The Case against Patanjali by Indian Medical Association and the tone of Judiciary is alarming. We need to look into its historical and global context to fully grasp its ramification.
Why do seemingly normal people commit atrocities and genocides? More importantly, why do millions other go along with these crimes as participants? We explore the Perpetration-Induced Trauma and its impact on the societies.
The Jia Tan incident unveiled a a stealthy Backdoor in XZ Utils Exposed Severe Global Cybersecurity Risks in the Open-Source ecosystem's vulnerabilities.
obviously not because of religion or community, just because we need to
(Photo by Ilse Orsel on Unsplash)
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” ― Frank Herbert
Believe me or I will kill you. What when you are dead?
If the only currency you have in your pocket is to kill others and everything else - your fetishes, your hatred, your idiosyncrasies, even your idea of god - is built upon that proverbial tower of skulls, then you can carry out your trade for only so long.
The tide is changing. Countries and societies are clearly choosing their sides in this battle of civilization.
In a world where the dead are being used to give to the land, what they took out while living; the fruits that our remains will bear will nourish this planet’s future.
In more ways than we can think of.
Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, the ex-PM of Malaysia has created quite a storm by baring his terror-sympathizing self to the world at large. How he sheltered Zakir Naik showed very clearly as to how he wanted to propagate the regressive ideology of the Islamists. But today he did try some verbal jugglery to fool the world, yet again. He wrote a Twitter thread on the French President Emmanuel Macron’s stand, which is worth reading to gauge the mindsets in play around the world. (Source)
Let us summarize Mahathir’s contentions and cut out the crap:
This call for global terror with four simultaneous assertions is how the so-called moderate Muslims back the violent Islamists.
Aah, because their hamburger didn’t have enough ketchup today?!
Until when will this global collective pretense and brain-deadery continue?
There are many ways that human beings dispose of the dead. Burial is the most common amongst the Abrahamic beliefs. In India and some of the Eastern countries, it has been cremation. Parsis leave the dead in ‘wells’ for the vultures to eat.
Death is a poignant moment in the journey of every being. How one is cared for and handled has a role in how one will progress further.
There is a new way that is being forged by a company in Washington state in the US. Recompose.
This company has piloted a way where the dead body is placed into vessels with a special mix to decompose the body
“vessels,” each a kind of temporary coffin where one body would be placed with a special mix of wood chips, alfalfa and straw and in a few weeks become usable soil (Source)
The team worked hard to change the laws in their state to allow for the decomposing of bodies in the way this company is doing as a valid and legal way to take care of the dead. They did their experiments on 6 dead bodies of people who had volunteered their bodies for such experiments.
Of course, for many, the cost of this process is a clear win as well. It’s a fraction of what it will cost in case of a normal burial.
A lot has happened since that conversation. Spade founded and dissolved a precursor nonprofit called the Urban Death Project; partnered with soil scientist Lynne Carpenter-Boggs at Washington State University who led a successful research trial (using the remains of six people who’d volunteered their bodies for the study); and convinced legislators to change state law about the disposition of the dead. That law was signed this summer and goes into effect in May, 2020. Recompose plans to open the following spring with a price of $5,500 per recomposition, setting it well above basic, no-service cremation but below most conventional funerals. (Source)
The ecological impact of the burials and cemeteries is tremendous on the land. Burials are clearly unsustainable! The environmental benefits from this could be huge! It would be best for the dead if the end-material (compost is a rather strange word for the remains and soil) can be distributed over different places as opposed to one area. The main thing is that the remains of a dead person should ideally not be static. That is why in India, we immerse the ashes in running waters - rivers.
In America, cemeteries take up an estimated 1 million acres of land; caskets destroy 4 million acres of forest every year; and burials use 30 million boards of wood and over 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid. According to Troy Hottle, a sustainability analyst and advisor to Recompose, the carbon dioxide saved by composting one human comes to between 0.84 and 1.4 metric tons. One metric ton is equivalent to burning 1,102 pounds (500 kilograms) of coal or driving about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) in a passenger car. (Source)
The current legal practices for the dead in the US currently also include dissolving a body using the ‘alkaline hydrolysis’ process.
State law previously dictated that remains be disposed of by burial or cremation. The new law, which takes effect in May 2020, added composting as well as alkaline hydrolysis, a process already legal in 19 other states. The latter uses heat, pressure, water and chemicals like lye to reduce remains. Cemeteries across the country are allowed to offer natural or “green” burials, by which people are buried in biodegradable shrouds or caskets without being embalmed. Composting could be a good option in cities where cemetery land is scarce, Pedersen said. (Source)
Quite honestly, burial is the most unsound and unsustainable from an economic and ecological standpoint. Given the rise in populations and lack of liveable land, specifically in countries such as India, burials are literally the encroachment by the dead of the spaces for the living! It is not a great way to conduct a society, is it? But this is another downside of the rampant conversions happening in India! Land encroachment for the dead will increase.
A few months back we had written a post asking a provocative but necessary question in the current context - Is Democracy Dead? (Source)
Democracy and its immediate cousin - Capitalism, are under stress. We need to review what is the future of democracy and what are the alternatives to it. Today’s alternatives at least and what could be workable ways in the future.
First, listen to how democracy may not be the most desirable.
So what kind of socio-economic alternatives are there?
One is the experiment by Communist China. They have simply concentrated more power and become the sponsors of businesses rather than running the businesses under their Party’s banner. They still decide the rules and conduct of the companies, but that is via coercion and laws while they give them enough legroom to work.
It's a veneer for democracy-ish Capitalism-ish society. The catch is in the ish’s, though. And it is anything but.
Communist Capitalis the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s capitalism checked by the centralized power of the Chinese state (Source)
As the leftist-woke culture and ‘value-system’ (of values-hegemony) proliferates, a new kind of socio-economic scenario is emerging - Woke capitalism. Where cancel-culture decides the priorities for businesses and their value system. They establish what will be their agendas and markets.
Whatever doesn’t agree with their ultra-woke-hegemonic ways can be easily ‘canceled’ via drones. Thank you very much!
Woke Capital is the ideology of much of modern America. It’s capitalism that enables decentralized censorship, cancel culture, and the American empire. It’s drone strike democracy. (Source)
Instead of the Treaty of Detroit we have, if you will, the Peace of Palo Alto, in which a certain kind of virtue-signaling on progressive social causes, a certain degree of performative wokeness, is offered to liberalism and the activist left pre-emptively, in the hopes that having corporate America take their side in the culture wars will blunt efforts to tax or regulate our new monopolies too heavily. (Source)
The other system is where crypto (or block-chain style) capitalism takes the forefront. Nobody controls. No one decides. It is a collective decentralized value-system, though skewed to the left. And, it is stateless.
Crypto Capital is the hope of the rest of the world. It is stateless capitalism, it is capitalism without corporations, it is decentralized censorship-resistance and it is principled non-violence. (Source)
As the chasm between the Electorate and the Elected grows, there are discussions happening whether Democracy as we know it is even desired?
Democracies can be easily manipulated and derailed by remote control these days. There was a time when one nation would engineer a long-term social change by coopting intellectuals and press. Now, all of those changes are on super-steroids. What would take decades is now taking weeks to accomplish.
Part of that is the ability to obtain, manipulate, and spin data and information.
After the Trump victory and the work of Cambridge Analytica, there has been a strong focus on how social media and big data are being used for political narratives and even worse, for spreading misinformation and outright lies.
This is now being called “Computational Propaganda“.
According to the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project, the use of algorithms, automation, and big data to shape public opinion – i.e. computational propaganda – is becoming “a pervasive and ubiquitous part of everyday life.”
In its third annual report, the Oxford project suggests that Cyber troops (government or political party actors collectively) in at least 70 countries are using social media to manipulate public opinion, harass dissidents, attack political opponents or spread polarizing messages. This work based on social media is not simple. It is targeted and has sophisticated analytics, algorithms, and AI tools behind it.
Here is a very interesting Q&A Congressman between Ted Cruz and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which underlines the battle that Democracy itself is fighting to save itself from those who purport to fight for the freedoms that Democracy brings but want to wield anarchist instruments that destroy Democracy itself.
Ted Cruz directly asks the question that needs to be answered by the Tech giants. “Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?”
Dorsey comes off with just simply plain bull-shit! His eyes say it very clearly.
When Wing Commander Abhinandan was captured by the Pakistanis, the then Air Chief BS Dhanoa talked to Abhinandan’s father.
Air Chief Dhanoa shares with Abhinandan’s father, who is himself a veteran who knew the Air Chief for many years.
The story of Flight Commander Ahuja during the Kargil battle was playing on their minds.
The Air Chief reiterated to Wing Commander Abhinandan’s dad that “Sir, I know we couldn’t get Ahuja back, but we will definitely get Abhinandan back.”
And we all know that Pakistan MP Ayaz Sadiq shared in the Pakistani Parliament how the Army Chief’s legs were shaking that night when India had threatened with an attack.
Why was the Pakistani Chief so shit scared? Air Chief Dhanoa explains why.
“The way he is saying that ‘pair kaamp rahe the’ something like that it is because military posture was very offensive.”
The trio of the Indian Armed services was ready for a joint attack on Pakistan and that would have been a decisive one.
“God forbid their misadventure on 27th had hit some of our military installation we were in a position to wipe out their forward brigades. They also know what our capability is,” Dhanoa further added. (Source)
So, the reason why Abhinandan was released was not some stroke of altruism on Pakistan’s side but the fear of being wiped out.
When Pakistan, which is known in global diplomatic circles as an establishment of pathological liars (Source), was saying it was a goodwill gesture, almost everyone knew the truth. The return was really due to the real military threats that India backed its talk of “return or else..” with.
The Indian diplomats, the CCS member, and intelligence officials said the missile deployment and the fact that the entire Indian military machine was on red alert, prompted Rawalpindi GHQ on the same day (February 27) to inform Delhi that it would release the pilot and that a statement to this effect would be made by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in Parliament on February 28. (Source)
This information was known even then. The night of murder threat, the missiles aimed, and the pressure from Modi’s strong stance was known across the diplomatic and press sources.
But the Indian anti-Modi brigade was busy congratulating Imran Khan on Wing Commander Abhinandan’s release, as opposed to their own PM, who was really responsible.
All these tweets below - given the context of what was going on behind the scenes and not so subtle hints from the Indian establishment about the consequences of not returning Abhinandan - show how these people, many of them from Press take their briefs from Rawalpindi directly.
Think about it - at that time, Modi had Pakistan by its, well, balls.
Enough to make their Army Chief shit in his pants.
The embarrassment equaled that after the 1971 surrender.
So, what spin do you think would Pakistan’s intelligence propaganda machine have wanted to send out?
Exactly what these Indian “intellectuals” and press people shared!
And these low-lives still have the nerve to say that they are not anti-India.
Hanuman bhajans in online Pak seminar: A video clip of an anti-India virtual event has gone viral on social media, where a bunch of irrelevant Pakistani diplomats, ‘political activists’ and full-time lobbyists employed by Pakistan and Turkey’s deep state are seen furthering Islamabad and Rawalpindi’s narrative on sovereign Indian territories of Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan. The event, being conducted on Zoom by Islamists and Pakistan-sympathisers, was turned into a circus as the participants were left befuddled owing to Indian nationalists hacking their meeting and playing high voltage devotional and patriotic songs. (Source)
More beheadings in France: Three people have died of which at least two are reportedly beheaded in a terrorist attack at Notre Dame Church in Nice, France. The attack that began at around 9 AM local time has also left several people injured. The police reached the spot immediately and apprehended the terrorist. As per local French media, the Nice Mayor, Christian Estrosi has said that the Islamic terrorist did not stop shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ while carrying out the attack. (Source)
Competition for jobs increasing in India: Hiring in India continues to recover at a 12 percent year-on-year growth rate in August 2020, but competition for jobs is 30 percent higher than last year, according to professional network LinkedIn’s labor market data. LinkedIn said in a statement its data also shows that professionals from Recreation & Travel, Retail, and Corporate Services are more likely to look for jobs outside their current industry. (Source)
India’s brand image: India retained its 34th position among 50 nations in the Nation Brand Index (NBI) 2020, conducted by market research firm Ipsos in collaboration with Simon Anholt, an authority on the national image. The US which held NBI’s top spot on seven occasions, dropped four positions from sixth place in 2019 to the 10th this year and China, which had remained stable at 23rd over the past four years, fell 12 spots to the 35th this year, below India. The study that analyses nations based on aspects such as exports, governance, culture, people, tourism, immigration, and investment, conducted 20,019 interviews online in 20-panel countries with adults aged 18 and above besides fieldwork between July and August. (Source)
Food to poor via Self-Driving trucks: Two self-driving trucks delivered more than 40,000 pounds of food last week from the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank to needy families in Toledo, Ohio. The delivery was part of a test drive featuring two human-guided, self-driving trucks produced by Locomation, an autonomous convoying startup located on Pittsburgh’s North Side. (Source)
Dogs were breeding when man was hunting: A new study has found dogs, which evolved from wolves, were splitting into distinct breeds as long ago as 11,000 years ago. A total of 27 ancient dog genomes were sequenced and they revealed that when the last Ice Age ended, there were at least five types of dog. These ancient breeds each had their own unique genetic ancestry and traces of them are seen today in modern pets. (Source)
Some poems are favorites of many. Or at least some of its words or verses. This is one such poem. Written by Walter D. Wintle, a poet who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The rendering is clean and awesome. Must listen.
Check out today’s “The Drishtikone Daily” edition.
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