One Geek

News just in the Nagaland ceasefire between NSCN(I-M) and government of India has been extended by 1 year

Went to Cafe Mocha yesterday. It is still as good as ever. Had to wait 5-10 minutes for a table which adds to anticipation. I had a lidnt hot chocolate which was made with half a block of chocolate and milk. It was very good, howerver I think the lidnt milkshake I had once was actually better. I also had a “That Chocolate Thing” and a mushroom crepe. I did cause myself some agony with my mouth but it was worth it.

Just read two interesting news arcticles about HIV/AIDS and TB.

The first is about an Indian boy with AIDS who has tied to a bedpost in a medical college hospital, placed in a ward with people with highly infectious diseases. This is plain stupid because people with AIDS generally have a poor immune system. Futher more HIV/AIDS is not contigous. However they did mention that he had TB of the brain so maybe that was why. Anyway the hospital admited that it was not equiped to deal with AIDS patients and now boy is being moved to AIIMS in Delhi. I don’t understand how you can have a hospital not equiped to treat AIDS patients in a country with so many people who are HIV+. You can read more here.

There have been some cases of TB on a British warship recently. The BBC has a report about it here. I found it interesting because it shows that it’s not just in developing countries. TB is something that we can beat in the forseable future though. The WHO/UN DOTS program is a really good way of treating it. I hope it gets halved by 2015 like was promised in the MDG’s.

Whilst some people think that Indian has less range of books then the West, I think they do a pretty good job. Whilst they don’t have the range of some of the book stores back home, they do contain many gems. I just finished reading a book written by an Indian domesitic worker with only 6 years of education. The book, A Life Less Ordinary by Baby Halder tells her powerful life story. It is an amazing story of adversity being overcome by courage and grace. There are so many stories like in India that go unheard.

I wish that women had more power in this world. It pisses me off all the stories that I hear about men sucking here. The level of domestic violence in this country is appualing. I really wish I could do something like I suggested last time I was in India.

Seriously don’t bite your tounge, and if you do don’t try and eat like normal. I have so many ulcers now and a really sore throat. I went to the office yesterday and one of the doctors had a look at me. Apparantly I don’t have tonsilities he just told me to take vitamins and use Listerine. I am rather bored of being sick. July has been a month of my not being well. Hopefully that means I’ll be well for the rest of the year ;-).

I went and saw a friend of mines band, Sahara House(I think that’s what it was called) play tonight at the Morision Cafe in South Ex. It was nice to go to a gig walking distance from my home. They ended up with a two and half hour set. It was very fun, lots of people dancing including me. They were a rather ecletic cover band covering Nirvana too Van Morision and most things in between. It was the perfect pick me up after a not so wonderful week. It was a bit weird going to a gig by myself but I meet some fun people there, so it was all good.

The Australian (an Australian newspaper) is surprisingly covering the ceasefire process in Nagaland. The NSCN(I-M) is threatening to not extend the ceasefire past 31st July. They are claiming the Indian army is arming the rival faction. I reckon it’s probably just saber rattling but you never know for sure. The world certainly is rather messed up at the moment with all the conflicts.

Rest assured I am not going to be travelling to Nagaland over the next few weeks.

Why are there some lessons I seem to always need to learn.

Patience and humility seem to be ones I often need to be reminded of. India can be good teacher.

Well India has realeased the ban on blogspot.com at last. So yay for that.

Well the repessive evil Indian government has blocked my internet connection from accessing any blogspot blog!
Whilst being a geek this is very easy for me to bypass it is still very upsetting.
I am hoping this is only a tempoary measure because it’s a pain in the neck to go around by passing the Indian Governments filtering.
Blanket blocking of the domain blogspot.com is bad and it’s going to have to be overturned soon I hope, due to public preasure.

There is an article here about it.

This poster is about female foeticide

The headline is “As per the census, there are 958 women for 1000 men. Because, more than 1 million female foetuses are aborted every year. Wake up before it’s too late. Ban Sex Determination.”

I found this on this blog

The world is making me rather sad, and more then a little angry at the moment.

I also found this interesting image on outsourcing

What is so important that requires the deaths of people in conflict zones. Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Dafur in Sudan, the list goes on..

There are so many places currently in conflict which I guess makes sense giving that the world spends 1 trillion dollars and guess who spends 47% of this amount?
The good old US of A of course.

How effectively is this money being spent?
In 2003 100,000 people died as a direct result of conflict according to this report. That’s 10 million dollars per a death, pretty expensive. There must be a cheaper way. And you know there is.. We could just starve countries to death instead of spending money on arms, that worked well with Iraq, until the US decided to break that plan and invade them.

Every year 6 million children under the age of 5 die from completely preventable causes. Apathy seems to be a much more efficient and effective merchant of death then armed conflict. Although World War II was a bit more effective causing about 63 million deaths according to this page. Though if you spread it over the duration of the war it’s only about 9 million a year. Add in other deaths due to poverty and I think you’ll see it’s more effective.

So if anyone really wants to effectively kill people just cut overseas development aid and wait for the people to die from things like hunger, malaria and HIV/AIDS. You see we just can’t kill people as cheaply and efficiently as poverty can. If you really want the land and resources of people in these countries just wait until most of them are dead, and either invade them cheaply or buy them out.

If you want to stop people dying needlessly there is a pretty simple method. Give the poor you voice, your time and some of your hard earned cash. Get behind the efforts already being made.

Did you know that if we took just 20% off the amount that the world spends on arm and put it into the Millennium Development Goals we could End Poverty in the next ten years.

Maybe that would also help solve the problems creating conflicts throughout the world.
My Other ideas for conflict zones:
all forces in disputed zones should withdraw, and all these zones should become neutral zones.
The world should have week where they don’t make or sell any weapons at all.
There should be a global ceasefire day.
We could abolish the concept of nations.

Does anyone else have any ideas? No idea is too crazy.
We could make people use homous loaded guns when they attack of each other.

Ben Harper’s Both Sides of the Gun was my album of choice on my trip to Nagaland. I think it’s quite a good album. A nice flying album too. I think for my flight back to Aus I am going to have to come up with a nice long home coming/flying playlist.

I have a new policy where I am going to try and listen to all of the 1000 songs or so in my iPod every 5 weeks. I think it will be a good way to keep my music well rotated, and with my custom smart playlists it’s easy to monitor.

CSW is one of my favorite acronyms I have learnt on this trip. Does anyone want to guess what it means?

I’ve uploaded some of my Nagaland photos, have a look here.