Saturday, August 28, 2010

Sick of American journalists' ignorance... denial?

"...false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war." - Building a Nation of Know-Nothings, NYT, Aug'10

I'm sick of reading supposedly-factual news articles and opinion columns written by American journalists in "highly regarded" publications such as The New York Times, in which these journalists routinely claim that WMDs in Iraq was a mistake by the US!

I say BULLSHIT!

Grow up, kids. Even a chaiwalla in India probably knows by now that American claims of presence of WMDs in Iraq were all blatant, fabricated lies! Lies with a clear purpose, these were projected as truth by the USA as a pretext to bleed, conquer and leech Iraq.

And what about the mother-of-all-lies - the link between Al-Qaida and Iraq that the US created like a genius? My fingers are burning... I don't have the capacity to write!

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Does the US-given designation of "State Sponsors of Terrorism" apply to the US itself?

Just noticed this - the map on the Wikipedia article for "State Sponsors of Terrorism" has the US colored. Does this please US-haters, by indicating indirectly that the US too is a sponsor of terrorism?

Funnily, these countries have been listed by the US

Friday, August 20, 2010

Four learnings from the Landmark Education session I attended on Tuesday, 17-Aug-10

Background: I'm an Aug'06 graduate of The Landmark Forum by Landmark Education.
  1. Stand in the future and live your present from the future: Stand in the future that you want to achieve, and let it empower you and give you happiness and a sense of fulfillment. Then work your present according to that future. The past is exactly that - past. The present is not supposed to be operated according to the past, but according to the future that you desire and have targeted
  2. Targets must be specific: Unless targets are specific and unambiguous, one won't achieve them. "I wanna lose as much weight as possible, as soon as possible." is a BS target. "I wanna lose 5 kg in the next 50 days." is a specific target. "I wanna get rich." is not a BS target; it's a CowShit target. "I wanna earn INR 1 crore in the next 1 year." is a specific target
  3. Targets should be realistic: Setting lofty-but-achievable targets is different from dreaming wildly. "I wanna earn 1 crore in the next 24 hours." is an unrealistic target for me (at present), although it can be a realistic target for someone who currently earns proportionally. "I wanna earn USD 1 million in the next 5 years." is a realistic target
  4. Work on the goals, not on the stories ("I want X but Y"): The Ys are all stories made up by us and assumed to be true, while the Xs are the goals. We convince ourselves that the Ys are true, and that our lack of success in achieving the Xs is justifiably attributable to the presence of Ys, and that these Ys result in our inability in achieving the Xs. We keep thinking about and working on the Ys, whereas we should be concentrating our energy and time on the Xs

My thoughts on Indian female drivers

The outrageous "hit, kill and flee" incident at Chandigarh presents an opportunity to pen my views about the driving of Indian female drivers. These are based on the many years for which I've been driving both two-wheelers and cars in various North-Indian cities.

My views can appropriately be segregated into two buckets - the first called G (for females aged >=16 and <30), and the second called W (for ages >=30). Females <16 years old are out of scope.
  • G: I don't just distrust the driving of most Indian females, and I also fear it, and I plead not guilty to the accusation of being a sexist. I not only have little confidence in the driving of most Indian female drivers from set G, I also get extra cautious when I am driving around one. However, there exists a small subset of G - about 5% of the full set - which does possess good driving skills. The remainder ~95% can be attributed with dangerous/pointless/random turns, frequent collisions, mid-road car stoppages, sudden braking, unneeded honking, etc. I have been victim of the oft-careless driving by set G drivers - in 2004 I was hit, hard, by a car driven by two young girls, who didn't bother to stop to say sorry!
  • W: The proportion of good drivers in W, in my opinion, is only ~2%. Frankly, I'm tired of the troubles created by this set! The drivers in this set generally appear clueless. No more to say...
Update (10-Jul-11): As if this was not already known to every guy (and the ladies too, although they wouldn't admit it), a study by the University of Michigan proves beyond doubt that female drivers indeed cause more accidents than male drivers.