Saturday, March 5

Urine

Urine is a curious bodily fluid, which is frequently made a butt of ewwww and ick jokes and expressions, but I somehow think this has been overdone. While reading this: and I quote:

What are the pros and cons of using camel urine as a medicament? The question was recently tackled in the journal Dirasat – a peer-reviewed research journal published by the Deanship of Academic Research, University of Jordan. In Vol 37, No 1, 2010, authors Mohammad A. Al-Natshah, and Isma’eel M. Al-Braishi, examine the history and philosophical aspects of its use in their paper: A Look at the Tradition Narrated by Okal and Oraynah, Medical Treatment by Impurities Filthy Things where they explain:

“Treatment by camels urine in particular is permissible by sharia scholars. As for being pure, the Sharia scholars were in disagreement as some of they said its pure while others said they are impure. Those who supported using it for treatment rested at the fact that it can be administered if patient is very ill though medical products are so advanced. The research goes a head by narrating, discussing and giving evidence, that the camels urine is impure but despite that filthy things can be used in pharmaceuticals.” [sic, various]

Building on the historical guidelines, practical progress in applied camel urine usage has also recently been made. Research by Dr. Faten Abdel-Rahman Khorshid, associate professor at the King Fahd Medical Research Center, Department of Medical Biology, Faculty of Medicine, Medical Center, King Abdulaziz University (KAAU), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has determined that camel urine contains nano-particles which might be effective against certain types of cancerous cells. The ‘active ingredient’ in the urine – identified by its codename PM701 – has already been tested in humans: See: Khorshid, F., H. Alshazly, A. Al Jefery and A.M.M. Osman, 2010. Dose escalation phase I study in healthy volunteers to evaluate the safety of a natural product PM701. Journal of Pharmacology and Toxicology, 5 ( 3 ): 91 – 97, 2010.
In order to further promote its medical potential in the fight against cancer worldwide, professor Khorshid has also applied for a swathe of international patents. Here is the US application – covering “an absolutely novel use of camel urine“ – it focuses on PM701 obtained from the adult single-humped Arabian camel (Camelus dromedarius) found roaming natural pastures near Jeddah.  ‘
Separation and formulation of bioactive fraction and subfraction from camel urine work as anticancer agent‘ (US patent app. 2009/0297622 A1)

What people dont realise is that urine is a sterile by product, it does not have any toxic materials. People have drunk urine as a medicine like the famous Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai. People drink processed urine on the space station after processing it. As a matter of fact, quite a lot of normal drinking water also contains processed urine. There’s a thought for the homeopaths who believe that molecules leave behind memories when diluted to hell and beyond.

Urine can also be used as an emergency medicine if you get hit by jellyfish. And I didnt know that urine shares many properties with amniotic fluid. Go figure. Its also considered to have therapeutic values in various Hindu sacred books. And cow urine been made into a cola!

Urine has also been used to make gunpowder, again because of the presence of nitrogen compounds in it and that makes saltpeter crystals which in turn is used to make gunpowder. So the next time somebody says to you when you have a lump, do you have a gun in your pocket, just say, yep, and i can make gunpowder as well.

Some even take a bath in it, here are dinka tribespeople…

Then again, its also been used as a protest vehicle. What happened to the good old days of using shoes, eh?

Friday, March 4

Nickel talking about Silver

I was sent a notification about a Lecture as below,

Date: Monday, 28 February 2011
Time: 17.00
Title: Exotic silverware during the Han period
Speaker: Dr Lukas Nickel (SOAS),
Venue: G50, Main Building, SOAS 

Just found the juxtaposition of the name of the professor, Nickel, talking about silver :) very apt, eh?

Thursday, March 3

Teach First

Well, I have been working with SIFE LSE to get them working with the teachers in the teach first organisation. The concept behind teach first is to take 500-600 absolutely brilliant teachers per year, give them individual coaches, give them a good grounding and then deploy them to the most challenging and difficult secondary schools in the country. The SIFE team is working to get the trading game into the schools via this channel.

But besides this, I thought that I should get a bit involved as well, so have put in a bid to be a coach for one of the teachers. Lets see how that works out. I am quite excited about this opportunity to work closely with these Brits who will teach for England. Now that’s the kind of passion and commitment that is rare in this world and if I can help in some little way, so be it.

Your feet in heels

How your feet do in heels.

Look at the stresses, bloody hell, and women go through this every day? !!!!!

Wednesday, March 2

Conditions of nationality

This bewildered me. I quote:

They need to have iqamas (residence permits) and obtain exit-reentry visas every time they want to leave the country.

Under the citizenship rules and regulations, children born to Saudi women with foreign husbands are not automatically entitled to Saudi passports at birth.

Boys can, however, apply to obtain the nationality when they are 18, while girls can only get it if they marry Saudi men.

The boys should be born in the Kingdom and lived here until they are 16 years of age. Saudi men married to foreign women do not face such a problem. Their children are automatically entitled to citizenship at birth.

Children born to Saudi women and foreign fathers need sponsorship.

Al-Sharif said many Saudi mothers register their sons and daughters under their sponsorship as drivers and housemaids regardless of their education in order to save them from deportation.

“These particular job titles will prevent their sons and daughters from getting proper jobs and prevent the mother from recruiting a driver or a housemaid from outside,” he added.

“These children feel humiliated in their motherland, the very place they were born in.”

Al-Sharif said that if the mother was able to register her children as companions to her, they would not be granted work permits regardless of their financial needs.

Al-Sharif said the husband would not have declared in his iqama that he is married to a Saudi, while the wife will not have made the same declaration in her civil records. “They have to have their marriage contract with them always to prove that they are husband and wife,” he said.

He also noted that daughters from such marriages are given cards when they are 18 years old stating that they should be treated like Saudi citizens, but added this would not allow them to work.

He also noted that foreign husbands would not be given any preferential treatment when they apply for Saudi nationality, no matter how long he remains married.

Al-Sharif said Saudi men who marry foreign women without permission from the authorities concerned have a different kind of problem. “They find great difficulties in documenting their marriage contracts or getting their wives and children into the Kingdom,” he said.

Al-Sahrif said children born to Saudi mothers and foreign fathers also have problems in obtaining free medical treatment in government hospitals.

He said the society has come across cases in which children from such marriages were not allowed to obtain their mothers’ pensions or social security assistance.

He claimed that children born to Saudi women and Palestinian men are not even allowed to apply for Saudi citizenship.

Simply bewildering why this kind of gender based discrimination would occur at this day and age. At one point, the UK also treated women differently from men but thankfully this has been resolved now. For example, if a British woman married a foreign man, her British citizenship would be lost but not so if you were a British Man marrying a foreign woman. There are still gender based differences, see here for example.

Tuesday, March 1

Where the hell did all the money go?

This was a very illuminating post on the situation with UK Debt. All that inflow from the empire, the North Sea Oil, all that and where the hell did all that money go?

We owned $4.25 billion to USA at the end of WW1. UK defaulted on this.

We took $435 billion for free from USA in lend lease and another $65 billion at 2% from USA as well as $15bn from Canada.

Unbelievable. And we are still spending like a drunken sailor. What the hell is this country doing with its financials? Why are the combined set of politicians being so stupid? Bloody hell.

Mishraism gets a slam

My ferociously erudite and diabolically brilliant friend, Salil Tripathi knocks the socks off a rather strange whiney article on India and China’s progress written by that strange character, Pankaj Mishra. I have to admit, I have yet to understand why he is rated that well, I mean, d’oh. Anyway, Salil writes back to the Mishra article. I quote this:

To put Indian growth in perspective: when it grew at 7.5% last year, India's income rose by an amount higher than the total income of Portugal ($194 billion), Norway ($183 billion), or Denmark ($178 billion) that year. It was the equivalent of adding a rich country's economy to a very poor one. More important, India has reduced the number of people living in abject poverty, even though its population has increased significantly. Once again, facts: In 1991, 36% of India's 846 million people, or a little over 304 million people, lived on less than one dollar a day, the measure economists at the World Bank use to define absolute poverty. That number - of 304 million people - represented possibly the highest-ever agglomeration of poor people in the world in one country at any time. Ten years later, the proportion of India's poorest dropped to 26% - a decline not only of 10 percentage points, but also in absolute terms. By 2006, India's population had risen to 1.02 billion people. If the proportion of poor is still at 26%, it means 267 million people now lived in absolute poverty. What it also means is that even though India added 156 million more people to its population during that decade - a figure combining the total populations of Britain, France and Spain put together - during that period, the number of poor people in India actually fell by 37 million, or the size of Poland. Had the poverty level remained the same, there would have been 361 million poor in India. Instead, the Indian economy had lifted 94 million people out of absolute poverty during that period - that's 12 million more people than the entire population of Germany, the most populous state in the European Union. Such growth would simply have not happened if India had not put in place macroeconomic changes in 1991.

People who moan about inequality need to understand that there is no crime or problem in people being rich. its when the poor remain or are kept poor is where the problem starts. Here are some of my responses about inequality here, here.

Then Mishra responds to Salil’s note here. Now besides the economic fallacies he exhibited in his first post, he now adds historical incoherence to his post, which Salil takes apart in the rejoinder to the rejoinder here. If nothing else, Mishraji, try to simplify your language. See these 2 statements:

1. Old assumptions of moral and civilizational superiority shape the neo-liberal view of Chinese and Indian history, in which the Indians and Chinese appear as deluded socialists and famine-struck peasants, who could only have been saved by western-style neo-liberalism.

2. I can only mention one here: the challenge of postcolonial reconstruction in countries devastated by war and colonialism, in a harsh geopolitical situation which forced ruling classes everywhere to choose sides in the cold war

Say what?

bah!, and seems like Mishraji gets slammed in other areas as well. Here’s another book review kerfuffle that he got involved in and the book’s author poked him

Friday, February 18

Ethnic Enclaves in the classroom

So the fact that minorities and immigrants prefer to live in their own enclaves is well known. This has a positive effect insofar as helping avoid the racism and discrimination they might fare in a heterogeneous enclave versus a negative effect where they do not adopt or adapt host country cultures or attain language proficiency. This behaviour is shown in every country and this can also be due to in country migration patterns as well, such as linguistic group enclaves or state enclaves, etc. But what happens to their children who are in a government secular school where presumably this impact would be reduced>?

A good paper caught my eye. Quote the abstract:

We use data on elementary-school students to investigate how the home language and other characteristics of a student's same-grade schoolmates influence that student's academic achievement. We exploit the availability of multiple cohorts of data within each school to control for endogenous selection by incorporating school fixed effects in the model. We also exploit the longitudinal structure of the data to estimate value-added models of the educational production function. We find that attending an “enclave” school provides a slight net benefit to Chinese home-language students and a large net cost to Punjabi home-language students. The results are consistent with a simple peer effects mechanism in which the academic achievement or behavior of peers is much more important than their home language.

I am not going to bore you with the statistics, but concentrate on the results. What this canadian study finds is that students who speak Punjabi at home have a strong negative association with math test scores while Chinese home language peers have a weak positive association with math scores. How curious, cultural factors? Linguistic factors? The study doesn't say this and their explanation is weak. They also reference similar results achieved by studying Black students in the USA. So linguistic factors are of lower importance compared to cultural factors. The authors also refer to another study that Punjabi youth in British Columbia, Canada have an oppositional sub culture and negative attitudes about academic work. No wonder their math scores are so crap, compared to the Chinese culture based students. Very un-pc, but I am reminded of the furore about the Chinese mother recently.

Well, here you go, some data points behind this debate, and lends some credence towards the fact that school achievement has some links with the culture you belong to.

A letter from a British Citizen

Man, he had it bad, didnt he? From here.

Dear Sir
Me LL.B (Hons.) Dip LP – 20 years in the legal profession – last 14 as a qualified solicitor of the supreme court. Own high street practice since 2002 – left the profession in October 2010. No longer worth the effort – over regulated, no respect from the public or the state, totally bored with being an unpaid VAT collector, dealing with the bullshit SRA and its “diversity” agenda, paying through the nose for PI insurance and for regulation, rates, having my rubbish collected from the offices I rented, etc. etc. I had two tiny rented offices, no more than bucket shops in reality and with all of the outgoings, the useless local authority and the tax man and others’ it cost me £100k each year just to open the doors of those offices before I earned a single penny. Clients going bankrupt throughout 2008-2009 leaving me with over 50k of unpaid fees which comes straight off of profit. Everyone else (usually the state) gets paid of course.
Wife BA, MA – 15 years as a wonderful teacher respected and admired by all in her job – a real go getter – excellent at her job and assistant head of one of the best secondary schools in the area – outstanding in last two Ofsted reports largely as a result of things put in place by her. Giving up her job. Sick of ever changing government targets, syllabus changes, instead of being a teacher being required to be mum, entertainer, best friend, disciplinarian, teacher, and at risk every day of some pathetic charge by some scrote of a child about something she may have done that could wreck her entire career. Sick of kids who can’t be arsed, and have no parental input but have all the “rights” given to them by the state.
I earned a decent profit (save in 2008-2010) on which I paid tax (as well as rates and as well as employing a number of staff). My wife earned over £55k per annum on which she paid PAYE. We have one son aged 14 at secondary school and who I spend a great deal of time educating – he gets NO homework from his school (and complaints in this regard are ignored even though parent governors have been raising the issue for years – perhaps it is something to do with the fact that the school has had a head on sick leave for years – much like many schools in this area – Over £100k per annum of taxpayers money and pension for sitting on your arse at home “ill” – it must be in the air here) and much of our time together in this regard is in combating what is essentially propaganda taught to our kids today. He will only grow up as an intelligent free thinking adult because of my input and despite his state education. I went to a grammar school. Getting rid of these has been a massive mistake.
We have both chucked our jobs. I made three people redundant and myself and my wife will no longer be paying taxes at anywhere near the rate we did before. We will both be seeking part time jobs and don’t really care about the salary levels.
Why would two professional people like us both dump our professions, the very things that as young adults we strove to achieve?
Simple. It just isn’t worth the effort anymore in a world where a significant minority leech off of the rest of us and where the government spends over 50% of what we earn and takes that money on pain of imprisonment. The North East and Wales live off of the rest of us. In my building alone I know that statistically we are paying everything for at least three families in the block. Why? Only 200 years ago the average worker worked 170 days each year. When I was a child (and I am only 45 now) a single full time salary was enough to buy a house and send children to university. In this country today it is impossible to survive without both adults working full time to pay the myriad of taxes, mortgage payments to the bankers for our massively overpriced houses, and god forbid that we wonder why our parents and grandparents never had to do this. Thanks to the labour government and the execrable Blair and Brown and that idiot Balls, money belonging to our children and grandchildren has already been stolen and spent on crap that no-one needs.
For at least twenty years we have seen the breakdown of society as it was when we were growing up and we no longer recognise the world we live in. There is no respect for me as a lawyer or for my wife as a teacher and that lack of respect is not only present in society at large, but also from the state. The claim that the world is a different place is usually a claim made by very elderly people. I am 45 and my wife is 39 and we are saying this already. So many millions of people don’t lift a finger and have families where no-one has ever worked. My father left my mother in 1967 when she had two children under the age of 3. She worked. We got on with it. She never claimed a single penny in benefits. I closed my practice in September 2010 but will never dream of going on the dole. I never saw my useless hapless father but I grew up, went to a grammar school and then to university. My eldest brother joined the army and served with distinction in the Falklands and elsewhere and went into the police. My younger brother joined a bank, then a building society and is now a university lecturer. Not one of us has ever lived off of the taxpayer, we have paid our taxes and have produced families of our own. We are all, to a man, sick of the country we live in. Millions economically inactive. A significant percentage of children leaving school at 16 unable to read or write properly and largely numerically illiterate. The corrosive “all must have prizes” mentality has ruined state education. Political correctness everywhere so that we are caged in by professional offence takers and rent seeking “charities” expounding that we are all too fat, drink too much, eat the wrong things, smoke (how dare we), think and say the wrong things, and that the sky is falling in, all clearly based on fake science and presented in a way that could only be believed by morons – politicians of course swallow it whole and continue to send these rent seekers large shovel fulls of our money.
Global warming (now called climate disruption) is going to kill us all even though empirical and actual real life measurements say the exact opposite, (have you noticed the Maldives and other island nations are still in situ? The Arctic and Antarctic are dong fine, polar bears are increasing and most glaciers are ok and the IPCC has been shown clearly to be a pathetic activist organisation, but we are still paying through the nose more and more as the months go by – I went to the Maldives on my honeymoon, but the fantastically large amount I paid for that holiday is nothing compared to the “damages” that we western countries must pay to these people because of our “crimes” – why hasn’t anyone just told them to fuck off?), even though the Team have been shown to be activists and not scientists (despite whitewashes to the contrary that treat us all like cretins). All of this garbage is repeatedly and never endingly stuffed into our faces by the disgustingly biased BBC, by those who teach my child, and by useful idiots who have taken on board fake science and whitewashed any difficulties in that respect – the crazed Huhne wishing to cover our country with wind farms even though Germany has caught a massive cold with this technology and it is clear to anyone who isn’t a cretin that it is a crazy way to seek to provide our energy needs.
Politicians who promise things and then break those promises. There is a massive list of these from both labour and the coalition. Blair was a liar – Cameron and Clegg are no different, especially on Europe. Where is the Big Repeal Bill? Where is “Cast Iron” Dave on Europe? – lets not think about the passing of powers that have happened since he became PM. We are all looking at Egypt and wondering when that day will come here. I confidently predict that it will come within my son’s lifetime if things don’t change.
So what will we do? The only solution is to opt out. We have been lucky and sensible enough to purchase a number of properties over the years. We will never sell them – they are the only things the state cannot steal from us. I have already told my wife that the state will renege on its promise to pay her pension – look at Poland.
Politicians – a mere 650 of them – have totally fucked this country and continue to sell us down the river to the post-democratic EU. If you have any interest in what your constituents think about their lives in this country I hope that you will take note of the opinion of myself and my wife. We are sick of the whole thing. We will buy a house with a garden and I will grow vegetables and hit things with axes, and she will manage our properties. The rest of you can go f**k yourselves.
Sincerely,

Thursday, February 17

Buddhist Monks and Marriage

I didnt know that Buddhist Monks used to be married. See this note. I betcha this will come as much as a rude shock to some as the fact that Hindu’s ate beef came as a shock to some gits.

       University of Tokyo Faculty of Humanities
Fuse Academic Lecture

Hosted by the Department of Indian Philosophy and Buddhist Studies
University of Tokyo

We are happy to announce the upcoming lecture by Dr. Shayne Clarke
of McMaster University, who has recently concluded ground-breaking
research in the area of Vinaya Studies. Dr. Clarke's lecture is
supported by the Fuse academic fund.

Presenter: Dr. Shayne Clarke (McMaster University)
Title: The Good Monk and His Wife are Seldom Parted: Reflections on
Married Monks in Indian Buddhism
Date/Time: February 16 (Weds.), 15:00-17:00
Place: Indian Philosophy and Buddhist Studies Seminar Room (Hō-bun
Bldg. 2, 3rd floor)
Presentation Language: English

Abstract: It is often assumed that Buddhist monks in India were not
married. Although we find occasional references to married monks in
Mahāyāna sūtras, the lifestyle of these monks is generally viewed as
an aberration of the monastic life, and their conduct is thought of as
being in contravention of the extant Vinayas.

In the present paper I investigate the position of married monks in
canonical Vinaya literature. The extant Vinayas contain several
interesting narratives that assume the existence of married monks in
India. Not only could monks continue to visit their lay (former?)
wives after ordination, but they could also leave home for the
religious life together with their wives. Husband and wife could enter
the religious life as monk and nun. Moreover, divorce, which is said
to be unknown in Brahmanical India, is mentioned in a number of Vinaya
texts. Although the canonical authors of the extant Vinayas knew about
divorce or some process by which unhappy couples could annul their
marriages, they never seem to insist that men get divorced before
becoming monks. I conclude, then, not that monks never marry in India,
but that monks in fact never divorce.