Interesting Cartoon

This comic strip was published in today's Dallas Morning News. I found it very funny and insightful about human nature, so I decided to share it on my blog.

The official truth about Iraq War is finally out!

I had written about the high price the world has to pay for America's foolish war on Iraq. In that article I had speculated whether the price that America and the rest of the world had to pay for a war was worth it to satiate the ego of one man. And now five years after the war was declared and flattened an entire nation throwing the lives of millions into limbo a high-profile US Senate panel has released a report which states that President Bush and his associates built up a false case for war against Iraq.

According to the report President Bush, vice president Cheney and many others were involved in creating a systematic and exaggerated propaganda about Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda, the stock of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear bombs in Iraq etc. These blatant lies misled not only the US congress but also the people and made them suppor the war. I came to know about this Senate Panel report in today's front page story of Dallas Morning News.

The 170-page report accuses president Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The report has been endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

The report is not only about Iraq, it also talks about alleged US attempts to destabilise Iran by pitting one faction against other. Apparently there were meetings of high-profile Pentagon officials in Rome and Paris where they deliberated about ways and means to destabilize the government in Iran. Pentagon officials studied the internal rivalries inside Iran wanted to set up a "Iranian hit" team which would target U.S. troops in Afghanistan. This is the US government itself wanting to kill their soldiers, can they get any more cruel and selfish?

It makes me wonder whether the speculations that the terrorists in North-East India being funded by CIA are true? After reading this confirmed report I wouldn't be surprised if it were US which is funding the Kashmir terrorists too, by proxy through Pakistan. It seems as if US doesn't want any country to prosper or become powerful, economically, militarily or otherwise. If it seems imminent there will be efforts to create internal strife in the country or a war will be declared. Will this trail of blood for oil and power ever end? Can the US not think of a situation where the entire world prospers and there is no hunger, poverty or civic disturbance in the world?

Historically the British used the "Divide and Rule" policy to conquer the world and plunder its riches for their own benefit. America seems to be following their example in a bid to retain its sole economic, political and military super-power status in the world. I wonder if US thirst for oil, wealth and power will ever be satiated?

Doesn't President Bush deserve to be impeached?
In 1998 President Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for moral trupitude because of the Monica Lewensky and Paula Jones scandals. Compared to the widespread destruciton that President Bush's actions has wrought upon the world, Clinton's actions were relatively harmless and of a personal nature. But there is no word or even whisper about impeachment of President Bush.

• Is it because the majority of those killed, impoverished and suffering are not Americans?
• Is it because destruction has been heaped upon Iraq and not America?
• Or is it because America doesn't care for their own soldiers fighting and dieing in Iraq because of the blatant lies of their president?

Read More: Dallas Morning News

Free tool to increase traffic to your blog!

One of the biggest problems that we bloggers face is the dissemination of our message to readers. Posting new articles is one thing but ensuring that it reaches the audience is completely different. RSS feeds are good but not really good enough to ensure readership. The latest trend is to send e-mail newsletters about new blogposts to targeted readers. Here is a low down on one of the most user-friendly e-mail marketing tools: Zookoda.

Zookoda is a simple, user-friendly and effective email marketing application designed for bloggers. This online tool enbables bloggers to send out blog summaries and newsletters on a periodic basis as decided by you. The summary could be despatched daily, weekly or monthly to your visitors e-mail. And the best part of Zookoda is that this service is completely free of cost.

Now wouldn't you like your blog visitors and readers to know what you are writing about in on your blog? Do you think it would make it easy for your visitors to read your posts if they were to receive a summary or sneak preview by e-mail? Would it make you feel comfortable if this process were to be automated and you don't have to bother about sending emails? If your answer is yes to any of the above questions then you must check out Zookoda and its amazing services.

For starters Zookoda helps bloggers in several ways including:
- Subscription management
- Creation of customised newsletter subscription forms for your blog.
- Helps you design aesthetically appealing newletters
- Create and Schedule newsletter despatches from your blog in your required frequency
- Get reports on the progress of your newsletter - you will get a low down on subscriptions, bounces, unsubscribed etc
- The newsletters can be sent to mobile users too.

Do all these facilities sound interesting and do you want to get a head start in promoting your blog? It is fairly simple just visit Zookoda and follow the instructions online.

Movie Review: Army of the Dead

Genre: Action/ Thriller
Director: Joseph Conti
Cast: Ross Kelly, Stephanie Marchese, Miguel Martinez, Mike Hatfield and others

How many treasure hunting movies can you recall? Quite a few I am sure. There have been quite a few movies about Inca treasure and how adventurers have been trying to get at it from time to time. From Mackenna’s Gold in 1969 to the Army of the Dead in 2008 the story has remained the same, groups of treasure hunters seek out the gold, find it and then fight over it, and at the end of the movie only the hero and heroine remain alive. Well Army of the Dead is a movie with a similar plot but with a little difference, here the hero and heroine don’t get any treasure at the end.

Army of the Dead has all the elements of intrigue, death, gore, death and heroics, but somehow fails to make its mark. While the movie is entertaining, with fast paced screenplay and enough thrilling action to keep you at the edge of the seat, it has nothing new to offer. It is quite understandable that it didn’t do very well in the box office.

The movie starts off with a group of students set out on an off-road driving cum camping outing into the deserts of Mexico. The trip is organized as a surprise birthday party for one of the students by classmates and their professor. But the professor has an ulterior motive, he wants to go into the Mexican wilderness and search for the ancient treasure. If it was just a treasure to be hunted it would be easy, but this cache of gold is fiercely guarded by an army of skeletons, who kill anybody and everybody who try to steal their gold. Whenever someone gets close to the gold, the stars turn black and the moon turns red and the army of skeletons is unleashed upon the treasure hunters.

Does the screenplay sound familiar? Of course it does, we saw armies of skeletons in The Mummy, The Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness. Now coming back to the Army of the dead, the skeletons in this movie are invincible, bullets do little harm, but fire does burn them to embers and electricity shocks them out of their wits.

The story is the same old plot, so there is nothing new in that. The acting is quite mediocre. I particularly hated the part when Miguel Martinez (the professor) gets a shock attack and starts jabbering and mumbling in praise of the army of skeletons and that nobody can escape. The love triangle in the film is totally unnecessary and the mercenaries hired by professor to help in getting at the treasure are pathetic.

In the final judgment I would give this flic 2.5 out of 5. Hopefully next time around Joseph Conti will do a better job of choosing the star cast and also drafting the story.

Here is a trailer of the movie:

Social Spark - the latest blog marketing community

I started blogging couple of years ago and since then I have dabbled with several online marketing and other schemes trying to generate revenue out of my blogs and online enterpises. Success rate has not been very high but finally I found this novel concept of online social marketing community SocialSpark, which acts as a bridging paltform between advertisers and bloggers.

The concept behind SocialSpark is simple and straight forward. On one side there are advertisers who want their message passed on to potential customers and on the other side there are bloggers who write about subjects of their choice and communicate with readers. The advertisers want to reach the readers and offer sponsored posts which bloggers take up and communicate the formers message to the reader. This way the blogger receives compensation for his efforts and the advertiser successfully gets his/ her message across to the right audience.

The first wave in social marketing was that of advertising in print, television and online. Then came the wave of public relations in which advertisers got news coverage in media. But the latest wave is in in the blogosphere where bloggers act as opinion leaders and convey advertisers messages to people. I think this is here to stay and SocialSpark will be remembered as the pioneer company in this sphere.

I signed up for SocialSpark and am now making some money online doing something I like the most, blogging. I am quite sure soon I will be able to supplement my income thanks to SocialSpark. Believe me this has been one of the simplest sign up processes and customer love is always to help in all possible ways. Check out social spark and you will not be disappointed.

The Global Food Crisis and President Bush

With the rise in gas prices food prices has been hitting the roof globally. There have been food riots and rebellions in several third world nations in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Like a phoenix rising out of nothing the “knowledgeable” American president made a statement that Indian middle class is responsible for the global food crisis. To quote his exact words from a Washington Post article: India, where the “middle class is larger than our entire population." But "when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food," he said. "And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”

Like most Indians living worldwide my first reaction was that of outrage and anger at the irresponsible statements of the American president. I then decided to go to the root of the problem and find out for real if India’s prosperity had anything to do with the global food crisis and what is America’s role in this problem. My findings were astounding and throw a light on who is actually responsible for the global food crisis.

In this essay I would like to start off by comparing the resources of two nations India and US. I have chosen these two nations because the president of the latter accused the citizens of the former of eating too much and causing a global food crisis. Let us get to the basics first:

Total Population:
US: 301 million
India: 1,129 million (1.2 billion)

Land available for agriculture
US: 938.28 million acres (Source: Economic Research Service, USA)
India: 445.95 million acres (54.9 percent of total land area of 3,287,263 sq. km or 812.30 million acres) (Source: Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations)

Total food wastage:
US: Almost 100 billion pounds of food is wasted in America each year. The annual value of this lost food is estimated at around $31 billion. (49 million people could have been fed by those lost resources) - Sound Vision
In the US 40-50% of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten - Global Issues
27 percent of the food available for consumption (about a pound of food every day for every American) ends up in garbage. - Dallas Morning News
India: Wastage of harvested food items is estimated to be valued around Rs.58,000 crore (US$ 13.80 billion) per annum. - One India

Obesity trends:
US: Nearly 237 million Americans are currently overweight. The U.S. is the 9th fattest nation in the world.
India: India ranks 176 among the world’s fattest nations and has 16% obese population (180.64 million)
Source: Forbes

Keeping the above statistics in mind I would like to elaborate on how much food gets wasted and where all they are being scrapped in the US. I read this article titled “One country's table scraps is another country's meal” by New York Times writer Andrew Martin in Dallas Morning News recently and was spurred to write this blog post.

• Across several parts of the US there is already a serious hatred about India and Indians which has stemmed from outsourcing. People hate India because of several reasons:
  Several people in the US lost jobs to better qualified and hardworking and cheaper Indian employees.
• Next when TATA Motors launched its fuel efficient Nano aka the people’s car, American’s driving hyper-polluting, fuel guzzling cars said millions of Indians will buy Tata Nanos and there will be a global fuel crisis.
• Now with Bush saying that rising prosperity of Indian middle classes is one of the causes of the global food crisis, this fire of hatred is getting fanned. And every time an American shops for grocery, it would not be uncommon for him/ her to be cursing Indians for rising prices.

Well these facts are not real and I have already proved in my blog post about “Who Gets the Fuel?” how Nano is not the threat to world’s petroleum reserves but the fuel-guzzling big V-8’s and V-6 cars are!

According to the article by Andrew Martin, a US government study estimated that “an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study – and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American”.

The main wastage happens at several places and due to several reasons. At grocery stores produce is discarded into trash because of minor spoilage or even cosmetic blemishes. According to a US Department of Agriculture estimate two years ago, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. This food that was wasted includes fresh vegetables and fruits, milk, grains, etc. But the study didn’t include ready-to-eat foods that are stacked high in super market shelves.

Several studies have proved time and again that Americans are the world’s largest trash generators. A study by the US Environmental Protection Agency recently declared that highest food wasters in the world are also Americans, who generate about 30 million tons of food waste year after year.

I am not saying that Indians don’t waste any food, but it is relatively lower and considering a population of 1.2 billion the amount of food wasted is normal.

According to a US Department of Agriculture estimate, if only 5 percent of the wasted food were to be recovered/ prevented, it could feed 4 million people a day and if this recovery were to be increased to 25 percent, it would feed 20 million people.

Food recovery and Why it is not happening now?
During Clinton’s administration, a national effort was launched to prevent/ curb food waste. One of the initiatives was to recover leftover crops from fields. But the effort was discontinued by the Bush administration.

And President Bush says that Indians are responsible for the global food crisis. Can he get any more stupid?

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the crystal skull

Genre: Action/ Adventure
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf, Ray Winstone, John Hurt etc

The past year and half has seen sequal after sequal of hit movies coming to theatres and most of them have been huge disappointments. There was Die Hard 4, Rocky V, Rambo IV and now it is the Indiana Jones.

Harrison Ford is back playing Indiana Jones after 19 years and I hope this is the last movie of this series by him. This latest edition of Indiana Jones was a sure shot disappointment for me. Hollywood directors seem to be getting old and unable to churn out new ideas and storylines. They are heavily depending on old hit movies and making sequals of them. Come on, the heroes of 80s are old and can no longer conjure up the same aura and adoration they did two decades ago.

Personally speaking I am a great fan of Harrison Ford, but I hate to see him old and infirm trying to act like a 18-year old kid. It can't get any absurd. Harrison Ford should not have jumped into the bandwagon to make sequals like Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. Indiana Jones definitely looks old and jaded and he has a son too in this movie and towards the end his family gets complete as he makes up with his wife. The so-called action sequences in this movie is quite staid and seems lazily designed to ensure that our hero in not in any great peril. Before the scene is out audience will be able to guess his escape step, there is not enough innovation gone into the screenplay and direction.

The wonder of all wonders, Indy survives attacks from all weapons including an atomic bomb. He walks out even as the atomic bomb explodes in the background, come on get real, Indy's no Superman and you don't have to make him out to be one. I don't know what it is about old heroes, they like to appear indestructible on the screen at least. I would say the movie is completely "laid-back" and is too slow for audiences, even if they are absolute Indy fans.

And I don't understand Hollywood directors fixation with Russians. The communist regime in former Soviet Union collapsed more than a decade ago and here in this movie shot in 2008, the director wants to show KGB spies crawling and attacking American secret army bases. Come on get real, find some real enemies. How much do you want to batter the Russians? They could have at least shown Al Qaeda or Taliban as the crooks or even some mafia dons of the US itself. But no, the crooks have to be Russians and that is what gives these guys some vicarious pleasure.

My suggestion for all movie goers considering this movie is "Don't go unless you are a blind fan of Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones". You can confirm by watching the video trailer of the movie.

Movie Review: Never Die Alone

Never Die Alone
Genre: Action/ Crime/ Drama
Director: Ernest R. Dickerson
Cast: DMX, Michael Ealy, Drew Sidora, Antwon Tanner, Robby Robinson etc

What happens when a drug dealer, outlaw and killer decides to return to his original place and settle scores with his old enemy drug lords? You'd expect loads of gun battles, street fights and action. Well in this movie there is a bit of action and fights but it has lot of drama and spiritual thought. This is one of the first movies I have seen in which there is only one White actor, everyone else is colored (African-American) and what is more surprising is that the entire story talks about Karma and redemption of the Hindu philosophy.

The story starts off with King David (played by DMX) returning to New York from Los Angeles to set right his life and try to correct all his wrongs. He wants to settle all his old scores, pay off debts and try and find his long lost children. Mike (Michael Ealy) is sent by Moon to collect payment from David. After collecting the money, Mike gets into a tussle and stabs David, who in turn sticks an ice pick into Blue's eyes. They kick and hurt David badly and abandon him in a gutter. A failing journalist Paul (David Arquette), who was passing by at that moment, drives David, a total stranger, to the hospital, where he succumbs to his injuries. But before breathing his last, David leaves everything he owns to Paul. The possessions include jewellery, money, car and a set of audio tapes, which contain the audio journal of David's life recorded on the drive from Los Angeles to New York.

Meanwhile Blue and Mike inform Moon about the tussle with David and that he is in the hospital. An angry Moon tells them to come to a parking garage where he sends gunmen to kill them all. In the parking garage gun battle Mike's sister and Moon get killed and Mike goes out baying for revenge. The rest of the movie goes back and forth in time. Partly showing David's past life and then jumping to the present where Mike and Moon are hunting each other. And of course Moon's men are hunting Paul to destroy all evidence that would possible link David's death to Moon.

As Paul listens to the David's audio journals, the life of a drug peddler is unfolded on the screen. After a particularly bad experience in the east, David travels west in search of better fortunes. There he finds a Vietnamese gang who can get him high-quality cocaine. With his smooth charm he finds a new girlfriend Janet (Jennifer Sky), a television star, who squanders her show biz career thanks to drugs and soon becomes sick. David promptly ditches her and with no job or money, Janet becomes David's heroin peddler to pay bills.

David meets a highly talented college student and stunning beauty Juanita (Reagan Gomez-Preston) and falls in love with her. Their relationship goes well, but Juanita tries his drugs. She hurts David's ego by saying that the $250,000 he has stashed away isn't enough to retire on. Angry, David secretly switches her heroin with cocaine, getting her addicted. Meanwhile Janet calls David and demands that he pay for her entrance to rehab or else she'll go to the police. The mention of cops angers David and he decides to do the same thing he did to Edna in New York: Mix drugs with car battery acid, resulting in a fatal seizure for her. Through a flashback, it is revealed that David is actually the father of Mike, Edna's child. Mike is a witness to Edna's killing by David.

Listening to the tapes Paul wonders if the money David talks about in his tapes is indeed hidden in the car. When he checks, he find that it is. But by now Moon's henchman are crawling like insects all over New York searching for him. After some more gun battles and chases in the dark, Mike hunts down Moon and kills him.

Now Paul is listening to the last tape when David talks about leaving Juanita, but she soon comes back, addicted to cocaine and begging for help. He offers to give her cocaine only if she has anal sex. This causes a proud Junaita severe emotional distress and depression and she takes to drugs even more. Juanita threatens to go to cops, if he doesn’t give her drugs.

As one watches the movie, it is hard to understand the movie, it moves too fast and confusingly back and forth in time. The only part of the movie I really liked is the underlying message it tries to communicate to the audience. There is no life in drugs either peddling or consumption. Janet's television career is ruined thanks to drugs, Junaita succombs to drugs even before she could step out of college. Innocent and unconnected, Mike's sister gets killed in a drug battle. And even though David King comes back to settle all scores and retire into a quiet countryside, his past catches up with him and takes his life. Drugs and guns are not the answer to life's problems. Hardwork and integrity are!

Watch the trailer here: