Category Archives: new world order

No cost water-harvesting when you stop raking

Posted on by

From Brad Lancaster’s Rain-water Harvesting blog comes the welcome advice that less is more. Raking removes ground cover, encourages water evaporation, dries out soil. The result is poor soil quality, lower aquifers and dry, unhealthy vegetation. Leave the leaves alone!

“Fortunately, there is a way to harvest water, even during droughts.  It costs nothing, and requires no expenditure of energy.  Can this be true?  Grab yourself a cool drink, take a seat, and let the litter fall.  Leaf and stem litter, that is.

A handful of mesquite leaf litter, delivered free of charge by the canopy overhead, can help retain water on your landscape. Photo credit: Julia Fonseca

You’ve been spending too much time raking and bagging those leaves, seed pods and twigs.  They could be working for you, if you don’t throw them out.  No, I’m not talking about composting.  Composting is work too! But if you just left the litter where it fell, it would in time form a nice natural mulch that would slow erosion, build up the water-holding ability of the soil, and help make the soil easier to dig, if you do decide to dig a swale someday.  Be a litter harvester!

Plant litter is so important that it is one of the three key measurements that the Natural Resources Conservation Service uses as a measure of watershed condition. Plant cover, litter, and rock all help stem erosion of sloping land.  If it’s not raining, only litter and rock can retard runoff, and shade the soil, AND retain moisture.  (But see my rant against crushed rock landscaping.)

A layer of litter will work for you every time it rains well enough to penetrate the litter layer, making it more difficult for the sun to evaporate moisture from the soil below. So, if you do need to rake up litter, then consider moving it to areas where it can mulch a plant.

Even when it isn’t raining, a layer of leaf litter recruits workers to improve your soil. Unlike rock, leaf and twig litter is readily colonized by tiny organisms, and those attract others and pretty soon you have unpaid laborers tunneling into your soil, creating “macropores” for better, deeper infiltration.  In urban Tucson you can also get thrashers, cactus wrens and towhees tilling the ground and scratching for goodies!

All work together to decompose your litter into smaller pieces, and that helps pump extra carbon into the soil.  Extra carbon in your soils is part of the magic.  Soil carbon boosts the ability of the soil to hold water for later use by plants, resulting in a healthier and more drought-resistant landscape.”

Comment

My interest in rain-water harvesting is not theoretical.  Apart from the rising cost of water in the US itself, which means higher bills during a time of recession, water has become a serious crisis in many countries, including India.

The southern state of Karnataka has a critical shortage of water and even in Tamil Nadu, which traditionally has torrential rains from two monsoons, water has become an election issue.

In part, this is because of a massive demand from increasing numbers of corporations, foreign and domestic, that flock to the state and receive preferential access at every level.

In part, it is because of  the government subsidy of agricultural water-use that leads to waste and mis-allocation.

There’s also the government-subsidized real estate boom, which created in India exactly what it created in the US – a huge misdirection of  funds into home-building . That’s led to shortages in building materials like concrete and sand.

It’s also put a big dent in the water table in many areas.

These days, bottled water is a necessity in many urban areas, but it’s expensive and makes for dependence on the water-supplier.

Water self-sufficiency is the answer,  both at the level of the house-hold and of the nation.

UN legal body endorses Khobragade’s immunity

Posted on by

Anil Nauriya, who advocates before the Supreme Court of India, has added an important point (in the Comment section):

Regarding the arrest of a Consular official, the Vienna Convention requires that this may be done [in the case of a grave offence] “pursuant to a decision by the competent judicial authority”?

The question is whether even a PRE-TRIAL judicial warrant of arrest would be such a “decision”.
The focus in much of the discussion has been on the meaning of “grave offence”.


I would argue yet another aspect of the question : that the pre-trial arrest even of a Consular Official [without full diplomatic Immunity] is of doubtful legality and, in any event,  had to be the subject of a pre-arrest hearing leading to a pre-arrest judicial decision on such liability for pre-trial and pre-indictment arrest.

Before such a pre-arrest hearing, all that the “competent judicial authority” could have done is to issue a summons and pass an order preventing the Consular official from leaving the US pending such a pre-arrest hearing.

The Deccan Herald reports that the UN legal office supports Khobragade’s claim:

” A United Nations agency has endorsed New Delhi’s claim that Indian Foreign Service officer Devyani Khobragade enjoyed full diplomatic immunity when she was arrested by the United States law-enforcement officials in New York on December 12 last.

The opinion of the UN Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) supports New Delhi’s argument that Khobragade enjoyed full immunity at the time of her arrest as she had already been accredited to the international organisation as a representative of India since August last year.

Khobragade’s lawyers have cited the UN OLA’s view in a court in Manhattan to counter the recent move by Preet Bharara, the US district attorney for southern district of New York, to dismiss New Delhi’s claim.

Stephen Mathias, UN Assistant Secretary General for Legal Affairs, on January 27 last wrote to India’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the international organisation conveying the UN OLA’s views on the issue. ”

He wrote that representatives of all members of the United Nations “to the principal and subsidiary organs of the United Nations and to conferences convened by the United Nations, while exercising their functions and during their journey to and from the place of meeting, enjoy the privileges and immunities set forth in Section 11 of the General Convention”.

SAC Case: Should Be About Racketeering, Not Insider-Trading

Posted on by

Previous Mind-Body Politic posts related to Steve Cohen, in reverse chronological order (incomplete):

Rajat Gupta Trial: The other Goldman insider ring, MBP, June 10, 2012

More on Einhorn’s rumour-mongering about Lehman, MBP, April 15, 2010

Third-point, Goldman trading chiefs exist together, Madoff programmers indicted, March 18, 2010

Hedge-funds: top ten earners in 2007-2008, MBP,  January 13, 2010

Steven Cohen: third-biggest owner of Sotheby’s in 2009, MBP, Dec. 30, 2009

Secretive Steve Cohen on talk-show, discussing relationship with ex, MBP,  Dec. 27, 2009

SAC spin-offs fail, even when they succeed, MBP,  Dec. 26,2009

SAC subpoenas former SAC trader Grodin, MBP,  Dec. 25, 2009

Den of Thieves: Hedge-hogs go into SAC remote mode, MBP, Dec. 23., 2009

Sad SAC: Reuters spikes hedge story on complaints from Steven Cohen, MBP.com, December 22, 2009

Ex-Sith lady uses RICO on Sith lord? Mindbodypolitic, December 17, 2009

ORIGINAL POST

In his piece at Deep Capture, “SAC Capital (and Steve Cohen too) should be convicted”, researcher Mark Mitchell is far more sanguine than I am that Preet Bharara really means to go after the chief of the mega-hedge fund SAC,  Steven Cohen, after he puts away  various underlings, like Michael Steinberg and Indian-born Matthew Martoma.

“By fixating on the insider-trading angle in all his cases, Bharara, in my opinion, undermined the whole credibility of his prosecution and opened himself up for charges that he is merely targeting politically-viable low-hanging fruit.

Lila: As I’ve documented thoroughly at this blog, Bharara hasn’t had much credibility in his Wall Street prosecutions for at least a year now, regardless of how successful his other prosecutions might have been in some people’s eyes. I’m glad to see some main-stream voices coming around to my view.

I think I know a little about the Steven Cohen investigation, from my conversations with some of the principals at Deep Capture, where the investigation of Cohen began

Here’s a piece I wrote which they picked up, back in 2009:

Steve Cohen, the anti-Midas (Judd Bagley at Deep Capture):

Here are Lila’s observations on the matter:

1. The high number of SAC traders who seem to have gone off into their own businesses.

You’d think with all that money and the fund’s record as the most consistently successful in the business (only one bad year on record), their traders would stay forever. Quite the opposite.  People seem to have been leaving all the time to form their own businesses.

But SAC was also said to be a very tough environment. You produced, or you left.

So maybe that’s why Lee and Far, Grodin and Goodman, all left to found their own firms?
Could be. But I’m not convinced.

2. None of the spin-off firms seems to have been very successful.

Why not? Why couldn’t these hot-shot traders make money on their own?

The Reuters piece suggests that perhaps the SAC experience didn’t foster business ability. And that perhaps SAC traders flounder without SAC’s huge supporting cast.

But those things are likely to be true of other firms as well, not solely SAC.

Still not convinced.

Furthermore, consider this.

3. A spin-off fund that didn’t get money from Cohen ended up quite successful:

“Healthcor, a healthcare industry focused fund, had raised $3.2 billion by June 2009 since launching four years ago. The fund returned 25 percent in 2006, 18 percent in 2007, and was up 4 percent last year, when the average hedge fund lost 19 percent. In the first 10 months of 2009, Healthcor was up 7 percent.

Healthcor, founded by Arthur Cohen and Joseph Healey, opened without any financial support from SAC. In fact, soon after Cohen and Healey struck out on their own, SAC sued the pair, accusing them of breaching their employment contracts. The matter ultimately was settled. (Healthcor’s Cohen is not related to SAC’s Cohen).”

4. Even spin-offs that were doing well were shut down.

When Stratix started in 2004, it had $60 million given to it by SAC. When it shut down, in 2007, it was up 17% and had $530 million under management. Yet it shut down. Why did it shut down? Those numbers sound pretty good.

Another spin-off, Fontana Capital, started out in 2005 with $50 million of SAC money. It grew to $325 million by 2006.  But sometime in 2007, Cohen pulled out all his money. And in 2009, Fontana was down to $16.1 million, despite being down only 7.69%, compared to the average S&P Financial index loss of 57%. Again, that sounds like it wasn’t doing all that bad.

Reuters quotes someone familiar with the record of ex-SAC traders:

“So many of the ex-SAC people seem to have this model where they attract you with fantastic returns in the first year but in year two or three or four you get annihilated,” said a person who is familiar with several former SAC employees’ records.

Shades of Bernie Madoff….

Someone need to look closely at what happened to the money at these firms…

Lila:

Unlike some, I don’t think the fact that Bharara has an agenda means that Martoma is necessarily innocent, either.

I just think that even guilty as charged, Martoma is small fry.

He’s Cohen’s employee and by every account I’ve read, Cohen kept notoriously tight control of his business and tolerated no dissent.

He was not the kind of hands-off employer who can plead ignorance after the fact, even though that’s just what he did.

So Martoma might be guilty as heck, but it’s beside the point.

Insider-trading, outside the  issue of racketeering, is an irrelevant and minor side-show.

Insider-trading as part of systemic racketeering is another thing.

But Bharara hasn’t shown that, nor does he even look like he’s trying to show that.

He looks like he’s polishing his resume for a move into politics.

Anyway, here’s Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture:

Deep Capture: SAC Capital (and Steve Cohen too) should be convicted….

“During the trial of Martoma, DOJ prosecutors confirmed that SAC Capital traded on inside information provided by a doctor at the University of Michigan, which was all well and good, but as I documented in my book, SAC Capital not only traded on inside information from another University of Michigan doctor, but also profited from short selling Dendreon’s stock after multiple doctors (some of whom had demonstrably corrupt relationships with Milken) conspired to undermine Dendreon’s treatment by convincing the FDA (also corrupted by Milken and his associates) to delay approval of the treatment (which had been proven effective).

Some journalists and their Wall Street sources have argued that insider trading is an essentially harmless offense and that SAC Capital deserves leniency, but their arguments obscure the fact that SAC Capital’s insider trading has involved the wholesale corruption of the FDA and some of the nation’s most prominent doctors, all of whom have (as my book documents in detail) shown themselves more than willing not only to provide Steve Cohen and his associates, including Milken, with inside information, but also to undermine pharmaceutical companies with effective treatments while promoting companies (i.e. companies that are financed by Milken and his associates) whose treatments are actually killing people.”

Lila: Exactly. But then, in that context, Matthew Martoma is actually the lesser offender.

He was after all a portfolio manager, a trader. His employment depended on his getting an edge.

When he stopped getting that edge (illegal, as it turned out), he was fired.  Since Martoma has been attested to be very knowledgeable in his field by the doctors with whom he interacted, it follows that his competitors in the field must also have been getting their “edge” in the same way.

Industry-wide corruption of that kind isn’t best addressed by throwing the book at some representative pawn/small fish in the game.  That only makes the prosecutors’ office look biased or politically motivated.

Which it usually is.

If the nation’s top doctors were engaged in corrupt activities, why aren’t some of them being prosecuted before Martoma?

And, if Steven (don’t call me Stevie) Cohen is a racketeer, prove that.

Then give yourself a gold medal. Not before.

Note: See John Cassidy’s piece at the New Yorker, “Has Steven A. Cohen bought off the US Government?” November, 4, 2013

Birth-Control Fatwas & Oops Factors

Posted on by

denver colorado skyline

Zahir Ebrahim, author of The Poor Man’s Guide to Modernity, brings up a problem in the comment section to my previous post.

I reproduce it here as a separate post, because it’s something that has stumped me, as well.

Briefly: How to get in front of false-flags, red herrings, and black ops before they unfold, or, at least, how to derail them after they’ve begun?

How indeed.

Bloggers and activists who write as things unfold are quietly censored through Internet filtering and monitoring, (eg. Google). and content manipulation (eg. Wikipedia).

Or, we are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” by the mandarins of the mainstream media, because we cannot reach into our pockets and come up at once with documents in triplicate with signed confessions from the Mossad and CIA to prove our claims.

Of course, some forty years hence, some appointed mouthpiece will, at tax-payer expense,  force open the requisite dusty archive where half-redacted memos, still greasy with guilt, will give the game away.

Masks will briefly slip from Olympian profiles, but until then…..

….even if activists do get heard, the media prince-lings who deign to respond, choose their place and time in ways that leave us bloodied and the issues even more bedraggled.

During the ruckus that ensues, the false-flag or black operation unfolds with the panache of an Augustan comedy….except that to those of us in the peanut-gallery it is tragedy.

That is how, as Zahir Ebrahim writes, no less than the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran fell victim to the Malthusian disinformation of the banking cartel:

“Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini introduced Birth Control through a fatwa (I haven’t seen the fatwa myself, only read or heard about it), as the population of Iran had almost doubled from the time of the Shah by the time of this fatwa in the late 1980s.

Well in the 2000s (I do not recall the year), the successor Ayatollah had to issue a new Fatwa encouraging families to have more children and not less children.

According to the understanding given to me on this topic, the first fatwa on birth-control had been issued because of the fears of over-population and Iran not being able to feed itself under the Malthusian construct.

(Not obvious how this fear was implanted in Iran under the Ayatollah, for he was always most wary of the Western agenda. But then again, he also fell victim to it in uncontrollably waging the eight-year war against Iraq — a war that was foisted by the West upon both the peoples of Iran and Iraq equally, and not just Iran alone ,which the people of Iran always tend to forget.)

Anyway, After the birth rate among the Shia Muslims declined drastically, while the minority Sunni Muslims (aprox. 20% of Iranians) had ignored the fatwa and had concentrated on having more and more children (Sunni Muslims do not accept Fatwas from Shia theologians, and vice versa), the demographics of Iran suddenly started to change. T

The Sunni strategy, I imagine both intellectually and financially supported from somewhere, was to come to key positions of power in Iran through the change in demographic. All legal, nothing subversive about it. In fact, it is the method that Palestinians have been employing to overwhelm their Israeli conquerors these past six decades. A most effective strategy!

This strategy, and the declining birth-rate among the middle class in the Shia households, woke up the Iranian government to the folly of the previous “ill-conceived” and “flawed” fatwa.

Now the impetus in Iran is to encourage more children — but not unsurprisingly, the next generation of the middle class and upper middle class, those whose parents or themselves grew up under the directive of the first fatwa, don’t seem to be energetically inclined towards having more children. Career paths dominate in Iran as much as they do in the West. A more detailed study of this is of course necessary. This is just the anecdotal version.

What this shows me however, is that “oops” cannot always be avoided — we are all human. But surely, as you put it: “that the ultimate source of such laws is an ideology crafted with MALEVOLENT intent by the foundation-funded think-tanks and research institutes.” can always be recognized and interdicted. No?

Provided of course that the government machinery, its media, and its intellectuals, are not already co-opted into either silence, acquiescence, or actually putting down their signatures to their own enslavement.

This is the real problem facing both India, Pakistan, and South East Asia. How to overcome our “asininity” which continually leads us to “oops” ex post facto?

Google’s “Hummingbird”: IP Theft & Mind-Control

Posted on by

Google’s new search algorithm Hummingbird adds to the company’s sinister reputation among privacy advocates.

Google’s creepy Google Glass didn’t help it either.

Now comes Hummingbird, the biggest algorithm change in the search engine in twelve years.

“Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words,” Sullivan reports. “It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that ‘place’ means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that ‘iPhone 5s’ is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.”

(“Hummingbird is Google’s biggest algorithm change in 12 years,” WebProNews,  Sept. 28, 2013)

Simply put, Hummingbird is about Google trying to find the holistic meaning behind the individual words of a search-string (the query or series of words you input into the search function),  or, in the case of websites, the overall intent behind the key-words most used.

Bottom-line: Google is trying to figure out what’s going on in your mind when you type out certain words.

That is terribly similar to an area of research dear to the defense and spy agencies – predictive software and technology.

For instance,  DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is very interested in developing the cognitive footprints of users for identification purposes.

The goal is to bypass the need for passwords, which tend to be cumbersome for users and vulnerable to password-cracking, phishing, social-engineering, memory failures, and hardware theft.

“Software biometric modalities” are to be used to develop what it terms Active Authentication.

Anyone can see how useful the new Hummingbird algorithm would be to DARPA.

Indeed, given Google’s prior collaboration with the CIA in the monitoring of social media, it wouldn’t be surprising if Hummingbird has also come out of a joint project with the government.

The defense agencies come up with the technology to figure out what random “bad guys” are up to. Google monetizes it and returns the favor by data-sharing with the government.

The consumer might have his every need…indeed wish…met, but web-users are now going to find that Google’s “free lunch:” is not only not free, it’s not remotely cheap.

And web users are the ones footing the bill.

Here’s how.

“Google Hummingbird: Where no search has gone before,” Jeremy Hull, iProspect, Wired, October 15, 2013

“Google has updated its search algorithm many times over the past few years, but previous updates were focused on making Google better at gathering information — for example, indexing websites more often and identifying spammy content. Hummingbird is focused on the user. It’s about Google getting better at understanding what searchers really want and providing them with better answers.”

That’s Google’s stated objective, of course. But how about websites?

When you search Google for answers to questions, what website owners want is for you to go to their site to get the information.

This is not only because they might hope to sell you something and thereby earn a living.

It’s also because they hope that by giving you good information not available in the mainstream media,  they might attract you to their site and persuade you on other issues.

By offering free information, web writers hope you will find them reliable, credible, or interesting and become committed readers. That’s why millions of writers and websites, spend inordinate amounts of energy and time finding answers and giving them away to others for free.

Of course, ethics and decency demand that readers who benefit from that information cite the place they found it and give the author credit.

Not Hummingbird.

It harvests information from the net and puts it on Information cards that pop up in answer to searches.

Now, if the information is immediately given to the reader by Google, why will they visit the websites from which Google might have culled the answer?

They won’t.  That means that Google is not only stealing the private data of its users through Gmail, Google Earth, and a bunch of other programs, it’s also stealing from the websites it’s supposed to be helping.

But “Hummingbird” is not just unfriendly to websites offering information to the public, it acts to control what information is presented to you and how.

Hummingbird’s graphic is an easy way for Google to give you what Google (and very likely, the government) want you to know, rather than what you might learn if you delved into your search results yourself.

The new graphic could even give you downright misleading or inaccurate information. Just think about Snopes, the ostensibly myth-busting site that somehow manages to bust myths only in left-liberal ways.

So, Hummingbird is not only using your personal information for Google’s own commercial (and the government’s surveillance) purposes, it’s using information from blogs/websites, without their permission, for its own operations.

That’s two counts of IP theft.

Then, the whole business of trying to determine exactly what you’re thinking when you type certain things into the search function sounds awfully like mind-reading to me. In order to do that kind of mind-reading, all sorts of personal information from your web usage (even more than Google has been collecting so far) has to be collated and compared. Mapped, if you will.

That’s two counts of privacy invasion.

Finally, by manipulating access to the knowledge available on the Internet, under the guise of consumer satisfaction, by giving you pre-packaged answers before it gives you your search results, Google is actually  trying to control your thinking.

That’s one count of mind-control.

Is it any surprise that the new algorithm shares its name with DARPA’s nano flying robot/drone Hummingbird, which beats its wings like a bird?.

DARPA’s Hummingbird is a spy drone:

“The drone, built by AeroVironment with funding from DARPA, is able to fly forwards, backwards, and sideways, as well as rotate clockwise and counterclockwise. Not only does the ‘bot resemble its avian inspiration in size (it’s only slightly larger than a hummingbird, with a 6.5-inch wingspan and a weight of 19 grams), it also looks impressively like a hummingbird in flight.

But that’s not vanity — it’s key to the drone’s use as a spy device, as it can perch near its subject without alerting it.”

Google’s Hummingbird seems no less innocuous and no less insidious.

It’s more evil-doing from the Franken-SearchEngine that routinely spies for the NSA and CIA and systematically  commits Intellectual Property theft.

Read more at Entrepreneur .com

British Charity “Rape Crisis” Is A UK Govt Front

Posted on by

From LibertarianAlliance.wordpress.com:

“One of the points I made was that RC [Rape Crisis] can hardly be regarded as an independent voice.

Bearing in mind that it gets the majority of its funding from the Home Office and the Equalities Unit, it should be regarded as a front for the British State – ie, it’s another fake charity.

I didn’t actually accuse RC of corrupt motives, but did draw attention to the scale of funding and the fact that HMG would dearly love to put Julian Assange on the first plane to Stockholm.”

Sean points to the accounts, the most recent set available, which is not very recent by company-or-private-sector-standards and would get them heavily finded for lateness if they were a simple plumber or small retailer…which says in the small print at the back that:-

(1) “Rape Crisis” received in 2008, £6,285 from charitable and fundraising activities, and £103,750 from the Home Office, “Lankelly Chase” (which must be some place or other), “UNISON” and the Government Equalities Office”.

(2) In 2009, it received £11,214 from charitable and fundraising activities, and  £196.685 from the various collectivist sources stated just now above.

http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/Accounts/Ends80/0001119680_ac_20090331_e_c.pdf
I think that makes it a “fake charity, don’t you? It seems to exist to do PR to lobby the government into bring in laws that the government wants brought in.

“Non-interfering” Kerry Cheers Overthrow Of Ukrainian Gvt

Posted on by

Daniel McAdams at LRC blog comments on John Kerry’s interventionist position on Ukraine:

“I am on RT today discussing John Kerry’s Munich trip, where he met the Ukraine opposition parties and said that the US is “fully behind” those seeking to overthrow the democratically-elected government by force — right before he warned any outside powers against interfering in Ukraine’s internal affairs.”

See also “US and Europe stand with people of Ukraine, says John Kerry,” The Guardian, Feb. 1 , 2014

NATO has joined Kerry to bully the Ukrainians government not to crack down on violence:

“Nato’s chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said he was “very concerned by attempts to involve the military in the crisis”.

The equivalent in terms of international provocation would be if the Russian President were to proclaim solidarity for the Occupy movement on US soil and warn American police against any militarized response.

While Kerry was double-dealing with the Ukrainians and thumbing the American nose at Russia, a little research turns up the interesting point that the largely peaceful Ukrainian protest suddenly turned violent at the same time as  Kerry’s visit and stepped-up support for it.

“Russia slams West’s support for Ukraine opposition,” AP, The Washington Post, Feb. 1, 2014

“The protests had been mostly peaceful until mid-January, when demonstrators angered by the new anti-protest laws launched violent clashes with police. Three protesters died in the clashes, two of them from gunshot wounds. Police insist they didn’t fire the fatal shots.“

See also “Russia slams as circus Kerry Ukraine opposition meetings,” Daily Star, Feb 1, 2014

“Russia’s outspoken Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin called Kerry’s upcoming meetings a “circus” in a tweet on Friday.

“It’s also necessary to involve Verka Serdyuchka in the talks,” he said in apparent sarcasm, referring to Ukraine’s bombastic drag queen pop star.

“Her/his authoritative opinion should be heard by the White House and taken into account!”

Is this another covert destabilization effort in the tradition of the color revolutions?

Evidently so.  At Storyleak.com, Michael Thomas breaks down the history:

“What is particularly surprising about the current color revolution unfolding in the Ukraine is that this nation was the site of the very same CIA implementation plan back in 2004/2005.  The Orange Revolution, as it was known at the time, was a classic CIA-engineered plot to impose their political outcome on the Ukrainian people. And they succeeded with flying colors.

That CIA-sponsored coup d’etat was so successful that it has since been used as a model for every other CIA-manufactured scheme that has toppled governments and reversed fair election outcomes the world over. In fact, the Ukraine is where the various social network utilities were used so effectively that the new MO has become known as the digital blitzkrieg. Never in human history have so many citizens been stampeded in the direction of overthrowing their government while being completely ignorant of the real forces manipulating the cattle prods.”

The article suggests that the Ukrainian government seems to be master-minded, as well the protesters. The result is that the Ukraine is being shepherded into the Eurozone, a communistic/fascistic scheme that will allow the patrons of the Eurozone to replenish their depleted treasuries:

“…. the Ukraine is looked to as a temporary savior because of its many large and robust markets, well established industrial base and transportation links to Asia, as well as it vast natural resources and raw materials.”

UN study slanders Asian men as rapists

Posted on by

I need to expand more on the way that “rape” is being used to slander Asian societies as a whole in the Western mainstream media, controlled ultimately by a small group of owners.

The basis for the slander is a UN-led study:

The UN multi-country study on men and violence in Asia and the Pacific.

The study is sponsored by Partners for Prevention—on behalf of UNDP (UN Development Program), UNFPA (UN Population Fund) UN Women, and UNV (UN Volunteers).
and is described as follows:

From 2010 to 2013, over 10,000 men in six countries across Asia and the Pacific were interviewed using the UN Multi-country Study on Men and Violence household survey on men’s perpetration and experiences of violence, as well as men’s other life experiences. The countries included were Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The study was a collaborative effort involving partners from academia, research institutes, civil society, the United Nations family and governments around the globe

Vietnam is also included, though not mentioned in the paragraph above.

The UN Population Fund’s goal is very clearly defined, behind the rhetoric of “rights.”

It is monitoring population growth and migration, ensuring family-planning through contraception and abortion, and securing female emancipation with a view to ensuring the previously-stated goals.

QUOTE:

The goals of UNFPA – achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health (including family planning), promoting reproductive rights, reducing maternal mortality and accelerating progress on the ICPD agenda and MDG 5 – are inextricably linked. UNFPA also focuses on improving the lives of youths and women by advocating for human rights and gender equality and by promoting the understanding of population dynamics. Population dynamics, including growth rates, age structure, fertility and mortality and migration have an effect on every aspect of human, social and economic progress. And sexual and reproductive health and women’s empowerment all powerfully affect and are influenced by population trends.

The findings of the UN study were trumpeted uncritically in the major media:

See “Nearly quarter of men in Asia-Pacific admit to committing rape,” Kate Hodal, The Guardian, Sept 9, 2013.

However, a few critical observers found gaping holes in the methodology used:

“One in four men in Asia “admit to committing rape”? It doesn’t add up,” Stuart Brown, The Guardian, Sept 18, 2013.

Brown points out the incredibly shoddy and tendentious reasoning behind the statistic that claims that one in four Asians are rapists.

QUOTE:

“The shocking headline figure that 25% of the men surveyed admit to raping a partner or a stranger appears to offer unequivocal confirmation that Asian women are the victims of a deep-rooted, cultural problem.As with many studies of this type, however, what we’re witnessing is the wide dissemination of one hopelessly misleading statistic, while the rest of the research in the report – the stuff that actually matters – is ignored.”

The study covers Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Sri Lanka, and Papua and New Guinea.

That itself is odd. Why would Korea, India, and Japan be left out?

The second oddity is that  the samples are not even representative nationally.

For instance, for Papua and New Guinea, the sampling is drawn entirely from one place – the island of Bougainville.

The third oddity is that there are only two places where “yes” responses to rape are over 25% and they are both areas with a recent history of violent conflict. A higher incidence of rape would be expected in such areas.

Without those two areas, the proportion of “yes” answers falls to 18%.

Finally, except in the case of Bangladesh, the question signifying admission of rape doesn’t even clearly indicate the use of force, but runs as follows:

“Have you had sexual intercourse with your partner when you knew she didn’t want to, but believed she should agree because she was your wife/partner?”

In the Bangladesh sample, where the question most directly mentions force, the number of “yes” answers is also the lowest.

This suggests that the results of the whole study have been dramatically skewed by the ambiguous structuring of a question that doesn’t even deal with what most people would call rape, but rather with the inherently problematic dynamics of marital relations.

But, even apart from the bogus nature of the questioning itself, there is the sheer ludicrousness of slandering the whole of Asia – some 4 billion plus people – on the basis of a questionnaire circulated to some 10,000 people, replete with elementary methodological flaws.

Indeed, the study looks less like a study and more like the kind of  public relations concoction that has armed the “anti-trafficking agenda” with equally sensational and equally flimsy claims.

See “Women’s Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study is Junk Science,” Village Voice, March 23, 2011.

Like bogus sex trafficking research, the bogus rape research seems to be driven by the need to come up with lurid statistics to draw funding, media attention, and political backing.

And what could be the goal of the study’s political backers, which are departments of the UN?

That too is evident.

The UN has always pursued the goals of the Western elites, under cover of internationalism.

Those goals include the need to corral and control the populous nations of Asia, lest they compete too strongly with those of the West for resources.

See the following:

George Kennan, Head of the US State Dept. Policy Planning Staff, Memo PPS23, Feb 28, 1948:

QUOTE:

In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

We should recognize that our influence in the Far Eastern area in the coming period is going to be primarily military and economic. We should make a careful study to see what parts of the Pacific and Far Eastern world are absolutely vital to our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing to it that those areas remain in hands which we can control or rely on.

Thus, the obvious implication of formulating bogus “rape studies” targeting Asian countries, let alone drawing wildly exaggerated conclusions from them, is the need for more surveillance and control of Asian populations by the international proxies of the Western elites.

Given the results of such surveillance and control in the US, where the prison population is the highest in the world and overwhelmingly black and brown, it is shameful that Asian media and government have not called out the slanderous characterizations of the UN study for what they are –

– Racist propaganda masquerading as social-science.

If the targets of the study had been African Americans, there would be no doubt that the researchers would have immediately been unmasked as latter-day theorists of classic scientific racism.

Fake Indian “rape crisis” driven by Western elite media

Posted on by

Update: My blog post on the bogus nature of UN rape studies:
http://mindbodypolitic.org/2014/02/02/the-highest-rape-rates-by-country/

ORIGINAL POST
An Indian “rape crisis” has been evoked in the major media in the wake of the infamous Delhi gang-rape of 2012.

The “rape culture” narrative about India has come to signal the regressive, medieval nature of traditional Indian masculinity.

Palash Ghosh argues that Indian men, who, after 9/11, were conflated with the category “terrorist,” are now being conflated with the category, “rapist.”

Delhi gang-rape trial: A new and negative image for Indian men? Palash Ghosh, Ibntimes.com, Feb 5, 2013

I would suggest that this conflation is intentional and it is typical of the demonization campaigns carried out by the Western state media against countries targeted for intervention, whether that takes the form of bombing or of proxy wars or of NGO psyops.

 

I would suggest that there is no “rape crisis” in India in need of such international intervention.

There is, however, an over-hyped, UN-backed,  elite-manufactured issue that functions as a site for state intervention.

The ” rape crisis” is actually the creation of  the left-liberal ideology that fronts for the corporate interests of Western elites.

This can be readily deciphered from the media stories about the Delhi gang rape.

The major media (Western elite) coverage of the Delhi rape posited it as typical of the medieval village culture characterizing Delhi, in which no Westernized/modern woman can ever be safe.

In contrast, the truly cosmopolitan cities of the West protect women, ran the elite narrative.

Statistics, of course, do not bear this story out.

Poulami Roychowdhury has argued as much in her lengthy academic analysis of the story:

“The Delhi Gang Rape: The Making of International Causes.”

QUOTE:

“CNN likened the assailants to men in other “traditional societies” who “see improvements in the status of women as a challenge to their own” and who use rape as a weapon of power against such advances.”

Roychowdhury shows how the international media created a false narrative of a Westernized, modern woman attacked by traditional, patriarchal, village men.

The truth is both the victim and her assailants were remarkably similar in moving from lower-class agricultural backgrounds into an urban setting.

The international media narrative also ignored the Indian man who attempted to save the victim.

He was also stripped and assaulted.

But the media erased him entirely from public consciousness.

QUOTE

“It goes almost without saying that Pandey’s case illustrates the ongoing resilience and appeal of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “white men saving brown women from brown men.”
Spivak’s theory illuminates why Pandey’s male friend, Awindra Pandey, disappeared from the pages of international media while Pandey and her assailants took pride of place in the discussion. Commentators seemed to forget that Awindra was even on the busand was also physically assaulted, stripped naked, and dumped on the side of the road. He disappeared, Firstly, because his body stood outside the economy of international care: white men are not in the business of saving brown men from other brown men. He also had to disappear because brown men are not typically viewed as allies of brown women.”

Chowdhury also demonstrates how the  emancipated female subject in the third-world  exists in a  narrative that ties her emancipation to her full participation in the neo-liberal economy.

She is described as going to malls and movies on her own, wearing Western clothes and accoutrements.

Meanwhile  the atavism of her male attackers is tied to their lack of integration into that economy.

Neither construction is accurate.

The “rape crisis” was a creation of  radical feminism embedded in the neo-liberal market-place, not an off-shoot of traditional Indian culture.

ITEM A The rape crisis is driven by financial incentives created by misguided, if not malicious, laws put in place by feminist ideologues.

See, “India to pay women big money to cry rape,” False Rape Society, January 8, 2010

It describes the law which has driven the “crisis of rape” now bearing fruition.

” It [India] has decreed that every woman who testifies that a male raped her will be handed the equivalent of 4,374.96 US dollars, a not-insignificant sum anywhere, but a huge payday in India.”

[Lila: in terms of Indian salaries, this would be the equivalent of $200,000 in the West, if we use the exchange rate prevalent at the time. Of course, this translation doesn’t account for the differing purchasing powers of the currencies, but $4, 374.96 is nonetheless a very large sum in India.]

ITEM B

The “rape  crisis” is driven by cultural Marxism

The goal of cultural Marxism is to create morally and biologically neutral “genders” that are fungible and detached from the traditional family structure.

Indeed, it is to construct “gender” so that it is inimical to family life.

In that regard, it’s notable that the man behind many of the protests following the Delhi gang-rape case was a left-wing radical.

 

He was a communist radical from the hot-bed of left-wing ideology, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The protests following the rapes were also organized mainly by left-wing radicals.

Many of the protests turned violent, injuring nearly 150 people.

QUOTE:

“The protests, largely by students, saw hooligan elements mingled in the crowd uproot wooden poles erected for the Jan 26 Republic Day event and set them afire at five places. They upturned vehicles, smashed window panes of buses and other vehicles and also hurled stones and water bottles on policemen in response to tear gas and baton attacks to prevent protesters from marching towards Raisina Hills, where prohibitory orders were put in place.”

Pictures of the protests were circulated world-wide, bringing even the UN into the picture.

The UN made official pronouncements about a “rape culture” in India.

 

This led to the usual politically-motivated commentary from the liberal-left spectrum of the Western media.

However, a few conservative/men’s rights blogs didn’t buy the story and correctly diagnosed the “rape crisis” as a concoction of left-feminist ideological activism.

Similar accusations of an American “rape-culture” have been accurately deconstructed by Dr. Christina Hoff Summers

“Researching the “rape-culture” of America,” Christina Hoff Summers, False-rape.net.

Only a year after the Delhi gang-rape case, the JNU communist who was behind the Indian “rape-crisis” agitation was himself accused of rape. He became the subject of the usual  trial-by-media-innuendo-and-womyn’s-assertion.

He killed himself, a victim of the left-anarchist monster he created.

The extremist ideology behind the “rape crisis” is evident in the new unequal laws in India.

In the case of rape:

See “Only men can be booked for rape,“ Nagendra Sharma, Hindustan Times, March 5, 2013

“Bowing to pressure from women activists, the government has decided to restore the term rape in criminal law that states only men can be booked for committing the offence against women. It has also decided to lower the age of consent for sex from 18 to 16 years.”

This is not gender-neutrality but gender-privileging.  It means that a female assault of a male, or a male assault of a male, or a male or female assault of a male child, are lesser crimes, to be treated under the separate section in the Indian legal code that pertains to unnatural sexual acts.

But that section does not make the rape of a male a crime against a person. Instead, it treats it as a crime against nature, like voluntary homosexuality.

That means female rapists/molesters of men or children can be guilty of unnatural acts, but not of rape, a most significant perversion of equal justice under the law.

In the case of domestic violence:

A woman can get a restraining order against her husband or boyfriend if he threatens suicide.

Under Indian law, threats of suicide by a man, however, are treated as domestic violence against the woman.

The reverse does not obtain.

If India were really a woman-hating patriarchy, as the feminists proclaim, would such laws pass?

At one men’s rights site, an activist writes:

[Note added: Paul Elam, the founder of the site, “A Voice for Men,” seems to have anger management problems that have led him to make incendiary statements I do not in any way endorse. I also do not support the harassment of feminist activists.]

“We’ve already seen men in that country [India] forced to the back of buses like African-Americans in 1950s America.  We’ve seen them beaten up by members of the public and female police officers alike for accidentally boarding the “female only” carriage of a train.  And now we’re seeing the government actively denying them equal protection under the law in sexual assaults.“

Conclusion: What is going on in India is not a rape crisis but a crisis of misandry.

1. “Indian Communist feminist Khurshid Anwar commits suicide after rape allegations,“ Anil Kumar, A Voice for Men, Dec. 30, 2013.

2.” Woman should be booked for filing fake rape case, says HC,” Urvi Mahajani, DNA India, August 1, 2013

3. “Be vigilant about false rape cases: HC to trial judges,” Harish Nair, Hindustan Times, May 24, 2013

4. “18% rape cases false, study,” Times of India, Dec. 27, 2008

5.  Delhi gang-rape case: Police find discrepancies in victim’s statement,” FirstPost, Jan 28, 2014

6.  Activists: Indian media sensationalized Delhi gang-rape case, Venus Upadhyaya, Epoch Times, October 11, 2013

7. Attributing rapes to unique Indian culture reeks of bias, Gajanan Khergamker, Eurasia Review, March 28, 2013

8. Indian government – men don’t matter, David Cuspis, A Voice for Men, March 29, 2013

9. One in four men in Asia ‘admits to committing rape’? It doesn’t add up, Stuart Brown, The Guardian, Sept 18, 2013.

10. A sad day for male rape victims in India,  Toy Soldiers, March 6, 2013

Western Churches Funding Conversions, Terrorism, Secession

Posted on by

Bharatabharati.wordpress.com reports on the Indian government’s crack-down on foreign funding of NGOs engaged in subversive politics:

“The latest report of the Home Ministry showed that more than Rs 10,000 crore was sent to India during 2009-2010, mostly from the USA and Europe to NGOs in India.

[Lila: 1 crore is 10 million rupees, which is $1590.584 million (or approximately $1.5 billion) at an exchange rate of 62.87 rupees to a dollar, calculated at this forex site.

“The report says that while it is not proper to make sweeping generalisations, it is necessary to note that the NGO sector in India is vulnerable to the risks of money laundering and terrorist financing……..

The report, approved by Union Home Secretary R.K. Singh in January 2012, revealed that major donors from abroad and receivers in India are Christian Missionaries and Church-sponsored NGOs.

“The list of foreign donors is topped by the Gospel For Asia Inc of the USA (Rs 232.71 crore) followed by Fundacion Vicente Ferrer, Barcelona, Spain (Rs 228.60 crore) and the World Vision Global Centre of the USA (Rs 197.62 crore),” said the report of Home Ministry on foreign contribution and regulation for the period of year 2009-2010.

These three are evangelical organisations. The fourth largest donor, Compassion International, is also from the US (Rs131.57 core) and belongs to the same category.

The India Today, in its story ‘Freelancers of God – Independent churches mushroom across India attracting foreign funds’ (published on 9 May 2011) has given an account of Indian Christian missionaries who are propelling their ‘work’ to convert Hindus to Christianity with the help of foreign funds.

The India Today story says that, “The preachers are not trained in theology. They often play with the sentiments of people and lure them with incentives and create communal tension. Most new pastors work among Dalits in the region. They also widely use faith-healing methods, which are not popular among mainstream churches. Political parties such as the Congress and the Akali Dal have refused to make conversions a controversy and the VHP and Bajrang Dal have accused both parties of playing to the Christian vote bank.”

Senior French journalist and writer Francois Gautier reveals in his article that, “The foreign funds sent for Gospel cause has a huge but obscure impact. Out of seven states in North East India four have absolute control of the Church. Most of the North East subversive groups / Terrorist outfits including Maoists have definite connection with Evangelical groups. 45% of non-Arab foreign funds coming to India are utilized through Churches for conversion and camouflaging services, while 40% Arab foreign funds are coming to boost up Jihad and Islamic services. Christian Fathers and nuns are living most lavish life in India by utilizing the money collected from overseas in the name of service to the poor people of the third world.”

Francois Gautier has busted the myths of the so-called ‘social and human rights activists like Medha Patkar.

In his article ‘The Truth about Medha Patkar’, Gautier has given a reference of letter of Dr Urmilaben Patel, member of the Congress Working Committee, written to Shri Pranab Mukherjee, Minister for External Affairs.

Patel wrote that, “You are kindly aware, that Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) headed by Medha Patkar is actively involved in opposing all hydro projects in India. I have recently received material which I find quite disturbing. I specifically draw your attention into the message of Ms. Patkar using the words of “pressurizing the UPA government”, and “honouring” a Supreme Court Judge for a favourable verdict, as is explicit in the emails.”

Gautier gives details of exchange of confidential emails between Patkar and Patrick McCully, ex-Director, International Rivers Network (IRN) based at Berkeley (United States). This mail conversation exposes how Patkar ‘reports’ to Patrick every details of the case and which Judge ‘favoured’ her and should be ‘honored”….

…Teesta SetalvadIt is always demanded to inspect the income source of the infamous Teesta Setalvad and her NGO ‘Citizen for Justice and Peace’. Teesta Setalvad is always been in clouds of mystery for her activities and how she raised funds for her NGO and how does she managed expenses of providing legal help and from which source, she got money to lure witnesses for the cases against Narendra Modi in Gujarat riots. Her bank statements with specific details are out suggesting how Setalvad allegedly used money to buy witnesses and how through manipulative activities, false submission before different probe panels and courts were allegedly filed. Again the pointer turns to the source of foreign funds. But no one wants make understand the fact.

No scope for Indian Media to escape in case of foreign funding issue. Gospels of Charity in Spain, Southern Baptist Church, World Christian Council, St. Peters Pontifical Church, Melbourne, Joshua Society, Berne, Switzerland are some of the sponsors which funds major Indian Media which ‘speaks for’ secularism and human rights in India.

The analysis of the Home Ministry’s 42-page report shows that 14,233 NGOs received foreign contribution of Rs 10,337.59 crore. The biggest fund inflow to NGOs has come from the USA (Rs 3,105.73 crore) followed by Germany (Rs 1,046.30 crore) and the UK (Rs 1,038.68 crore). These three countries have topped in the donors’ list of Home Ministry for many years.

As per the report, most the funding has been generated from Christian missionaries of USA, Germany and UK and the donor missionaries have also formed their Indian subsidiaries. The other toppers come from Italy (Rs 583.47 crore), the Netherlands (Rs 509.46 crore), Spain (Rs 437.25 crore) Switzerland (Rs 302.06 crore), Canada (Rs 297.98 crore), France (Rs 189.12 crore) and Australia (Rs 148.28). The eleventh big donor to Indian NGOs is from UAE with Rs 133.15 crore.

World Vision Chennai According to MHA figures, the funding for Christian mission agencies has shown a regular increase. Also, over 80 percent of the voluntary organisations receiving foreign funds are Christian Mission agencies. “The highest amount of foreign contribution was received by the World Vision of India, Chennai, Tamil Nadu (Rs 208.94 crore).”