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Wednesday, January 06, 2016

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.

Tuesday, January 05, 2016

The Genius Of The US Constitution

English: The Bill of Rights, the first ten ame...
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"
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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.

Sunday, January 03, 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.”