THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Ms. Joshi is currently busy with various activities, including a lot of thought about gas, petroleum, water, energy, and information technology. On the side she is socializing with a really cool bunch of people from all over the world who are also thinking about the same issues, but in the meantime, she would like you to read this article about a "The Search for a Buddha without Boundaries." Ms. Joshi takes no responsability for the photograph (it looks nothing like the overgrown site she visited), but she takes full responsibility for the article. As you can tell from "responsability", Ms. Joshi has been socializing with people who speak Spanish. But more on that later. In the meantime, please read "In Search of a Buddha Without Boundaries" in the Irrawaddy Magazine. PS: The author will be posting the posting photographs of her visit (some really cool ones from a Go Pro camera) as soon as she figures out the intricacies of the technology. PPS: Oops. T...

Here's my response to Gerrard Toffin's fascinating take on astrology and dasha. Dasha is not: staving off disease or afflictions caused by supernatural beings (dasha).  Dasha means "time."   _______________________________ Dear Professor Toffin: I read your article on astrology and timing-very interesting and thank you for addressing what I feel is a cultural topic of great interest but which so far has been neglected in public discourse. I don't have time to address all the points raised in your article, except these few important points: Dasha means "time"--specifically the time ruled by each planet in a person's life at that specific time. Maha dasha, antar dasha, pratyantar dasha, shoookshma dasha and prana dasha--you can go down to the breath level, and all of these are planetary forces ruling a person at a specific time. More here on how to calculate: http://www.galacticcenter.org/blog/joni-s-blog/vedic-astrology-for-w...

Seems the NSA, despite collecting millions of cellphone records and billions of metadata, still has no idea ifSnowden is a whistleblower or a spy. Admiral Michael Rogers, the new NSA chief, has this to say (according to the NBC website): Asked whether he thought Snowden was or is working for the FSB, the Russian security service, Rogers said: "Could he have? Possibly. Do I believe that that's the case? Probably not." Now that’s some fuzzy “possibly/possibly not” intelligence right there for the most omniscient agency in the world. Which goes to show you that listening to a billion phonecalls about homework and dinner may actually be the wrong strategy, in terms of collecting intelligence. Since traditional methods of intelligence, taken to monster extremes, as evidenced by the NSA global surveillance strategy, has clearly failed, I thought I’d help the NSA out here with my trusty astrological calculator. Snowden: spy or whistleblower? Edward Jos...

CUTTING OUT THE MIDDLEMAN CNBC has this interesting article: What Russia-China relations mean for the dollar.  Basically, the Chinese and Russians have cottoned on and said: “hey, why are we paying all this money to America to change our yuans to dollars to rubles, then back again? Lets cut out the middleman.” Now it’s always painful for the middlemen to hear they are middlemen. All around the world, producers are constantly trying to cut out the middlemen and get straight to their consumers. Like religious devotees of yore, who yearned to get straight to God without intercession from priests and popes and other figures of religious authority, the Chinese and the Russians, it appears, have finally figured out the way to divinity. Basically, just exchange yuans for rubles. How easy is that? The large-than-life of the illusion of the indispensability of the dollar, compounded by lots of illusory sleight of hands in Wall Streeters, financial institutions, regul...

Surprise! The World Bank says food prices are rising! Read the Saturday, May 31, 2014 article “ World Bank sounds alarm on rising global food prices” here. Now Mr. Bill Gates must be happy. Very happy. Because when food prices rise, guess who benefits? Monsanto, on whom Bill Gates has invested, and whose stock price rises are now $120 per share. Its all uphill from here for the richest man in the world. Never mind of the rest of the world’s starving poor. Meanwhile in Argentina, where Monsanto has taken over the control of agricultural land in unprecedented ways (with the help of countries like America which have managed to put Argentina in serious 100 billion debt and unable to negotiate much about these issues), the maize is taken in small plastic packs, and flown all the way to… Nepal. Where I saw the maize at my local store a fortnight ago, sitting pretty and waiting to be turned to popcorn. Of course, I didn’t buy it. First because I like the Argent...

I used to run an email mailing list called Bol! in 1998. We had 600 members who were interested in issues of reproductive health and development from all over the subcontinent. I used to moderate daily discussions. One day, I got into trouble. Someone forwarded me an email about South Africa’s health minister, and how he believed that AIDS was a Western conspiracy. He thought the virus had been developed in a lab in the West, and set loose on Africa to cause depopulation. I’m trained as an anthropologist. So for me, this was an interesting belief that for better or worse we had to deal with, because it came from a power broker in Africa, right in the heart of the AIDS epidemic. A medical doctor on the list, however, denounced me for posting it, and immediately announced he was leaving the list, because I was spreading appalling misinformation. These things happen. If you want to have discussions, you can’t avoid controversy. Medical doctors, in my opinion, often turn ou...

Its clear that NGOs have become a force onto themselves. At any given moment, at any part of the world, a NGO is probably engaging citizens to take part in some form of group activity. These group meetings are considered essential tools for social change. Almost all of the time, participation is voluntary, meaning people are not paid for the one or two hours of their time to take part in the meeting. Add up the citizen hours of people engaged in water groups, forestry groups, women’s groups, VDC groups, health groups, men’s groups—and you end up getting a very large chunk of productive time being given over to the activities of NGOs and their programs. The funding comes from INGOs, who use small block grants of $1000 to these groups to entice participation. Now the question arises: does it economically make sense for a country’s citizen to spend this much time in voluntary group activities? And how much time do they lose from a day in which they could be earning money in alre...