Author Archives: Editors

America’s Words of Peace and Acts of War

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By David Bromvich

“In Obama’s case, too, as in Nixon’s, the exorbitant love of secrecy springs from a desire not to be judged. It has its source in an almost antinomian assurance that there is no one in the world who knows enough to judge him. There is, however, a respect in which Obama has become a stranger president than Nixon. What after all are we to make of the bizarre alternation of the commands to kill and the journeys to comfort the killed? As this president has lengthened the shadow of American power in Arab lands and made it hard for someone like Farea Al-Muslimi to persuade his countrymen that the U.S. is not at war with Islam, he has made serial visits to comfort Americans mourning the dead after the mass murders in Tucson, in Aurora, in Newtown, and in Boston. None of these speeches has carried a hint of the perception that there could be a link between American violence at home and abroad. The role of this president — a president of safety and protection rather than a president of liberty and the rule of law — is dismaying in itself. But there is something actively morbid in the dramatic assumption of grief counseling as his major public function, even as he continues in secret his wars against people about whom he will not speak to Americans except in platitude.”

“Is America at war with Islam? The question began to be asked when the first evidence emerged of the transfer of hundreds of innocent Muslims to Guantanamo and the despotic new order that permitted indefinite detention of suspects. The investigations in Iraq led by David Kay and Charles Duelfer established that our war against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had actually torn apart a country empty of such weapons; and this was a second large piece of evidence to suggest that America was waging a war against Islam founded on prejudice and hostility. The racist treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and elsewhere gave additional point to the suspicions. Nothing, in fact, that George W. Bush ever said could be construed to signal a religious war. But all wars are an infernal machine in which the persons most infected with hate inevitably flourish and are promoted.” Click link for full article;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/americas-words-of-peace-a_b_3217088.html

Posted by F. Sheikh

Mathematics of Roughness

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By Jim Holt

Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity.holt_1-052313.jpg

To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form—the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now pull off one of those subflorets. What does that look like? A still tinier cauliflower. If you continue this process—and you may soon need a magnifying glass—you’ll find that the smaller and smaller pieces all resemble the head you started with. The cauliflower is thus said to be self-similar. Each of its parts echoes the whole.

Other self-similar phenomena, each with its distinctive form, include clouds, coastlines, bolts of lightning, clusters of galaxies, the network of blood vessels in our bodies, and, quite possibly, the pattern of ups and downs in financial markets. The closer you look at a coastline, the more you find it is jagged, not smooth, and each jagged segment contains smaller, similarly jagged segments that can be described by Mandelbrot’s methods. Because of the essential roughness of self-similar forms, classical mathematics is ill-equipped to deal with them. Its methods, from the Greeks on down to the last century, have been better suited to smooth forms, like circles. (Note that a circle is not self-similar: if you cut it up into smaller and smaller segments, those segments become nearly straight.)

Only in the last few decades has a mathematics of roughness emerged, one that can get a grip on self-similarity and kindred matters like turbulence, noise, clustering, and chaos. And Mandelbrot was the prime mover behind it. He had a peripatetic career, but he spent much of it as a researcher for IBM in upstate New York. In the late 1970s he became famous for popularizing the idea of self-similarity, and for coining the word “fractal” (from the Latin fractus, meaning broken) to designate self-similar forms. In 1980 he discovered the “Mandelbrot set,” whose shape—it looks a bit like a warty snowman or beetle—came to represent the newly fashionable science of chaos. What is perhaps less well known about Mandelbrot is the subversive work he did in economics. The financial models he created, based on his fractal ideas, implied that stock and currency markets were far riskier than the reigning consensus in business schools and investment banks supposed, and that wild gyrations—like the 777-point plunge in the Dow on September 29, 2008—were inevitable.Full article on link below!

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/23/mandlebrot-mathematics-of-roughness/

 

“What kind of woman is willing to share her husband?” By Jemima Khan

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Jemima Khan investigates why more and more Muslim women in Britain are choosing to become “co-wives”.

She was introduced to her husband by a friend. She says that at first she was hesitant. “I was like, ‘No, I can’t do it. I’m too jealous as a person. I wouldn’t be able to do it.’ But the more that time went on and I started thinking about it, especially more maturely, I saw the beauty of it.”

Photograph: Getty Images

“She confesses that “if he was to stay all the time I’d love it”, but says that having time off “is definitely beneficial in some ways as well”. She has “more freedom” to see her friends and her family, and it is a relief “not having a man in your face half the time, when you are cranky, and he can go somewhere else and you can manage the kids on your own”.

“According to Mizan Raja, who set up the Islamic Circles community network and presides over the east London Muslim matrimonial scene, women are increasingly electing to become “co-wives” – in other words, to become a man’s second or third wife. As I reported last year in the New Statesman, Raja gets five to ten requests every week from women who are “comfortable with the notion of a part-time man”. He explained: “Career women don’t want a full-time husband. They don’t have time.” So couples live separately, a husband visiting his wives on a rota. Click link for full article;”

http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/religion/2013/04/what-kind-woman-willing-share-her-husband

Posted by F. Sheikh

Boston Bombing:Thank goodness it wasn’t . . . fill in the blank!

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A worth reading article by Kathleen Parker in Washington Post. After the bombing, every ethnic group was praying and hoping that the perpetrators do not belong to their group. The author writes;

“As the manhunt for the Boston bombers reached its climactic conclusion, Americans of all hues and backgrounds heaved a sigh of relief. Thank goodness it wasn’t . . . fill in the blank:

● a white Christian from the South;

● a dark-skinned Muslim foreigner;

●an illegal Latino immigrant.

Thank goodness.

The marathon bombers, officials say, are of Chechen background. Huh? Is that, like, in Czechoslovakia or something?

. The mere fact that the brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were connected to Islam was sufficient for some to justify holding all Muslims in suspicion.

The relief, meanwhile, was that “our” demographic group wouldn’t this time be blamed. Even darker-skinned Muslims, familiar with group demonization following 9/11, reportedly were relieved.

Whom do we hate when the enemy is a composite of our own diverse ecosystem? When “them” is “us?”

Even a tiny percentage of 1.5 billion Muslims, or 21 percent of the world’s population, who have embraced jihad is enough to give pause. Moderate Muslims share that pause

Once we begin to discriminate in the assignment of rights to citizens and legal residents based on their thoughts, religious affiliation, assemblage — or our own assumptions — we risk becoming our own worst enemy. Click link below for full article;

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathleen-parker-the-terror-of-not-knowing/2013/04/23/ee4c4f58-ac46-11e2-b6fd-ba6f5f26d70e_story.html

Posted by F. Sheikh