Links/Commentary: June 13, 2014

For 25/Prairial/222:

• I’ve been following Dickson Despommier’s work on urban farming for a few years now, and the Vertical Farming project has come far in the past five years.
• One effect of Colorado’s decision to legalize marijuana has been a significant spike in the potency – from 14-15% THC to about 25%. The NY Times’ Maureen Dowd put out a hilarious article last week, wherein a 60+ woman tried to pull off the stoner version of an irresponsible teenager going on an alcohol binge. I wonder if this not-so-bright woman tries to consume entire canisters of medication for headaches or allergies “if nothing happens at first”
• Disturbing news from Iraq this week, as ISIS fighters swept into Mosul and Tikrit, echoing the Taliban’s rapid gains in 1995-96. This is very significant, because ISIS-controlled territory now sits astride major pipeline networks connecting Iraq to Turkey and the Mediterranean, while coming uncomfortably close to the super-giant Kirkuk oil field…
• Iraqi Kurds want to see a divided Iraq, to create a Kurdish homeland. If the Sunni and Shia parts must splinter, can we can them Assyria and Babylon please?

Links/Commentary: June 09, 2014

Assorted commentary for today, 21/Prairial/222:

• The mainstream British media seem to have a sort of blackout on coverage for the Green Party, despite surging support that saw the Greens land fourth place behind the Tories in the recent EU elections, with an impressive 8% of the overall vote (and only 3 seats, given the vagaries of the Westminster model). More media space seems to be reserved for the Lib-Dems (fifth behind the Greens), or for the gaffe-prone racists from the UKIP and the BNP. For Europe as a whole, the Green-EFA bloc has garnered an impressive 58 seats this time. Even better days are hopefully ahead…
• I’m starting to look a little bit like Julius Martov. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad one.
• Corey Robin on the Jacobin Magazine: The model of a “virtuous” defendant, in the Stalinist and American criminal justice systems. The US prison population now equals that of the Gulag system just before Stalin’s death, according to one of the more reliable estimates, and a good chunk of these are in for petty non-violent crimes like marijuana possession. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: 750,000 prisoners incarcerated on charges of marijuana possession, at about $21k a year to keep them in prison, cost about $15.75 billion a year – $46 billion if you consider that the average sentence is a little over 3 years long. Quite a pretty penny for the prison-industrial complex, no?
• While a uniform civil code is most welcome in India, care must be taken to ensure that it is truly uniform, and not just pandering to the majority. Scroll.in covers the Goa civil code, which the BJP holds up as India’s only “truly uniform” code.
• The level of support enjoyed by the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is surprising, given how badly the Nazis treated Greece in their 1941-44 occupation. The once-fringe party took in 10% of the Greek vote in the recent EU elections
• Today’s feel-good story: The women of a small Uttarakhand village solve their water woes, and bring about an economic upswing.

Links/Commentary, June 08 2014

Assorted commentary for today, 20/Prairial/222:

• The New York Times reports that Iran’s leaders “want to double the population to 150 million by 2050“. This comes on the very day that I discover the existence of plans by Iran to import about 1 bcm of potable water from the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan (across about 900 miles of the most politically unstable regions on earth). If they go through with both, this is not going to end well. 
• Belen Fernandez on Uruguay’s Pepe Mujica, a sort of cross between a retired Robin Hood and Bilbo Baggins. Uruguay hasn’t done too badly at all after a decade of the leftie/progressive Broad Front government.
• Whatever happened to the Taliban spokesman who ended up as a freshman at Yale?
• Some Chinese cities are bulldozing entire mountains to create new flat land to expand into, at an unprecedented scale. A group of Chinese researchers voice their concerns in this Nature piece. 

I’d like to end with this article from the India Water Portal: Sobering voices amongst all the hype over the next iteration of “Ganga rejuvenation” plans. The BJP’s quoting of the Sabarmati “clean-up” as an example is most illustrative (like the rest of the “Gujarat model”). From the article: 

“The BJP says that it will clean up the Ganga in Varanasi the way it has cleaned up the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad. Ecologists, aware of the work on the Sabarmati, oppose this. The water flowing through the Sabarmati in its 10.4 km stretch in the city of Ahmedabad is actually the water of the Narmada River diverted into Sabarmati. This water was originally meant for Kutch, Saurashtra and North Gujarat, they claim. Upstream of the Sabarmati, from the point where the Narmada main Canal releases water into it, the river is dry. “And if one goes down to the Vasna barrage, downstream of Ahmedabad along the Sabarmati, one can easily see the polluted river”, says Thakkar. “One could divert Narmada water into Sabarmati, because it is a small river. But if this model needs to be followed for a huge river like the Ganga, one will need to bring water from the Brahamputra. The cost of pumping water from the Narmada into the Kshipra river, the latest river interlinking project, is Rs. 16 lakh per day. One can imagine the cost if water has to be diverted into the Ganga. Is it sustainable?”, he asks.“

Links/News: May 26, 2012

Assorted stuff for the day:

• From Brainpickings, a look at living alone – then and now
• Startup incubators working a little TOO well: Meet the entrepreneur who squatted at AOL’s Palo Alto Campus for over 2 months (CNET)
• Illegal file-sharing chips away at North Korea’s censorship/propaganda firewall (Torrentfreak). Come to think of it, the worlds envisioned by organizations like the MPAA/RIAA are quite similar to that of DPR Korea, in terms of total control of information. An earlier article on TF looked at corporations posting the craziest of take-down notices – not unlike the IPL’s botched attempt at a news blackout except for the most conformist of sources
• From Alternet, the first of a 5-part series on how “activists, theorists, organizations and ordinary citizens are rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up.” A wonderful example is the Evergreen Co-operative, which has changed the face of one of Cleveland’s most dirt-poor neighbourhoods
• A pretty interesting introduction to forged “historical” coins, which seem to be proliferating in India (some even sold on eBay!)
• The AMAZING AMAZING Ken Burns on the art of storytelling (Brainpickings)

Probably THE trippiest thing I have seen in months!

Found this gem of a video on Youtube. Its an awesome rendition of a Siberian folk tale by a Russian/Siberian band called Bugotak. Enjoy!

Links: May 25, 2012

Back to blogging after a long long time. Here are some highlights of stuff I’ve been reading today:

The Poverty of Nations (Counterpunch), on Adam Smith’s magnum opus turned upside-down in today’s world 

Athina Tsangari reviews Brooklyn Castle, a middle school in Central Brooklyn with a large (and rather successful) Chess programme

From Marginal Revolution, why is re-building Haiti taking so long?

Building on CJ’s post on old-is-gold computer games, here is one awesome repository!

Oil Wars on the horizon (Counterpunch). I’ll probably deal with some of this in longer posts subsequently.

Alstom Foundation announces 90,000 euro grant to Husk Power Systems (The Hindu). HPS is a rather nifty concept aimed at villages deemed “economically unviable” to reach via conventional electricity transmission mechanisms

“Healthy” elephant populations in the four Southern states (The Hindu). I noticed the “indirect evidence” bit in particular, having seen it used in tiger counts in 2006 – and having closely followed the rather embarassing series of events that followed, culminating in the shutting down of Project Tiger

Good news from Ranthambore – its raining litters! (The Hindu)

The start of a new resource war? Oil discoveries in Kenya’s Turkana Basin could lead to a situation not unlike that in the Niger Delta, if current attitudes persist (Project Syndicate)

Joseph Stiglitz and Jeff Madrick @ #occupywallstreet

The protesters are not allowed to use mega-phones? Damn – would’ve been fun to see annoyed bankers!

Watch the video here

I was at Occupy Philadelphia for all of Sunday night – and I plan to go back again. I really hope this turns into a strong coherent movement, and an inspiration for progressive forces everywhere to beat back the creeping Fascism one can see in all major countries in the world.

And hopefully media coverage will be better than this nonsense at NYT. Now what what what does knowing the stock price of Apple have to do with anything about this protest?!

Josh Fox (Gasland) on the Keystone Xl pipeline

Cinema: Ten (2002)

Ten (2002)

This was one hell of a novel film – an unnamed woman driving a car (Mania Akbari) is the main character, and the movie is divided into ten sequences – ten encounters between the driver and her passengers. These include her son, her sister, an old woman on her way to a mausoleum, a prostitute and a young to-be bride. Along the way we learn that the woman has divorced her husband, and this is a source of much conflict between the woman and her son Amin (Akbari’s real-life son, also named Amin). After a lot of quarreling, the mother relents and allows him to go stay with his father. This part is just pure feminist-fodder, Amin resents the fact that his mother is an independent, working woman, calling her selfish and a bad mother for not being a housewife. The old woman in the third sequence is the sort of religious nut who simply won’t stop talking about their piousness, but the best scenes come with the to-be bride. The first time she is seen is when she is offered a ride back from the mausoleum, when she talks about wanting to get married, but her tone and her face reveal some sort of underlying tension. She is later seen in scene 9 (and scene 8? I couldn’t make out), when her to-be husband rejects her. When Amin’s mother asks her why she has worn her veil so tightly, she loosens it and we realize that she has shaved her head. In a moving scene, half laughing and half crying, she says it makes her feel free, liberated. The part with the prostitute was also good – the prostitute got into the car when Amin’s mother braked, thinking it was a man. We never see her face, and even when she leaves the car looking for another customer, we only see her back, properly veiled.

I don’t know how much this film grossed, but it must have cost next-to-nothing to make (talk of RoI)! It is entirely filmed on a digital camera, most of the actors (except for Mania Akbari) are amateurs and there seems to be no film crew involved – just the camera placed on the car’s dashboard. Overall, the film explores how excess social conservatism causes a ton of social problems and friction on a personal level. Very well-made, engrossing.

Music: Wardruna. Insanely trippy stuff. Pre-Christian Nordic folk music, with 3 planned albums and each album has 8 runes.

Runaljod - Gap var Ginnunga (Wardruna, 2009)

 

Nostalgia Attack!

Finally managed to locate my old feed-list and promptly loaded it into my reader. Two pieces of awesome-ness from there:

1. Whataman on whataman: AK’s tribute to Nangafakir. I humbly re-post
2. Pandu/IISc freethinkers. I hope he remembers Nokia 2600s on vibrator mode.