THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

The Gates Foundation has been out and about, promoting vaccination. With a backlash from parents cautious about the increasing amount of vaccines being given to children, they have also seemingly started to put advertorial pieces in magazines like the New Yorker. Rather than persuade people, however, I’d argue that these kinds of advertorial journalism, funded by big foundations, actually work to alienate people from the causes they are advocating. The piece about vaccines that ran in the New Yorker is a mixture between the fine, old fashioned public service announcements crossed with a bit of authoritarianism: “Vaccinate your kids immediately, (stupid) parents.” Before this, the New Yorker also ran a piece about the Bill Gates and his new interest in recycled water. The piece then cleverly mixes up Monsanto’s bio-engineering, implying that both water recycled from sewage, and genetically modified seeds, inspire unreasonable disgust in people even when they are both perfectly safe. ...

A few months ago, my boss, a young Australian woman with a very cool approach towards life, showed up at work and said: “I hope none of you are pregnant.” We all looked at her enquiringly. “If so, you should know that my two year old daughter has just been diagnosed with chicken-pox.” Apparently pregnant women should stay away from chicken-pox patients. Later, when she was dropping me off in her car, I asked her why she hadn’t vaccinated the child. She said she’d been about to, but the child got the disease before she could get her shots. Then she said: “You know, I was talking to a friend of mine, and she said: getting this disease is like getting rid of bad karma. Its not a bad thing—it cleanses the body of bad toxins.” I nodded. It appeared, on a metaphysical level, to make sense. I have a document of my immunization record. In it, I see my parents gave me my shots: the MMR, the DPT, and the BCG shots. I also got the polio vaccine. Despite this, however, I came down with mea...

People, in case your local media failed to inform you, here’s the news: the New World Order just ended today. The balance of power just shifted to Eurasia, and its going to be a new and hopefully more peaceful century. Italy joined the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank yesterday (March 17th, 2015), followed by France and Germany. England has also decided to join, despite vociferous opposition from the USA. The USA’s ostentatious reason is that China doesn’t have the capacity to run a bank of this stature, because its culture is too corrupt and it doesn’t have the capacity to monitor corruption. And, it says, China will use this opportunity to consolidate itself as a global power, since it would have inordinate say in the workings of the bank. All of these are valid concerns. The only problem with these arguments, though, is that the Third World’s big powers, long cut out of the decision-making processes of the World Bank and the ADB, has now come into their own. They are raring t...

Sony was hacked this month. Nobody knows who did it. It started off with some juicy revelations in the media that Sony’s hack had revealed several interesting conversations with Sony insiders talking about Angelina Jolie. “Spoilt brat” and “minimally talented” were apparently two terms used to describe her. The articles instantly got worldwide attention. Blame was put on North Korea, for purportedly hacking the company’s email system in retaliation for making a film about its President’s assassination. North Korea denied it had hacked Sony, but said whoever did it had done a “righteous deed.” Obama stepped in, and said North Korea was responsible. He added it wasn’t an act of war but cyber -vandalism. The media went crazy, printing article after article showing how North Korea was an odious human rights violating state. They said America had bowed down to North Korea by canceling screenings. It appeared serious military action against North Korea would become li...

Did you catch the “monkey reviving his electrocuted friend” video? If you didn’t, you can watch it in the link below. Do you think you could have reacted with that much common sense to heal a human who was electrocuted? Monkey saves electrocuted friend: http://fox6now.com/2014/12/25/monkey-saves-other-monkey-after-being-electrocuted/ While watching this video, I was struck by how calm and collected The Healer was. Besides being surrounded by a large audience of unruly, loud humans, and besides being aware that he (or she?) is in an urban environment which could turn threatening to a monkey any minute, he continues with the work of resuscitating his friend without missing a beat. The Healer knows, first of all, that the monkey underneath his hand is alive. That despite looking like a potato crisp, his friend is alive and well. Secondly, he doesn’t rush in and use the Western method of resuscitation: thumping the monkey on the heart would have been so easy, and wou...

  I don’t understand economics all too well, beyond what a sporadically employed writer can be expected to understand. Having said that, I think that puts me in a unique position to explain to you, in simple terms, what I see unfolding before me in the world of currency. The American dollar, shored up by oil and its free access to the printing press, courtesy of the Federal Reserve, is under enormous pressure. Despite assurances that all is well, and despite the rising stock prices, insiders seem to think the dollar’s day is over. All over the world, nations have started to use their own national currencies to trade, which means that America’s middleman fees have been eliminated. In addition, there’s the questioning of where the “safe haven” is, in reality. With the USA printing 17 trillion dollars in the last decade, under the confident assumption that its economy would always be the eternal safe haven, there’s an oversupply of dollars. And what happens if you print ...

I recently read an The Economist blog post explaining homeopathy. The tone was condescending, and derogatory. I felt it didn’t do justice to a healing system that seems to have helped many people. I was also healed by a homeopathic doctor—rather to my surprise. I share the story with you so you can make up your mind about the intangibles that make up the process of healing. In 2007, I attended the Berlinale Film Festival. I was part of a contingent of filmmakers that attended the Talent Campus, which was a “campus” aimed to bring together young filmmakers and provide them with access to mentors from different filmic disciplines. We saw Gael Garcia Bernal, Frederick Wiseman and Wim Wenders. We heard the composer who’d done the music for “Peter Pan,” and we met the cinematographer of “Red, Blue and White.” The time I spent in Berlin was fun, and took my mind away somewhat from an incomprehensible accident that had killed a close friend of mine from college on New Year’s eve. ...