Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Episode 21: Suez, De-Globalization, and a Semiconductor Fab for India

https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/episode-21-suez-de-globalization?r=66qfh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=email

the suez episode should be a wake up call for us to decouple ever more from especially china. in particular, if china invades taiwan, what do we do for semiconductors? we need fabs in this country.

Monday, March 29, 2021

Former CDC Director: COVID Escaped from Wuhan Lab

The former head of the Center for Disease Control in the United States believes that COVID19 came from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China:





Biden as Dhritarashtra, Kamala as Gandhari

Biden has become a Dhritarashtra, with Kamala as his Gandhari.
Under their blind gaze, all of their Kauravas are running amok.

Dinesh D'Souza wonders who's really running the world's most powerful "democracy":

Biden Flunky Blocks US Senator Ted Cruz from Filming Detention Camps

When US Senator Ted Cruz attempted to visit a migrant detention facility to get evidence on the poor conditions of detained children there, the Biden administration ordered its people to block access to the senator:


So much for America's much-vaunted constitutional separation of powers.

Apparently, during the pandemic, the Biden Whitehouse has accorded itself Emergency-like dictatorial powers. While family gatherings at home can include no more than a half-dozen family members, the detention of alien migrant children can pack untold numbers of them together without any vaccination.

Next time Americans give lectures to us on human rights, we can always hold up the mirror to them.

North Korea Evades Oil Sanctions Thru Murky Chinese Backchannels

Saturday, March 27, 2021

Fauci dismisses Redfield's comment on lab origin of wuhan virus

i am reminded of "milady doth protest too much". fauci fails the 'smell test': he said, eg. "don't wear masks", "HCQ is no good, remdesivir is good". and somehow he's considered an infallible oracle. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9408781/Dr-Fauci-dismisses-ex-CDC-Director-Dr-Redfields-belief-COVID-leaked-Wuhan-lab.html

i have had my suspicion that there is a large conspiracy which, in the end, is about the depopulation of certain 'surplus' populations. 

the wuhan virus seems to affect some ethnic populations more than others. eg east asia was hardly affected. in the US and UK, whites seem less vulnerable. of course there could be many reasons, but is it engineered to be so? see the stats in the US: this means whites are less vulnerable to the virus than others. see below for a) wuhan virus deaths by race, b) US population by race. shows that non-whites are dying proportionately more than whites.














narrative: casually 'awarding' indian cuisine to sri lanka, or even better, jews or christians

where do i begin?

even the words appam and idiyappam are malayalam words. i doubt if 'idi' means anything in sinhalese. 

it's a kerala specialty, both appam and idiyappam. if jews or christians brought these to kerala '2000 years ago', why don't you call them INDIAN dishes, no SRI LANKAN? coz no jew or christian is claimed to have gone to sri lanka '2000 years' ago. so it couldn't be that they are sri lankan dishes. 

secondly, christians came to India only around 345CE, led by a refugee named Thomas of canaan. any other date is pure bunkum, 'truth by repeated assertion'. the sainted saint thomas DID NOT COME TO INDIA. he died in ortona, Italy. clever portuguese in the 15th century conflated thomas of canaan with the sainted guy.

thirdly, there is a totally opposite legend, that says sri lankans from 'eelam' (eezham) migrated to kerala (presumably bringing their cuisine with them). thus the 'eelava' or 'ezhava' community, which is the largest hindu community in kerala, which has a belief that it was a Buddhist community that was downgraded to OBC some few centuries back. 

kerala's 'syrian christians' have very little to do with syria. 80% of them are ezhavas converted in the 19th century. and cunningly, ezhava cuisine has now become 'syrian christian cuisine'! amazing narratives.

white guys writing for a commie Chinese paper casually recycling manufactured mythologies! 

this is like joseph needham casually awarded much of indian science and tech to china. 





the Dems are coming. for you.


fahrenheit 451: Democrats want censorship, more censorship.

funding and muscle for kerala elections come via boat

why there are suddenly lots of new 'voters' in kerala

bangladeshi illegal aliens have been given the vote. just like in bengal. nice work!

How Ship Caused Global Supply Traffic Jam - The Wall Street Journal.

Quick notes: TSMC | Vegan wonders...

  • TSMC: “Twenty years ago there were 20 foundries, and now the most cutting-edge stuff is sitting on a single campus in Taiwan.” How a Taiwanese chipmaker became a linchpin of the global economy.

    Since every new node of process technology requires more challenging development and bigger investment in new production capacity, other chipmakers have over the years started focusing on design and left production to dedicated foundries such as TSMC. The Pentagon has been quietly pressing for the US to invest more in advanced chipmaking so that its weapons are not dependent on foreign manufacturers.


  • Making honey without bees and milk without cows: Tailoring the micro-organism carefully and choosing the right feed stocks for fermentation, it's possible to create anything from honey, to egg whites, to milk. "It is molecularly identical, so it should be the same".


  • Salami Slicing: China silent on further disengagement at other points. . . . . Threat remains.


  • Transportation model: Gadkari's unfortunate obsession with aping the US model.


  • Heat wave: Deadly heat waves will be common in South Asia, even at 1.5 degrees of warming. A wet bulb temperature of 32 degrees Celsius (89.6F) is considered to be the point when labor becomes unsafe, and 35C is the limit to human survivability—when the body can no longer cool itself.


  • Jaguar I-Pace launches in India: Costs twice as much as a Tesla Model-3.. Indian govt would need to address the country's dirty power grid, which would increase the carbon footprint of EVs plugged into it.


  • Getting stale already: Y Combinator's new batch features its largest group of Indian startups


  • North India needs this fix:


  • Secrets for practioners of Meditation:



Friday, March 26, 2021

picture of the day: niazi surrenders to aurora. #bangladesh war 1971

we need to make a shibboleth out of this like the yanks do of "lee surrenders to grant in the civil war", see below. 



misguided local hackers helping, in effect, the chinese?

just like BLM and other 'US is racist' messages were thrown back in blinken's face by xi's minions in alaska last week.

balaji srinivasan @balajis interview: comprehensive

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/506-episode-everything-balaji-on-bitcoin-ethereum-media/id863897795?i=1000514364656

and very long, but worth listening to. balaji is a visionary; and the fact that he has moved from silicon valley to singapore/india is significant. 

lots of ads and other junk in the podcast, though. sigh. 

AstraZeneca Got Its Vaccine Right. The Rollout Has Been a Mess. - The Wall Street Journal.

AstraZeneca Got Its Vaccine Right. The Rollout Has Been a Mess. https://www.wsj.com/articles/astrazeneca-vaccine-slow-rollout-mess-data-11616695692 

Not to mention some high officials in the US are probably colluding with Pfizer etc to fend off low cost competitor. 

Xi Jinping Doesn't Have a 'Democratic Bone' in His Body: Biden

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

"what do you do with a problem like mariiiiiiia"? er... china?

sing it to the tune from 'the sound of music'.

why cochin's container port as well as rama setu will never fly

vallarpadam has a depth of only 8m. no big container ship captain in his right mind will ever go there. 

same with rama setu. people would be nuts to take their ships through the shallows with the risk of getting stuck.


now they're widening the suez canal with... this? 

cracks in the walled garden: alibaba to offer an app on wechat's rival platform

intel to build two fabs in arizona to compete with TSMC, Samsung


takeaways from shooting 1. arabs are white, 2. terror has no religion and more

Takeaways from the Boulder, Colorado shooting

Quick notes: Atmanirbhar America | Krishna Ella...

  • Atmanirbhar America: U.S. Senate mulls $30 billion in funding to boost chipmaking sector.. The semiconductor industry has been pushing for an investment tax credit for spending on semiconductor tools.


  • Coolies get lectured: U.S. Defence Secretary raises human rights concerns with Jaishankar. . . . . . . Don't grovel before USA.


  • Covaxin more effective against variants: Some experts suspect Covaxin could be more effective against variants since it combats the whole body of a virus instead of the "spike-protein" tip.

    'Rarely does one see such commitment.': Bharat Biotech's Krishna Ella wins Covaxin fight. . 'He came back from the US only to work for his country.'. . 'He has invested his fortunes to build this company and is married to his work.'

    AstraZeneca: German team discovers thrombosis trigger.


  • 'Brick on Wheels' - A machine that can produce 12 thousand bricks in one hour



  • 1,100 megawatts: Pakistan's China-built nuclear reactor starts operation


  • BIG-IP: Hackers are exploiting a server vulnerability with a severity of 9.8 out of 10. As if the mass-exploitation of Microsoft Exchange servers wasn't enough, the vulnerability this time is in BIG-IP, a line of server appliances sold by F5 Networks


  • The Mahavakyas: That the Reality is remote is a misconception. It is removed by the instruction that it is within one’s own self.


Tuesday, March 23, 2021

covishield interim efficacy data being contested by fauci's entity

astrazeneca and oxford seem to have screwed up their trials in the US as well as elsewhere. brahma chellaney pointed out that they have not released the results of their small bridge trial in india (let us remember a volunteer in chennai sued for 5 crores because of serious side effects, and serum instituted counter-sued him for 100 crores, but that's the last we heard about it).

the tragic(?) #defenestration of pratap bhanu mehta

https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/episode-19-the-tragic-defenestration

ecosystem has sprung into action, but pbmehta's productive output as a scholar (which i assume is some sort of cultural marxism), nor his verbose, content-light pieces in the indian express, do not seem to justify the high valuation that is placed on him.

what really is his claim to fame? does he have a high h-factor? is he cited highly by his peers? which of his books are texts or best-sellers? are any of his theories household names or seminal contributions?

i don't think so, to answer my own questions.

he really should have kept his opinions to himself, rather than impose them on his students and damage the university's image especially as an administrator. i can say this because i have been teaching for years, without once bringing my personal views into the picture. i thought those were not relevant to my work as a professor or as a director of a small business school. it is true that sometimes students or ex-students have sought me out based on what they read of my articles. but it is completely unethical of me to impose my views on them. but that's not true of many faculty. i was aware of an iim faculty who was a zealous convert (hindu to christian) and she was quite happy to evangelize. another man was a marxist zealot and he used to preach his views to students as well. 

Sunday, March 21, 2021

US Losing to China: Bill Maher

Comedian Bill Maher gets audiences to laugh & cry with his sobering words:

More poverty, smaller middle-class in India in pandemic? JNU type 'research'

https://qz.com/india/1985855/more-poverty-smaller-middle-class-in-india-china-in-pandemic/ 

Frankly, seems like an absurd report. I think Pew just took the big drop in gdp in 2020 and assumed that would have led to an increase in poverty. Will the big rise in gdp in 2021 then reverse it? Of course they will not 'research' that.

Anything to put India down. 

Saturday, March 20, 2021

Space Transformation: ISRO to Spin Off Space Assets into NSIL

ISRO will spin off its space assets, including satellites & launch vehicles, into New Space India Limited (NSIL), recently created as a replacement for the now defunct Antrix Corporation:





Another entity called INSPACe (Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre) will help to cultivate a private sector space industry, assisting Indian startups & companies in licensing useful technologies from ISRO, and in accessing ISRO's facilities for use in developing their own technology.


With NSIL and private companies taking over the operation of satellites, and even launch operations, this will free up ISRO to return to its core roots as a developer of launch vehicles & spacecraft, to help push India's technological envelope further.

Hopefully, ISRO can then make a beeline towards reusable launch vehicle technology, since that's where the rest of the world is now shifting.

China Beats America With Its Own Stick

youngest ashoka chakra recipient in the history of the indian army

captain r harshan of trivandrum. rakta-sakshi at 26. this is the day he was killed in action. 

his father shri radhakrishnan nair received the award for him. 



Quick notes: 5G royalties | Gig economy...

  • $2.50 per phone: Huawei to collect 5G royalties from Apple, Samsung and other smartphone makers.


  • China wins: China’s CATL, will make prismatic batteries for future Volkswagen EVs.. “The Chinese have become very strong on a technological level which means the supply side is bigger”.


  • SMIC: China chipmaker gets state funds for $2.4 Billion plant. China wants to build a coterie of tech giants that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Intel Corp. and TSMC.


  • "Hack everybody you can": Indian organisations hit by hackers exploiting Microsoft Exchange servers vulnerability


  • The Gig Is Up for Uber: Uber drivers in UK to get minimum wage, holiday pay and pensions after court ruling.


  • Pew Study: India added 75 million people to poverty in 2020. By contrast, China added 1 million to its poor population. . . . . . . Technology-challenged vikAss ain't helping


  • Odisha Farmer Builds EV:




  • Toxic cesspool: There is a deadly bacteria growing in Hyderabad’s lakes and other water bodies apart from heavy metals, sewage and other pollutants.


  • Adulterated Jaggery: “We don’t even use a gram of jaggery that we produce because it has 'poison' in it. For household use, I procure chemical-free jaggery.”.. Investigation revealed widespread usage of industrial bleaching agents, additives and acids along with seashells, wood powder and other materials.


  • How the State drives innovation: Many of the revolutionary technologies that make the iPhone and other products and services “smart” were funded by the U.S. govt. Take, for instance, the Internet, GPS, touchscreen display, as well as the voice-activated personal assistant, Siri. And Apple did not just benefit from govt-funded research activities. It also received its early stage finance from the U.S. govt’s Small Business Investment Company program. Venture capitalists entered only after govt funding had gotten the company to the critical proof of concept.

    Other Silicon Valley companies, like Google, have profited in a similarly immense fashion: Google’s algorithm was funded by the National Science Foundation. Many of the “new economy” companies that like to portray themselves as the heart of U.S. “entrepreneurship” have very successfully surfed the wave of U.S. govt-funded investments. Hence, one secret to Silicon Valley’s success has been its active and visible hand, in stark contrast to the Ayn Rand/Adam Smith folklore often bandied about.

    Clearly, the role of govt is not to run commercial enterprises, but to spark innovation in strategic areas. Government should never have an exclusive license or hold a large enough portion of the value of an innovation so that its commercial use would be deterred in any form or fashion. But at the same time, it is self-defeating even for private-sector innovation if private firms are the only ones to gain all the reward. Indeed, the same criticism made about banks — socialization of risk, privatization of reward — holds for the innovation economy.


Friday, March 19, 2021

the guy who has his fingers on the nuclear buttons

no wonder his own party (Dems) was trying to make sure somebody else had the codes. what happened with that? is there adult supervision?


biden tripped three times in a row just climbing the steps to the presidential plane.

not to make fun of an old man, but is this safe? a good idea to have this obviously impaired man in charge?


That's such a mean thing to say about the Congress!

Or the commies. 

Thursday, March 18, 2021

The unbearable #sunyata of being a dynasty scion

vaccine imperialism

human assembly lines are not so far off after all

just yesterday, i had speculated that test tube assembly lines for humans are a long way off, and therefore indian womens' wombs would have value. https://rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com/p/episode-17-why-is-the-west-attacking


mechanical wombs. jeez. maybe Matrix is not so distant after all. 

trinidad and tobago's romila thapar, irfan habib, yogendra yadav and kavitha krishnan combined

https://newsday.co.tt/2021/03/17/bernard-yawching-defends-book-accusing-unc-hindus-of-racist-agenda/

in other words, motivated humbug from someone who's well compensated for bigotry, racism and lies.

What India should do to Twitter. Should have done it years ago.

Myanmar Coup: 183 Dead in Myanmar Military Crackdown

Hungary 1956, Prague Spring 1968, and now Myanmar 2021...

Democracy being crushed by a large neighboring superpower

is it worth it? yes, to #bigpharma. not to us.


astrazeneca/covishield does not seem to work against south african variant

but it's still a good idea to take your covishield shot in my opinion. 

this is a definite dampener, though. and it is alarming. 


CONCLUSIONS

A two-dose regimen of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine did not show protection against mild-to-moderate Covid-19 due to the B.1.351 variant. 

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

brit univ releases student sex worker #toolkit

you still think 'Britain's Daughters' is a film that doesn't need to be made?

the white christian patriarchy turns their college girls into sex workers, and it's officially endorsed by a university!

here's the toolkit. boy, toolkits are popular these days.

h/t @bennedose

payments entities zoom in value. should GoI take 49% UPI public and monetize it?

if stripe = $95 billion, square = $110 billion, and paypal = $280 billion, then what is the market value of UPI?

keep 51% to ensure that UPI data sits in india and is secured. 

i've never quite understood why there should be NUEs to compete with UPI, if the latter is part-privatized and ceases to get special treatment from GoI.

Monday, March 15, 2021

YAHJ: yet another vaccine hit job by a sepoy, a new one named alia allana

anybody calling for 'justice for patsy stevenson' as they did for seditious 'disha ravi'?

guess not. 

patsy stevenson was the redhead brutalized by police during the sarah everard vigil. 

but the outrage is always selective. 

the same characters who were howling for disha ravi are thunderously silent now. why?

sounds like a pile of the usual horse manure in regards to india

because 
1. india has hardly any external debt denominated in foreign currencies
2. india's growth prospects are quite good
3. india's debt-GDP ratio is considerably lower than those of the US, japan, etc. https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-national-debt


of course not. the Final Solution(TM) is depopulation

that really is what elite white climate change fundamentalists think. all these pesky non-whites! off with their heads!


in the mote v. beam dept 2: leslie udwin will make BBC film 'Britain's Daughter' on sarah everard. no? ok.

poor sarah everard, 33 years old, was murdered (apparently by a police officer) while walking home in london. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56384600. yeah, soul-searching. you can also soul-search about the millions you murdered in india in cold blood, starving them to death. 

i suppose the very woke and very distressed leslie udwin (born in israel, lived in south africa, now british) will surely make a heartbreaking BBC documentary called 'Britain's Daughter' about the patriarchy and religious/cultural problems of white christian britain that made sarah's murder inevitable?

no? i guess not. finger-pointing and religion-shaming is reserved strictly for hindus. 

there's an obvious agenda. 


and this leslie (the equivalent of scumbags like india's 'eminent' historians) got her 15 min of fame. 

ps. i am not trivializing sarah's death or using it to score debating points. i am merely looking at the media reaction, which is, not surprisingly, to defend little britain, which is the paragon of all virtue in the anglosphere self-definition. 

in india, on the contrary, the media reaction (local and global) was intended to excoriate modi and add to the narrative of 'hindu fascism!', 'majoritarianism!' etc, etc.

Quick notes: Cyber frontline | Server chips...

  • Sino-Pak axis on Cyber warfare: There is evidence to believe that China is assisting Pakistani hackers in their campaigns against India, notably including an operation intended to steal sensitive data from the Indian military and plant malware on Indian defense systems launched in 2019.


  • 256-core server chips from Chinese Academy of Engineering: Switching from MIPS to RISC-V should not be too challenging given the architectural similarities. Meanwhile, the adoption of RISC-V means that Loongson's upcoming processors will be supported by a broad ecosystem of software and hardware, something that will inevitably make them more competitive.


  • Wannabe East India Companies: India’s move to deter digital monopolies may hit Amazon, Walmart


  • Facebook + Google versus the news industry: Lobbyists for Facebook and Google threw their weight against new U.S. legislation to allow news publishers to negotiate collectively against tech companies over revenue sharing. The bills come not long after Facebook battled with Australia over news content.


  • Gardening in hot summers: How to successfully grow a garden in HOT climates



  • Boarding Schools for India’s Outcasts: "We used to produce about six doctors a year [from graduates]. This year we have produced 189".


  • Toxic city: Hyderabad home to multiple contaminated sites


  • US Army takes to Yoga: Why the Army is teaching Yoga to new recruits


Sunday, March 14, 2021

this made my day. puppetry ki jai.


comprehensive US report on competition in digital markets ie #BigTech

https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_digital_markets.pdf

h/t glenn greenwald.

may be useful in terms of indian attempts to rein in Big Tech.

in the mote vs. beam dept, dear @jamestraub1 pontificates in @foreignpolicy

There was an article in Foreign Policy magazine by one James Traub, apparently one of their regular columnists. Says he, "I have been living in, visiting, and writing about India for 45 years, it is shocking to think that a country I always regarded as almost helplessly democratic, barely governable, avowedly secular, is now firmly under the thumb of a Hindu nationalist regime"


I have news for Traub: "I have been living in, visiting and writing about the US for 43 years, and it is truly shocking to me that a country that I always regarded as a beacon of democracy turned into a banana republic, with a stolen election in 2020 and a pathetically funny process for resolving disenfranchisement and voter-fraud issues, with free speech firmly canceled, riots at the drop of a hat, and now under the thumb of a leftist regime that capitulates to both Isamism and Chinese communism."


Fix your own, what must be called a 'democracy' for lack of a better term, first, Traub. Then pontificate on others.


nb. in case you are not aware of mote vs. beam in traub's christian scripture, here's the source:

1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

— Matthew 7:1–5 KJV (Matthew 7:1–5 other versions)



See the difference between Rashmi Samant and Disha Ravi?

The former was lynched for being a Hindu. The latter, who did criminal sedition, was rescued by the same lynch mob. 

How does Adani make his money?

Adani makes his money the old fashioned way. He earns it.

And you, Raoul? 

Thursday, March 11, 2021

China poses 'real' threat of war: Retired four-star US naval officer

Quick notes: Cyberwar | Linear generators...

  • Did China just wake us up to cyberwar? “Our defensive preparedness is almost non-existent. When Kudankulam happened, it was not the govt that went out to find who was behind it. It was a bunch of private hackers who did. Whatever capability exists in India is mostly outside the govt”.... As for offensive cyberwar capabilities, “If you can’t even defend your own networks and assets, what offensive capabilities are you likely to have”.

    India still groping in the dark: At least one connection opened by Chinese state-sponsored hackers into the network system of an Indian port was still active. “There is a need to guard smaller companies that are part of the grid. Because if one is hacked, entire systems can be compromised.”


  • Chinese cyberattack on Microsoft morphs into global crisis: The Chinese initially targeted high value intelligence targets in the U.S, but it has changed since. “They went to town and started doing mass exploitation -- indiscriminate attacks compromising exchange servers, literally around the world, with no regard to purpose or size or industry.”

    Chinese hackers targeted SolarWinds customers in parallel with Russian op.

    China building offensive, aggressive military: top US Pacific commander.


  • Linear Generator: Mainspring Energy has been at work on a novel "linear generator" that it says can provide on-site electricity with lower emissions than fossil-fueled engines and microturbines, and greater flexibility than fuel cells. . . . . . . . Free-piston linear generator.



  • Sweden's Scania admits to bribing officials in India: Scania paid bribes to win bus contracts in India in seven different states between 2013 and 2016


  • India is the capital of the groundwater crisis of the world:


  • Bandish in Raag Hameer: Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan | Hafeez Ahmed (Tabla)



  • Malaysia: Friendly and tolerant country where its three major ethnic communities live in harmony. . . . true?


Russia and China to Build Lunar Space Station



Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Wuhan Lab Theory a Dark Cloud on China

'liberal' dictionary has different meanings for common words

Bharatiya (@rotormagic) tweeted at 1:42 PM on Wed, Mar 10, 2021:
From a share elsewhere with due recognise to the creator: https://t.co/8nUkU7i8Pm
(https://twitter.com/rotormagic/status/1369561826069938178?s=03

Water war coming

Brahma Chellaney (@Chellaney) tweeted at 1:39 PM on Wed, Mar 10, 2021:
The dams China is planning on River Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) just before it enters India will have "a combined [electricity] generating capacity of 60 gigawatts, or almost three times that of the Three Gorges Dam," the world's biggest. via @kinlinglo https://t.co/eObQZvfxy0
(https://twitter.com/Chellaney/status/1369561029462560771?s=03

Brutal torture and murder of Hindu boy, 14, in Karnataka

Because he was friendly with an rop classmate girl. This is secularism. 

Really ancient humans in India

the solution? depopulation! let's get rid of the non-whites! how about a pandemic?


Tuesday, March 09, 2021

hindu hatred on twitter india and in US academia

there's a simple translation: hindu need to start doing spectacular acts to get the attention of the powers that be.

there's a simple translation: hindu need to do spectacular acts to get the attention of the powers that be.

so much more spiritual...

so much more spiritual to worship the mutilated corpse of a dead arab stuck on a stick, ain't it?

Monday, March 08, 2021

on women's day, where does patriarchy come from?

look no further. it's from the stinkin' deserts of west asia.

the etymology of 'woman' is old english 'wif+man', ie wife of man, thus subservient, also see the myth of eve as made from adam's rib. then there's the ratio of women's wages vs. men's wages. it has persistently remained at some 70% in the west despite all the women's lib (unless i am mistaken). this has not budged since biblical times. a woman's wage is 30 shekels to a mans' wage of 50 shekels, ie 60% (bible, leviticus 27:1-4). 

the etymology of 'aurat' is arabic 'awrat' meaning 'defective, nude, genitalia, that which must be covered up'.

speaks volumes about patriarchy.

Sunday, March 07, 2021

NFT's - the New Collector's Coins of the Digital Cryptocurrency Era

 Just as traditional currencies have led to collector's coins, etc, now Cryptocurrencies are spawning NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) which are like the digital equivalent of such special edition coins.

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/974089381/whats-an-nft-and-why-are-people-paying-millions-to-buy-them

So can these digital collector's items then develop their own independent worth, beyond that of the cryptocurrency itself?


Saturday, March 06, 2021

the #jamestraub #foreignpolicy magazine illusion and what's behind it

Said James Traub, apparently a columnist for FP magazine: "I have been living in, visiting, and writing about India for 45 years, it is shocking to think that a country I always regarded as almost helplessly democratic, barely governable, avowedly secular, is now firmly under d thumb of a Hindu nationalist regime."

I, a columnist for Rediff and Swarajya, can truthfully counter with: ""I have been living in, visiting and writing about the US for 43 years, and it is truly shocking to me that a country that I always regarded as a beacon of democracy turned into a banana republic, with a stolen election in 2020 and a pathetically funny and incompetent process for resolving disenfranchisement and fake-vote issues, with free speech canceled, riots at the drop of a hat, and now firmly under the thumb of a leftist regime that capitulates to both Isamism and Chinese communism."

Let us remember that James Traub has been doing this for a long time.

This 'liberal' has been at it for a long, reflecting the increasing demonization of India:


Is Modi's India Safe for Muslims? https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/26/narendra-modi-india-safe-for-muslims-hindu-nationalism-bjp-rss/?utm_content=buffer8e857&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer


Why Narendra Modi's new foreign policy won't make Washington happy https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/23/faster-stronger-worse/


We need a dictator with a gun and a hoover https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/18/we-need-a-dictator-with-a-gun-and-a-hoover/


And the piece de resistance:

The End of the Gandhis - Can Rahul run India? Can anybody? https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/04/29/the-end-of-the-gandhis/#.UYCzdJigUBQ.twitter


now you get the picture. this man is shilling for #deepstate's "embedded assets", the italians.

the dangers from AI for india

a powerful interview of rajiv malhotra by madhu kishwar, based on his latest book. he makes the point that india is quite likely to lose the AI war, and as a result be balkanized, and civilizationally wiped out.


there are two more episodes to this interview. i have only listened to the first. 

it is good to look at the worst case scenario. as andy grove said, "only the paranoid survive". but the point is that in the guns vs butter scenario, we have always chosen the butter. unfortunately, the guys with the guns, first the muslims, and then the christians, came with their guns, and took our butter away. 

now the chinese have a good chance of doing the same to us. 

the americans are already doing this to us, by stealing our data and manipulating our emotions. 

it is a very scary scenario.

i can't say i am very surprised. i had written about this as an existential threat to the country, way back in 2018. it is fairly visible to anybody with a background in software that we are utter nobodies in that world, especially in AI/ML and related technologies. this is what i said then. of course malhotra provides a lot more depth and research to the argument, and he's been thinking about this for five years, he says. note that i am not trying to claim credit or priority, i'm sure many have seen this danger, and malhotra is articulating it very well. he also says the powers that be have not paid attention; and that must be true. this is a rather subtle threat, a bit removed from those who are fighting last century's battles all over again.

biden jokes. reminds me of reagan carefully separating out the black jelly beans.

this is not a harmless comment. hinduphobia. not yet hindu-hatred. biden shows flashes of his true anti-india sentiment when his mental fog lifts a little. (remember the biden amendment 1992 that stopped the cryo engine for ISRO).

a defense of substack by matt taibbi

global vibrancy of AI efforts

india doesn't look too bad, but i fear that most of the AI work being done in india is for foreigners such as google labs or microsoft labs. the indices for india are skewed in other ways too. https://aiindex.stanford.edu/vibrancy/

sanjay, mohandas, and other early stage investors, please note. 

bottom line, india is really nowhere in AI. this could be an existential problem unless we get serious about it. rajiv malhotra has been sounding the alarm in his new book. 

also, here's the full stanford report on AI 2021. https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/

is oxford unsafe for hindus?

well, this abhijit fellow said so in so many words, didn't he?

stanford's AI index may be useful as a compendium of data

https://hai.stanford.edu/research/ai-index-2021

some takeaways. where is india in AI? we're losing the plot here. there were some noises from niti ayog, and then a rival national AI plan from some other entity, i forget which. net result: stasis. sigh. 

  • Private investment in AI substantially increased – despite the COVID crisis negatively impacting the economy in other ways. 
  • China surpassed the U.S. in significant scholarly work. Chinese-affiliated scholars were cited in more peer-reviewed journals than any other country's scholars, indicating China's AI research has increased in quality and quantity. However, the United States has consistently (and significantly) more cited AI conference papers than China over the last decade.  
  • Synthetic media, colloquially known as deepfakes, are on the rise, with breakthroughs in the generation of synthetic text, imagery, and video demonstrating the progress of AI but also highlighting the potential for unethical or dangerous use.
  • Ethical challenges of AI applications have become a bigger focus for the AI community, with a significant increase in papers mentioning ethics and related keywords between 2015 and 2020.
  • Diversity in AI is low – in 2019, 45% of new AI PhD graduates who stayed in the United States were white, while 2.5% were African American and 3.2% were Hispanic. AI researchers are forming more affinity groups to try to improve diversity in the field, and these groups are seeing significant growth in their membership and impact: Black in AI members had twice the number of papers accepted at NeurIPS in 2019 compared to 2017, and participation at workshops held by the Women in Machine Learning Group has grown from under 200 participants in 2014 to more than 900 in 2020. 
  • Since Canada published a national AI strategy in 2017, other nations have followed, with more than 30 countries committing to national AI strategies by 2020.
  • More AI PhDs took jobs in private industry rather than academia, and professors continued to leave higher education for roles in corporations. 
  • Corporations have come to dominate the tools that AI researchers use, with corporate-backed software libraries (Google's TensorFlow and Keras, and Facebook's PyTorch) becoming the most popular frameworks on GitHub.
  • Government interest in AI continues to be significant, with the U.S. government spending billions of dollars across civil and non-civil uses of AI. AI has been mentioned three times more in this Congress than in the previous one.