Making choices

In 2016 my final pass% for the choices in the election was 30%.

This year was better. Have been tracking my voting choices. While this post might end up attracting a bunch of more telemarketers before the next election, want you all to see how tricky it can be for many voting choices, given the Marketing machinery that goes behind every one of these measures and propositions.

To say elections are messy in the US is an understatement! 

My 2020 Election Report card : 

Pass/ Fail: 12 pass, 10 fail, 1 Meh. That is >50%. Better than 2016! 

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✅ means got it right..❌ means the choice has lost or is almost gone.

My vote:
President?VP - Biden/Harris - ✅

Voted for Sanders in the Primary. Had nothing against Biden and thought the choice of Kamala was interesting. I love Kamala as she has more balls than most of the old goats in the senate. It was sickening to see so many of my racist Indian friends (yes, you can have friends who have views different than yours) who suddenly attached themselves to her after she became the VP choice, but will take it.  

Unlike my meh vote for Hillary, voted for this Biden/Harris ticket whole heartedly.

My original thought during the primary was that the US ship had moved too far to the right and was about to topple.. to bring it back to center, you might need to try and pull it too far to the left or it might still end up wobbling for a long time.. Biden is a moderate. He is almost a Republican in a lot of ways, compared to Bernie. Hope a moderate choice is good enough to get the US back on track! for COVID/healthcare, social justice and the economy/Foreign policy (that was my order or priorities).

I personally want us to have a decent working relationship with China and Taiwan till we can get our own Hardware (read semiconductor, chip making in general) business up and running in the US. This was at a personal level where you are thinking just about you and your family. You can ask me "isn't every choice on your ballot, your choice, where you doing the absolute selfish thing?" and I will answer immediately "No. Politics is about "people" as a collective. This is where an individual decides a collective choice. You have to see if your selfishness is goign to backfire on you badly when making choices."

When it comes to China, saying you have to stop eating out when your stove at home isn't working is not a good strategy. Subsidising farmers and not fabs is ridiculous. If Fabs were subsidized, maybe the trade war was not called for and there would be no retalliation on Pig/soy/bourbon etc.  from China and the folks who were hit in the US getting subsidies to compensate for this retaliation. This was an elaborate chess game which in my opinion was botched and turned into a game of "whack-a-mole" by someone who knows more about chess than all the grandmasters put together. 

Not absolving China of unfair practices or asking for trouble. They made a lot of bad choices in the last three years. If China had elections, Xi would have probably lost in a landslide after COVID. But they don't, so this is China's chance to do better and get back on the right side of things. Hope the Chinese "community" is able to "capitalize" on this! 

Half this country agrees Nazi's are bad, but almost all of them seem to be anti China now?! Not good for the world. Hope this situation changes. Things will never be the same again but they can get better.

Now for the rest of the choices.

Ro - House Rep District 17 ✅ 72.9% to Ritesh 27% (Ro was a reluctant vote. Given he is young, expected his votes to align with Bernie.. but was not to be. This was my lesser of two evils vote. All those ads with Ritesh being blessed by the priests was a turn off. I am not going to vote for him because the local priests endorsed the guy. Who do you think I am? an Indian version of an Evangelical Floridian? was the thought in my head)
Ann - State senate District 15 ❌ 46% to 53.9% for Cortese
Evan low -State assembly District 28 ✅ 73.1%

Skipped it (Judge vote with only one candidate in ballot...only Kim Jong Un runs an election with one name only one name on a Ballot? No.. we do it too! ) 

Govind only - Local Community College Board-  ❌ (got only 14% of the vote)

William and sudha - Local school board ❌-  the ladies who want to shut the local schools  for where we live are leading with 38 and 27% . Sudha trails by 3000 votes and Bill is a distant 4th with only 11%. (this was the big disappointment for me on local level)

Steven and kitty -Cupertino City Council ~ Meh Top 2 win.. Only Kitty made it and is in 2nd place with a 900 vote lead. Steven in 4th place and trails by 1100 votes. The surprise is the Conspiracy theorist Charlene Lee who is in 5th place and still got 2600 votes!!  Cannot call this a win. Not sure if Kitty can do what she told me before the election without the support she needs of the 5 total members.

Bosworth, Gatto and Angela- Local Sanitary district - ✅ (all the three candidates picked are leading with 33, 24 and 24% of the vote. unlikely to change)

Propositions for CA : Only 83% of votes reported so far :

14- yes ✅ fund stem cell research 50.9% (not yet called)
15-yes ❌  Change how business property taxes are assessed. Got only 48% (not yet called)

 Not sure how this helps. It would be a good thing if Apple which practically runs Cupertino could just come up with 11M $ to stop the four local schools from closing. How can schools in Cupertino close for lack of funds? More people enrolling their kids in private schools (less PE? Grade inflation, which is a term I heard for the first time two weeks ago?) This topic needs a blog post in itself! 

16-yes ❌ End ban on affirmative action. Got only 43.5% (called)
17-yes ✅ Restore parolee vote – 58.7% (called)
18-yes ❌ Allow some 17 year olds to vote 

If they turn 18 by election, they should vote in March primaries so their candidate would be on Nov ballot). Got only 44.4% (called). This is a big big disappointment where the older generation screws the younger generation. Sorry kids. I tried?!

19-no ❌ change property tax transfer rules – 51.2% (not called yet)
20-no ✅ Increase criminal penalties and limit parole – 37.8% (called)
21-yes ❌ Allow rent control expansion – got only 40% (called)
22-no ❌ Classify gig workers as contractors - got 58.5% (called)

Read a yes vote on this as an Uber win and contractor loss as they get screwed out of benefits and voted no.Wanted to make sure Uber drivers who are risking a lot during COVID times to have healthcare.  This was the most controversially worded measure that had an intent to confuse.. Maybe Yes was the right vote?  Eventually when COVID leaves and I am on planes again and get to talk to Uber drivers enroute to SFO.. will find out the ground reality.

23-no ✅ Add regulation for kidney dialysis clinics – got only 35.9% (called)

Had to ask a doctor relative for advice on this! 

24-no ❌ Amend state data privacy law – got 55.9% (called). 

This was yet another one which was worded badly. My take is folks have voted against their own interest thanks to word play on the ballot. Have one adorable friend who is a technical writer who will hopefully take to task these folks who end up writing ballot measures with an intent to deceive and confuse the voter! 

Technical writing was weaponized in this ballot! At this rate they could write a ballot measure for mandatory castration of all male babies once they reach the age of 10 and have it pass..that was my thought after reading this!

25-no✅ End use of cash bail – got only 44.1% (called)

Measures for Local region:  Voted for keeping an existing tax or add a tax, and all three passed! 

M-yes -   ✅ pass school district parcel tax .. 73% 
S-yes -   ✅ pass parcel tax for santa clara valley water district - 75%
RR-yes - ✅ Peninsula corridor 0.125% sales tax increase - 69.6%

Don't have a problem paying Taxes as long as there is accountabilty for that tax dollars and it actually ends up doing what it is supposed to do. Seeing all the signs for "please stop our school from closing" on every street corner is making me want to push for more reform on commercial properties to pay proportional taxes which would actually benefit the local community!

Overall, happy with this pass %. Makes me feel less disconnected with the rest of the community this time compared to the last time. 

Waiting for Biden/Harris and an all star team to bring some much needed sanity. In the meantime

- Social distance

- If you can't wear a mask

- wash your hands often

- Get tested if you are sick

- Exercise regularly

- Talk to people who don't agree with you

Put yourself in other peoples shoes or make a conscious attempt to engage

Bring facts and truth back! 

Let's all work on avoiding the concept of "alternate facts" as they are just "lies". 

NASER

The Past : NASER 

NASER, an acronym I am coining stands for  "News Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Rubbish". Till the morning of the election everyone, even the guys at fivethirtyeight who has predicted things very successfully in the past wrote a post that said "no matter which scenario we pick, Hillary Clinton comes up the winner". Today the US stands where it is because people are disconnected with reality.

There is the Fox news watching folks who believe that all muslims are terrorists and the Chinese are taking their jobs or that Obama is after their guns.. the list goes on. Then there is the coastal mix that has no idea that there are folks who are born and raised in the Midwest who have never crossed their county borders and have lived to be past sixty and their aspirations for the rest of their lives and their children look very bleak. 

There is probably one dude who is going door to door and collecting some info. This then gets amplified and mirrored multiple times with some embellishments and gets called news. We live in a country where 1$ was shown as collateral 31 times to create a debt crisis. Same thing happens to polling?!

Three weeks ago, spent 4 hours voting.

(Put the sticker on my phone instead of my shirt.. it lasted three plus weeks! now it is a bitter reminder of my pass %...)

Today we have the results, but I have to check across different sites to find out if I got an A or a D.  When we wait at airports, Jr. plays a game on her phone called family feud and she keeps bugging me to help her with answers. There when you answer something it goes "you said the answer is Hillary.. the audiene said Trump".. wish there was an answer key to the election that shows the correct answers to all the things you picked and gives you a score and it gets mailed to your home after the exam, err. election is over. 

This time majority of my choices were not the winning choices. Usually it is 50/50. This time it is more like 30/60. Chances are I am way too disconnected with the folks around me. We should all get a disconnect score at the end of an election, be it within your city, county, state and the nation. 

Last night I went for a yoga class and for 90 minutes forgot what was going on outside that hot room. The fact that my hand was sending pain signals every 10 seconds was making it more challenging than thoughts of the election. Came home to find out that Trump was very close to winning and there was a general doom and gloom scenario in the house and neighborhood. There was also a lot of disbelief that this could acutually have happened. 

I did predict a Trump win and got yelled at for it three weeks ago. My prediction was based on two things. The first was related to how Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. The media world over said he had no chance or he had only a fighting chance, but he came roaring with an absolute majority. The reason the pollsters were not predicting that right? A lot of folks did not tell everyone who they were really voting for but came out in droves to vote for the BJP. At that time, voting for the BJP was associated by mainstream media as a Hitler vote! In my mind, the same thing was going on in the US. Folks who want to vote for Trump, but have a problem associating with the stigma (there were Republicans endorsing him who would not mention him by name) weren't going to advertise it loudly!

The second thing was our own dissonance with what is happening in a large part of the country. In this year I have made one trip to Ohio, one aborted trip to Ohio which ended in a Denver airport sleep in, one trip to Seattle, Austin and Pittsburgh as fas as domestic travel goes. The Ohio and Pittsburgh trip were eye opening. There is a overwhelming sense of despair for folks who have a problem and sincerely believe their problem is because of a,b,c thanks to what they see and hear. The fact that they associate the root causes of their problems to things or countries or folks, that are so far off the mark, does not make their problems unreal. They are vey very real. Folks who were able to screw the same nut into the same bolt for 8 hours a day, five days a week for 20 years and get paid a decent salary to raise kids, put food on the table and pay a mortgage are suddenly jobless. A lot of such jobs were also military jobs making tanks and other things we may not need. If we closed those plants, they all have to make something else or have some other skill. The roof, the food, the kids, they don't go away. Yes, there is a sense of entitlement for some because of their race, but the folks I met or spoke to were not showing any entitlement. They were just lacking a job matching their skillset. 

The Present : Day After Tomorrow

That movie keeps coming to mind. Yes, Trump is now President elect. We did have a tough time explaining to our kids what was going on. It is true that we have a democracy and the we accept the system for what it is.

If someone tells you "Clinton won the majority vote", that is an excuse. The rules of the game is the electoral college and everyone has known the rules for hundreds of years, so both campaigns were playing for the electoral college. If Trump won, it was with the same rules. That part is easy to explain.

If someone tells you "the third party vote is what cost Clinton the election", that is also an excuse. We always knew that Johnson/Weld were going to do better in this election because they were a compromise for people who used to vote for establishment Republicans and the Libertarian folks were not going to vote for Hilary anyways. That was a constant that wasn't new or unexpected.

We are not ready for a woman president. Even that part is easy to explain. There are so many nations out there with women leaders, but the US is not ready for it. Maybe some other woman will be President some day. The fact that Hillary came so close is something to rejoice. Someone asked me during the Primary, why are you not coming out in support of Hillary explicitly. My answer was "I don't like women who stand by their husbands in front of the press to show their support after said husband has just been caught cheating with a girl old enough to be his daughter. She should have castrated the bastard or separated from him, not stand by him and take that crap for the sake of politics". I was lectured on that statement by many of my family and friends that in spite of that she is where she is. I was Hilary neutral.. let's put it that way. My reason for not being enthusiastic was my perception that she can be pushed easily. She did prove me wrong in the debates. 

The hardest part to explain to the kids? A guy who said and did what he did, managed to get elected to this office. If your kids aspire to be the POTUS someday, the value system that you need to instill in them are not ones of family values, compassion, responsibility to fellow citizen and country but whatever Trump stands for. That is a new low as a parent. It is a growing up lesson as a parent. Our kids have to grow up to a new reality and wake up to a lot of concepts a little too early. Forget the tooth fairy or Santa.  Jr. was getting nightmares after reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" which is mandatory 9th grade reading. Maybe it should be mandatory 6th grade reading! but I did have a spin for it.. 

The greatness of the American electoral process is not that a black man was our president for 8 years. It is not that a woman managed to stand for this office and come close to winning it. It is that a man like Trump can be President if he perseveres. That is a very American thing to do. You ignore anything anyone says about you and still manage go grab America. Okay, looks like the cynic in me is staring to come out again. Deep breath. Deep breath. Where were we?

We told our kids this morning that the only thing no one can take away from them is their education and knowledge and the more they share that knowledge the more valuable it is. The little one looks up at me and goes "what I learned in this election is that if you have a rich daddy, you can be messed up and still become president!" and she gives me a look that says "if only you were rich..."  Definitely not the value system conversation you want to have.. but ... 

The Future : A big ship vs. a jet ski... I am thinking Hunt for Red October

A dictatorship is like a jet ski. You can change direction very fast with your hands and the craft responds. It can go fast and there is a good chance to crash and burn. A large and complicated democracy with electoral colleges, senate, house of representatives, city councils, governers, etc. is like a ship. You can be the captain and say "set course for this lattitude and longitude" and that gets conveyed to a first officer to another guy to another guy and finally by the time it gets to change, it is not fast or perceptible. The US is like that ship. There are social experiments that have time scales in the decades. 

Trump is a social experiement. We thought we were going to get golden spangles by mixing potassium iodide with lead nitrate, but were surprised to see an orange sediment in the test tube. The lead was there.. but the iodide was missing! If my daughter reads this, please note that I still remember this from 30 years ago. I will do a pop quiz on this sometime soon. Get ready.. where were we again? This whole election thing is making me go all over the place.  This social experiement has to be supported and accepted. We still do not know how the world will react. I am not expecting wide spread riots like the ones that happen in third world nations when an election is close. There is a lot more tolerance in the US than the world gives us credit for. Trumps words during his run up to this office definitely do not project him as a President for everyone and he is most likely going to be pushed over by the likes of Putin. 

If there is one thing that any President has always focussed on irrespective of managing the way we are perceived by the world, it is the strength of the USD. Trump will not do anything to damage that. If anything that is for sure. That will be the first reassuring thing. 

His biggest challenge is to bring jobs back to the US. Sooner or later the good folks in the midwest will realize that robots took a lions share of their jobs, not the Chinese, not bad trade deals, not Mexicans and immigrants. Trump can make tanks that no military would want to use and stock pile them if that is what it means to put food on the table for that vote base or he can try and line up with the world and realize that good jobs will mean energy jobs and Information technology jobs. Those are the engines for the next decade. Making his constituents happy and getting jobs back automatically involves certain other compromises. That will keep him busy and away from his hate rhetoric.

When I first became a manager, I realized that it is easy to be an individual contributor than a manager. It is not easy to herd cats. Trump has a government job for the first time. Moving from the private sector to the government, he is going to have a massive transition. First they are going to take his phone away and give him one of those kid phones (you should watch Obama describe it in one of the late shows) and that might mean, no tweeting at 3PM.  That is just the first adjustment. 

There is an expecatation from the POTUS from everyone here and abroad. At the least he should meet the expectations of those who voted for him. Let's hope he does that. I am all for a happy midwest where folks prosper again. Hope that hole in the US donut becomes a cream filled solid one. 

On a side note, a majority of my Indian family and friends who are US citizens are sad that Trump won. There are a few who voted for Trump because of one or both of below reasons :

a. He will lower taxes

b. he will put the muslims in their place (they are still friends or family and they took this stand because of things they encountered in their life.. we continue to have an active dialogue on that)

A majority of my Indian family and friends who are NOT citizens are overwhemingly happy that Trump won.

They are happy for one or many of below reasons :

a. He will fast track green card process which has crawled under Obama

b. H1B visas will be a thing again and we can see IT folks come to the US to work

c. The US deserves to have Trump as President as he represents the real US (read it as "you are not any better off than we are")

Everyone has their reasons and biases.

Today was as interesting as any other day on the road (same or slightly more traffic), at work (interesting challenges), at home (sheet rock guy lights a cigarette inside house) and life goes on. My taxes are unlikely to change. Given we live in California, we are likely to continue to show our kids a pro immigrant, pro LGBT, equal opportunity lesson. Sure, I have some explaining to do as usual on my Asia trips where everyone asks me why as an American I got Trump elected ! Folks, was already asked this when he was a nominee. That will pass soon. 

It is possible that my kids will have a heavier debt burden with more wars and unnecessary spending on things that are no good for the world as a whole.. but that is a long term thing that can course correct. Barring a few downsides, this does not change things for us here. There is a fear for certain minorities in certain areas of the country and one does worry about President Trump's ability to control a mob and restrain it given his rhetoric. Most likely nothing like that will happen. The few crazies will act up much like the few RSS groups acted up after Modi won in India, but other than that, life will go on.

There is a mandate for jobs in the US. We have to provide some service or manufacture something for those jobs. Finding what service to provide or what to make in a cost competitive way is going to be the challenge and it is to be seen how Trump will solve that problem. We also have a mandate for a non politician to be in charge because folks think the current establishment politicians cannot get things done. That is true only to a certain extent. The rest is the impact of globalization which most of the population does not understand or refuses to accept. Trump is unlikely to reverse that process.

Given he was unlikely do a lot of things and he did, hoping that he does manage to reverse it.. 

Time will tell. . . 

ps. a humble request to my democrat friends. Do not distance yourself from the process or the participation. Continue to engage in the debate. talk to people who do not share your point of view. if anything my travels have taught me, it is to sit and hear things you don't want to hear, but dig deeper to find why and what drives others to do or say what they say. you can actually learn a lot. if anything go listen to Positively 4th street and imagine putting yourself in another shoes.. that is not a good start, but at least a start. 

pps. It is safe to say that the media world over is lazy. No one actually goes talks to people and collects real data. Indirect references, copying other peoples snippets has become the norm. I can talk to my grandma on the phone over five days, call it a statistic and publish it and chances are, if it fits the story, it will be amplified, embellished and repeated over and over again. Do your own research where possible. Travel if possible. Watch the travel channel, Discovery channel or National Geographic instead of FOX or CNN or MSNBC. Talk to people! Those folks who have never left their county in their entire life, go meet them if you can! 

A star spangled tricolor..

This year marks a half way point in my life. I have spent exactly the same number of years in India as in the United States. Considering this blog has been going for years now, you know my views on India and the USA evolve over time, partly because of changes in the two countries and partly because of a change in my own perspective as I grow up and grow older. 

In spite of all the changes accompanies with a lot of continued soul searching, there are some basic truths about what my perception of right and wrong are which have not changed over time. Think of it as the BIOS program that is written into my Hard Drive. Could be running Windows for a few years and switching to Mac OS for a few years but my dislike of Powerpoint may not have changed.. again, may not be the best analogy and I do like Powerpoint, not that there is anything wrong with it!

It does feel every now and then, that India and the USA are going through some kind of role reversal between the late eighties and now, especially with respect to big social norms.

Right now the "guys" (guessing this is a majority guy thing) in Kansas are coming up with a severe restriction on abortions. The odds against a woman from a poor community are now stacked up even higher. If she gets raped or is forced into a pregnancy by her husband, she cannot do anything about it. The state is not going to support her well to raise that kid either or improve her day to day life in anyway. Looks like it is a question of time before the Christian version of Shariah laws get passed as bills in some mid western states.

There is no middle ground. Most of these states have middle aged white males running the show (sorry for the racial profiling here, but it happens to be a theme) who seem to either be really ignorant (anti science, blind faith folks who believe the earth was created 7000 years ago!) or evil (they know what they are doing.. keep the people stupid so they can continue to get votes.. just like the ROmans had the folks high on wine with cheap tickets to watch the gladiators while the State of the State was degrading) with some powerful backers and the overall population doesn't get it.

On the other extreme we also have gun control laws that are going through which everyone agrees is not going to solve anything. The one thing that everyone agrees is a check to see who gets the guns and a restriction to take away guns from folks who have mental health issues. In all the debates I have seen and participated in, be it conversations in person or on the new debating platform called Facebook, this is the only thing folks agree on. Not restricting the number of bullets, not putting armed gunmen in schools etc.

Background checks and periodic registration checks to make sure your gun is still with you! However, that seems to not get traction across the board. It makes sense to hire more people (especially gun knowledgeble Veterans) and put them to work to do background checks and cross checks against medical conditions. Get all guns registered just like we treat cars.There seems to be an extreme position taken by pro and anti gun supporters with no middle ground!

Women have a raw deal in India. Even the few women in power seem to start taking an anti-woman stance the minute they get to power. Indian women never band together as a group. Have seen this all through my life. The older women seem to have an attitude that says "I suffered all through my life. Why make it better for the next generation!". It is heartening to see some of that change in recent times where women are challenging a Male dominated system. 

Then again, a select subset of women seem to have it good. Thanks to female infanticide in the mid eighties in India when Ultrasounds came to India, there is a shortage of girls in a certain age group in certain communities and the guys outnumber girls 3-1 or 4-1. The girls in these communities get to do some kind of "natural selection" and are now demanding dowries before selecting a boy. So it gets interesting as this seems to be a demand and supply thing. However in other communities which are relatively poor, the same thing has led to frustrated male youth who cannot find a partner and resort to violence against women.

Then there is gay marriage. The hate and oppression against this segment of society in the US is mind boggling, now that it is out in the open. However, their fate seems to be a lot better here than in other countries. If gay folks in USA are living in a bedroom closet, in India they are in a closet that is located in an underground bunker. I do not forsee gay people in India having any rights or openly fight for their rights in my lifetime. Heterosexual widows are treated like outcasts to this day, so chances of gay rights? Slim to none.

Right now there is a belief system clash that is happening in both countries to the point where the average citizen has to take a one way or another stand on some of these issues.

The "American way of life" or the "American Dream", terms that meant something to me twenty years ago seem to have taken on muddled connotations. There seem to be two American ways of life and the dream seems to be taking on a bipolar character in itself.

All said and done, the only thing we can hope for is that there is constructive debate across the globe and people can resolve things with debates instead of extreme measures.

There is a lot of hate out there that needs to be changed to love.

Wish when our kids grow up to be our age, the world will be a better place, but my hopes of that keep dwindling, a little bit each day.

India, Pakistan, Iraq, USA, gooooo Wikileaks! *

Finally got to a mirror site to read some Wikileaks. For some reason the links would not work on the sites or Firefox would scare me. Tonight the stars aligned and this site let me in..

This was nice reading. Was hoping to have a laugh at what came out of Delhi but found this one from Islamabad and it was interesting..

These two paragraphs really made it interesting..

Pakistan/India
--------------
¶8. (C) Petraeus said the most important threat to Pakistan was on the western border and internally. Terrorists were an existential threat to Pakistan. Kayani agreed. However, Kayani observed that he had postponed a missile test. The Indians, he said, in contrast, had conducted one just a few hours before. Kayani said he had no intention to resume missile testing as long as the current tensions persisted. He promised to be transparent with allies about his plans and had briefed us about his move of 6000 troops to the Indian border. Kayani said he was determined to exercise restraint in his actions with India. He recounted that he had taken no
ISLAMABAD 00000155 003 OF 003
action the evening that Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee had supposedly called President Zardari and threatened to declare war. Kayani asked to be alerted if the U.S. had any warning of another attack - he understood that the Indians had been warned about the Mumbai attack. He mentioned that discussion of the consequences of a follow-on attack made both India and Pakistan hostage to extremists and increased the likelihood of an attack. “If there is any clue about another attack,” he said, “please share it with us.”

and

Swat Valley
-----------
¶5. (C) Kayani was clear that the GOP had lost control of the Swat valley. He said the police had no ability to come in after the army to “hold” territory. He recounted that half of the 600 police officers, supposedly from the NWFP’s elite police units, destined for Swat had deserted, largely because there was no command structure. Petraeus replied that the U.S. had confronted this same issue in Iraq, describing it as a “clear and leave” strategy, requiring the retaking of the same ground multiple times. Petraeus observed that the police are the most vulnerable, since they are exposed in communities. Petraeus noted that increased measures to control population movements would probably have to be put in place throughout the country, which would require considerable manpower.

Pakistan has similar issues like Iraq when it comes to controlling extremists.

The military leadership is patient enough to not go for war. That is great. Maybe, maybe there will be a lasting peace when India and Pakistan jointly fight extremists.

The USA for its part is playing both sides. Well, that is to be expected!

India could have hastily gone to war and would be in the same boat as the USA. Thankfully there was no war. Looks like India was warned by the US about the attacks and the Pakistanis could not do anything about it either.

Just go through this stuff.. you might even find out who in India was warned about the attacks and what they did when they were warned!

This is one treasure trove of information which shows you that inspite of all that press and google and facebook being ubiquitous and in our face.. the hows and whys are always wrong!

Educated folks react to information thrown at them by the "in your face" media. We assume so many things, sway to popular opinion or in cases where we think we are better than the person who gets their news from facebook friends because we read and read a lot.. well, we read garbage!

If the press did what Wikileaks exposed on a daily basis, a lot of war, bloodshed would have been averted! A lot of politicians would have been exposed and their true colors come to light. People, countries might be more civil towards each other...

Well, maybe..

Go read it!

*.. this one is equally interesting..

Happy 4th

USA celebrates another birthday amidst challenging times. The great thing about this country is that when things get really ugly, the people find the will and resolve to pull together and change things for the better.

Here's to the US of A!

We did watch fireworks, from a local middle school playground. It was definitely not as good as last years, but we were happy that there was any fireworks at all.

If things go the way they should, next years fireworks should be blast!

.