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“Why Some Muslims in America Fall Prey To Extreme Ideology of Violence” By F. Sheikh

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There could be different factors involved in rest of the West, but this article deals mainly from American perspective. Recent study by the George Washington University, From Retweet To Raqqa, concludes that there is no specific profile of a Muslim terrorist and they come from all demographics. They are not necessarily raised as religious fanatics, uneducated or disadvantaged as one might expect. As per study 40 % are under the age of 21 year. I think the proper question is not what motivates them, rather what makes them vulnerable to extreme ideology of violence? Many experts are still at loss to answer this question. There may be some other factors, but I think, unfortunately one of the major contributing factor is that Muslims are living in a  charged anti-Muslim environment that makes them feel insecure, depressed and marginalized. It is especially true of teenagers. Some teenagers sense additional pressure of feeling different from their peers, and even target of anti-Muslim insults, ridicule and taunts from their own friends. It can lead to alienation, isolation and being bottled up in anger. Teenagers usually do not want to talk about it at home because they do not want to upset their parents. If teenagers do not have an outlet to express their feelings and anger at the dinner table at home or in Muslim community centers, unfortunately this bottled up anger and alienation may make them vulnerable and prime target of extreme nihilistic ideology like ISIS.

 Although Muslim adults have more capacity to absorb such pressures, but for some who face discrimination, ridicule and insults at job may react the same way as teenagers does.

Sometimes the situation described above may get worse if the discussion at home or Islamic centers is ‘limited’ to grievances against the West’s part in the creation of Al-Qaeda, Taliban (Use of Taliban freedom fighters-Jihadis to defeat Russia in Afghanistan), ISIS by military misadventure in Iraq and support of repressive regimes in Muslim lands. This discussion limited to just grievances sometime may leave the wrong impression on alienated teenager or adult of justifying the violent acts of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and which may re-enforce the already bottled up anger and might even inflame it further.

As American citizens, there is nothing wrong in disagreeing with the policies of the West and USA, and many Americans do, but grievances discussion must always be followed by a strong and clear emphasis that to bring the change in situation and policies is possible only through political process and not by the violence as advocated by the extreme ideologies like ISIS. This change through politics and community involvement was achieved by minorities like Jews, Irish and Catholics who faced similar hostility as Muslims are facing today.  In 2012, Douglas Saunders wrote in NYT in his article ‘Catholics Then, Muslims Now’;

 “As late as 1950, 240,000 Americans bought copies of “American Freedom and Catholic Power,” a New York Times best seller. Its author, Paul Blanshard, a former diplomat and editor at The Nation, made the case that Catholicism was an ideology of conquest, and that its traditions constituted a form of “medieval authoritarianism that has no rightful place in the democratic American environment.”

 The hostility against Catholics was so virulent that many liberals, including Bertrand Russel, supported the above view. Catholics, Jews and other minorities were able to overcome this hostility and become part of American fabric by involvement in politics and community works like building charity hospitals, Museums, colleges and universities.

I strongly feel having such discussions at dinner tables and in Islamic Centers, including Sunday schools and emphasizing on right course of action through political process and community involvement will provide the opportunity to some of the teenagers and adults who feel alienated and bottled up to open up and prevent them following a wrong path-and may also lead to some observation that who needs more help and attention. Such discussions will help regardless the cause of alienation and anger.

There is a great fear in Muslim communities that any such open discussions may lead to some misunderstandings by the law enforcement officials with untoward repercussions. Many Muslims are afraid to write even ‘terrorist’ in their emails that it may trigger automatic surveillance. These fears may well be true and not without foundations, but remaining behind the bunkers carries even more disastrous consequences both for current and future Muslim generations.

 

Fayyaz Sheikh

  

 

What is general relativity? by David Tong

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It is one of the best simple understandable explanation from Newton’s law of gravity to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Watch video below or continue to read below(f.sheikh).

The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity. Einstein wasn’t the first to come up with such a theory — back in 1686 Isaac Newton formulated his famous inverse square law of gravitation. Newton’s law works perfectly well on small-ish scales: we can use it to calculate how fast an object dropped off a tall building will hurtle to the ground and even to send people to the Moon. But when distances and speeds are very large, or very massive objects are involved, Newton’s law becomes inaccurate. It’s a good place to start though, as it’s easier to describe than Einstein’s theory.

Suppose you have two objects, say the Sun and the Earth, with masses $m_1$ and $m_2$ respectively. Write $r$ for the distance between the two objects. Then Newton’s law says that the gravitational force $F$ between them is

\[ F=G_ N\frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}, \]

where $G_ N$ is a fixed number, known as Newton’s constant.

The formula makes intuitive sense: it tells us that gravity gets weaker over long distances (the larger $r$ the smaller $F$) and that the gravitational force is stronger between more massive objects (the larger either of $m_1$ and $m_2$ the larger $F$).

Different force, same formula

There is another formula which looks very similar, but describes a different force. In 1785 the French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb came up with an equation to capture the electrostatic force $F$ that acts between two charged particles with charges $Q_1$ and $Q_2$:

\[ F = \frac{1}{4 \pi \epsilon _0} \frac{Q_1 Q_2}{r^2}. \]

Here $r$ stands for the distance between the two particles and $\epsilon _0$ is a constant which determines the strength of electromagnetism. (It has the fancy name permittivity of free space.)

The problem with Newton

Newton’s and Coulomb’s formula are nice and neat, but there is a problem. Going back to Newton’s law, suppose you took the Earth and the Sun and very quickly moved them further apart. This would make the force acting between them weaker, but, according to the formula, the weakening of the force would happen straight away, the instant you move the two bodies apart. The same goes for Coulomb’s law: moving the charged particles apart very quickly would result in an immediate weakening of the electrostatic force between them.

But this can’t be true. Einstein’s special theory of relativity, proposed ten years before the general theory in 1905, says that nothing in the Universe can travel faster than light — not even the “signal” that communicates that two objects have moved apart and the force should become weaker.

Why we need fields

This one reason why the classical idea of a force needs replacing in modern physics. Instead, we need to think in terms of something — new objects — that transmit the force between one object and another. This was the great contribution of the British scientist Michael Faraday to theoretical physics. Faraday realised that spread throughout the Universe there are objects we today call fields, which are involved in transmitting a force. Examples are the electric and magnetic fields you are probably familiar with from school.

EinsteinAlbert Einstein (1879-1955) in 1921.

A charged particle gives rise to an electric field, which is “felt” by another particle (which has its own electric field). One particle will move in response to the other’s electric field — that’s what we call a force. When one particle is quickly moved away from the other, then this causes ripples in the first particle’s electric field. The ripples travel through space, at the speed of light, and eventually affect the other particle. In fact, the particle that is moved also generates a magnetic field and emits electromagnetic radiation. The end result is a complex interaction of rippling fields — but the point is that the force is really one particle being affected by ripples propagating through the field of the other.

It took scientists a long time to fully develop this field picture of electromagnetism. The main credit goes to the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, who not only realised that the electric and magnetic forces were two aspects of a unified force of electromagnetism, but also replaced Coulomb’s simple law of electrostatics with four equations that describe how electric and magnetic fields respond to moving charged particles. Maxwell’s four formulae are some of the most amazing equations in physics because they capture all there is to know about electricity and magnetism.

Gravity and spacetime

So what about gravity? Just as with electromagnetism there needs to be a field giving rise to what we perceive as the gravitational force acting between two bodies. Einstein’s great insight was that this field is made of something we already know about: space and time. Imagine a heavy body, like the Sun, sitting in space. Einstein realised that space isn’t just a passive by-stander, but responds to the heavy object by bending. Another body, like the Earth, moving into the dent created by the heavier object will be diverted by that dent. Rather than carrying on moving along a straight line, it will start orbiting the heavier object. Or, if it is sufficiently slow, will crash into it. (It took Einstein many years of struggle to arrive at his theory — see this article to find out more.)

Another lesson of Einstein’s theory is that space and time can warp into each other — they are inextricable linked and time, too, can be distorted by massive objects. This is why we talk, not just about the curvature of space, but about the curvature of spacetime.

The equation

The general theory of relativity is captured by a deceptively simple-looking equation:

\[ R_{\mu \nu } - \frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu \nu } = \frac{G_ N}{8 \pi c^4}T_{\mu \nu }. \]

Essentially the equation tells us how a given amount of mass and energy warps spacetime. The left-hand side of the equation,

\[ R_{\mu \nu } - \frac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu \nu }, \]

describes the curvature of spacetime whose effect we perceive as the gravitational force. It’s the analogue of the term $F$on the left-hand side of Newton’s equation.

The term $T_{\mu \nu }$ on right-hand side of the equation describes everything there is to know about the way mass, energy, momentum and pressure are distributed throughout the Universe. It is what became of the term $m_1 m_2$ in Newton’s equation, but it is much more complicated. All of these things are needed to figure out how space and time bends. $T_{\mu \nu }$ goes by the technical term energy-momentum tensor. The constant $G_ N$ that appears on the right-hand side of the equation is again Newton’s constant and $c$ is the speed of light.

What about the Greek letters $\mu $ and $\nu $ that appear as subscripts? To understand what they mean, first notice that spacetime has four dimensions. There are three dimensions of space (corresponding to the three directions left-right, up-down and forwards-backwards of space) and one dimension of time (which only has one direction). If you want to understand how a moving bit of mass affects spacetime, you need to understand how it affects each of those four dimensions and their various combinations.

(As an analogy, think of the way you’d describe an object moving at constant speed along a straight line in Newton’s classical physics. You need two pieces of information: the direction and the speed of the motion. The direction is given by three numbers, each telling you by how much the object moves in each of the three directions of space. Therefore, the motion is described by a total of four numbers, three relating to space and one giving the speed. Since speed is distance covered per unit time, we need three bits of information relating to space and one to time, in order to describe the motion.)

Click link below for full article;

https://plus.maths.org/content/what-general-relativity

‘America’s Blue-Collar White People Are Dying at an Astounding Rate’ By Barbara Ehrenreich

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Could the bump in white working class deaths be the result of widespread despair?

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.”

It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. There has also been a major racial gap in longevity—5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women—though, hardly noticed, it has been narrowing for the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide, alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction.

There are some practical reasons why whites are likely to be more efficient than blacks at killing themselves. For one thing, they are more likely to be gun-owners, and white men favor gunshots as a means of suicide. For another, doctors, undoubtedly acting in part on stereotypes of non-whites as drug addicts, are more likely to prescribe powerful opiate painkillers to whites than to people of color. (I’ve been offered enough oxycodone prescriptions over the years to stock a small illegal business.)

Manual labor—from waitressing to construction work—tends to wear the body down quickly, from knees to back and rotator cuffs, and when Tylenol fails, the doctor may opt for an opiate just to get you through the day.

The wages of despair

But something more profound is going on here, too. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it, the “diseases” leading to excess white working class deaths are those of “despair,” and some of the obvious causes are economic. In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working class people of any color.

I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back—and better yet, a strong union—could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas like retail, landscaping, and delivery-truck driving. This means that those in the bottom 20% of white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces.

White privilege was never, however, simply a matter of economic advantage. As the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.”

Some of the elements of this invisible wage sound almost quaint today, like Du Bois’s assertion that white working class people were “admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.” Today, there are few public spaces that are not open, at least legally speaking, to blacks, while the “best” schools are reserved for the affluent—mostly white and Asian American along with a sprinkling of other people of color to provide the fairy dust of “diversity.” While whites have lost ground economically, blacks have made gains, at least in the de jure sense. As a result, the “psychological wage” awarded to white people has been shrinking.

For most of American history, government could be counted on to maintain white power and privilege by enforcing slavery and later segregation. When the federal government finally weighed in on the side of desegregation, working class whites were left to defend their own diminishing privilege by moving rightward toward the likes of Alabama Governor (and later presidential candidate) George Wallace and his many white pseudo-populist successors down to Donald Trump.

At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken it up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal. The Guardian, for instance, now keeps a running tally of the number of Americans (mostly black) killed by cops (as of this moment, 1,209 for 2015), while black protest, in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and a wave of on-campus demonstrations, has largely recaptured the moral high ground formerly occupied by the civil rights movement. Click link for full article;

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18638/barbara-ehrenreich-americas-blue-collar-white-people-are-dying-at-astoundin

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‘The Libido Crash’ By Katherine Rowland

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( For ADULTS only and not for the shy ones, but I am sure you are still going to read it)

Header essay marilyn nyc17585

IN the drawer of her bedside table, Julie maintains an archive of lust. Here are the naked Polaroids she slipped in between her husband’s business papers, explicit notes once left on mirrors, Anaïs Nin, a riding crop. Come evening, Julie used to watch her husband’s movements from across the room, eager for the moment when dinner was done, the kids were asleep and all other intrusions to pleasure had been dismissed. When strangers asked if they were newlyweds, Julie loved responding that they had been married for years, and believed that they were inured to the frazzled disinterest that had settled over the bedrooms of her friends. ‘You always hear how attraction fades with time – the honeymoon period comes to an end. But I always thought that was other people’s misfortune,’ she says.

So when her longing began to dull, Julie struggled to discern what was going on. She blamed the stress of work, the second child, her busy and travel-heavy schedule, the effect of changing seasons, until she had run down the available excuses, and still found she would rather go for a jog on Sunday mornings than linger in bed.

These days, Julie says it feels ‘like suffocating’ to endure her husband’s affections. ‘I’m supposed to get home from working all day, play with the kids, cook dinner, talk about entertaining things, and then crawl into bed and rather than sleep perform some sexual highwire act. How is that possible? That sounds like hell, honestly.’

Julie still loves her husband. What’s more, her life – from the dog, to the kids, to the mortgaged house – is built around their partnership. She doesn’t want to end her marriage, but in the absence of desire she feels like a ‘miserable fraud’.

‘I never imagined I would ever be in the self-help section in the book store,’ she says, but now her bedside table heaves with such titles asSex Again (2012) by Jill Blakeway: ‘Despite what you see on movies and TV, Americans have less sex than people in any other country’;Rekindling Desire (2014) by Barry and Emily McCarthy: ‘Is sex more work than play in your marriage? Do you schedule it in like a dentist appointment?’; Wanting Sex Again (2012) by Laurie Watson: ‘If you feel like sex just isn’t worth the effort, you’re not alone’; and No More Headaches (2009) by Juli Slattery.

‘It’s just so depressing,’ she says. ‘There’s this expectation to be hot all the time – even for a 40-year-old woman – and then this reality where you’re bored and tired and don’t want to do it.’

Survey upon survey confirms Julie’s impressions, delivering up the conclusion that for many women sex tends toward numbed complacency rather than a hunger to be sated. The generalised loss of sexual interest, known in medical terms as hypoactive sexual desire, is the most common sexual complaint among women of all ages. To believe some of the numbers – 16 per cent of British women experience a lack of sexual desire; 43 per cent of American women are affected by female sexual dysfunction; 10 to 50 per cent of women globally report having too little desire – is to confront the idea that we are in the midst of a veritable crisis of libido.

Today a boisterous debate exists over whether this is merely a product of high – perhaps over-reaching – expectations. Never has the public sphere been so saturated in women’s sexual potential. Billboards, magazines, television all proclaim that healthy women are readily climactic, amorously creative and hungry for sex. What might strike us as liberating, a welcome change from earlier visions of apron-clad passivity, can also become an unnerving source of pressure. ‘Women are coming forward talking about wanting their desire back to the way it was, or better than it was,’ says Cynthia Graham, a psychologist at the University of Southampton and the editor of The Journal of Sex Research. ‘But they are often encouraged to aim for unrealistic expectations and to believe their desire should be unchanging regardless of age or life circumstances.’

Others contend that we are, indeed, in the midst of a creeping epidemic. Once assumed to be an organic feature of women, low desire is increasingly seen as a major impediment to quality of life, and one deserving of medical attention. Moreover, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy in 2010 found ‘a higher percentage of women with low sexual desire feel frustrated, concerned, unhappy, disappointed, hopeless, troubled, ashamed, and bitter, compared with women with normal desire’.

To make matters worse, according to Anita Clayton, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, most women don’t delve into the causes of their waning desire, but settle instead for a sexless norm. She writes inSatisfaction (2007):

You erode your capacity for intimacy and eventually become estranged from both your sensual self and your partner. The erosion is so gradual, you don’t realise it’s happening until the damage is done and you’re shivering at the bottom of a chasm, alone and untouched, wondering how you got there.

Fearful of this end, Julie sought medical help, taking a long and dispiriting tour of conflicting advice (‘Your experiences place you in a near majority of women, but your disinterest in sex isn’t normal’), ineffectual treatments (men’s testosterone cream, antidepressants, marital counselling) and dashed hopes (‘Each time I tried out a new therapy, I told myself it was going to get better’).

Julie is hardly alone. Instead, she counts among a consumer population of millions that pharmaceutical firms are now trying to capture in their efforts to fix the problem of desire. But what exactly are they trying to treat? A physical ailment? A relationship problem? An inevitable decline? Could low desire be a correlate of age, a result of professional stress, a clear outlier on the sexual-health spectrum or a culturally induced state of mind?

For drug makers, these questions pose more than a philosophical quandary. It is only by proving that low desire and its favoured tool of measurement – libido – are diagnosable, medical problems that new drugs can be approved.

The task has been herculean, and fraught with confusion. ‘Some of the statistics that get circulated are based on very badly designed studies,’ says Katherine Angel, a researcher on the history and philosophy of science and former fellow at the Wellcome Trust in London. As a result, it’s possible to interpret ‘the presence of fluctuating levels of sexual desire as indications of a medical problem, rather than natural fluctuation over time’.

That hasn’t stopped big pharma from entering the fray. In the case of women’s libido, the industry has spent years in hot pursuit of the condition and its chemical cure, a female analog to the blockbuster drug Viagra. Yet the more scientists try to hone in on the nature of desire, and the more they try to bottle or amplify it, the more elusive it becomes.

The idea that women could suffer from low desire and benefit from medical intervention reflects a major social shift. Looking back 150 years, it would be hard to conceive that doctors would be concerned with too little desire. The Victorian era is notorious for its desexualised treatment of women. Upheld as moral counterweights to men, women were thought to be sexually passive, untroubled by lust.

Yet another Victorian idea, the notion that love must constitute the centre of marriage, has amplified anxiety over lost desire today. Breaking with a long tradition of unions brokered chiefly for economic and social advantage, the Victorians privileged romantic affection between husband and wife. In the 20th century, this idea expanded to encompass sensual intimacy, and reciprocal pleasure was seen as the key to strong marriages – and the greater good.

The turn toward sensual reciprocity made partnerships more democratic, and couples were meant to provide each other with sexual, spiritual, emotional and social fulfillment. But these gains introduced new stressors, says the family historian Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College in Washington State. ‘New expectations were piled on to marriage – many of which were good,’ she says, ‘but they occurred in tandem with new pressures, sex among them, as well as diminished expectations for social life outside of marriage.’

In an infamous cartoon in The New Yorker in 2001, one woman confides to a friend over drinks: ‘I was on hormone replacement for two years before I realised what I really needed was Steve replacement.’ Medicine has been reluctant to engage the question of just how much monogamy and long-term togetherness affect sexual function and desire, and the ‘Steve’ problem remains an issue that is tacitly acknowledged and yet under-discussed. To return to Julie’s growing pile of self-help titles, the books all promise to return, revive, restorewithout really getting down to the brass tacks of why desire extinguished in the first place. As Julie notes, the honeymoon grinds to an end, but the issues leading there are complex. In short supply is attention to the way mind and body react to social structures such as popular media, faith and marriage.

click link below for full article;

https://aeon.co/essays/can-women-s-lost-libido-be-fixed-with-mere-drugs

posted by f. sheikh