such outrageous things, we call them out on their bullshit as they scurry behind technicalities which don’t matter to anyone with a functioning brain.

Don’t live in Houston? No problem. You and I are going to engage in that most important aspect of political campaigning– Getting out the VOTE. I have a few dozen relatives in Houston, so do you. Today’s the day you make a phone call and tell them to get to the polls to vote for Jay. What are you waiting for? Continue reading →

Attacking the Myth of the Model Minority Myth

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(via Econlog) Those of the any Asian persuasion in the last 10-15 years have probably heard at least one campus activist screaming about the Model Minority Myth. Now, simple yokel that I am, I would have have thought it a good thing to be a model for just about anything (although I suppose I’m still waiting for swashbuckling, studmeister South Indian action hero…).

But, there’s a certain corpus of thought in Leftist politics that strongly believes otherwise. They assert that the Model Minority Myth is perpetrated by The Man for a variety of motives such as the ones summarized at ModelMinority.com –

…Americans reluctant to address the realities of continuing racism and white privilege have consistently portrayed Asian Americans as a “model minority” who have uniformly succeeded by merit.

While superficially complimentary to Asian Americans, the real purpose and effect of this portrayal is to celebrate the status quo in race relations. First, by over-emphasizing Asian American success, it de-emphasizes the problems Asian Americans continue to face from racial discrimination in all areas of public and private life. Second, by misrepresenting Asian American success as proof that America provides equal opportunities for those who conform and work hard, it excuses American society from careful scrutiny on issues of race in general, and on the persistence of racism against Asian Americans in particular.

A recent, interesting study conducted by Northwestern U decided to put some of these claims to the test.

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Midnight’s oil

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Could India become a petro-rupee state? The Indian oil minister said last week that the country has almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia, just when conventional wisdom says it’s running out. Energy independence would be excellent; relying on oil without building a real economy, disastrous.

Petrominister

[Mani] Shankar Aiyar, minister of petroleum for India… believes that India could become a petrodollar state in the 21st century… The optimism is grounded in massive oil deposits, close to 30 billion tons, in Central India. That’s twice the size of the deposits in Iraq (13 billion tons, according to the Institute of Petroleum) and just shy of Saudi deposits. With this, India, which imports 70 percent of its oil, could become an exporter… [Link]

India may exhaust its existing oil fields soon, and as its economy grows, so does its thirst:

India has oil reserves to last only till 2016, if no new discovery is made, the Petroleum Minister, Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar, said today. [Link]

ONGC’s oil output has stalled at about 520,000 barrels a day in the past couple of years and is expected to decline as older fields near the end of their productive lifespan. Mr Aiyar voiced concerns about a fall in domestic output at a time when India’s rapidly expanding economy is fuelling huge demand for energy. [Link]

Central India has oil deposits twice the size of those in Iraq and just shy of Saudi deposits. But they’re not easy to extract

India ranks sixth in the world in terms of energy demand… While India has significant reserves of coal, it is relatively poor in oil and gas resources… The majority of India’s oil reserves are located in fields offshore Bombay and onshore in Assam. Due to stagnating domestic crude production, India imports approximately 70% of its oil, much of it from the Middle East… The World Energy Outlook… projects that India’s dependence on oil imports will grow to 91.6% by the year 2020. [Link]

Nearly half [India’s] electricity, according to various estimates, gets stolen by individuals placing illegal feed wires onto power lines… [Link]

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The best defense is a good offense

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The WaPo reports that software and services are great bootstrap industries because, unlike heavy manufacturing and chip fabs, they don’t have a lot of dependencies on infrastructure (via Globalisation Institute):

Chennai also shows why India succeeds in software and services. To do software, you only need one functional buildingTo do software, you don’t need a broad infrastructure base; you need one functional building. I visited Tidel Park, a gleaming office block here that houses 31 software firms, two-thirds of which are foreign. There aren’t any power cuts here because the building has its own backup generators. There are no connectivity worries because it is served by six competing broadband providers. And it certainly is safe. Tidel Park boasts 150 guards and a security control room that would not look out of place on Darth Vader’s Death Star. [Link]

However, eventually you need a manufacturing base and the ability to generate economies of scale. The khadi cloth era of protecting domestic industries only made them sluggish and unresponsive and postponed global competitiveness. Relative to centralized planning, few of India’s early leaders understood adaptive systems or emergent effects:

… the opening of India’s economy has forced its manufacturers to reinvent themselves. Chennai’s auto-components firms have done this almost manically. Ten years ago, their brakes and valves were crummy enough to scare away the international car majors that considered manufacturing in India. Today, you can’t spend an hour with any of the components Actually, getting rid of the tariff barriers is where you startfirms without hearing about the international quality certifications they’ve amassed; the Deming Prize, awarded for manufacturing excellence by a Japanese committee, has acquired talismanic status… the city’s business leaders pepper their conversation with Japanese management lingo.

The results are dramatic. The TVS Group, the largest of India’s auto-components firms, now exports around a third of its output — proof that it meets international standards. The rival Rane Group reports that it has reduced defects from 10,000 parts per million to 250 and that 28 percent of its engine valves are now exported. One of the TVS companies, Sundram Fasteners, has won a General Motors “Supplier of the Year” award five times, and it supplies 100 percent of GM’s radiator caps.
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Better Dead than Fed (by an Infidel)

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StrategyPage has an update on the latest snag affecting post-quake relief efforts in Pakistan –

Under pressure from Islamic conservative politicians, Pakistan agreed to get [out] NATO troops, performing relief work in the earthquake zone, within 90 days. There are about a thousand NATO troops involved in the relief operations. The Islamic conservatives find this very embarrassing, with all those infidel (non-Moslem) soldiers in a Moslem country. Many conservative clerics are preaching that it is better to suffer and die from privation, than to tolerate infidel soldiers in your neighborhood. Thousands of people in the earthquake zone face death, as the brutal Winter weather has closed in. The NATO troops have the most helicopters and other high tech gear to get aid to people who need it most. European governments are trying to get civilian specialists into the area, to replace the departing troops.

These pressures are the same reason last weekend’s Predator strike on a senior Al Qaeda leader was initially pitched by the Pakistani’s as the product of a bungled bomb –

Pakistan declared that Harethi died when a bomb he was assembling went off. But people in the are displayed missile fragments, including data plates that said “AGM-114.” That’s a Hellfire missile, normally fired from CIA Predator UAVs known to operate in the area. The Pakistani government does not like to admit it allows the CIA to fly armed UAVs freely around Pakistan, but it does.

Tis a delicate dance when you’re barely sovereign over your own country & don’t want to admit that others (infidels, no less) are in there cleaning up your mess. Pakistani newspapers do seem to be talking pretty readily about the big secret –

“For their part, it is not surprising that the Pakistanis would deny that Rabia was taken out by a US missile. Although the government of Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf is one of Washington’s most valuable allies in the war on terrorism, anti-American sentiment in the country runs high. Public acknowledgement that US drones are operating over Pakistan and launching missiles could direct that sentiment toward Musharraf,” he points out.

In the meantime, it appears that Amartya Sen’s dictum that the ultimate source of modern hunger is politics, not poverty may find a sad new proofpoint.

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Bombs over Bongs

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Sixty-four years ago today, Japan kicked off its Pacific Ocean campaign by attacking Pearl Harbor. The Pacific war led to the starvation of three million Bengalis by the British and the bombing of Calcutta. It also paved the way for Indian independence.

The Japanese raided the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta, attacked British ships in the Indian Ocean, and occupied parts of Assam and the Andaman Islands. Indian forces under British command fought back in Burma, and British bombers based in Bengal raided Japan.

Mitsubishi Zero: Suicide bomber

Several areas in India anticipated Japanese bombing:

Their air force bombers had already dropped a few bombs on Calcutta, the biggest city of India at that time, and on the naval station at Vishakapatnam on the east coast. There was a bomb scare in Madras city which was to the south of Vishakapatnam on the east coast. There were blackouts and air raid practices in all the big cities of India, including Bangalore City, where an aircraft factory was being built up with the help of the Americans… [Link]

A survivor recalls the bombing of Calcutta:

I remember the bombing of Calcutta by the Japanese, the target being Howrah Bridge. That morning had been a lovely clear and breezy day and we were flying kites…Our hero was an Indian Air Force Hurricane pilot who, night after night, shot down Zeros

We all had duties to perform when the siren would sound, such as putting a small bag with a piece of black rubber, Vaseline and bandages around our shoulders. We had no fridge in those days and drinking water was stored in earthen jars on the veranda. When the siren sounded that day, my parents brought in the water jars and my sisters and I ran downstairs to the ground floor and hid in the air raid shelter… When the “all clear” siren sounded we would leave the shelters and look at the damage… The bombing of Calcutta led to an exodus of residents – Howrah and Sealdah Stations being packed with people trying to get out. [Link]

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That necklace appears to be weighing you down

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Gold. The metal is synonymous with Indian culture. All the aunties that are shamelessly pressuring us younger folk to get married, are really doing so simply because it will provide them occasion to sport their bling. When my mom travels overseas she always calls me to have “the talk:”

“Abhi-beta, if something happens take care of your brother. You know where we keep the family gold right?”

She proceeds to tell me in laborious detail about the many locations, safety deposit boxes, etc., where the family jewels are kept. I shouldn’t even mention the map to the dig site in the forest behind our house. The Christian Science Monitor reports that India’s obsession with Au is actually weighing down the growth of the Indian economy:

In India, nearly all that glitters is, in fact, gold. With a stockpile already worth $200 billion, Indian gold purchases jumped nearly 40 percent this year, making the country the world’s leading consumer of the precious metal.

Gold may seem like a savvy investment as its value hits a 22-year high. But experts say it may actually be weighing down one of Asia’s fastest rising economies. It would be better if the money locked up in the glistening yellow metal went instead to finance new start-ups or better roads, boosting the Indian economy over the long term, economists contend.

That could provide quite a boost, given that the amount Indians have saved in gold – mostly as jewelry – is worth 30 percent of the country’s $690 billion economy. But Indians have a deep cultural soft spot for the soft metal – something that may hinder new efforts to introduce more modern investment strategies for India’s burgeoning middle class.

“It’s fair to say India’s economic growth would be higher if the money tied up in gold was invested more productively,” says Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute in San Francisco.

But really now, how are you going to convince those aunties that giving up the gold is better for their society? I myself am a silver man. I especially like it on my kaju-katli.

…earlier this year there was a mini gold rush in Tamil Nadu, where people affected by last year’s tsunami put up to half the aid money they had received into gold jewelry,” Ms. Leyland says. “They could wear it, keep it safe, and it was in a form where it couldn’t be frittered away.”

Worries over security aren’t restricted to poorer or displaced Indians, however. The country’s growing middle class is still skeptical of financial investments and even bank deposits, preferring physical assets like gold and property.

There is definitely going to be a generational conflict over the gold in my family. My mom made me a gold Om chain a long time ago but I never wear it. I’m always afraid I will lose it and I just never thought gold was that attractive (one of the many reasons I am a bad Indian son). I have always admired gold for its more pragmatic uses.

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Wikiveda

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Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

— Balwinder Shaikh’s Pir in Amrit

Mama Beeb reports that India is putting together an ayurpedia to fight inappropriate patents in developed countries (via Slashdot): Claim: 80% of U.S. patents on medicinal plants by 2000 were of Indian origin

In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts… One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is wading through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a medicine derived from the mango fruit…. putting together a 30-million-page electronic encyclopædia of India’s traditional medical knowledge…

Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth encyclopaedia project… reckons that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin… … in most of the developed nations like United States, “prior existing knowledge” is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database…

Mogambo is displeased

The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country’s traditional medicine in five languages – English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish – in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them. The electronic encyclopædia, which will be made available next year, will contain information on the traditional medicines, including exhaustive references, photographs of the plants and scans from the original texts…

… ayurvedic texts are in Sanskrit and Hindi, unani texts are in Arabic and Persian and siddha material is in Tamil language… there are some 54 authoritative ‘text books’ on ayurveda alone, some thousands of years old… [Link]

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…then you can’t have our money

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I know that there are many lawyers and current law students that read SM on a daily basis. Therefore I thought it might be of value to point out that the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments today in a case pertaining to the Solomon Amendment. The Christian Science Monitor reports on the crux of the debate:

At the center of the legal showdown: to what extent military recruiters should have access to law school campuses. The case involves conflicting conceptions of free speech. It also could erode some civil rights laws, which use federal funding to encourage nondiscrimination.

On one side of the current case are a group of law professors and law schools seeking equal treatment of gays interested in serving the nation as members of the armed forces. In protest of the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning openly gay individuals from the military, the law schools restricted military recruiters from fully participating in school-sponsored employment events.

Military recruiters could still come to campuses, but the law schools’ employment placement offices would not assist them. The message was that the schools would not abet military discrimination against some of their own students.

I have thought a lot about this issue. I am a big time supporter of the military but on this issue I would side with the law schools. The law schools could bar any other employer that openly discriminates, so why not the U.S. military? I understand that a ruling in favor of the law schools could set a dangerous precedent. It would embolden people to protest all kinds of federal laws based on the logic that they were following their conscience. Take for example the pharmacists that oppose filling a prescription to the morning-after pill. In many instances they HAVE to fill the prescription by law. I would not want that to change. The threat of federal money being taken away from a University that only has the best interests of its students (i.e. protecting is LGBT community) in mind does not seem fair to me.

Law schools have “a Hobson’s choice: Either the university must forsake millions of dollars of federal funds largely unrelated to the law school, or the law school must abandon its commitment to fight discrimination,” justices were told in a filing by the Association of American Law Schools.

The federal law, known as the Solomon Amendment after its first congressional sponsor, mandates that universities, including their law and medical schools and other branches, give the military the same access as other recruiters or forfeit money from federal agencies like the Education, Labor and Transportation departments.

Dozens of groups have filed briefs on both sides of the case, the first gay-rights related appeal since a contentious 2003 Supreme Court ruling that struck down laws criminalizing gay sex.

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