Discovery Times Channel had a program on the rising anti-American feeling in the world. The program was Thomas L. Friedman reporting from the Arab world, asking students and intellectuals why 19 young people decided to take the lives of 3000 innocent civilians in United States.
Most people said it was because of the US support for Israel and other dictators in the Arab world. According to one student, everyone was shocked when Sept 11 happened in America but it happens everyday in the Arab world. According to Friedman, Arab countries are suffering from the poverty of dignity and humiliation is a very powerful force in international relations.
Another student mentioned that Americans tend to view Arabs and Middle East with terrorism, for which Friedman replies that it was not 19 Norwegians who attacked us on Sept 11th. Also it is not as if the terrorists are illiterate and poor people. Mohammed Atta was an educated Arab, who wanted to be a town planner. He was a normal person, till he moved to Europe where he got radicalized in a mosque in Hamburg.
This brings to the question of understanding the relations of immigrants in European countries. Friedman travels to Belgium which has been in the middle of a stormy relation between Muslim immigrants and natives. The natives complain that the immigrants fail to assimilate to the society and the immigrants complain that they are humiliated by their hosts. The radical mosques in these countries take advantage of the desparation of the immigrants turn them into terrorists. It was the same way Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was released by India in Khandahar became a terrorist according to Bernard Henri Levy in Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
Continue reading “The reasons behind anti-Americanism” →

One of the areas where President Bush and Senator Kerry disagree entirely is on the funding for Stem Cell Reasearch. Like the ancient Church, which opposed new scientific discoveries because it did not go well with the religious laws, the President has been using his religious beliefs to stop Federal Funding for Stem Cell Research.
The problem with this is that other countries like Britain who are not tied by such rightwing thoughts are issuing licences to allow their researchers to use cloning techniques to produce stem cells.Soon other countries would be much ahead of United States in finding cures to diseases. The positions held by the President is not supported by members of the Republican Party. Few months back, former First Lady, Nancy Reagan had come out in support of Stem Cell Research

In an election year, it is no surprise that John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, has sought to take advantage. He says he will end the Bush administration

One of President Bush’s characterization of his opponent Senator John Kerry is as a flip flopper. The Republicans have been repeating it like a mantra in all occasions. So in a world of sound bytes, all that matters is words like “fuzzy math”, or “flip flopper”. Richard Cohen has an article in the Washington Post asking who is the real flip flopper ?

Bush also declared himself a determined unilateralist, kissing off treaties and understandings and even spurning NATO’s help in Afghanistan. Now, though, the unilateralist of old is sending Colin Powell around the world, seeking alms and arms for Iraq. Flip-flop.
Bush would not negotiate with North Korea. He did. Flip-flop.
Bush told the United Nations to butt out of Iraq. Now he wants it in. Flip-flop. [Washington Post]

Moral of the story: If you are a flip flopper, start calling your opponent a flip flopper.

Newsweek has a new poll in which John Kerry is leading ahead of George Bush by 7 points.

Coming out of the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Sen. John Kerry now holds a seven-point lead over President George W. Bush (49 percent to 42 percent) in a three-way race with independent Ralph Nader (3 percent), according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll The poll was taken over two nights, both before and after Kerry’s acceptance speech. Respondents who were queried after Kerry’s Thursday night speech gave the Democrat a ten-point lead over Bush. Three weeks ago, Kerry

In United States, if any state takes any money from the Federal Government for sex-education in schools, then they are supposed to teach only sexual abstinence (due to Catholic beliefs ?) and should *not* provide any information on contraception. California, the state everyone hates, refused to take federal money and “started teaching about contraception”:http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/9207762p-10133041c.html.
bq. In briefings Thursday for House offices and today for Senate staffers, the California Wellness Foundation, which runs a statewide teen pregnancy initiative, said the state’s teen birth rate had dropped from 11th highest in the country in 1991 to 21st place in 2002.
bq. Brindis, citing figures from the state Department of Health Services, said the teen birth rate fell from 73 to 41.1 per 1,000 youths between the ages of 15 and 19. That drop exceeded the 30 percent decline in the national rate between 1991 and 2002, and put the state slightly below the national teen birth rate of 43 per 1,000.
And interestingly, the shift to this comprehensive plan was started under the Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.

The former First Lady Nancy Reagan has come out in “support of Stem Cell Research”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12862-2004May9.html. This must be shocking to the Republican party.
bq. Former first lady Nancy Reagan endorsed stem cell research Saturday night and made an impassioned call for taking the controversial procedure out of the political arena, saying it could help cure illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts her husband. Such research is generally opposed by political conservatives and many antiabortion groups, because it involves the destruction of days-old human embryos. President Bush signed an executive order in 2001 limiting research to existing embryonic stem cell lines.
When it affects someone you love so much, your ideology can take a “U” turn.
Scientists in United States are falling behind researchers in other countries as they cannot use Federal money to study certain stem cells. But states like California and New Jersey have passed laws encouraging stem-cell research.

“Tom Friedman”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/opinion/06FRIE.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fThomas%20L%20Friedman in NY Times
bq. Mr. Bush needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the heads of both NATO and the U.N., and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. There, he needs to eat crow, apologize for his mistakes and make clear that he is turning a new page.
Followed by “Little Green Footballs”:http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=10946_Friedman-_Were_All_Doomed_Unless_Bush_Grovels
bq. Thomas Friedman demands that Donald Rumsfeld be fired, and maybe the entire Pentagon along with him. He says it?s the only way to restore our honor. After laying waste to our military command, Friedman proposes that President Bush invite to Camp David the UN Security Council, and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria, and grovel before them in abject shame, wearing sackcloth, rubbing ashes into his hair, and weeping.
but at the “end of the day”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/politics/07RUMS.html?hp
bq. President Bush said on Thursday that he was sorry for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, but vowed that the man in charge of the United States military, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would remain in his job. Mr. Bush expressed his regrets in the White House Rose Garden at the side of King Abdullah II of Jordan after they met in the Oval Office. The president, who had deplored the abuse but stopped short of an apology in Arab television interviews on Wednesday, appeared to direct his words to the king as the leader of an Arab nation.

The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal is getting murkier
bq. For one thing, the scandal is not just limited to six people – as House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter repeatedly insisted on Capital Report last night. His “six” doesn’t seem to include the soldier who, according to the one report, had sex with a female prisoner. Nor does it seem to include the two people cited in General Taguba’s report who work for two private companies – CACI and Titan – and apparently participated in interrogations.
bq. Moreover, the whole issue of contractor involvement in interrogations has stirred up a hornet’s nest on Capitol Hill. These contractors are not subject to the military justice system. They cannot be subject to court martial. So how exactly, some members of Congress want to know, will they be held accountable for their actions? [From CNBC Capitol Report Mailing List]
But will Donald Rumsfeld quit over this ? The answer is: “No”:http://www.utusan.com.my/utusan/content.asp?y=2004&dt=0506&pub=Utusan_Express&sec=World&pg=wo_06.htm.

Thomas Friedman had an article in New York Times expressed “his concern”:http://www.apolloalliance.org/apollo_in_the_news/friedman.cfm that America is losing its competitive edge to countries like China and India.
bq. First, one of America’s greatest assets, its ability to skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world and bring them to our shores to innovate, will be diminished, and that in turn will shrink our talent pool. And second, we could lose a whole generation of foreigners who would normally come here to study, and then would take American ideas and American relationships back home. In a decade we will feel that loss in America’s standing around the world.
But now American Universities too are alarmed by the “reducing number of foreign students”:http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/world/story/0,4386,248461,00.html.
bq. This year, foreign applications to graduate schools in the United States have fallen by 32 per cent with applications from China, India and western Europe showing a dramatic drop. The decline is raising concerns that the US could lose a longtime source of competitive advantage in research, science and engineering. The danger, some argue, is also that the US is forfeiting its successful tradition of educating and befriending the world’s brightest students and probable future leaders.
Intel CEO Andy Grove is also “expressing concerns”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-04-27-forum_x.htm on this and explains that people should not surprised outsourcing is happening
bq. We have to fix our education system. We have to invest more in R&D. And we have to be more consistent about our infrastructure if we want to be competitive. If you have a worse education, a worse infrastructure, and you spend less of your gross domestic product on R&D, what makes you think you should be in a pre-eminent position?
In countries which are now offering competition to United States, education is considered very important. These countries also offer an economic advantage in terms of reduced expenses and the natural outcome of this is outsourcing of not just call centers and software development, but also of R&D. If United States has to address this issue, it has to look deeper and find the cause of the problem and not waste energy by “blaming India”:http://blameindiawatch.blogspot.com/.

Yesterday there was a public talk by “Sri Sri Ravishankar”:http://artofliving.org/v2/srisri/srisribio.htm at UCLA. He was talking about a visit he had from some 130 Naxalites. He had a talk with them, made them do meditation and after a few days they went back and made around 8000 of them surrender.He described Naxalites as “terrorists with communist ideology”. Now they have have laid down arms and switched to agriculture. Now maybe Sri Sri should talk to the Resident Idiot.
One of the questions from the audience was: What was his advice to President Bush. He replied, “You should try all options before taking the stick. But there are some people in the world who only understand the stick.”