Narendra Modi

An Email From Donald Trump

You May Not Kill

Buddha with the Elephant Nalagiri (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Buddha made a suggestion. That was 2,500 years ago. Maybe 2,800. He taught against violence. Do not kill. Violence is wrong. Do not kill people. Do not kill animals. Simply put, do not kill. Obviously he was born into a world where people killed. He managed to tame bandits and killers just by teaching. He went on to found the world's first republic. It just made sense to him that rulers should not be by birth. He thought about it and said, let's pick instead. Let's peacefully deliberate and pick. Revolutionary.

Well, that was then. We live in the era of the modern nation state. America is a state. The message can not be a suggestion. Do not kill. There is law saying you may not kill. No one, but no one, may kill. Not only that, violence is illegal. You may not only not kill, you may not so much as slap. You may not slap your child, not your wife, not the stranger at the mall.

There is sanctity to the human body form. It is protected by the law. And America has one of the best law enforcement of anybody out there. I have not done a study, nor have I read up on it, but I would not be surprised if there is a claim that America is number one. Never mind the results. I am talking about capability and resources.

It is not suggestion, it is not a class lesson. It is the law. Enforced by law enforcement. You may not kill. You may not slap. No violence, no need to explain. This is Buddha come full circle. Or at least that is my worldview. I am a Buddhist. Me and Richard Gere.

Not only that is the law. I am arguing that is absolutely the first responsibility of the state. More important than education, health, taxation, more important than the Iraq War, more important than going to the moon, or to Pluto, more important than roads and bridges. The American state has no more important responsibility than preventing acts of violence. You can't disagree with me on this. This is a fact. There is no arguing otherwise.

If that is the number one law of the land, if that is the government's absolute top responsibility, how come the constitution says you have a right to bear arms? Because at one point in pre-history, American citizens needed it. It is like the appendix, at one point in our evolution we needed it, but we have not needed it in a long time now. The best thing to do with the appendix is to cut it off. It has no use. But left there it could potentially infect. The right to bear arms is America's appendix. Cut it off. Not only does it have no use, it fundamentally undermines America's number one law, and foremost responsibility.

America is at daily war with its black population. This is not a case of the appendix might infect. It has so very actively been infecting. The gun is not a dual purpose device. It is not also a toothpick. There is only one thing anyone can possibly do with a gun. Kill. You can't even slap with a gun. It is not a mild violence device. It is a killing device.

The genius of capitalism is that it is the best mechanism designed by humanity for the allocation of resources. If America's capitalism is working right, resources going into manufacture and sale of guns will go elsewhere. Maybe people will build and sell cheap smartphones with that money. Maybe they will offer free ad supported Wi-Fi in those gun-infested neighborhoods. Capitalism has to be democracy's servant. And no democracy worth its salt can put up with killing citizens.

The gun lobby is about money. Guns are big money. So are iPhones. So are Android phones. Reallocate. Go launch a fast food chain for healthy eating. Offer a tutor service. There are enough entrepreneurs with ideas that could use resources, in those same neighborhoods. Run entrepreneurship competitions. Maybe not only the appendix should be cut, there should be a government program to buy back guns across the country, and to help engineer a restructuring of some of the industry. There should be a global law saying guns may only be sold and may only be possessed by professionals in law enforcement and the military. We will need a world government before we can have that global law. God knows we need one. All of Africa is one big inner city. There is daily war.

Guns have to go. You may not kill. There is sanctity to the human body form.

If hunting is a sport, regulate it like a sport. I don't think it is, but we can disagree on that one fine point. Every sport is regulated, even soccer. And soccer balls don't kill people, guns do.

The top responsibility of the world government would be to enact a global 911 service with a response time of three minutes or less for every point on earth. It might take a decade to build, but there is no skipping it. You may not slap. You may not shove. You may not shoot. You may not stab. You may not kill.

There is sanctity to the human body form.

The Insanity Of Guns In America

This brought tears to my eyes :(.

Posted by Khushbu Mishra on Tuesday, January 5, 2016

My favorite guy in the Western Hemisphere (in the East, he competes with the Dalai Lama .... I have also come to like Modi a lot, Amitabh Bachchan is a perennial) speaks up.

The Genius Of The US Constitution

English: The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution Česky: Originál Listiny práv, prvních deseti dodatků k Ústavě Spojených států amerických Deutsch: Die Bill of Rights genannten ersten zehn Zusatzartikel zur US-amerikanischen Verfassung, die den Bürgern bestimmte Grundrechte garantieren Español: La Carta de Derechos de los Estados Unidos, el término por el que se conocen las diez primeras enmiendas de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos de América (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

People understand concrete, so let's talk concrete. The Pluto flyby, remember? Happened not long ago. Well, the US Constitution made that possible. The reason the US is the only country that has now been to every planet in the solar system? The US Constitution. The iPhone was brought to you by? You guessed it. The US Constitution. And it has not even been copyrighted. It is so brief. Any literate high school student can go through it in one brief sitting.

The United States Constitution was written by some kind of a genius. Karl Marx maybe?

What is most confounding to me is as to why not every country out there simply does a copy paste job on it. It would work everywhere. Just like the laws of physics don't change from solar system to solar system. Think of the US Constitution as a million dollar check that is just laying around for anyone to come and pick. Or a billion dollar check. I don't understand why it is not happening on its own. Why reinvent the wheel? The US Constitution is like the wheel. It would work in every country. You don't even have to change a thing, except replace the country's name with yours. And it would work. No need to give credit.

This is the fuel NASA needs to make it to the edge of the solar system — and beyond

Greenland: Should We Be Worried?

What scientists just discovered in Greenland could be making sea-level rise even worse

Tens Of Trillions In Parked Money In The Face Of Unmet Need

नरेन्द्र मोदी और "काला धन"
What Did I Do?
MLK, Malcolm X, And Assassinations
2016: The Year For Barack Obama's Revolution From The Top
Right To Privacy Is Important
Barack Obama: George Washington
Barack Obama Is Biologically Superior
An Open Letter To Barack Obama

Here I present, in one big graphic, a big reason why Barack Obama should become George Washington to the world. The UN is no world government, people, and the world needs one, with climate change and terrorism and everything else that's going on.

I am no Economist, or at least not a trained one, but I think you just have to be literate to realize something is going on here. Trillions, tens of trillions, are getting parked outside countries, while trillions in infrastructure, and trillions in solar energy could save and enrichen the planet. Every dollar a day person could have his/her own mom and pop store and spring out of poverty like a swoosh. So why are we not doing it? Because there is no world government.

The global economy right now lacks the institutions that will plough these trillions to good use globally. If there is no scarcity of capital, what is the scarcity? The scarcity is that we have not bothered to build a world government.

Global Politics Is Perhaps Star Wars

In the Star Wars movies, you see these various life forms. There are numerous groups. They look different, they weight different, they sound different, they organize different. These are fundamentally different groups. Maybe that is what global politics is. We perhaps live on a Star Wars planet.

Yesterday I felt like the bottom fell out. What is this? What's going on? Let me go read the Shia Sunni entries on the Wikipedia. They likely have been massively vandalized. All is fair in war, I guess. I guess not all terrorists are alike. Not that I am calling anyone a terrorist.

The drone attacks prove my theory. I have always felt Americans take the Star Wars movies way too seriously.

Saudi Arabia-Iran row spreads to other nations @CNN https://t.co/wcBEiTdGlC

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) January 5, 2016

Pathankot Attack: Response To Modi Visit?

The ISI and the Pakistan Army do not call Nawaz Sharif boss. I am not giving Nawaz a clean chit. But those are parallel centers. It is less about Kashmir or any other real or imagined issue. It is about the unchallenged power, money and prestige they enjoy now. So when Modi engages in diplomatic innovation and drops by to say Happy Birthday to Nawaz, he is threatening to those organizations. They don't like it. You are eating their cake. Peace does not work for them. They are not driven by what's best for the people of Pakistan. It is much narrower self-interest that drives them. So how do you deal with them?

Be realistic, and keep expectations low. Unless the Pakistani Army and the ISI are brought 100% under the Pakistani parliament, no real progress is possible on any issue. Then basically it is a counter terrorism operation that the Israelis are really, really good at. They know to make deep intelligence penetrations. They know to make surgical strikes. They know to strike their operatives globally. This is not traditional war. You are not fighting the state of Pakistan. You are not fighting Nawaz Sharif.

Good photo shoots with Nawaz in the public venues of the world is as far as it might go in the short run.

Or maybe this is not the handiwork of the ISI, or any group it sponsors. There is no dearth of freelancers in Pakistan who will happily attack both Indian and Pakistani targets. They will as happily attack ordinary Pakistani citizens.

Pathankot terror attack: PM Narendra Modi chairs high-level meeting

Pathankot air base is under terror attack since Saturday. The security forces have already killed four terrorists and two more are believed to be still holed-up inside the base, and an operation is underway to flush them out.

Pathankot terror attack: India exercises restraint, avoids direct anti-Pakistan comments

Unidentified terrorists attacked the IAF base in Punjab's Pathankot town early on Saturday, leaving three IAF personnel and five terrorists dead. ..... Meanwhile, Pakistan has condemned the Pathankot attack.

Pakistan strongly condemns Pathankot terror attack

Building on the goodwill created during the recent high level contacts between the two countries, Pakistan remains committed to partner with India to completely eradicate the menace of terrorism afflicting South Asian region, the statement said. ...... Terrorists from Pakistan had launched a terror attack on Dinanagar town in Punjab's Gurdaspur district on July 27, 2015, leaving seven people dead, including a senior police official.

Battle for Pathankot Indian airbase enters second night

The attack is being seen as a blow to an apparent Indo-Pakistani peace initiative launched just days ago. ..... Pakistan's foreign ministry and the US State Department have condemned the attack. ..... The attack started before dawn on Saturday, when a group of gunmen - wearing Indian army uniforms - entered the residential quarters on the base. ..... The identity of the attackers is not clear. Some Indian security officials suggested the Islamist militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed was to blame. India says the group is backed by Pakistan, but Islamabad denies this.

Pathankot attack: Terrorist called mother, said ‘I am going to be a martyr’
In one of the phone calls, a Home Ministry official familiar with tape-recordings made by the Intelligence Bureau, said a man with a southern Punjab accent repeatedly tells his mother that he is heading towards martyrdom.

Intelligence officials attribute the Pathankot airbase attack to the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad on the basis of intercepted phone calls made late Friday by a member of the assault team. ..... a man with a southern Punjab accent repeatedly tells his mother that he is heading towards martyrdom. The mother can be heard crying in the background, at one point gathering herself to ask her son if he has eaten. ..... the men seemed to be hysterical, and not very well-trained”. ..... The conversations, he said, reminded him of Naved Yakub, a Lashkar-e-Taiba jihadist held in Udhampur last year, who dropped out of school to escape a life of poverty by joining the jihadist group. ...... Based on the phone calls, investigators believe the men crossed one of the streams running across the India-Pakistan border in Gurdaspur — the same route used by a group of Lashkar terrorists who attacked a police station in Gurdaspur last year, killing nine. ..... Punjab Police investigators believe the four terrorists first hijacked an Innova van, after crossing the border early Friday morning. The car stalled on the Pathankot-Jammu highway with a flat tyre, after which the terrorists are thought to have executed its driver, Ikagar Singh. ..... The terrorists then hijacked a vehicle used by Superintendent of Police Salwinder Singh, who was travelling home from a religious leader’s Dera, along with his friend Rajesh Verma, a jeweller, and Verma’s cook Madan Gopal. From testimony given by Verma to the Punjab Police, the men were carrying a large bag, possibly filled with food, assault rifles, a global positioning set and a cellphone. ..... there was no official account of how the terrorists succeeded in penetrating its 10-foot outer perimeter walls, topped with razor-sharp cobra wire, and this in spite of specialist warnings. Early investigations suggest that the men walked along the National Highway to the Air Force base undetected, from the location where they abandoned their car.

Pathankot operations a national embarrassment, who will take the responsibility?

All this happened near one of the most heavily guarded international borders in the world. Not in a far away place not used to terror attacks. .... The Pakistan backed Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists easily gained access into a vital Indian Air Force Station at Pathankot. They managed to cause the intended damage and instill fear across India..... The inefficient handling of the operation cost us the lives of seven soldiers and also damaged the reputation of our elite security forces....... After Saturday's operations, the Centre even declared that the entire operation was over and all the terrorists have been killed. On Sunday, the firing once again began causing fear and embarrassment at the same time.

Two terrorists actually stayed inside the IAF Station undetected the entire Saturday night.

...... Local media reports suggest that the Punjab Police and other security agencies initially refused to take the words of the abducted SP seriously. They wasted a lot of precious time. ...... After watching the botched up Pathankot security operations, the masters of the terrorists in Pakistan must be smiling. ..... A good 24 hour lead was wasted and the terrorists had easy access to a top IAF base.

Two terror teams may have attacked Pathankot using different vehicles

all the phone calls made by the terrorists to Pakistan were on numbers identified as that of JeM by the security establishment for a long time now.

‘Militants were heavily armed, began spraying us with bullets’

“The militants were heavily armed. They began spraying bullets as soon as they spotted our men near the mess.”

Greece

A Pain in the Athens
Why Greece Isn't to Blame for the Crisis

despite endless lazy moralizing commentary to the contrary, Greece has very little to do with the crisis that bears its name. To see why, it is best to follow the money—and those who bank it. ....... The roots of the crisis lie far away from Greece; they lie in the architecture of European banking. When the euro came into existence in 1999, not only did the Greeks get to borrow like the Germans, everyone’s banks got to borrow and lend in what was effectively a cheap foreign currency. And with super-low rates, countries clamoring to get into the euro, and a continent-wide credit boom underway, it made sense for national banks to expand private lending as far as the euro could reach. ....... So European banks’ asset footprints (loans and other assets) expanded massively throughout the first decade of the euro, especially into the European periphery. Indeed, according the Bank of International Settlements, by 2010 when the crisis hit, French banks held the equivalent of nearly 465 billion euros in so-called impaired periphery assets, while German banks had 493 billion on their books. Only a small part of those impaired assets were Greek, and here’s the rub: Greece made up two percent of the eurozone in 2010, and Greece’s revised budget deficit that year was 15 percent of the country’s GDP—that’s 0.3 percent of the eurozone’s economy. In other words,

the Greek deficit was a rounding error, not a reason to panic

. ........ In such an over-levered world, if Greece defaulted, those banks would need to sell other similar sovereign assets to cover the losses. But all those sell contracts hitting the market at once would trigger a bank run throughout the bond markets of the eurozone that could wipe out core European banks. .....

something had to be done to stop the rot, and that something was the troika program for Greece, which succeeded in stopping the bond market bank run—keeping the Greeks in and the yields down—at the cost of making a quarter of Greeks unemployed and destroying nearly a third of the country’s GDP

. ...... how has such a small economy managed to generate such a mortal threat to the euro? ...... what the European elites buried deep within their supposed bailouts for Greece. Namely, the bailouts weren’t for Greece at all. They were bailouts-on-the-quiet for Europe’s big banks, and taxpayers in core countries are now being stuck with the bill since the Greeks have refused to pay. .......... The final figure “loaned” to Greece was around 230 billion euro. ...... They raised bonds to bail Greece’s creditors—the banks of France and Germany mainly—via loans to Greece. ..... Of the roughly 230 billion euro disbursed to Greece, it is estimated that only 27 billion went toward keeping the Greek state running. Indeed, by 2013 Greece was running a surplus and did not need such financing. Accordingly, 65 percent of the loans to Greece went straight through Greece to core banks for interest payments, maturing debt, and for domestic bank recapitalization demanded by the lenders. By another accounting, 90 percent of the “loans to Greece” bypassed Greece entirely. ...... bondholders, who got to sell their now LTRO-boosted bonds back to the governments that had just bailed them out .........

the whole shebang “was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”

....... If 230 billion euro had been given to Greece, it would have amounted to just under 21,000 euros per person. Given such largess, it would have been impossible to generate a 25 percent unemployment rate among adults, over 50 percent unemployment among youth, a sharp increase in elderly poverty, and a near collapse of the banking system—even with the troika’s austerity package in place. ....... someone in core Europe is going to have to own up to all of the above and admit that their money wasn’t given to lazy Greeks but to already-bailed bankers who, despite a face-value haircut, ended up making a profit on the deal. ....... Germany being a serial defaulter that received debt relief four times in the twentieth century ....... We’ve never understood Greece because we have refused to see the crisis for what it was—a continuation of a series of bailouts for the financial sector that started in 2008 and that rumbles on today.

It’s so much easier to blame the Greeks and then be surprised when they refuse to play along with the script.