Challenge the status quo

I stumbled this website just now, it gives a great summary of where, everything we use, comes from an goes. It's a 20 minute video , but worth every minute of it, I promise! Check it out and spread around if you like it :)

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Curious GWB - George Bush Raps

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JX-Bx0BETQ

Brilliance in action!

I came across Kiva.org recently and am so impressed by their work, I wish to become part of them or similar organization one day God Willing ( insha'Allah ;) ).

What they basically do is let people like you and I lend money (starting as low as $25) to anyone around the world too poor to benefit from regular banks etc.. This model is known as microfinance. I just signed up 6 businesses.

This is all you gotta do:

1) Go to http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses

2) Select someone from the list or refine your search by region, gender etc. and click on "more>>"

3) Click on "Checkout>>", unless you want to add more loans.

4) Donate some money to kiva itself for running this effort, if you like.

5) Go through the sign-up process and bam! You're in business.

The crazy thing is that this is not even a donation, you get your money back as the borrowers pay you back (there is a small risk involved of course should the borrower fail to pay you back on time but turns out microlending has return rates that surprised even the most accomplished of the lenders/bankers!).

So you can use the same money over and over to help more and more people. I personally can't think of a better way to enable people to help each other with minimum physical or monetary input and maximum output, hence, the title. ;)

Good Luck!

Tibet/Buddhism VS China/Communism, who is the bad guy?

Since Tibet/China issue is all over the news these days and I did not know much about it, I thought I would do a bit of research. The mainstream media, like always, seems to portray a monolithic image, i.e., "Chinese are the cruel and the monstrous, the Tibetans are the victims". So after some research, I came across an article by Michael Parenti "Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth" (http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html).

I liked the article mainly because it attempted to explore the other side of the picture, which helped me understand the nature of the conflict a bit better.

Article was full of surprises for me, here is a glimpse of it:

1) To start with my favorite paragraph:

"To welcome the end of the old feudal theocracy in Tibet is not to applaud everything about Chinese rule in that country. This point is seldom understood by today’s Shangri-La believers in the West. The converse is also true: To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. Tibetans deserve to be perceived as actual people, not perfected spiritualists or innocent political symbols. “To idealize them,” notes Ma Jian, a dissident Chinese traveler to Tibet (now living in Britain), “is to deny them their humanity."


2) Tibet's religious leaders and elites (including monks, Dalai Lamas) have a long history of cruel serfdom. To quote:

"The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery."

It was the Chinese who abolished this heinous practice and gave basic human rights to the serfs, after their invasion of Tibet. If you think China has human rights issues, can you imagine how bad it must have been in Tibet??

3) Oppressive theocracy of Buddhism is not very different from Christianity, Islam etc. Dalai Lamas and the monks are not very different from the preists and the Mullahs. Some are good, some are bad. An example for the latter:

"Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.”²¹ Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet."


4) Tibetan resistance has not always been "peaceful" as opposed to what you hear in the media. E.g.:

"The issue was joined in 1956-57, when armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts.²⁷ Meanwhile in the United States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that organization. The Dalai Lama's second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951."

5) CIA secretly funneled $1.7 Million/year to the Tibetan exile community throughout the 1960s against the Chinese (surprise!).

6) Dalai Lama does not represent all of Tibet, there are at least three more schools of thought who do not accept Dalai Lama as their sole leader. Hence, the followers of Dalai Lama do not represent the will of all of Tibetans either. I wonder if they even represent the majority?

7) Monks are not exactly "monks", they run harems of women for their pleasure. To quote:

"Kim Lewis, who studied healing methods with a Buddhist monk in Berkeley, California, had occasion to talk at length with more than a dozen Tibetan women who lived in the monk’s building. When she asked how they felt about returning to their homeland, the sentiment was unanimously negative. At first, Lewis assumed that their reluctance had to do with the Chinese occupation, but they quickly informed her otherwise. They said they were extremely grateful “not to have to marry 4 or 5 men, be pregnant almost all the time,” or deal with sexually transmitted diseases contacted from a straying husband. The younger women “were delighted to be getting an education, wanted absolutely nothing to do with any religion, and wondered why Americans were so naïve [about Tibet]."

5) Chinese did undermine Tibetan culture.

So to recap, I would repeat the same paragraph as in the beginning:

"To welcome the end of the old feudal theocracy in Tibet is not to applaud everything about Chinese rule in that country. This point is seldom understood by today’s Shangri-La believers in the West. The converse is also true: To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime. Tibetans deserve to be perceived as actual people, not perfected spiritualists or innocent political symbols. “To idealize them,” notes Ma Jian, a dissident Chinese traveler to Tibet (now living in Britain), “is to deny them their humanity."