In 58 posts with close to 100k words, we shared a lot in 2024! Explore 2024’s biggest geopolitical shifts, cultural battles, and bold insights with Drishtikone’s year in review. See you in 2025! Happy New Year! Be safe!
When you see Russia get into existential war over Ukraine, or Israel bomb Syria or India battle with Pakistan or Bangladesh, it is not because of some whim. It has a historical and geographical context. That is critical to understand for analyzing geopolitics.
Dive into the shadowy world of the Deep State—its hidden structures, powerful networks, and the far-reaching impact on global events and control.
How every country and society handled economic decisions during COVID was different due to uncertainties. But racists, anarchists, and the unscrupulous not just spread evil but even judge others.
Photo by BP Miller on Unsplash
“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” ― Rosa Luxemburg
When one has to approach any exalted being within the Dharmic framework, we do that via Upasana. That is Upa (upon/similar) + Asana (position). In other words - being in the position of.
If you were to be in the process of Upasana of Krishna, for example, the aim was to raise your consciousness so we reach the position of Krishna’s consciousness. Unless I was Krishna himself, how could I ever understand the import of what he said or did?
But sometimes even that is not enough. We often wonder sometimes why we did something we did in the past. Why did we indeed?
Every moment and every situation brings its set of factors impacting our decisions. Along with them, there are certain uncertainties that we have to deal with. And, decision-making time is not unlimited. Within that time, we have to make the decision given the factors that we have at hand and the uncertainties facing us.
As complex as it seems, this is the simplest scenario.
For, we could be in a group with many people who are willing to place hurdles in our way at every step. No matter what we do.
Even when it goes against their professed stand in public or the good of many. The greed for profit they may make by destroying everything around them may propel them to do anything. Even the most egregious things.
When India was faced with the COVID pandemic, India was the only country in the world where sitting governments in Delhi and Mumbai orchestrated a mass exodus of workers who had come to those cities from other parts of the country. Specific instructions, threats, and misinformation was circulated. No arrangements were made for proper streamlining. All the benefits of a lockdown were thrown away.
India was the only country where administrators and other forces, supposedly responsible, worked to create a mass spread of the virus.
When faced with such extreme uncertainty that had no precedence in the world along with power-hungry unconscionable public forces, those decisions had many, many variables. The decisions made at those times with the factors and information at hand are very hard to judge now. Yet those who cannot even tell their arse from the elbow, love to write tomes on how it was done wrong.
To give someone the power to spread anarchy, chaos and misery is bad enough. That they then get to judge those who mitigate their evil is what denigrates us as a society!
Wanted to sincerely thank Kamlesh Ma’am for her contribution to Drishtikone. Truly humbled, ma’am. 🙏
Our last newsletter edition exposed how the Punjabi entertainment industry has been deeply compromised and may actually be siphoning off and even funding the Khalistani terror campaigns and the so-called “Farmers protests” in India.
Later that day, we had a discussion with Vijay Patel, who had shared the initial tweet and subsequently we shared our information with Legal Rights Observatory - LRO as well.
The Legal Rights Observatory (LRO) has now created a detailed report and shared it with the Indian Home Ministery and the Income Tax authorities on the global network of money-laundering, terror-financing, and funding of social unrest in India.
As we had discussed, the same companies that we shared are being used to rout money using the British corporate law loop-holes
These companies have been working with Khalsa Aid - the front of Babbar Khalsa terror organization, an organization that planned and executed the bombing of AI-184 Canadian flight that killed 329 people. (read Issue #209 - Engineered Lawlessness and Issue #208 - The Silence of Collusion? for more details)
Little known fact - homes of Diljit Dosanjh, Gippy Grewal and others, including offices of two Punjabi film producing companies - were raided in 2012.
One of those film producing firms was - Speed Records!
Harjit Singh Sohi, director, investigations, I-T, said separate teams of the department began raids at the houses of Dosanjh, Miss Pooja and Grewal in the morning. "Simultaneously, the premises of Batra Films and Speed Records were raided in Jalandhar,"(Source)
Interesting.
So what the heck did the IT department find at that time?
When the pandemic had started, different governments used different strategies. Some seemed to have succeeded only to find that it wasn’t so easy. Singapore went from heroes to poster boy of failure to contain the cases.
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Singapore was a global standard bearer for taming the deadly illness. Now it’s home to Southeast Asia’s largest recorded outbreak and is racing to regain control. (Source)
India, obviously, did not have that luxury of changing directions midstream. So it had to go with one strategy and then make incremental changes to it.
For that, it looked to the Barbell strategy that was shared in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile.
Taleb has defined this strategy as below.
Barbell Strategy: a method that consists of taking both a defensive attitude and an excessively aggressive one at the same time, by protecting assets from all sources of uncertainty while allocating a small portion for high-risk strategies. (Source)
So why did India do what it did?
Sanjeev Sanyal, the economic advisor to the Modi government, explains to a hapless and clueless New York Times reporter with a rather low IQ (her inputs into a shameful article on India from this interview confirms that prognosis) how the thinking of the government think-tank worked.
The questions that faced India were:
So, that is why they went for the Barbell strategy. As he suggests, it is a common technique for handling situations of uncertainty finance and derivatives. Sanyal explains that when you don’t know which way to go, you combine two opposite strategies and hedge against the worst outcome, and then do Bayesian updating of conditions as you go.
All of this obvious went well above the brains of the entire New York Times team, which - as is the common practice amongst entitled and privileged Western reporters - focused on the “poor and wretched poor conditions.” So, they focused on trains (Virus Trains) that took the migrants - who were forced out of the city by two unscrupulous (anti-Modi, may I add) Chief Ministers in Delhi and Mumbai - to their hometowns. I mean look at the egregiously nonsensical suggestion - that a lockdown forced the labor to go back home and Modi ran the “Virus Trains” to take them back home. Once the vile local governments started playing with the lives of their citizens and pushing people out, what should the central government have done? Not ensure their safe return? New York Times is bankrupt in terms of basic sense, that is known to any thinking person, but it is racist and propagandist in its whole reporting.
All this happened after this interview! (Source) Let that sink in.
Sanjeev Sanyal or the Indian government were not the only ones who were looking at Barbell strategy to chart their COVID strategy. Even Goldman Sachs was suggesting it in April.
In a recent report, Goldman recommended a barbell investment strategy for navigating the gradual economic restart. "The path to recovery is extremely uncertain and likely to be uneven. For equity investors, this means that many 'winners' and 'losers' will likely be determined by the ability of businesses to reopen and by the speed of consumer demand normalization instead of traditional cyclicality," wrote analysts. The brokerage also said its economists recently studied the reopening experiences of other countries and found that "initial reopening timelines often prove too optimistic, reopening plans are usually gradual, and recovery is easier and quicker in manufacturing and construction than in consumer services." (Source)
There is a certain tested way to handle a situation of high uncertainty that not many have a clue about in terms of future ramifications. Isn’t that the way out?
Well, economics is a discipline of people who keep theorizing things. For example, this fetish against lockdowns - with the suggestion that they screwed up with the economic activity, has been looked at by some economists.
The economists Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov, Ivan Werning, and Michael Whinston did their study and suggested that the right strategy lies between “complete lockdown and full laissez-faire.”
For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter lockdown policies on the oldest group. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the most vulnerable group both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups. (Source)
After the initial harsh lockdown, restrictions should be relaxed gradually.
A Bloomberg article explains it this way.
In their paper, they modified a basic epidemiological model of the disease’s spread to account for the different risks among different age groups. They then placed a value on the loss of life and assumed that lockdowns eliminated all economic activity for that share of the population thrown out of work. (Source)
The article is supposed to be a take-down of the suggestion that complete lockdowns are not the god sanctioned strategy and anything short of that is a contamination in the divine dispensation. So they come out with the suggestions saying that fear of disease was responsible more for economic slowdown than the lockdowns themselves. Really?!
You see, the journalists and reporters in the leftist / (so-called) liberal media of the West are a schizophrenic bunch of racists.
In the US, they are a rabid lockdown fan. But in India, it becomes a ‘no-lockdown’ champion. Only because Modi did what they preach in the first place and their masters don’t like him. Because Modi doesn’t let these billionaires plunder the Indian economy, the way they have gotten a free-hand to do with the American one. (The Truth about Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, and Modi Government)
New GST not for MSME: Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) do not require to pay a minimum of 1 percent of Goods and Services Tax (GST) liabilities in cash as businesses with an annual turnover of less than Rs 6 crore are exempted from the new rule, a finance ministry official said. The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) last week introduced a change in the GST rules that restricted the use of input tax credit (ITC) for discharging GST liability to 99 percent, the official said requesting anonymity. The move was aimed at curbing the misappropriation of the ITC through fake invoicing, he said. (Source)
No non-Sunnis or activists in the POJK administration: Pakistan has prohibited liberation activists, non-Sunnis from participating in political life in PoJK. The government recently introduced The Azad Jammu and Kashmir Elections Act 2020 amidst intense protests by rights groups and activists working for the liberation of PoJK from the Pakistani government. The Act imposes blanket restrictions on dissidents who wish to contest elections at multiple levels and allows only those who pledge to conform with dominant notions of the Pakistani government and pledge allegiance to Pakistan and support its occupation of PoJK. (Source)
Nashville bombing a Suicide attack?: Authorities have been searching a two-story suburban house in the Nashville area as they probe the huge blast that ripped through the downtown of the southern US city on Christmas morning. Nashville bomb probe leads US investigators to 500 leads, suicide bombing is being suspected. Police say the blast was an "intentional act" but the motive remained unclear and FBI behavioral analysts were involved in the investigation. (Source)
2000-year-old street food: Archaeologists in Pompeii, the city buried in a volcanic eruption in 79 AD, have made the extraordinary find of a frescoed hot food and drinks shop that served up the ancient equivalent of street food to Roman passersby. Known as a termopolium, Latin for hot drinks counter, the shop was discovered in the archaeological park's Regio V site. (Source)
Homeland Security warns the US against China: As Washington is absorbed with the fallout of a suspected Russian hacking operation against U.S. organizations, the Department of Homeland Security is warning American companies not to be complacent when it comes to cyberthreats from China. A 15-page “business advisory” released Tuesday by DHS cautions that Chinese intelligence services could collect and exploit data held by U.S. firms doing business in China, highlighting longstanding concerns from U.S. officials. (Source)
The Dharmic traditions are built on Yoga and Meditation. We have talked about Moksha and a state of bliss that is available to us all the time, not just in spurts, as it is to someone with an accidental brush with the enlightened state.
Until now, all that sounded like mumbo-jumbo to the un-initiated. Now, scientific research is showing that those who are deep meditators and on the spiritual path show characteristics in their body and brain that ordinary human beings cannot even come close to. And, that is occurring all the time. Not just sometimes in spurts like for the rest of us.
You see, all the Yogis explained the basis of Yoga in terms of prana, chakras, and nadis. None of them ever talked about in terms of bones, blood, or muscles. Not one doctor has ever seen a nadi or a chakra. But everyone agrees that Yoga works miraculously in ways that are even difficult to understand or explain.
The truth is that Yoga works at the energy level of the body and not physical. A realm that has eluded modern medicine. So, it is interesting that the difference the scientists are finding between normal human beings and the ones who have undergone the Yogic way of life and rigor is at the energy level.
A fascinating video!
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