the law of unintended consequences strikes again

This is a news story but let me lead you on a journey. The Journey starts from the USA where the cost of energy is way too low. So when the cost of gas went up through the roof, instead of trying to improve the fuel efficiency of its vehicles (a spectacular stupid measure just to save the bacon of the big 3 American car manufacturers and the tragic part is that it wont, their goose is cooked, their products suck, are too expensive and the spectacular mismanagement of the universal health provision and pension funds will sink them), the idiot president decides to go for bio fuels.

Now the idea is simple, convert basic food grains such as corn and rapeseed into fuel like what Brazil has been doing for a long period of time. Ok, so that's a good idea and to make sure that sufficient quantities are available and distributed, they decide to subsidise it a bit more.

So what happens? people rush to grow more corn and rapeseed and then less of the other food grains. Another issue, the cost of feeding cattle with grain goes up as well. Add in the impact of global warming, floods, drought, water shortage, lack of agricultural credit, bad infrastructure...., and you arent surprised that the cost of wheat has jumped 60% since January.

Now let me take you down a different street. The amount of money which we spend on food is relatively static. The ratio between wealth and food consumption/cost is not direct. In other words, you might become richer but you wont spend the same increased proportional amount.

This is because there is a limit to what you can eat and drink. you could increase the quality, you can go outside to eat, you can improve the quality of wine, but this flattens out after some time. Unfortunately, this works on the flip side as well. You can get poorer but you will still need a certain amount to eat, any less and you head into malnutrition and starvation.

So while rich countries such as USA can subsidise their bio fuel efforts, while the price rises in England for wheat and milk will rarely impact us as proportionally, the cost increase is tiny, for the great majority of the world's population who live below the poverty line and in the developing countries will get hit very badly. You ask about poor people in UK/USA/Europe?

Well, are they really poor? The majority of "poor" people in the west have their own homes, have their own cars, washing machines, televisions, microwave and have good meals, in fact, their problem is excess calories and fat. The poor people in the emerging countries do not have any assets, and rarely have sufficient meals on a daily basis.

Simplistically speaking, if the price of a loaf of bread made out of wheat goes up from 1 $ to 1.6 $, and you purchase 1 loaf per day, and you earn say 10 $ per day, the % increase is relatively small compared to somebody out in Zimbabwe who earns 1$ per day. Mind you, the Zimbabwean guy will be considered rich and very lucky that he can get a loaf of bread.

Which brings me to the news item. A senior UN official Jacques Diouf, Director General of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has warned that the rise in the prices of milk, wheat, corn, etc. will lead to social unrest.

Let this be a warning, dont muck around with food, if you cannot purchase an iPhone for your daughter for christmas, you can go buy a SonyEricsson or a Motorola or swear at Apple and purchase an iPhone on ebay.

When you dont have sufficient quantities of food and your daughter is lying there with a distended stomach, you riot and revolt. Governments have toppled, revolutions have broken out and murder mayhem have happened.

The market is badly out of kilter and the international food stocks are dangerously low. Given the ever present problem of food aid, cost of food etc. etc., it is high time that the United Nations create food banks and maintain controlled prices or food aid for the poor. But not till this current US administration is in power.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Pakistan 'prostitutes' beheaded

Here's another brilliant piece in the annals of Pakistani History. Prostitutes beheaded for being SUSPECTED of being prostitutes. And what about the filthy men who visited them? You know something?

Between them pushing the women into burqa's, in to kitchens, pregnant, barefoot, no education, no business, no visibility, no nothing and they are personally leading their people into either being a flock of snot running illiterate moronic men or extinction. Not so much of a problem if the latter considering the gene pool but the former leads one to worry. If these taliban treat all women as broodmares, and only you donkeys mate with them, then all you end up are with hinny's?

And the saddest part is that far too many people will agree with this step.


All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

The strange case of Chinese executions

Now here's an interesting observation if a bit ironic. China, along with Saudi Arabia, Iran and USA usually end up inhabiting the top part of the list of countries where executions happen.

I have seen emails from right wing americans float across my in-box spitting on public executions of criminals in Iran. Not very sure what they are objecting to. Are they objecting to the execution or the fact that its happening in public? If the latter then its silly because that's obviously missing the wood from the trees. But I am digressing.


Many NGO's and Human Rights Activists have been on this case for a long time, and China obviously is in the cross hairs. Which is the reason why the China Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese state is now stating that, "Vice president of the Supreme Court of China Jiang Xingchang said on Thursday that since January 1, the number of death penalty cases has continued to decrease. Last year there was the lowest number of the death penalty cases in ten years. "

And

"Jiang Xingchang said that the reform of the capital punishment approval system has been recognized by the people and has become common knowledge in various judicial departments and people's courts. In recent years, the number of death penalty cases with a two-year delay of execution has been equal to or greater than the number of death penalty cases with immediate execution.

Jiang Xingchang said there has been significant improvement in controlling the standards of the death penalty. The Supreme Court has paid closer attention to evidence; and is more careful to ensure fair judicial procedures.

"There should be serious consideration of and standard procedures on whether or not a criminal should be sentenced to death," said Jiang Xingchang."

All very nice and good, but on the same day, this also comes out.

"A letter written by the disgraced former head of China's drug watchdog Zheng Xiaoyu shortly before his execution in July is being used to warn local government officials against corruption.

Zheng's letter titled " Posthumous Writings of Remorse" was read to prosecutors in Bozhou city, Anhui Province, at a routine meeting recently to encourage the legal officials to draw lessons from the case and maintain an honest work ethic, Friday's Procuratorial Daily reports."


As long as the Chinese state looks at the death penalty as a measure of retribution, punishment and a way to teach lessons, the death penalty will keep on being applied. And as you would have surmised, I am not in favour of the death penalty at all. The day our legal system is proven 100% accurate, just and fair, I will agree. :)

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Some random thoughts about Hinduism

An email reply to a friend on a mailing list when he was talking about how Democracy took root in India because of the spirit of free inquiry and debate in Hinduism and Buddhism. Buddhism, yes, but not Hinduism. Here is what I wrote back to him.

Actually, I am not that impressed by that Amartya Sen argument either. What free debate and inquiry? The examples he quotes are not appropriate at all.

We do not debate. Period. We do not have a concept of itjihad or interpretation related to a baseline. We do not have debates because our religion/philosophy is highly stylised and individualist. We also have the concept of destiny and the concept of maya. Between these two, what debates are we talking about? If we were indeed good at debates, then by process of elimination, there would be a single variant of Hinduism. The fact that we don't means that we did not have a debate. We simply do not have a civilisational history of open debates between intellectuals as you would see in Christianity or Islam. We let different strands be, you want to worship Vishnu? sure, I am going to worship that stone as a representation of ...., duality of life? i am going to write a hymn and sing. If you dont like it, do write your own. The flip side of this was the richness of thought, very wide and very deep strands of widely different philosophy but no debate. So Hinduism is more like a very thick cylinder of multiple strands which thickens and grows as time passes unlike say Islam which is more like an inverted pyramid which keeps on wanting to return to the point but keeps on splitting and dividing and growing into an even bigger base.

The other factor to consider is that Hinduism's development was always very tightly connected with the state. An independent theological or even philosophical framework never arose like we have seen in the monastery system of Buddhism and Christianity or the madrassah system of Islam. The funding for the intelligentsia and theologians (as opposed to temple dwelling priests) almost always came from the king. And that constraints thinking. Examples of kings who encouraged debate are extremely rare. The Muslims, Christians and Buddhists did not rely on their funding on the kings, more on trade or proletariat funding, hence were able to debate, discuss and have heretical thoughts! :)

As for Democracy, the very fact of maya and destiny means that democracy took easy root. Mind you, if tomorrow another political system came, that will also take root. Simply because we work on 2 different planes of existence. Another reason why Hinduism survived the arrival of Islam and Christianity and will keep on surviving. Which is also why I hate this tendency of people to start defining what Hinduism is and what the rituals should be or what traditions are right....

ah! well, some idle imaginings on a Friday!

have a nice weekend folks

Cheers

bd




All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Far Right is ahead of the socialists in East Germany

The Spiegel is reporting that the SDP (the socialists) are now behind the far right in the east German state of Saxony. Remember what I had said before?

I quote

But on Thursday, the party hit a new low. A survey in the eastern German state of Saxony shows that were voters to head to the polls on Sunday, more people in the state would mark the box next to the neo-Nazi party National Democratic Party (NPD) than would vote for the center-left SPD. The poll, carried out by Forsa, has 9 percent of those surveyed supporting the NPD with just 8 percent for the SPD.

And now with Germany already being the targets of Islamist terrorism, the signs are not good that the far right will start getting into a rampage again. We have unfortunately seen this before!

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Another small skirmish in the new great game in Turkey

I am sure you didn't even notice the fact that now Iraqi Oil is now flowing through the port of Ceyhan in Turkey. See this report.

This is something that the Americans and Europeans desperately want. If they can manage to extract oil from the Middle East and export through Turkey, it kills a whole flock of birds with one stone.

• It removes the bottleneck of the Persian Gulf as a threat to oil shipments.
• It brings Turkey firmly into the western alliance
• It removes Russia as the main supplier of oil/gas for Europe and provides a way to get middle eastern and central Asian oil/gas into Europe outside Russian soil
• It allows the Kurds to have a great new distribution channel which does not go through Shia or Sunni territory!
• It will remove the Southern Iraq vulnerability to the oil pipelines, currently all Iraqi oil is sent out from southern Iraq and Basra
• It will make it easier to attack Iran as there is no threat to oil flowing.
• It also allows the west to put the squeeze on Syria
• It allows for better control over the Caucasian countries

Interesting days ahead, my friends, interesting days ahead.


All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Another wonderful step in the Zimbabwean Magic Kingdom

So here's the situation. The official exchange rate to the dollar is say 10. The unofficial exchange rate is 10,000. You are friends with the moron corrupt thief of a President. So he signs a letter stating that the central bank will give you dollars at the official rate of 10. So what do you do? You take the dollar and pay 10 to the central bank. Then you sell the dollar in the open market for 10,000. And repeat.

But the economy is collapsing, the main dollar earning industries of tobacco, agriculture and mines are collapsing, dead, or taken over. When they are not, they do not have electricity, water, raw materials or anything. They cannot import equipment or raw materials because they cannot afford it, they arent friends with the moron president and his gang of robbers. So no exports and that means no dollars.

So the central bank devalues the local currency. Will that help? of course not, it just means that instead of the dollar costing 10, it now officially costs 100. What's the street price? well, that's gone up correspondingly and is now 30,000.

See what the BBC has to say: One US dollar now buys 30,000 Zimbabwe dollars on the official market, having previously earned 250 Zimbabwe dollars. However dealers said that on the illegal market, $1 was buying 250,000 of the Zimbabwean currency

How funny and amusing for us, how sad for all the Zimbabwean allies and other assorted idiots who think of the Great Thief Mugabe as the great white shining hope of anti-imperialism.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

In Saudi Arabia, the laws of economics can only be avoided just that long and no longer

I wrote before about Indian Investments in Egypt, and about the abayas used in Saudi Arabia being made in India, and now comes a news report that Saudi Arabia is waking up to the fact that it is just a rentier economy, living off the oil and not actually adding any value.

As the author says, "Saudi's are spectators of other's efforts" and I further quote

It is a fact — and most of us know — that the shomakh is made in England or Switzerland, that prayer mats are imported from China, that our coffee pots — dallah — are also made in China and our incense burners (mabkhra) are made somewhere else by hands other than ours. I must stress here that I am certainly not against trade and exchange, but it does seem that when it comes to things that we like to emphasize as part of our culture and lifestyle, we ought to be able to make them ourselves.

This reminds me of something that happened in Egypt. A few months ago there was a report of Chinese-made Egyptian pharaonic souvenirs and how Egyptian workers found them to be a threat to their livelihood. But the competition, which was admittedly tough on the Egyptian workers, meant that they would lose part of their income because the Chinese products were cheaper.

Haven’t we been here before? Once again, it is the mentality that is putting us down, the mentality of being a consumer, a person who is offered the goods on silver platters, a person who relies on his wealth to last him forever, and does not feel the need to budge an inch in order to work for himself. Now our concern should be how to wake up from this state. Or are we awake but just unwilling to act? Don’t we feel that we are gradually being made to face a different economic reality?

The whole unemployment issue from which Saudi Arabia is suffering, is proof that our oil wealth only helped us to a certain extent, but now reality has dawned. Finally we are reaching some kind of realization that perhaps Saudis can accept jobs they once thought were beneath them. Honest labor was shunned because Saudis thought that there were others who could do it. Things have at last begun to change, albeit slowly.

I think this is a good effort and Saudi's are waking up to the fact that the oil will not remain forever. At some point in time, they will have to justify their existence. More importantly, as and how the oil becomes rarer, their ability to chart their own course will be further proscribed. If all that you do is to sit and earn from the oil, then what stops somebody else from kicking you out? And who is going to protest and protect you? Remember that!

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Muslim Ambassadors to Sweden demand legal protection for the Prophet Mohammad

I was laughing myself sick when I read this news story. Apparently 20 ambassadors from Muslim Countries are going to to the Swedish Government and demand a change in the law to protect Prophet Mohammad. I quote from the Egyptian Ambassador Mohamed Sotouhi, "Muslims need legal protection against the desecration of the Prophet Muhammad, maybe something similar to the protection enjoyed by Jews and homosexuals."

I dont believe this, but it seems to be true. I wish I was a fly on the wall and I am sure the Swedish Foreign Minister will be keeping an old stony face when listening to these idiots, lol. The idea that Gods and Prophets require protection from humans is so amusing.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Update: 7 September, as the update goes, the ambassadors are not going to demand for changes. Obviously saner counsels have prevailed.

This was the best quote, "Reinfeldt said that he had "explained how Swedish society works and that we don't have elected representatives making editorial decisions", adding that "this is an open country, a tolerant country".

And these 20 ambassadors are so stupid that they needed to be told this basic fact. Who did appoint these morons who do not know this basic fact? Oh! sorry, bigger morons than them obviously! And there is something so pavlovian about all this.

The way to deal with a labour shortage is to raise wages and improve working conditions!

Check out the commentary on the Economist website, I couldnt have written it better.

“LABOUR shortage” is one of the most nonsensical phrases ever coined. Real shortages happen outside the market economy: armies run short of ammunition; sailing ships may lack wind. But with six billion people on the planet, labour is not in short supply. What “labour shortage” means is that employers can’t find workers with the right skills at a price they like. Similar shortages are reported of Rembrandts, lobsters and nice houses in London.

Nonetheless, the news that British farmers are complaining of a “labour shortage” is excellent news. For the past five years, eastern European workers have been pouring into Britain—perhaps as many as a million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of other nationalities, legal and illegal. The result has been a triumph of European integration. The diligent new arrivals have boosted economic growth in Britain, and many have gained money and know-how to help rebuild home countries ruined by communism.

The solution for British farmers is simple: compete. They need to offer their seasonal workers better pay, living accommodation and other treatment. As Marina Lewycka’s new novel “Two Caravans” illustrates so poignantly and amusingly, the bottom end of the agricultural labour market is a cesspit of scams, abuse and squalor. Workers are paid below the minimum wage, overcharged for cramped and dirty accommodation, ripped off for bogus “agency fees” and transport costs.

The farming lobby wants the government to ease the “shortage” next year by bringing in thousands more workers from Ukraine under a special scheme in which a temporary work visa comes tied to a particular job. That, the farmers explain, gives them “certainty” that their workers won’t bunk off half way through the harvest.

That is an odd argument: the best way of encouraging workers to stay put and work hard is to treat them properly, not to use schemes more reminiscent of the imperial days of bonded labour and coolies. Britain and other EU countries should allow Ukrainians to compete in the western labour markets—but as full-fledged participants, not as a reservoir of uncomplaining low-paid workers for a noisy, influential but actually peripheral bit of the economy.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Christian University groups - can non Christians join?

Here is a classic tale of two rights crashing into each other. The first right is the right of association. In other words, this is the right which you have to form groups that you like and as long as the group is not advocating anything illegal, go for it. But on the other hand, there is a right not to be discriminated against.

So far so good. Take the first right. I want to form a gentleman's club. So I form it. That's my right, no? Well, ummm, not fully. Because if I want to keep the women out of it, I will be violating the non-discrimination laws/right. But it becomes more and more complicated. If I want to form an Alcoholics Anonymous group, i can form it, but would I be forced to allow a wine lover into the group? How about a Christian group? Do I have to allow Muslims, Hindu's and the worst bit, athiests into the group? Just what will a Hindu do in a Christian Group?

But as it so happens, and I quote from this report

CUs at Birmingham and Exeter universities and their respective student guilds over claims of discrimination.

Last year, both Christian societies had their bank accounts frozen and were banned from using student union facilities for failing to amend their constitutions to allow people of other faiths and beliefs into membership and leadership roles. Both Christian unions retaliated with threats of legal action.

See here and here for the guidance given by the Equality Challenge Unit. I have to admit, as a libertarian, this very idea of having an Equality Challenge Unit raises my hackles. This is a classic governmental overkill for something that can be easily done by sitting around a beer/coffee and having a pragmatic chat.

But no, we have to push forward with a gigantic governmental body and spend obscene amounts of money on something that really doesnt need one. Next thing you know, a bloody conference, a UN Treaty and international NGO's have formed like parasites and sucking on the taxpayer's tit like there is no tomorrow. Discrimination has to be fought but the legal system already provides that guarantee!

Anyway, read and weep on the inability of our societies to manage themselves in a commonsensical manner.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Only Bengali's will appreciate this joke, I am afraid

Very amusing, I was laughing fit to burst.

A is for "Aaffice". This is where the average Kolkakattan goes and spends a day hard(ly) at work. If he is in the Government he will arrive at 10, wipe his forehead till 11, have a tea break at 12, throw around a few files at 12.30, break for lunch at 1, smoke an unfiltered cigarette at
2, break for tea at 3, sleep sitting down at 4 and go home at 5. It's a hard life!

B is for "Bhision". For some reason most of the Bengalis don't have good bhision. In fact in Kolkata most people are wearing spectacles all the time. The effects of this show in the city.

C is for "Chappell". This is the Bengali word for the Devil, for the worst form of evil. In the night mothers put their kids to sleep saying 'go to bed, or Chappei will come and take you away.'

D is for "Debashish". By an ancient law every fourth Bengali Child has to be named Debashish. So you have a Debashish everywhere and tying to get creative they are also called Deb,Debu, Deba with variations like Debnath and Deboprotim thrown in.

E is for "Eeesh". This is a very common Bengali exclamation made famous by Aishwarya Rai in the movie Devdas. It is estimated that on an average a Bengali uses eeesh 10,089 times every year. (That's counting eeesh and other eeesh-ish words).

F is for "Feesh". These are creatures that swim in rivers and seas and are a favourite food of the Bengalis. Despite the fact that a fish market has such strong smells, with one sniff a Bengali knows if a fish is all right. If not he will say 'eeesh what feeesh is theesh!'

G is for "Good name". Every Bengali Boy will have a good name like Debashish or Deboprotim and a pet name like Shontuda, Chonti, and Dinku.While every Bengali Girl will be Paromita or Protima as well as Shampa, Champa and Tuki. Basically your nickname is there to kiil your good
name.

H is for "Harmonium". The Bengali equivalent of a rock guitar. Take four Bengalis and a Harmonium and you have the successors to The Bheatles!

I is for "lleesh". This is a feeesh with 10,000 bones which would kill any ordinary person, but which the Bengalis eat with releeesh!

J is for "Jhola". No self respecting Bengali is complete without his Jhola. It is a shapeless cloth bag where he keeps all his belongings and he fits an amazing number of things in. Even as you read this there are 2 million jholas bobbling around Kolkata- and they all look exactly the
same!

K is for "Kee Kando". It used to be the favourite Bengali exclamation ill eeesh took over because of Aishwarya Rai (now Kee Kando's agent is trying to hire Bipasha Basu).

L is for "Lungi". People in Kolkata manage to play football and cricket wearing it. Now there is talk of a lungi expedition to Mt. Everest ..

M is for "Minibus". These are dangerous half buses whose antics would effortlessly frighten the living daylights out of Formula 1 race drivers.

N is for "Nangtoe". This is the Bengali word for Naked. It is the most interesting naked word in any language!

O is for "Oil". The Bengalis believe that a touch of mustard oil will cure anything from cold (oil in the nose), to earache (oil in the ear), to cough (oil on the throat) to piles (oil you know where!)

P is for "Phootball". This is always a phavourite phassion of the Kolkattan. Every Bengali is born an expert in this game. The two biggest clubs there are Mohunbagan and East Bengal and when
they play the city comes to a stop.

Q is for Queen. This really has nothing to do with the Bengalis or Kolkata, but it's the only Q word I could think of at this moment. There's also Quilt but they never use them in Kolkata.

R is for "Rabi Thakur". Many years ago Rabindranath got the Nobel Prize. This allows everyone in Kolkata to frame their acceptance speeches and walk with their head held high and look down at Delhi and Mumbai!

S is for "Sardarjee" whom Bengalis are very envious of because he is born with a semi-monkey cap on.

T is for "Trams". Hundred years later there are still trams in Kolkata. Of course if you are in a hurry it's faster to walk.

U is for "Ambrela". When a Bengali baby is born they are handed one.

V is for "Violence". Bengalis are the most non-violent violent people around. When an accident happens they will shout and scream and curse and abuse, but the last time someone actually hit someone was in 1979.

W is for "Water". For three months of the year the city is underwater and every year for the last 200 years the authorities are taken by surprise by this!

X is for "X mas". It's very big in Kolkata, with Park Street fully lit up.

Y is for "Yastarday". Which is always better than today for a Bengali.

Z is for "Jeebra", "Joo","Jip" and "Jylophone".

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Heard of Ants in Pants on the wedding night but this is ridiculous

BRANDON, FL (NBC) -- Kevin and Gail Gued were attacked by dozens of stinging ants in their honeymoon suite at the Country Inn & Suites in Brandon.

Kevin Gued says the ants started biting him as soon as he crawled between the sheets.

When he and Gail pulled the covers back they discovered hundreds of ants.

The hotel offered to move the Gueds to another room, but the couple declined and left.

They say all they want is for the Country Inn & Suites to pay their medical bills.

"We're just frustrated because I have bites all over my body, we're supposed to be going on our honeymoon, and I just don't feel that we were treated fair," said Kevin.

The hotel manager says that the ants were likely stirred up by construction crews working in the lot next to his building, and insists that his business doesn't have a bug problem.


All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

The joys of BBQ's, London, South Africa and Oz

I love my BBQ, I love barbequeing and there is nothing better I like than to cook for friends and family, sitting outside in the garden, large hunks of meat and off we go! Too bad I am in England where the wet and miserable weather means that BBQ's are more hits and misses than reality. My daughter calls a BBQ as a Babaque, since Baba cooks!, lol. So if you are ever in town and are free and the weather is fine (big ? there!), here's an open invite! :)

But here comes two reports about BBQ's. The first from the Nobel Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu who talks about a BBQ as one of the national ethos items, a cause for unity and something that draws the country together. I quote,

"Archbishop Desmond Tutu has become patron of South Africa's national barbecue day, declaring that the shared love of sizzling sausages over an open flame was a strong unifying force between blacks and whites in a still divided country.

The title "Patron of National Braai Day" – using the Afrikaans word for barbecue by which all South Africans refer to barbecues – added to the numerous honours bestowed upon the man regarded as South Africa's moral conscience."

Sounds lovely, what a great country, to have a national BBQ day!, I love the food in South Africa, the kind of meat they make is absolutely brilliant. Many a pleasant hour I have spent in the environs of Santown in Jo'Burg chomping my way through great hunks of meat! :)

but move over to the other side of the world to Australia where the great backyard is disappearing due to the pressures of population in the country and it took a Pom to point this out. This means that the great tradition of BBQ'ing is slowly disappearing which is a bit of a shame!

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Zimbabwe - now the bakeries are running out of wheat to make bread

See this report from the Guardian. The main bakery is now going to shut down its shop in Bulawayo. And the Naked Emperor Robert Mugabe is still being feted by his fellow kleptocrats and autocrats in Africa, given a free pass by the assorted liberals (see the number of column inches devoted to Zimbabwe or Congo in the various newspapers), the people who can do something are discredited by their stupidity in Iraq, and the United Nations is running around like the usual headless chicken. All this while this grotesque thief of a leader is running the country into the ground.

Read and Weep.

Zimbabwe's food crisis deepens as leading bakery forced to shutCris Chinaka and Nelson Banya in Harare
Thursday September 6, 2007

Guardian

Zimbabwe's main bakery said yesterday that bread shortages would worsen after closing one of its biggest outlets due to a lack of wheat, deepening a food crisis which a UN agency said was "acutely serious".

The closure followed the government's recent admission that it could not afford to pay for wheat from Mozambique.

Amid an economic crisis with runaway inflation and chronic food and fuel shortages, Robert Mugabe's government had planned to buy 36,000 tonnes of wheat from its neighbour to ease the bread shortage.

Lobels Bread, the country's biggest bread producer, has only two days' supply of wheat and has been forced to cut daily production to 40,000 loaves from 200,000 loaves in May, Lemmy Chikomo, the firm's operations director, told state media.

Mr Chikomo said that Lobels had shut its bakery in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second biggest city, on August 25 and had sent home hundreds of workers at its main factory in the capital, Harare.

"Flour availability has deteriorated, and this has forced us to use our strategic stocks since May. Now we are only left with two days' supply," he said.

Officials from the state-owned Grain Marketing Board, which is responsible for managing national wheat and maize stocks, were not immediately available for comment. The World Food Programme's Zimbabwe representative, Kevin Farrell, said it was seeking an additional £50m to deliver grain to southern districts, which are suffering most from the shortages.

Mr Farrell said a visit he made to the region showed the situation was getting "acutely serious".

"We aim to have, for distribution, just about 300,000 metric tonnes and we have about 60% of that, including pledges and donations," he told reporters after receiving a $3.5m (£1.75m) donation from the Canadian embassy in Harare.

Critics accuse Mr Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, of mismanaging the economy and destroying the agricultural sector through his government's seizure of white-owned commercial farms.

The seizures, which began in 2000, saw some of the country's most fertile land handed over to black people without farming skills and led to a drop in agricultural output in a country that once exported food to other parts of Africa.

Mr Mugabe accuses the west of sabotaging Zimbabwe's economy in retaliation for the seizures and working with the opposition to oust him. The economic crisis has worsened in the past three months, with the government imposing a price freeze on many consumer items to try to control inflation, currently above 7,600%.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Charity - Some uncharitable questions

Charity is pretty good. If you have the money to spare, whether 1 Euro or 1000 Pounds or 10000 Rupees or 1 million dollars, it is considered to be pretty good! But some questions arise.

1. Why is charitable giving tax deductible? A case can be made for both sides. The yes side says that you need to give financial incentives to people to give more and if you give £1 in tax rebates so that you get £3 back, so then it is a good deal for the tax payer, assuming that the charity is for the public good (and not for terrorism funding!) The no side says, this is detracting from the charitable business itself, if a person is determined to give charity, then the foregone tax savings should be thought as charity as well. Many people use charity as a tax saving instrument anyway!

2. What is charity to be spent on? Do you want the charity to be spent on an opera house? Or on providing free lunches to poor children? Do you want the charity money to be spent on constructing a huge sports stadium in London or the money will be better off used in Congo for feeding the starving children there? If you are ok with Congo, what about rehabilitating child soldiers? Or what about providing an opera house in Congo? Where is a good place?

3. Should charities advertise? Is charity a demand led business or supply led business? I sit down watching TV and I find advertisements for funds from Save the Children. Surely giving charity is my business, why are the charities pushing and advertising for funds? And why are they using charitable funds to ask for more charitable funds?

4. Should charities be professional or amateur? Many charities are professionally run, specially the large ones. They have full fledged operations, supply chains, factory operations, sales and distribution, advertising and public relations, you name it. Look at OXFAM and Christian AID. Are they companies or are they amateur operations? If they are professional companies, why are they getting tax benefits? And should charities have professional managers? or should bumbling amateurs be the right person to drive them?

5. Should donors be able to specify where and how money can be spend? I give money to Oxfam but specifiy that Oxfam can only use the money in Liberia. I give money to my alma maters but specify that the money has to go to a Library rather than scholarships for poor students. I also specify that the Library should be called after myself, The Bhaskar Dasgupta Library of Pretentious Learning and obnoxious charity.

6. Can the government be charitable, such as using the Lottery money? When the money is raised by a morally suspect activity such as lottery (which is nothing but legalised gambling on a probability event), can that really be used for morally good purposes? This is how a lottery works. In Nazi German concentration camps, there used to be a lottery of bread. Every camp of say 100 people would put aside a certain bread amount, say 100 grams which would sum up to 10 loaves of bread. The winner of the lottery would get 1 Loaf of bread (1 kilo) , the 9 remaining loaves (kilo's) was used by the commandant, the guards, the dogs and was used to pay for painting the gas chambers and the gardners. Still think lottery money is good money? What about capitalism money? can you use that aid money in communist cuba? How about Big Pharma charity? Can you use them for research funds in poor country? Knowing how grasping they are? How about technology funding from the evil Microsoft empire? Or how about funding from Bill Gates for malaria research?

7. Shouldnt Charities be transparent about why and who they are funding? You know how the Government of India provides information on foreign charitable giving to India? Here's the latest report. An extract from the report says,"The list of foreign donors is headed by the Gospel Fellowship Trust India, USA (Rs. 229.15 crores), followed by Gospel for Asia, USA (Rs 137.18 crores) Plan International, UK (Rs. 111.18 crores) Foundation Vincent E Ferrer, Spain (Rs 104.23 crores), and Christian Aid, UK (Rs 80.16 crores)." Curiously, the Gospel trusts do not have much of a web presence. Given the sheer importance and sensitivity of proselytisation in countries like India, do we need to be careful? Do we need transparency? Do we need public accounts of where and how charities are spending their money? What is a good amount of monies spend on administration compared to funds actually spend on the objective/recipient? 10%? 20%? or the usual 50%?

8. Can you reject charity money? When a certain Prince of Saudi Arabia offered $10 million to NY as charity after 9/11, the most almighty row broke out and the Mayor had to return the money. Tainted money? There has been no whisper of wrong doing about the Prince. He is the majority shareholder of another iconic American firm, the Citigroup. So it is fine for him to be the largest shareholder of the largest American financial firm measured in hundreds of billions of dollars but it is not ok for him to give $10 million?

Here's a fascinating article in the NYT of today which sparked these questions.

September 6, 2007

Age of Riches

Big Gifts, Tax Breaks and a Debate on Charity

By STEPHANIE STROM

Eli Broad, a billionaire businessman, has given away more than $650 million over the last five years, to Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to establish a medical research institute, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and to programs to improve the administration of urban schools and public education.

The rich are giving more to charity than ever, but people like Mr. Broad are not the only ones footing the bill for such generosity. For every three dollars they give away, the federal government typically gives up a dollar or more in tax revenue, because of the charitable tax deduction and by not collecting estate taxes.

Mr. Broad (rhymes with road) says his gifts provide a greater public benefit than if the money goes to taxes for the government to spend. “I believe the public benefit is significantly greater than the tax benefit an individual receives,” Mr. Broad said. “I think there’s a multiplier effect. What smart, entrepreneurial philanthropists and their foundations do is get greater value for how they invest their money than if the government were doing it.”

It is an argument made by many of the nation’s richest people. But not all of them. Take the investor William H. Gross, also a billionaire. Mr. Gross vigorously dismisses the notion that the wealthy are helping society more effectively and efficiently than government.

“When millions of people are dying of AIDS and malaria in Africa, it is hard to justify the umpteenth society gala held for the benefit of a performing arts center or an art museum,” he wrote in his investment commentary this month. “A $30 million gift to a concert hall is not philanthropy, it is a Napoleonic coronation.”

Elaborating in an interview, Mr. Gross said he did not think the public benefits from philanthropy were commensurate with the tax breaks that givers receive. “I don’t think we’re getting the bang for the buck for gifts to build football stadiums and concert halls, with all due respect to Carnegie Hall and other institutions,” he said. “I don’t think the public would vote for spending tax dollars on those things.”

The billionaires’ differing views epitomize a growing debate over what philanthropy is achieving at a time when the wealthiest Americans control a rising share of the national income and, because of sharp cuts in personal taxes, give up less to government.

Familiar Recipients

A common perception of philanthropy is that one of its central purposes is to alleviate the suffering of society’s least fortunate and therefore promote greater equality, taking some of the burden off government. In exchange, the United States is one of a handful of countries to allow givers a tax deduction. In essence, the public is letting private individuals decide how to allocate money on their behalf.

What qualifies for that tax deduction has broadened over the 90 years since its creation to include everything from university golf teams to puppet theaters — even an organization established after Hurricane Katrina to help practitioners of sadomasochism obtain gear they had lost in the storm.

Roughly three-quarters of charitable gifts of $50 million and more from 2002 through March 31 went to universities, private foundations, hospitals and art museums, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

Of the rest, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation accounted for half on the center’s list. That money went primarily to improve the lives of the poor in developing countries. Valuable as that may be, it also meant that the American public effectively underwrote several billion dollars worth of foreign aid by private individuals, even though poll after poll shows Americans are at best ambivalent about using tax dollars in such assistance.

In contrast, few gifts of that size are made to organizations like the Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity and America’s Second Harvest, whose main goals are to help the poor in this country. Research shows that less than 10 percent of the money Americans give to charity addresses basic human needs, like sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry and caring for the indigent sick, and that the wealthiest typically devote an even smaller portion of their giving to such causes than everyone else.

“Donors give to organizations they are close to,” said H. Art Taylor, president and chief executive of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance. “So they give to their college or university, or maybe someone close to them died of a particular disease so they make a big gift to medical research aimed at that disease. How many of the superrich have that kind of a relationship with a soup kitchen? Or a homeless shelter?”

Philanthropists like Mr. Broad say that looking at philanthropy solely as a means of ameliorating need is too narrow. “If you look historically at what Carnegie did with creating a library system and the Rockefellers in creating Rockefeller University, I think it does a lot more for society than simply supporting those in need,” Mr. Broad said.

About 2 percent of the money Mr. Broad has given away through his two foundations over the last five years, or $15 million, went to support organizations like the United Way and the United Jewish Fund, which serve needy people as well as the middle class. The foundations also have given money to groups that help homeless children, and the International Rescue Committee.

Still, Mr. Broad dedicates his biggest gifts to areas he thinks lack government support, like the $25 million he gave to the University of Southern California last year to found an institute for integrative biology and stem cell research, or the tens of millions he dedicated to complete the new Disney concert hall in Los Angeles.

Like many major philanthropists, Mr. Broad said he considered such gifts an illustration of the Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” The argument is that simply taking care of the poor does nothing to eliminate poverty and that they will ultimately benefit more from efforts to, say, find cures for the diseases that afflict them or improve public education.

As for Mr. Gross, despite his uncharacteristically fiery criticism of what he calls “philanthropic ego gratification,” some of the large gifts he and his wife, Sue, have made are not so different from those made by other billionaires. He has given millions to a local hospital, for example, and for stem cell research.

And in 2005 the couple gave roughly $25 million to Duke, Mr. Gross’s alma mater.

But the Duke gift illustrates Mr. Gross’s priorities. The money is almost exclusively for scholarships.

“Universities have their own thing going — they want to build infrastructure and endowments and perpetuate their system, which isn’t necessarily in the social interest,” Mr. Gross said. “Scholarships get a little more down to the ground level.”

Taking Aim at the Tax Code

The investor Warren E. Buffett also voices strong feelings about how donations are used.

When Mr. Buffett pledged $30 billion to the Gates Foundation, he included a little-noted requirement that the foundation spend each increment of the gift he hands over, in addition to its own annual legally mandated spending. If Mr. Buffett transfers $1.3 billion of stock to it, it must spend every nickel within a year.

“I wanted to make sure,” he said, “that to the extent I was providing extra money to them, it didn’t just go to build up the foundation size further but that it was put to use.”

The Gates Foundation’s work is largely international, although a portion of its spending supports efforts to improve urban education and access to college, so Mr. Buffett’s money is unlikely to be used to address basic needs in this country.

“I think the government ought to make sure that all the people here who drew short straws have a decent minimum,” Mr. Buffett said. “We moved toward that with Social Security, but we could go a lot further now.”

He does not regard his gift as charitable and expects no tax benefit from it, in part because he has credit for past donations that he has not used.

Rather, he calls his sister, Doris Buffett, the “real philanthropist” in the family. Ms. Buffett runs an organization, the Sunshine Lady Foundation, that helps the needy pay for college, medical expenses, mortgages, glasses and cars.

Mr. Buffett recently has brought attention to himself as a critic of inequities in the nation’s tax system, which offers the wealthy better tax breaks for charitable giving than it does the average taxpayer. Deductions for charitable giving can be claimed only by the fewer than half of all taxpayers who itemize, and those falling in higher tax brackets get bigger deductions for cash gifts.

The charitable deduction cost the government $40 billion in lost tax revenue last year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, more than the government spends altogether on managing public lands, protecting the environment and developing new energy sources.

Rob Reich, an assistant professor of political science and ethics in society at Stanford, goes so far as to say that the tax code promotes inequities through the breaks it provides for charitable giving.

Take schools. The Woodside Elementary School in Woodside, Calif., where the median family income is $196,505, raised $7,065 a pupil in 1998 from charitable contributions to a foundation it created, according to Professor Reich’s research. Across the San Francisco Bay, a similar foundation to support the Oakland Unified School District, where the median family income is $44,384, raised $138 a pupil that year.

In effect, the government is subsidizing a system that enhances inequities between poor and wealthy public schools, Professor Reich said.

Raising Questions

Legislators, regulators and others are asking more questions about exactly what charities do with the money they are given.

“When foundations, corporations and individuals give money to the opera,” said Xavier Becerra, a California Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee who represents a district in Los Angeles populated largely by young working-class immigrant families, “my folks are very unlikely to benefit from those forgone tax dollars that could have been used for health care, for after-school programs for kids, for help in getting access to college education.”

Yet Mr. Becerra himself is a beneficiary of one of the country’s wealthiest charities, Stanford, which has a $15.2 billion endowment and gave him a scholarship. “There is no way my parents could have afforded for me to go there without the generous financial aid the university gave me,” he said.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Grover G. Norquist, whose Americans for Tax Reform lobbies for lower taxes, suggests taxing nonprofit hospitals that cannot demonstrate that they provide significant care for the poor.

“I’m not aware of anything they do that a for-profit hospital doesn’t do in terms of providing free care,” Mr. Norquist said.

Like other billionaire philanthropists, Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, has given his largest gifts to his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1999, he donated $32 million for a computer science center bearing his name, and he pledged $100 million this year to support basic research that he hopes will reduce dependency on carbon-based fuels.

But when the university suggested using some of that gift to put up another new building named for him and hire new professors, he said no.

“I told them to use the basement of an existing building and some of the really smart people they already have,” Mr. Siebel said.

Attracting philanthropic support to fight substance abuse is one of the biggest challenges in fund-raising, but Mr. Siebel has donated more than $15 million to the Meth Project, an organization he created. “I think we’ll save a lot of lives in the end,” Mr. Siebel said. “Isn’t that what philanthropy is supposed to be about?”

He has also given the Salvation Army more than $18 million over the last six years, mostly to support services for the homeless. He said he gives to the organization because of its low administrative costs and lack of frills.

“When I first started doing this, I made a contribution to some organization, Harvest something or other, I think, that was working on homelessness,” Mr. Siebel said. “The next thing I knew, I got a plaque in the mail and an invitation to an awards ceremony.”

He added: “I never gave them another nickel. What were they spending money on plaques for?”

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Inseparable toddlers make a run for it - awwwwww

As my readers would know, recently I had the dubious pleasure of attending my little daughter's first play date. She absolutely is inseparable from her friend, Jules. And Jules apparently loves her right back. There is a picture of these two pre-schoolers up on my facebook profile. And here is a story today which makes you go "awwww".

ABERDEEN Two three-year-olds ran away together because they were being split into different nursery groups. Erin Toner and Bradley Lindsay have been inseparable for the past year and cried when they heard they would no longer be in the same class. The pair escaped the playgroup while their supervisor’s back was turned and made towards a busy road. They were stopped when another parent came across them by chance. Erin’s mother, Emma Morrison, said: “Bradley said he was taking Erin away on holiday with him.” The mothers are trying to get them put into the same class.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

MI5 chief held up for an hour by airport immigration - WHY?

So the MI5 chief Jonathan Evans was held up for an hour by Heathrow Immigration. For those who do not know, MI5 is the nodal domestic intelligence / anti-terrorism agency. See here for a detailed overview. And so the head of the main chap is reduced to queueing up at Heathrow's notorious immigration hall to get in. The only other immigration hall which is worse than Heathrow's is Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport which is dark, dingy and full of green suited stony faced ghouls.

But this is gobsmacking for two reasons. One is that the main gateway to the United Kingdom is so poor that visitors have to queue up for an hour to even get to the immigration control desk, then the whole long palaver to collect baggage, walk out, get a car, and then sit for another few hours in traffic or suffer from stinky slow underground carriages.

Well, BAA, the firm which owns Heathrow, is notorious for poor inefficient service. I still fail to realise why the government is dithering while Rome is burning? The government should realise that the privatisation of BAA was a spectacular mistake although not at par with the privatisation of the railways and underground. But still, just imagine the cost to the economy. Penny wise Pound Foolish.

The second thing which amazed me was that a senior British official will queue in the first place. If you are in almost any other European, American or Emerging market, this kind of person would have his/her own channel through which he will be zoomed through while ordinary mortals like me would simply sit and smell the miasma in the immigration hall. Only in the UK will queueing be required for even senior officials.

Remember the stink when Tony Blair jumped the queue on the road and drove on the bus lane? People were not upset it was Tony Blair but the fact that somebody actually jumped the queue.

But seriously, Heathrow has to be fixed and fixed very quickly otherwise the UK will suffer even more. Everybody is moaning about Heathrow but for some reason, the Prime Minister is not really doing much about it.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

The children of war - the abandoned, detested and spat upon children

Soldiers being soldiers, during wars, they sow their wild oats and from these wild oats, small children frequently come up and their lives are generally made hell. We have seen this with the round eyed children in Japan post the World War II.

We have seen this with the black and white children of the american soldiers who left them behind after the Vietnam War and the Korean War. We have seen the spate of babies born to Russian soldiers rapes across a swathe of Eastern Europe and Germany in the dying days of World War II.

Each of these children had a horrific upbringing (if they managed to live past the pregnancy/attempted abortions), many were detested by their own mothers and families, they were spat upon, discriminated against, and and and.

I had read about all these poor unfortunate children before but reading this review brought another forgotten corner to light. These are the children of the German Soldiers in Norway. We know how the mistresses and children of German soldiers in France, Belgium and Netherlands were treated (very badly). The women were frequently tonsured completely, kicked and abused, chased out of town. Less said about their children the better.

We do have a very difficult question. Do we visit the sins of the fathers on the children? Specially if the children are innocent? How long does historical restitution last? Can discrimination go so far? This is also related to discrimination and affirmative action.

Remember the quote about restitution which goes something like, "my grandfather didnt collect compensation from your grandfather but I am here to collect and you are here to pay. Difficult questions none the less.

Again, this very sad poignant story meant that this will go into my to be read file.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Childhood@h-net.msu.edu (June, 2007)

Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen, eds. _Children of World War II: The Hidden Enemy Legacy_. Oxford: Berg, 2005. viii + 296 pp. Notes, references, index. $28.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84520-207-1.

Reviewed for H-Childhood by Richard Ivan Jobs, Department of History, Pacific University.

Children in Danger or Dangerous Children?

Few academic books could enjoy such propitious timeliness as this collection of essays. The essays resulted from a research project begun in Norway in 2001 to explore the history of children born of Norwegian mothers and German fathers during World War II. These children, now in their sixties, have been receiving considerable media coverage lately as they have organized to press their rights and seek damages for discrimination from Norway in the European Court of Human Rights. In the past year, major print and television media outlets, even in the United States, have covered this story as these "war children" from Norway, Germany, and elsewhere have sought to make their stories heard through organized activism. These essays give voice to these historical subjects through ethnographic interviews and personal testimonies as well as study the impact, experience, and variety of state policies regarding these ongoing reminders of the war's legacy. Thus, the book as a whole reveals, in a transnational and comparative fashion, the ways in which these children and their mothers were categorized and stigmatized as the object of both benevolent and harsh state policies and social pressures.
Importantly, the comparative aspect not only juxtaposes nation-states, but also examines the differences and continuities between the periods of Nazi occupation and the postwar years of liberation.

The editors, Kjersti Ericsson and Eva Simonsen, used the project in Norway as a base to work toward an international focus, resulting in this collection of fourteen essays which cover the prelude to the war via Republican children in Spain to Black German "Occupation" children of the war's aftermath. The essays, however, mostly focus on the offspring from German soldiers and local mothers throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. As is usually the case with such collections, the burden to make the essays cohere effectively falls to the editors, who, in their introduction and epilogue, have done a marvelous job of laying out the meaningful themes and historical significance of the topics under study. This is particularly noteworthy here, because several of the essays fail to fully capitalize on their interesting material with persuasive interpretation. That is to say, all the essays are interesting for the information they provide, but they are rather uneven in narrative quality and historical analysis. Perhaps this is a consequence of the disciplinary methodology of the individual authors, but without a descriptive list of contributors, this reader is left guessing. Still, Ericsson and Simonsen have a done a very good job of laying out the complexities, problems, and historical significance that these essays reveal collectively.

This compilation shows in new ways the contradictions and twisted logic of Nazi racial and social policies, but also, importantly, the problematic ways in which these children were managed in the postwar period in their respective countries. The various postwar national policies regarding these offspring of German soldiers are the focus of many articles in the book and show the range of responses possible. Thus state policy intersects with lived experience. Kåre Olsen's interesting opening chapter uses the Norwegian Lebensborn maternity home as a case study to explore how Nazi policy would place the children of German soldiers and local mothers on a racial scale that differentiated "valuable" populations of northern Europe from those of lesser quality, from the East for example. Thus, the Lebensborn maternity homes, designed to care for the mothers and their offspring in ways that would promote a healthy Aryan population, was the logical inverse of the genocidal efforts to eliminate racial undesirables. But after the war, these children became a national political problem for Norway because of the hostility directed towards them as a result of their German paternity. Lars Borgersrud examines the Norwegian War Child Committee established in 1945 and its efforts to deny these women and their children citizenship and to deport them, if not to Germany, then to Sweden or even Australia. Thus, these women and children landed in a legal limbo and were denied their rights and citizenship--the subject of the current legal suit. Meanwhile, Arne Øland's chapter shows how the Danish government succeeded in concealing the German paternities of several thousand children born during and shortly after the war. His chapter combines a historical narrative followed by extended personal testimonies, but it ends without any sort of conclusion or interpretive analysis that connects his policy survey with these biographical sketches. Thus, the reader is left wanting the author to advance an interpretation or argument in addition to providing information and anecdote. Still, the official silence in Denmark was a marked contrast to the overt machinations in Norway to be rid of the problem altogether.
Fabrice Virgili shows that in France it was felt that the children were French, but that due to their problematic paternity, they ought to be sheltered from social ostricization. Hence the French state responded in a protectionist and pronatalist manner, while in the Netherlands, these children were viewed as a threat to Dutch society and the object of occasional violence, as recounted by Monika Deiderichs.

Particularly interesting to this reader was the persistence of eugenic social policies and scientific endeavor in the wake of the war and its terrible racial legacies. Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria's article on the children of German women and African American soldiers clearly demonstrates how this racial/anthropological scientific enterprise continued well into the postwar period as these children were repeatedly put under professional study in ways reminiscent of the Nazi regime.
While not seeking to eliminate these children from the German population, the study of their racial difference did help determine social policy of the 1950s, emphasizing how they ought to be treated as different from the more purely German children. The policies of socialization, then, were meant to make up for this racial difference.
This theme comes through elsewhere, too, as states were worried that local children with soldier fathers might be too "German," which could be displayed, for example, in a propensity for marching. Hence, psychiatrists and other professionals across Europe engaged in diagnosis and remedy at the service of the state to determine if these children were in danger or themselves dangerous--perhaps even depraved due to their German paternity. It becomes evident over the course of the book that there were two competing paradigms regarding what might become of these children due either to their biological heritage or socialization.
Thus, these children became valued for what they offered as objects of scientific study in the postwar nature/nurture debate. Michael Richards looks at similar themes in prewar Spain. Since his essay is neither about World War II nor the German paternity of children, it is something of an outlier in this collection. Nonetheless, what is interesting is that the dilemma for Republican children in Francisco Franco's Spain was not about race or nationality so much as ideology. Many of these children were secretly given to families sympathetic to the new regime, because "it was concluded that 'Marxism' had 'psycho-biological roots'
and that women were particularly prone to this threatening 'bio-psychic'
conditioning" (p. 123). The danger to Spanish children lay within the ideology of the familial household, and particularly with the mother, thus efforts were made to counteract these pseudo-biological leftist tendencies among Republican children through the socialization and moral puericulture of Nationalist households.

Some chapters, like Dorothee Schmitz-Köster's on German Lebensborn homes, read more like reports than interpretative essays. While Ebba D.
Drohlshagen's ruminations on the terminology for these children are interesting and full of data, they again lack the interpretive bite of a compelling essay. Anette Warring's chapter on the plight of Danish women as sexual collaborators is a story familiar to historians of the period, though of course the particulars may be new. The issue of women's sexual practices during the war is a recurring theme throughout, and while related, it leads some essays away from the valuable contribution of this book and its focus on children into the well-trod territory of women, sex, and the war. However, the chapter by Kjersti Ericsson and Dag Ellingsen explicitly shows how the stigmatization of the mother affected the offspring, or as they write, "not only were the 'sins' of the mothers visited upon their children: so also were the sins against the mothers" (p. 99) as they suffered through violence both symbolic and real. In an interesting twist, Regina Mühlhäuser shows how the children of German fathers in the occupied eastern territories served to stigmatize the soldiers as lacking appropriate racial awareness. Owing to the children's "racially mixed" nature, the manner in which the Nazi state dealt with these children while in control of Poland was a marked contrast to those of Norway. In Poland there was a danger of either the dilution of German blood or the dangerous improvement of the subject population due to the infusion of German traits. The Nazi policies in Bohemia and Moravia lay somewhere in between those of Norway and Poland.
Michal Šimunek shows how the Nazi protectorate there adopted policies that it hoped would be a long-term eugenic breeding program for the systematic change and replacement of hereditary traits. Because of the already high degree of intermarriage between ethnic Czechs and Germans in the Sudetenland, the goal became carefully selective breeding to diminish the Czech qualities of children while augmenting the German ones.

This collection, as a whole, certainly adds to our understanding of the lasting impact and human legacy of the war. As the editors state, "the war did not only take lives, it also created lives" (p. 1). Taken as a whole, we also see how various policies of intervention in the postwar period anticipate or parallel the proliferation of the welfare state.
The suitability of mothers, the social scientific study of children, and the adoption of policies to develop and provide for these young charges all presages the expansion of the European state into familial affairs as the continent struggled to recover from the effects of the war. This book is, without a doubt, the most complete study of these war children to date, filling a significant void both in the history of the war and the history of children, but it also suggests numerous directions for new research or for a truly transnational monograph to examine the issue comparatively.


Copyright ? 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

Say what? To combat terrorism - push for evangelism?

Thanks to Venkat again for bringing this to my attention.

This is so bizarre, simply cannot understand what the heck is this chap on about. I can only suspect that the guy was smoking banned substances. I don't even know where to start to deconstruct this. When did we find out that Christianity and Islam are competing against each other? other than in the diseased minds of the terrorists and perhaps this chap?

His history sucks as well, he has forgotten the Kingdom of Granada, the movement into the African countries which had missionaries and christian populations, Philippines, etc. etc. So it has expanded into an European Christianised nation. Also the immigration from Muslim countries can be positioned as the entry of Islam into Christian Europe.

He is positioning the current terrorist events in India as a reaction to Hindu fundamentalism which shows even further lack of history knowledge (has he forgotten Operation Gibraltar?).

He is talking about evangelical Islam establishing its universities, Say what? which one is that then? the Advanced University of Burqa and Jinns in Helmand Province, Chancellor Mullah Omar and Dean of Studies, Osama Bin Laden? Or is he pointing to the Lal Masjid Madrassah? And he wants Islam to setup a secular university?

And he also shows that he also does not know about the history of the old universities that he mentions. Oxford as a centre of evangelism Christians? Similarly, there is no evidence that Harvard was formed by or for evangelical people or purposes. Perhaps he has been smoking banned substances.

Reading his profile on Wikipedia now confirms that he is of the loony side of the world and is eminently ignorable. Just read his conclusion!!!!

Very amusing, Kancha, please keep these coming, this provided me with some major chuckles!



Religious terrorism: The way out
Kancha Ilaiah

The best way to get out of the fundamentalist morass is to work out an evangelical agenda says Kancha Ilaiah.

The Hyderabad blasts ripped open the vulnerability of all city centres anywhere in the country and in the world. Terrorism blowing off the lives of innocent people moving on the course of their day to day life cannot be stopped by any state as a bomb could be planted anywhere and that could blow off any number of people. For all the terrorist attacks in the world fundametalist Islamic forces are shown as the source. While the other sources of terrorism need to be investigated and non-religious reasons for such terrorist mind formation need to be brought out.

Any operators of terrorism need to be prepared for sacrifice including the instant death of persons involved. Two obvious examples were the plane pilots of 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre and also the human bomb that exploded to kill Rajiv Gandhi. If the LTTE kind of terrorism originated out of nationality struggles, the other modes of terrorist struggles seem to have emerged out of religious challenges or insecurities.

If the Islamic fundamentalist forces were the real source of terrorist attacks in the Indian sub-continent and elsewhere we must see why this is happening from that society? Why not from Christian society or why not from Buddhist society?
Even to plant bombs at public places the terrorists not only prepare for death, while preparing to kill others, they do a lot of research about the places, the planting of bombs and lot of strategic planning should also go along with it. For example, how much planning must have gone into using of airplanes, for hijacking them and training the people for that massive task with known prospects of their own death in the 9/11 attack, for that matter for the Hyderabad attack?

In this post-capitalist globalised world, Christianity and Islam are competing with each other. Ever since Islam captured Constantinople and gradually transformed Turkey into an Islamic nation, it did not expand into any European-Christianised nation. It also could not expand into the Buddhist world. But subsequent to that period it mainly expanded into Hindu Indian sub-continent. The main reason for its expansion in Hindu Indian sub-continent seems to be the caste system and its easy convertability into Islam.

Certainly there could have been evangelical Islamic teams like Sufis working for such massive conversions in this part of the world. Islam now ceased to be a competitive evangelical religion and its expansion in India has slowed down quite significantly. In the present democratic India it suffers from the fear of minoritism. In the post-Independence India instead of Islam, Christianity has been growing and that is because of its evangelical agenda.

There is a feeling among the evangelical Christians that India is a place for expansion as it is suffering from caste and untouchability. Though both Islam and Christianity are facing the violent resistance of the organised- upper caste led Hindutva politico-spiritual forces, very organised Islamic fundamentalist groups seem to have chosen terrorist attacks as a checkmate to Hindu resistance in India.

We can see a major contradiction between evangelical Christianity and Hindu fundamentalism. But Christianity seems to think that an open evangelical challenge based on caste discrimination is a best checkmate to Hindutva fundamentalism. Since Hinduism cannot become an evangelical religion as it is based on Karma and caste it has no scope to challenge such democratic competitiveness in the sphere of religion.

In Islam those youth who are willing to sacrifice for the sake of their religion would have been a great source for its expansion if it were to choose an open democratic evangelical path.

In fact, religious evangelism found the need for negotiating with scientific discoveries and innovative techniques of propaganda. This method of spreading of religious ideologies proved to be very positive and development oriented. From King Ashoka's earliest evangelical efforts changed the conditions of ancient India and other countries like China and Srilanka. In the Christian world from the days of geographical discoveries, Renaissance and Reformation evangelism played a crucial role in expanding science and applying it for human advancement and also spread of that religion.
An evangelical Islam would have established its own advanced universities. Many forget the fact that Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia and so many great Euro-American universities started as evangelical theological centres.
The Islamic world did not build globally competitive and scientifically matching theological or secular universities because an open democratic theological and scientific discourse is not there on their agenda.

The best way for getting out of the present fundamentalist and terrorist morass of any religion is to work out an evangelical agenda of its own. Even the Shia and Sunni bloody fights within Islam can find a solution in evangelism. They can democratically compete with one another as Protestantism and Catholicism compete. All the youth who are wasting their energies around terrorist activities could be drawn for positive and democratic expansion of their religion. Then their abilities to sacrifice, investigate, discover things would be put for a positive use, of course, for their own religion and also societies at large.


All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Why are EU lobbyists refusing to come clean on their funding?

Now this is quite curious, no? Why are the EU Lobbyists refusing to open up their books to make it clear as to who is funding them? I support the commissioner, go for it, get them to open books and have some transparency on who is funding whom. I am a taxpayer and if there are parties out there who are influencing my life through influencing legislation, I want and need to know.

See this article from EurActive, some extracts given here.

Faced with a boycott from public-affairs firms in Brussels over revealing their fees in a new public register, Anti-fraud Commissioner Siim Kallas has insisted that financial disclosure was a non-negotiable part of his transparency proposals, due next year.

In a speech held at Nottingham University on 3 March 2005, Administrative Affairs and Anti-Fraud Commissioner Siim Kallas launched the idea of a transparency initiative concentrating on three key areas:

• Increasing the financial accountability of EU funding;
• strengthening personal integrity and independence of EU institutions, and;
• imposing stricter controls on lobbying.

Since then, the debate has tended to focus on the transparency of lobbying and the issue of whether to regulate the activities of the estimated 15,000 professionals seeking to influence decision-making in Brussels: public affairs consultants, lawyers, and activists of all kinds.

Issues:

Designing practical rules for financial disclosure of lobbying activities in Brussels is the final and perhaps highest hurdle in the way of Commissioner Kallas's initiative to make the EU more open and transparent to the general public.

Last month, Brussels's largest public-affairs companies - represented by umbrella group EPACA - refused to participate in a proposed voluntary register because it would have forced them to disclose the names of their clients and the amount of fees they receive (EurActiv 23/08/07).

But Kallas said he will not bow to pressure and was seeking practical solutions to the problem. "Without financial disclosure, this whole exercise loses credibility," the Commissioner told a group of Brussels-based journalists last week (30 August). "There must be financial disclosure. We will fight to have an acceptable solution to this question."

Latest & next steps:

• Oct. 2007: Commission to present study by the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA) on the "professional ethics of holders of public office", including the executive power, central banks and courts of justice. The study, Kallas said, will give an overview of problems that can arise across 20 EU member states covering four main areas: Conflicts of interest, revolving doors, gifts and spouses.
• Oct. 2007: Commission to present study and proposed measures to a Parliament hearing on lobbying issues.
• Spring 2008: Commission to present proposal for lobbyists' register.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!