Barackface

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Saif Ali Khan On So-Called "Love Jihad"

Saif Ali Khan: Intermarriage is not jihad, it is India

I know intermarriages because I am a child of one and my children are born out of it. Intermarriage is not jihad. Intermarriage is India. India is a mix. Ambedkar said the only way to annihilate caste is intermarriage. It is only through intermarriage that the real Indians of tomorrow can be truly equipped to take our nation forward with the right perspective. I am the product of such a mixed marriage and my life has been full of Eid and Holi and Diwali. We were taught to do adaab and namaste with equal reverence. ..... My children were born Muslim but they live like Hindus (with a pooja ghar at home), and if they wanted to be Buddhist, they would have my blessing. ...... We are a blend, this great country of ours. It is our differences that make us who we are. We need to get beyond mere tolerance. We need to accept and respect and love each other. ..... There are different laws for Hindus and different laws for Muslims. This is bound to create trouble. ..... I think we should have one law for all Indians, a uniform civil code, and we should all think of ourselves as one nation. ...... I stopped believing in the Tooth Fairy first, then Santa Claus, and finally, I really don’t know what I feel about a personal god. But I believe in love and in trying to be good and helping the world. I don’t always succeed and then I feel bad. My conscience is my god, I think, and it tells me that that one tree in Pataudi near which my father is buried is closer to god than any temple, church or mosque.

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

$100 Billion Plan To Save The World

The bitcoin logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Scale out the Google/Facebook drone initiative to blanket the planet with internet access, effective immediately. Cost $25 billion.
Design a $25 smartphone and flood the Arab countries (and subsequently rest of the world) with them. The dollar a day crowd gets the phone for free. Distribute shared solar chargers alongside. Cost $25 Billion.
Use Bitcoin technology (zero cost for money transfers) and mPaisa technology (bank account on your phone, you get money on your phone, you pay back on your phone) to radically expand microfinance globally. The goal is to not generate any profit, just to keep the fund intact. Cost: $50 Billion. Anyone with a phone with internet access can borrow upto $100 per year as long as they keep up with their monthly payments. If they miss three monthly payments in a row, they don't get to borrow any more for the following two years, after which they can choose to get back in the swing. You need a phone, and you need to send in an image of your fingerprint to a central database, and your picture perhaps. There is an app for that. A credit rating agency is instantly being set up. This program comes from the air. There is nothing between the dollar a day crowd and the internet. The interest rate on the loan is 5% per year. This is to make room for the fact that 5% of the borrowers will default. You can only get $100 per year for now. The next Warren Buffet should add another $50 billion to this. This would be the magic bullet of curing poverty.

The best way to fight ISIS (population: 20,000) is to show to them and to the two billion Muslims and everyone else how small and irrelevant they are. They don't speak for two billion people. This political challenge is primary. The military threat, though very real, is secondary.

$100 Billion Plan To Save The World http://t.co/Mer1FaE34N @womensworldbnkg @Silatech @MicrofinanNews @GdnDevelopment @GuardianGDP
— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) October 8, 2014

@helengreiner @Drone_Life @ImranKhanPTI @FoxBusiness @Newsweek @MSN @ASCETweets $100 Billion Plan To Save The World http://t.co/Mer1FaE34N
— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) October 8, 2014

Ebola And ISIS: Scary

Yesterday a friend of mine posted something on Facebook that I quickly debunked in the comments section of his update. An Ebola victim thought to be dead when picked up to be taken away to be cremated started moving his hands. He was apparently still alive. This was no Zombie Apocalypse. But some outlying news outlets on the web had spiced it up and written up a zombie angle to the story. And my friend's update said, "Now I am scared!"

But this update today from another friend - a high school friend in Sydney, Australia - has given me jitters.

ISIS is planning to infect their "suicide squad" with Ebola and send them to the west while they're still undetectable, and spread an Ebola epidemic to the west. How is the West going to handle this threat?! The world is going mad!!!

From Forbes: ISIS may already be thinking of using Ebola as a low-tech weapon of bio-terror, says a national security expert, who notes that the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” and terror groups like it wouldn’t even have to weaponize the virus to attempt to wreak strategic global infection.

Such groups could simply use human carriers to intentionally infect themselves in West Africa, then disseminate the deadly virus via the world’s air transportation system. Or so says Capt. Al Shimkus, Ret., a Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. “The individual exposed to the Ebola Virus would be the carrier,” Shimkus told Forbes. “In the context of terrorist activity, it doesn’t take much sophistication to go to that next step to use a human being as a carrier.”