Category: Uncategorized

Kenny Muhammad, known as the “Human Orchestra” performs with the New York Symphony Orchestra. He is “one of the best technical beatboxers ever.”

(Submitted by Zakir Gowani)

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press

WASHINGTON – If the uninsured were a political lobbying group, they’d have more members than AARP. The National Mall couldn’t hold them if they decided to march on Washington.
But going without health insurance is still seen as a personal issue, a misfortune for many and a choice for some. People who lose coverage often struggle alone instead of turning their frustration into political action.

Illegal immigrants rallied in Washington during past immigration debates, but the uninsured linger in the background as Congress struggles with a health care overhaul that seems to have the best odds in years of passing.
That isolation could have profound repercussions.

Lawmakers already face tough choices to come up with the hundreds of billions it would cost to guarantee coverage for all. The lack of a vocal constituency won’t help. Congress might decide to cover the uninsured slowly, in stages.

The uninsured “do not provide political benefit for the aid you give them,” said Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health. “That’s one of the dilemmas in getting all this money. If I’m in Congress, and I help out farmers, they’ll help me out politically. But if I help out the uninsured, they are not likely to help members of Congress get re-elected.”
The number of uninsured has grown to an estimated 50 million people because of the recession. Even so, advocates in the halls of Congress are rarely the uninsured themselves. The most visible are groups that represent people who have insurance, usually union members and older people. In the last election, only 10 percent of registered voters said they were uninsured.

The grass-roots group Health Care for America Now plans to bring as many as 15,000 people to Washington this year to lobby Congress for guaranteed coverage. Campaign director Richard Kirsch expects most to have health insurance.

“We would never want to organize the uninsured by themselves because Americans see the problem as affordability, and that is the key thing,” he said.

Besides, added Kirsch, the uninsured are too busy scrambling to make ends meet. Many are self-employed; others are holding two or three part-time jobs. “They may not have a lot of time to be activists,” he said.

Vicki and Lyle White of Summerfield, Fla., know about such predicaments. They lost their health insurance because Lyle had to retire early after a heart attack left him unable to do his job as a custodian at Disney World. Vicki, 60, sells real estate. Her income has plunged due to the housing collapse.

“We didn’t realize that after he had the heart attack no one would want to insure him,” said Vicki. The one bright spot is that Lyle, 64, has qualified for Medicare disability benefits and expects to be getting his card in July.

But for now, the Whites have to pay out of pocket for Lyle’s visits to the cardiologist and his medications. The bills came to about $5,000 last year. That put a strain on their limited budget because they are still making payments on their house and car.

“I never thought when we got to this age that we would be in such a mess,” said Vicki, who has been married to Lyle for 43 years. “We didn’t think we would have a heart attack and it would change our life forever.”

While her own health is “pretty good,” Vicki said she suffers chronic sinus infections and hasn’t had a checkup since 2007. “I have just learned to live with it,” she said.

The Whites’ example shows how the lack of guaranteed health care access undermines middle-class families and puts them at risk, but that many of the uninsured eventually do find coverage. Lyle White has qualified for Medicare, even if the couple must still find a plan for Vicki.

Research shows that nearly half of those who lose coverage find other health insurance in four months or less. That may be another reason the uninsured have not organized an advocacy group. At least until this recession, many have been able to fix the situation themselves.

“The uninsured are a moving target,” said Cathy Schoen, a vice president of the Commonwealth Fund, a research group that studies the problems of health care costs and coverage.

But even if gaps in coverage are only temporary, they can be dangerous. “Whenever you are uninsured, you are at risk,” said Schoen. “People don’t plan very well when they are going to get sick or injured.”

Indeed, the Institute of Medicine, which provides scientific advice to the government, has found that a lack of health insurance increases the chances of bad outcomes for people with a range of common ailments, from diabetes and high blood pressure to cancer and stroke. Uninsured patients don’t get needed follow-up care, skip taking prescription medicines and put off seeking help when they develop new symptoms.

Such evidence strengthens the case for getting everybody covered right away, Schoen said. But she acknowledges the politics may get tough. “It certainly has been a concern out of our history that unorganized voices aren’t heard,” she said.

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By Sylvia Tamale

Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Female Same-Sex Practices in Africa. Edited by Ruth Morgan and Saskia Wieringa. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2005

Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men & Ancestral Wives confronts the millions of Africans that have lived in denial of the existence of lesbianism on the continent with a reality shock. Its contents sit very uncomfortably within a culture that treats same-sex relationships as taboo, alien, unnatural transgressions. Not only do African societies treat any form of homoeroticism (same-sex love and desire) with disgust, considering it a grave pathological sin, but it is also listed as a criminal offence in most countries. Absurd as it may sound, if the law finds two consenting adults of the same sex making love, it would subject them to imprisonment (in countries like Uganda, for life).

Tommy Boys demonstrates the hopelessness in enforcing a “victimless crime”. The rich narratives of various lesbians from six African countries provide a rare peek into the complex personal lives of lesbian individuals.Participants were interviewed from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. Through their voices, the reader learns a great deal about the lives of African lesbians — from the way some of them play out the dominant gender roles, including violence, to the delicate ways that they make love. The narratives include captivating stories of “lesbian men” who impregnated their lovers, female sangomas (medicine people) that secretly make love to their “ancestral wives”, and exploratory “mummy-baby” boarding school relationships. Each of the ten chapters opens with a photograph from the brilliant collection of South African lesbian rights activist, Zanele Muholi, which adds to the appeal of the book.

…

The most problematic issue with Tommy Boys lies with its methodological and conceptual approach. Readers that expect “deep” sociological analysis and conceptual insights woven into the narrative descriptions will be bitterly disappointed. The fact that the book was conceptualized and primarily driven by two white women who also co-authored each of the chapters written by the black researchers, is not lost on any critical reader. For example, in the introductory chapter of the book, we are informed that, “The project which forms the basis of this book was conceptualized… around Ruth’s kitchen table when Saskia was spending a few days in Johannesburg en route to Namibia… The problem was that we could not identify sufficient African woman researchers working on female same-sex practices” (Morgan and Wieringa, 2005: 11). We are further informed that once the African researchers had been identified, both Wieringa and Morgan proceeded to conduct a training workshop for them in methodological, theoretical and analytical issues related to life history research on same-sex relations. The research itself was conducted in three quick months, in time for the 2003 International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society (IASSCS) confererence. The findings were subsequently disseminated in a conference session on African lesbianism organized by Wieringa and Morgan.

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RIYADH (Reuters) – A Saudi man has divorced his wife by text message, a newspaper said Thursday.

The man was in Iraq when he sent the SMS informing her she was no longer his spouse. He followed up with a telephone call to two of his relatives, the daily Arab News reported.

A court in the Red Sea city of Jeddah finalized the split — the first known divorce in Saudi Arabia by text message — after summoning the two relatives to check they had received word of the husband’s intention, the paper said.

Saudi Arabia practices a strict form of Islamic Sharia law, and clerics preside over Sharia courts as judges. Under the law a man can divorce his wife by saying “I divorce you” three times.
The Saudi man was in Iraq to participate in “what he described as ‘jihad’,” according to the Arab News. Many Saudis have gone to fight with al Qaeda militants against the Iraqi government and U.S. forces.
(Reporting by Asma Alsharif)

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Obama’s Turkey Visit
by Nuray Mert

Obama did what was expected, dispensing good luck charms for all. What he left behind is a state of delirium, a la the Hunchback of Notre Dame: “He gave me water.”

Even though some of Obama’s gestures during the visit — such as Obama reminding the young people he was chatting with of the time for Muslim prayer — have drawn a lot of interest, there is nothing extraordinary about them. Such cleverly staged acts are no new inventions. When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he took on the role of the patron of Islam. In 1857, during the Sepoy Rebellion in India, the British asked the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid to intervene as the Caliph of the Muslims to help suppress the rebellion. At the end of the 19th century, Obama’s predecessors also came to Sultan Abdülhamid II to ask him to use his authority as the Caliph to get the Muslims of the Philippines to support the United States. None of this, however, helped prevent the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

We need not go that far back in history. Throughout the Cold War, the whole Western world, under the leadership of the United States, used Islam endlessly. A part of the conspiracy called Ergenekon in Turkey is rooted in this dirty alliance.1 Then, even as the curtain finally came down on the Cold War, the radical Islamic ideology and organizations were nurtured and supported to the end — the path that led to the founding of Al Qaida. Now that radical Islam has aimed its guns at the United States and the West, the project has become pacifying it.

Some Turks may say: “The past is past. At this point in time, isn’t this the best for us? This mission turns us into a world-class actor. Would it be so bad to be part of the solution?” The problem with this line of thinking is that the project to which we are asked to contribute has nothing to do with peace and the welfare of humanity. Neither is the issue just Islam. The project is one of dividing up the world. What needs to be done, first of all, is to ask: “Why, for what, and for whom are we getting involved?” Second, remember that, in this kind of involvement, it is often countries such as ours that pay the highest price.

Look at the present state of Pakistan, which was assigned the role of helping get the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The country became a frontline of jihad, attracting radical jihadists from all over the world, which has destroyed its delicate internal social and political balances. The Pakistanis have received no other reward for the role they played in the Cold War except for a phone call after 9/11 threatening that they either join the U.S or be “bombed back to the stone age.”

Turkey has also been one of the countries in the “Green Belt.” Our mission was to form a shield of “moderate Islam” against the influences of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in the region and to back the U.S. in filling the vacuum left in Central Asia with the departure of the Soviet Union. Those groups and interests in Turkey who cooperated with one another on such projects through the “deep state” back then have since started fighting one another. They still have not resolved their differences.

Leave alone interrogating this cooperation with global plunderers in the name of humanity; even at the level of realpolitik, there is still a desperate need for a long, serious questioning of these issues. Much as the Turkish government expects gains from such cooperation, there is a need to calculate what is to be lost in working with those at the summit of world power. Countries participating in these grand projects often face deep fragmentation of their internal politics.

Thinking about and dealing with the implications of this is hardly ever the concern of the world powers trying to order the world around their own interests. It is always the job of countries like Pakistan, now facing the threat of being “bombed back to the stone age” as it cannot take a firm position against the Taliban given its internal balance of power. Even before getting to this point, the political environment of the country may have already acquired a medieval quality through conflicts and internal fragmentation of society.

In politics, extreme cynicism can have a pacifying impact leading to inaction and immobilization. The acceleration of international politics is unforgiving for those slow to respond, let alone unable to act. On the other hand, it also does not help to be too reckless merely for the sake of adjusting to the speed of world politics.

Have I drawn too pessimistic a picture? The concerns I have tried to express would make better sense if we read some history and look at what is happening around us in the region at this point of historical rupture. Collectively, whatever we do, let us first abandon the Hunchback complex and stop sleep-talking: “He gave me water.”

1 Translator’s Note: Ergenekon is the term used for the last two years in Turkey to refer to the Turkish gladio, an ultra-nationalist group with strong ties to the military and security forces, currently being accused of several acts of conspiracy. Because of its strong alleged links to the state, it is also referred to as the “deep state.” Here the author is referring to the role of Ergenekon in the founding of the Turkish Hezbullah, a terrorist Islamist group (unrelated to the Lebanese Hezbullah).

Nuray Mert is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul University in Turkey. She has regular columns in the Turkish dailies Radikal and Hürriyet. This article has been translated from her article “Bana Su Verdi!” (“[He] Gave Me Water”) published in Radikal on 9 April 2009. Translation by Sedef Arat-Koç, Associate Professor, Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

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Urdu began its prominence in 17th Century and reaches it apex around partition time. During those centuries, use of Farsi slowly declined and Urdu rose as a language of elite and masses. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, and Christian writers wrote volumes in Urdu.

Even Portuguese and British literary wrote Urdu poems and took part in poetic assemblies called Mushaeras. Then, Urdu was language of Indian courts, especially in North India and Hyderabad. During these Urdu centuries, newspapers and periodicals ran love story serials. These stories were written in a poetic form, called Masnavi or narrative poems, as is the case with poet Mir Hasan. In those days, his fairy tale love story of Prince Badar Munir and Princess Be-Nazeer was the talk of the town. The poet Mir Hasan 1728-1787, titled this Masnavi Sahr ul-bayan (Magic of describing). The readers of the time eagerly waited for the next installment of the story.

For Urdu and Gujarati

For full Masnavi and its translation

Here are few verses Mir Hasan that have became very famous
He describes the condition of fragile army of Mughals

Jo payade hain, so dare sar mundate naee se
Foot solders were afraid of barbers for a head-shave

savaar gir paDeN, sone meiN, charpaee se
The riders were plunging from beds in sleep
He describes the rulers and Rajas engrossed in fun

Sharab-o-kabab-o-bahar-o-nigar
Wine, kebab, spring, and damsel

Jawni-o-masti-o-bos-o-kinar
Youth, lust, kisses, and intimacy

Do it while you can

Gaya waqt phir haat aata nahiN
Once lost, time cannot be clasped

Sada aish, doraN dikhata nahiN
Time never showers luxuries, forever
Do not lose time in formalities

KaTi raat harf-o- hikayat meiN
Night slipped away in formalities

Sahar ho ga-ee bat ki bat meiN
Day broke, telling stories in story
Wealth is momentary

Kisi pas dolat yeh rehti nahiN
The wealth does not stay with any forever

Sada naw kaghaz ki behti nahiN
A paper boat does not float forever
Flowering time of life

Bars pandrah, ya ke sola ka sin
Teens of fifteen or age of sixteen

Javani ki rateN, muradoN ke din
These are nights of youth and days of fulfillments
Intimacy at supreme

laboN se mile lab dahan se dahan
Lips met lips and mouth met mouth

dilon se myle dil, badan se badan
heart met heart and chest met chest

(Submitted by Asghar Vasanwala who can be reached at asgharf@att.net)

Laura and Fadwa kindly translated an article I wrote in Arabic for Al-Akhbar from a few weeks ago.

Here it is:

What has oil madness brought to the Arab person? What can we say about the accumulated billions that have gone to support the Western banks and corporations hostile to our interests, or to buy arms for America to use to support those servile regimes, or for the sake of subjugating those who raise their voices against Israel. Is there anyone among us who will yearn for Arab oil and its political actions, if the oil runs out?

As’ad Abu Khalil

If Arab oil runs out, there would be a great deal of change in our Arab world. If the oil runs out, there wouldn’t be clusters of men flocking to the Janadriya Festival screaming of manhood saying good things about a king who finds it hard to speak correct Arabic. If Arab oil runs out, there wouldn’t be the Arab national missionary, Ma’n Bashur, to endure the hardship of travel in order to take part in the glorification of a government whose job is to fight nationalism and to strengthen regionalism and the Bedouins and tribalism and factions. If the oil runs out, no one would come to the Janadriya Festival, except for Abdullah and his sons – unwillingly. If the oil runs out, a corps of senior religious officials in the Kingdom would become a television laughingstock and a reason for the intellectuals to show the ugliness of these people and a target of real enlightenment – not the false enlightenment of the entourage of this or that Emir.

If Arab oil runs out, the sermons of the mosques of the Shi’a and Sunni would join together equally to condemn the doctrine of primness and fanaticism and hostility towards the Saudi women with abundant money. If the oil runs out, the dark extremists could never speak in the name of Islam, and repress the dream and tolerance and the true brotherhood of man. If it ran out, their historical splendor and luster would be returned to Mecca and Medina and debate and discussion would return to them. Poetry and prose in all their forms would return to the season of the Haj as it was before the rise of Mohammed Bin Abd-al-Wahab. If oil runs out, religious scholars would speak the truth and would condemn doctrines of fanaticism supported with oil money.

If Arab oil runs out, we wouldn’t be talking about the Saudi age – the first and the second – and the imperialistic policies of the West wouldn’t depend on the Saudi regime. There would be a great change in the Arab world, and the media would stop calling the Saudi king by the title “Servant of the two Holy Places.” Servant of the two Holy Places? And who gave him the right? And how does he serve the two Holy Places? And what about his service for American and Israeli interests? Doesn’t that deserve a special title too? If the oil runs out, they would call the Saudi king the servant of dates and perfume – no more – that is if the monarchy continued which wouldn’t survive without the benefits of oil. If Arab oil runs out, Saudi women would drive cars and buses and vehicles, uncovered or with hijab or veiled, if they wanted. If oil ran out, Saudi women would leave their marital jails for the open society and freedom.

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(Submitted by a reader)

Indo-Asian News Service

The work of India’s greatest filmmaker and one of cinema’s greatest auteurs, Satyajit Ray, will be showcased in a special series by the prestigious Film Society of Lincoln Centre in New York April 15-30.

Featuring over 20 films, with six in new 35 mm prints from the Academy Film Archive, “First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy” concentrates on what is roughly the first half of Ray’s career, when he broke out internationally as an important new voice in world cinema.

“A Ray film invites you in, but also demands that you accept it on its own terms,” says Richard Pena, the Film Society’s director of programming. “And those who open themselves to Ray’s method are in for some of the richest experiences the cinema has to offer.”

The recent spike of interest in India – from its propitious emergence as a major economic power to the worldwide success of “Slumdog Millionaire” – makes this an especially apt moment to witness and celebrate Ray’s accomplishments, said the society.

Ray won the Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement at the 1991 Academy Awards, “for his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures and for his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world”.

“First Light” opens April 15 with the film that put him on the cinematic map, “Pather Panchali” (1955), which Pauline Kael wrote was “beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love”.

With a brilliant soundtrack by Ravi Shankar, to which Wes Anderson paid tribute by using it in “The Darjeeling Limited” along with music from many other Ray films, “Pather Panchali” (Song of the Road) is the first part of the “Apu Trilogy” following a boy’s adventures in a remote Bengal village.

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By Jerry White

The current auto crisis follows decades of plant closings and mass layoffs that transformed Detroit into the poorest major city in America. The rise of the Motor City was synonymous with US industrial preeminence, as well as the improvements in living standards won by the auto workers in mass struggles. The collapse of the Motor City is perhaps the poignant symbol of the historic decline of American capitalism, its turn to financial speculation, and the unrelenting assault on the working class.

See the pictures