Tag: Western civilisation

Arvind Kejriwal flies high

March 8, 2014 No Comments filed under Archived Authors
Does he not realize that he is under the microscope? He has two choices: pay his way or disclose his funding sources (that was already happening). The latter path will still leave him open to accusations of bias, but that is the problem of being (and promising to be) Mr Clean.

By taking India Today’s private Beechcraft
flight today (March 7, 2014), you make me feel foolish that I ever
supported you or reposed some faith in you as a politician of a new
India. Your representative on the prime time chat show may have
pathetically tried to defend the indefensible with such pitiable excuses
as 1) the Beechcraft ride was paid for by India Today and not by you,
and 2) that you took the flight in the interest of saving time!  

Your
defender didn’t seem to reflect for a moment that just this morning in
Gujarat you had eloquently fired away several questions at Narendra Modi
on his use of private flights and then within hours you had hopped
aboard one yourself, after all the moralistic stance you had taken all
this while about eschewing the VIP culture, the red lights, the
security, the cavalcade and other perks of office and what have you. 

The
truth is that your action today tantamounts to spitting on the face of
all those true aam admis who have stood by you and believed in the
values that you pretended to abide by all this time. The truth is today,
you don’t have a shred of a fig-leaf left to hide your abject bareness
behind.

 regards

Hanif Kureishi and Comrade Lenin

March 8, 2014 No Comments filed under Archived Authors
Are writers special? Is writing a special talent? Can creative writing be taught?

Ian Jack comments (down below in the article) on HK’s comments on the above (in summary they agree: Yes, Yes, and NO, but Jack warns about the downsides of cutting the branch you are sitting upon). 

Hanif Kureishi thinks creative writing courses are a waste
of time, which is a dangerous thing to say given that he makes his
living (not all of it, but probably more of it than he does from his novels) as
a professor of creative writing at Kingston University. Telling a story well took a rare skill, he
told an audience at the Bath literary festival last weekend.
He estimated that perhaps 0.1% of his students had it. Could it be taught?
Kureishi didn’t think so. Would he pay money to take an MA in creative
writing himself? “No … that would be madness.”


We should feel sorry for all
concerned: for a university that may consequently face a sharp drop in fee
income; for Kureishi’s students, who have paid £5,800 each (£12,700 for non-EU
citizens) for their professor’s useless course; and not least for Kureishi
himself, biting the hand that fed him out of a rage (I speculate)
that he has to make money in this despicable way.


….But how do you explain the apparently unstoppable growth of a
vocational course for a vocation that is being remorselessly de-monetised? When
Kureishi started out, the University of
East Anglia had Britain’s only department of creative writing, which may
also have been the only one outside North America. Today no broad-based
university would dream of living without one, despite the fact that writing
(“literary” and otherwise) earns increasingly little money, if any at
all, and we are returning to the time when it was confined as an occupation to
those who had private incomes or the patronage of philanthropists and
academies.


What tempts students towards such an
unfeasible career? A clue lies on
Kingston University’s website: “A Kingston University creative writing
MA graduate has been snapped up in a six-figure deal by one of the world’s
biggest publishers after her self-published books topped the Kindle download
rankings, selling tens of thousands of copies.” In other words, like winning the national lottery, it could happen
to you.


Workshopping is probably the most
hateful feature of writing courses, easily mistaken for an American idea
because, like Alcoholics Anonymous, it believes in the benefits of group
frankness. In fact, according to a
professor of creative writing I once met in Chicago, the practice originated in
the early years of Soviet Russia, when Leninists wanted bourgeois activities
such as writing to assume the more muscular, proletarian habits of workers’
committees. According to my American professor, Lenin found the results
hard-going when they were shown to him, and announced a preference for an old
favourite, Pushkin. In this, Hanif Kureishi and the Chairman of the Council of
People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union would have been at one.

regards

Chicoms blame internet for terrorism

March 8, 2014 No Comments filed under Archived Authors
For all the (imaginary, real) trappings of prosperity China is never going to be able to afford democracy (forget liberal democracy), even to the point of unbanning youtube or facebook. This may be acceptable for most people, others I imagine simply dont care, and the miniscule number of activists do not count (or will be shouted down). But try as they might the manadarins will not be able to inoculate against derision. You dont have to do much, just quote their own statements verbatim. Mockery truly is the best policy.

Example: History and reality have shown that the Communist Party of China is a
loyal representative of the interests of people of all ethnic groups in
Xinjiang. Socialism is a broad road of prosperity for people of all
ethnic groups in Xinjiang. The great homeland is a beautiful home of
happy life for people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang.

The Xinjiang Room is named after the autonomous region of Xinjiang in
China’s northwest, which occupies one-sixth of the nation’s landmass.
Xinjiang is famous for its melons and flatbread, mosques and natural-gas
reserves. If that doesn’t sound very Chinese it’s because Xinjiang
culturally is much more Central Asian
than East Asian. In fact, Xinjiang’s name means New Frontier, and the
region was only given that appellation in 1884 when China’s Qing dynasty
had conquered its population of ethnic Uighurs and other minorities.
Since then, the region has chafed against rule from Beijing, which is
farther from Xinjiang’s Silk Road oases than Baghdad is. Memories of two
short-lived republics of East Turkestan, as some Uighurs prefer to
think of their homeland, have heightened separatist dreams ever since.

For many of us, this was why we were in the room. On March 1, black-clad assailants had unleashed a terrorism spree
in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, stabbing and slashing
passersby. By the time their rampage had ended, 29 people had been
killed and more than 140 injured. The government has blamed the attack
on “separatists from Xinjiang” who were also terrorists bent on jihad.
We wanted to know more. Who were they and where in Xinjiang were they
from? Should we expect more terrorism to come from disgruntled Uighurs?
Were the Kunming attackers jihadis or were they more motivated by
separatism? Could there be something else too that triggered this
horrific mass murder? What could the government do to win hearts and
minds in a tense, restive region?

But then, a postscript: as Xinjiang’s party secretary Zhang
Chunxian tried to leave the Xinjiang Room, a media scrum descended.
Zhang, a Han Chinese like nearly all of the men who have held the
highest-level post in the Uighur autonomous region, spoke his mind. The
main reason for the terrorism in Xinjiang was, drum roll: the flow of
information via the Internet. Zhang said that nearly all terrorism in
Xinjiang was aided by terrorists jumping the Great Firewall constructed
by China’s state censors. 

regards

MH370 (Kuala Lumpur to Beijing) is lost at sea

March 8, 2014 No Comments filed under Archived Authors
Let us hope against hope that some survivors can be found in time. This may or may not be connected to the ethnic disturbance that took some precious lives in Kunming recently (or given China’s rapacious record any number of discontents ranging from Burma to Kenya). Again let us hope for the best.

A search and rescue operation is underway after Malaysia Airlines said that a plane carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew on board went missing en route to Beijing.


Radar contact with the aircraft,
flight MH370, was lost in airspace controlled by Vietnam in the early
hours of Saturday morning, China’s
Xinhua news agency said. The aircraft did not enter airspace controlled
by China and did not make contact with Chinese controllers, Xinhua
added.


A
statement published on Facebook by the airline said : “Malaysia
Airlines confirms that flight MH370 has lost contact with Subang Air
Traffic Control at 2.40am, today (8 March 2014). “Flight MH370,
operated on the B777-200 aircraft, departed Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am on 8
March 2014. MH370 was expected to land in Beijing at 6.30am the same
day. The flight was carrying a total number of 227 passengers (including
2 infants), 12 crew members.

regards

“I have been too comfortable”

March 7, 2014 No Comments filed under Archived Authors
Hong Kong tries hard for democracy but China will not stand for it. Imposing democracy from top is a difficult exercise (as seen in India), it will take decades for the masses to catch on (if at all).

Still an imperfect democracy is better for people like us (we like to talk freely, we would like to talk even more freely but democracy constrains us), others may prefer the higher growth standards of autocracies (based on anecdotes it appears that the Indian middle and elite class – like Robert Young quoted below- heavily favor autocracies where the rights of the poor people will be even more curtailed than it already is).

As he lay on the tarmac of a central Hong Kong
street, gazing up at the skyscrapers, Chan Kin-man came to a
realisation. “I have been living a very comfortable life – up in an
office, writing articles, encouraging people to negotiate. Suddenly, I
have to prepare myself to go to jail. “It was a very striking
moment for me,” said the 55-year-old academic later. “I have been too
comfortable. And at some point, Hong Kong people have to sacrifice
something to make people believe we are serious about democracy.” His
epiphany came during a test run for Occupy Central, a pro-reform civil
disobedience campaign that wants to see thousands take over Hong Kong’s
financial district – much to Beijing’s alarm.

On Thursday, one of China‘s
top leaders reportedly said that importing a western-style democratic
system to the region could prove catastrophic. Zhang Dejiang, who heads
the leading group on Hong Kong affairs, said that copying a foreign
electoral system could “become a democracy trap … and possibly bring a
disastrous result”, Ma Fung-kwok, a delegate at Thursday’s closed-door
meeting, told Reuters.
Britain
showed little interest in developing democracy in Hong Kong until the
1997 handover to China loomed. Then, under the “one country, two
systems” framework, it negotiated greater freedoms for the region and a
commitment to eventual universal suffrage.

Authorities agree votes for all should be adopted when the region has a new chief executive in 2017, but want to ensue there are no unwelcome candidates. “It
is obvious that the chief executive has to be a person who loves the
country, loves Hong Kong and doesn’t oppose the central government,” the
region’s chief secretary for administration, Carrie Lam, has said.

Opponents
complain that nominations will be channelled through a committee packed
with Beijing loyalists, and want the public to gain the right to put
candidates forward too. Unless Beijing shifts by the end of the
year, Occupy’s organisers say they will risk their careers and freedom
to press for change.

Chan and his co-founders – Benny Tai, another
academic, and Baptist minister Chu Yiu-ming – hardly appear rabble
rousers. Chan peppers conversation with references to the sociologist
Jürgen Habermas. The full name of the movement is the hippy-ish Occupy
Central with Love and Peace. Non-violent civil disobedience – modelled
on the activism of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi – would be the
last resort, after mass deliberative meetings that would form the basis
for negotiations by the opposition pan-democratic parties that are
backing Occupy.But opponents claim the campaign threatens chaos.

Robert
Chow Young, a television host and a leader of the pro-business Silent
Majority group, called the campaigners evil. He paints a graphic picture
of a paralysed city and plunging stockmarket, with law and order
breaking down. “Let us not let some dreaming, wild-thinking person
think they can be immortalised by doing something crazy. Why should we
suffer for them? What do we stand to gain?” he asked. “Nothing. What do
we stand to lose? Everything.”

A poll by the non-partisan Hong Kong Transition Project
(pdf) found that 54% were opposed to Occupy Central, and only 38%
supported it – though were Beijing to warn against participation,
campaigners would gain support.

regards

Chinese folly in Eithiopia/Kenya

March 6, 2014 1 Comment filed under Archived Authors
China may be the next best imperial beast but it should be prepared to get bloody noses everywhere (not that it particularly cares) within the hard as well as soft boundaries.

Africa’s fourth-largest lake could drop by 20 metres, causing an ecological and human disaster to rival the shrinking of the Aral Sea in central Asia, if Ethiopia goes ahead with massive irrigation projects linked to a giant dam, according to a university paper….Lake
Turkana, located almost entirely in Kenya but fed by the river Omo,
which rises in Ethiopia, will be severely impacted by the 243 metre-high
Gibe III dam, which is due to be completed this year, says the study,
published by the University of Oxford’s African Studies Centre. It suggests water levels could drop by half, devastating the lake’s fisheries and affecting the livelihoods of 170,000 agro-pastoralists.

…. protests outside the Chinese embassy in Nairobi, with campaigners calling on
Beijing to halt funding for the scheme. Angelei says the Nairobi
government is divided on the issue, but that at least protests are legal
in Kenya, unlike in Ethiopia, and she urges donors to heed Human Rights Watch’s concerns that “funds given to Ethiopia are not used to oppress its people”….Although
progress on Gibe III has been considerably delayed by funding
constraints, China signed a memorandum of understanding last year to
finance construction on another mega dam on the Omo, Gibe IV, and plans
further dams on the Blue Nile as well.

Ethiopia’s plans for
constructing dams on the Nile have traditionally met with robust
opposition from Egypt, which has tried to maintain control of more than
half of the Nile’s flow through the colonial era Nile Waters Agreement, as well as through threats of armed force.…Perhaps
reflecting Cairo’s recent decline as regional strongman, Burundi last
week joined five other upstream nations in the new Nile Basin Initiative,
creating the two-thirds majority of riverine states required to put the
new treaty into force, and thereby effectively wresting control of the
Nile waters from Egypt and Sudan. It threatens Egypt’s right to 55.5bn
cubic metres annually, conferred by the previous agreement.

regards

(HIV) Cure is a 4 letter word (miracle is 7)

March 6, 2014 30 Comments filed under Archived Authors
We can go back to having as much sex as we want  (unfortunately STDs are again on the rise). However the promise of GM cure is now endless and that must be a good thing (we like living like Mr Micawber). The best goodies (like age reversal therapy) will be reserved for the 1%, the “annual income twenty
pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six” folks will perhaps need to wait for Indian origin generic therapy to take shape (and if WTO approves).

Scientists have been excited about the prospect of genetically modifying
patients’ immune cells to make them resistant to disease since doctors
effectively cured an HIV patient in 2008. Timothy Brown, also known as
the Berlin patient, had a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukaemia.
 Spotting their chance to treat both conditions, his doctors found a
donor who carried the rare mutation that made their immune cells
resistant to HIV. Immune cells are made in the bone marrow. Since the
operation, Brown has had no detectable level of HIV in his body and no
longer takes anti-HIV drugs.

Bone marrow transplants are risky
operations and cannot be given to everyone with HIV. But modifying
patients’ immune cells might be the next best thing. One shortcoming of
the latest therapy is that the patients still make normal immune cells,
which can and will be infected by the HIV virus. Levine said one
hope for the future was to genetically modify stem cells in the
patient’s bone marrow that grow into immune cells. Those patients might
then produce a steady flow of resistant immune cells, leaving HIV
nowhere to hide.

The latest treatment was not without its problems. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine,
the authors report a total of 130 mild or moderate side effects, 32 of
which were linked to the modified cells rather than the infusion
procedure. The most common reactions were fever, chills, headaches,
muscle and joint pain. One patient was taken to the hospital’s emergency
department after falling ill. The scientists note too that the
patients’ body odour took on the smell of garlic, a consequence of them
breaking down dimethyl sulfoxide, used to preserve the genetically
modified cells.

regards

Kachins against ka-ching

March 5, 2014 1 Comment filed under Archived Authors
The dams across the Irrawaddy were to be built and the power exported to Big Brother. However the Burmese govt suddenly had a change in heart, in part driven by resistance to the project from Kachins who populate the headwaters and have been displaced. BB has now launched a “win hearts and minds” operation but the natives remain unconvinced. There is also fear that if/when general Thein Sein steps down the projects will be restarted and the lands that they hold sacred will be no more.

It was a project conceived, financed and – so far partially – built by the
state-owned Chinese Power Investment Corporation (CPI), to take
electricity across the border and help industrialise the Chinese
province of Yunnan. At 152 metres high and with a potential capacity of
6,000 MW of electricity, the Myitsone was to be the largest of seven
dams at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River. If completed, it will be
the 15th largest dam in the world. But soon after work started in 2009,
the project ran into trouble.

Environmentalists objected because
the Irrawaddy is Burma’s most important water resource, supporting a
thriving fishing industry, irrigating Burma’s rice bowl, and supplying
silt to the Irrawaddy delta….Ordinary Burmese objected because the Irrawaddy is the country’s spiritual
lifeblood, the subject of stories, songs and poems. With around 90% of
the electricity from the dam going to China, the Burmese saw little benefit for themselves….Finally,
the people of Kachin state objected because the 296-square-mile
reservoir would not only submerge 63 villages, it would also drown a
sacred site at the confluence of the N’Mai and Mali rivers. As
work got underway, the Kachin Independence Army broke a 17-year-old
ceasefire to attack the dam site. In 2010, 10 bombs exploded around the
dam site, killing a Chinese worker.

Still the Burmese government pushed ahead with the project, keen to placate Burma’s staunchest ally and biggest trading partner. Then in 2011 Burma’s new president, Thein Sein, abruptly announced a halt to construction,
and promised that the dam would not be built during his term in office.
It was a stunning turnaround that infuriated the Chinese.

regards

A new (unwelcome) guest

March 5, 2014 No Comments filed under Archived Authors
As if we do not have enough problems with real polio here is possible evidence of a copycat virus. Permanent guests of Hotel California beware!!


The first known case appeared in
2012. Sofia Jarvis in Berkeley began to experience wheezing and
difficulty breathing. The 2-year-old spent days in the intensive care
unit at Children’s Hospital Oakland. Doctors thought she had asthma. On a follow-up visit, her mother Jessica Tomei, 37, realized something else was wrong.

“As
we were leaving the doctor’s office, I noticed that she went to grab
something with her left arm and she stopped, midway,” Tomei said. Eventually
Sofia was brought to Van Haren’s clinic with “a unique set of
symptoms.” She was treated with steroids and intravenous immunoglobulin
therapy, used to reduce the severity of infections by giving the body
antibodies to protect against bacteria and viruses. “None of it
helped,” said Van Haren, a neurology professor at the Stanford
University School of Medicine.

“We don’t have a final case count, but it’s
probably in the neighborhood of 25 cases, all in California,” said Van
Haren. The median age of those stricken is 12.

The children don’t have
polio, but their symptoms look much like the disease that terrified
generations of parents beginning in the 1890s. Patients lose the
ability to move their arms or legs, which “just dangle, like empty
balloons,” Van Haren said. Because the children can’t move their limbs,
the muscles atrophy and the limb shrivels.

“The
cause of most of these cases is not known. Some clinical and laboratory
features, such as the pattern of inflammation seen in the spinal cord
on MRI, are consistent with a viral process,” said Glaser. Van Haren suspects the culprit is an enterovirus.
That is a family of viruses that includes polio but also the milder
hand, foot and mouth disease, common in infants and children. Unfortunately while there’s a vaccine for the polio virus, “we don’t have vaccines for the other enteroviruses,” Van Haren said.

regards

Eternal youth

March 4, 2014 No Comments filed under Archived Authors
…the promised land where (rich) people will stay young forever.… as always…Bahamas

Bahamas resident Peter Nygard says he is receiving stem cell therapy
and that a study from the University of Miami suggests he is getting
younger, the Bahamas Tribune
reports.  

“They are looking at me, and my markers have shown exactly
that I have been actually reversing my ageing and getting younger,” the
70-year-old says.


regards

Brown Pundits