*michael parekh on IT*

ON GOD AND THE BRAIN

SEEKING THE TRUTH

Some new work by scientists at Johns Hopkins University gets at a question long asked by neuro-scientists:

"...is God a delusion created by brain chemistry, or is brain chemistry a necessary conduit for people to reach God?"

As this NPR article, the first in a five-part series by Barbara Bradley Hagerty, goes on to explain:

"...now, some researchers are using new technologies to try to understand spiritual experience. They're peering into our brains and studying our bodies to look for circumstantial evidence of a spiritual world. The search is in its infancy, and scientists doubt they will ever be able to prove — or disprove — the existence of God.

I spent a year exploring the emerging science of spirituality for my book, Fingerprints of God. One of the questions raised by my reporting: Is an encounter with God merely a chemical reaction?"

In a subsequent piece in NPR, the third in the series, the author goes on to recount some experiments by Andrew Newberg from the University of Pennsylvania:

A few years later, Andrew Newberg made that possible. Newberg is a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of several books, including How God Changes Your Brain. He has been scanning the brains of religious people like McDermott for more than a decade..."

"Newberg found that result not only with Baime, but also with other monks he scanned. It was the same when he imaged the brains of Franciscan nuns praying and Sikhs chanting. They all felt the same oneness with the universe. When it comes to the brain, Newberg says, spiritual experience is spiritual experience.

"There is no Christian, there is no Jewish, there is no Muslim, it's just all one," Newberg says.

A little theological dynamite there — but, remember, the research is just beginning."

Theological dynamite indeed, but the nascent field of neurotheology (aka the Science of Spirituality), is intriguing indeed, especially when the studies start to explore the so called "God Chemical":

"...Snyder, who is chairman of the neuroscience department at Johns Hopkins and was not involved in the study, says scientists suspect that a key player in mystical experience is the serotonin system.

The neurotransmitter serotonin affects the parts of the brain that relate to emotions and perceptions. Chemically, peyote, LSD and other psychedelics look a lot like serotonin, and they activate the same receptor."

The whole series is worth reading, including listening to the audio in the interactive guide that accompanies the series.

(Hat-tip to my friend Greg Ostroff for his original tweet that led me to these articles).

* Image source.

ON A HISTORIC SILK ROAD SPOT

CHANGING TIMES

One of the most memorable places I've had the opportunity to visit over the years is the ancient town of "Kashgar in the western-most regions of China.  As this New York Times article earlier this week explains:

A thousand years ago, the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road converged at this oasis town near the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert.
Traders from Delhi and Samarkand, wearied by frigid treks through the world’s most daunting mountain ranges, unloaded their pack horses here and sold saffron and lutes along the city’s cramped streets.
Chinese traders, their camels laden with silk and porcelain, did the same.
The traders are now joined by tourists exploring the donkey-cart alleys and mud-and-straw buildings once window-shopped, then sacked, by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.

Now, Kashgar is about to be sacked again."

The piece goes on to explain how this historic town is likely to be changed forever as the central government in Beijing moves forward with it's plans to make the town's residents "earthquake proof" by essentially razing the many parts of Kashgar that make it so special for visitors and those interested in preserving history.

"Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.

In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.

Demolition is deemed an urgent necessity because an earthquake could strike at any time, collapsing centuries-old buildings and killing thousands. “The entire Kashgar area is in a special area in danger of earthquakes,” Mr. Xu said."

Some of the motivation here at the highest levels of the Chinese government may be to control and contain some of the separatist efforts in recent years to carve out a more independent identity for the region.  The piece is worth reading in it's entirety.
The place is not very critical in the global scheme of things.  But once visited, it remains etched as a very special place in history.  Here's hoping some of Kashgar is preserved for generations to come.

ON NEW ORIGINS

SURPRISING START
Google's "Doodle logo" was a bit of a surprise today, given that it wasn't an immediate reminder for a national holiday or event.  Clicking it, takes one to this page from the National Geographic:

"Meet "Ida," the small "missing link" found in Germany that's created a big media splash and will likely continue to make waves among those who study human origins.

In a new book, documentary, and promotional Web site, paleontologist Jorn Hurum, who led the team that analyzed the 47-million-year-old fossil seen above, suggests Ida is a critical missing-link species in primate evolution (interactive guide to human evolution from National Geographic magazine).

(Among the team members was University of Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich, a member of the Committee for Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)

The fossil, he says, bridges the evolutionary split between higher primates such as monkeys, apes, and humans and their more distant relatives such as lemurs.

"This is the first link to all humans," Hurum, of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway, said in a statement. Ida represents "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor."

Pretty cool stuff indeed, and the article goes on to provide a lot more detail on the find and it's implications.  Most surprising though was this obvious question at the very end of the piece:

"What's more, the newly described "missing link" was found in Germany's Messel Pit. Ida's European origins are intriguing, Richmond said, because they could suggest—contrary to common assumptions—that the continent was an important area for primate evolution."

It'll be interesting to see where this line of research goes, shedding light on where humans really did come from.

ON EDUCATION IN PAKISTAN

ROOT CAUSES

There is an eye-opening story in the New York Times today on the state of education in Pakistan.  It matters to us for a whole host of reasons, not the least of it being that we may bear some responsibility for it.  First the context:

"...the state has forgotten the children here, the mullahs have not. With public education in a shambles, Pakistan’s poorest families have turned to madrasas, or Islamic schools, that feed and house the children while pushing a more militant brand of Islam than was traditional here.

The concentration of madrasas here in southern Punjab has become an urgent concern in the face of Pakistan’s expanding insurgency. The schools offer almost no instruction beyond the memorizing of the Koran, creating a widening pool of young minds that are sympathetic to militancy.

In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended madrasas."

Bear in mind that the word "Madrasa" used in the piece simply means "School" in Arabic.  It's being used incorrectly here to refer to Islamic schools.
That aside, the piece does make some sobering points:

"President Obama said in a news conference last week that he was “gravely concerned” about the situation in Pakistan, not least because the government did not “seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people.”

He has asked Congress to more than triple assistance to Pakistan for nonmilitary purposes, including education. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has given Pakistan a total of $680 million in nonmilitary aid, according to the State Department, far lower than the $1 billion a year for the military.

But education has never been a priority here, and even Pakistan’s current plan to double education spending next year might collapse as have past efforts, which were thwarted by sluggish bureaucracies, unstable governments and a lack of commitment by Pakistan’s governing elite to the poor.

“This is a state that never took education seriously,” said Stephen P. Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. “I’m very pessimistic about whether the educational system can or will be reformed...”

"...Literacy in Pakistan has grown from barely 20 percent at independence 61 years ago, and the government recently improved the curriculum and reduced its emphasis on Islam.

Failures in Education

But even today, only about half of Pakistanis can read and write, far below the proportion in countries with similar per-capita income, like Vietnam. One in three school-age Pakistani children does not attend school, and of those who do, a third drop out by fifth grade, according to Unesco. Girls’ enrollment is among the lowest in the world, lagging behind Ethiopia and Yemen.

“Education in Pakistan was left to the dogs,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad who is an outspoken critic of the government’s failure to stand up to spreading Islamic militancy."

"This impoverished expanse of rural southern Punjab, where the Taliban have begun making inroads with the help of local militant groups, has one of the highest concentrations of madrasas in the country.

Of the more than 12,000 madrasas registered in Pakistan, about half are in Punjab. Experts estimate the numbers are higher: when the state tried to count them in 2005, a fifth of the areas in this province refused to register.

Though madrasas make up only about 7 percent of primary schools in Pakistan, their influence is amplified by the inadequacy of public education and the innate religiosity of the countryside, where two-thirds of people live.

The public elementary school for boys in this village is the very picture of the generations of neglect that have left many poor Pakistanis feeling abandoned by their government."

And to the point of our bearing some of the blame:

"The phenomenon began in the 1980s, when General Zia gave madrasas money and land in an American-supported policy to help Islamic fighters against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan."

The whole piece is worth reading in it's entirety, since at the minimum, it illustrates the multi-generational nature of this state of affairs.

ON GOD MAKING A COMEBACK

BIGGER THAN EVER

"God is Back" has got to be one of the best titles ever for a new book.  The review of the book by the New York Times promises more between the covers as well:

"Not all that long ago, the great minds of Europe predicted a future with little or no religion. Science would make us highly skeptical of miracles. Psychiatry would direct all of our awe and wonder inward. Changing roles for women would weaken the patriarchal structure that props up clerics. Whatever script for modernity one followed, it had God playing a bit role.

As we all know, it didn’t happen that way. Modernity arrived and improvised new starring roles for God. The Americans led the way by becoming both “the quintessentially modern country” and a very devout one, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in their new book, “God Is Back,” and most of the world has followed that model.

In rich countries and poorer ones, democratic and undemocratic, primarily Islamic and primarily Christian — everywhere, basically, except Europe — devotion to God has remained surprisingly robust.

“The very things that were supposed to destroy religion — democracy and markets, technology and reason — are combining to make it stronger,” write Mickle­thwait, editor in chief of The Economist, and Wooldridge, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, who together have written previous books about globalization and American conservatism, two ­similarly sweeping topics."

Here's the bit that surprised me from the review:

"While fundamentalists of all kinds get most of the attention, the authors zero in on another phenomenon: the growth and global spread of the American megachurch. With no state-sanctioned religion, American churches began to operate like multinational corporations; pastors became “pastorpreneurs,” endlessly branding and expanding, treating the flock like customers and seeding franchises all over the world. The surge of religion was “driven by the same forces driving the success of market capitalism: competition and choice.”

Definitely a side of religious expansion that's not been in the mainstream view.  Just added "God is Back" to my Kindle reading list.

ON A NEW TAKE ON OLD FEARS

STUCK IN A RUT

Roger Cohen has an interesting op-ed in the New York Times today titled "Israel, Iran and Fear", where he makes some thought-provoking points about Israel:

"Uncertainty does not so much hang over the country as inhabit its very fiber.
Existential threats — from Iran, from Hamas and Hezbollah, from demography — are forever invoked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses — for now — to support even the notion of Palestinian statehood..."
"As Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East scholar and author, suggested to me recently: “The biggest risk to Israel is Israel.”
"A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically destined for Palestine.

As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...”

There are no easy solutions out of this well-known and understood rut.  Just pushing it along doesn't seem to point to a way forward any more.

ON TAKING A STAND

SAYING NO

Thomas Friedman has yet another notable op-ed from his current trip to India. 

In a piece titled "No way, no how, not here", he writes about India's muslim community collectivly refusing to allow the burial of the 9 assailants in the Mumbai attacks on November 26th, 2008, in the main Muslim cemetery in Mumbai.  That multi-day attack took the lives of 173 people and injured over 300.  This excerpt from the piece in particular stood out:

""Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam," explained M.J. Akbar, the Indian-Muslim editor of Covert, an Indian investigative journal. "Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine.

The Koranic term for the killing of innocents is 'fasad.' Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis. In a beautiful verse, the Koran says that the killing of an innocent is akin to slaying the whole community. Since the ... terrorists were neither Indian nor true Muslims, they had no right to an Islamic burial in an Indian Muslim cemetery."

He goes on to put this in a broader context:

"To be sure, Mumbai's Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-your-face defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out.

It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets - from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan - but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and Web sites, as "martyrs" whose actions deserve praise.

Extolling or excusing suicide militants as "martyrs" has only led to this awful phenomenon - where young Muslim men and women are recruited to kill themselves and others - spreading wider and wider.

What began in a targeted way in Lebanon and Israel has now proliferated to become an almost weekly occurrence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is a threat to any open society because when people turn themselves into bombs, they can't be deterred, and the measures needed to interdict them require suspecting and searching everyone at any public event. And they are a particular threat to Muslim communities. You can't build a healthy society on the back of suicide-bombers, whose sole objective is to wreak havoc by exclusively and indiscriminately killing as many civilians as possible.

If suicide-murder is deemed legitimate by a community when attacking its "enemies" abroad, it will eventually be used as a tactic against "enemies" at home, and that is exactly what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The only effective way to stop this trend is for "the village" - the Muslim community itself - to say "no more." When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.

That's why India's Muslims, who are the second-largest Muslim community in the world, after Indonesia's, and the one with the deepest democratic tradition, do a great service to Islam by delegitimizing suicide-murderers by refusing to bury their bodies. It won't stop this trend overnight, but it can help over time."

One can but hope, but it is a start worth noting for now.

* Image source.

ON PAKISTAN AND MEXICO

GROWING FROM WITHIN

The New York Times has an eye-opening article outlining how the Taliban is making substantial inroads into mainstream Pakistan, specifically in the region of Swat, a region the size of Delaware.  Here's an excerpt:

"International attention remains fixed on the Taliban’s hold on Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas, from where they launch attacks on American forces in Afghanistan. But for Pakistan, the loss of the Swat Valley could prove just as devastating.

Unlike the fringe tribal areas, Swat, a Delaware-size chunk of territory with 1.3 million residents and a rich cultural history, is part of Pakistan proper, within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the capital.

After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under Taliban control, marking the militants’ farthest advance eastward into Pakistan’s so-called settled areas, residents and government officials from the region say.

With the increasing consolidation of their power, the Taliban have taken a sizable bite out of the nation. And they are enforcing a strict interpretation of Islam with cruelty, bringing public beheadings, assassinations, social and cultural repression and persecution of women to what was once an independent, relatively secular region, dotted with ski resorts and fruit orchards and known for its dancing girls."

The piece goes on to add:

"Last year, 70 police officers were beheaded, shot or otherwise slain in Swat, and 150 wounded, said Malik Naveed Khan, the police inspector general for the North-West Frontier Province.

The police have become so afraid that many officers have put advertisements in newspapers renouncing their jobs so the Taliban will not kill them.

One who stayed on the job was Farooq Khan, a midlevel officer in Mingora, the valley’s largest city, where decapitated bodies of policemen and other victims routinely surface. Last month, he was shopping there when two men on a motorcycle sprayed him with gunfire, killing him in broad daylight.

“He always said, ‘I have to stay here and defend our home,’ ” recalled his brother, Wajid Ali Khan, a Swat native and the province’s minister for environment, as he passed around a cellphone with Farooq’s picture.

In the view of analysts, the growing nightmare in Swat is a capsule of the country’s problems: an ineffectual and unresponsive civilian government, coupled with military and security forces that, in the view of furious residents, have willingly allowed the militants to spread terror deep into Pakistan.

The crisis has become a critical test for the government of the civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari, and for a security apparatus whose loyalties, many Pakistanis say, remain in question."

The whole situation is eerily similar to what's going on in Mexico, where drug cartels have effectively terrorized and as a practical matter, taken over several mainstream regions of Mexico, with the loyalties of many in the central government in question.
Both countries were recently highlighted by the Pentagon has being critical countries to watch in 2009, as this report outlines:

"Mexico and Pakistan are at risk of a "rapid and sudden collapse," according to a recent report from the U.S. Joint Forces Command..."

"In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico," the report says.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Joint Forces Command said the latest assessment was likely written before the Mumbai attacks which further inflamed tensions in South Asia.

The Joint Operating Environment report, meant to examine worldwide security trends, says Pakistan, in the event of such a rapid collapse, would be susceptible to a "violent and bloody civil and sectarian war" made more dangerous by concerns over the country's nuclear arsenal.

The report says that "perfect storm of uncertainty" by itself might require U.S. engagement."

In both cases, it's unclear what the U.S. can effectively do without exacerbating the situation.  But in both cases it's clear that what happens in these countries matters to both the U.S. and the rest of the world.

ON AMERICA REAFFIRMED

WE'RE HERE

Well, history came and went.  We have our 44th new President, Barack Hussein Obama, welcomed by over two million Americans in person and millions more around the world. 

The pageantry, pomp and circumstance were fun to watch, even with the backdrop of a stock market sliding another 5% and a panoply of problems big and bigger to deal with going forward. 

His inaugural speech seemed just right for the times, focusing more on the nation than himself, as the New York Times notes here:

"It was, in many ways, exactly what one might have expected from a man who propelled himself to the highest office in the land by denouncing where an excess of ideological zeal has taken the nation.

But what was surprising about the speech was how much Mr. Obama dwelled on America’s choices at this moment in history, rather than the momentousness of his ascension to the presidency."

As a first generation American from somewhere else, the words that hit home for me in particular were the following:

"For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth.

And because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace."

I know from personal experience there is no other nation that welcomes foreigners with an open a heart and a generosity of opportunities, and it is something that makes us unique at our core. 

It is one of our greatest enduring strengths as a nation long-term, even though the political mood on immigration may wax and wane in the short-term.

And in particular it's going to be one of the critical drivers to our growth going forward, leading others to follow by example. 

It was a good day to remember.

We now return to our regularly scheduled crises.

ON DIRECTING THE MUMBAI ATTACKS

REMOTE CONTROL

Imagine if we had the transcript of the 9/11 hijackers talking to their bosses in another country, WHILE conducting their attacks.  That seems to be what the Indian government seems to have in the case of the Mumbai attacks a few weeks ago.  As the Long War Journal reports:

"The Pakistan-based handlers of the Mumbai terrorists ordered the murders of civilians over the phone and cheered after hearing the gunfire, according to the dossier of evidence India provided to the Pakistani government.

The documents, obtained by the Indian newspaper The Hindu, provides a cold, calculating, and chilling look at the masterminds behind the late November military-style assault on the Indian financial capital of Mumbai. More than 170 people were killed and hundreds wounded during the 60 hour terror spree that shut down the city. The Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based terror group allied with al Qaeda and supported by powerful elements within Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency and the military, carried out the attack.

Six Pakistani handlers monitored the news coverage from Mumbai and kept in constant touch with the terrorists holed up in Nariman House and the Taj Mahal and Trident hotels during the three day siege. The handlers are identified as Zarar, Kafa, Wassi, Jundal, Buzurg, and “Major General.”

What's interesting here is that the "Major General" could be the former head of Pakistan's premier intelligence service, the ISI, as the piece explains:

"A senior US military intelligence official familiar with the dossier said that the "Major General" is indeed Hamid Gul, the retired former chief of the ISI. "It's Gul," the official told The Long War Journal. "This is why the US is trying to get him on the UN list of terrorists." In December 2008 the US attempted to get Hamid Gul and other former military and intelligence officials added to the UN list of designated terrorists but has so far been rebuffed."

Also eye-opening are what the handlers communicated to their operatives:

"The Pakistan-based handlers provided real-time intelligence and directed the terrorists to killed specific hostages.

The exchange between Mumbai terrorists Fahadullah and Abdul Rehman operating at the Trident Hotel and their Pakistani handlers provides a terrifying look at the minds of the masterminds behind the attack. The exchange shows they planned and executed the attack for maximum media coverage, ordered the murder of hostages, and cheered after the murders were carried out.

“Brother Abdul. The media is comparing your action to 9/11,” one unidentified handler said. “One senior police official has been killed,” referring to the chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad killed in an earlier gunfight.

“We are on the10th/11th floor,” Abdul Rehman responded. “We have five hostages.”

“Everything is being recorded by the media,” the handler identified as Kafa told Rehman. “Inflict the maximum damage. Keep fighting. Don’t be taken alive.”

“Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims,” the other handler told Rehman and Fahadullah. “Keep your phone switched on so that we can hear the gunfire.”

“We have three foreigners, including women,” Fahadullah said. “From Singapore and China.”

“Kill them,” the handler said.

According to the dossier, Abdul Rehman and Fahadullah are recorded ordering all of the hostages except for two Muslims to stand in line. The terrorists then shot and killed the hostages.

The handlers are heard cheering in the background. Kafa then orders the Trident-based terrorists to “find the way to go downstairs.”

In another exchange, also during the early morning of November 27, one of the terrorists operating from the Taj informed his handler that senior Indian political leaders were in the hotel. The handler excitedly orders the terrorist to find them.

“There are three ministers and one secretary of the cabinet in your hotel. We don’t know in which room,” a handler said.

“Oh! That is good news,” a terrorist responded.

“It is the icing on the cake! Find those 3-4 persons and then get whatever you want from India,” the handler said.

“Pray that we find them,” the terrorist responded."

The full piece is worth reading.  Also worth perusing is the full dossier obtained by The Hindu newspaper.  The New York Times also has a piece on this dossier.