Monday, August 05, 2019

Big BJP Move On Kashmir

The abrogation of Article 370 which had been giving special status to Kashmir in India and the bifurcation of the state into two to be governed by the central government in Delhi has been a big step. That Kashmir has been put under martial law is telling. There are fears this is an attempt to turn Kashmir into a Gaza Strip. One hopes the martial law aspect is, at best, temporary. If India takes away democracy from Kashmir, it will be a deep wound to India's very soul.

India keeps saying all of Kashmir belongs to India. Pakistan keeps saying all of Kashmir belongs to Kashmir. They are untenable positions. The two powers should come together to recognize the Line Of Control as the final border between the two countries and help bring down the tension levels in the state. Ordinary Kashmiris suffer daily inconveniences and regular cruelties. That is a blight on the Indian conscience. No democracy, no India.



















Article 370: Will revoking special status be good for Kashmir, India? We have grown so used to the status quo that a change of this magnitude challenges our intellectual faculties......... GoI’s decision to revoke Article 370, scrap Article 35A and reorganise J&K (into two Union territories) will go down as one the most audacious decisions taken by New Delhi since Independence.
New J&K to be like Puducherry: Here is how India's new Union territory J&K will function
Modi government's new roadmap in Kashmir Change is in the air, with a sharper focus on recasting the political and administrative structure that allowed separatism to fester in the Valley and squeezed the space for governance.
This Amit Shah photo reveals Modi govt's top secret plan on Article 370
Government's decision on Article 370 as a "betrayal of trust": Omar Abdullah
Article 370: Why is Kashmir tense about it & what can India do According to this article, except for defence, foreign affairs, finance and communications, Parliament needs the state government's concurrence for applying all other laws. Thus the state's residents live under a separate set of laws, including those related to citizenship, ownership of property, and fundamental rights, as compared to other Indians. As a result of this provision, Indian citizens from other states cannot purchase land or property in Jammu & Kashmir. Under Article 370, the Centre has no power to declare financial emergency under Article 360 in the state. It can declare an emergency in the state only in case of war or external aggression. The Union government can therefore not declare emergency on grounds of internal disturbance or imminent danger unless it is made at the request or with the concurrence of the state government. ....... "Article 370 under the Constitution has been ascribed as a temporary provision and not a special provision. There are provisions in the Constitution - temporary, transitional and special. Temporary is the weakest. The question is - how can be it ended and when shall be ended"
What is article 35A and why is everyone in India talking about it now When the J&K Constitution was adopted in 1956, it defined a permanent resident as someone who was a state subject on May 14, 1954, or who has been a resident of the state for 10 years, and has lawfully acquired immovable property. ......So under this clause no outsider can own property in J&K or get a state job.
J&K and Ladakh: Union Territory with legislature and without legislature Jammu and Kashmir being an UT with legislature, will have the option of forming their own governments and having a legislature with elected members and a chief minister (like New Delhi and Puducherry), yet the powers of such governments will be lesser than the state governments. ....... UTs with their own Legislatures -- Delhi, Puducherry and now Jammu and Kashmir -- will send representatives to the Rajya Sabha, besides the Lok Sabha. Other UTs send representatives only to the Lok Sabha.
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Sunday, August 04, 2019

America's Insane Gun Laws, Hate Ideologies, Mass Shootings: Recipe For Domestic Terrorism

When you kill one person, that is murder. When you kill one person for what their background might be, that is a hate crime. And it is important to distinguish. Just like it is important to distinguish between a killer and a serial killer. If someone fell to a serial killer in your area, the citizens need to be alerted. The killer might strike again. Say if a hate crime is committed against a Sikh in a particular town, the Sikhs in that town might want to take notice. Because it might happen again.

Terrorism is when one person or a group of people kill indiscriminately a bunch of people in a public place driven by a particular ideology of hatred. The FBI has been mislabeling too many acts of domestic terrorism. There can be lone-wolf terrorism. Someone might not be an official member of some organized group, but might be inspired by some ideological teachings online, and they might go perpetrate a well thought out act of violence. It is not true America has not seen acts of terrorism on its soil since 9/11. It just saw two. Most mass shootings, if properly investigated, will be found to have been acts of domestic terrorism. Some might be mental health fail scenarios.

Which makes the ideology of hate very relevant. Hate speech is not harmless. When you openly incite violence from a podium, that has got to count. What do you think Al Qaeda and ISIS do in their online videos?

You can not whitewash terrorism. Just because a white male opened fire inside a black church does not make it any less of an act of terrorism.

Mass shootings hit America with greater regularity than hurricanes and tornadoes. Gun deaths far exceed war deaths in this country. The gun laws, as they stand, are insane.







Deadly violence heightens concerns about domestic terrorism and white supremacists Investigators recovered extremist materials during a search of 19-year-old gunman Santino William Legan’s home in Nevada, according to one law enforcement source, and Legan had posted a photo on Instagram urging people to read a novel widely associated with white supremacists....... the Gilroy attack fell into into an increasingly common category of domestic threat: those associated with white supremacy...... in the El Paso massacre. The suspected assailant taken into custody, Patrick Crusius of suburban Dallas, is believed to be the author of a hate-filled manifesto posted online ..... In July, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that a majority of domestic terrorism cases the bureau has investigated are motivated by white supremacy. ..... the bureau was investigating about 850 cases of domestic terrorism...... the gunman in the Parkland, Fla., shooting in February 2018 that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School fixated on racist imagery, but authorities did not designate the attack as a hate crime ...... political polarization and a rise of far-right nationalism is contributing to hate crime around the globe....... Louisville resident Ed Harrell told the Louisville Courier-Journal that as he crouched in the parking lot and grabbed his own revolver, the gunman walked past and said: “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.” ...... For months before the attack, Bowers posted angrily on social media, calling immigrants “invaders” and said Jews were the “enemy of white people.” ...... Tarrant livestreamed the shooting and left a 74-page manifesto in which he detailed how he grew to hate immigrants and specifically Muslims, and aimed to kill them and encourage others to do the same.

Trump briefed on Ohio mass shooting In a second tweet , he wrote, “God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio.” ...... Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley says the gunman in a mass shooting that killed nine people in Ohio was wearing body armor and had extra magazines. ...... Two women who were in a bar across the street from the Dayton, Ohio, shooting say they are in shock...... The 23-year-old says people her age “don’t think something like this is going to happen.” ..... Tianycia Leonard says she heard “loud thumps” she initially thought were people pounding on a dumpster. The 28-year-old says she then realized “it was gunshots and there was a lot of rounds.”..... the Dayton shooting is the 22nd mass killing and sixth public mass shooting in the U.S. in 2019. It came just hours after 20 people were killed in an El Paso, Texas, shooting...... the second mass shooting in the U.S. in less than 24 hours took place in “a safe part of downtown.” .... The Oregon District is a historic neighborhood known for its entertainment offerings.

2020 Dems back gun limits after El Paso mass shooting “It’s not just today, it has happened several times this week. It’s happened here in Las Vegas where some lunatic killed 50 some odd people,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said as he and 18 other White House hopefuls were in Nevada to address the nation’s largest public employees union. “All over the world, people are looking at the United States and wondering what is going on? What is the mental health situation in America, where time after time, after time, after time, we’re seeing indescribable horror.”...... Sanders blasted Republican Senate leadership for being “more concerned about pleasing the NRA than listening to the vast majority of the American people” ...... O’Rourke appeared shaken as he told the union forum he’d heard early reports that the shooter might have had a military-style weapon, saying the country needs to “keep that (expletive) on the battlefield. Do not bring it into our communities.” ....... O’Rourke said the U.S. may require direct action, urgency and in some cases nonviolent civil disobedience, to make real change. ...... “This is a sickness,” Biden said. “This is beyond anything that we should be tolerating.” He added: “We can beat the NRA. We can beat the gun manufacturers.” .......

Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, noted: “We are the only country in the world with more guns than people.”

...... New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said, “This has got to be a movement, politics or not, we’ve got to make ending this nightmare a movement before it happens to yet another community or another person dies.” ........ Elizabeth Warren tweeted: “Far too many communities have suffered through tragedies like this already. We must act now to end our country’s gun violence epidemic.

Ideology Kills. How Do You Police It? The manifesto that appeared just before the El Paso shooting opposed racial mixing...... Is Donald Trump—recently seen on Twitter gloating over the burglary of a congressman’s home in Baltimore—capable of a statesmanlike response that acknowledges and repudiates his support from those who openly or tacitly celebrate the crime? ...... no debate will be necessary about what motivated the killer, or what fountains of ideas he drank from. ...... The author of the manifesto pronounced himself in “general” agreement with the Christchurch murderer. He opposed racial mixing; he thought America was committing suicide by letting Hispanics “invade.” He intended to kill to counter these trends, and he claimed to be ready to die in the act. He even endorsed, tactically, the targeting of innocent and unarmed people, using the phrase “low-security targets” (imagine the type of subhuman consciousness that would refer to cowering children this way)........ The ideal, he suggests, would be automation without immigration, so the low-paying jobs would go to robots, and non-immigrant Americans would get the good jobs. ...... To my knowledge only one politician on the national stage has done all of these things. ........ These conspiracies have been snatched from the buffet line of bad ideas, then served up as a form of fascism. .......

keep in mind how commonplace, on a sentence-by-sentence level, portions of that manifesto are.





The Death Rattle of White Supremacy In the past week alone, three American cities have experienced three mass shootings, with gunmen killing at least 32 people. Yesterday, police say that Patrick Crusius, 21, walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, a border town with an 80 percent Hispanic population, opened fire, and killed 20 people. Several hours later, police say that Connor Betts, 24, shot and killed at least nine people in a busy downtown district of Dayton, Ohio. At the beloved annual Gilroy Garlic Festival, 19-year-old Santino William Legan allegedly opened fire on the crowd and killed three people. ....... The El Paso shooter allegedly wrote a four-page note to explain his deadly rampage. The author of the manifesto claimed that he was inspired to target Hispanics after reading the manifesto of the Christchurch, New Zealand, terrorist who attacked two mosques and killed 51 people in March. He wanted to kill Hispanic immigrants as an “act of preservation” to reclaim his country from “destruction,” he explained. He referred to Hispanics as “invaders with high birth rates” and expressed his fear of “shameless race mixers,” “the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc,” and the “cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by invasion.”...... President Donald Trump used invasion to describe a caravan of immigrants trying to cross the border. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has called immigrants “invaders” who “pollute” the country and make it dirtier. In the past few weeks, President Trump told four congresswomen of color, all U.S. citizens, to go back to where they came from. He stood onstage at a campaign rally while the crowd chanted “Send her back!” for 13 seconds. He retweeted Katie Hopkins, a British extremist who has called migrants “cockroaches” and called for a “final solution” for Muslims. Some Trump supporters now openly flash white-power signs in front of cameras........

Hate that was once hidden has now been given permission to come out of the closet and drop its white robes and masks. This has real-life consequences for communities of color, Jews, and immigrants.

Robert Bowers, the terrorist who shot and killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, wanted to punish Jews for allegedly helping to bring “invaders”—immigrants and Muslims—into the country.......

My local mosque now has an armed guard with a bulletproof vest standing outside our weekly Friday prayers.

My Jewish friends say their synagogues have amped up security in the past year. We no longer feel safe in our houses of worship. .......

If you have been in power your whole life, equality looks like oppression.

Some white Americans feel that people of color are “replacing” them with each success, each publication, and each promotion. Those who have historically been marginalized, excluded, or cast as permanent sidekicks, though, finally feel that we have the chance to taste the American dream, which in my home tastes like goat biryani......

For them, our success is the American nightmare.

...... the FBI has recorded about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in 2019, most of them involving ties to white supremacy ...... As a Muslim American, I have been asked for 18 years to denounce violent Muslim extremism done by terrorists I’ve never met. My loyalty and patriotism are interrogated, questioned, and treated as suspect. So what do we say to those who enable and promote a white-nationalist ideology?



He’s Getting Worse Trump is turning the American presidency into a platform for the wholesale demonization of minorities. ....... The current, and (to date) most debased, phase of the Trump presidency—the phase that includes the unceasing demonization of minority legislators and the endorsement of North Korean communism—began, in retrospect, on May 8, in the Florida Panhandle, at a rally in Panama City. It was there that Donald Trump gave tacit approval to the use of violence against immigrants. ..... His message was typically soulless. He tried to provoke feelings of deep insecurity among his followers ....... Late in his disorderly presentation, as he discussed the work of Border Patrol officers, he raised, and then dismissed, the idea of allowing them to use violence against migrants. ...... “And don’t forget—we don’t let them and we can’t let them use weapons,” he said. “We can’t. Other countries do. We can’t. I would never do that. But how do you stop these people? You can’t. There’s—” ...... It was then that he was interrupted by a woman in the crowd. “Shoot them!” she yelled....... The president found this funny, as did his audience...... he encouraged—in the greasy, joking-not-joking style he has perfected—the normalization of violence....... In March, in an interview with Breitbart News, he made it plain that he was sympathetic to those of his supporters who might feel compelled to become violent on his behalf. “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” And he has spoken about the press in such a way as to possibly stimulate thoughts of violence among his more fervent adherents. ...... But in this latest phase, his rhetoric has become particularly sweeping. Brown people in general have become his targets. And there is no reason to hope that he will reform. His followers reward his radicalism, and his handlers are among the most cynical figures in American political history...... there is no one of any influence in his party who is willing to confront him. ...... As Trump faces the possibility that he will lose the presidency next year, he may become more enraged, and more willing to deploy the rhetoric of violence as a way to keep his followers properly motivated. The Panama City speech was an important moment in Trump’s ongoing effort to make the American presidency a vehicle in the cause of marginalizing and frightening racial minorities; the killings are a possible (and predictable) consequence of such rhetoric. ........ Three years ago, The Atlantic, in its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president (an editorial motivated not by love for Clinton but by fear of Trump), stated, “In one of the more sordid episodes in modern American politics, Trump made himself the face of the so-called birther movement, which had as its immediate goal the demonization of the country’s first African American president. Trump’s larger goal, it seemed, was to stoke fear among white Americans of dark-skinned foreigners.” ....... It is depressing to realize that we were correct (though, if anything, understated in our analysis), and it is depressing to think that there is no immediate way out of this crisis.
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Saturday, August 03, 2019

An Intelligent Conversation On Trade

I am not a big fan of Donald Trump. The guy is asinine. But you do deal with the office.

There is a need for an intelligent conversation on trade. Donald Trump is a hammer looking for a nail. He is arguing against sound economic theory. At some level, his moves can be seen as a fascist's fantasy for a Great Depression. Come, Depression, come!

He has beef with China, but he also has beef with India. He has beef with India, but he also has beef with Germany.

The WTO has prevented many wars. Countries that trade seldom go to war. Instead of saying China lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, Donald Trump says China stole hundreds of billions of dollars. Minus China, the US was looking at a Great Depression in 2008. It is good to have some large economies in the world.

Trade talk has to be forward-looking. The pre-WTO world had much strife.

Giving every human being on earth a biometric ID that rests on the Blockchain, and giving everybody access to credit and financial services, in general, is what would be forward-looking. The next generation of trade talks will be about allowing human beings to move from anywhere to anywhere else on earth. That would immediately add trillions of dollars to the global GDP.

Intellectual property laws written in the US Congress can not be imposed upon the world. That truth is no clearer than with medicine. What we need is a world government, a global parliament.


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Friday, August 02, 2019

The US Health Care Mess

And when I say mess, don't get me wrong, I am not saying there is an ebola epidemic in the US. I mean that in an organizational chart sense. When it comes to health care in the US as a whole, I think it is a scenario of the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

Describe to me how the system works right now. You can't. It is not like the curry on the plate was made with this one recipe, and now you are going to use a different recipe tomorrow.

You can't just throw more money at the problem. You can't just 100% privatize. You can't just 100% nationalize.

It is the biggest chunk of the economy. If you think about it, social security and medicare are such big parts of the US economy, as is defense, and you have health care, and is America not already a socialist country? The government in the US is bigger than it is acknowledged.

Good luck figuring it out.



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Bernie: Reagan Or McCain?

Ronald Reagan lost in 1976, ran again and won in 1980. Is that Bernie? Or McCain lost two times running for president. Is that Bernie? I am not counting out Bernie. He brings brute force to some basic progressive ideas. He might as well cross the line. It could be a Bernie-Warren ticket, with Kamala Harris as Secretary of State, or something, or Attorney General.





President: Bernie Sanders
Vice President: Elizabeth Warren
Attorney General: Kamala Harris
UN Ambassador: Tulsi Gabbard
Secretary of Labor: Andrew Yang
Secretary of Urban Affairs: Pete
Texas Governor: Beto

Who did I leave?

Corey Booker: Senator from New Jersey (you stay right where you are!)

Bernie jogs. Elizabeth drinks green tea. That would be their secrets.

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WTO Reform: A New Round Of Trade Talks Are Necessary



Bilateral will do no good. This is like India and Pakistan going bilateral on Kashmir. No progress has been made in 70 years. If the US and China insist on resolving this on their own, there might be no progress.

This is not about saying the US is right about China, or China has a point. This is about the very mechanism of talks, the very framework. The issues come later.

China might not be a western-style democracy. But Germany is. France is. The UK is. Italy is. India is a democracy. You want all of them at the table.

Infographic: Here’s How the Global GDP Is Divvied Up



The US seems to be 25% of the global economy, but that is very far from 100% or even 51%. The European Union, Japan, India, and China are important players. By now the supply chains in the global economy are so complex, it makes little sense to not give the major trade powers seats at the table. China and the US can not do this alone.

There is economic theory around trade. Much of it supports trade. But then there is the politics of trade. And that can sometimes decouple from the economic theory. If your goal is to fill up the streets of Hong Kong with protesters, maybe the trade war is a good idea. But that does not seem to be the stated goal. The US trade deficit might be more to do with the US dollar's position in the global economy.

A prolonged trade war might cost Donald Trump the 2020 election. He might lose even without it. The polls show him at 42% and trailing Joe Biden in every battleground state. The dude might get impeached. Maybe there is no firewall for him in the US Senate. Maybe it will be Pence versus Harris in 2020. Who knows?

There is political peril for both sides. The Chinese army out in the streets of Hong Kong will seriously undermine the Chinese Communist Party. This is not 1989. You can not cover it up.

The biggest political peril is that the two powers drag the global economy into a major recession, and that gives rise to all sorts of fascists around the world.


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The Third Democratic Debate

Looks like we are moving towards 10 candidates on the debate stage for September. (Full disclosure: I did not watch the second debates either.) And it might make sense to keep it there until Iowa. If you can fit them on one debate stage, hey! But if you winnow it down to five, those might be Biden, Bernie, Warren, Harris, and Pete. But I believe that would be too narrow. 10 until Iowa. Then five going into New Hampshire and South Carolina.

The thing to note though is that the rest are still in the race. Unless they themselves drop out, they only have lost their slot on the debate stage. They are still on the ballot.

Nothing prevents a network from holding a debate among just the top five, either.

Health care in America is a lot to wrap your head around. Just to articulate an understanding of the system as it exists today is a lot. To offer an alternative is much more. But the hardest part might be, how do you go from here to there? If you make people anxious, you are toast. You don't want people thinking, what we have is not working for everyone, and a better system would be good, but if I lose what I have when you start on the journey, I am not too excited. Where do I get my insulin?




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