Wed, duped, dumped

August 14th, 2009

– India, oh India.  You want so much to be a hi-tech first world nation.   With Bollywood and your high tech business parks – it’s all very impressive.

– Until one looks behind the scenes and realizes how very third-world and primitive you really are in the aggregate.

– Those of you with the brains, connections and opportunities just cannot wait to run away from the ‘real’ India and move into your gated communities and glass and chrome business parks.

– Don’t come talking to me about how wonderful India is – there are a lot of unsightly things hidden in your closets and back streets – just behind the glossy advertisements and nationalistic bragging.

– And with all of the powerful spiritual traditions that have come out of your country, it is deeply amazing to me that more of you cannot find the courage to look at the truth.

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CHANDIGARH, India – Jaswant Kaur is one of more than 15,000 ‘holiday wives’ spread across India’s northern Punjab state who, after years of abandonment, still awaits her husband’s return from Britain.

A fortnight after their lavish wedding in the border district of Gurdaspur, Karamjit Singh – considered a prize ‘catch’ for most Punjabi parents wanting their daughters married as he was a non-resident Indian settled abroad – left for London.

He promised his excited 21-year-old bride, who had never left her small town, that he would send her immigration papers within weeks to enable her to join him.

The groom and his family also carried away 700,000 rupees ($21,867.73) in dowry and gold ornaments which the bride’s parents had raised by mortgaging their small plot of land and house.

Eleven years later, Jaswant Kaur still waits for news from her husband.

“We now learn that he already had a wife and two children in London when we were married” Kaur said.

“For him I was nothing but a sexual dalliance and a source of gratification for his greed in the dowry.

“Along with my family, I stand disgraced socially as an abandoned bride. I have no recourse to any redress whatsoever.”

More…

Personal update – 14 Aug 09

August 14th, 2009

I had my Prostatectomy operation on August 11th and it went fine.   Currently, I’m recovering at home.   On the 19th, I go in for a followup visit to have my catheter removed and to get my prostate biopsy results.   With luck, the cancer will have been confined to the prostate itself and its removal will have ended the problem.   You good wishes that it should turn out this way will be much appreciated.

I’ll post more when I know more.

USGS Report Shows a “Dramatic” Decline in U.S. Glaciers

August 8th, 2009

“Fifty years of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research on glacier change shows recent dramatic shrinkage of glaciers in three climatic regions of the United States. These long periods of record provide clues to the climate shifts that may be driving glacier change.”

Thus begins a report (pdf) released on Thursday by the U.S. Geological Survey showing a “dramatic decline” in three “benchmark” glaciers the agency has studied for five decades.

Beginning in 1957, the USGS has taken annual measurements of the South Cascade Glacier in Washington state, and followed shortly thereafter monitoring the Gulkana Glacier on the coast of Alaska and Wolverine Glacier in Alaska’s interior.

All three glaciers have shrunk and thinned, the report says, with the mass loss rapidly accelerating over the past 15 years. The South Cascade Glacier has lost nearly 25% of its weight, and the two Alaskan glaciers about 15%.

Between 1987 and 2004 all three glaciers consistently lost more snow and ice each summer as compared to years prior, the report says. Combined with less snowfall the loss has led to the net decline of the glaceirs.

The three benchmark glaciers tell the story for most of the many thousands of glaciers across the country and worldwide.

More…

Hardliners closing portal to paradise

August 8th, 2009

Rahman Baba, “The Nightingale of Peshawar”, was an 18th-century poet and mystic.

He withdrew from the world and promised his followers that if they also loosened their ties with the world, they could purge their souls of worries and move towards direct experience of God. Rituals and fasting were for the pious, said the saint. He emphasised that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart – that we all have paradise within us, if we know where to look.

For centuries, Rahman Baba’s shrine at the foot of the Khyber Pass has been a place where musicians and poets have gathered, and his Sufi verses in Pashtun made him the national poet of the Pathans.

Then, about 10 years ago, a Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrasa was built at the end of the track leading to the shrine. Soon its students took it on themselves to halt what they saw as un-Islamic practices. On my last visit, I talked about the situation with the shrine keeper, Tila Mohammed. He described how young Islamists now came and complained that his shrine was a centre of idolatry and superstition: “My family have been singing here for generations,” said Tila. “But now these Arab madrasa students come here and create trouble.

“They tell us that what we do is wrong. They ask people who are singing to stop. Sometimes arguments break out – even fist fights. This used to be a place where people came to get peace of mind. Now when they come here they encounter more problems, so gradually have stopped coming.”

“Before the Afghan war, there was nothing like this. But then the Saudis came, with their propaganda, to stop us visiting the saints, and to stop us preaching’ishq [love]. Now trouble happens more and more frequently.”

Behind the violence lies a long theological conflict that has divided the Islamic world for centuries. Rahman Baba believed passionately in the importance of music, poetry and dancing as a path for reaching God, as a way of opening the gates of paradise. But this use of poetry and music in ritual is one of the many aspects of Sufi practice that has attracted the wrath of modern Islamists. For although the Koran does not ban music, Islamic tradition has always associated music with dancing girls and immorality.

At Attock, not far from the shrine of Rahman Baba, stands the Haqqania, one of the most radical madrasas in South Asia. Much of the Taleban leadership were trained here, so I asked the madrasa’s director, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, about what I had heard at Rahman Baba’s tomb. The matter was quite simple. “Music is against Islam. Musical instruments lead men astray and are sinful. They are forbidden, and these musicians are wrongdoers.”

Nor were Sami’s strictures limited to the shrine’s music: “We believe there is no power but God,” he continued. “I invite people who come here to return to the true path of the Koran. Do not pray to a corpse: Rahman Baba is dead. Go to the mosque, not to a grave.”

This sort of madrasa-driven change in attitudes is being reproduced across Pakistan. There are now 27 times as many madrasas in the country as there were in 1947: from 245 at independence, the number has shot up to 6870 in 2001. Across Pakistan, the religious tenor has been correspondingly radicalised: the tolerant, Sufi-minded Barelvi form of Islam is now out of fashion in northern Pakistan, overtaken by the more hardline and politicised Wahhabism.

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Betraying the Planet

August 8th, 2009

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

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– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.


Is the Climate Problem in Our Heads?

August 6th, 2009

– Nice article over on Dot Earth by Andrew Revkin.   He’s writing about a new 225 page report by a task force of the American Psychological Association in which they are examining what aspects of human psychology are tending to make us, as a species, make bad choices about so many things – like the environment.

– It’s a subject near and dear to my heart.   In fact, my desire to chronicle the gathering Perfect Storm is beginning to be overshadowed by my desire to explore questions like these.   Because certainly the first step towards solving a problem must be to understand where the problem is coming from.

– Everyone can, perhaps, go take a moment now and look in the mirror.

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A task force assembled by the American Psychological Association hopes to spur more research on the role of the human mind in shaping the behaviors resulting in rising greenhouse-gas emissions as well as on traits that can impede an effective response to global warming and similar slow-building environmental risks.

The task force has produced a 225-page report on psychology and climate that is being released to coincide with special sessions on climate at the association’s annual meeting in Toronto. (The link to the report has been balky; I’ll update if a better one is created.)

The group is hoping that the report can also inspire specialists in other fields to collaborate with psychologists. For instance, an effort to shape an initiative for curbing emissions would have a higher chance of success if it considered research showing which messages and incentives cause people to change, or resist change. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting in order to understand how to get people to act,” Janet Swim, a psychology professor at Penn State and the task force leader, said in a statement.

The report reviews research on the behavioral element in every part of the climate problem — from consumer habits to the human tendency to give outsize importance to immediate costs even when confronted with evidence of big long-term risks. In essence, as this report and many previous studies show, the human mind appears to be set up in the worst possible way to grasp and act on global warming, which is one of those problems where the most damaging outcomes are somewhere and someday, not here and now. (My guess is that these tendencies are one reason we need to approach climate change and the energy gap more in the way we treat Medicare insolvency than the traditional environmental problems we grew up with back in the 20th century — sewage in rivers, smog in air — which were literally in your face.)

More…

New Zealand most peaceful nation on Earth

July 30th, 2009

The 2009 Global Peace Index is out, and NZ leads the world!

The top ten is:

  1. New Zealand
  2. Denmark
  3. Norway
  4. Iceland
  5. Austria
  6. Sweden
  7. Japan
  8. Canada
  9. Finland
  10. Slovenia

Interesting how many of these top ten have violent pasts – Austria and Japan, and Slovenia more recently.

The bottom 10 are:

  1. Iraq
  2. Afghanistan
  3. Somalia
  4. Israel
  5. Sudan
  6. Congo
  7. Chad
  8. Pakistan
  9. Russia
  10. Zimbabwe

More…

Climate ‘biggest health threat’

July 30th, 2009

Climate change is “the biggest global health threat of the 21st Century”, according to a leading medical journal.

The Lancet, together with University College London researchers, has published a report outlining how public health services will need to adapt.

It also highlights the consequences of climate-related mass migrations.

The authors aim to add their voice to the call for carbon mitigation and will focus on making clear the ways in which climate change will affect health.

University College London (UCL) climatologist Mark Maslin called it “the Stern report for medics”, referring to the 2006 review that outlined the future impacts of the climate change situation in economic terms and advocated comprehensive, early-stage action to address it.

“The medical profession has to wake up if we’re going to save billions of lives. This is why it’s in the Lancet – it is the only way to do this is working with medics and other professionals to get that message across,” Professor Maslin said.

“Being a climatologist and jumping up and down pulling my hair out and saying ‘we’re all going to die in a horrible way’ does not work.”

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East Coast May Feel Rise in Sea Levels the Most

July 30th, 2009

Sea levels could rise faster along the U.S. East Coast than in any other densely populated part of the world, new research shows, as changes in ice caps and ocean currents push water toward a shoreline inlaid with cities, resort boardwalks and gem-rare habitats.

Three studies this year, including one out last month, have made newly worrisome forecasts about life along the Atlantic over the next century. While the rest of the world might see seven to 23 inches of sea-level rise by 2100, the studies show this region might get that and more — 17 to 25 inches more — for a total increase that would submerge a beach chair.

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Up to 10,000 boat people ready to flee

July 30th, 2009

CANBERRA – The arrival of the biggest boatload of asylum seekers since the new wave of illegal migrants began building late last year has again set alarm bells ringing in Australia.

As the 194 people migrants were being taken into detention on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, reports emerged of as many as 10,000 more waiting in Malaysia for their chance to risk a journey that has claimed dozens of lives.

While the Opposition blames the relaxation of the harsh detention regime of the former Coalition Government for the resurgence of boat people, evidence is mounting that laws passed in Canberra have limited deterrent effect.

International agencies support Government contentions that the upsurge in illegal voyages since late last year are largely the product of wars, persecution and poverty, and reflect larger, similar, movements into other rich nations.

Further studies have shown that tough messages from Australia are often ignored, misunderstood or not received by people desperate to find safety and security in a new home, and that “shonky” migration agents encourage others.

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