Author Archives: Lila

Natural AC: Five plants that can dehumidify for free

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Tillandsia Royalty Free Stock Images

I’ve been looking around for natural methods to combat humidity for those days when the air-conditioner fails….or in places where it isn’t used.

For instance, AC isn’t as popular in Europe as it is in the United States.

That’s for a variety of reasons – including greater environmental awareness, better built homes, and popular fear of illness from constant exposure to cold air. Many Europeans think  air-conditioning makes you sick.

[Read this American tourist’s AC-induced cultural-shock in France.]

AC is also a lot of maintenance and expense.

So, finding a way to get humidity down without becoming dependent on a complicated mechanical device has got to be attractive to anyone with a survivalist bent.

There are several well-known natural methods to reduce humidity, but they still take quite a bit of effort and not all the ingredients are easy to come by in developing countries.

One of them requires hanging cheese-cloth (or gunny, burlap, or jute) bags of rock-salt from the ceiling, with buckets beneath to catch the water as it drips down.

Rock-salt is a desiccant, which means it extracts the moisture from the air until it is water-logged itself.

If you’ve ever had a salt-shaker that got clogged on humid days, you know how that works.

By the way, the solution to moisture in salt-shakers is simple – throw in a few grains of raw rice. They’ll absorb moisture in the shaker and keep your salt dry.

If rock-salt (salt with large crystals) is unavailable where you live, you can also spread table-salt in pans and leave them on counters or shelves. Table salt will absorb some atmospheric moisture until it’s too wet do absorb any more.  After the salt becomes water-logged, it can still be heated, dried, and reused.

Other dehumidifiers include baking soda , silica, and charcoal briquets. They do well as desiccators, but they’re not cheap in many places and they need to be replenished…or, in the case of silica, heated for reuse.

I’ve never tried salt or silica this way, so I don’t know if it actually has an appreciable effect on the humidity inside a house that’s worth the effort and clutter of pans and bags all over the place.

A simpler and more aesthetic method would be to grow indoor plants that absorb humidity.

At first, this seems counter-intuitive, because most plants add to the moisture content of the air.

If you live in an arid area, humidifying plants can be very useful.

That’s besides all the other proven benefits of house plants – purifying the air, improving mental focus and general health, speeding up healing, and making it easier for you to breathe.

Still,  there are a few plants that reduce humidity or at least balance it.

DoItYourself.com has a list of five “plant dehumidifiers” that are easily grown indoors:

1. The Peace Lily, which needs watering just once a week and sucks in moisture from the air the rest of the time.

2. The Reed Palm, which also purifies the air.

3. English Ivy, which you can hang from the ceiling out of your way, where it will reduce humidity and take care of airborne mold.

4. Boston Fern, which balances the humidity in the air, in addition to reducing it.

5. Tillandsia (also known as air-plant), which doesn’t even need a root system to absorb water an nutrients from the atmosphere.

The catch to this list is that when I researched the names of plants that add to humidity indoors, three names on this list –  the peace lily, the English Ivy, and the Boston fern – showed up on the list of humidifiers as well.

So, if humidity is a severe problem where you live, it might be better to just stick with the Reed plant  (one of the most useful plants in permaculture) and Tillandsia.

Tillandsia, a type of bromeliad, needs no soil and very little watering and can be mounted on cork, wood, wire, twigs, on a shelf or wall cabinet.

No cost water-harvesting when you stop raking

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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.

Study suggests whites don’t see non-whites as “people”?

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From April Kemick at the University of Toronto (Scarborough) website:

“The human brain fires differently when dealing with people outside of one’s own race, according to new research out of the University of Toronto Scarborough.

This research, conducted by social neuroscientists at U of T Scarborough, explored the sensitivity of the “mirror-neuron-system” to race and ethnicity. The researchers had study participants view a series of videos while hooked up to electroencephalogram (EEG) machines. The participants – all white – watched simple videos in which men of different races picked up a glass and took a sip of water. They watched white, black, South Asian and East Asian men perform the task.

Typically, when people observe others perform a simple task, their motor cortex region fires similarly to when they are performing the task themselves. However, the UofT research team, led by PhD student Jennifer Gutsell and Assistant Professor Dr. Michael Inzlicht, found that participants’ motor cortex was significantly less likely to fire when they watched the visible minority men perform the simple task. In some cases when participants watched the non-white men performing the task, their brains actually registered as little activity as when they watched a blank screen.

“Previous research shows people are less likely to feel connected to people outside their own ethnic groups, and we wanted to know why,” says Gutsell. “What we found is that there is a basic difference in the way peoples’ brains react to those from other ethnic backgrounds. Observing someone of a different race produced significantly less motor-cortex activity than observing a person of one’s own race. In other words, people were less likely to mentally simulate the actions of other-race than same-race people”

The trend was even more pronounced for participants who scored high on a test measuring subtle racism, says Gutsell.”

Comment:

Actually, what the researchers found was not that “people’s brains” react differently when they watch people of other races than their own.

What they found was that white people’ brains reacted differently when they watched non-whites, as opposed to other whites. A bit of a difference.

Now, if the researchers had also done tests with brown people as the study group and then blacks and other groups, then it would be valid for them to generalize from their research to conclusions about people as a whole.

But they can’t generalize about “people” from one subset of people without being guilty of the very thing they’re supposed to be studying, racism.

Of course, the perceptions of the whites in the study might not have had so much to do with color as such, although it manifested that way, but as with the status evoked by white skin. Since white or light-skin tends to signify higher status in contemporary society, it follows that when white people – in this study – showed less awareness of or empathy toward dark-skinned people, they might have been doing that not so much because of the different skin-colors of the people they were observing, but because of what those colors signify today, which is lower status.

This inference is strengthened by a similar study of race and perception conducted by Sophie Trawalter et al. in 2012.

Quoting from the abstract of the Trawalter study:

Archival data from the National Football League injury reports reveal that, relative to injured White players, injured Black players are deemed more likely to play in a subsequent game, possibly because people assume they feel less pain. Experiments 1–4 show that White and Black Americans–including registered nurses and nursing students–assume that Black people feel less pain than do White people. Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 provide evidence that this bias is rooted in perceptions of status, not race per se.

The authors suggest that the findings of their study do not necessarily mean that whites are being racist in not caring when non-white people feel pain. The findings could also mean that white people show less empathy because, for one reason or other, they think black people can tolerate greater pain.

Of course, none of these conclusions means much until studies of black or brown perceptions of white people are also done.

One might guess that in those studies it will be found that browns and blacks are actually more sensitive to the pains of whites than those of their own.  One might guess that, because in recent studies it’s been shown that both whites and blacks rated white faces as more intelligent, honest, and attractive than they did black/dark-skinned faces….

I’ll pull up the link in a minute… (incomplete)

UN legal body endorses Khobragade’s immunity

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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”.

Rain-water harvesting: Green living on a Bangalore roof

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From Rainwaterharvesting blog, run by a Bangalore couple who are active in the water-conservation and rain-harvesting movement in India:

“Almost all the rain on the building site falls on the roof. In Bangalore it can rain 970 mm in an average year. This meant that our house roof with an area of 100 square metres had 97,000 litres of pure rainwater falling on it. With the idea why allow it to go waste, we started to harvest it? This harvesting was done at many levels.

From the staircase rooftop which had an area of 10 square metres, we placed a Rain barrel and collected the water on the roof itself. A small platform was designed and the 500 litre Rain Barrel placed on it. On the staircase roof we placed a gutter to collect the rain. This came down into a vertical pipe with an end cap called the first rain separator. During the first rain and subsequently when we want to clean the roof or the rain gutter we open the cap and the dusty water flows out through the first rain separator. Then after a ‘Y trap’ rainwater flows in through a ‘dhoti filter’ into our rain barrel. We checked the rainwater quality using a H2S strip test and found the water potable. Sometimes when there is slight contamination we use a method called SODIS (Solar Disinfection) to treat the collected rainwater for drinking purpose. Here you fill a PET bottle with the rainwater and leave it in the sun for 5 hours. The water is now sterilized and can be brought into the house cooled and is ready for drinking. This is not a low cost solution for water treatment but a no-cost solution.  Our annual requirement of drinking cooking water comes from this rain barrel alone.

Rain Barrel

We also have an Ecosan toilet on the terrace. This pan in the toilet separates solids and liquids at source. We collect the urine in a barrel, dilute it and use it as a fertilizer for our terrace garden. The solids are covered with ash every time we use it. This is then transferred to some Blue drums we have kept on the terrace and again covered with earth or straw. We then plant trees in these drums. Trees such as Papaya, lemon, curry leaves, sapota are planted and they grow well. No waste from our toilet on the terrace leaves the roof.

The rainwater falling on the Ecosan toilet too is collected in a 200 litre rain barrel and used for ablution purpose.

We have a box type solar cooker to cook our lunch on the terrace. A solar water heater heats water for bath and for the kitchen. During cloudy days we use a ‘Gujarat boiler’ which uses bio-mass for the water heating. The Gujarat Boiler also generates ash for us to use in the Eco-san toilet. We have planted many trees in front of the house and the twigs and branches from the trees are used for the Gujarat Boiler.

Next we have placed a bathroom on the terrace itself. This also has a front loading washing machine which is one of the most water efficient ones in the market. We collect the water from the bath we have on the terrace bathroom as well as from the washing machine in a small ferro-cement tank placed just below the roof slab. We then pump it up to a planted reed filter to clean up the grey-water using a small pump. The reed filter is Cattails – reeds found in lakes- placed in 4 blue drums. In a fifth drum we have sand and gravel filter to clean up the grey-water further. This treated grey-water is then used for the terrace garden where we sometimes grow rice paddy.  Some extra grey-water is also used for flushing the toilet in the ground floor. No greywater is allowed to go waste.

The rice on the rooftop grows well on even a small area. We place 2 sheets of a pond lining material called Silpaulin with a brick edging. The sheet is then filled with a mix of compost, vermi-compost and red earth up-to a depth of 2 to 3 inches. Rice paddy is then planted in it. The water required for the paddy comes from grey-water alone. For the fertilizer the urine from the Eco-san toilet is used. Kitchen waste which is composted is also added to the soil. We have had productions of paddy to the tune of 1 kg per square meter. We have also found that we can grow 4 crops of rice in a year. Millets can also be grown instead of rice. Vegetables such as tomatoes, brinjals, lady-fingers, chilies all grow on the terrace though the monkeys who frequent this place can also be a nuisance at times.

A small wetland has also been created in a ferro-cement tank where different plants and fishes occupy and clean water.

Solar photo-voltaic panels on the roof provide enough power for us to store in batteries and use to light 11 bulbs in the house. The house incidentally has no fans let alone AC’s thanks to the cool terrace as well as thanks to the trees planted on the sides which enfold it in shade.

A well designed rooftop can provide all the water required for a house-hold, provide energy for cooking , lighting and water heating, provide food-grains and vegetables , enhance bio-diversity as well as absorb all the waste-stream from the house from the kitchen and bathroom / toilets and convert it to reuse .

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

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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

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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?

British Charity “Rape Crisis” Is A UK Govt Front

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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.

Fake “Rape Crisis”: UK rape rate ten times Indian

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One feminist notices something odd in the hype about the Indian rape crisis:

QUOTE:

“Let’s look at the numbers for India, population 1.2 billion (about 48% of whom are women):

In 2011 there were 24,206 reported rapes. Of these 26 per cent resulted in convictions.

The UK has a population of about 56.2 million.”

Lila: This  article was written in January 2013.  I don’t know where the author got her numbers.

The UK population in 2011 was 63.3 million. The population in 2012 was 63.7 million.

The Indian population in 2011 was approx. 1.21 billion.    In 2012 it was 1.22 billion.

That means that the UK has a population that is roughly 20 times smaller than India’s.

The article continues:

QUOTE:

“Fifty-one per cent are female.

In 2011 there were 14,624 rapes reported. Of which 24 per cent resulted in a “conviction or caution”.

Lila: If these rape statistics are in any way accurate, then the rape numbers in the UK are nearly half those in India, even though the Indian population is 20 times greater.

That means that the per capita rape rate in India is TEN TIMES smaller than that in the UK, a settled and developed country, with high levels of prosperity and education, one of the major powers.

Moreover, the UK rape rate is this high, even though Britain is a heavily policed country, with perhaps the most extensive surveillance networks in the world that routinely and illegally snoop on British citizens.

Britain also has a large and complex criminal justice system with multiple agencies to protect women and an academic culture that often shills for the feminist agenda.

But nonetheless the British rape rate is ten times that of India.  Where is the outrage?

Remember that the Indian rape rate is ten times smaller, despite extensive and severe poverty in India, few social networks outside kinship networks, and a very low per capita rate of policing.

Remember that India also has a very large population of illiterate young males, many without jobs and routinely experiences huge influxes of migrant workers into  severely overcrowded cities, already suffering from near-collapse in infrastructure and utilities.

Remember that India suffers from critical energy and water shortages, from soaring food and gas prices, from inflation and endemic corruption.

It has some of the world’s most congested and dangerous roads and some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists and separatists.

It is the target of unrelenting espionage and interference from the major powers.

India suffers in addition all the extraordinary stresses of very rapid economic development coupled with the crushing impact of  an alienating foreign culture on its traditional social fabric.

Finally, remember that behind the Indian rape rate are financial incentives created by feminist laws that reward women with windfall sums for bringing rape charges.

The Indian law privileges women as rape-victims while denying even the possibility that women might molest and rape, thus erasing the male as victim of sexual violence.

India has a jurisprudence weighted in favor of the woman coupled with a  feminist leadership that nonetheless demands even greater privileges and exemptions.

It has a media culture that is sensitive to every outrage to women and silent on outrages against men.

And yet, incredibly, the rape rate in India is ten times smaller than that in Britain.

So, where, I repeat, is the outrage?

Where is the United Nations study on the parlous condition of women in the United Kingdom, which rapes at ten times the rate of India?

Where is the UN study on the US, which rapes at higher rates than India?

Where is the UN study on South Africa, which rapes at higher rates than India?

“Non-interfering” Kerry Cheers Overthrow Of Ukrainian Gvt

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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.”