Suman Palit

One of a series of developments in the fluid political situation in Afghanistan is the increasing worry both India and Russia have over continued Pak interference in Afghanistan.


Musharraf has clearly exceeded his welcome in Afghanistan, and now risks getting caught in a diplomatic pincer between India and Russia who continue to see eye to eye
on their version of the Afghanistan Solution. The US is now faced with walking a thin line between bravely hoisting Musharraf on slippery moral high ground, and getting bogged down in policy clashes with the Russia-India axis. For now, both countries appear content to merely keep the disconnect between Musharraf's words and actions cloaked in muted diplomatic efforts. All the while, the windows for dialogue on Kashmir appear to close each day, with both India and Pakistan retreating to pre- Dec 13^th positions and the Russians firmly planting their feet behind the Indians.


Given the Machiavellian nature of US foreign policy, Musharraf might land up isolating his people from the international community if he cannot find a reasonable way to work with both the Russians and the Indians. Cooperating on a mutually acceptable Afghanistan policy is going to continue to be a critical factor.

Richard Bennett in a recent post holds up Trout Unlimited and the fishermen and hunters who have led to an amazing rebound in salmon numbers in Marin County.. I think it's deliciously ironic that it took activists with a decidedly un-PC outlook on Nature, i.e. fishing & hunting, to bring about real, responsible environmental change in touchy-feely Marin county.



This kind of model has worked wonders almost everywhere it's been tried. Harnessing the power of individual self-interest, and applying simple economic principles to serious environmental issues like habitat loss and loss of valuable flora and fauna has led to some spectacular and very underreported successes. Other grass-roots organizations using similar models as Trout Unlimited have had successes like the following:

1. Pheasants Forever helping farmers struggling with cropping small wetlands .
   
2. Groups like the North American Pronghorn Foundation working to bring back endangered species of antelope.
   
3. In terms of dollars and cents invested, nobody beats the Safari Club at their conservation efforts.
   
4. Turkey enthusiasts, as I write this, are out there putting their money, heart and hands towards reclaiming wasted habitat under the auspices of several programs.
   

Of course, to the ardent animal rights weed smokers, and their media apologists, it is a far better thing to let habitat die out than to admit that hunters and fishermen and people who work the land, get their hands dirty, delight in close contact with Nature and shed some animal blood on the way out, have been the key to the spectacular rebound of many native North American species.



For these clueless curmudgeons, the only spiritually correct way to conserve is to federalize all public land, raise taxes and elevate politically motivated bureaucrats to positions of power where they can micromanage environmental policies. Policies which, more often than not, are conceived in a cauldron of bad science, wishful anthropomorphizing, and lots of unreasoned guilt.

Coyote @ the dog show is justifiably outraged at allegations of gross mismanagement by the Department of Interior of money meant for Indian (as in Native American) communities. Has anyone suggested an IRS audit of employees who may have been directly or indirectly misappropriating some of this money ?



Across the country, these folks have the poorest education, highest unemployment, highest alcoholism, and highest suicide rates of any ethnic group in the US. They have their reasons. If you’ve been looking for something to get outraged over, this is it.




I think an issues like this needs wider circulation than it can get from mainstream media. It takes commentators like Swen to join all the dotted lines and make the connections between the jumble of stories, press releases and glossed-over coverage. He has been covering this for a while. Read his posts, if you haven't done so already. Buried in one of his links is also a way to contact the activists.

Thanks to all those Instapundit readers who came clicking by with over 700 visits yesterday.. I have to mention that my most frequent reader is my Dad, who still lives in Kolkata, and absolutely loves the fact that each day he gets to read a post on a new topic. That in of itself, is incentive enough for me to keep the Kolkata Libertarian alive and kicking for a long time.

Reader Rashmi Sinha recommends a new community weblog designed to bring together members of the Indo-Pak community. A toast to efforts such as these..!

First I wake up to the smell of another freshly brewed Instapundit link. Then I find out I've been made Blog of the Day, a fleeting but sweet nomination. Thank you, one and all.

Hawkgirl joins with the new blog Give war a chance. Lennon is laughing from his grave.

Efforts are now underway to unleash gun-toting bounty hunter vigilante-types on foreign students.I apologize in advance for the emotional rant that follows:



For i = 0 to 1e¹⁰⁰⁰⁰

  BEGIN RANT....


As a former foreign student myself, having to contend with uncaring foreign student-service bureaucracies was a nightmare in of itself. Now do foreign students have to contend with the risk of having their doors flattened by trigger-happy bounty hunters..? This is outright idiocy. The responsibility for tracking foreign students,as well as ensuring their rights are not trampled upon by declaring open season on them, is one of the primary responsibilities of the INS. Claiming increased efficiencies by palming this task on to private organizations like detective agencies and bail bondsmen known for their general disregard for the law is patent rubbish..!! The INS needs to integrate their own databases with colleges and universities, or have permanently stationed liasons whose job would entail keeping a low-profile tab on all enrolled foreign students. Yes, it would bloat this absurdly bloated bureaucracy even furthur, but let's assign responsibility where responsibility is due, shall we?




Some students are concerned that simple class-skipping or trips overseas to visit their families would trigger unreasonable suspicion. “A small slip could lead to huge problems,” says Abhay Shah, a 25-year-old graduate student from India at the University of Georgia. ..



Exactly! Foreign students often go home for long periods at a time.. now they get to come back to body-slamming Rambos who failed to do a little fact-checking before busting in the door.



Second-class citizenship, anyone?? Oh, I forgot, foreign students aren't Americans and therefore deserve to live under a permanent blanket of suspicion..! How utterly dumb and clueless of me to think that at time like this, when honest hardworking Americans are living in abject fear of terrorism, a rational debate on immigration is possible!! How completely un-American of me to even suggest such tomfoolery! I must be a closet Noam Chomskyite..! Oh horror of horrors !




  continue:

.....END RANT

Megan McArdle has this concise explanation for why the Microsoft sanctions are a patently bad idea



..Software has a very high fixed cost: the cost of developing the product, and the minimum physical and administrative overhead needed to run the business. It has a very low marginal cost: the cost of producing each extra unit of product. Unlike, say, a basket of groceries, Microsoft saves no money on the stripped down product, because the main cost, development, is a sunk cost: money already spent that can't be recovered. In fact, the remedy increases Microsoft's costs, by forcing the company to develop the same product twice. So profit margins will be squeezed at both ends...




Ironically, a similar sort of realization may be sinking in as piracy-happy software addicts in India clash with industry and government. Local law-enforcement is getting some updated operating procedures for dealing with piracy and since 1996, software piracy rates appear to be slowing.



With the growing reliance of the Indian economy on the IT industry, the light bulbs must be going off in several Indian software-jock heads: "I pirate software because software is expensive because software is built by software companies because software companies hire people like me at fantastic super-above average salaries... If I let piracy go unchecked, there will be fewer software companies making fewer software products, hiring fewer people leading to more job competition.. oh my god, what the hell was I thinking..!"



The understanding that bits & bytes are real economic entities and commodities in their own right, subject to market forces like cotton or steel has been hard to come by, both in the Asia-pacific underground market as well as the courtrooms of American law.

I always knew that the various flavors of Indian democracy, particularly at local and grassroots levels, was of a rough 'n tumble nature unlike anything the sedate parliamentarians of the West have ever seen. There is still room for surprise! In what is seen as a perfectly normal turn of events, India's third sex is stepping into a different sort of limelight.




V N Pal, a senior professor in Kanpur University and convener of the election campaign of the eunuchs in Kanpur, believes that the kinnars symbolize an electoral repositioning away from a mainstream so muddied that it has become too arduous for the working class to navigate. Eunuchs have a rather dichotomous relationship with the gender mainstream of India: on the one hand, they are treated as a pesky subspecies, fluent at extorting protection money from traders and from families celebrating marriages and the birth of male infants; on the other, they are believed to have the power of the profane, the ability both to un-blight the future, and, in violent contrariness, lay curses that can cripple generations, financially, anatomically and spiritually.




One waits with baited breath to see how effectively this oracular sub-caste can, er, penetrate the Indian political arena under a relatively favorable social climate. However, India's eunuchs are unlikely to make much headway in the national sphere.. making sex (and the twisting of sexual identity) the cornerstone of an otherwise healthy campaign may not play well beyond regional politics. This is, however, more than just a humorous sideshow in Indian politics. It's a sign that grassroots democracy in India is evolving within local cultural constructs, responding to local customs and taboos while skillfully exploiting them at the same time.

Found a link to a site via Rallying Point warning of pyramid and ponzi schemes. Here is a pyramid scheme for everyone to avoid.

Found Richard Bennets cool new Internet toy. Guess what happened when I entered the URL for the Kolkata Libertarian..? A post on Richard Bennett's comments about India on the edge of the Anglosphere.. hmmm .. twilight zone, here we come!

"Comic book guy" on the Simpsons calls this "best slogan ever", as he retreats into his store to dispense more insults..


Now all I have to do is wait for sub-peonas from Fox lawyers..

The all-important consumer confidence in privatisation appears to be on the upswing. Captured by this business article are two crucial factors emerging in the business and legal climate in India:




..Clearly the country’s courts are not in any mood to entertain frivolous litigation on the subject of privatisation...



..But even more important, the signs of success are now becoming visible, and ordinary workers are beginning to realise their lot may just improve with privatisation.




In the end, pragmatism will win out over utopian impossibilities like socialism, marxism and all the other "isms" that have tumbled through the Indian political and social climate over the last fifty years.

US administration officials "deeply irritated" by Mushys claim that the Daniel Pearl kidnapping was really a profoundly devious Indian intelligence plot..!



If Mushy and his generals have such a high opinion of Indian military intelligence, the same community that failed to predict the Kargill invasion until Pakistani irregulars were knocking on their doorstep, then India has little to fear from them. Since that is unlikely, and this appears to be another case of Islamic paranoia run amuck, Mushys American handlers in the State department must be fed-up with this growing PR nightmare. So what happens when a 8000 lb gorilla decides to scratch a 10 lb itch on his backside..?