Category Archives: Politically Incorrect

Are you familiar with the Portuguese dish carne de vinha dalhos? I thought not. It consists of pork in wine vinegar and garlic. The Portuguese have made it for centuries. It became the mainstay of sailors meals because they would preserve pork in barrels when they set out on their voyages. When they were hungry, they would reconstitute garlic by marinating it in red wine or vinegar and cook it with the pork.

Doesnt sound that exciting, does it?

Now, consider what happened to the same dish when the Portuguese arrived in Goa. They did not have access to red wine or wine vinegar. So they used palm vinegar. But because their dish seemed inferior to the local cuisine, they began tarting it up with spices and with ground, dried red chillis.

The dish finally came to life. And it may be the most famous Goan dish in the world today. Of course, we dont use the Portuguese name.

We call it vindaloo.

The story of vindaloo seems to capture the central paradox of the journey of the chilli. The Portuguese did not discover chillis in Goathey were unknown in Western India then. It was the Portuguese who introduced the chilli to Goa, using plants that had recently been discovered in the Americas.

Though the Portuguese had the original dish, the garlic, the vinegar and the chilli, nothing much happened till they reached Goa. It was only then that someone had the bright idea of adding chillis to flavour their traditional dish.

What is it about the chilli and some societies? Food historians will tell you that the chilli spread all over the world because of the influence of the Portuguese.

It is not always a pretty story. In the early years of the 16th century, the Portuguese took the chilli to Africa. At that stage, Africans (like Indians) enjoyed pungent flavours, such as the melegueta pepper, which they used to spice up their food. So, they loved the chilli and even today, the peri peri sauce that the Portuguese introduced to their colonies is popular in Africa.

If the story ended there, it would be fine. But then, it got nasty. Once the Portuguese realised that chillis were an in-demand commodity in Africa, they began using them as currency. More specifically, Portuguese slave traders began paying for their human cargo partly with chillis rather than gold. Because the slave trade operated in large sections of Africa, (not just the parts that became Portuguese colonies), the chilli spread far and wide.

Nobody seriously disputes that white people (Europeans) brought the chilli (which had been secured after a partial genocide of the native South American people) to Africa and Asia. But heres the thing: why did it never become an integral part of European cuisine in that case? Most of the foods that emerged from the New World (chocolate, potatoes, tomatoes etc.) found their way into European cuisine.

But not the chilli.

It remained a rarely used flavouring, useful for buying slaves or planting in the colonies. Why were white people willing to use all the new flavours they found in the Americasexcept the chilli?

I have been trying to find an answer to that question. But nothing I have read seems convincing. Even in the US, though the chilli did eventually work its way north from Mexico and it turns up in Tex-Mex cuisine, it is hardly a staple in that country.

The Spanish, the Italians and the Portuguese, who had first claims on the chilli, rarely added it to their cuisine. They do use some chilli in southern Italy (in such areas as Calabria) and some Italian pastas do use a little chilli (aglio olio pepperencino or arrabiata) but these are relatively recent inventions, dating back mostly to the 19th or 20th centuries, at least three centuries after the chilli first arrived on their shores. Even Spanish and Portuguese chorizo (which may now use chilli) is mostly mild and the chilli component has been upped only over the last few decades.

The Hungarians use paprika, but they got it many centuries after the chilli came to Europe. And they got it from India via Turkish merchants. And no Asian would regard Hungarian goulash as being particularly spicy or hot.

On the other hand, the chilli spread all over Asia. Nobody is quite sure how it happened. There was not enough contact between the Portuguese and the Thais to explain how the chilli became a staple of Thai cuisine. The case of China is more complicated. The chilli is not popular in the coastal regions where, you could argue, Portuguese ships would arrive with cargoes of chilli. Instead, it is popular in landlocked Hunan and Sichuan where there was little or no contact with the Portuguese. Food historians tie themselves in knots trying to explain how the chilli got to Hunan and Sichuan where it is a defining characteristic of the cuisine.

More curious is the case of Japan. We know that Portuguese ships sailed regularly from Goa to Japan. And we know that the Portuguese taught them how to make tempura. (More likely Goan cooks on the ships taught them how to make bhajiyas.) But there is almost no chilli in Japanese cuisine.

There are many alternative explanations. One, favoured by Korean scientists, is that some varieties of the chilli grew wild in East Asia anyway. Yes, the Portuguese did bring American chilli species to Asia but by then, the Koreans had some experience of the flavour from their own chillis. There is apparently DNA evidence to support this claim. If it is true that we had chillies in East Asia then it would explain not just Thailand but also our own North East where nobody had heard of Portugal when they started adding chillis to their dishes.

Another view is that chillis only appeal to people who live in warm climates. Thats why Europeans did not take to them. This sounds right but the theory collapses when you think about it. When winter comes to Korea, they dont give up on chillis. What about Bhutan where some statistics suggest that the average family consumes one kilo of chilli every week? Bhutan is not a hot country but it must have among the highest per capita consumption of chilli in the world.

Frankly, I dont have an answer to the question. It is true that white people are beginning to enjoy the chilli but for the most part, it is a freak show. Chilli-heads compete to see who can eat the hottest chilli. There is no real introduction of chilli into the local cuisines. When chillis are consumed, it is usually in the form of sauces. And many of those sauces come from non-white countries: the Caribbean, Africa, South America or even Thailand whose Sriracha has been bastardised in America.

So, as politically incorrect as this may sound, there is no getting around the fact that chillis are not really meant for white people. Yes, white people procured them by slaughtering people of colour in South and Central America.

And yes, they brought them to Africa and Asia. But they were no more than couriers.

You need a bit of colour to know what to do with the chilli. It sounds a little racist, I know. But its true.

The views expressed by the columnist are personal

From HT Brunch, October 1, 2022

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Why hide the papers? Why keep the conspiracy theories related to Netaji Subhas Boses death alive? And why deny India the truth about the death of one of its great freedom fighters?...view detail

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Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: Colour and the chilli - Hindustan Times

Quite a few lovers of English literature raised a glassspecifically a Macallan single malt Scotch with a dash of waterthis past April. The occasion? The centennial of the birth of the greatest comic writer of his generation, and kingfish of the literary quaffers as well: Kingsley Amis.

Make that two or three glasseser, no, Lets do this right, I can hear him bellowing. Prepare a decent-sized flask. Knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1990 for his services to Literature and known affectionately to his friends as Kingers, Amis was a man of letters who excelled above all as a novelist and cultural critic. Along with his lifelong friend, the poet Philip Larkin, he has a strong claim to being the best-known British writer of the second half of the twentieth century.

Bursting on the literary scene as the author of Lucky Jim (1954), a satirical gem and the first British campus novel, Amis (1922-1995) followed that tour de force with another twenty novels, pulling off the feat of being both best-selling and critically acclaimed throughout the next forty years. Numerous contemporaries achieved commercial success; many others impressed the reviewers or dazzled the literary academics. Yet Amis was virtually alone as a mainstream novelist who, consistently, both captivated the broad reading public and attracted serious, if at times severe, attention from the literary-intellectual elite and literary scholars. The masterpiece of his mature years is surely The Old Devils, published in 1986, which received the august Booker Prize, a combined British version of the Pulitzer and National Book Award, beating out Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale and other strong contenders.

Like so many others, I first met Amis in the pages of his hilarious debut novel when I read Lucky Jim in the mid-1970s before my first trip to England. It was a quarter-century after the publication of the novel and the British university world that it portrayed. Yet, as I soon discovered first-hand, initially during my encounters at several English universities and later as a Ph.D. student in the U.S., Lucky Jim had not much datedand had indeed remained superior in every way to the flood of academic novels that had followed in its wake on both sides of the Atlantic.

It was an unsettling experience to read Lucky Jim just as I was embarking on my Ph.D. in literary history. Its hero Jim Dixon is a history lecturer at a provincial British universitylike Amis at University College, Swansea in the 1950swhose policy in his teaching and research is to read as little as possible of any given book. His scholarly topic is The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485: a perfect title, Dixon muses, which crystallized the articles niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. As his research proceeds, Dixon reflects that he had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. Explaining his topic choice to his colleague Beesley, Dixon points out: Havent you noticed how we all specialize in what we hate most?

Bathed in scintillating wit, laced with delicious satirical invective, and sidesplittingly funny on every page, Lucky Jim yielded a laugh-out-loud quotient that exceeded any ultramarathon binge-watch of sitcoms. In the genteel climate of early post-Second World War British and American academic life, its mockery of higher education had the force of a convulsive shockand a revelation. Although the novel certainly triggered personal disquiet that suggested my idealistic imaginings about the exalted vocation of professor needed quick revision, Lucky Jim turned me into a permanent Amis fan.

My admiration for Amis both as an entertaining satirist and formidable polemicist grew with the years. I paid him a visit in 1985. Growing restless as he basked in public praiseAmis hated nothing so much as boredom, even endlessly sunny California dayshe had decided to burnish his politically incorrect credentials. His target was feminism. He was returning for a second round. Six years earlier, his novel Jakes Thing (1978) had raised the eyebrows and the ires of some womens libbers as they were known in the 1970s, chiefly in the U.S. (The novel was short-listed for the Booker in the U.K.) Jakes Thing tells the woebegone saga of Jacques Jake Richardson, a 59-year-old Oxford University lecturer fretting over the loss of his libido and frequent impotence. That is to say: Jakes thing doesnt work, and much of the blame went to the women in Jakes life.

The subject of the women, and incriminations about sexism widely voiced a few years earlier had resurfaced by the time of my visit to the Kingers. On a chilly mid-March afternoon in London, I found myself sitting in Amiss bachelor digs in a small house in Kentish Town. In a decidedly unusual mnage, the floor upstairs was occupied by none other than his first ex-wife, who served as his housekeeper/cook/chauffeur, assisted by her third husband, in return for free rent and household expenses. (Amiss divorce a couple of years earlier from his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, had been public and painful.)

The hubbub in literary London about Jakes Thing and the women had died down, and probably would have been utterly forgotten, if it had not been for the appearance of its thematic sequel, Stanley and the Women (1984), published just a few months earlier both to acclamations and animadversions, with the latter predominating. It was back to the barricades, Amis announced with glee, reveling in the sniping from the feminist snipers. The reservations about Jakes Thing now seemed in hindsight little more than a tempest in a teapot compared to the firestorm of controversy attending Stanley and the Women. The twice-divorced Stanley Duke is a quite explicit British version of Archie Bunkernot an Oxford don like Jake but rather a car magazine staffer who handles the advertising accounts. Even more so than Jake, he is a cantankerous, ill-tempered, behind-the-times man of old-fashioned opinions who finds himself "out of touch, high and dry, a survivor from a bygone era."

What are those opinions? Consider a representative passage in which Amis satirizes feminism, psychiatryand even the Soviets, as the twice-divorced Stanley quotes approvingly a friend who holds forth that women are like the Russians:

If you did exactly what they wanted all the time you were being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace, and if you ever stood up to them you were resorting to cold-war tactics and pursuing imperialistic designs and interfering in their internal affairs.

With specific reference to his ex-wife, Stanley explains that her Orwellian version of history is to make up the past as she goes along. You know, like communists.

[W]hatever she said has got nothing to do with what's happened. If you remind her that she said something, and it doesn't suit her down to the ground at that moment to have said, she says she didn't say it, even if you're fool enough to produce a boatload of people who heard her say it.

Asked whether such pronouncements reflected Amiss own opinions, he told one interviewer: People are so over sensitive. If they had a sense of humor it would help. He might have added that three of the women in the novel are presented quite favorably, as a counterbalance to the trio of difficult women.

This line of thinking considerably enriches the novels title. On this view, Stanley and the Women refers not just to his tribulations with his two wives and female sex therapist, but also to cordial and warm relations with his housekeeper, journalist colleague, and occasional lover, Lindsey. This more inclusive interpretation of the title helps us to appreciate that his Swiftian satire is not directed against women per se, but rather against some features of second-wave feminism that Amis regarded as immature, narcissistic, and above all humorless. A line from one of the other male characters is firmly autobiographical, in fact, pure Kingers: The rewards for being sane are not many, but knowing what's funny is one of them.

He would have fully endorsed the view of Clive James, a younger friend in the circle of his son Martin, who affirms it in an essay on Kingsley in The Rub of Time:

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. The sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humor are without judgement and should be trusted with nothing.

However fallacious (or, at minimum, dated) Stanley Dukes generalizations about women, it is worth noting here that the other half of his analogyabout the Russiansseems unfortunately true enough if applied to the current batch of Kremlin diplomats conducting peace talks with Ukraine and guided by Vladimir Putins speeches on Russian history. Indeed, though Amiss novels about Russia were often dismissed on the left as the bluster and blather of a Cold Warrior, they seem stunningly relevantquite unfortunatelyin todays geopolitical climate.

I should add that diatribes about the Russians, by which Amis meant Party apparatchiks and the Soviet nomenklaturanot the Russian peopleturn up frequently in his oeuvre. Of course, novels such as Russia Hide-and-Seek (1980) were widely condemned in bien pensant circles when he wrote them. Amis had good grounds for some aspects of his critique, starting with the liquidation of Soviet art. Consider, for instance, this passage from The Russian Girl (1992), spoken by a prominent Russian dissident on how Soviet Russia coopted writers and destroyed literature:

You don't crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes. [This situation has] applied in Russia for a long time, not just since 1931or 1917.

Back to Stanley and the Women. A few dissenting voices notwithstanding, the novels ambivalent reception in London was practically a Kingers coronation in comparison to its boycott in New York publishing circles. It made the rounds for months with repeated, not-so-polite turndowns for Britains most famous novelist, including from houses such as Harcourt Brace and Viking, both of which had published him for three decades. Before my visit, leading periodicals such as TLS and the Spectator reported that feminist editors had pressured those publishers and others to rescind offers to publish Amis. American publications ranging from the New York Times Book Review to the Saturday Review ran stories throughout the spring and summer of 1985 about whether Amis was the victim of censorship. Rumors swirled in the conservative press about the forbidding specter of a new feminist-left version McCarthyism. The novel was finally published by Summit Books a year later.

For a brief moment, Amis was the center of a feud among New York and London literati about Cancel Culture, circa 1985: "the biggest debate on what should be or should not be made available to the intelligent reader, as another Amis biographer Richard Bradford observed, since the unbanning of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1959/60. (A telling, curious landmark to cite, for Bradford omits mention that Amis had loudly refused to take part in the 1950s campaign to lift the Lady Chatterley ban in Britain, arguing that Lawrence was nothing more than a sexual ideologue indulging in sexual explicitness in order to provoke a sensation.)

Amis would continue to have immense success with the British publicno fewer than six of his novels were adapted for British film and television during 1986-92and with the critics. At the time of his death in October 1995, he had more than forty titles in print. He still has more than a dozen today, and Penguin Modern Classics marked the Amis centennial by adding two more, a pair of collections, covering his poetry and his nonfiction. Among Amiss current top sellers are a high-spirited trio devoted to his favorite non-literary activity: drinking.

Reissued in a posthumous omnibus edition, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis includes an engaging introduction by another world-class imbiber, Christopher Hitchens, who enjoyed many a round with the Kingers. A late-life honor that Kingsley valued far more than the Bookerso went the rumorwas his featured appearance in several print ads for the divine Macallan malt whiskey, with partial remuneration, gratefully acknowledged, in his favored currency to ensure maximum liquidity.

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At Amiss memorial service, held in October 1996, exactly a year after his death, his son Martinperhaps Britains best-known novelist of the succeeding generationspoke wistfully about his fathers afterlife. Martin voiced confidence that the world will now begin to see him differently, and not just as the old devil. We will begin to see the whole man. The service closed with an excerpt from a posthumously broadcast radio interview in which the host asks Kingsley if he would most like to be remembered as Kingsley Amis the critic, the poet, the serious writer, or rather as Kingsley Amis the man who wrote books that made people laugh?

Oh, he answered, as somebody who made people laugh.

You shall be, Kingers, you shall.

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The Old Devil and the Whole Man: Kingsley Amis at 100 - The American Conservative

"You are too sensitive," Shlomit Weiss was told by the manager of the department at Intel at which she worked in the 1990s following her first year of management. "Your team's performance is good, but you won't be able to advance to senior management positions," her manager concluded before leaving the room as the young Weiss remained, wiping away her tears.

Thirty years later, its seems only Weiss remembers the name of the manager who disappeared into the abyss. She, on the other hand, was appointed recently as senior vice president and co-general manager (GM) of the Design Engineering Group (DEG) at Intel, making her the most senior Israeli in the organization. She will report directly to the company's CEO Pat Gelsinger, and from now on there will be no less than 20,000 employees under her sensitive management style.

This appointment puts Weiss, who has just turned 60, among a limited list of people with a direct line to the CEO of Intel. This list numbers the 20 most senior executives in the global computing giant and includes two Israelis - Weiss and Amnon Shashua, the founder and CEO of Mobileye, who functions as a kind of an independent unit within the company and will split from the parent company in the coming months if the plan to issue Mobileye on Wall Street succeeds.

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Shlomit Weiss.

(Photo: Gil Nehoshtan)

Weiss is now the most senior Israeli at Intel but is based locally only from a geographic standpoint. In practice, she manages a global operation at Intel. With her appointment to one of the top positions, she now has the responsibility for planning and designing all of the company's production processes, the same weak point that caused Intel - which was once the market leader and set the tone when it comes to chip miniaturization - to lose ground when competitors, from the East and the West, overtook it in the race for fewer nanometers.

This story is also that of the war over engineers that has been going on in recent years between hardware manufacturers who discovered Israeli talent. Intel, the largest private employer in Israel, faced Nvidia, which bought Mellanox for $7 billion in 2019 and has since become a monster in the field of chips for gaming. Intel is also storming the gaming world with two consecutive flagship processors that were developed in Haifa, an unprecedented occurrence at the company that usually prefers to spread development over several different centers.

Weiss became the latest appointment in the significant shake-up initiated by Gelsinger, who was appointed CEO of Intel in early 2021, and has since replaced many senior executives. Gelsinger, by the way, apparently does not have a problem with sensitive female management. Other than Weiss, he has appointed four more women to senior positions, not in human resources or legal consulting, which are usually reserved for women, but rather in "hardcore" departments - head of the customer computing division, VP of technology, and VP of data centers and artificial intelligence.

"During that feedback conversation back in the 1990s, I started to cry because I'm really sensitive. It happened 30 years ago, but I remember it as if it happened yesterday. In the end, I wrote a book about it, which is based on my experiences as a manager and describes real events that happened at Intel during my time," Weiss told Calcalist a few weeks after the announcement of her appointment.

"I wrote a book about it because I really think that I have a unique management style. There are managers who believe in being tough, that the more you demand, the more you will get. There are other managers who think that the most important thing is to be liked and if something cannot be done then it's ok, they will accept anything. I believe that you need to combine both styles. I really care about people, I like to see pictures of children and grandchildren, I make sure employees develop professionally and that they feel part of the action, but I also have high demands. Over the years I have found the balance between those demands, because engineers like challenges, but it is also important to me to provide a personal touch. However, let's not label it female management - I call it 'leadership with a soul', it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a woman," she clarifies.

Weiss emphasizes that she is against affirmative action for women, but is still in favor of giving them a boost and assisting them in marketing themselves at higher levels because women somehow still have a harder time with those issues. Even at Intel, despite the fact that Gelsinger is pushing women into senior positions, the balance is still completely in favor of men.

You have been at Intel since 1989. Are there more women in the company today?

"It is enough to see the team close to Pat to understand how much progress Intel is making when it comes to women. There are more women within the organization than there were in the nineties, but the number is far from 50%. We need to work on this, we need someone to help women speak up about the good work they do."

One more thing that should be made clear at the beginning of the interview with Weiss is that she is not married and has no children, but this is not intentional. She wants to clarify: "It's not really a decision that I made or that I said, 'I can't have a family because I want to build a career,' it just happened. I actually really like to disconnect from work and when I take time off I have no issue with others replacing me.

Sorry for the completely politically incorrect question: if there are no family obligations weighing you down, why did you insist on being the first in your current position not to do it from the U.S., but from Israel? After all, most of your employees are not here at all, and neither is management.

"First of all, I have a family that I am very connected to, my mother and sister, and it is also important for me to live in Israel. The division's employees are scattered around the world. Most of them are in the U.S., there are large groups in India and Malaysia and a number of smaller groups in Europe, so there is no value or meaning to my location. It is true that I am the only one in top management that is not in the U.S. This is the first time that such a central position is located in Israel, but when it was offered to me I said that I wanted to stay in Israel.

It just means there will be a lot of evening work hours and a lot of plane travel. Pat holds a regular weekly meeting where everyone connects remotely and there is also a monthly meeting where everyone arrives physically and Amnon and I connect online. A few days ago, I participated in my first such meeting that lasted all night (Israel time) because they have it from 8am to 5pm (PT). I presented at two in the morning," Weiss laughs. By the way, for some reason, Shashua did not participate in all of the management's recent forums, even though one of the main issues on Intel's agenda is Mobileye's IPO on Wall Street. The IPO was supposed to take place by the end of 2022 at a value of $50 billion, but in view of the situation in the markets, it will shrink towards $30 billion and may be further postponed. "I don't know why Amnon was not in attendance," says Weiss, "maybe he is on vacation.

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Pat Gelsinger.

(Photo: Alex Kolomoyski)

Intel currently finds itself in its most complex situation since its founding as severe management mistakes made in the last decade damaged its leading position in the processor market and returned its market value back 20 years to only $110 billion. Not only Nvidia, but even AMD, which has been chasing it all these years, has already overtaken it in market value. Although Gelsinger announced an ambitious strategic plan of focusing on core areas as opposed to diversification and chasing (often belatedly) after trends that has characterized Intel over recent years, in the second quarter the company shocked investors when it reported its first loss in thirty years. Intel not only posted a loss compared to a profit of $5 billion in the corresponding period and not only missed forecasts for the second quarter, but also dramatically reduced forecasts for the second half of 2022. Intel reported revenues of $15.3 billion in the second quarter, which were $2.7 billion lower then forecasts and reflect a decrease of 17% compared to the corresponding period last year. Currently, it expects revenues of $15-16 billion for the third quarter, well below the previous forecast of $18.7 billion. In an annual summary, Intel will reach revenues of only $65-68 billion, compared to an expected $76 billion. There was no good news in the field of profitability either. Intel officially announced a slowdown in hiring new employees and a $4 billion cut in capital expenditures from $27 billion to $23 billion. Even after this cut, it will register a negative flow of $1-2 billion dollars in 2022.

Last quarters reports were a severe disappointment and there is a feeling, at least in the capital market where the stock has fallen by 45% since the beginning of the year, that Gelsinger's plan is not really working.

"The stock price is short term. People who buy the stock don't look at the fact that in four years Intel will have four new factories that will do amazing things. The new strategy is long term, it's not something that can happen immediately. Leading in production processes is an event that takes time, but you can already see the beginnings of change in small things like the fact that last year the Alder Lake processor was released and a year later the Raptor Lake was released, both of which are the most advanced processors intended for gaming computers. We received feedback from Intel's customers that they really want us to succeed and Intel is learning from the mistakes we made in the past."

Both you and Gelsinger have been at Intel since the nineties and have witnessed the deterioration. What were the really big mistakes of the last few years?

"I think the significant problems began mainly over the last five years. These were organizational issues where no one addressed technological problems in time. There was a culture of looking for guilty parties and people were simply afraid to warn about issues. Today, Pat is leading a real cultural change where everything is on the table and the problems are discussed. They don't look for someone to blame. Cultural change doesn't happen in one year, but I see that things are starting to seep in and already Intel is back to working in the new-old way. It's a change that allows for more innovation and a push for challenges."

Is this what ultimately led to the lag that resulted in competitors from the East managing to produce 7 nanometer chips ahead of you?

"The very fact that Intel only had internal production meant that there was no ability to solve the technological problems, it's a cycle that fed itself for too long. Today, part of Intel's great transformation is also in the decision to move to external production and not just do everything in-house."

Intel's main challenge is in bridging the gap that opened up in the transition from 14 nm 10 nm chips. While Intel fought to reach a normal production process of 10 nm chips, competitors were already deep in developing 7 nm and even 4 nm. The gap is so significant that Intel tried to mask it through simple semantics by calling the 10 nm chips "Intel 7" and the 7 nm chips "Intel 4". Intel dominated this field undisputedly until 2016, when the production processes began to creak.

The problems and mistakes built up at Intel in recent years under the two CEOs who changed rapidly - Brian Krzanich, who led the company from 2013 to 2018, followed by Bob Swan, who held the chair for an even shorter period of three years until the beginning of 2021. At the end of Krzanich's time, both Weiss and Gelsinger, like many others at Intel, abandoned the company because they felt that the ship was rocking and going nowhere.

"I felt that things were not going well, I wanted a change. It was always very important for me to enjoy work, after all we invest so much time there and if we enjoy ourselves then we are also more successful. This is what always motivates me. At the time I was managing a division in Haifa, I was responsible for a thousand people. When I talked about the change, I was told that the only way was to move to the U.S. and I didn't want to. So I went for a big change," Weiss recalls.

Weiss received a parting gift from Intel, a voucher that offered her four meetings with a writer so that she could write the management book she had always dreamed of, which she did. At the same time, she also received a call from Eyal Waldman, founder and then CEO of Mellanox. When he heard that I had left Intel, he said, 'Come to Mellanox, we'll decide on the position when you arrive, and so she did. In the end, the position was defined as something quite similar to what she does today at Intel - Senior Vice President of Engineering. At first it was exciting, but then Nvidia came along and acquired Mellanox and things changed, including the almost immediate departure of Waldman who was reluctant to join the merger forced upon him by the board.

"After the completion of the merger, Nvidia began to mix the companies and change the structure. They built the organization differently and it was no longer the same for me. At that time Sunil Shanoy (who served in her current position at Intel - S.S.) came to me with the offer to return to Intel and I was enthusiastic. It is very important to me how we work and not just what we do. I decided that I want to come and be a partner in the big change that is happening in the company. What is happening today at Intel is very different from the way it has been conducted in recent years. Today it is much more similar to the beginning and the way it was conducted when Andrew Grove was CEO."

What are the goals that Gelsinger has set for you?

"Intel's engineering organization is responsible for all Intel projects. If the company decides to develop something new, we receive the definitions and technical requirements from the relevant division and decide how to build the product, what the correct production process is, and after the initial production we check that everything works and only then can it move on.

Is it still possible to close the technological gap created by your competitors in the last five years?

"Intel learns from its mistakes, it learns to do things differently. In manufacturing processes, for example, Intel announced that it will have five different processes at the same time. Intel 7, Intel 4 and others. The push to make many improvements in four years is ambitious and it is still in the works, but I believe it is possible."

What is Israel's place in Intel today? Before Gelsinger took office, the expansion of the factory in Kiryat Gat was almost frozen and there were also quite a few concerns regarding Intel's place in Israel as a country caught in the middle of the chip war between the U.S. and China.

"Intel Israel is very central to Intel today, not necessarily in numbers, but in the type of projects it receives. The very fact that year after year Israel has been allowed to develop the company's flagship products - both Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, is unprecedented. At the same time, the factory in Kiryat Gat is expanding and there is a new building in Haifa, which means a lot."

Now that you are part of top management, can you tell us what they are saying about Israel? Are they reconsidering manufacturing here because of China?

"No, not at all. It was a completely different strategy and Intel is not there today. Intel learned from all kinds of indecisive strategies, to be decisive. To mark where we are going and to get there. Pat believes in Israel. It should be noted that he arrived here a few months after his appointment and immediately announced the expansion of the factory and also about expanding development plans here. It was his decision not to stop in Israel and this included the construction of the new building in Haifa. The acquisition of Tower was also his decision. There is an understanding and trust that Israel knows how to deliver the goods. There are very experienced people here.

It is impossible to ignore the tough competition for employees against Nvidia and other companies. How do you feel since the hiring freeze? Is it easier to recruit employees today?

"On the one hand, yes, because there is a strategy and people want to be part of the success. Everyone is very motivated to return Intel to what it used to be. When I left, there was no energy. Today there is more drive to win, but on the other hand, in Israel there is more competition. It used to be all about software, but now suddenly the world of hardware has overtaken the world of software in terms of demand. Suddenly hardware engineers are something in demand, once everything was just software and hardware people had about three options.

Don't you feel relieved after the layoffs?

"Layoffs are a temporary solution to a decline in the market and expectations. There is an understanding that the world will not continue to grow as it did during Covid. However, good engineers are still recruited, even though there is officially a freeze. As soon as recruitment declines, there are more people available. Right now there is a halt, but two or three months ago we were in full competition. Only in this quarter did everyone stop to look at where they stand. There are still open positions in Intel Israel."

See original here:
Everyone is very motivated to return Intel to what it used to be - CTech

On many development metrics, Bangladesh's performance and achievements have been justly recognised and feted at home and around the world. However, while the 50-year transformation scenario has indeed been robust, near-term trends have exposed systemic weaknesses, making the medium-term outlook decidedly shaky. While the immediate sense of macroeconomic breakdown has been tempered, the micro realities of poor and middle-class households struggling against a relentless cost-of-living crisis, and the meso realities of enterprise-level heightened uncertainty in growth outlook in critical subsectors, signal the entrenched presence of "bad days" for a majority of the population.

In May 2022, the fifth round of the PPRC-BIGD panel survey estimated the proportion of new poor to be 18.5 percent. Last week, the government's statistical agency at last acknowledged that the poverty rate had indeed gone up and now stood at 29.5 percent, compared to the pre-Covid level of 20 percent. But this rise in poverty numbers and the economic despair of an escalating number of the middle classes is only the visible tip of the crisis iceberg. The real worry is in the political economy of the policy landscape impacting both crisis management in the short term and growth management in the medium term.

Bangladesh has a vibrant public discourse on the state of the economy. However, what is frequently missing is a political economy lens and connecting the necessary dots.

Is corruption only a moral failure or does it flourish due to how rule-making, incentives, and sanctions are being politically constructed? Is the reluctance towards reforms only a question of inefficiency or is it dictated by the compulsion of protecting vested interests? Are implementation weaknesses a lack of capacity or are they due to how merit is systematically sidelined to the benefit of sycophancy? What indeed is the reality of economic governance?

We have always had deficits in our economic governance. But over the last decade, the political economy of the policy landscape has morphed into something more structural. Alouha tribhuj, or an iron triangle, of three tendencies has come to define and limit the policy landscape.

The first part of thelouha tribhujis a one-sided vision of development. Infrastructure has become the "be all and end all" of development, with social development pushed to the sidelines. This is not to say that "social" is out of budgetary attention. But even in "social," all the attention is on the hardware, with software out of sight. School-building has become more important than the quality of education. Hospital-building has become more important than the quality of healthcare. Standalone infrastructures without attention to integration with other parts of the infrastructure network is leading to plummeting liveability and productivity of urban centres. Focus is on the concrete only, without commensurate attention to user protocols, maintenance and infrastructure governance.

The consequences of this one-sided focus are all too familiar: shocking lack of road safety and unpredictability of travel; drop in the quality of educational experience; healthcare becoming a reality of galloping costs without results.

The second part of the iron triangle is the rampant spread of conflict-of-interest-driven policy-making. Boundaries of public and private interests are constantly transgressed in the policy landscape in favour of private interests closely aligned with ruling groups. Flouting of rules and, in some cases, rules specifically designed for narrow private interests have shockingly become the norm in critical and remunerative sectors such as finance, banking, energy, transportation, ICT, and infrastructure. Such collusive "contact and contracts" have become brazen and become a structural property of today's economic governance.

Some sectoral examples make the above abundantly clear. Quick rental electricity plants were adopted as a short-run option to address load-shedding. But why has it continued far beyond the initial timeline, with a relentless expansion of installed capacity without required investment in distribution infrastructure and primary energy supplies? Why was gas exploration deliberately sidelined for a disastrous overdependence on expensive LNG import? Why has the state agency Bapex been systematically sidelined in favour of a foreign firm in Bhola gas fields, as a glaring example? No wonder capacity charges have emerged as the brazen face of planned inefficiency and corrupt collusion, dictated not by economics but by political economy.

A similar story holds sway in the most catalytic of economic sectors namely transportation. Primacy of narrow politically-connected private interests have become a structural barrier not only to road governance, but also to the economics of transportation impacting travel time, onerous formal and informal costs of travel, and rampant failures in road safety. The BRTC has been rendered a perennially sick state-owned enterprise, route permit allocation is dominated by a transport owners' oligopoly standing in the way of both road safety and sector efficiency, and the BRTA is nowhere near rising up to its stewardship role. Rule-flouting private interests are effectively being given the immunity to continue the misgovernance stalemate.

Turning a blind eye to glaring conflicts of interest nay, positively supporting corrupt and collusive rule-making has also come to cast the darkest shadow over the banking and financial institutions sector. The pillars of finance sector governance are either over-eager to pander to selected private interests, or conspicuously inactive in their regulatory and supervisory responsibilities that has led to astounding levels of fraud and corruption. The case of PK Halder has perhaps become emblematic of such entrenched institutional culpable misgovernance.

The consequence of such corrupt and collusive rule-making is neither vague nor inconsequential with the most serious impact on competitiveness of the economy. Our exports-to-GDP ratio one measure of competitiveness has halved over 2012-22, from 20 percent to 10.6 percent. The continued stagnation in the private investment-to-GDP ratio is another cause for worry. Most recently, collusive regulatory moves appear to have unnerved external investors in the stock market. In such an amoral world, the "good entrepreneur" is effectively left adrift with a herculean uphill task.

The grip of the "iron triangle" works differently, but no less negatively in the case of development projects, particularly infrastructure projects. E-tender was supposed to have brought in transparency and efficiency to the whole process of awarding contracts, but reality speaks otherwise. Corrupt, inefficient and collusive practices work here through informal barriers to competitive bids, inflated costs, post-approval cost escalations, and project delays.

The third part of thelouha tribhujis theobicharer orthoniti the economics of injustice rooted in policy marginalisation of all those lacking political voice, including workers, farmers, small entrepreneurs, and now even the middle classes. Not one member of the common masses sits idle, relentless in their effort and labour for whatever opportunities come their way, but the benefits of policy attention is disproportionately faced away from them towards a small number of favoured groups. Public transport, prices of essentials, utility costs, affordable housing, access to quality healthcare and education, access to green spaces each of these pillars of quality living, central to the welfare of the common people, lacks the level of policy attention that would make a difference. It is as if the common masses have to shoulder the burden of resilience while fruits of growth flow disproportionately to favoured groups.

The second face of the economics of injustice is equally concerning. All our discussions are around macroeconomic imbalances and the ensuing crisis. Yet, we also need to keep in focus our medium-term goal of achieving the SDGs. In at least three areas, there is a real danger of reversal with Bangladesh becoming off track in SDGs: nutritional deficits (with nutritious items disappearing from the household diet due to lack of affordability), rise in secondary dropout level, and rise of youth unemployment (particularly, educated youth unemployment).

Bangladesh may be at an inflexion point in its development journey. Plenty of other initially successful countries fell into the "middle-income trap" because warning signals were not heeded and reform needs were pushed under the carpet. Will Bangladesh be able to recognise thelouha tribhujfor what it is a vicious triangle of mutually reinforcing policy tendencies that has morphed into a structural barrier straddling Bangladesh's inclusive and sustainable development aspirations? This cannot be overcome or dislodged merely by technical recommendations and feel-good talk. The need of the hour is a dismantling of thelouha tribhujthrough a qualitative change in political realisation, political approach and political will, and an urgent big push on reforms.

Hossain Zillur Rahman,an economist and political sociologist, is the executive chairman of Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC).

Read more here:
Louha tribhuj and the political economy of development - The Daily Star

William Boyd is not slowing down. Here I am, the 70-year-old novelist tells me over Zoom, 40 years on from my first novel, and Im actually busier than ever. And I think my imagination is actually cranking up better than ever. I seem to be slightly speeding up as I get older!

Theres certainly an abundance of imagination on show in Boyds new novel, The Romantic, which is the fourth of his whole-life novels, covering a colourful character from birth to grave.

But then Boyd has always been busy, as the author of 17 novels, five collections of stories and numerous screenplays. He is, by any measure, one of Britains most successful writers; he is speaking to me from his home in affluent Chelsea (between the Kings Road and the river).

I almost wrote one of Englands most successful writers but the blended nature of Boyds upbringing is a key element of his identity. He was born in Ghana, raised there and in Nigeria, then educated in Scotland, France and Oxford. Now he divides his time, as his book blurbs put it, between London and southwest France. He has a well-spoken accent with just a tincture of Scots remaining.

This mixed-up national identity is reflected in the hero of The Romantic. Cashel Greville Ross is raised initially in Ireland, and his lifespans the 19th century just as Boyds earlier whole-life novels The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002) and Sweet Caress (2015) spanned the 20th.

Most of the 19th century was a period of turbulent change, says Boyd. Almost like the 20th to 21st century in a way. I had to factor in the way technology began to influence peoples lives, from chamber pots to flushing toilets, or from coach and horses to speeding trains. So its a very rich world to explore.

Cashels life moves from Ireland to Oxford, and from there the surprises never stop. The rambunctious romp of his story takes Cashel to India (fighting in the third Kandyan War), Italy (meeting Byron and Shelley), Africa (discovering Lake Victoria a year before Speke and Burton) and the United States. The book has been likened to a less politically incorrect version of the Flashman stories.

But it also deals in issues that have preoccupied Boyd throughout his career, specifically identity and the influence of chance on our lives. Cashels confusion about his identity in one sense it is the story of a man who never knows quite who he is runs deep. I dont know if you spotted this, laughs Boyd, but at different stages in the book hes called an English c**t, a Scottish c**t and an Irish c**t!

Boyd is also concerned with the sleight of hand involved in telling a fictional story as though it were fact. He opens the novel with a preface about its source material and adds little details of verisimilitude footnotes, sketches throughout. Im trying to show how powerful fiction is, and how it can deal with the human condition better than anything else can.

That aspect of being impulsive, of being driven by your heart not your head, I think Im a bit like that myself. I have a romantic nature

And even in Boyds shorter novels take Armadillo (1998) or The Blue Afternoon (1993) hes always interested in the aspects of a life we dont often see in fiction, like the workplace.

Im a realistic novelist, unapologetically, and so the world youve created, and the characters youve created, have to be three-dimensional, textured and real. For a long time I resisted writing about a writer, so lots of my protagonists have proper jobs: loss adjuster, primatologist. Its an attempt to give a granular feel to the fiction.

In The Romantic even the most minor of characters are rich in detail. Bad writing or bad novels are easy to spot, Boyd says, because they only trade in stereotypes. And if youre a serious novelist, you must always strive to avoid falling into that trap, of going to central casting with the chatty barman or whatever. Youve got to make the character step off the page in a distinctive way.

Another trick of the trade is how you name your characters dont just call them John Smith or Sally Watts. Come up with something a little bit individual, and immediately the character starts to live. Something like Cashel Greville Ross, or Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, or Salvador Carriscant.

The novel is called The Romantic because Cashel is a romantic not just in the obvious sense though he is popular with women, and falls for one painfully for life but also in his spirited interest in everything. To what extent, I ask Boyd the least obviously autobiographical of novelists when you write about this restless, ambitious character, are you writing about yourself?

In response he says he was partly inspired by reading Stendhals autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard. In it, he identifies himself as a romantic but he sees it as a kind of curse on his life. He kept falling in love with women, making a fool of himself and having to leave town. And that aspect of being impulsive, of being driven by your heart not your head, I think Im a bit like that myself. I have a romantic nature. I recognise from Stendhals account of his life and his errors, things that chime with my own! And its from these sorts of collisions that your novels grow.

Boyd referred to himself earlier as an unapologetically realistic novelist. But there is, surely, a lot of playfulness in his work, and particularly his short stories?

I see so many of my contemporaries not being published, or their books going out of print. Im very conscious of how a reputation that seems to be thoroughly established can suddenly fizzle out

I think thats absolutely true. I use my short stories as a way of flexing muscles I wouldnt flex in my novels. I use the alphabet, an A to Z, theres one story which is an attempt to write a story in the form of a nouvelle vague film. And you wouldnt want to spend two years writing a novel to see if that worked, but you can do it over a few days with a short story.

[But in the novels] I do do that slightly meta literary stuff. Brazzaville Beach is written in the first person and third person. Any Human Heart is a 500-page novel written as a journal. People sometimes disparagingly describe me as a traditional novelist. But tell me other traditional novelists whove fractured their narrative in this way, and changed pronouns, or used 77 photographs, and so on.

Boyd certainly doesnt exhibit the lack of confidence that infects even many successful novelists. (Iris Murdoch said that every novel was the wreck of a perfect idea.) He says he spends twice as long planning each book as I do writing it. Ive never abandoned a novel, because Ive done all this preliminary work. And each novel in a way has turned out as I hoped it would, there are no runts of the litter as far as Im concerned.

He is not, however, complacent. For me the absolutely main ambition now is to keep the show on the road. All my books are in print in the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and of course the UK. How do you keep that going? Because I see so many of my contemporaries not being published, or their books going out of print. Im very conscious of how a reputation that seems to be thoroughly established can suddenly fizzle out. And Im aware of my good fortune in that sense.

See the original post here:
William Boyd: '40 years on from my first novel, my imagination is cranking up better than ever' - The Irish Times

Part One of a series

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) took to the Twitter social media platform on Tuesday, September 27, to clarify allegations that it has included a 'casteist' text, in the Class 6 History textbook, which talks about the Varna system and went viral on social media. The Boards defense: CBSE, which acts as a board that sets exam and affiliation guidelines, is not a publisher of textbooks across the country and schools affiliated to them use NCERT curriculum, especially from class 9 to 12.

"The class 6 History textbook containing topics on Varnas has been wrongly attributed as published by CBSE. This is factually incorrect. It is clarified that CBSE does not publish History textbooks, thus the matter does not relate to CBSE. Team CBSE," said the tweet by the national level of board of education. which received backlash from netizens and political parties such as Actor and Politician Kamal Hassan's Makkal Needhi Maiam and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, two prominent political parties in Tamil Nadu.

Who then published the errant text?

The Free PressJournal reported the controversy and the boards clarification. CBSE, which acts as a board that sets exam and affiliation guidelines, is not a publisher of textbooks across the country. The book, which has the viral image of the text, was published by XSEED Education which is a publishing house based out of Singapore. The issue of tenders, costs and profits over textbooks is one that has dogged government text book boards for decades.

How did the controversy erupt?

It was social media users shared a chapter's page about the Varna System that went viral. According to the lesson's text, the Brahmins were priests and instructors, the Kshatriyas were warriors, the Vaishyas were businesspeople, artisans, and landowners, and the Shudras were labourers who assisted the other three varnas, which created an uproar among netizens.

Caste in Indian textbooks has been a long standing issue, unresolved and unaddressed. In 2021, as reported byThe Telegraph,an Odisha-based study revealed a strong bias against the oppressed castes in school curricula. The findings corroborate, with evidence, what many have said: School curricula erase Dalit and non-elite caste histories and lived experiences.

Details of the study:

A research group consisting of ISI Bengaluru and IIT Hyderabad experts analysed ten literature and social sciences textbooks taught to classes IV to VIII in Odisha schools. It found that only three of ten books ever mention Dalits, or only five per cent of the total pages that present Indian social life. This stark finding underlines the near invisibility of Dalits in our school curricula.

Textbooks, especially for the social sciences, formally open up the world for learners. This is why inclusion is crucial to representation and participation and exclusion perpetuates exploitation. Put differently, it is shadows and silences in our textbooks that hold a mirror lesson for teachers, students, families and society.

Exclusion as denial

From the late 1990s to presently, firstCommunalism Combat, now Sabrangindia have tracked these shadows and silences.Vimal Thorat, Convenorof the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) and a former professor of Hindi at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), speaks to co-editor, Teesta Setalvad of her decades long struggle to ensure that Dalit literature from seven Indian languages (translated into Hindi) is available to MA Part II students at the IGNOU.

There will be no social transformation without the consistent and creative propagation of the fundamental values of equity and non-discrimination, said Vimal Thorat. If we want a society where there is camaraderie, fraternity, a sense of justice and equality, then these issues need to be brought in, inculcated and taught from standard 1 onwards; but we dont have these basic constitutional values in our syllabus. Why?

Excerpts from the Interviews:

The first all girls school was set up by Savitribai Phule, a radical feminist in Pune in 1848; she challenged gender exclusion and the caste order and yet this narrative is absent from our textbooks.There was a resistance even in the NCERT to ensure the inclusion of Phule, Jyotiba, Savitribai Phule and Ambedkar earlier. The first NDA government removed references to these radical thinkers in 2002; we had to struggle to get them back in 2012 but we are not sure what this government, given its orientation, will do.

Due to the strong Dravidian movementin the South, due to the heritage of rationalism and resistance led by Periyar and Narayan Swamy against Brahmanical hegemony, there was a strong impact in the social sphere and even in the area of education; there is a need for a new awakening in the north.

The period in India, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, was also a period wherein atrocities against Dalits in Punjab and Haryana also sharply increasedThis reached a terrible climax in 2013, when 42 Dalit girls were raped in Haryana and the organisation that I represent, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) raised the issue consistently through mass meetings and campaigns. The incidents were shocking; they shook the nation. I recall when we held the Haryana Dalit Mahila Samaan Rally so many other cases came up before us. These should be the issues for the mainstream Indian feminist movement.

The pain and exclusions experienced by Dalit feminist writers, expressed powerfully in their literature has not been foregrounded as Indian feminist writing.How many Indian children in schools, or students at universities know the work of Kumud Pawde a Dalit Feminist who made a powerful statement in her essay, The Story of My Sanskrit an extract from her a autobiography Antasphot?[The work traces the path of a Dalit woman in the public sphere of education and employment: bureaucratic apathy to in-egalitarianism and an absence of revulsion to untouchability]

The issue of the Feminism of Dalit, Adivasi and Minority women needs to be considered carefully. The life experiences of Dalit and Adivasi women are different; they are life and death issues rarely seen and articulated in the middle class urban feminist movement.Security is a key issue for Adivasi women as is becoming clear in the heart of the Adivasi areas. Dalit women face attacks almost every day and the issues faced by Muslim women are also specific. For the Indian feminist movement to be representative and meaningful, all these issues need to be represented. In 2013 in Haryana in the course of two months there were 42 gang rapes of Dalit girls and women.Dalit feminist writing like that of Kausalya Baisantry (Dohra Abhishaap, Twice Cursed) speaks of the combined curses of untouchability and patriarchy.Urmila Pawars autobiographyAaydan(2003) is seminal. She is also known for her short story writing in Marathi. She hails from the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. Urmila Pawar, Daya Pawar, Baby Kamble and Shantabai Gokhale are among the other prominent voices of Dalit literature. Her memoir Aaydan speaks of the weaving of cane baskets. It was the main economic activity of the Mahar caste to whom, she belongs.The symbolism of 'Chani' in Dalit womens writing: 'Chani' is the name given to dried pieces of meat; handling of animals was an activity segregated to the untouchables and therefore the women among them would perform this difficult task. The symbol of Dalit women, in their autobiographies speaking of carrying basketfuls of meat taken from dead animals on their foreheads even as the blood from the animals flows down the bodies. Hunger is the most compelling motive and to quell this hunger women would subject themselves to this. Then they would dry and cure the meat.

2021 Odisha study of history texts

Though the 2021 study focuses on schools in the state Odisha, there are suggestions hat the situation in many other states is no different. The invisibility of Dalit characters distances the texts from reality. It may also teach students to adopt a hierarchical approach in social interactions. In Indias social life, which is based on exclusion, notions of purity and pollution get enforced with (overt and covert) violence against the less powerful. The study refers to school texts in Gujarat, which call the caste system benign. In Rajasthan, too, caste is described as a good system based on professional differences.

In 1999, a study of the Gujarat state textbooks conducted byKhoj Education for a Plural India programme, (and published inCommunalism Combat, October 1999)described the caste system as the ideal way to build society. Of course, their [lower castes] ignorance, illiteracy and blind faith are to be blamed for lack of progress because they still fail to realise the importance of education in life, the book noted.

Caste is a precious gift,1999 Social Science Texts

The caste system receives generous treatment in Indian textbooks, as analysed by theKhojstudy, be it the ICSE text books or the Gujarat board.

Even the section in the text book of the Gujarat state board that seeks to explain the constitutional policy of reservations makes remarks about the continued illiteracy of the scheduled castes and tribes.

So, for instance, the same textbook pays lip service to political correctness through a fleeting reference to the fact that the varna system later became hierarchical, but in the same chapter, a few paragraphs later, literally extols the virtues of the intent of the varna system itself.

There is also no attempt nor desire, either in this text or the ICSE texts to explain the inhuman concept of untouchability (based on the notion, so impure as to be untouchable) that Jyotiba Phule and B.R. Ambedkar made it their lifes mission to challenge, socially and politically. In understanding and teaching about caste, both this text and other ICSE texts display a marked reluctance to admit or link the ancient-day varna system to modern-day Indian social reality.

The Varna System: The Varna system was a precious gift of the Aryans to the mankind. It was a social and economic organisation of the society built on the basis of the principle of division of labour. Learning or education, defence, trade and agriculture and service of the community are inseparable organs of the social fabric. The Aryans divided the society into four classes or varnas. Those who were engaged in the pursuit of learning and imparted education were called Brahmins or Purohits (the priestly classes). Those who defended the country against the enemy were called the Kshastriyas or the warrior class. Those who were engaged in trade agriculture were called the Vaishyas. And those who acted as servants or slave of the other three classes were called the Shudras. In the beginning, there were no distinction of high and low. The varna or class of a person was decided not on the basis of birth but on the basis of his work or karma. Thus a person born of a Shudra father could become a Brahmin by acquiring learning or by joining the teaching professionIn course of time however, the varna system became corrupted and birth rather than vocation came to be accepted as the distinguishing feature of the varna system. Thus society was permanently divided into a hierarchy of classes. The Brahmins were regarded as the highest class while the Shudras were treated as the lowest. These distinctions have persisted in spite of the attempts made by reformers to remove them. Yet, the importance of the Varna system as an ideal system of building the social and economic structure of a society cannot be overlooked.(Emphasis added).(Social Studies text, Gujarat State Board, Std. IX)

The only reference in this standard IX text to the indignities of the caste system as it exists today is through an attempt to blame the plight of the untouchables on their own illiteracy and blind faith.

Problems of Schedule Castes and Scheduled Tribes: Of course, their ignorance, illiteracy and blind faith are to be blamed for lack of progress because they still fail to realise importance of education in life. Therefore, there is large-scale illiteracy among them and female illiteracy is a most striking fact. (Emphasis added). (Social Studies text, Gujarat State Board, Std. IX, 1999)

The ICSE texts are similarly non-critical and evasive.The New ICSE History and Civics, edited by Hart and Barrow, Part 1 has this to say.

The Caste System: The division of society into four varnas (classes) had its origin in the Rig Vedic period. Members of the priestly class were called brahmins; those of the warrior class, kshatriyas; agriculturists and traders, vaisyas; and the menials, sudras. It is said that the caste system in the Rig Vedic times was based on occupations of the people and not on birth. Change of caste was common. A Brahmin child could become a kshatriya or a vaisya according to his choice or ability

Varna in Sanskrit means the colour of skin and the caste system was probably used to distinguish the fair coloured Aryans from the dark coloured natives. The people of higher castes (brahmins, kshatriyas, and vaisyas) were Aryans. The dark skinned natives were the sudras, the lowest class in society, whose duty was to serve the high class.

2019 New India

In 2019, the NCERT issueda circular announcingthe culling of three chapters from its Class IX history textbook under a policy to rationalise courses. The topics were clothing and caste conflict, cricket history, and the impact of colonial capitalism on peasants. This would imply that the struggles of the Nadar women of Travancore in the early 19th century to wear upper body clothes to cover their breasts, or the discrimination against the talented cricketer Palwankar Baloo to lead the Indian cricket team as he was a Dalit, would not be spoken of in textbooks.

However, a 2019studyof how caste was communicated through textbooks for Class 6 and 10 students has found some improvements compared with twenty years ago. In 2005, NCERT textbooks tried to address caste in a more explanatory way. The author of the study, journalist Sumit Chaturvedi, credits the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 and the Draft Learning Outcomes for elementary education, a document prepared by the NCERT in 2017, which spoke of sensitising students towards caste. Yet, Chaturvedi also notes some problems. The books focus on vulnerable caste groups and their lived experience, whereas dominant caste identities or the logic of the caste system is not interrogated. The perception is also created that caste is an issue of the vulnerable only, which supposedly indemnifies the dominant castes. Third, he notes, the books still allow the youth to claim they are casteless.

However with the coming and consolidation of the NDA I and NDA II governments, the NCF 2005 has been abandoned, texts slashed of their content and the New Education Policy (NEP-2020) implemented.

Though caste re-formulates over time, it is often taught as a thing of the past that has no relation to or continuity with what happens today. It allows the dominant castes to distance themselves from recognising that caste-based exclusions and violence are an existing malady. It thus facilitates denial of thelived experiences of the Dalitsand perpetrates violence against those who experience caste discrimination and bias.

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Caste in CBSE Texts, Who is to Blame? - NewsClick

By Paul SperryReal Clear Wirehttps://www.realclearwire.com/

Since being named special counsel in October 2020, John Durham has investigated or indicted several unscrupulous anti-Trump informants. But he has spared the FBI agents who handled them, raising suspicions he's letting investigators off the hook in his waning investigation of misconduct in the Russiagate probe.

In recent court filings, Durham has portrayed the G-men as naive recipients of bad information, tricked into opening improper investigations targeting Donald Trump and obtaining invalid warrants to spy on one of his advisers.

But as the cases against the informants have gone to trial, defense lawyers have revealed evidence that cuts against that narrative. FBI investigators look less like guileless victims and more like willing partners in the fraudulent schemes Durham has brought to light.

Notwithstanding his reputation as a tough, intrepid prosecutor, Durham has made excuses for the misconduct of FBI agents, providing them a ready-made defense against any possible future prosecution, according to legal experts.

"Durham was supposed to clean up the FBI cesspool, but it doesn't look like he's going to be doing that," said Paul Kamenar, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, a Washington watchdog group. "He started with a bang and is ending with a whimper."

In the latest example, critics point to a flurry of pretrial motions in Durham's case against former FBI informant Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the false claims regarding Trump and Russia advanced by the opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign known as the Steele dossier.

Next month, Danchenko faces charges he lied to FBI investigators multiple times about the sourcing of the information in the dossier, which the bureau used to secure wiretap warrants to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. Relying on Danchenko's reporting, the FBI claimed that the adviser, Carter Page, was a Russian agent at the center of "a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between Trump and the Kremlin to steal the 2016 presidential election.

"The defendant was providing them with false information" as part of "a concerted effort to deceive the FBI," Durham alleged in a recent filing with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., where the trial is scheduled to be held Oct. 11.

Had agents known Danchenko made up the allegations, Durham asserted, they might have asked more questions about the dossier and not relied on it to swear out the ultra-invasive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to electronically monitor Page, a U.S. citizen who was never charged with a crime.

But Danchenko's legal team points out that he turned over an email to the FBI during a January 2017 meeting with agents and analysts that indicated a key dossier subsource may have been fictionalized.

Stuart Sears, one of Danchenko's attorneys, argued earlier this month in a motion to dismiss the charges that investigators "essentially ignored" any concerns they may have had about Danchenko's sourcing, because they continued to renew the FISA warrants based upon it. Therefore, he argued, any lies his client allegedly told them were inconsequential, making them un-prosecutable under federal statutes requiring such false statements to have a "material" impact on a federal proceeding.

While Durham did not dispute the FBI's apparent complicity in the fraud, he waved it aside as immaterial to the case at hand. "The fact that the FBI apparently did not identify or address these inconsistencies is of no moment," he said in his filing.

At the same time, Durham acknowledged agents allowed the fabrications to contaminate their wiretap warrants noting they were "an important part of the FISA applications targeting Carter Page." But he stopped short of blaming the FBI, even for incompetence. According to Durham, the nation's premiere law enforcement agency was misled by a serial liar and con man.

"He's painting it as though the FBI was duped when the FBI was more than willing to take the initiative and go after Trump," Kamenar said, adding that though Danchenko may have been a liar, he was a useful liar to FBI officials and others in the Justice Department who were pursuing Trump.

The special prosecutor's indifference to the FBI's role in the scandal is more remarkable in light of what Danchenko admitted in his January 2017 interviews with the FBI. He told investigators that much of what he reported to Steele was "word-of-mouth and hearsay," while some was cooked up from "conversation that [he] had with friends over beers," according to a declassified FBI summary of the interviews, which took place over three days. He confessed the most salacious allegations were made in "jest."

Still, the FBI continued to use Danchenko's claims of a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between Russia and Trump to convince the FISA court to allow investigators to continue to surveil Page, whom the FBI accused of masterminding the conspiracy based on Danchenko's bogus rumors. Agents even swore in FISA court documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations that Danchenko was "truthful and cooperative."

The combination of Danchenko reporting a "conspiracy" and the FBI vouching for his credibility persuaded the powerful FISA court to continue to authorize wiretapping Page as a suspected Russian agent for almost a year. In addition to collecting his emails and text messages in 2017, agents were able to sweep up all his prior communications with Trump officials from 2016.

If the FBI were skeptical of Danchenko, it didn't show it. The next month, the bureau put him on its payroll as a confidential human source, or CHS, making him part of the bureau's untouchable "sources and methods" sanctum and thereby protecting him and any documents referencing him from congressional and other outside scrutiny. It made him a paid informant in spite of knowing Danchenko was a potential Russian spy threat who could be feeding federal agents disinformation. The FBI had previously opened a counterespionage probe of Danchenko from 2009 to 2011, and as his lawyers pointed out in a recent court filing, agents who were part of the case probing Trump/Russia ties, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, "were well aware of the prior counterintelligence investigation" when they were supposedly conned by their informant.

"It stretches credibility to suggest that anything else would have caused the FBI to be more suspicious of Mr. Danchenko's statements and his potential role in spreading disinformation than the very fact that he was previously investigated for possibly engaging in espionage on behalf of Russia," Sears said. "Armed with that knowledge, however, the FBI nevertheless persisted" in using him as a source while never informing the FISA court of the prior investigation.

The FBI didn't terminate Danchenko until October 2020, the month after the Senate declassified documents revealing the FBI had investigated him as a Russian agent. It also happened to be the same month Durham was appointed special counsel.

On Oct. 19, 2020, then-Attorney General Bill Barr tapped Durham "to investigate whether any federal official, employee, or any other person or entity violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III."

So far, Durham has focused on the "any other person" part of his mandate. Federal officials and employees appear to be getting a pass.

Though Durham prosecuted former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith in August 2020, when he was acting as a U.S. attorney, he did not initiate the case. Rather, it was referred to him by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who first exposed how Clinesmith had doctored exculpatory evidence in the Page warrant process. Even though Clinesmith admitted forging a CIA email to make it look like Page never helped the agency monitor Russia, when in fact he did and clearly wasn't acting as a Russian agent, Durham failed to put him behind bars. Clinesmith was sentenced to 12 months' probation and 400 hours of community service, which as RCI first reported, the registered Democrat satisfied by researching and editing articles for his favorite liberal weekly newspaper in Washington.

Kamenar said the Clinesmith case was a "bad omen" for how Durham would handle dirty FBI agents. He pointed out that the prosecutor could have charged Clinesmith with the more serious crime of altering a CIA document, but instead negotiated a deal letting him plead to the lesser offense of lying to a government agency, which Kamenar called "a garden variety process crime." And "now he's got his law license back."

Clinesmith worked closely on the case with FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten, who was singled out by Horowitz in a 2019 report for cutting a number of corners in the dossier verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into the FISA affidavits and mislead the court.

Auten met with Danchenko at the bureau's Washington field office and helped debrief him about the dossier in January 2017. And he wrote the official FBI summary of those meetings, which noted Danchenko "contradicted" himself several times. Auten learned firsthand that the information Danchenko passed to Steele was nothing more than bar gossip, and that his "network of subsources" was really just a circle of drinking buddies. Also at those meetings, the analyst received an Aug. 24, 2016, email revealing that Danchenko never actually communicated with Sergei Millian, the Belarusian-born American businessman whom he had identified as his main source of Trump/Russia connections the all-important, albeit apocryphal, "Source E" and "Source D" of the dossier. It turns out Danchenko attributed the critical "conspiracy of cooperation" allegation the FBI cited as probable cause for all four FISA warrants to this made-up source, meaning the cornerstone evidence of suspected Trump-Russia espionage was also made up.

What's more, Auten learned that though Danchenko was born in Russia, he was not based there and had no access to Kremlin insiders. On the contrary, he confirmed that Danchenko had been living in Washington and had previously worked for the Brookings Institution, a Democratic Party think tank whose president at the time was tied to Clinton.

Yet Auten and his Crossfire team led the FISA court to believe Danchenko was "Russian-based" and therefore presumably more credible. They used this same description in all four FISA affidavits, including the two renewals that followed the January 2017 meetings with Danchenko.

Internal FBI emails from two months later revealed that Auten knew that using the term "Russian-based" was deceptive. While tasked with helping review Crossfire documents requested by Congress, including FISA applications, he worried about the description and whether it should be corrected. He discussed the matter with Clinesmith. But the falsehood reappeared in subsequent FISA applications.

It was also in January 2017 that Danchenko revealed to Auten and his FBI handlers that one of his subsources was his childhood friend Olga Galkina, whom he said supplied him the rumor that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague during the campaign to hatch a plot with Kremlin officials to hack Clinton campaign emails.

The FBI already knew from intelligence reports that Cohen had not, as the dossier claimed, traveled to Prague to conspire in the alleged Russian hacking of Democrats, or for any other reason.

On Jan. 12, 2017, Auten and his Crossfire teammates received a CIA report that warned the Cohen rumor was likely part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The agency had discovered no such Prague meeting took place after querying foreign intelligence services, shooting a major hole in the dossier. The CIA report should have led the Crossfire team to treat any allegations sourced to Galkina with caution. But on the same day, the FBI got its FISA wiretap on Page renewed based on another groundless claim by Galkina this one alleging the Trump aide secretly met with top Kremlin officials in Moscow to discuss removing U.S. sanctions. The falsehood showed up in two more FISA applications, which alleged "Russia's efforts to influence U.S. policy were likely being coordinated between the RIS [Russian Intelligence Services] and Page, and possibly others."

Galkina also had a relationship with Charles Dolan, a Clinton adviser who figures prominently in the Danchenko case Durham is prosecuting.

It turns out Dolan was one of the sources for the infamous "pee-tape" allegation about the Kremlin supposedly having blackmail evidence of Trump consorting with prostitutes at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, which has been debunked as another dossier hoax. But according to Durham, Danchenko tried to conceal Dolan's role in the dossier from the FBI. The special prosecutor argued that the deception deprived FBI agents and analysts information that would have helped them evaluate "the credibility, reliability and veracity" of the dossier. He said if they had known Dolan was a source, they might have, among other things, sought emails Dolan and Danchenko exchanged exposing their Ritz-Carlton hoax.

"Had the defendant truthfully told the FBI that Dolan played a role in providing certain information for the Steele reports the FBI might well have interviewed and/or collected such emails from Dolan," Durham speculated.

In addition, the prosecutor said, investigators might have learned of Dolan's "involvement in Democratic politics" and "potential bias as a source for the Steele reports." Except that they already knew about Dolan and his politics as well as his involvement in the dossier. It's also likely they already had his emails.

In another interview with Danchenko about his dossier sources, which took place June 15, 2017, FBI agents asked Danchenko if he knew Dolan and whether he was "contributing" to the Steele reports. Though Danchenko acknowledged he knew Dolan, he denied he was a source. Agents didn't ask any follow-up questions. (They also never sought to charge him with making false statements to federal agents.)

How did the FBI know to ask about Dolan? Because he was well-known to the bureau's Russia counterintelligence agents as a businessman who frequently traveled to Moscow and met with Kremlin insiders. But more importantly, his friend Galkina was under FISA surveillance as a suspected Russian spy at the time, according to declassified records. The FBI was collecting not only Galkina's emails, but also those of Dolan and Danchenko, all of whom regularly communicated in 2016 which suggests that at the time the FBI asked Danchenko about Dolan, it had access to those emails and was reviewing them.

This may explain why, as defense lawyer Sears noted, "the FBI never asked Mr. Danchenko about emails or any other written communications with Dolan" and why it never interviewed Dolan.

While Durham acknowledged that the FBI knew about Dolan's troubling ties at the time and neglected to dig deeper, he said he's not bothered by the oversight. "The fact that the FBI was aware that Dolan maintained some of these relationships and failed to interview Dolan is of no moment," he maintained dismissively in a court filing. All that matters, he suggested, is that the FBI was lied to.

One of those emails was particularly alarming. In an Aug. 19, 2016, email to Dolan, Danchenko made it clear he was compiling dirt on Trump and his advisers and sought any rumor, no matter how baseless and scurrilous. He solicited Dolan, specifically, for "any thought, rumor, allegation" on former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Such emails called into question the veracity of the whole dossier and further tainted the credibility of Danchenko's "network of subsources." But on June 29, 2017 two weeks after the FBI asked about Dolan the FBI renewed the FISA wiretap on Trump adviser Page based on, once again, the dubious dossier.

From its wiretapping of Galkina, moreover, Auten and others at the FBI who sorted through such FISA collections would have seen communications showing her strong support for Hillary Clinton, and how Galkina was expecting political favors in exchange for spreading dirt on Trump. In an August 2016 email to a friend, Galkina expressed hopes that Dolan would help her score a State Department job if Clinton won election.

It was a major red flag. But like all the others, the FBI blew right past it. Agents continued to vouch for Danchenko as "truthful" and his subsources as reliable, and continued to cite Galkina's fabrications in FISA renewals.

Under FISA rules, the FBI had a duty to "immediately inform" the secret court of any misstatements or omissions, along with any "necessary corrections" of material facts sworn in affidavits for warrants. But the FBI failed to correct the record, even after it became obvious it had told the court falsehoods and hid exculpatory evidence. In August 2017, agents finally got around to interviewing Galkina, who confessed the dossier allegations attributed to her were "exaggerated," according to the Horowitz report.

Scammed by the Alfa Bank Scam?Last year, Durham also painted the FBI as a victim of the 2016 political machinations of two other anti-Trump informants Michael Sussmann and Rodney Joffe, who conveyed to investigators false rumors about Trump allegedly setting up a secret hotline with the Kremlin through Russia-based Alfa Bank.

Durham charged Sussmann, a Washington lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, with lying to the FBI's top lawyer James Baker when he told him he was coming in with the tip outlined in white papers and thumb drives all on his own and not on behalf of Democrats and Clinton, whom he was billing for the Trump-Alfa "confidential project."

"Sussmann's false statement misled the FBI general counsel and other FBI personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the FBI of information that might have permitted it more fully to access and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussmann's clients," Durham maintained in the indictment.

But evidence emerged at the trial of Sussmann, who was acquitted, that bureau officials already knew the "political nature" of the tip and where the data came from, but withheld the information from field agents so they would continue investigating Trump through the election.

For example, in a Sept. 22, 2016, email describing the "special project," an FBI official in Washington stated that "Counsel Baker provided [Supervisory Special Agent] Joe Pientka with 2 thumb drives and identified they were given to him by the DNC."

"Everybody at the FBI actually thought the data came from a political party," Sussmann lawyer Sean Berkowitz argued, according to the trial transcript. "The (case) file is littered with references to the DNC."

But Durham kept offering explanations for why FBI brass bit on the politically tainted tip, opening a full field investigation based on it.

"Had Sussmann truthfully disclosed that he was representing specific clients [the Clinton campaign], it might have prompted the FBI general counsel to ask Sussmann for the identity of such clients, which, in turn, might have prompted further questions," Durham argued.

"In addition, absent Sussmann's false statement, the FBI might have taken additional or more incremental steps before opening an investigation," he added. "The FBI also might have allocated its resources differently, or more efficiently, and uncovered more complete information about the reliability and provenance of the purported data at issue."

Headquarters, however, did know the identity of the clients. Problem was, they blinded agents in Chicago, where a cyber unit was assigned to the case, to the fact that the source for the information was Sussmann and Joffe a federal cyber-security contractor who was angling for a job in a Clinton administration. (A longtime FBI informant, Joffe was terminated last year after he was exposed as the ringleader of the Alfa Bank scam.)

"You were not allowed to speak to either the source of the information, the author of the white paper, or the person who provided the source of the information and the data?" Berkowitz asked Chicago-based FBI agent Curtis Heide during the trial, according to transcripts.

"Correct," Heide replied.

Another Chicago investigator was led to believe the tip came into the bureau as a referral from the "U.S. Department of Justice."

Still, field agents were able to debunk it within two weeks.

The FBI was not fooled by the hoax, yet nonetheless went along with it for the next four months. The case wasn't formally closed until Jan. 18, 2017, just two days before Trump was inaugurated. But then it was soon reopened after Clinton operatives again approached the FBI as well as the CIA with supposedly new evidence, which also proved false.

"Comey and crew kept the hoax alive," former FBI counterintelligence lawyer Mark Wauck said, referring to then-FBI Director James Comey. They welcomed any predication that allowed them to open investigations on Trump, he added.

Pientka testified that Comey was "fired up" about the tip, despite the fact nothing had been corroborated. Comey even held senior-level meetings on the Alfa investigation in his 7th floor office. (Pientka, who led the "close-hold" investigation from headquarters, also helped supervise the Crossfire Hurricane probe.)

Ironically, no one knew better that Sussmann was a Democratic operative with an agenda than Baker the official Durham claimed was the direct victim of the scam.

Baker, a fellow Democrat, was a close friend of Sussmann, who had his own badge to get past security at the Hoover Building. Sussmann had Baker's personal cell number and Baker cleared his busy schedule to meet with him within hours of Sussmann calling to discuss his tip. Baker was well aware that Sussmann was representing the DNC, because Sussmann entered the building numerous times during the 2016 campaign to talk with top FBI officials about the alleged DNC hack by Russia. In fact, Sussmann had just visited headquarters with a delegation from the DNC on Aug. 12, 2016 several weeks before he approached Baker with the bogus Alfa tip. They were there to pressure the FBI into concluding Russian intelligence was behind the "hacking" of DNC emails.

"I understood he had been affiliated with the Democratic Party, but that he had come representing himself," Baker testified during the trial.

Why didn't he tell investigators about Sussmann? "I didn't want to share his name because I didn't want to color the investigation," he said. "I didn't want to color it with politics."

In his closing argument, Durham prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis told jurors the FBI's conduct was "not relevant."

"Ladies and gentlemen, you've seen that the FBI didn't necessarily do everything right here. They missed opportunities. They made mistakes. They even kept information from themselves," he said. "That is not relevant to your evaluation of the defendant's lie."

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton complained Durham and his team have been acting more like apologists for the FBI than potential prosecutors of the FBI.

"The FBI leadership knew full well the Clinton gang was behind the Alfa Bank-Russia smears of Trump," he said. "Durham tried to pretend (the) FBI was a victim (when) it was a co-conspirator."

Wauck agreed. "The FBI-as-victim narrative was a bit of a legal fiction that Durham deployed for the purposes of the trial," he said. "The reality that emerged is that the FBI's top management was complicit in the Russia hoax that Sussmann was purveying."

Folding Up His TentDurham was first tasked with looking into the origins of the Russiagate probe in May 2019, before his formal appointment as special counsel in 2020. Trump and Republicans have expressed disappointment that after a total of more than three years of investigation, he has not prosecuted any top former FBI officials, including Comey and Andrew McCabe, who signed some of the FISA affidavits, or Peter Strzok, the biased leader of the Crossfire Hurricane probe who assured McCabe's lawyer in an August 2016 text that "we'll stop" Trump from becoming president. None has received a target letter. In recent months, McCabe and Strzok have gone on CNN, where they work as paid contributors, and smugly bashed Durham for running a "partisan" investigation, while at the same time gloating he's held the FBI up to be more of a victim than a culprit.

"Comey and Strzok and McCabe have gotten a free ride out of all this," Kamenar said.

Also, Durham went easy on Baker, another top FBI official, even after he held back key evidence from the special prosecutor before the Sussmann trial, a blatant lack of cooperation that may have cost Durham a conviction in the case. Comey's general counsel has received "favorable treatment," Wauck observed.

Baker, who reviewed and OK'd the FISA applications, never told Durham about a damning text message he received from Sussmann on his cellphone. Durham had already indicted Sussmann for lying to Baker, and he could not use Sussmann's smoking-gun message "I'm coming on my own not on behalf of a client or company" during the trial to convince jurors he was guilty of lying about representing the Clinton campaign. Legal analysts said it was slam-dunk evidence that would have sealed his case.

Baker testified he didn't turn over the text to Durham because no one asked for it. He proved a reluctant witness on the stand against his old pal Sussmann.

"I'm not out to get Michael and this is not my investigation. This is your investigation," he told DeFilippis during questioning. DeFilippis has since stepped down to take a job in the private sector.

(Demonstrating the incestuous nature of the Beltway, Baker also happens to be an old friend of Bill Barr, who hired Durham. Barr hired Baker as his deputy when he ran Verizon's legal shop in 2008.)

In another sign Durham has not lived up to his billing as an aggressive prosecutor, FBI Director Christopher Wray suggested in recent Senate testimony that Durham's team has not interviewed all of the Crossfire members still employed at the bureau. In lieu of face-to-face interviews, he said Durham's investigators have reviewed transcripts of interviews of the agents previously conducted by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the FBI's in-house disciplinary arm.

Recent published reports say Durham is in the process of closing up shop and completing a final report on his findings by the end of the year. Republicans have promised to seize on the report if they win control of the House in November and take back the gavel to key oversight committees on the Hill, along with subpoena power.

Some former colleagues who have worked with Durham and are familiar with his inquiry blame COVID-19 for his relatively few prosecutions and lackluster record. They say pandemic-related shutdowns in 2020 and 2021 set back his investigation by limiting travel, interviews, and grand jury hearings. As a result, they say, the clock ran out on prosecuting a number of potential crimes. The last FISA warrant, which according to the court was illegally obtained, was approved June 29, 2017, which means the five-year federal statute of limitations for that crime expired months ago.

Though Durham hinted in the Sussmann case about investigating a broader "conspiracy" or "joint venture," there are few signs pointing to such a massive undertaking. Bringing a "conspiracy to defraud the government" charge, naming multiple defendants, would require Durham adding staff and office space and beefing up his budget by millions of dollars, the former colleagues said.

According to expenditure statements, Durham continues to operate on a shoestring budget with a skeletal staff compared with his predecessor Mueller's robust operation, which indicted 34 people. And one of the two grand juries Durham used to hear evidence has expired. It recently wrapped up work, apparently without handing down new indictments (though some could be under seal).

"If Durham were building toward an overarching indictment alleging a corrupt conspiracy between the Clinton campaign and the FBI to deceive the court, he would not be charging people with lying to the FBI," former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said.

If there are any investigations still open after Durham retires, they could be handled by U.S. attorneys, the sources said. At least one of Durham's prosecutors works as a trial lawyer in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C.

According to a court exhibit, Joffe "remains a subject" in the Sussmann-related investigation into alleged attempts by federal contractors to defraud the government with false claims about Trump and Russia. Joffe invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify after receiving a grand jury subpoena and has not cooperated with requests for documents. His lawyer did not return phone calls and emails.

The Special Counsel's Office did not respond to requests for comment.

The FBI declined comment for this article, but issued a statement last year saying it "has cooperated fully with Special Counsel Durham's review."

Paul Sperry is an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. He is also a longtime media fellow at Stanfords Hoover Institution. Sperry was previously the Washington bureau chief for Investors Business Daily, and his work has appeared in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Houston Chronicle, among other major publications.

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Durham prosecutes FBI informants, while protecting their handlers - The Highland County Press

Miami-Dade College rose to the challenge of hosting this years Banned Books Week from September 18 to 24. Ostensibly, the purpose of the annual event, which began in 1982, is to celebrate our fundamental right to freedom of expression and draw attention to works of fiction and nonfiction that schools, bookstores, and libraries have decided not to carry because their content is unacceptable to the self-appointed upholders of morality and enforcers of correct opinion.

The crisis is real. Intellectual and creative freedom are under attack these days from both the right and the left, and few causes are as important as defending the right of authors and scholars to write and publish. We need many more events devoted to the preservation and advancement of our liberties.

A look at the works featured in this years Banned Books Week suggests that progressive causes du jourdominated the event. Meanwhile, politically incorrect works containing allegedly insensitive content that got banned, and, in some cases, unbanned in recent months have gotten short shrift.

Some people, very watchful when it comes to threats from the right, refuse to recognize the threat to freedom of expression posed by the left, or simply fail to care if a few dead white male authors and their works go down the memory hole.

The central role of the American Library Association in determining which books, and causes, will feature prominently in Banned Books Week is unmistakable. In an email exchange with Book and Film Globe, Sue Arrowsmith, Miami-Dade Colleges director of media relations, emphasized this point.

Banned Books Week is a national celebration sponsored by the American Library Association. During that week, academic, public, and school libraries across the nation put together activities highlighting challenged books with the purpose of educating everyone about censorship [and] the values of literature. Miami-Dade College, like so many schools in the region and beyond, has participated every year, Arrowsmith stated.

Arrowsmith went on to suggest that the festival goes about promoting banned books in a neutral manner, without favoritism to any message or theme.

We dont necessarily highlight specific books/authors or themes at MDC. We focus on creating activities and events to highlight the importance of reading and engage the student body in conversations, she wrote.

That may all sound well and good. But by the organizers own admission, the selection of books to feature in the event was heavily dependent on lists compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the ALA. And, for its part, that office admits that a high degree of subjectivity goes into the drawing up of the lists and that they are quite far from comprehensive. The offices website states, The lists are based on information from media stories and voluntary reports sent to OIF from communities across the U.S.

In case the point still is not clear, the website further states, The Top 10 lists are only a snapshot of book challenges. Surveys indicate that 82-97% of book challengesdocumented requests to remove materials from schools or librariesremain unreported and receive no media.

Given the methodology here, it is fair to characterize the lists of suppressed books, which determined what titles would feature prominently during Banned Books Week, as lists of those works that individual librarians, booksellers, and others who took it upon themselves to file reports to the OIF would like to see circulate more freely. They are far from neutral or thorough.

In fact, virtually of the titles listed on the OIFs list of Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2021 embrace racial and sexual identity politics, sexual explicitness, and/or an anti-police agenda.

The list for 2020 was slightly more neutral and included a couple of worksHarper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbecks Of Mice and Menthat have fallen afoul of politically correct sensibilities.

But it is clear that the OIF put forward a monochromatic list for 2021 based on subjective criteria. Hence it is no surprise the Banned Books Week Twitter feed, which links to a website run by the ALAs Office for Intellectual Freedom and the Banned Books Week Coalition, retweeted a high volume of content from such left-leaning sources as PEN America, the Authors Guild, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and author Jonathan Friedman.

The heavy preponderance of content from such bodies leaves little doubt that Banned Books Week chose to take an explicitly political stance going beyond a purely objective and neutral defense of intellectual and creative freedom wherever and whenever it may be under attack. A typical retweet is the one of an announcement for a PEN America event in Detroit on September 24, which reads: Join us for a #BannedBooksWeek in-person discussion that celebrates Black gay literature in all of its permutations& offers strategies to push back against escalating book bans driven by anti-Blackness & homophobia.

You will search hard to find tweets or retweets of notifications of events focused on the plight of the authors of politically incorrect content in the current environment. But that doesnt mean that the threat to writers associated, fairly or unfairly, with the values and speech of a less egalitarian past is not real. Brave New World, Of Mice and Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird have come under attack in Florida jurisdictions.

In April 2022, the Miami New Times published lists of books banned in schools in Florida counties since July 2021. The lists established that the school district of Indian River County, one of the wealthiest in the nation, had made Brave New World and Of Mice and Men unavailable, while Palm Beach County suppressed To Kill a Mockingbird. One might expect a banned books fair taking place in Miami to call attention to this travesty.

But opinion is not settled and bad decisions sometimes get reversed. Another resource, the Florida Censorship Action database maintained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, tells us that Brave New World is no longer suppressed in any way in Indian River County and that Of Mice and Men is not banned outright there at this time. Rather, they have restricted the status of the latter work.

According to the same database, To Kill a Mockingbird has since returned, and Bryan Griffin, press secretary for Governor Ron DeSantis, stated in a tweet that the book is not currently banned in Florida but did face censorship in California in 2020 along with other works of literature.

All venues and organizations taking part in Banned Books Week should do their utmost to protest the troubles that To Kill a Mockingbird has faced. That Harper Lees novel underwent even temporary suppression is an outrage exemplifying the solipsistic, illogical mentality of the social justice warriors.

The book may contain a few terms that we in 2022 consider dated and offensive. But the irony of this books suppression by the woke authorities is supreme, for To Kill a Mockingbird offers some of the most eloquent denunciations of racism in any American novel. In his famous courtroom speech in Chapter 20, lawyer Atticus Finch repeatedly decries the evil assumptions that racists in his community make about the character of black citizens. He goes on to argue passionately that people in general, not this or that race or ethnicity, are flawed: There is not a person in this community has not told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.

One wonders what those who ban To Kill a Mockingbird make of the fact that Aaron Sorkin, one of the most outspoken liberals in Hollywood, adapted the novel for the stage in 2018, and that, according to an account by theater critic Kyle Smith in The New Criterion, the plays critique of bigotry and intolerance, and its appeal to our shared humanity, were so powerful and eloquent that they brought members of the audience to tears.

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Not All Banned Books - Book and Film Globe

This is an incredible story from The New York Times about Hollywood censorship. Meg Smaker made a documentary about four Islamic jihadists being de-programmed at a Saudi rehab center. Sundance accepted it. Some who had seen the movie said it was great, but that some right-wing voices might denounce it for humanizing the jihadists. But that's not what happened:

Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.

Sundance leaders reversed themselves and apologized.

Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive director of Jihad Rehab and called it freaking brilliant in an email to Ms. Smaker. Now she disavowed it.

The film landed like a truckload of hate, Ms. Disney wrote in anopen letter.

Ms. Smakers film has become near untouchable, unable to reach audiences. Prominent festivals rescinded invitations, and critics in the documentary world took to social media and pressured investors, advisers and even her friends to withdraw names from the credits. She is close to broke.

What a gutless crapweasel Abigail Disney is. She loved the movie until her cool lefty friends hated it. She is a huge figure in the documentary filmmaking world, so this about-face from her is very consequential.

One person who defends the film is Lorraine Ali, a Muslim who is also a Los Angeles Times critic:

Lorraine Ali, a television critic for The Los Angeles Times who is Muslim,wrotethat the film was a humanizing journey through a complex emotional process of self-reckoning and accountability, and a look at the devastating fallout of flawed U.S. and Saudi policy.

She is dismayed with Sundance.

In the independent film world there is a lot of weaponizing of identity politics, Ms. Ali said in an interview. The film took pains to understand the culture these men came from and molded them. It does a disservice to throw away a film that a lot of people should see.

According to the Times, the lefty Muslim critics and their white allies demand that the film tell a political story that blames Western oppression for turning them into jihadists. These people are against art, are against truth-telling. Read on:

When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic,wroteJude Chehab, aLebanese American documentarian, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isnt. Point blank.

Ms. Disney, the former champion, wrote, I failed, failed and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are.

Her apology and that of Sundance shook the industry. The South by Southwest and San Francisco festivals rescinded invitations.

Jihad Turk, former imam of Los Angeless largest mosque, was baffled. In December, his friend Tim Disney brother of Abigail invited him to a screening.

My first instinct, he said, was Oh, not another film on jihad and Islam. Then I watched and it was introspective and intelligent. My hope is that there is a courageous outlet that is not intimidated by activists and their too narrow views.

This is infuriating. Who the hell do these people think they are to believe that their ethnic background gives them the right to tell artists what stories they can and cannot tell, and how they have to tell it? I know that's a naive question in 2022, but we can't stop asking it. Think of all the good films that will never get made because cowards like Abigail Disney yield to left-wing censors.

And think too about who these politically correct filmmakers are making movies for: the kind of narrow audiences who want to see Islamic terrorists as sympathetic figures, victims of Mighty Whitey. Think of the kind of narrow, rigid minds that only want to see movies that reinforce their point of view, and who not only don't want to see anything that challenges that point of view, but don't want anyone else to see that kind of movie either.

We're dealing with something similar, but far less consequential, in Baton Rouge. A black undergraduate at LSU is angry at some 1930s-era murals in one of the academic buildings on campus. "RACISSSSSSST!" she says. More from the Baton Rouge Advocate:

Her request that LSU remove murals from the walls of Allen Hall isn't new, but compared to those who have raised questions previously, Alexia Kimbleis reaching a much-wider audiencewhen she asks that the university take down paintings that show Black people laboring in agricultural fields while White people work in more comfortable settings.

She highlighted the muralson TikTok this month, drawing nearly a half-million views and more than 90,000 likes.

I wanted to draw emotion and capture the essence of what its like to be a Black student at a (predominantly White instituion)," she said. "Not every Black student can attend an HBCU school, nor do they want to, but they deserve a place here. They should be accepted here, they shouldnt be judged and have this constant reminder that they dont belong here.

Umm ... what? How does a historically accurate depiction of agricultural life in an earlier era of Louisiana history telegraph to a black student in 2022 that she "doesn't belong" at the university? And guess what: the murals don't depict slavery. They depict agricultural life in Louisiana in the 1930s. But that detail doesn't bother Miss Thin Skin:

Those showing obvious differences between Black and White people remain. For example, Blacks are depicted laboring over sugar cane and cotton; White people are shown in scientific settings.

"Walking on campus and having that be one of the first things I saw going into my classroom, it really took me aback," Kimble said.

She wants there to have been black scientists in Louisiana at the time? Well, that would have been a great thing, but they did not exist here. Does she think farm labor is somehow degrading? Who on earth would be offended by this, except someone who is bound and determined to be offended? It is a great thing that we have made so much social progress in the last century since the murals were painted that now there are black scientists in this state -- and black people doing every kind of work. But that's not how things were in the 1930s. Alexia Kimble wants to airbrush history.

What's so telling about the story is that nobody is willing to defend the murals on the record. They know how this goes in our culture: you speak up for this work of art, you'll be denounced as a racist, and who knows what doors might close to you? If the reporter challenged Kimble to defend her views, it doesn't really come across in the piece. It reads like a story written by a reporter who thinks the black student's criticism of this mural needs no defense. To be fair, if he tried but couldn't get anybody to defend the murals on the record, that's not his fault. But on evidence of what's presented, he doesn't seem to have challenged Kimble.

Take a look at this video LSU produced nine years ago, featuring a Florence-based art restorer, talking about the history of these frescoes, and the care that went into creating them:

Yet Alexia Kimble seems to know none of this history. She simply gazes upon the murals, decides that they offend her, and is now leading a campaign to destroy them. This is barbarism: the idiotic destruction of things you can't understand, or refuse to understand, because you can.

If you look at her TikTok page, you see that Alexia Kimble has a Rich Inner Life. She's an obese pansexual who loves to film herself lip-synching. For example:

We are not dealing with Stokely Carmichael here.

In this screenshot from one of her TikTok videos about the murals, we learn that this Young Scholar hasn't bothered to discover that the triggering murals don't depict slaves. Seriously: she's trying to have the university destroy a work of art that she has not troubled to understand:

She told a Baton Rouge TV station:

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I just want to let every Black person know that goes to LSU or any PWI, you have every right to be here, you have every right to make this place comfortable for you, said Kimble.

Of course you have every right to be there, but you don't have every right to bully people into accommodating your every desire, and calling them racist if they don't. It doesn't look like there are plans by LSU to yield to this whiny child's demands, which is good. But whenever institutions do, they teach young people that the way to get what they want in the world is to complain endlessly about minor things, and to expect those in authority to give them what they want.

It frustrates me in part because I looked at those murals every day I went to class in Allen Hall in the 1980s. It never once occurred to me that they depicted anything degrading about black people, or made white people look especially good. I thought that they were what, in fact, they are: period murals in the WPA style illustrating what life looked like in Louisiana in that era. They are beautiful. But left-wing people won't let us have beautiful things. They demand that we airbrush history. Whether it's cloddish student activists like Alexia Kimble, or jelly-spined zillionaire film executives like Abigail Disney, these people hate history, they hate art, and they hate free thought. And, of course, the irresponsible local media -- the Advocate reporter, and the TV station -- simply parrot Kimble's claims as if they had merit.

Originally posted here:
Attack Of The Left-Wing Philistines! - The American Conservative

To the Editor:

Abortion is healthcare. As an ob/gyn, I help usher women safely through the joys and sorrows of childbearing, including abortion care. Since the June Supreme Court decision, state legislators are free to dictate the medical care I and my colleagues across the nation provide, however misinformed or politically motivated they may be.

Women in conservative states are already feeling the impact, even when seeking care for miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. At this time, no state explicitly restricts care for these conditions. However, their treatment often includes the exact same procedures and medications used to provide elective abortion. There are already many reports of pharmacies withholding medications for the treatment of miscarriage.

In Texas, any layperson may sue if they even suspect an illegal abortion. Physicians in some states may face extensive legal fees, loss of their medical license and even prison time. When doctors and hospitals are forced to weigh factors other than the safety of their patients, like the appearance of impropriety or financial risk, the patients suffer.

Conservative legislatures across the country have repeatedly proposed and sometimes passed bills with problematic and incorrect medical statements. For example, right wing candidates are touting abortion bans from the moment of fertilization. This phrasing puts the legality of IVF, IUD contraceptive devices and Plan B type morning after pills in jeopardy. Many politicians profess their disdain for late term or partial birth abortions. Both terms are purely political and have no place or meaning in actual abortion care.

A 2020 Ohio bill even proposed physicians should have to reimplant ectopic pregnancies - a literal scientific impossibility that left every ob/gyn I know either laughing or shaking their head in horror because the lawmaker had clearly not bothered to discuss this sweeping and life altering proposal with any doctor.

Another favorite talking point is the exception for the life and health of the mother. In all my years of medical training and practice Ive never been taught about the mythical line that, when crossed, means there is an official threat to the patients life. How much bleeding is enough? How high the fever? How many seizures? What if they attempted suicide?

What about delayed cancer treatment? Im still early in my career, but Ive encountered every one of these tragic scenarios and many more.

A woman is 14 times more likely to die during childbirth than during an elective abortion. For many that number is much higher. How dying does she need to be? Which begs the question, who decides? Surely it shouldnt be the politician hoping to score points by casually spouting medical nonsense, ignorant of the devastating real world consequences.

He doesnt have to look into the eyes of the woman who narrowly survived her last delivery, the woman whose baby wont ever leave the NICU, the woman whose children already go to bed hungry, the woman whose partner beats her senseless and tells her she doesnt get a choice. Thats my job, apparently.

The science of medicine is far from exact. Thats especially true for the dynamic, wondrous, but sometimes perilous process of pregnancy and childbirth. While wed like things to be black and white, the reality is innumerable shades of grey. Decisions surrounding pregnancy, pregnancy complications and pregnancy loss are complicated and deeply personal.

I sincerely hope the people of Iowa and nationwide can recognize this and vote accordingly.

Emily Garrett, MDEverett, WA

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Letter to the Editor by Emily Garrett, MD | The Standard Newspaper - Waukon Standard