|

Zardari calls J&K militants terrorists

Byoliveridley

Declaring that India is not a “threat” to his country, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has described the militants operating in Jammu and Kashmir as “terrorists,” the first such admission by any top Pakistani leader.

“India has never been a threat to Pakistan. I, for one, and our democratic government is not scared of Indian influence abroad,” Mr. Zardari told Wall Street Journal in an interview.

He spoke of the militant groups operating in Kashmir as “terrorists,” the paper said, noting that former President Pervez Musharraf would more likely have called them “freedom fighters.”

Indicating a major shift in Pakistan’s well-known position, Mr. Zardari had, as chief of the Pakistan People’s Party, said in March that the ties between the two countries should not be held “hostage” to the Kashmir issue, which should be left for future generations to decide, raising hackles at home

via The Hindu : Front Page : Zardari calls J&K militants terrorists.

Apparently, “our terrorists” ≠ “your freedom fighters” any more. I am not sure it changes the equation much in Kashmir, which, last I checked, was still burning.

Predictably, Mr. Zardari is getting a lot of guff about his statements and his foreign minister has already walked them back. He is more used to being a monarch maker who works in the background, put a microphone on him and his gaffes are McCainesque.

Similar Posts

  • |

    Mercury Exposure in India?

    Byoliveridley

    Ex-workers ask HLL to accept liability for mercury deaths

    The death of a 47-year-old man who had worked for a Hindustan Lever thermometer factory for 18 years brought out hundreds of ex-employees, who had also been exposed to toxic mercury, to the streets.

    Scores of people in the area suffer from skin diseases, premature greying, incessant headaches, stomach pain, kidney problems and blood in the urine, say the former workers who approached the Supreme Court in 2005 demanding compensation.

    Well, I don’t know what to say. This tragedy goes on in India continuously, occupational pollution exposure is through the roof in most factories. Safety equipment is not used, enforcement is minimal, all in all, in a country of 1+ billion people, some are more expendable than others.

    I suspect this one is getting more play because a large multinational is involved. But Indian factories are equal opportunity killers, whether owned by large behemoths like Unilever, or by your local rotary club small businessman.

    It looks like they have not even done an autopsy/blood test to look for mercury in this man’s system, so it’s early days.

  • | |

    Colonialism, Pharmaceutical style

    Byoliveridley

    Legal wrangle puts India’s generic drugs at risk – health – 29 January 2007 – New Scientist

    Tens of thousands of people being treated for AIDS will suffer if Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis succeeds in changing India’s patent law, the humanitarian agency Medecins Sans Frontieres warned on Monday. Novartis is challenging a specific provision of India’s patent law that, if overturned, would see patents being granted far more widely, heavily restricting the availability of affordable generic medicines, MSF says.

    In 2000, antiretroviral (ARV) treatment cost was estimated at $10,000 per patient annually. But the availability of generic drugs produced mainly in India, allowed costs to plummet to about $70 per patient per year, Mwangi adds.

    You’ve got to love the friendly multinational arguing to make extra billions while people die. But I don’t think any Indian judge will overthrow Indian patent law. And there is a national interest  exemption built into most patent statutes, per the TRIPs agreements.

  • |

    Tamil MPs play hardball for LTTE

    Byoliveridley

    Members of Parliament from Tamil Nadu will have to resign if the Centre does not come forward to ensure a ceasefire in Sri Lanka within two weeks, according to a resolution adopted at an all-party meet chaired by Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi on Tuesday.

    Asked if this meant Ministers in the Union Cabinet and MPs in the Rajya Sabha would resign in the event of the ceasefire not happening in two weeks, Mr. Karunanidhi told The Hindu that he meant that all MPs would tender their resignation. “Ministers are MPs first, are they not?” he asked.

    via The Hindu : Front Page : T.N. MPs to quit if Centre fails to ensure ceasefire

    As Malini Parthasarathy points out in her editorial, this sudden increase in rhetoric coming from the DMK and other Tamil parties seems to coincide with an apparent impending military breakthrough by the Sri Lankan army. Why apparent? Because the only sources of news are the SL army and the LTTE, and neither, are, shall we say, neutral! Overt support for the LTTE has been absent since the late ’80s and especially since Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, so the timing most definitely reeks of LTTE’s covert influence on the Tamil parties in Tamil Nadu. This would be a good time for the LTTE to get some breathing room and regroup.

    The Central government would become a minority if this threat was carried out. Which is why the Sri Lankan envoy was summoned and India’s “concerns” were addressed, whatever that means.

    I think that the LTTE is a band of ruthless terrorists who should disappear from the face of this Earth. They have systematically eradicated moderate Tamils in their bid to be the only Tamil voice. Additionally, they have killed many civilians, Tamil, Sinhalese and Indian over the course of their bloody insurgency. The Sri Lankan army and polity, of course, are guilty of mass genocide and human rights themselves. But, they have the power of the nation state behind them and smell a final victory. I don’t seem them stopping now.

    How is this going to end? Not very well for the central government, who will lose quite a bit of support after only recently surviving a confidence vote. Not too well for the millions of civilians caught in the conflict, who will bear the brunt of increasing desperation on both sides of the war. Will the LTTE ask for a negotiated ceasefire if things get too hot for them? Probably. Will the Tamils of Northern Sri Lanka ever get the autonomy they so deserve? Not if the Sri Lankan government sees itself as being in a position of strength. So, why was this war fought? I don’t know. But, I don’t believe in war, so there…

    As a great believer in the educational power of fiction, I heartily recommend Love Marriage, a story set in the Sri Lankan tamil community, tells the history from the tamil side. You can read a Q&A with the author at the always excellent Sepia Mutiny.

  • The LA Times does Ambassador Cars

    Byoliveridley

    Please, we don’t need any sentimentality! These cars need to go away, they’ve done their bit for 50+ years, it’s time to retire!

    India’s ugly icon of the road – Los Angeles Times

    TO describe the most famous car strutting along India’s roads today, think of some of the qualities associated with hot automotive design.

    Sleek. Sporty. Sexy. Fast.

    Now throw them out.

    None of those words applies to the Ambassador — in fact, quite the opposite, many say. Its boxy shape, like a derby hat on wheels, is an aerodynamic nightmare. It can have trouble overtaking wandering cows, let alone more powerful rivals. It’s not the car you’d pick to impress someone on a first date, or a fifth.

    Yet everything the Ambassador is not doesn’t change what it is: an icon of modern India, a national treasure that epitomizes the country’s last 50 years, which is how long the car has been rolling off the same assembly line in eastern India, day in and day out.

  • |

    Fun with maps: BC Smart meters and the 2013 election

    Byoliveridley

    SmartMeterVotingMapI have been MOOC’ing this summer and learning how to do maps. Geography as an adult is much more fun than my 10th grade geography class.

    Chad Skelton over at the Vancouver Sun intrigued me with his data retrieval and mapping of British Columbia’s Smart Meter uptake. if you’re not from BC, here’s a short intro (#BCpoli-aware feel free to skip the next two paragraphs).

    BC Hydro is the government owned (Crown Corporation) utility that produces and distributes electricity for the province of British Colombia in Canada. In 2011, BC Hydro announced its intention to spend $$$ upgrading all its electricity meters to “smart meters”. These meters are capable of being read via wifi by meter readers, and potentially also give BC residents the ability to monitor their electricity usage in near-real time.

    Many concerns were raised about the smart meters. One was about the costs of the program vs. perceived benefits. The others, which gained traction were around an emerging movement in BC connecting wifi, cell signals and wifi-enabled smart meters with a whole variety of health effects. While few, if any of these health concerns have been actually causally linked to smart meters, or even to the amorphous descriptor “wifi radiation”, these health concerns have gained traction even among official bodies such as the Union of BC Municipalities, municipal councils and school boards. The BC provincial election in 2013 was a chance for people to voice their concerns. The opposition parties all brought the issue up during canvassing.

    For my peer assessment mapping project, I wanted to see if areas of relatively high smart meter refusal were correlated or co-located in any way with voting against the ruling BC Liberals.

    This is the map I made, my first ever map not scrawled on paper.


    View Larger Map

    Reading the Map

    The electoral districts are colour-coded by BC Liberal Party percentage, darker means higher vote for the BC Liberals. I chose this rather than “who won” because I was looking more for an anti-BC Liberal effect. I will, at some point in time, try to overlay “who won” as well. The smart meter refusal data is in three different coloured and sized circles. Large and red means higher refusal, and small and green means low refusal. This is a hybrid of a graduated circle symbol scheme and a diverging colour scheme. Clearly, using points to represent areas is a big limitation, but it is sufficient for a quick peek.

    Anything to See?

    • An overwhelming majority of people had smart meters installed, > 90% in most places. So, BC Hydro’s brute force, no options, default installation plan was mostly successful
    • Places of higher than normal refusal tended to vote against the BC Liberals. I believe this had more to do with existing anti-BC-Lib tendencies influencing smart meter refusal rather than the other way around.
    • Urban centres like Victoria and Vancouver had relatively low rates of refusal. Is this because of higher apartment proportions, or because smart meter refusal was restricted to a small number of high information, highly motivated individuals whose number varied by location and whose numbers in places like Victoria were muted by larger populations?. Note that my home area of Victoria had the most (7300) rejected smart meters, even though the percentage is small. The ageing white (l)iberal enclave of Saltspring Island (Ganges), aka hippieville, Canada had by far the highest refusal percentage. So, is this smart meter refusal map mostly a hippie population distribution map?

    The take home message for me was that the anti-smartmeter movement had little influence on the election, which was most likely won on the usual and mundane issues of the economy, trust and corruption.

    Methods

    1. I downloaded data on smart meter refusal from the Chad Skelton’s post and Tableau public
    2. The data from BC Hydro is categorized using their division of BC into distinct geographical billing areas. I used billing area names to geotag the information. The site http://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/ has a feature where addresses can be uploaded in bulk via a text interface, and the site returns the place, and latitude longitude. I added province and country to the place names, and edited ambiguous names to make the search more effective.
    3. I uploaded this table to arcgis to form one layer. Arcgis is a big and expensive GIS software, with a limited free online playpen where this map is displayed. I used graduated circles and natural breaks to represent the different levels of smart meter refusal. A big limitation to this approach is that the BC Hydro billing areas are just that, areas, not points on a map. However, the area boundaries are not available as a shape file, and geographical areas vary widely. So, the points correspond to the centre of the nearest big population area mentioned in the BC Hydro billing area description
    4. I downloaded BC electoral district shape files from Paul Ramsey of Open Geo. These shape files are an improved version of those available from Elections BC, again, thanks to Chad Skelton for pointing me in this direction
    5. Elections BC lists 2013 provincial election results information by party by district. However, there is no publicly downloadable mapped source for the election data results. I used the open source GIS desktop software QGIS to open the shape file and add the attribute of BC Liberal percentage to the shape file. I uploaded this shape file to arcgis and layered it with the smart meter refusal rate graduated circles to look for patterns.

    Maps are fun to play with, and I know very very little about them, which is a great combination. Every minute I spent making this map was a learning experience. Comments and feedback, please. I think I will slowly incorporate mapping into my skill set. But I think I will use open source/free solutions in the future.

  • Best way to pick legislators? At random.

    Byoliveridley

    While discussing options for Canada’s broken senate, I advocated for making senate selection random, an idea near and dear to many science fiction acolytes.  I believe this to be a superior alternative to the current lot of retired civil servants, failed politicians, washed up broadcasters, privileged elite, and a few decent people that currently make up the Canadian Senate. Here’s a study (pdf) that says a mix of random legislators makes for good policy.

    The Abstract

    We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an ”efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.

    Need to move those people from the bottom left to the top right

    Good policy is supposed to maximize social gain. It is difficult for legislators to make good policy in the absence of personal gain, so everyone needs to be in the upper-right quadrant of the figure. The simulation works by denying any party a majority unless they can appeal to a number of independent, random actors. Since these legislators can’t be re-elected and have little to gain personally, they will make decisions based more on social gain than personal gain, and move things upward and right. The simulation also found that having no parties and complete independence conferred little advantage. The optimum was a little more than half of the legislature to be “independent” and “random”.

    This is only a simulation. In practice, few people are independent and promises of future positions and future prestige will presumably influence independents to vote to preserve privilege rather than maximize “social good”. But the current system of a very small minority (1-2% of Canadians belong to a party) of people of a very specific kind passing policy based on diktats from the prime minister is not a good system anyway.

    So, a senate that is part “elected” and part random would presumably provide the best outcome. A completely lottery senate would be a great, great improvement to the Canadian senate as it exists today. I am glad there’s some research to back my pet proposal.

    via Washington Post – Study Says Pick some Legislators Randomly