Immigrants To The United States

"Another very important feature revealed in Sangam literature is the conception of the unity of the land-mass stretching from the Himalayas in the north to Kanyakumari in the south. In at least two sources, Tamil kings were praised as having had supremacy amidst all the chieftains who reigned in the land between ‘the Himalayan abode of Gods’ in the north and Kumari in the south and the lands which have the sea as the frontier. 46 The northern limit of this cultural unity is often referred to as the Himalayas. Ganges in floods, as well as ships travelling on the Ganges, is among the scenes depicted in Sangam literature. Pilgrims from all over India coming to have holy baths at Kanyakumari as well as Rameswaram (Koti) have been mentioned in Sangam literature. Speaking of Himalayas and Kanyakumari in association, is another hallmark of many Sangam poems. Apart from such spiritual-cultural unity of India depicted in Sangam poems, there is at least one poem that refers to the political unity of India. This poem, from Puranannuru, speaks of a time when the whole of India ‘from Kanyakumari to Himalayas’ was ruled as one nation, unifying the diverse geographical zones of ‘plateaus, mountains, forests and human habitations’ by kings of the solar dynasty, and identifies Tamil kings as descendants of the solar dynasty."

"Because the assumption of Mosaic ethnology was well established, it was important to secure both families of languages within that framework. Ellis claimed that Tamil is connected with Hebrew and also with ancient Arabic. Their logic was that since William Jones considered Sanskrit to be the language of Ham, and other scholars claimed that Sanskrit descended from Noah's oldest son, Japheth, by the process of elimination the remaining son of Noah, Shem, must be the ancestor of the Dravidian people. This made Dravidians a branch of the Scythians or in the same family as Jews."

"His work had far-reaching consequences. It established the theological foundation for Dravidian separatism from Hinduism, backed by the Church. It was accompanied by Christian usurpation of many of the classical art-forms of South India. The concept of dissociating Tamils from mainstream Hindu spirituality provided Caldwell an ethical rationale for Christian proselytization. Eighty years after his death, a statue of Caldwell was erected in Chennai's Marina Beach alongside the statue of another missionary scholar, G.U. Pope. It is a major landmark in that city today."

"The story that places the Apostle St Thomas in India in 53 CE is a lingering medieval myth. 1 It implicitly includes colonial and racial narratives; for instance, that the peaceful apostle ministered to the dark-skinned Indians, who turned on him and killed him. This myth, however, has no historical basis at all. Nevertheless, it has been shaped by various Christian churches into a powerful tool for the appropriation of Hindu culture in Tamil Nadu, by giving credit to 'Thomas Christianity' for everything positive in the south Indian culture, while blaming Hinduism for whatever is to be denigrated. It further serves as a tool to carve out Tamils from the common body of Indian culture and spirituality."

"But the catalyst who is credited with the construction of the 'Dravidian race' was a missionary-scholar from the Anglican Church. His name was Bishop Robert Caldwell (1814–91), an evangelist for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, who combined the linguistic theory of Ellis with a strong racial narrative. He proposed the existence of the Dravidian race in his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Race, which enjoys extreme popularity with Dravidianists to this day. Bishop Caldwell proposed that the Dravidians were in India before the Aryans, but got cheated by the Brahmins, who were the cunning agents of the Aryan. He argued that the simple-minded Dravidians were kept in shackles by Aryans through the exploitation of religion. Thus, the Dravidians needed to be liberated by Europeans like him. He proposed the complete removal of Sanskrit words from Tamil. Once the Dravidian mind would be free of the superstitions imposed by Aryans, Christian evangelization would reap the souls of Dravidians."

"We interviewed Pierre Kory on my channel. It got almost million views in a few days. Then YouTube sent us notice banning it... What a shame they cannot face the evidence and experience of an accomplished doctor."

"It matters little whether such ideas have any basis in fact. Once an idea becomes entrenched in the institutional machinery and eventually in the collective imagination of the public, it can be used for all sorts of exploitation."

"While Deivanayagam was busy fabricating textual interpretations, the archbishop of Mylapore was manufacturing archeological evidence to prove the myth of St Thomas. In 1975, he hired a Christian convert from Hinduism to fabricate epigraphic evidence proving the visit of St Thomas to South India. When this hired gun failed, the archbishop sued him in court. The Illustrated Weekly of India raised questions alleging corruption in this case."

"There are institutions which study India academically for the purpose of evangelism and have formal links with Indian evangelical institutions. All these factors … create a strong population-base in India that will be financially, institutionally and emotionally dependent upon the West’s right-wing. … both state and non-state players—invest in building institutional infrastructural logistics in India, for effective control at social and political levels. A base for Western domination is being effectively constructed within India through evangelical organizations. The goal is to spread a fundamentalist kind of Christianity and create a population of believers with strong emotional bonding and dependence on the West. The Christian right in the United States is particularly active and ambitious in this regard."

"Wikipedia biases in my entry (just as one example) which it prevents being corrected. It is re-colonizing Indians."

"India is the world largest territory, both geographically and by population, that is up for grabs by the expansionist, predatory ideological movements in the world."

"India's postmodernist scholars who brag about their Western training and connections are encouraged to deconstruct Indian civilization, showing it to be a scourge against the oppressed. The deconstruction of India by Indian thinkers has a destabilizing effect which invites a new kind of colonialism. The most fashionable kind of difference being championed by Indian postmodernists is of the subalterns 'from below', seen as the oppressed underclass. But many of these oppressed minorities have been taken over by global nexuses (churches, Chinese Maoists and Islamists, to name only the major ones) with the result that they are not truly autonomous and independent but satellites serving a new kind of remote-controlled colonialism. Thus, the postmodern posture on difference has had the overall effect of causing native cultural identities to become vulnerable to imperialism – which is exactly the opposite of what the postmodernists claim they want to achieve."

"Unfortunately, Hindu nationalism today sometimes seems to be mimicking the worst things about the West, by becoming obsessively history-centric. But this is different than the past of Hinduism, and is atypical amongst Hindus even today."

"I believe in science, I believe in evidence, if there are other treatments that the modern medicine doesn't support those should also be brought to the table, whether its ayurveda, whether its Naturopathy... and should be evaluated in clinical trials."

"Meanwhile, in a very famous Hindu pilgrimage center in the forests of Kerala, a Catholic priest proclaimed that his parish had unearthed a stone cross established by Thomas in 57 CE. The location was close to the ancient Mahadeva temple at Nilakkal, in the sacred eighteen hills of the deity of Sabarimala. 18 Soon, a church with a five-foot granite cross was erected and consecrated by top Catholic clergy, and daily prayers were started. 1Meanwhile, in a very famous Hindu pilgrimage center in the forests of Kerala, a Catholic priest proclaimed that his parish had unearthed a stone cross established by Thomas in 57 CE. The location was close to the ancient Mahadeva temple at Nilakkal, in the sacred eighteen hills of the deity of Sabarimala. 18 Soon, a church with a five-foot granite cross was erected and consecrated by top Catholic clergy, and daily prayers were started."

"It is through Western categories, and hence the Western 'gaze', that the people who constitute the Judeo-Christian traditions see the world. This gives the Western perspective a de facto status as arbiter of what is considered universally true. When another civilization is the object of such a gaze, it becomes relative and no longer universal. Indeed, its depiction as the alien makes it interesting precisely because it is particular and not universal."

"He then goes a step further and briefly imposes a Freudian reading on the text, a reading outdated and crude even in the current Western context of cultural criticism. He says the depiction of 'the other' in Ramayana can be understood as a projection of the unfulfilled sexual desires of traditional Indians. .... The motive of applying a totally alien framework, viz., the Freudian one, to a traditional Hindu text is something that is questionable."

"Mara Beller has probably succeeded in making what may well be the first truly penetrating assessment of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Physicists have been too much in awe of the mystique of their topic to have done anything comparable. [...] I am sorry if this role reversal of old and new is an anticlimactic answer to three quarter century of Copenhagen riddle. Mara Beller made me do it!"

"Shapin’s admirable essay misses, however, the point of Mara Beller’s piece in Physics Today (1998). Beller is not urging a more thoughtful attitude on physicists by pointing out that the wisdom of Bohr would sound like nonsense if it came from sociology or cultural studies. Quite the opposite. She is denouncing the great icons of quantum physics for uttering what she takes to be nonsense, and she is urging scientists to clean up their own act before they get on with the business of mocking others."

"By using only simple analogies and intuitively appealing, yet misleading, metaphorical images, Bohr established supposedly necessary connections between acausality, wave-particle duality and the impossibility of an objective unified description in the quantum domain. One needed no technical knowledge of quantum mechanics to read Bohr's operational analysis of mutually exclusive experimental arrangements consisting of bolts, springs, rods and diaphragms. While publicly abstaining from criticizing Bohr, many of his contemporaries did not share his peculiar insistence on the impossibility of devising new nonclassical concepts-an insistence that put rigid strictures on the freedom to theorize. It is on this issue that the silence of other physicists had the most far-reaching consequences. This silence created and sustained the illusion that one needed no technical knowledge of quantum mechanics to fully comprehend its revolutionary epistemological lessons. Many postmodernist critics of science have fallen prey to this strategy of argumentation and freely proclaimed that physics itself irrevocably banished the notion of objective reality."

"In an exchange several months after his New York Review of Books article, Weinberg admitted that the founders of quantum theory had been wrong in their "apparent subjectivism," and declared that "we know better now." What exactly do we know better now? Do we know better that one should not infer from the physical to the political realm and if yes, why? Or do we know better that the "orthodox" interpretation of quantum physics the one that confidently announced the final overthrow of causality and the ordinary conception of reality is not the only possible interpretation, and that, ultimately, it might not even be the surviving one?"

"The opponents of the postmodernist cultural studies of science condude confidently from the Sokal affair that "the emperors ... have no clothes." But who, exactly, are all those naked emperors? At whom should we be laughing?"

"While Einstein's belief in an objective reality is similar to that of Weinberg and Sokal, his arguments for his conception of reality are not. In fact, Einstein was no "naive realist," despite such caricaturing of his stand by the Copenhagen orthodoxy. He ridiculed the "correspondence" view of reality that many scientists accept uncritically. Einstein fully realized that the world is not presented to us twice-first as it is, and second, as it is theoretically described-so we can compare our theoretical "copy" with the "real thing." The world is given to us only once - through our best scientific theories. So Einstein deemed it necessary to ground his concept of objective reality in the invariant characteristics of our best scientific theories."

"We find ourselves in agreement with most of the points made in Mara Beller's article "The Sokal hoax: At whom are we laughing?". … Beller is right to point out that this quasi-religious attitude can arise in any field, even in physics. Thus, many physicists have for years blindly repeated Bohr's and Heisenberg's views on the foundations of quantum mechanics, without having a clear idea of what they meant. We are pleased to note that the grip of the so-called Copenhagen orthodoxy is weakening and that physicists are beginning to consider alternative views on foundational questions with an open mind."

"Like the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, whom Steven Weinberg attacked in his 1996 New York Review of Books article on Sokal's hoax, Bohr was notorious for the obscurity of his writing. Yet physicists relate to Derrida's and Bohr's obscurities in fundamentally different ways: to Derrida's with contempt, to Bohr's with awe. Bohr's obscurity is attributed, time and again, to a "depth and subtlety" that mere mortals are not equipped to comprehend."

"Astonishing statements, hardly distinguishable from those satirized by Sokal, abound in the writings of Bohr; Heisenberg, Pauli, Born and Jordan. And they are not just casual, incidental remarks."

"Indeed, in 1998, after the physicist Alan Sokal mocked humanists for delving into physics to support their ideas in a way that seemed ignorant at best and zany at worst – in what has come to be known as “Sokal’s hoax” – historian Mara Beller published an article in Physics Today entitled “The Sokal hoax: at whom are we laughing?”. She cited remarks by Bohr – but also by Heisenberg and Pauli – to make the point that in this respect physicists could sometimes be as zany as humanists, and there is no neat way to distinguish between the two."

"I read the Beller article in Physics Today. In fact, I’ve read several of her articles before: she writes very well. She of course has a point about Bohr’s intractable language; I’ve spent many hours myself trying to make some sense of it all. To the people with less patience than I, I’m sure it’s not obvious that they should struggle to find some meaning there. That’s exactly why someone has to get in and say something reasonable about (a modernday version of) the “Copenhagen interpretation” before things get out of hand."

"Several readers have asked me for Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics. As best I can remember, they are: 1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best. 2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing. 3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually IS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies – e.g.the postwar British Secret Service."

"Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay."

"On political matters basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumour at a high political or police level."

"One good rule is that the language in Soviet secret documents ordering that action be taken is usually valid, while other information may be mere Party-line myth—as with the 1933 secret instructions to blockade the Ukraine and the Kuban to prevent famine victims escaping northward. The operational order was intended to be obeyed, and it was. The explanation given was false: that the peasants were acting on instructions of Socialist Revolutionaries and the Polish intelligence service."

"I told you so, you fucking fools."

"He became the first anesthesiologist to experiment with the segmental epidural; he pinpointed exactly which portion of the spine needed to be anesthetized during labor... He became an outspoken advocate for expertise in obstetric anesthesiology, complaining in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1985 that it was an old custom to assign the least experienced anesthetist and the most antiquated equipment to the maternity ward. ...he observed that interns, residents, and nurses with no training were often ordered to administer anesthesia in delivery rooms at the last minute, a situation that would never be tolerated in the operating room. Bonica urged the creation of twenty-four-hour anesthesia services dedicated to maternity wards, unheard of then, but fairly routine today."

"Bonica... was the first to treat pain as a disease all its own, using the multiple disciplines of neurology, orthopedics, psychology, and physical therapy, along with alternative therapies such as acupuncture. I was captivated by Bonica's ability to successfully treat a multitude of patients whose pain had previously confounded doctors for years. His book revealed how, with dedication and the proper tools, pain could be eiliminated, even if the primary illness remained. This was revolutionary in the 1940s, and it was still considered revolutionary, fifty years later."

"Anesthesiologist John Bonica faced one of those life-threatening scenarios when his wife, Emma, gave birth to their first child in 1943. Aware that anesthesiologists avoided obstetrics, Bonica personally trained the chief obstetric resident at St. Vincent's in New York in anticipation of Emma's labor. When she was ready to deliver, the chief resident was performing a cesarean section. ...To his dismay, Bonica discovered that the obstetrician wanted to avoid anesthesia. ...But even this wary doctor believed that a small amount of ether was necessary... The nervous intern... administered too much ether too quickly. ...Bonica pushed the intern aside and stepped in to save the lives of his wife and baby. From that unsettling moment on, the development of safe obstetric anesthesia was all-important to Bonica."

"In 1946, Dr. John Bonica began the first multidisciplinary pain center in Tacoma, Washington, based out of a private practice. It arose from his recognition that chronic pain was optimally treated by a team of specialists. For the first time, patients suffering pain were routinely evaluated by different medical specialties, physical therapists, and psychiatrists. ...Other multidisciplinary pain programs began to emerge around the country, carrying forward the original Bonica model."

"John Bonica, himself an army surgeon during World War II, recognized the gross inadequacy of managing war injuries and other painful states of veterans with the existing unidisciplinary approaches. This led him to propose the concept of multidisciplinary, multimodal management of chronic pain, including behavioral evaluation and treatment. Bonica also highlighted the fact that pain of all kinds was being undertreated; his work had born fruit in that he is considered the "father of pain," and he was the catalyst for the formation of many established national and international pain organizations. ...As a result of his work, the American Pain Society (APS) and the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) have been formed, are still active, and continue to lead in pain research and pain management. Bonica's lasting legacy is The Management of Pain..."

"The first pain management systems were set up in the 1940s and 1950s and initially focused on chronic pain and palliative care in the UK. Although palliative care services dealt with more than pain they did bring to bear a whole systems approach to the problems which eventually influenced other types of pain management services. Both these services were led by charismatic figures, such as Dame Cicely Saunders in the UK and Dr John Bonica in the USA, who advocated a multidisciplinary and multiprofessional approach to pain management. However, the reality was that historically these service arose locally out of special interest rather than any coherent strategic planning."

"It has been thirty years since John Bonica, the great anesthesia-based pain educator, expressed concern that pain was not well controlled because of the failure of physicians to apply available knowledge."

"It was a summer day in 1941. The circus had just arrived in the tiny town of Brookfield, New York. Spectators flocked to see the wire-walkers, the tramp clowns -- if they were lucky, the human cannonball. They also came to see the strongman, Johnny "Bull" Walker, a brawny bully who'd pin you for a dollar. ...Now, the strongman hadn't told anyone, but he was actually a third-year medical student. He toured with the circus during summers to pay tuition ...over the next five decades, he'd draw on these dueling identities to forge a whole new way to think about pain. It would change modern medicine; so much so, that decades later, Time magazine would call him pain relief's founding father."

"Right around D-Day, Bonica showed up to Madigan Army Medical Center, near Tacoma. At 7,700 beds, it was one of the largest army hospitals in America. Bonica was in charge of all pain control there. He was only 27. ... Bonica tracked down all the specialists at his hospital -- surgeons, neurologists, psychiatrists, others. And he tried to get their opinions on his patients. It took too long, so he started organizing group meetings over lunch. It would be like a tag team of specialists going up against the patient's pain. No one had ever focused on pain this way before."

"John Bonica was an anesthesiologist and is recognized as the father of pain management, a field that has now evolved into the well-recognized medical specialty called Pain Medicine. After completing residency in 1944, Bonica joined the United States Army and was appointed Chief of Anesthesiology at Michigan Army Medical Center in Fort Lewis, Washington. For the next three years, he gained first hand experience while treating painful injuries in World War II veterans. As an anesthesiologist, Bonica found that the tools at his disposal, opioid analgesics and peripheral nerve blocks using local anesthetics, were just a small part of what was needed to adequately diagnose and treat patients with complex, chronic painful disorders. He went on to pioneer the concept of bringing multiple medial specialists together to evaluate patients and and construct a comprehensive treatment plan for each patient. Thus, the multidisciplinary approach to pain management was born."

"Bonica's years of wrestling caught up to him. ...Still in his mid-50s, he suffered severe osteoarthritis. Over the next 20 years he'd have 22 surgeries, including four spine operations, and hip replacement after hip replacement. He could barely raise his arm, turn his neck. He needed aluminum crutches to walk. His friends and former students became his doctors. ... Already a workaholic, he worked even more -- 15- to 18-hour days. Healing others became more than just his job, it was his own most effective form of relief."

"Bonica, the anesthesiologist and former pro wrestler, had founded the clinic. He wrote a classic pain-management textbook from what he learned. ...Later, his disciple, Dr. John Loeser, expanded Bonica's clinic. Hundreds of clinics followed across the country. But insurance companies gradually stopped paying for the services that made the clinics multidisciplinary. Prescription pills were easier and cheaper, and at least for a while they worked well. In 1998 Loeser resigned as the multidisciplinary clinic was marginalized at the school that had invented the idea. A decade later, [Alex] Cahana said, "it was as if [the clinic] didn't exist. It was a metaphor for what happened to multidisciplinary pain management."

"Willard Fordyce, working with physician John Bonica, reconceptualized subjective ( and therefore unreachable) "pain" into observable and measurable "pain behaviors," and showed that these respond to reinforcement contingencies just like all other behaviors. Fordyce and Bonica's program at the University of Washington was the first modern, interdisciplinary, and effective pain clinic."

"John Bonica, the indefatigable champion of the multidisciplinarity of pain, took heart at the new interest generated by the gate control method. Since 1960, he had influenced a generation of young anesthesiologists, who were trained as fellows at the University of Washington... He also collected the names of researchers and clinicians interested in pain and had begun correspondences with many of them. Between 1969 and 1975, this evangelical work bore fruit, when Bonica was invited by the Japanese Ministry of Health and by corresponding agencies in several European and Latin American nations to consult on the development of pain clinics and facilities. In May, 1973, he brought 350 pain researchers together in the Seattle suburb of Issaquah for 3 days of papers and discussion and gained the group's approval to launch an international, interdisciplinary professional organization devoted to pain research and management. The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) was formally incorporated the following year, and the first issue of the journal, Pain... was sent to members in January 1975."

"The practical turn in modern pain therapy is primarily traced back to American anesthesiologist John Bonica. In the early 1950s, he first tried to found the management of pain on the methods of regional anaesthesia. In 1953, he published a book... Focusing on regional anaesthesia, it was intended to list all known options for treating pain. ...regional anaesthesia alone is not the way to obtain regular therapeutic success in cases of chronic pain. However... it started a move toward detachment from the components of cultural theories that, while suitable for wordy explorations of chronic pain, only considered the statements of patients in a distanced manner, in practice leaving the patients to themselves with their pain."

"Pioneering pain researcher John J. Bonica (1990) believed that being rewarded for pain behaviors is a key factor that transforms acute pain into chronic pain. According to Bonica, people who receive attention, sympathy, relief from normal responsibilities, and disability compensation for their injuries and pain behaviors are more likely to develop chronic pain than are people who have similar injury but receive fewer rewards. Consistent with Bonica's hypothesis, headache patients report more pain behaviors and greater pain intensity when their spouses or significant others respond to pain complaints with seemingly helpful responses, such as taking over chores, turning on the television, or encouraging the patient to rest (Pence, Thorn. Jensen & Romano, 2008)"

"It is... with perfect timing that Dr. Dermot Fitzgibbon... with the collaboration of Dr. John D. Loeser... have provided us with a comprehensive interdisciplinary, patient-centered, guide to the assessment, diagnosis, and management of cancer pain. With a combined experience of over 50 years in pain management and in the spirit of Dr. John Bonica, both Drs, Fitzgibbon and Loeser have composed a detailed treatise that covers not only pain (with a lower case p) as a symptom, but also Pain (with a capital P), as a disease, with all its physiologic, pathologic, emotional, social, and existential dimensions."