by B. R. GOWANI

Jamie Lynne Grumet’s three-year old boy sucking her breast. “The World Health Organization recommends breast-feeding ‘up to two years of age or beyond.’ The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that ‘babies should continue to breast-feed for a year and for as long as is mutually desired by the mother and baby.’” PHOTO/Time TEXT/USA Today

the newsstand sales are down
please! please! please!
in the name of capitalism
for the sake of economy
and for financial health of TIME
buy our magazine
Jamie wouldn’t sit and nurse
till you enhance our sales
have some pity on her malnourished legs

“When we arrived in Cebu, our boat was met by a fleet of paddling beggars. They held out home-made coin-catchers while ferry passengers tossed coins and food scraps. Not an easy way to earn breakfast, but then nothing’s easy for those at the bottom of the food chain in the Philippines.” PHOTO/Chris

please have some mercy
God has blessed you with so much
since last two days
my child is without milk
please help us
may God bless you

“Half of Mumbai’s 12 million inhabitants live in shantytowns, and many of them—like this mother and child—survive by begging.” PHOTO/National Geographic

in the name of God
please give me some money
to buy milk for this child
may Lord bless you with many children
and turn you into a milllionaire

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by SUSAN JACOBY

The Age of American Unreason

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Americans are alone in the developed world in their view of evolution by means of natural selection as “controversial” rather than as settled mainstream science. The continuing strength of religious fundamentalism in America (again, unique in the developed world) is generally cited as the sole reason for the bizarre persistence of anti-evolutionism. But that simple answer does not address the larger question of why so many nonfundamentalist Americans are willing to dismiss scientific consensus. The real and more complex explanation may lie not in America’s brand of faith but in the public’s ignorance about science in general as well as evolution in particular. More than two thirds of Americans, according to surveys conducted for the National Science Foundation over the past two decades, are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity. Nine out of ten Americans do not understand radiation and what it can do to the body. One in five adults is convinced that the sun revolves around the earth. Such responses point to a stunning failure of American public schooling at the elementary and secondary levels, and it is easy to understand why a public with such a shaky grasp of the most rudimentary scientific facts would be unable or unwilling to comprehend the theory of evolution.

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In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts released a survey indicating that fewer than half of adult Americans had read any work of fiction or poetry in the preceding year… Only 57 percent had read a nonfiction book. In this increasingly a-literate America, not only the enjoyment of reading but critical thinking itself is at risk.

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In recent years, television has commissioned an unceasing stream of programs designed to appeal to a vast market of viewers who believe in ghosts, angels, and demons. More than half of American adults believe in ghosts, one third believe in astrology, three-quarters believe in angels, and four-fifths believe in miracles.

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Misguided objectivity, particularly with regard to religion, ignores the willed ignorance that is one of the defining characteristics of fundamentalism. One of the most powerful taboos in American life concerns speaking ill of anyone else’s faith-an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions. Both the Constitution and the pragmatic realities of living in a pluralistic society enjoin us to respect our fellow citizens’ right to believe whatever they want-as long as their belief, in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But many Americans have misinterpreted this sensible laissez-faire principle to mean that respect must be accorded the beliefs themselves. This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both antiintellectualism and anti-rationalism.

Third World Traveler for more

by KEVIN RAFFERTY

Ichiro Ozawa’s acquittal on charges of infringing the political funds law leaves the man variously called the “Shadow Shogun,” “The Fixer,” “Bully” and “the Destroyer” — free to organize one last throw of the political dice to become kingmaker if not king of Japanese politics.

It will not be easy because there are probably many more people, especially within his own party, who hate Ozawa as those who think of him as the last hope for reforming Japanese politics and rescuing the country from its otherwise inevitable fall to Third World country status. (On Wednesday, lawyers acting as prosecutors appealed Ozawa’s April 26 acquittal to the Tokyo High Court.)

For more than 20 years Ozawa has been the grit in the constantly changing kaleidoscope of Japanese politics, in which the bits clash and change places colorfully without anything really changing at all. Once the young high-flying secretary general of the then ruling Liberal Democratic Party, he helped to end the party’s 40-year power monopoly. He then made and unmade four new parties.
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The public face of the fightback by vested interests is seen in Noda’s determination to restart the country’s nuclear power plants. The only operating reactor of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants, which previously supplied 30 percent of the country’s electricity, was taken offline on May 5 for maintenance.

Japan is importing energy to make up for the shortfall; natural gas imports are running 20 percent higher, helping to push Japan into a record trade deficit for the financial year ended March 30. When the sweltering humid heat of the summer hits in July, it is doubtful whether Japan can get sufficient imports in time. Some areas, such as the Kansai region around Osaka may face cuts of up to 20 percent if alternative energy supplies are not found.

Even with the early introduction of cool-biz attire — open-necked, short-sleeved shirts for suits and ties — this month and super cool biz — Hawaiian shirts — in June, it promises to be a long-suffering summer.

The Japan Times for more

by PER LILJAS

Forty years after Bangladesh’ liberation war, indigenous communities are still stuck in the same struggle

Twelve-year old Dipu Chakma was woken up by the crashing sound when the front door of his family’s hut was kicked in. Five men entered, their faces covered in cloth. Hurriedly, Dipu got up from his bed and ushered his little brother Riku to the back of the hut. Sneaking out through a window, Dipu heard the men shouting and caught a glimpse of them lunging for his and Riku’s father, whilst their mother tried to intervene.

“My heart was beating fast, I thought they were going to kill him,” Dipu says. Hiding in the bushes outside, the two boys heard the struggle come to an end, and the men leaving down the hill. Shortly after, their mother came to find them, blood running down her forehead, tears running down her cheeks. The men had taken her husband with them. She led the boys uphill. While spending the night in the plantations, their hut and hundreds of other huts were torched and burned to the ground.

Minority Voices for more

by A. G. NOORANI

The book makes a fascinating exploration of the story of Iblis in Quranic verses.

For centuries, the motif of Iblis (Satan) as a figure to be admired, rather than despised, has continued in Sufi lore and Islamic literature. Of course, Iblis also retained his place in religious belief as the damned one. The lay Muslim and the ulema point to the Quranic verses which describe the fall of Satan from the exalted position he once occupied as Azazil, the archangel, and Satan’s confrontation with Adam and Eve leading to their expulsion from heaven. The Sufi resents any suggestion that his faith in the Quran is weaker than that of the maulvi. But he reads the text differently.

God formed Adam from clay and breathed into him His spirit. He ordered the angels to bow before this unique creation made of clay but with the divine spark within. All obeyed, except Iblis. He argued: “I would never prostrate myself before a mortal whom Thou has created out of clay and mould. I am better than he: Thou created me of fire and, him Thou created of clay.” Satan is banished from Paradise for his defiance, and a divine curse rests in him until Judgment Day. But he is given a respite until then so that he can tempt and test man.
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Dr Peter J. Awn of the Department of Religion in Columbia University was the first to explore the theme with a wealth of learning in his work Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblis in Sufi Psychology (E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1983). Whitney S. Bodman, Associate Professor of Comparative Religion, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, discusses his work and proceeds to make his own fascinating exploration of the Quranic verses, the classic Commentaries, the writings of old mystics and modern writings including those of the poet-philosopher Iqbal. The diversity of interpretations of Iblis in modern works, he holds, “is foreshadowed in the diversity of the Quranic story itself. The Quran does not tell a simple story of Iblis but weaves a complex and suggestive narrative that allows for a range of diverse and divergent interpretations. Muslims through the ages have found within that range the opportunity to explore various nuances of the age-old issue of theodicy. The Quran indeed not only allows this exploration but also invites and encourages it.”

The mathnawis of Fariduddin Attar and Jalaluddin Rumi, one of the greatest mystic poets of all time, are rich in allusions to Iblis. In his devotion, Iblis can still hope for God’s mercy. Attar wrote: “My heart was filled with His glory;/ I was a confessor of His unity./ Nevertheless, without cause, in spite of all this devotion,/ He drove me from His threshold without warning/… Since without cause I was driven away by Him,/ I can also, without cause, be called back by Him./ Since in God’s actions there is no how and why, it is not right to abandon hope in God./ … Since, without cause, You bestowed the gift of existence,/ In the same way, without cause, drown me in Your generosity.”
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Mansur devotes a whole chapter in his Tawasin to lblis. “There was no monotheist like lblis among the inhabitants of the heavens. When the essence revealed itself to him in stunning glory, he renounced even a glance at it and worshipped God in ascetic isolation…. God said to him, ‘Bow.’ He replied, ‘To no other.’ He said to him, ‘Even if my curse be upon you?’ He cried out, ‘To no other.’”

A few centuries later, Sarmad spoke in the same vein. He was a Jewish convert to Sufism who met the same fate as Mansur. Aurangzeb ordered him to be beheaded on the steps of Jama Masjid, Delhi, where his tomb is. Sarmad wrote in one of his quatrains: “Go, learn the method of servantship from Satan: Choose one qibla and do not prostrate yourself before anything.” Satan emerges as a strikingly colourful, almost attractive, figure in Iqbal’s Javid-Namah. In another poem, Iqbal has Gabriel and Iblis exchanging taunts and reproaches. Gabriel tells Iblis: “You lost the loftiest position by your denial. What prestige can angels now enjoy in the eyes of the Almighty?” Iblis retorts what a daring and stormy life he leads on earth in contrast to Gabriel’s uneventful existence in heaven. The concluding lines read: “If ever you find yourself alone with God, ask Him: Who has coloured the story of Adam with his own blood? I prick the conscience of the Almighty like a thorn. You can only declaim, Oh God! Oh God!”

Frontline for more

by STEPHANIE HANES

Time Magazine style breastfeeding a global goal

Time Magazine has upped the debate about breastfeeding – and in particular, the sort of extended breastfeeding that health organizations say should be a global goal. Save The Children and others say mothers should breastfeed their children for at least two years.
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Now, we have our own opinions about whether Time’s cover is helpful for what should be a national conversation about breastfeeding. (As we noted last week, the US ranks last among 36 industrialized nations in support of breastfeeding, with only 35 percent of moms exclusively nursing when their children are three months old.)
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In the southern African country of Malawi – one of Save The Children’s top ranked developing countries for moms – 77 percent of children are still breastfed at age two. That number is even higher in Bangladesh, where 90 percent of children still nurse, and in Nepal, where the number is 93 percent. Moms in India nurse 77 percent of their two-year-olds, and mothers in Rwanda are still breastfeeding 84 percent of theirs.
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There are good reasons for this.

Breastfeeding until age two, according to Save The Children, is one of the clearest steps that mothers in developing countries can take to ensure the health of their children.

Christian Science Monitor for more

Breast-feeding a 3-year-old is normal, anthropologist says

by ELIZABETH WEISE

Despite a breast-feeding brouhaha kicked off last week by a Time magazine cover photo of a mom nursing her 3-year-old son, that’s actually the norm worldwide, experts say. But in the United States, breast-feeding children that old is practiced among a tiny sliver of mothers.
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When Dettwyler studied 1,280 U.S. children whose mothers nursed them for more than three years, she found they were “perfectly fine and they didn’t need therapy and they didn’t think they were having sex with their mothers.”

The children were nursed between three and nine years, with half being weaned between ages 3 and 4. The mothers tended to be middle- and upper-class women, the majority of whom were highly educated and worked outside of the home.

“This is not the stereotype of the Earth Mother nursing the child until he’s 5, and she also grows her own cotton and weaves her own diapers,” Dettwyler says.

Multiple studies show that breast-feeding is beneficial for both mother and infant. Breast milk contains immune factors that protect children against infection while their own immune system is still developing.

USA Today for more

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

John Lilburne. SOURCE/Wikipedia

In 1638, John Lilburne was put on secret trial by the Star Chamber of Charles I. His crime? The writing and distribution of seditious pamphlets that skewered the legitimacy of the monarchy and challenged the primacy of the high prelates of the Church of England. He was promptly convicted of publishing writing of “dangerous consequence and evil effect.”

For these intolerable opinions, the royal tribunal sentenced him to be publicly flogged through the streets of London, from Fleet Prison, built on the tidal flats where Fleet Ditch spilled out London’s sewage, to the Palace Yard at Westminster, then a kind of public showground for weekly spectacles of humiliation and torture. By one account, Lilburne was whipped by the King’s executioner more than 500 hundred times, “causing his shoulders to swell almost as big as a penny loafe with the bruses of the knotted Cords.”

The bloodied writer was then shackled to a pillory, where, to the amazement of the crowd of onlookers, he launched into an impassioned oration in defense of his friend Dr. John Bastick, the puritan physician and preacher. Only weeks before, Bastick’s ears had been slashed off by the King’s men as punishment for publishing an attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury, an essay that Lilburne had happily distributed far and wide. Lilburne gushered forth about this barbaric injustice for a few moments, before his tormentors gagged his mouth with a urine soaked rag. After enduring another two hours of torture, the guards dragged him behind a cart back to the Fleet, where he was confined in irons for the next two-and-a-half years. This was the first of “Free-Born” John Lilburne’s many parries with the masters of Empire.

While in his foul cell in Fleet prison, Lilburne was kept in solitary confinement on orders of the Star Council, his lone visitor a maid named Katherine Hadley. Somehow the maid was able to sneak pen, paper and ink past the Fleet’s guards to the young radical. According to Lilburne’s own description, he was “lying day and night in Fetters of Iron, both hands and legges,” when he began to write furiously, penning a gruesome account of his mock trial and torture, The Work of the Beast, and a scabrous assault on the Anglican bishops, Come Out of Her, My People. These pamphlets were smuggled out of Newgate, printed in the LowLands and distributed through covert networks across England to popular acclaim and royal indignation.

Oliver Cromwell, then a Puritan leader in the House of Commons, took up Lilburne’s cause, giving a stirring speech in defense of the imprisoned writer. It swayed Parliament, which voted to release Lilburne from jail. Lilburne emerged from prison grateful to Cromwell, but not blind to the general’s dictatorial ambitions: he would later pen savage attacks on Cromwell and his censorious functionaries.

Counterpunch for more

by NILMINI GUNARATNE RUBIN

According to historian Mark Largent, more than 63,000 people were forcibly sterilized under eugenics-inspired official programs in 30 states between 1907 and 1980. ILLUSTRATION/Daniel Zender/The Times

My mom’s first day of motherhood was one of the happiest of her life. It was also one of the worst.

She had accompanied my dad from Sri Lanka to Washington State University in 1968, so he could complete his doctorate as a Fulbright Scholar. The school was in Pullman, a small town near the Idaho border. Fluent in English, she worked as a university librarian.

During her pregnancy, at age 30, she received care from one of Pullman’s few obstetricians. She endured labor without drugs, and I was born healthy in 1972. Because fathers weren’t allowed in the maternity ward overnight, my dad went back to their apartment when I was a few hours old.

As soon as he left, the doctor cut out my mom’s uterus.

He didn’t ask permission to perform the hysterectomy. In fact, he ignored her pleas. “There are too many colored babies already,” he told her. Exhausted from labor, my mom was too weak to resist as she was wheeled into the operating room and put under anesthesia. On her medical record, the doctor wrote “exploratory” as the reason for the operation. The real reason, of course, was eugenics, the racist pseudoscience of human breeding.
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The word “eugenics” was coined in 1883 by a British scientist, Francis Galton, who was Charles Darwin’s half-cousin. In the U.S. the movement was championed by wealthy elites like John Harvey Kellogg, doctor, corn flakes magnate and creator of the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Mich. The Nazis relied on eugenics research financed by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Los Angeles Times for more

(Thanks to reader)

by AMY O’LEARY

Jeanne Sager set up a separate computer login for her 6-year-old daughter, Jillian, to protect her from objectionable material after Jillian stumbled upon a graphic video while watching “My Little Pony” videos. PHOTO/Randy Harris for The New York Times

When Children See Internet Pornography

Parents have learned to expect, and often dread, two sex talks with their children: the early lesson about the “birds and the bees” and the more delicate discussion of how to navigate a healthy sexual life as a young adult.

But now they are wrestling with a third: the pornography talk.
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Dana, a divorced mother of three in Massachusetts, assumed her sons would seek out pornography and thought it was normal for her 9-year-old to want to look at pictures of naked women. But when he was 13, he asked why women liked to be choked. She then realized she needed to explain to him that pornography isn’t real and that the people are paid actors. She compared it to WWE wrestling matches, which her son knows are fake.

Unlike many parents, Dana had an opportunity to help her son understand what had upset him, which is why therapists like Mr. Klein say that keeping the lines of conversation open is the best safeguard against any potential harm. “We’re not going back to 1950 here,” he added, “to a world where there are no mobile devices, no apps.”

The New York Times for more

(Thanks to reader)