A collection of crowd-sourced images of the flooding in Chennai can be seen at skymetweather.com.
Author Archives: Lila
Real Estate Mafia And Chennai Flood Damage
From Scroll.in:
With every invitation to Make in Chennai, the city is unmaking itself and eroding its resilience to perfectly normal monsoon weather events. The infrastructure of big commerce has replaced the infrastructure to withstand natural shocks.The 2015 disaster was not just avoidable; it was a direct consequence of decisions pushed for by vested interests and conceded by town planners, bureaucrats and politicians in the face of wiser counsel.
The case of the Pallikaranai marshlands, which drains water from a 250-square-kilometre catchment, is telling. Not long ago, it was a 50-square-kilometre water sprawl in the southern suburbs of Chennai. Now, it is 4.3 square kilometres – less than a tenth of its original. The growing finger of a garbage dump sticks out like a cancerous tumour in the northern part of the marshland. Two major roads cut through the waterbody with few pitifully small culverts that are not up to the job of transferring the rain water flows from such a large catchment. The edges have been eaten into by institutes like the National Institute of Ocean Technology. Ironically, NIOT is an accredited consultant to prepare Environmental Impact Assessments on various subjects, including on the implications of constructing on waterbodies.
Other portions of this wetland have been sacrificed to accommodate the IT corridor. But water offers no exemption to elite industry. Unmindful of the lofty intellectuals at work in the glass and steel buildings of the software parks, rainwater goes by habit to occupy its old haunts, bringing the back-office work of American banks to a grinding halt.
The vast network of waterbodies that characterised Chennai can only be seen on revenue maps now. Of the 16 tanks belonging to the Vyasarpadi chain downstream of Retteri, none remain, according to Prof. M. Karmegam of Anna University.
Virtually every one of the flood-hit areas can be linked to ill-planned construction. The Chennai Bypass connecting NH45 to NH4 blocks the east flowing drainage causing flooding in Anna Nagar, Porur, Vanagaram, Maduravoyal, Mugappair and Ambattur. The Maduravoyal lake has shrunk from 120 acres to 25. Ditto with Ambattur, Kodungaiyur and Adambakkam tanks. The Koyambedu drain and the surplus channels from Korattur and Ambattur tanks are missing. Sections of the Veerangal Odai connecting Adambakkam tank to Pallikaranai are missing. The South Buckingham Canal from Adyar creek to Kovalam creek has been squeezed from its original width of 25 metres to 10 metres in many places due to the Mass Rapid Transit System railway stations. Important flood retention structures such as Virugambakkam, Padi and Villivakkam tanks are officially abandoned.
Capacity reduction
Before political rivalry between the two Dravidian parties brought it to a midway halt, an ill-advised Elevated Express freight corridor from Chennai harbour to Maduravoyal had already reclaimed a substantial portion of the Cooum’s southern bank drastically reducing the flood-carrying capacity of the river.
Remarkably, all these causes were listed out by the government’s own officials at a seminar on waterways organised by the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority in 2010. But there seems to be many a slip between enlightened understanding and enlightened action.
The Second Masterplan prepared by the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority glibly authorises built-up spaces with no regard to hydrology. In the Ennore region, the authority has reclassified waterbodies, intertidal zones and mangrove swamps as “Special and Hazardous Industries” and handed it over to the Kamarajar Port Ltd.
In Ponneri, a town in a rural part of Chennai Metropolitan Area, developers are executing Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority-approved plans with no regard to drainage. Last weekend, Ponneri received 370 mm of rain – 135 mm more than Chennai did. While it suffered from flooding, damage to property and life was not high. Ponneri is slotted to be developed as a Smart City. But will our dumb engineers be able to build a smart city?”
Note: I don’t believe this has anything to do with “dumb” engineering. It has everything to do with the government-construction mafia that overrides any other input from engineers or architects or civil servants.
A Reader’s Tip
One reader suggests that the attacks against Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza are part of the on-going psychological war on America’s ostensible ally in Asia, India.
I’ll follow up on that when I’ve had time to get into the whole story. D’Souza, from my perspective, isn’t an Indian public figure in the US I feel compelled to support, given that he’s spent his whole career telling American conservatives what they want to hear…or think they want to hear…misrepresenting many things about his country of origin in his eagerness to please his country of adoption.
But, in the end, what did it get him?
A hard-core of conservatives are also nativists and racialists and they would never accept a dark-skinned Indian man as one of them, no matter how thoughtfully he argued or how faithfully he defended their interests.
And D’Souza didn’t always argue thoughtfully, although almost always with insight.
He often took cheap shots at liberals and the left, for one thing, which discredited his other positions.
Hitting the left accurately where it hurts is fine, but tarring the many decent left-libertarians, anti-imperialists, and humanitarians, who for one reason or other call themselves leftists or liberals, is foolish and wrong.
Remember, the rule in American politics is that if you’re a conservative, you get handled worse if you also happen to be a minority.
It’s as though the media establishment sees people who go against their natural interests as some kind of traitor rather than just intellectually non-conformist.
Levels Of Brain-washing
First Level Brain-washing: General Public:
Reaction:
“The Paris attacks were committed unprovoked by Islamicists (ISIS) who hate us (France/America/substitute country name) for our freedoms.”
RESULT: Anger directed against Islamic countries, Muslims, all brown people.
Helps NWO-instigated ongoing psyop called “war on terror.”
Second Level Brain-washing: Informed Public/Activists:
Reaction:
“The Paris attacks were blow-back by radicalized young men who join ISIS, who hate us (France, America/substitute country name) for attacking them before.”
RESULT: Anger directed against French, American and allied Muslim governments.
Helps NWO-instigated ongoing psyop to dismantle all governments.
Deprogrammed public & activists:
Reaction:
“The Paris attacks were committed by Western intelligence operatives, working with their golem, ISIS and with hired operatives of Western-allied Muslim outfits to instigate public support for more funding for the “war on terror.”
RESULT: Anger directed against Western intelligence outfits and the Western elites who run them.
Obstructs NWO’s continuing psyop on the world, called the “war on terror,” which might better be called the “war OF terror.”
Hint:
Open defecation is a social problem in India and Indonesia, not in Syria. Middle-class Syrian Muslims are not likely to be involved in anything like that.
Conclusion: the “migrants” are operatives.
Note that the CIA has, for several years, been using feces and menstrual blood in its intelligence operations abroad: for example, these “Egyptian feminist” activists, who front for Western intelligence.
[I deleted the link because of the images. You can find them by googling for Egyptian feminists sh** and bleed, or looking up the archives of Reason magazine.]
The secondary benefit Western intelligence agencies derives from the usage of feces and menstrual blood is that the public begins to be habituated to such images in the news, which helps promote genres of porn involving feces and menstruation.
The intelligence agencies are ultimately run by financiers/elites that depend on the global porn trade, so the use of these images can be seen as government-funded advertising to increase big porn’s market-share.
The images also make homosexuality more acceptable, for reasons I needn’t flog.
A further benefit to the agencies is that by running public campaigns against open defecation in Asia, on the one hand, while simultaneously running intelligence operations involving open defecation, on the other, the Western public is conditioned to associate militant brown (“like feces”) Isis operatives with, first, Islam and Muslims in general, and, secondly, with all brown-skinned people, especially South Asians and Indians.This conflation helps transform rational debate over immigration into something visceral and racial that solidifies resentment and anger toward all foreigners and thus supports imperial aggressions.
Lack of hygiene ( a social and economic problem) becomes conflated with “brown people” (color and race) and these in turn become conflated with attacks against the West leading to the notion of an anti-white foreign invasion generated by the third-world.
Syria, of course, is not a “third-world” country.
The propaganda classic, “Camp of the Saints,” made exactly the same move, conflating impoverished people in Calcutta with a migrant invasion of Europe, and in the process exacerbating white working-class anxieties.
The author, Jean Raspail, is a royalist, but, like all too many who fawn on blood-elites, he himself is working-class.
The Calcuttan slum-dwellers who, in the book, land up in Paris, in the real world, cannot even afford to leave their slum, let alone, Bengal or India.
In the book, the slum-dwellers from Calcutta are uniformly depicted in the most loathsome terms, as perpetually copulating, disease-ridden sub-human monstrosities, swamping the shores of the “beloved city” of France.
The “beloved city” is a phrase from Revelations that actually refers to Jerusalem, so that in Raspail’s white-nationalist supremacist vision, the Christian end-times becomes fused with British Israelism and white Europeans become the “true Israel,” surrounded in the last times by the demonic forces of Gog and Magog, now equated with the third-world.
This is simply sleight-of-hand, intended to distract from the groups actually orchestrating the “clash of civilizations.”
The Key To The Paris Attacks
The Pentagon’s NATO Option (2005).
Public memory is short.
Why Do-It-Yourself Is Here To Stay
An excellent piece by Charles Smith (Of Two Minds) – h/t to LewRockwell.
Labor overhead is all the labor-related expenses paid by employers: the vast majority of pundits, most of whom have never hired a single employee with their own money, tend to overlook the overhead costs paid by employers: workers compensation insurance (soaring), healthcare insurance (soaring), disability insurance, unemployment insurance, 401K or pension contributions, etc.
The “solution” in the Digital Revolution is to eliminate all labor overhead and transfer all these risks and expenses onto the free-lancer. As a free-lancer/self-employed worker, I am well-acquainted with these overhead costs: it costs $15,300 annually to purchase stripped-down healthcare insurance for my self-employed wife and I.
This is $7.66 per hour for a 2,000-hour work year. The total value of the labor overhead paid by employers for someone of my age and experience exceeds the $15/hour being trumpeted as a minimum wage.
In other words, it would cost an employer $30/hour to pay me $15/hour.
The net result of reducing labor to auctioned-off surplus is that the state, and thus ultimately the taxpayer, is paying the overhead costs. The person being paid $5 to shop at Target (or $50/day to deliver whatever the high-earners didn’t order through Amazon) for a top 5% earner can’t possibly afford $15,000 a year for healthcare insurance, much less all the other benefits paid by employers.
So they end up getting social welfare benefits for low-income people such as Medicaid, food stamps, Section 8 housing subsidies, etc. In other words, this form of menial labor is ultimately subsidized by taxpayers.
The person paying someone a menial sum to perform some service may think they’re “hiring” that person, but in reality the taxpayer is footing the majority of the costs–the real “employer” is the taxpayer.
In other words, this informal “work” is a simulacrum of paid employment. All the costs being offloaded onto the informal worker end up in the taxpayer’s lap.
How can this be lauded as a functioning system of employment? It can’t, because it isn’t.
Those who believe the Digital Revolution will create more work also overlook the realities of risk when it comes to employing people. Once again, I wonder how many of these people have ever hired a single person on their own dime, i.e. with their own money, paid the overhead costs of an employer and took the risks of hiring employees.
Here’s one example from real life: you hire a fellow cash-only (informally or through some sort of labor auction exchange) to clean the roof gutters on your house. He falls off your roof and is seriously injured. You may think your insurance will cover you, or the labor auction exchange’s claim of coverage will protect you, but guess again: you could be on the hook for a huge settlement/judgment that will not be paid by your homeowner’s insurance or the labor exchange.
Labor laws don’t disappear just because you’ve hired someone informally. Anyone violating labor laws is also exposed to lawsuits and claims, exploratory “fishing” or otherwise. How about claims of ethnic, religious or gender discrimination? Those don’t disappear just because you’re an informal employer.
Many people seem unaware that a $10,000 claim for violating labor statutes may cost $10,000 or more to defend in court (or in pre-trial legal expenses). You’re out $10,000 either way.
Few pundits seem to put themselves in the shoes of those performing menial tasks for their “betters” for minimal compensation. What are the risks and rewards for managing an injury (real or faked) for those auctioning off their labor for a few dollars?
Those within the insurance industry know that there is an entire class of people who claim injuries in department stores, etc. so they can settle for $5,000 each “incident”– and they get the settlement because it will cost the corporation far more than $5,000 to contest, investigate, go to court, etc.
How good a job will you get when the worker bid so little to get the work? Once again, few pundits seem to put themselves in the shoes of those performing menial tasks for their “betters” for minimal compensation. You want to supervise people who are rushing to finish the task so they can hurry to their next low-paying gig? No thanks; be my guest. From my experience, it will cost me more time/money to re-do the work that was done poorly than it would to have done the work myself and forget hiring someone for the lowest bid.
This is why I will never hire anyone again, no matter how low the wage or cash payment: the risks are way too high and the rewards far too modest. Anyone who’s been a “real” employer like I have knows the realities, risks and costs. Those who’ve never hired a single employee with their own money are ignoring the realities.
When I need some real work done, I hire licensed contractors who pay all the labor overhead costs and pay for liability and disability coverage. These are very costly, so the service is costly. But you get what you pay for.
As for hiring someone myself–I can’t afford the true costs or risks. It literally makes no financial sense to hire someone if you pay the full freight. I will hire formal enterprises that pay the full costs of their employees, but only when I can’t do the work myself.”
US Trans-Formation: Money, Control, Depopulation
Gender dysphoria is a psychological condition like anorexia.
Like anorexia, gender dysphoria is most likely a result of injured family dynamics or social pressures.
But while anorexics are not given liposuction to appease their anxieties, people with gender identity confusion are given sexual reassignment surgery (SRS).
As one tortured “trans-gender,” who quickly came to regret his transformation, realized, the medical community is making big money from this quack “treatment”:
The recently published WPATH Version VII has simply allowed the medical community to open the “floodgates” for this very tragedy to unfold. To get on cross gender hormones and then have surgery has become almost as simple as going to the convenience store for a pack of gum. If the client [Lila: the word client, instead of patient, is instructive] wants it, give it to them. “Real Life Test”? Maybe, maybe not, depending on your circumstances, occupation, etc. It is a billion dollar industry that thrives on your illness.
Get help. Don’t mutilate your body. The psychiatrist, psychologists, and surgeons will enjoy a wonderful life. You, however, could end up with a tortured life, ending up penniless, possibly unemployed, without family or friends and maybe even homeless. And that’s if you haven’t tried or committed suicide by then! All so you can become the girl you “think” you are inside and wanted to be! People, God or whatever you believe in made you in the correct gender. It is encoded in your very DNA. If you think differently, get real help; but, DON”T CHANGE IT.”
There are several incentives at work here for the ‘trans agenda’:
- MONEY: These lucrative surgical and hormonal therapies are a bonanza for the unethical professionals who offer them. Drug companies make big money from them. Meanwhile, the expensive treatments become another burden that tax-payers are forced to pick up, making them more impoverished. The fetishitic and pornographic aspects of trans life-style are also cash cows for the sex industries (pornography, sex-toys, fetish costumes etc).
- CONTROL: The advantage of creating another protected class is that it becomes dependent on the government and antagonistic to the general population. Trans activists can thus be successfully used as proxy rulers, snitches, and controllers, to demonize and further destroy heterosexual families. The “trans” agenda helps the government interpose itself intimately into childrens’ lives and makes them destroy family and society from within. The increasing numbers of confused teens drawn into this community become a reliable vote-bank for pro-government policies.
- DEPOPULATION: The end-game is to reduce the number of “breeders.” This is the real goal of encouraging people with psychological issues to turn themselves into guinea-pigs for treatments that have no chance of changing their chromosome-determined sex, but have a 100% chance of destroying their ability to have children.
US Soldiers Disciplined For Reporting Afghan Boy Rape
The US military is disciplining its own soldiers if they report on the horrendous rape of boys by allied Afghan police chiefs. The soldiers are being told it is none of their business and is an Afghan internal criminal matter.
That might well be true, but in the case of rapes taking place at US military bases, the soldiers are within their rights to report the matter. At the least, they should not be disciplined.
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R., Fla.) is demanding that the decorated Green Beret who blew the whistle on U.S.-allied Afghan forces raping boys be reinstated by the Army immediately.
Buchanan labeled war hero Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland’s dismissal from the force a “national disgrace.” Martland stood up for an Afghan rape victim in 2011.
“Driving Sgt. Martland out of the Army is a national disgrace,” Buchanan said in a statement. “He stood up for American values and should be commended, not punished.”
This week, reports surfaced that U.S. soldiers and Marines have been instructed to ignore suspicions of Afghan forces raping boys. While Martland appealed his dismissal from the Army, he was rejected this week. He will be discharged at the start of November.
Buchanan called on the Army Board for Correction of Military Records to reverse its decision and reinstate Martland. Otherwise, he demanded that either Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey or President Obama take action.
“The only people who should be punished and discharged from the service are the ones who created and condoned the immoral practice of ignoring child rape on a U.S. military base,” Buchanan said.
Earlier this week, the Republican congressman also demanded the House and Senate Armed Services Committees launch investigations into the alleged policy that discourages troops from reporting sexual abuse of boys at the hand of Afghan forces.
The commander of U.S. forces on Afghanistan has insisted that no such policy exists.”
The Ashkenazy or Sephardic Roots Of Hitler
From the Daily Telegraph:
Saliva samples taken from 39 relatives of the Nazi leader show he may have had biological links to the “subhuman” races that he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust.
Jean-Paul Mulders, a Belgian journalist, and Marc Vermeeren, a historian, tracked down the Fuhrer’s relatives, including an Austrian farmer who was his cousin, earlier this year.
A chromosome called Haplogroup E1b1b1 which showed up in their samples is rare in Western Europe and is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.
“One can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised,” Mr Mulders wrote in the Belgian magazine, Knack.
Haplogroup E1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18 to 20 per cent of Ashkenazi and 8.6 per cent to 30 per cent of Sephardic Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population.
Knack, which published the findings, says the DNA was tested under stringent laboratory conditions.
“This is a surprising result,” said Ronny Decorte, a genetic specialist at the Catholic University of Leuven.
“The affair is fascinating if one compares it with the conception of the world of the Nazis, in which race and blood was central.
“Hitler’s concern over his descent was not unjustified. He was apparently not “pure” or ‘Ayran’.”
It is not the first time that historians have suggested Hitler had Jewish ancestry.
His father, Alois, is thought to have been the illegitimate offspring of a maid called Maria Schickelgruber and a 19-year-old Jewish man called Frankenberger.”
Thanks To All The People Who Tweet/Link Me
Thank you to all the kind souls who take the time to link, tweet, or repost my pieces.
I appreciate it a great deal, since I don’t have the time to do it myself and am reluctant to get on other forums because of all the crazy stuff I’ve experienced.
Jeff Rense and Henry Makow, both of whom I’ve fingered for running disinformation, overlooked that and still gave me a boost. I appreciate both, though I will still call out disinfo as needed.
I would call out all your names except it might embarrass some of you or cause you trouble, given that this blog isn’t exactly uncontroversial, but you know who you are.
Thanks.