San Francisco Bay Area Community Leader Hasan Jahangir Hamdani remembered

 

 

 

In a book introduction program held on January 21, 2024 at the Chandni Restaurant in Newark, California, San Francisco Bay Area South Asian community leader Syed Hasan Jahangir Hamdani was remembered and eulogized.  The promoted book was Hamdani’s ‘Dasht e Junoon’, a posthumous collection of his mainly Urdu and some Persian poetry. Hamdani’s family members as well as Bay Area connoisseurs of literature including Tashie Zaheer, Professor Abdul Jabbar, and Javed Ellahie spoke at the event.

 

 

Emcee, Ahsan Jahangir Hamdani

                                         

Poetess Mehnaz Naqvi

                                                    Mrs. Sahab Hamdani
 

 

Singer Almas Shabvani

 

                                                Attorney Javed Ellahie

                                                    Professor Abdul Jabbar

 

Journalist Abdus Sattar Ghazali

 

 

Urdu Poet and Community Leader, Tashie Zaheer

                                                Dr. Anshuman Chandra

Miranda warning/rights of a different kind

Miranda warning/rights of a different kind:

You have a right to remain stupid.

You have a right to remain ignorant.

 

Israel is the most civilized country in the Middle East

 

 

Let’s be clear about what we mean by civilization. We’re not talking about grandiose architecture, or marvels of literature, or the masterpieces of visual arts. We are talking about civilization as it concerns a man on the street—i.e., YOU. In that respect, a society bound by laws is a civilized society.

I am sure many of you have been to Israel. Once you clear immigration at the Ben-Gurion Airport, you are equal to everybody else present there. Your ethnicity, socioeconomic background, the language you speak, or the beliefs you hold do not matter. That is the kind of civilized society all of us want to live in. A society bound by laws is a predictable place. When there are no laws, or the laws are not uniformly applied to all, you are on your guard all the time because anything can happen anytime.

A civilized society is run by laws that apply to everyone, including the lawmakers. There are laws and procedures in place that decide how a citizen can become a lawmaker. In uncivilized societies, a strongman comes to power by pushing weaker people aside; once in power, he puts in laws that apply to all the citizens but not to himself and a chosen few.

When Saddam Hussein appeared in court, and the charges under the Iraqi laws he was being tried for were read to him, he yelled, ‘You are going to try me under the laws that I made?’ And that is the mentality of the rulers/lawmakers in many countries. Save for Turkey, or to some extent Iran, the countries in the Middle East are not civilized at all.

Back in 1998, I was flying out of Jeddah, and the plane was scheduled to leave on time. But something happened, and the plane stopped taxiing to the runway. We thought it was a temporary thing, and the pilot was waiting for the runway to be clear, but then the wait time kept stretching. We wanted to know what was going on. ‘There are some issues with the runway,’ we were told. After waiting for over an hour, we were cleared to take off. We later found out we could not leave at the scheduled time because someone from the royal family had decided to fly, and they had preference over us.

Let's be clear series of ads by JewBelong.org

 Let's be clear: Israel wants the world to see the Palestinian freedom movement as Islamic terrorism.

Let’s be clear: Israel wants anti colonial protests to be seen as antisemitism.

Let’s be clear: Every act of Palestinian resistance is an opportunity for Israel to steal more land.

Let’s be clear: Outside of its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel is the most civilized country in the Middle East.

Israel has a right to defend itself--the real meaning

 

Israel has a right to defend itself= Israel has a right to indiscriminately kill the Palestinians

 

How can a criticism of Israel be called "antisemitism" when in the current conflict both warring parties are Semitic?

Gaza November 2023: Gaza Holocaust

 

Killing innocent civilians of Gaza and making life hard for everyone living there appears to be a deliberate Israeli decision to force the Palestinians out of Gaza.  It is no longer a massacre; it is a holocaust.  And all this is being done with the US's complicity.

Photo: courtesy of BBC (Getty Images).

October 7

October 7 was a terrible day. A large group of armed men suddenly appeared from nowhere and started killing people. By the time the carnage was over, scores of people including women and little children lay dead. These innocent people did not even get a chance to ask why they were being beaten up and killed.
I told you the date but forgot to mention the year.  The year was 1849. The site of the massacre was New Mexico, USA.
But those were different times. Colonizers had a free hand to push politically unorganized, technologically backward indigenous people to a side and call them savages.  Any act of resistance from the lesser human beings was an act of terrorism and was met with full force.

October 7, 2023 was an equally grisly day.  Media reports suggest around fourteen hundred people were killed in a few hours; around two hundred were taken hostage. No civilized person can condone such acts of savagery. But people are not stopping at the condemnation of the October 7 attacks.  They are questioning the morality of pushing millions of indigenous people to Bantustans.  They are questioning the rectitude of demographic engineering of a land.  And they are questioning the legitimacy of controlling a large group of people without giving them any representation in the affairs of the government trying to control them.

How to avoid getting the IRS error code 3000 when filing a Form 990-N for your non-profit organization

 

Is the IRS error code 3000 bothering you? 

 

After talking to the IRS on the phone I have figured out how to avoid the IRS error code 3000 when filing a Form 990-N  for our non-profit organization.

To file a Form 990-N  for your non-profit organization you go to the following website

 

https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/annual-electronic-filing-requirement-for-small-exempt-organizations-form-990-n-e-postcard

 

 Press the button that says submit Form 990-N. You will reach the following page.

 

Sign in with login.gov information 

 

 Sign in 

 
 Once you get the code on your phone enter the code. Then you reach here.

 

 Pressing either of the two available options on the page above you reach the problem page.
 

 

You must edit where it says edit to change to “exempt organization” as shown above.

If you don't make that change you will get the error notice.

"An ever has occurred. See below for more information. If the problem continues, please contact the IRS at 877- 829- 5500

IRS error code 3000

Error Category General error

Description The system had a general error, Please try again later. "

 

In short, the key is to change to exempt organization before you can go any further in filing a Form 990-N  for your non-profit organization. 

Rim Jhim Hall, Kabul, California

 

Look at this photo. You can clearly see the faces of these Afghan men and women leaving Kabul on a US Air Force plane after the city fell to the Taliban in 2021. You wonder about their stories and ask what happened to them and where they went. I met one of them in San Jose two days ago.

This young Afghan could speak Urdu. How come? I have met older Afghans living in Europe and the USA who are fluent in Urdu. They moved south after the Russian invasion in 1979. While staying in Pakistan for a couple of years, waiting for their asylum papers to be processed for migration to western countries, they picked up Urdu. But Masud was too young to be one of them. How did he speak Urdu so well? He told me he was born in Karachi! He explained to me where he and his family lived in Karachi: the landmarks he described--Disco Bakery, Rim Jhim Hall--made sense. He was only seven when the US forced the Taliban out of Kabul and Hamid Karzai came into power. One day, Masud's father said to the family, "Let's go back to our home country." And just like that, the family moved back to Kabul. After completing his studies, Masud found work with the US Embassy. Several years later, when Kabul fell back to the Taliban, his employment earned him a seat in the C-17 cargo plane that left Afghanistan with over 600 people.

 

Photo, courtesy of USA Today.

How long does it take to clone a Samsung SSD?

 How long does it take to clone a Samsung SSD?

Using Samsung's migration tool, it took 8 hours to clone a Samsung 4 TB SSD onto a Samsung 8 TB SSD.

Buying a stock and then regretting the decision

Buying a stock and then regretting the decision

This is a five year time capsule post.  Thursday, October 13, 2016: UN, Unilever, after being at a high of $45-$46 for several weeks came down to $43 something.  I looked at the options.  If I buy at the market price and then sell options for November 2016 I will have my cost covered till the stock drops to $37.  So Thursday night I set up the automatic purchase: if UN is at $43.40 I’ll buy 100 shares. Friday, November 14: Coming back home after walking children to school, found out that Capital 360 had made the purchase of 100 UN stocks at $43.31 each.  I quickly looked at the options and set up to sell UN at $40 on November 18, if I get $6 per stock today.  By the end of Friday, the option sale was not done.  Now I am worried.  Did I buy at the wrong time?  Is the market going down and I should have been patient?  What if I am stuck with Unilever with this high price for a long time to come?  Only time will tell.

Upper Lake Fall Festival 2022

Upper Lake Fall Festival 2022

"Music, food, beer, booth, arts and crafts vendors, raffle items"

For some reason this festival was not as well attended as the Kelseyville Pear Festival 2022 or the Lakeport Festival 2022