Bhutto's assassination

The world continues to unravel under George Bush's savage US leadership.

The vast chain of events unleashed by his abysmally cock-eyed response to 9/11 now includes the death of Benazir Bhutto, his lame, preemptive, red-flag-raising, apology of an excuse notwithstanding "she knew that her return to Pakistan earlier this year put her life at risk."

And such aftershocks of his administration's excesses will continue to be felt in America and the world.

Only a goliath-sized Democratic leader of Jimmy Carter's moral stature and Bill Clinton's intellectual grasp can possibly mop and clean up the debacle GWB leaves behind - Hillary, Obama, Edwards, know and be clear now, you have to be in it for the tough long haul, not just the photo-ops.

War criminals take their cue from the US!

Interesting thought raised by Mary-Jane Deeb on PBS NewsHour (re. the Algerian bombings, http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2007/12/12/20071212_algiers28.mp3) on 12/12, when responding to a question put to her by Margaret Warner on the extent of support to Islam in Algeria. According to Mary-Jane, and I'm paraphrasing, "the support is variously estimated at 15-30%, but

• only a minority commit violent acts,
  
• others may support violent action but not themselves kill,
  
• yet others may give money for Islamic causes but do not want to know what these people are doing, and then
  
• you have some who are neutral, and
  
• finally at the other end of the spectrum those who are actually critical' of these actions"

This distribution bears a remarkable similarity to opinions on Waterboarding, destruction of those tapes by the CIA, or for that matter, any of the other brazenly criminal political events that have taken place in our country in the recent past and been aped in various parts of the world (remember we set ourselves as the 1st world, the leader, torchbearer, the gold standard, but that's another story in there..)

We could say for example

• there are just a minority who actually participate in waterboarding, torture, wars of aggression (___name your crime) like 'Bush/Cheney and their minions' (love that phrase, heard it on the snippet on 'Climate change hearings' on PBS yesterday),
  
• there are others who approve of such behavior but look the other way,
  
• there are still others who give money for such right-wing neo-con causes that support these activities,
  
• others who are neutral (the apathetic public), and then
  
• there are those who are critical but probably afraid to speak out, and
  
• lastly there are brave souls who are critical and do speak out...

Just being an armchair political scientist I would hazard a guess that this same distribution (the old Bell curve) of support for all kinds of political causes can be found in all parts of the world - Afghanistan, erstwhile Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon... YET, YET.. we have bombed two countries out of shape, and are blithely pondering annhilation of a third using the proclivities of the small violent minority in these countries for despicable causes, scapegoating in the process entire nations, cultures and religions as being EVIL, while we keep excusing ourselves of one atrocity after another conducted by our violent minority by saying - oh those were the bad apples in Abu Ghraib, oh this was a military error in the white phosphorous gassing of Faluja, oh that third was just enhanced military questioning while giving swim lessons...

And when you think that their violent minority consists of "non-state" actors, mostly disabled, disillusioned, handicapped out-of-work dregs of their society (http://disabilitytechnews.anhnses.com/archives/150 ), while our violent minority consists of the supposedly lawful (I say, supposedly, remembering the Bush/Gore tug-of-war) representatives of our government that have managed to hijack our systems of checks and balances and have wrapped the flag around themselves and their criminality, then you can understand the enormity of the world's problems!

Barry Bonds, Alberto Gonzales and Perjury

It makes me want to PUKE!

We have spilt the blood of close to 4,000 of the brightest and best US military, with another 50,000-plus permanently physically wounded (loss of toes and fingers not counted!), uncounted mental casualties, bombed, slaughtered, raped, rendered homeless refugees of upto 85 to 655 thousand Iraqi dead (depending upon who’s doing the counting), another 2 million Iraqi wounded and displaced and YET - YET, the various commissions relating to the intelligence gathering or failure thereof, Abu Ghraib, NSA, FISA, CIA torture, Attorney purges (related and unrelated to the war) have been systematically lied to both by ex-Attorney General and White House personnel, false stories planted and leaked, key evidence has been suppressed lost, stolen, shredded, disks wiped clean, WH personnel have refused sub poenas, the President and the ex-Attorney General have both claimed loss of memory on specific questions, the President and the VP have consistently refused to appear under oath…

I have been diligently following these stories even though I lack a degree in law, politics, or have no degree in sewage cleansing, but I blinked for a second and the next thing I hear is - Barry Bonds is indicted on perjury!

I’m sorry I don’t understand sports; so I don’t understand what it is that he did that was even one-tenth as bad as the story I’d been following the past 7 years! Can someone please explain to me how this country can spend resources on a baseball commission to study the extent of drug abuse amongst players, list players who do not appear before the commission as drug abusers by default for non-appearance, and indict on perjury those who have appeared but claimed innocence when that is exactly what this country’s President, VP, ex-AG, and the entire WH gang have been doing for the past 8 years!!

Oh, thank you, I forgot that’s why you need a Harvard Law degree and an MBA! Poor Barry Bonds!

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442_pf.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_conflict_in_Iraq_since_2003

Holiday decor

As if winter is not tough enough to deal with, snow, sleet, and howling winds included, there's these holidays!

Not generous enough and you can be called a scrooge, but succumb to the subtle cues from all your service personnel - and you’ll single-handedly pressure the Feds into raising the Fed Funds rate!

Not merry enough and you’ll be diagnosed as suffering from SAD, too merry and you might convince the cops you’re DUI!

But the most conflicting of all holiday time chores is the DECORATIONS!

First there’s the timing of it.

It’s not even Black Friday after Thanksgiving and the neighbors have wheeled in their scarecrows, rushed back and torn down their cotton cobwebs off their trees, unpeeled all the decals of various ghouls off their twenty-two window panes, baked a couple of pumpkin pies off of their jack o’lanterns and in the darkness of the early November sundown replaced all that with three giant motorized and lighted reindeer galloping eternally skyward, a shimmering lace of lighted snowflake trimming hanging on their eaves, a lighted candle and wreath on each of their twenty-two window panes, a gleaming red sateen bow and wreath in front of their eight-cylinder Chevy Suburban, and both lyrics and aroma of chestnuts roasting on an open fire wafting off their hearth, warming the cockles of my heart - except NOT! I’m still struggling with the dishes from Thanksgiving Day - breakfast, that is! (Dinner was with kind friends who had invited us over!)

We just can’t catch up and so have resorted to an elaborate formula to calculate exactly when to start Christmas decorations: in years that Christmas falls on Wednesday or later - start decorating the weekend before, else two weekends before, unless snow, wind, rain, any other foul weather, work, housework, children’s homework, children’s EC activities, friends, or a Winter box-office opener gets in the way, in which case wait till the weekend before.

And that’s only the ‘when’ part of it! the ‘how’ of it is another story entirely! Promise you another post on that!

Capitalists in a Capitalistic Society

Hah!

Browsing through Wikipedia for a bit on US Demographics, I was amazed to learn that only 1% of the US population was categorized as “Capitalists” by Dennis Giblert Professor of Sociology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_demographics)! I guess all the rest are workerbees whether it means they work for someone else or for themselves as Subway franchisees!! I guess you could still argue that the US can still claim the mantle of being the cradle of Capitalism with this miniscule 1% of its ‘Capitalist’ population, but would that be like saying India is a Christian nation with less than 2% Christians? or that Brazilians are a vegan nation with probably 1% vegans? or that China is … you get my point!

Who are the foolish wannabees that vote Republicans into power on the theory that they believe in an ownership society - ownership by the 1% of the 99% I suppose!

Vacation - I

Growing up in India, vacations were the same every year – summers visiting our parents’ ‘native place’, Kerala, a trek our parents took to all that was familiar and known to them, which ironically became for us an adventure into the unknown or at least the semi-known. Ironically again, we were to mimic our parent’s roles in similar inter-generational treks reserved for us in the future with our children on transatlantic visits ‘home’ to India. The difference, of course, was that ‘home’ was redefined as the entire subcontinent, rather than just my parent’s birthplace, Kerala.

The trips to Kerala began and ended with a bone-crushing two-day train journey in the sweltering pre-monsoon heat on the Indian Railway’s Cochin Express pulled by steam-powered locomotives, puffing outbound from Bombay (now Mumbai) at the intricately carved, cavernous VT Station (the initials, which then stood for Victoria Terminus should rightfully have changed to CST, for the station apparently was rechristened as Chhatrapathi Sivaji Terminus in 1996, but the thoughtful public steadfastly cling to VT! which I must thank them for - can you imagine being stranded in Mumbai, bad enough that we have to call it that, and then having to ask for directions to VT and drawing a blank from the cabbie?). The trip usually in May at the height of the summer heat, then seemed tedio, draining every ounce of energy from all of us, but is now laden with memories so dear! The train would wind its way through Pune, Lonavla, the Western Mountain Ranges or ‘the Ghats’, the highlands and green forest jungles of Kerala’s Malabar Coast at the end of which we would emerge with faces blackened like chimney sweeps, coal dust in our hair, teeth, armpits and every exposed crevice and pore of our bodies. As my father’s fortunes rose we graduated to first class and then air-conditioned-first, which unfortunately resulted in sealing us off from contact with real life. Train travel in India in those days was nothing if not a contact sport - loud blustering arguments between coolies and customers, the jostling of co-passengers scavenging for more than their fair share of space, the explosion of aromas as an assortment of spices from home-cooked parathas, thayiru saadams, sambars, and railway canteen puri-bhajis assaulted all our senses, the trading pit frenzy of the station vendors’ pakoras and samosas competing for our attention and purse – all denied to us in the cool, silent, insulated comfort of the Indian Railways air-conditioned first-class left us feeling that we were at the losing end of the bargain. The mixed pleasure of that chaos and clamor were, as is usually the case, felt only in their absence and we continued our annual pilgrimage home in decorum, ease and respectability while cut off from all that raw life.

Little wonder then, that, much to my family’s consternation, on my very first attempt at independent travel over thirty years ago, I instinctively headed for the hills of Ootacamund (Ooty), to test the toy trains and view the hills and tea and coffee plantations of South India. To this day, that trip is rarely mentioned by me or others in the family - not quite as if I had eloped, had a child out of wedlock or committed some other equally grave social faux pas - but near enough! I had a fair idea as to what, about that trip, might have seemed irksome: for one thing there was the traveling at 25, and then the travelling as an unmarried woman, and then again the travelling unaccompanied, and, the nail on the coffin, so to speak, the travelling on a trip having nothing to do with work or visiting family! No, it wasn’t a visit to the ‘native’ place!

That was decades before the internet. All I did by way of trip planning was to get an airplane ticket and schedule to the nearest airport, Coimbatore. On landing, a short trip by cycle rickshaw to the interstate bus depot got me on my way to a two hour unreserved bus trip to Ooty, through some of the most picturesque landscapes I’d ever seen, between one bustling village after another. I don’t quite remember how I landed up at Hotel Dasaprakash, but it was clean, comfortable and well within my budget. I walked around exploring the neighborhoods in and around the hotel the first couple of days, before embarking on a tour of the mountains. And, at Dodabetta Peak in the Nilgiris, came upon one of the most stunning lookouts that I had ever seen, which I suppose, was not saying very much for me, at that time. But many, many years later I was to come upon another lookout, almost identical, almost half the world over, and I had a sense of indescribable déjà vu - but let me not get ahead of my story.

The valley that the Dodabetta Peak looked out at was misty with the cold air and oils from the magnificent eucalyptus trees that Ooty is known for. In the briskness of the mountain air I tugged hard at my thin shawl which I found wanting, having carried it more for show than substance. Some of my companions on the tour bus that took us to the mountain tops took pictures, but neophyte traveler that I was at that time, I hadn’t armed myself with the, now obligatory travelling appendage, a camera! I suppose my memory of those hills and trees and brisk mountain air has weathered the passing of these thirty years, but I search google for pictures of Ooty that might match the view from that lookout in my memory’s eye, and incredibly, I find none! Was it all a figment of my fevered imagination? Or did I once stand up there at the top of the Nilgiris on Dodabetta Peak?

[Crossposted at Paisleys and Peacocks.wordpress.com and to be continued…]

Well! Here’s to the first of many musings!

Hopefully the world will provide enough occasions for many more! and if they are not wry enough for the tall claims of this blog, it will certainly be because of my own limits rather than the capacity of the world around us to surprise, provoke, astound, and sometimes leave us apoplectic!

For a timid start let me just point to the big gun story last week on all media - Number of mentally ill banned from buying guns doubles (http://www.cnbc.com/id/22026333/for/cnbc ). On reading the details my heart just bled for the gun industry! Doubles, mind you! not just your anemic 3.5% fall in housing prices, or 1.5% fall in job growth but a full 200% drop!! All the papers and newswires and TV outlets said so (ABC - “..soars..”, Chicago Tribune - “..more than double..”, NBC - “..doubles..”.)

I did a quick mental calculation, but found out the ole batteries needed a little charging and so I’d need to supplement with a calculator or an excel sheet or two.

Here’s the enormity of the NRA’s problem! Out of an US population of 301,139,947, only 218,627,602 unfortunately qualify for owning a gun, being above 20 (18 and 21 are the various cut-offs for hand-guns and rifles etc. - more detail than you want right now?).

Now prior to the VA Tech shooting only 174,863 of these were listed on the FBI ‘gun ban’ databases - i.e. 0.08% of the adult population approximately; and now that these databases have doubled (yes, doubled!) to 393,957 (or 0.18% of the adult population), the gun market is seeing its entire market collapse by a whopping 0.1%!!

Please someone pass this ole biddy her smelling salts!