No protest vote this time around

I do not know how people outside the US deal with the electoral college aspect of the presidential election.  I started explaining that to my father when he hurriedly moved on to another topic.  Or, maybe it was because of my long-winded way of explaining anything that puts students to sleep ;)

The electoral college is also why I have not been worried in the past about casting my vote as a protest against the major party candidates.  Thus, for instance, in the historic 2000 elections, when I was in the blue, blue state of California, I voted for Ralph Nader.

If there were no fascist candidate in this upcoming election, then my protest vote would be for the libertarian, Gary Johnson.  But, I won't vote for Johnson.  Why?  Because of the fear of the racist winning in Oregon.

Back in 2000, Al Gore had a huge lead over junior Bush, and I was confident that a few people like me voting for Nader would not help the Republican.  But, Oregon in 2000 was decided by a difference of less than 7,000 votes--thanks to a huge support for Nader.  In 2000, there weren't even that many disgruntled Democrats and yet Gore barely squeaked past.

This time, there are disgruntled Democrats wherever I turn.  The Bernie or Bust people might really hold their votes back, whereas even the principled Republicans are apparently ready to vote for the xenophobe.  The last thing I want to do is help the misogynist by voting for Johnson.

Gary Johnson has picked a strong running mate in William Weld.  As the New Yorker notes,

Together, Johnson and Weld represent the first Presidential ticket with two governors since 1948, when the Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey, of New York, and Earl Warren, of California.

Consider the following that Johnson says:

The unintended consequence of when you put boots on the ground, when you drop bombs, when you fly drones and kill thousands of innocent people—this is resulting in a world less safe, not more safe

Or this:

Johnson isn’t reflexively against all government. He supports the Environmental Protection Agency, arguing that policing polluters is a proper function of the government. As governor of New Mexico, he aggressively used the power of the state to force Molycorp, a large mining corporation, to clean up a contaminated site. He eventually allowed the E.P.A. to declare the area a Superfund site, turning the issue over to the federal government, which had more resources to go after the company. “The government exists to protect us from harm, and that pollution is harm,” Johnson said. “Libertarians would say, ‘You and I have the ability to sue Molycorp. We can bring them to bear from a private standpoint.’ But the reality? You can’t.”

Of course, there are the usual extreme libertarian positions that are worrisome.

I decided to check in with the website that the New Yorker piece referred to, ISideWith.com, in order to check how much I agree with the presidential candidates.

Ahem, I am surprised at how much I am aligned with Clinton's positions:

And what a relief that on "no major issues" do I side with the fascist!  I tell ya, I am not the right wing nutcase that my faculty colleagues think that I am ;)

BTW, it turns out that I am even more anti-Trump than the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, is--she sides with Trump on economic issues!

Here is to hoping that the Berniacs and the Greenies do not mess things up for the country and the world.

Quote (dream) of the day: on AfPakIndia

I dream of a day, while retaining our respective identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore, and dinner in Kabul. That is how my forefathers lived. That is how I want our grandchildren to live.

A lovely sentiment, wouldn't you agree?

That was India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, quoted in this talk by Hillary Clinton, when she was at Chennai a while ago. (Hey, I am a tad late to this party!)

Instead, what a colossal destruction of life and property because of the unwillingness to coexist over the years since 1947!

Hillary Clinton has been the best news in the Obama administration.  After their intense primary battles, I wondered how much Clinton would be okay to being the second violinist.  But, boy has she been impressive as a team player, and as a quiet and efficient cabinet official!  Pretty much no gaffes as the Secretary of State.  While we might not agree with her policy perspectives every single time, Clinton has represented the US absolutely as America's diplomat-in-chief.  I might seriously vote for Obama if he ditches Biden and makes Clinton his running mate.

Anyway, back to the Indian context for this entry: the US-India Higher Education Summit here in DC.

This unprecedented event also highlights the importance of education between our two countries. Academic exchange programs provide deep roots for our countries' relationship. Our ties are anchored by the more than 12,000 alumni of U.S. Department of State's public diplomacy programs in India, the 104,897 Indian students studying in the United States in 2010, and the more than 2 million Indian-Americans living in the United States. And the Fulbright Program has laid the foundation for this relationship since its inception in 1950. Today's events are the next step in developing our relationship.

The State Department is actively promoting internships in India for American students:

With more than 100,000 Indian students studying in the United States each year, young people in India tend to know a fair amount about U.S. cities, culture and businesses. But fewer than 3,000 U.S. students study in India annually.

Isn't it a tragic irony that India and the US, two countries literally on the other side of the planet from each other, are able to interact to this level, while even the next door Pakistan and Afghanistan are alien worlds to Indians?  What the fuck is wrong with this world :(

Almost two decades ago, in the dead of the night, the phone at home rang.  Fearing for the worst news from India, I shakily answered it.  It was my old school mate, Srikumar.

The guy had decided to take the land route from the Czech Republic to India, but could not proceed east from Iran because Pakistan would not issue him a visa.  To make things worse, Srikumar was all out of money too.  "Can you get me an air ticket from Tehran to anywhere in India?" was his question in the middle of the night.

I assured him I would.  In the morning, I contacted my friend, Shahab, who was from Iran, who then gave me the phone number of his preferred travel agent.  A day later, Srikumar was out of Iran, over the Pakistani air, and safe in India.

As Robert Kaplan wrote:

Aryans may have infiltrated from the Iranian plateau, and together with the subcontinent’s autochthonous inhabitants were part of a process that consolidated the political organization of the Gangetic Plain in northern India around 1000 B.C. This led to a set of monarchies between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C., culminating with the Nanda Empire which in the fourth century B.C. stretched across northern India and the Gangetic Plain from Punjab to Bengal. In 321 B.C., Chandragupta Maurya dethroned Dhana Nanda and founded the Mauryan Empire, which came to envelop much of the subcontinent except for the deep south, and thus for the first time in history encouraged the idea of India as a political entity conforming with the geography of South Asia.

A long and rich history in this geography.  If only we could soon figure out how to maintain our respective  identities and yet interact in friendly manner--friendly enough to travel the old trading routes and stop at the eateries in Amristar, Lahore, and Kabul.

One heck of a good looking foreign minister ... best yet?

What a wonderful transformation over the years ... from the likes of Henry Kissinger to ... no, I am not referring to Hillary Clinton, but Pakistan's foreign minister:

Caption at the source:

The new Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar on arrival in New Delhi, on Tuesday. While leaving Islamabad, she said re-engagement was better than no engagement.

Hillary Clinton channels George W. Bush

Not too long ago, President Bush notoriously famously asserted:

You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror

Oh, those were the days the anti-war patriots were incensed, and feebly fought back that opposing crazy wars ... oh well, you remember all those days, don't you?

Years passed.  The US was deep in two wars. Then, the president got term-limited. (If we didn't have the constitutional amendment, would Bush have won a third term, too?)

A new president came into office promising hope and change.

The change was that instead of a surge in Iraq, we now had a surge in Afghanistan. And then to compensate for the winding down of activities in Iraq ... President Obama took the fighting to the shores of Tripoli.

Congressional authorization for war be damned, this new president declared, thereby confirming that Bush had won a third term after all..

The current Secretary of State, who was lauded for her testicular fortitude during the primaries, now eerily echoes (ht) President Bush:

the bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them? For the Obama Administration, the answer to that question is very easy.

I suppose we need to remind ourselves the immortal words of the previous vice president, as a statement on behalf of the Bush/Obama/Cheney/Clinton composites to us, the anti-war people, as well:

go f--- yourself

More inconvenient truths: this time from Ron Paul!

I would love to have Ralph Nader and Ron Paul as members of every possible committee (too bad Nader isn't in Congress) because, then from totally different ideological ends of the spectrum, both these old guys will keep needling the politicos with all kinds of inconvenient truths.  (Full disclosure: I voted for Nader in 2000 and 2008.  2004 is all foggy in my mind)

In the video blow (I can't recall how I ended up here) Paul points out the horrendous American foreign policy history

“A lot of people in this country have come to the conclusion that our policy overhaul has been inconsistent; that sometimes we support the bad guys and the bad guys become our enemies,” Paul told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Rep. Paul pointed to America’s support for Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, its collaboration with Saddam Hussein against Iran in the 1980s, and its propping up the Shah in Iran for decades before that.
“But we keep supporting Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, all these dictators, and yet we pretend that as soon as, well, it looks like the dictator might fall, we're all for democracy and we're for freedom and we're against these dictators,” he said.

 Watch it because the video is far more effective than the mere text, and listen to Clinton's response:



But, here is the question: what percentage of the American electorate will be able to understand what Paul talks about, versus the percentage as convinced with the Iraqi links to the 9/11 attacks?

People taking the high ground in Libya, while Obama wusses out

The mad "our man in North Africa" Gaddafi continues to make things worse for his own people.  Firing on people, even children, hiring thugs from other countries in order to shoot and kill Libyans .... how much more insane can this guy get?

Yet, ordinary Libyans haven't lost it all (ht)


Christopher Hitchens is unhappy with President Obama's responses, or the lack of any, to the revolutions on the "Arab Street"

For weeks, the administration dithered over Egypt and calibrated its actions to the lowest and slowest common denominators, on the grounds that it was difficult to deal with a rancid old friend and ally who had outlived his usefulness. But then it became the turn of Muammar Qaddafi—an all-round stinking nuisance and moreover a long-term enemy—and the dithering began all over again. Until Wednesday Feb. 23, when the president made a few anodyne remarks that condemned "violence" in general but failed to cite Qaddafi in particular—every important statesman and stateswoman in the world had been heard from, with the exception of Obama. And his silence was hardly worth breaking. Echoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had managed a few words of her own, he stressed only that the need was for a unanimous international opinion, as if in the absence of complete unity nothing could be done, or even attempted. This would hand an automatic veto to any of Qaddafi's remaining allies. It also underscored the impression that the opinion of the United States was no more worth hearing than that of, say, Switzerland.

Perhaps the line about testicular fortitude was not off the mark, after all!  Hitchens concludes thus:

Libya is—in point of population and geography—mainly a coastline. The United States, with or without allies, has unchallengeable power in the air and on the adjacent waters. It can produce great air lifts and sea lifts of humanitarian and medical aid, which will soon be needed anyway along the Egyptian and Tunisian borders, and which would purchase undreamed-of goodwill. It has the chance to make up for its pointless, discredited tardiness with respect to events in Cairo and Tunis. It also has a president who has shown at least the capacity to deliver great speeches on grand themes. Instead, and in the crucial and formative days in which revolutions are decided, we have had to endure the futile squawkings of a cuckoo clock.

Or, as we put in bluntly at casual conversations, "all talk and no shit."

Wait, is Obama slowly backing away from all this for the reason that Jon Stewart has figured out?

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America was for democracy before it was against it?

As street protests started intensifying in Egypt, I blogged earlier that the US will have a tough time figuring out how to deal with the "our son a bitch" realpolitik that America has been pursuing, well, forever.
Vice President Joe Biden, who for decades was a senator who was actively involved with foreign policy issues as well, says that Mubarak is no dictator. 

Asked if he would characterize Mubarak as a dictator Biden responded: “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with – with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”

Really?  What then are the markings of a dictator?
Here is a headline from a few hours ago:

US speaks again, but no one seems to be listening

The Daily Show does a fantastic job of examining the American commitment to democracy:

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Wikileaks TMZ :)

The opener was quite imaginative.  The Hillary Clinton piece was way too funny

It gets better

First Hillary Clinton, and now Barack Obama. Am mighty glad they did the videos

It gets better

Cleaner cookstoves for the global poor

In one of the columns I wrote in the Register Guard (editor: have you stopped writing for the paper?  Did they find out your work is nothing but "mashed potatoes"? Hahaha!!!) I noted the connection between the high incidence of Acute Respiratory Illness and the usage of wood and charcoal in the tiny kitchens. 

I was, therefore, appreciative of the efforts to design and provide cleaner stoves--particularly the local angle:

It was thus with a gladdened heart and local pride that I read, after returning home, the essay in The New Yorker magazine, which also was referred to in a recent editorial in this newspaper. The article featured the Aprovecho Research Center, right here in Oregon, which has won international recognition for its efforts to design better stoves that also would be inexpensive.

It has been almost a year since then, and I am happy to read in the news that the US government is taking this project to a higher level:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced today the formation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a more than $60 million dollar public-private partnership to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions.  

A neat correlation that does not turn into any causation linking my column and this news :)  Anyway, my first thought was this: if 60 million dollars are all that was needed to get this going, we waited this long?  Well, better late than never, I suppose.

So, what is this Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves?  It is:

a new public-private initiative to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance’s ‘100 by 20’ goal calls for 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020, toward a long-term vision of universal adoption of clean and efficient cooking solutions.

How will this be done?

To achieve its ‘100 by 20’ goal, the Alliance will establish industry standards; spur innovative financing mechanisms; champion the cause across the donor and development communities; develop indoor air quality guidelines; address global tax and tariff barriers; field test clean stoves and fuels; and develop research roadmaps across key sectors such as health, climate, technology and fuels.

Sounds great. But, I wonder if this is slightly more than a much narrower focus I would prefer.  I hope that in this process, we will not repeat the same errors that are typified by the classic experience that John Kenneth Galbraith's wife talked about when she lived in India during Galbraith's service there as the US ambassador.  Mrs. Galbraith noticed how much the maids had to bend to sweep and mop the floor. So, to make their lives better, and to improve productivity, she gave them the long-handled brooms and mops that we are so familiar with here in America.

Good idea, right?  Yes, the maids did use them--but, after cutting the handles off first.

It is for those kinds of reasons that I am hoping that the Alliance will also focus on massive education and marketing of both the need and the technology.  It is a similar theme expressed at Aidwatch on what will be needed to make this a true success:

If this new effort is going to avoid the mistakes of its predecessors, it needs to do a few vital things:

• It needs to get as much input as possible from the people who will actually use the stoves. The stoves will need to be as much like existing stoves as possible, to minimize the change in cooking style required to use them. In particular, women need to be able to cook traditional foods that are appealing to their families. Listening to the women who’ll cook on them is the best way to do that.
• It needs to produce affordable stoves and consistently distribute them. Price is a big barrier to use of better cookstoves, since the benefits aren’t immediately obvious. The stoves need to be cheap enough that families can buy them with a minimum of savings or debt. Since they won’t last forever, there needs to be a steady supply of available improved stoves. That means building a structure for production and distribution, not some kind of one-off stove airlift.
• Finally, it will need to market the stoves intensely. Since the benefits to getting a new stove are obvious, and the problems aren’t, they’ll need to really sell these stoves. Women, and their families, will need to be convinced of the benefits. That will require a lot more than a dry brochure or an earnest slogan.  It will need actual ads, with an advertising strategy behind them.

I hope this works out.  I can still clearly recall how much my grandmother's life became easier after gas stoves finally reached her small town.  The kitchen, which was all the way in the back of the house to keep the smoke away--among other reasons--could now be moved into an inner room.  And, no more coughing as the smoke built up.

 

So, do your part to cheer this Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves on.  And, if you have a few dollars to spare, perhaps donate to this venture? 

Hillary Clinton in Pakistan ... for what?

Pakistan is upset, watch this video, from America's finest news source:

The end of men?

While having "the end of .." in the title is a great selling strategy, I am not sure that such prognostications stand the test of time; right, Professor Fukuyama? :)
But, that aside, this essay in the Atlantic raises a number of issues that I have often brought to my students' attention--BTW, most of the students are female--and have also blogged about here.

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

As I have even mentioned in this blog quite a few times, my reality from the time I was growing up was one in which I didn't know that men were "supposed" to be the dominant gender.  (I prefer "gender" to "sex" ... pedantic, I suppose!)  I think the biggest reason for this was Indira Gandhi.  Ever since I knew how to say "prime minister", well, it was Indira Gandhi.  Then the 1971 war with Pakistan when I was a kid and people--politicians and regulars alike--were comparing her with Durga and Kali.  One politico went as far as to rephrase the famous Louis XIV statement when he said "India is Indira, and Indira is India"

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The trend that I see as an educator is all the more about female students simply kicking butt.  In my second year at WOU, one fantastic female student, who later went on to a prestigious law school, commented that she didn't have a boyfriend because up and down the Valley she hadn't run into any guy who could stand up to her intellect!!!
Anyway, read this from that same Atlantic essay:

Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.
The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs.

The Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin aspects of the last campaign, and their continuing presence on national and international politics, is all the more the beginning of a trend of women showing up in places where they were previously not allowed.  Good for 'em, and us, I say!  I am guessing that the coming decade will be the decade of women in American politics--it will be transformational.  (Even though I don't care much for Meg Whitman's politics, and even though I am not a California resident, I am cheering her on because I am convinced she will be way better than Jerry Brown, who is trying to relive the past.  It is that kind of transformation I am looking for)

I still stand by my semi-serious joke that once scientists figure out how to make easy the biological reproduction without the sperm from men, well, that will be truly the end of men ... And that day of reproduction will come sooner than we think.

The Armenian genocide: Another test of US' testicular fortitude?

The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted, by a narrow one-vote margin, on a non-binding resolution "condemning as genocide the mass killing of Armenians early in the last century by the Ottoman army."
Of course, as a reader of this blog you are fully aware that this is not the genocide that happened in 1994 in Rwanda.  Or the genocide carried out by the Nazis.  Or .... well, you get the point, which Samantha Power articulated in her book A problem from hell.

The Armenian genocide happened (yes, Turkey, it happened!) almost a hundred years ago and we still lack the testicular fortitude to take a stand on it.  The presidential candidate who was praised for her testicular fortitude, Hilalry Clinton, is now the Secretary of State.  So, what was her response?  Ahem, not much different from the previous secretaries who all lobbied against such a resolution!

“We do not believe that the full Congress will or should vote on that resolution and we have made that clear to all the parties involved,” Clinton said. 

So, you are thinking, but the candidate who beat Clinton in the primaries, Barack Obama, promised change.  In fact, the following is what he said two years ago: (ht)

I also share with Armenian Americans – so many of whom are descended from genocide survivors - a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide. That starts with acknowledging the tragic instances of genocide in world history. As a U.S. Senator, I have stood with the Armenian American community in calling for Turkey's acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. Two years ago, I criticized the Secretary of State for the firing of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, after he properly used the term "genocide" to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians starting in 1915. I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy. As a senator, I strongly support passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.106 and S.Res.106), and as President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide.
Genocide, sadly, persists to this day, and threatens our common security and common humanity. Tragically, we are witnessing in Sudan many of the same brutal tactics - displacement, starvation, and mass slaughter - that were used by the Ottoman authorities against defenseless Armenians back in 1915. I have visited Darfurian refugee camps, pushed for the deployment of a robust multinational force for Darfur, and urged divestment from companies doing business in Sudan. America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that President.

I guess elections are nothing but castrations...

Meanwhile, Turkey is already ticked off, and has begun a lobbying campaign.  The Turkish government has recalled its ambassador to the US for consultations, and

A Turkish government statement condemned the vote, saying, "“This decision, which could adversely affect our co-operation on a wide common agenda with the US, also regrettably attests to a lack of strategic vision.”

"At least you can't blame this on a woman"

There are times, not a whole lot though, when I disagree with Katha Pollitt.  But, even when I disagree with her arguments, there is no denying that she is a wonderful writer with a clear stand. The following paragraph?  Not only well written, but also one that I agree with:

If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny. We would hear constantly about her voice, her laugh, her wrinkles, her marriage and what a heartless, evil bitch she is for doing something--whatever!--men have done since the Stone Age. Each week would bring its quotient of pieces by fancy women writers explaining why they were right not to have liked her in the first place. Liberal pundits would blame her for discouraging the armies of hope and change, for bringing back the same-old same-old cronies and advisers, for letting healthcare reform get bogged down in inside deals, for failing to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan--which would be attributed to her being a woman and needing to show toughness--for cozying up to Wall Street, deferring to the Republicans and ignoring the cries of the people. In other words, for doing pretty much what Obama is doing. This way I get to think, Whew, at least you can't blame this on a woman.

This is why your credit card debts are piling up!

All because of a 2:00 AM thing--not to be confused with the the 3:00 am phone call of the presidential primary

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Dalai Lama, we don't care. But, up in arms over Google?

It is funny how President Obama did not even want to meet with the Dalai Lama, lest our creditor our friend China get all offended.  But, oh, when Google says it experienced cyberattacks from China, the administration jumps up and down.  Yet again showing that money talks and everything else can take a hike.  Including the Dalai Lama!
I like the tongue-in-cheek comment that Hillary Clinton suddenly transformed into Google's Secretary of State :) But, wait, this joke is in Forbes magazine?  How ironic!

Even more hilarious and quite strange is the comment from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

in a speech to oil company executives in Houston on Thursday, criticized Google for its threats to leave China after the cyber-attacks, suggesting that Google’s decision to no longer filter out Internet searches objectionable to the Chinese government were an irrational business decision. After all, Ballmer said, the U.S. imports oil from Saudi Arabia despite the censorship that goes on in that country.

There, that is a good logic, and consistent too: We are business folks and we don't care how horrible the regimes are. 

Anyway, there are other countries, too, where Google censors information in order to satisfy the home country:

India: To abide by obscenity laws, Google strips out certain pornographic results from its Indian search pages. It has also removed content from the Indian version of its social networking site, Orkut, that's deemed by the government to be politically incendiary, like one group representing the Hindu nationalist party Shiv Sena.
France and Germany: Their strict ban on hate speech extends to the Web. Google obliges them by blocking search results for extremist groups like the neo-Nazi group Stormfront and the Holocaust denial association AAARGH.
Thailand: Lése-majesté, or insulting the king, is a serious crime in Thailand. Hence Google's agreement to block Thai users from viewing videos on YouTube (owned by Google) that mocked king Bhumibol Adulyadej, including one that showed him with feet on his head, a symbol of degradation to Thai Buddhists.
Turkey: Google has kowtowed to Turkish government demands that it block a handful of YouTube videos that portrayed Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the revered founder of the country, as a homosexual. Turkey has banned YouTube anyway for the past two years in an attempt to persuade Google to remove the Atatürk clips from global distribution.

Droning about Pakistan

Sometimes I wish I were not a news junkie and, more than that, I wish that I had no interest at all in whatever was happening anywhere on the planet.  For one, despite my best attempts to stay focused on my own work and life, I end up blogging like this!  For another, it is damn depressing.

I check BBC for a news update after my coffee, breakfast and shower, and I read this report on Hillary Clinton's Pakistan trip:

it would be hard to imagine a more hostile and sceptical audience for a US secretary of state.

Mrs Clinton acknowledged there was what she called a trust deficit towards the United States in Pakistan because of past policies.

But she said she was working to change that by reaching out to ordinary Pakistanis.

And she flatly refused to discuss one of the major issues that the "ordinary Pakistanis" have with the US: the use of Predator drones.  Now, I could have just stopped with this; no, I had to read more stuff and get depressed and pissed off.  Over at Foreign Policy's AfPak channel, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedermann provide this chart and write:

The number of civilian deaths caused by the drones is an important issue, because in the charged political atmosphere of today's Pakistan, where anti-Americanism is rampant, the drone program is a particular cause of anger among those who see it as an infringement on Pakistan's sovereignty. A Gallup poll in August found that only 9 percent of Pakistanis favored the strikes, and two-thirds opposed them.
And, according to Philip Alston, a U.N. human rights investigator, the use of drones to carry out targeted assassinations that end up killing civilians may well violate international law.
On Tuesday at a news conference in New York, Alston publicly warned that unless the Obama administration explains what the legal basis is for selecting the individuals targeted by drone attacks, "it will increasingly be perceived as carrying out indiscriminate killings in violation of international law."

Meanwhile, we are just about a week away from the second round of elections in Afghanistan.  Today is Friday--I am willing to bet that the militants are spending the weekend plotting their next violent attacks.  Crap, I should have just slept through today!!!

Swine flu and global public health

The worldwide attention paid to swine flu is great, from a public health perspective.  If only we could equally effectively rally our country and the rest of the world about the many infectious diseases that ail millions of poor everyday.

In early September, in a few villages in Orissa, which is a state in India, about 40 people died and more than 200 were admitted to hospitals.  It was not because of the swine flu, which has so far claimed about 300 lives in that country.  The deaths in Orissa were because of diarrhea.

Diarrhea is a gastrointestinal infection that typically spreads through contaminated water or food.  A bad infection results in severe loss of fluids and even death, which was what happened in Orissa.  According to the World Health Organization, the deaths of nearly two million children every year in the less developed countries has one single culprit—diarrhea.   

The fact that many of the severe diarrheal deaths can be traced back to contaminated water should not come as a surprise given that more than 2 billion people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, lack access to clean water and sanitation facilities.  Not having such facilities means a slew of other waterborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and hepatitis.   

The irony is that in such contexts, it is practically impossible to implement the typical swine flu prevention advice—to frequently wash hands.

When I was in India this past summer, as reports of swine flu came to dominate the news and conversations, I sincerely suggested to my parents that they should frequently wash their hands, and time it by humming the “happy birthday” song. 

As the words slipped out of my mouth, I knew it was a stupid and incongruous advice because of the water shortage in the city.  Apartment complexes were paying hefty amounts to private operators who supplied water by transporting them in special water-tankers.  When that was the condition for middle-class households, I cannot imagine the less affluent spending their precious money to wash hands in order to battle an invisible enemy.    Clean water is a super-luxury for the poor. 

I do not mean to minimize the risks of a global pandemic, particularly if the swine flu virus were to mutate into a highly virulent form.  But, I do want to point out that the global focus on the swine flu, which we have rightfully managed to accomplish, should remind us that being a good citizen of the world also means that we ought to pay attention to the priorities of the rest of the world—in particular, the sufferings of the poor, who are almost always voiceless in the international arena.

Unfortunately, our track record has not been one that we can proudly hold up when it comes to supporting public health programs for the world’s poor.  Even a couple of years ago, Congress and the White House bickered over allocating $25 billion for public health programs in Africa.  Soon after that, in what comes across as quite a surreal contrast, the same people quickly committed all of us taxpayers to a couple of trillions of dollars—that  we do not have—in order to bailout various economic institutions here in the US.  Well, the $25 billion for Africa that we fought over sure does seem like chump change these days! 

As the economist Jeffrey Sachs has pointed out “we’ve just been making choices to ignore the poor rather than calculations based on real resources available. We made a choice to let millions of people die and not honor our commitments.”

Changes in our attitude towards war and peace will certainly win over a few hearts and minds around the world.  But, we can easily and dramatically increase that number if only we spent even a fraction of our military expenditures on public health programs around the world that will immediately improve the everyday lives of millions of poor.  Here lies an opportunity for the “soft power” that Secretary Hillary Clinton often talks about.  Above all, it is the right thing to do.

How are we doing re. Afghanistan? SNAFU!

As the Economist's Style Guide points out, snafu is an acronym--not an abbreviation!  It stands for "situation normal, all f*&$ed up."

Snafu is the acronym/word we might want to use to explain where the US is when it comes to Afghanistan.

John Dickerson has a great point here:

Obama's insistence on slow deliberations on Afghanistan contrasts with the policy tempo on other fronts. Obama has been a president of action. Economic collapse? Here's a government program to address it. Car companies failing? Here's a program to help them. Want the Olympics to come to your town? Obama can help—tonight in Copenhagen he plays his role of chairman of the Chicago Chamber of Commerce as he pitches that city to the International Olympic Committee.

Let us face it: candidate Obama talked loudly and often about Afghanistan.  So, this is not as if he is being asked to decide thanks to some 3:00 a.m. phone call!  And it is not just Afghanistan where President Obama continues to dilly-dally.  I am all the more ticked off that he spent precious time talking up Chicago to the IOC.

And in another piece, Dickerson zooms into where the differences might lie when it comes to the different perspectives on Afghanistan: if the Taliban gains enough in the near future to even form a government, will that mean that al-Qaeda will make a return as well?  Is there a strong link between the Taliban and al-Qaeda?  On the one hand, I am glad they are seriously thinking about this, as opposed to the previous administration that blatantly lied about the Iraq-al Qaeda connection.
But, the reality is that this, too, is not a new question and we have had enough time to think through that.  Karzai's government being inefficient and corrupt is not news either.  So, what gives?
Dickerson writes:

several administration sources expressed skepticism about McChrystal's thinking. "A lot of assumptions—and I don't want to say myths, but a lot of assumptions—were exposed to the light of day," one senior administration official told the Post. One of the key assumptions exposed, according to the Post, was the contention that the return to power of the Taliban would mean a new sanctuary for al-Qaida.
Any kind of thorough review tests even the most basic assumptions. The link between Taliban insurgents and al-Qaida is long-standing, so it is perhaps a sign of how rigorous the Obama process is that even this premise is now open to question. On Sunday, National Security Adviser Jim Jones was so wary of making the al-Qaida/Taliban connection that when asked on Face the Nation whether a return of the Taliban would mean a return of al-Qaida, he ducked the question.

Why is everybody waffling on this question?  Yes, there is a nexus between these two groups.  But, our goal was to remove al-Qaeda from Afghanistan--not to completely sanitize the place.  We can always keep watch from outside, as we did with Saddam in Iraq, and ensure that the al-Qaeda aspect is under check, if not eliminated.  So, what does President Obama think?  Again, Dickerson:

Two months ago, Obama said, "If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaida would plot to kill more Americans."
Where does Obama stand on this issue today? Tuesday he spoke to the employees of the National Counterterrorism Center. "We know that al-Qaida and its extremist allies threaten us from different corners of the globe—from Pakistan, but also from East Africa and Southeast Asia; from Europe and the Gulf." What country is missing? Afghanistan, the country where, for months, Obama has talked about "al-Qaida and its extremist allies," which previously had meant the Taliban.

What the hell is going on?  David Axe, et al, write that:

After nearly a decade at war in Afghanistan, the United States still has not defined the terms of the conflict. Seven months after President Barack Obama's administration released its wide-ranging strategic review of the war, basic questions remain. Who is the enemy? What are the objectives? Is counterinsurgency meant to achieve the goal of counterterrorism (beating al Qaeda), state-building (bringing stability and democracy to Afghanistan), or both? What would "victory" in Afghanistan even look like? And how will the war stay won, after the United States leaves?

How can we not know why we are in Afghanistan after seven years of engagement there?  WTF?