india and stem cell research

i don't know what mohandas g would really think, but pankaj mishra seems to think he'd be critical of india's emerging biotech growth. either way, this article drops some knowledge on this economic spurt, with a couple of good parables and gandhisms tossed in for good measure.

The ancient system of Indian medicine known as Ayurveda assumes that fetuses are alive and conscious when it prescribes a particular mental and spiritual regimen to pregnant women. This same assumption is implicit in "The Mahabharata," the Hindu epic about a fratricidal war apparently fought in the first millennium B.C. In one of its famous stories, the warrior Arjuna describes to his pregnant wife a seven-stage military strategy. His yet-to-born son Abhimanyu is listening, too. But as Arjuna describes the seventh and last stage, his wife falls asleep, presumably out of boredom. Years later, while fighting his father's cousins, the hundred Kaurava brothers, Abhimanyu uses well the military training he has learned in his mother's womb, until the seventh stage, where he falters and is killed.

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Obsessed with imitating Western consumer lifestyles, most middle-class Indians are unlikely to have much time for Gandhi's belief that "civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants."

fake news

for anyone who didn't realize the extent of the prepackaged news segments the white house used, revisit this article from the times, published on march 13, 2005. An excerpt -

...as a senior department official, Patricia Harrison, told Congress last year, the Bush administration has come to regard such "good news" segments as "powerful strategic tools" for influencing public opinion. And a review of the department's segments reveals a body of work in sync with the political objectives set forth by the White House communications team after 9/11.

I seem to remember that bush, while on his social security promotion tour, said that one reason he stumping was that a lot of people get their info from the local newscast.

without sanctuary

i grew up in rural north carolina. when i recently saw a picture of john richards being hanged it literally brought the lynchings home. i recognize the surname of some of the lynchers - it was not an uncommon last name in my elementary and high school. these connections to the present bring this history alive.

atrocities are not unique to the american south. yet our collective memory is such that only a few generations later, we need to be reminded of our history, and that radical genocidal movements can and did take hold here, very close to our homes.

visit without santcuary

clinton profile

this clinton profile makes me smile

...to come from nothing and become president of the United States, a person has to be metabolically preposterous, a freak cluster of aspirations and desires and appetites. To assume that this hunger would fade away after the presidency is naïve. In Kigali, Rwanda, I watch Clinton spend three minutes trying to coax a smile out of a long-faced child with AIDS; he simply will not leave until he's managed to do so. In Lesotho, he jumps out of the car as we're headed to the king's palace and starts grabbing people's hands...