Now that dog-fighting, dog-drowning Mike Vick has expressed televised contrition, received punishment, been washed in the blood of the Media, redeemed and welcomed back into the fold – yes, he’s a born again athlete, 21st century style – it’s time to hear from you, gentle congregants, and for Vick’s supporters to put their doggies where their mouths are.  And really, Obama? Really? A contragulatory call?  I still heart you Barack but please. This is only going to come back to bite you (pun intended) because MV’s not through yet; he might be done with dogs but that leaves spouses, girlfriends, kids…Yes, this is all only my opinion but I am a registered, licensed armchair psychiatrist and I know chronic, psychotic behavior when I see it, and I know it doesn’t go away magically.

[images via mugshots.com and blackyouthproject.com]

If you can’t beat ‘em, harvest their organs. I was already appalled that Bill Clinton decided in 1999 to have the US serve as Osama Bin Laden’s air force and support the Kosovo Liberation Army (AP/USA Today, 1999), a terrorist organization which funded its arms and training through the heroin smuggling trade (FAIR, 1999) and which forcibly recruited  some of  Kosovo’s young men (The Independent, UK, 1999) to take up arms and join them in their war of secession from Yugoslavia,  and I was appalled that Clinton had used as his pretext for bombing Europe for the first time since WW II the KLA-faked “mass grave” at Racak (Toronto Sun/Centre for Peace in the Balkans, 2001) . I was equally appalled by the US media’s one-sided coverage of the Kosovo conflict because it suited our own geopolitical plans in Europe. With the USSR gone, Yugoslavia was the last of the Eastern Bloc, and communism in Europe simply had to go.

On the other hand one can hardly blame any Albanian or Bosnian Muslim or Croatian Catholic for wanting to break free of  violent Serbian Orthodox Christian ultra-nationalism under gangsters like Milosevic and his immediate predecessors, but I didn’t know just how ugly the fundraising had been within the KLA’s so-called liberation movement.  Often in war it’s hard to choose the “good” side and justify in your heart which innocent civilians are the most expendable, eh? (see Tesla’s Letters).

But that’s what the media’s for, to get us all whipped up and cheering for “our” team like the whole thing’s a big football game, and to keep us from examining matters too closely. Even now the US and its Western European allies are bent on suppressing some dirty little truths about the Kosovo conflict, and once again the mainstream media has gone missing, aside from the Washington Post so far.   To bad Julian Assange wasn’t around in ’99.  And now here’s the story from Julia Goren at the Huffington Post…

Coverup on Serbian-Organ Harvesting: ‘Pro-American’ Kosovo Prime Minister Thaci Oversaw the Scheme

by Julia Goren, huffingtonpost.com

Switzerland has gagged one its Ambassadors from promoting a controversial [2008] book about war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Carla Del Ponte, who prosecuted crimes at The Hague [and authored the 2009 book Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity], claims some current Kosovo leaders once sold vital organs from Serb prisoners…

The Hunt by Carla Del Ponte

The book, The Hunt: Me and War Criminals, was due to be launched in Milan. It details atrocities committed by Albanians against Kosovo Serbs in the late 1990s and says that some of those currently in power in Kosovo made money selling Serb organs.

…Del Ponte’s book tells, in particular, about the obstructions she had to surmount “in her attempts to prosecute people guilty of the war crimes, committed during the armed conflicts in the Balkans in the nineties”… “Carla Del Ponte’s book on her work as Chief Prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal contains statements which are impermissible for a representative of the government of Switzerland,” Spokesman for the Swiss Foreign Department Jean-Philippe Jeannerat stated…

Kosovo's Prime Minister/alleged organ harvesting entrepreneur Thaci

The Kosovo Liberation Army’s veteran leader, Hashim Thaci, now Kosovo’s prime minister, in the mid-1990s spent time in Switzerland, a centre for radical Albanian emigre circles, where he mysteriously acquired funds for the KLA.

Serbian press reported the organ scheme worth about four million euros was (continue reading…)

The modern wellness professional?

Welcome to YogaLeaks.  So the other day I’m sitting on the bus from Borough 6 to Borough 1 minding my own business looking over people’s shoulders at what they’re reading, and there’s a woman sitting in front of me patiently writing something over and over again in a lined composition book.  I can’t make out the words but I can tell it’s the same sentence repeating line after line.  She flips through the book, presumably to check her count so far, and I see that it goes on for pages and pages and pages.

I subtly lean forward and squint harder at her neat cursive, and see that it reads

again and again and again.  It must have been hundreds of times. This is clearly a major, life-changing project for her. Now, I’ve listened to Coast to Coast AM enough times to know witchcraft when I see it. This was a textual version of a rain dance; that or she’s following up on a tip from some entrepreneurial self-help book. 

I am  struck by the small amount of money. Why not make it a million?  I infer that she’s a simple, modest witch who sets realistic goals for the supernatural. But what strikes me most is that it doesn’t say “make” or “earn,” but receive. “I will receive $10,000,” as though the universe will be magically granting it if she writes it down enough times, sort of a secular version of legendary huckster-minister Reverend Ike’s money prayers (and if you’re ever visiting New York, forget St. Patrick’s Cathedral. You haven’t lived until you’ve visited Reverend Ike’s church uptown.)

A few minutes later I check in on her again and watch her flip through her many, many pages of money mantra to a section in the back with notes, apparently taken during a seminar.  Here are the snippets I was able to catch:

free of strategy

free of judgement – write down some words you don’t like hearing (free of judgement)

 concretize to actualize – make it real

my goals:

have a thriving home practice: 10 clients per week

establish a network of other wellness professionals

be seen as an authority on any topic

I’m struck by that last line, which is similar to her money mantra; not “become” an authority on any topic, which is absurd enough, but “be seen as an authority.”  This must be some entrepreneurial course on how to hoodwink people.  Ironic that she’s training to be a wellness professional.  Is she perhaps a yoga or Pilates instructor?

Beware, wellness consumers.  Even new age practictioners, even your friendly, neighborhood Namaste-spouting yoga teacher,  just might be working an angle, or more to the point, working you like a limbered up voodoo doll.

[image via potentwealthsystem.com]

Oh well, MTV Desi has me pegged.  They’re exactly right about me but at least they acknowledge that I also acknowledge that I am one more gawking American.

And I can’t complain about being named an honorary Desi, sort of.

New York Press Delves Into the Paan Game
by Abdullah

When I first saw the headline “Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater” on the cover of this week’s New York Press, naturally, I grabbed a copy and asked myself the question you’re asking yourself right now; What the hell is the New York Press?   Well, it’s a paper that’s running a cover story about something inherently Desi that’s breaking into mainstream culture. And why not? It didn’t take long for Americans to adopt the more… CONT’D AT MTVDESI.COM>> 

The Asia Society also commented and was a tad less snarky than MTV (but who am I to complain about being snarky in a blog post from time to time, eh?).

A Paean to Paan
by Aliya Sabharwal

…From describing his initiation into the practice of paan-chewing to drawing interesting comparisons to the tobacco-dipping culture of his Appalachian relatives, Stanley seems to have seriously and diligently researched this “local” practice. But the result is a riot for those familiar with paan chewing or chewers, if only for the novelty of reading an eloquent homage to the substance.  CONT’D AT ASIASOCIETY.ORG>>

Well, now it’s just too much. My paan habit has also made the celebrity gossip page of India Abroad, the major newspaper for Indian expats around the world, getting top billing over Tom Cruise’s tweets to Anil Kapoor (see p. 6).  I’m truly honored and humbled.

Jeffrey Stanley is Addicted to Paan…CONT’D AT INDIA ABROAD>>

[images via mtvdesi.com, asiasociety.org, and indiaabroad-digital.com]

I heart paan

I bought tobacco paan from this walla near the Belur Math monastery along the banks of the Ganges in West Bengal, India.

This week’s New York Press, ”New York’s Plummy Weekly Newspaper,” cover story is my monologue thinly disguised as an essay, ‘Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater’, the title a loose parody of Thomas de Quincey’s scandalous 1821 memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

Enjoy the article, go to your nearest Indian grocer and enjoy some meeta paan, and if you’re craving more dope on the delicacy here’s a short clip of me ordering it from a paan walla just across from the ancient Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves in Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Orissa in eastern India, this past January (footage courtesy of documentary filmmaker David Gaynes).

*

And the article…

Confessions of a White, Middle-Aged Paan Eater

JEFFREY STANLEY is addicted to what may arguably be India’s most disgusting export

I pull my hat low as I pound the rain-slicked sidewalks of Curry Hill around noon on a frigid November weekday. I look about furtively as I walk up Lexington, stopping outside of a DVD shop before I dart inside. There I meet my sugar man, a Punjabi who only goes by the nom de commerce Arora.  By now I know his real name, but he likes to go by the one-word moniker.  I’m happy to…CONT’D AT NYPRESS.COM>>

[IHeartPaan logo, paan walla photo and video are property of me. Logo via nypress.com]