1: Vivek Ramaswamy

@Dr_Uditraj Hello. Namaste.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) October 1, 2023

12: Vivek Ramaswamy

Vivek Ramaswamy Leans Into His Hindu Faith to Court Christian Voters The Republican candidate for president makes a pitch that the faiths have much in common, but for many religious conservatives, the difference is a hurdle. ........ “I looked up his religion and saw he’s Hindu,” he recalled. “I was going to vote for him until that came up.” What the country needs is to be “put back under God,” as Mr. Smith sees it, and he doesn’t want to take a chance on someone who is not a Christian. ......... At that point, he said, “I got back on President Trump’s train.” ........ He mentioned Mr. Ramaswamy’s list of 10 core “truths,” the first of which is: “God is real.” (The second: “There are two genders.”) ......... “He welcomes the deeper questions.” Mr. Ramaswamy is polling under 5 percent in most recent national polls. ........ Mr. Ramaswamy’s approach has been to confront the issue directly and argue that he has more in common with observant Christians than they might think. ........ Mr. Ramaswamy said his faith taught him that Jesus was “a son of God, absolutely.” (That “a” is a sharp distinction from the central Christian belief that Jesus is the son of God. Hinduism is a fluid and expansive tradition, and many believers embrace scores of deities, with some seeing Jesus as one teacher or god.) ............... He frequently mentions his experience attending a “Christian school” in Cincinnati (St. Xavier High School, a Catholic school). And he contrasts “religions like ours,” which have stood the test of time, with the competing worldviews of “wokeism, climatism, transgenderism, gender ideology, Covidism,” as he put it to an audience in New Hampshire. ............. Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign has disseminated clips of an Iowa pastor comparing him to the biblical figure of King David ............. The biggest objective now, Mr. Brody said, is combating “cultural Marxism” and correcting the course of “a country gone haywire.” ............ “The lazy narrative that he’s Hindu so he can’t appeal to evangelicals, I don’t buy it at all,” Mr. Brody said. ........... About half of American Protestants now say they prefer to attend a church with people who share their political views .......... Swami Vivekananda, who represented Hinduism at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, took pains to depict his faith as monotheistic, in contrast to the stereotypes of its followers as “heathen” polytheists. Although the faith has many deities, they are generally subordinate to one ultimate “reality.” Many Hindus and scholars say its theology is too complex to be described as either wholly monotheistic or wholly polytheistic. .............. He sees Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch against “wokeism” as a way to counter stereotypes associating Hinduism with hippies, yoga and vegetarianism. ............. Many evangelical voters embraced the crude, thrice-married casino magnate not because he was one of them but because they believed he would fight in the public square on their behalf. ............. Most Indian Americans, including Hindus, are Democrats. But some conservatives see an opening with a population that prioritizes family life, marriage and education. ........ there were more similarities among committed believers across traditions than between serious and nominal adherents within the same faith. .

At a Fourth of July event in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israeli Army had attacked “the most legitimate target on the planet — people who would annihilate our country.” He was referring to months of armed resistance against Israeli settlers by young men in the Jenin refugee camp. ......... More than 20 years ago, another right-wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led an extensive military campaign against the same refugee camp. It was two years into the second Palestinian uprising. Palestinian suicide bombers, some of whom hailed from Jenin, had rocked Israeli streets. In response, the Israeli Army invaded the West Bank and ravaged the Jenin refugee camp, then, as now, a center of Palestinian resistance. .......... a consensus among international and Israeli human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.......... With the absence of any hope for statehood, and with no viable political leadership to lead the struggle, some take matters into their own hands through armed and unarmed forms of resistance, others are apathetic or preoccupied with the crippling effort to support their families, and many live in fear. ........ In 2002, though round after round of American-mediated negotiations had faltered, there was still the hope — and the expectation — that a peace process would resume. The two-state solution was touted as the only option for peace. The framework of territorial partition — that Israel would withdraw from the territories it had occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors — was the dominant policymaking approach. ........... With Hamas’s rise to power in 2006, Israel, in coordination with Egypt, tightened a hermetic blockade on the strip, effectively severing it from the rest of Palestine, and experimented with military techniques to force the population into submission. .......... Alongside food restriction policies and an economic chokehold, this took the form of devastating military assaults. The military referred to this doctrine as “mowing the lawn,” the approach of using disproportionate military force to periodically weaken Palestinian resistance and manage a restive population chafing against Israeli control. ............ Last week, Israel turned this military approach, perfected in the Gaza Strip, onto the West Bank, as it cordoned off the refugee camp in Jenin, pummeled it from the air and ground and destroyed crucial infrastructure for water and electricity as a form of collective punishment. ........... In the time between the two invasions of Jenin, Palestinians throughout the West Bank have been systematically funneled — through land expropriation, home demolitions and expansion of settlements — into isolated urban centers surrounded by land occupied by Israel. Just like Gaza, most urban centers in the West Bank can now be, overnight, entirely severed from the ecosystem around them, as was witnessed in Jenin. ........... The transformation of Israeli political culture that accelerated after the violence of the second intifada and the impunity Israel enjoys internationally have culminated in the most right-wing government in Israeli history. .......... what Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has called “a regime of Jewish supremacy” in all the areas under their control. .............. a singular constant: Israel’s ability to sustain its settlement of Palestinian territory without accountability, while equating Palestinian resistance to terrorism ........ That this framing has long been accepted among the major Western powers is particularly galling for Palestinians in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where resistance to illegal occupation is hailed as heroic and supported by Western weapons and military training. .

The Next Battle Over Colorblindness Has Begun . Race gaps characterize nearly every dimension of U.S. life: life expectancy, maternal mortality, employment rates, income, wealth, environmental exposures, criminal justice involvement and many others. Policymakers routinely seek to close these gaps, even when debating policies that aren’t directly about race, such as environmental regulations, health policy and criminal justice reform. ......... a healthy democracy requires open debate. In a country shaped throughout its history by racial discrimination and disparity, excluding race from policy debate would impoverish our discourse and threaten to delegitimize the political process. .

The reason is that not all bomblets explode as they’re meant to, and thousands of small, unexploded grenades can lie around for years, even decades, before somebody — often, a child spotting a brightly colored, battery-size doodad on the ground — accidentally sets it off. The weapons used today by Russia and Ukraine are said to leave as many as 40 percent duds lying around, and they will remain a threat to the people of Ukraine, no matter the outcome of this conflict. ........ As of today, 123 nations — including many of America’s allies — have agreed never to use, transfer, produce or stockpile cluster munitions. ......... But not Russia or Ukraine or the United States, which used cluster munitions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, the United States actively opposed the treaty. ....... Together, these three nations have more than a billion cluster munitions stockpiled, far more than the number of weapons expected to be destroyed.” .......... But as the fighting dragged on and Ukraine proved increasingly capable of standing up to Russia, line after line has been crossed, with Washington and its allies agreeing to provide sophisticated weapons like the Patriot air-defense system, the HIMARS long-range rocket launcher, the Abrams tank and soon the F-16 jet fighter. ......... There is a legitimate debate about whether this amounts to the sort of mission creep that marked conflicts in Vietnam or Afghanistan. Sending cluster munitions to Ukraine amounts to a clear escalation of a conflict that has already become far too brutal and destructive. But the greater issue here is sharing a weapon that has been condemned by a majority of the world’s nations, including most of America’s close allies, as morally repugnant for the indiscriminate carnage it can cause long after the combatants have gone.

The John Roberts Two-Step Roberts’s view that the Constitution is colorblind and sees no racial distinctions. ....... while Roberts may mention “race,” “discrimination based on race” and “racial discrimination,” he doesn’t discuss racism. .......... I want to highlight Chief Justice Roberts’s avoidance of racism as a prime example of “racecraft,” the term coined by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields to describe the transmutation of a set of actions (racism) into a set of qualities or characteristics (race). .......... “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America,” “transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.” ..........

the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism, that is, race.

......... To remove racism and racists from the equation is to pretend that there’s no social force to push against — no inequality to rectify. Instead, there is only a quality, race, that Roberts says the Constitution cannot recognize. ......... When read in its entirety, the dissent gives a picture of Harlan not as a defender of equality, but as someone who thinks the Constitution can secure hierarchy and inequality without the assistance of state law. It’s not that segregation was wrong but that, in Harlan’s view, it was unnecessary.

DeSantis isn’t going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool........ once you realize someone you care about is gay, the idea of persecuting them presumably seems way less attractive. ....... Gay bashing is morally intolerable as well as politically inept. ........ I also detest terms like “bodies with vaginas” as a substitute for “women.” It isn’t a sensitive or inclusive use of language; it’s misogynistic and Orwellian......... Look — the whole world changed with the advent of social media. If you’ve got influencers with millions of followers warning that, say, giving milk to babies is dangerous, you’ve got to do something more than issue a press release.