Earthday April 21st

Carbon Footprint: A measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount
of green house gasses produced.
Calculate your household carbon footprint:
www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html
www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/carboncalculator/#

An interesting focus:
Those who live in poverty:• contribute very little to global warming-yet–

• are most frequently devastated by it’s effects: flooding, drought, famine, loss of species, and

• have the least means to adapt to the devastation caused–as we saw with Hurricane Katrina.

• The people of the United States contribute a disproportionate amount of carbon emissions: 25%, while being only 5% of the world population.

The Crisis is NOW.
Mother Earth • Love Your Mother • Do something good for Mother Earth every chance you get

Serious Humor

World Universities‏: Ranking

A summary of the current results (January 2008) sorted by country is presented in the following table. For each country the first 10 and 5 universities have been chosen and then they have been ranked by the sum of the positions of these universities:

Top 4000

First 10 -First 5
USA 1 - 1 CANADA 2 - 2 UNITED KINGDOM 3 - 3 GERMANY4 - 8 NETHERLANDS 5 - 6 AUSTRALIA 6 - 5 SWEDEN 7 - 4 SPAIN 8 - 10 JAPAN 9 - 9 ITALY 10 - 11 SWITZERLAND11 - 7 FRANCE12 - 14
FINLAND 13 - 13 TAIWAN 14 - 17 BRAZIL 15 - 19 CHINA 16 - 14 CZECH REPUBLIC 17 - 20 AUSTRIA 18 - 12 NORWAY 19 - 16 PORTUGAL 20 - 22
For further informations visit: http://www.webometrics.info/index.html

Science and religion.

Why the slow scientific development in Muslim world?

Although the relatively slow pace of scientific development in Muslim countries cannot be disputed, many explanations can and some common ones are plain wrong.

For example, it is a myth that women in Muslim countries are largely excluded from higher education. In fact, the numbers are similar to those in many Western countries: The percentage of women in the university student body is 35% in Egypt, 67% in Kuwait, 27% in Saudi Arabia, and 41% in Pakistan, for just a few examples. In the physical sciences and engineering, the proportion of women enrolled is roughly similar to that in the US. However, restrictions on the freedom of women leave them with far fewer choices, both in their personal lives and for professional advancement after graduation, relative to their male counterparts.

The near-absence of democracy in Muslim countries is also not an especially important reason for slow scientific development. It is certainly true that authoritarian regimes generally deny freedom of inquiry or dissent, cripple professional societies, intimidate universities, and limit contacts with the outside world. But no Muslim government today, even if dictatorial or imperfectly democratic, remotely approximates the terror of Hitler or Joseph Stalin—regimes in which science survived and could even advance.

Another myth is that the Muslim world rejects new technology. It does not. In earlier times, the orthodoxy had resisted new inventions such as the printing press, loudspeaker, and penicillin, but such rejection has all but vanished. The ubiquitous cell phone, that ultimate space-age device, epitomizes the surprisingly quick absorption of black-box technology into Islamic culture. For example, while driving in Islamabad, it would occasion no surprise if you were to receive an urgent SMS (short message service) requesting immediate prayers for helping Pakistan’s cricket team win a match. Popular new Islamic cell-phone models now provide the exact GPS-based direction for Muslims to face while praying, certified translations of the Qur’an, and step-by-step instructions for performing the pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah. Digital Qur’ans are already popular, and prayer rugs with microchips (for counting bend-downs during prayers) have made their debut.

Some relatively more plausible reasons for the slow scientific development of Muslim countries have been offered. First, even though a handful of rich oil-producing Muslim countries have extravagant incomes, most are fairly poor and in the same boat as other developing countries. Indeed, the OIC average for per capita income is significantly less than the global average. Second, the inadequacy of traditional Islamic languages—Arabic, Persian, Urdu—is an important contributory reason. About 80% of the world’s scientific literature appears first in English, and few traditional languages in the developing world have adequately adapted to new linguistic demands. With the exceptions of Iran and Turkey, translation rates are small. According to a 2002 United Nations report written by Arab intellectuals and released in Cairo, Egypt, “The entire Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece translates.” The report adds that in the 1000 years since the reign of the caliph Maa’moun, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.

It’s the thought that counts

But the still deeper reasons are attitudinal, not material. At the base lies the yet unresolved tension between traditional and modern modes of thought and social behavior.

That assertion needs explanation. No grand dispute, such as between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, is holding back the clock. Bread-and-butter science and technology requires learning complicated but mundane rules and procedures that place no strain on any reasonable individual’s belief system. A bridge engineer, robotics expert, or microbiologist can certainly be a perfectly successful professional without pondering profound mysteries of the universe. Truly fundamental and ideology-laden issues confront only that tiny minority of scientists who grapple with cosmology, indeterminacy in quantum mechanical and chaotic systems, neuroscience, human evolution, and other such deep topics. Therefore, one could conclude that developing science is only a matter of setting up enough schools, universities, libraries, and laboratories, and purchasing the latest scientific tools and equipment.

But the above reasoning is superficial and misleading. Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame—the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.

Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or “butterfly-collecting” activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked.

Religious fundamentalism is always bad news for science. But what explains its meteoric rise in Islam over the past half century? In the mid-1950s all Muslim leaders were secular, and secularism in Islam was growing. What changed? Here the West must accept its share of responsibility for reversing the trend. Iran under Mohammed Mossadeq, Indonesia under Ahmed Sukarno, and Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser are examples of secular but nationalist governments that wanted to protect their national wealth. Western imperial greed, however, subverted and overthrew them. At the same time, conservative oil-rich Arab states—such as Saudi Arabia—that exported extreme versions of Islam were US clients. The fundamentalist Hamas organization was helped by Israel in its fight against the secular Palestine Liberation Organization as part of a deliberate Israeli strategy in the 1980s. Perhaps most important, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US Central Intelligence Agency armed the fiercest and most ideologically charged Islamic fighters and brought them from distant Muslim countries into Afghanistan, thus helping to create an extensive globalized jihad network. Today, as secularism continues to retreat, Islamic fundamentalism fills the vacuum.

How science can return to the Islamic world

In the 1980s an imagined “Islamic science” was posed as an alternative to “Western science.” The notion was widely propagated and received support from governments in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Muslim ideologues in the US, such as Ismail Faruqi and Syed Hossein Nasr, announced that a new science was about to be built on lofty moral principles such as tawheed (unity of God), ibadah (worship), khilafah (trusteeship), and rejection of zulm (tyranny), and that revelation rather than reason would be the ultimate guide to valid knowledge. Others took as literal statements of scientific fact verses from the Qur’an that related to descriptions of the physical world. Those attempts led to many elaborate and expensive Islamic science conferences around the world. Some scholars calculated the temperature of Hell, others the chemical composition of heavenly djinnis. None produced a new machine or instrument, conducted an experiment, or even formulated a single testable hypothesis.

A more pragmatic approach, which seeks promotion of regular science rather than Islamic science, is pursued by institutional bodies such as COMSTECH (Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation), which was established by the OIC’s Islamic Summit in 1981. It joined the IAS (Islamic Academy of Sciences) and ISESCO (Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) in serving the “ummah” (the global Muslim community). But a visit to the websites of those organizations reveals that over two decades, the combined sum of their activities amounts to sporadically held conferences on disparate subjects, a handful of research and travel grants, and small sums for repair of equipment and spare parts.One almost despairs. Will science never return to the Islamic world? Shall the world always be split between those who have science and those who do not, with all the attendant consequences?

Bleak as the present looks, that outcome does not have to prevail. History has no final word, and Muslims do have a chance. One need only remember how the Anglo–American elite perceived the Jews as they entered the US at the opening of the 20th century. Academics such as Henry Herbert Goddard, the well-known eugenicist, described Jews in 1913 as “a hopelessly backward people, largely incapable of adjusting to the new demands of advanced capitalist societies.” His research found that 83% of Jews were “morons”—a term he popularized to describe the feeble-minded—and he went on to suggest that they should be used for tasks requiring an “immense amount of drudgery.” That ludicrous bigotry warrants no further discussion, beyond noting that the powerful have always created false images of the weak. Progress will require behavioral changes. If Muslim societies are to develop technology instead of just using it, the ruthlessly competitive global marketplace will insist on not only high skill levels but also intense social work habits. The latter are not easily reconcilable with religious demands made on a fully observant Muslim’s time, energy, and mental concentration: The faithful must participate in five daily congregational prayers, endure a month of fasting that taxes the body, recite daily from the Qur’an, and more. Although such duties orient believers admirably well toward success in the life hereafter, they make worldly success less likely. A more balanced approach will be needed.
Science can prosper among Muslims once again, but only with a willingness to accept certain basic philosophical and attitudinal changes—a Weltanschauung that shrugs off the dead hand of tradition, rejects fatalism and absolute belief in authority, accepts the legitimacy of temporal laws, values intellectual rigor and scientific honesty, and respects cultural and personal freedoms. The struggle to usher in science will have to go side-by-side with a much wider campaign to elbow out rigid orthodoxy and bring in modern thought, arts, philosophy, democracy, and pluralism.

Respected voices among believing Muslims see no incompatibility between the above requirements and true Islam as they understand it. For example, Abdolkarim Soroush, described as Islam’s Martin Luther, was handpicked by Ayatollah Khomeini to lead the reform of Iran’s universities in the early 1980s. His efforts led to the introduction of modern analytical philosophers such as Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell into the curricula of Iranian universities. Another influential modern reformer is Abdelwahab Meddeb, a Tunisian who grew up in France. Meddeb argues that as early as the middle of the eighth century, Islam had produced the premises of the Enlightenment, and that between 750 and 1050, Muslim authors made use of an astounding freedom of thought in their approach to religious belief. In their analyses, says Meddeb, they bowed to the primacy of reason, honoring one of the basic principles of the Enlightenment.

In the quest for modernity and science, internal struggles continue within the Islamic world. Progressive Muslim forces have recently been weakened, but not extinguished, as a consequence of the confrontation between Muslims and the West. On an ever-shrinking globe, there can be no winners in that conflict: It is time to calm the waters. We must learn to drop the pursuit of narrow nationalist and religious agendas, both in the West and among Muslims. In the long run, political boundaries should and can be treated as artificial and temporary, as shown by the successful creation of the European Union. Just as important, the practice of religion must be a matter of choice for the individual, not enforced by the state. This leaves secular humanism, based on common sense and the principles of logic and reason, as our only reasonable choice for governance and progress. Being scientists, we understand this easily. The task is to persuade those who do not.

Pervez Hoodbhoy is chair and professor in the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he has taught for 34 years.

Conflict art and religion

You Thought the Danish Cartoons Were Bad?

Dance, as though no one is watching, Love, as though you've never been hurt before, Sing, as though no one can hear you, Work, as though you don't need the money, Live, as though heaven is on earth. ~Rumi~

As you can see above, anti-Islamic drawings are neither a new nor rare thing in this world. The preceding cartoons were found around the web and are shown here as an example of a burgeoning anti-Islam picture movement that is just now exploding on the Internet.

These few pictures are posted here on this blog to point out the relative inoffensiveness of the Danish pictures and to note the exploding anti-Islam movement being pushed mainly by anti-Muslim bigots, primarily on the Internet. They are not meant as a cynical "free speech" measure, nor are they meant to insult, attack or provoke Muslims.

They are meant to be simply informational, similar to the anti-Semitic cartoons reprinted by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. The purpose is to show that blasphemous depictions of Muhammad have occurred throughout history and to illustrate, discuss and condemn the recent explosion in anti- Islam blasphemy.

We should note that the Muslim riots rocking our TV sets, instead of dampening the production of such artwork, have had the paradoxical effect of causing a burst of creative effort in that department.As far as the recent artwork above, who is making it? Those producing this art seem to be mostly White Europeans, Canadians and Americans, typically conservative men aged, say, 20-50. Most of them seem to be atheists. The Europeans are rightwing by European standards (often to the left of the US Democratic Party).

The Americans are almost all US conservatives and supporters of George Bush and the US Republican Party. A few of the artists are US Jews. One was produced by American White Supremacists.Almost all of those producing the cartoons are supporters of the imperialist wars on the Chechen, Kashmiri, Iraqi and Palestinian people.

Needless to say, most of them are strong Zionists, though most are not Jewish. All of them oppose liberals and Leftists as "appeasers of Islam", "Quislings", "dhimmis", etc.A couple of the works above are older drawings, one a German woodcut and the other a painting depicting a scene from Dante's Inferno. One is a satirical drawing by famous US cartoonist. Two remind me of the worst Nazi anti-Semitic poster propaganda.At this point, there is no stopping this Islamic blasphemy juggernaut. The "can't draw Muhammad (pbuh)" taboo is out of the bag, the Ridicule Muhammad (pbuh) and Attack Islam Train is on the tracks, racing at 80 mph, with plenty of fuel and no obstacles in sight.

Since the flood of anti-Islam blasphemy is only beginning, Muslims need to think hard and calmly about what to do next. They can't exactly riot and rage forever about this, and the more the Muslims riot and rage, the more drawings the provocateurs and the Muslims' enemies gleefully churn out, the more anger at Muslims, and the more support for the Muslims' enemies.

Perhaps the best response, though it has been ham handed so far, is for Muslims to produce cartoons ridiculing some choice Western taboos. As long as this culture war is on, pens are superb weapons, since they neither kill nor physically harm. In this way, Muslims fight the provocateurs and bigots on their own turf, with their own weapons, in their own way, without rising to the bait and hurting their own interests.For Muslims, a retreat from stones to pens takes the fight beyond schoolboy tantrums towards coolheaded adult behavior. The first choices in the Muslim counteroffensive have been cartoons about the Holocaust, which, unfortunately, which isn't a very funny subject.But then, many of the pictures above are about as nasty, mean and ugly as your average "Holocaust howler". At some point, a joke traverses from funny to vicious.By and by, I feel that Islam will reach an accommodation with modernity. Until then, though, it looks like a wild ride.

Economics: Is India shining?

How Poor is India?

The IT boom affect about 6 million people only

India Inc. and Bollywood apply pandolsian gloss over their penury, hide the slums, cover the destitute and portray India as a modern state. Nothing could be farther than the truth.
Some startling statistics have just been released by a forgotten wing of Dr Singh’s own administration, the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector.

Around 80 per cent of India’s working population is in this sector. Nearly 80 per cent of this group earns less than 20 rupees a day and 85 per cent of this sub group is trapped in debt. By that usual sleight of hand we have drawn an arbitrary line to define poverty: Rs 12 a day constitutes the poverty line.

This encourages the illusion that 77 per cent of India is now above the poverty line. It isn’t that much above in any case. Nor is this poverty line index-linked to inflation. Twelve rupees a day buys much less today than it did three years ago. The traditional poverty groups remain where they were: 88 per cent of Scheduled Tribes and Castes, 80 per cent of “Other Backward Classes” and 85 per cent of Muslims belong to the “poor and vulnerable” class.M. J. Akbar is Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle newspapers. He can be reached at

mjakbar@asianage.com http://www.khaleejtimes.com/ColumnistHomeNew.asp?section=mjakbar&col=yes

The other point of view

GDP

growth is estimated at a stunning 8 percent-plus.
Foreign exchange reserves are at over $103 billion.
The stockmarket is going through the roof.
Check out the mushrooming malls, improving telecom connectivity, booming industry.
A great monsoon last year has heralded greater growth.
The government has ambitious plans to link rivers, to build superhighways -- both concrete and wireless, criss-crossing the nation.
A South Asia Free Trade Agreement has been created.
Plus radical economic and strategic pacts with the United States, the European Union, and Southeast Asia.
There is no better time to be an Indian, declares Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
The nationwide media blitz -- India Shining -- would have us believe that we are now looking at a resurgent India, an economic and military powerhouse striding firmly towards its rightful place in the world.
But there are many who disagree.
Global corporations cite corruption, red tape, high inflation, poor laws and an infirm infrastructure as reasons for their not wishing to invest in India.
Opposition�parties call it a pre-election gimmick.
Economists say many�million�Indians still do not have access to potable water, electricity, decent housing or even good roads.
And literacy rates are appalling.
Foreign policy pundits compare India unfavourably with China's phenomenal rate of growth and environmentalists point to the growing ecological ravages due to unchecked industrial growth.
Is India really shining?
Why do you think so?
Do you think the 'feel good' factor sweeping India is more imaginary than real?
What does India need to do to become an economic superpower?

India's Middle Class Failure

India's 200m-strong middle class is the most economically dynamic group on the planet, but is largely uninterested in politics or social reform. Until it begins to engage politically, India will suffer from a lop-sided modernisation.
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad in Prospect:
As the actual Mother India celebrates the 60th anniversary of her independence, there is....both surging optimism and crushing despair about her future. As the saying goes, everything and its opposite is true in India. The seven Indian Institutes of Technology rank near the top of global surveys, and job offers to graduates from the Indian Institutes of Management rival those to graduates of the famous US business schools; yet a third of the country is still illiterate. Three hundred million Indians live on less than $1 a day—a quarter of the world's utterly poor—yet since 1985, more than 400m (out of a total population of 1bn) have risen out of relative poverty—to $5 a day—and another 300m will follow over the next two decades if the economy continues to grow at over 7 per cent a year. Population growth, even at a slower pace, will mean that there will still be millions below the poverty line, but the fall in number will be steady. At the other end of the scale, India has the largest number of dollar billionaires outside the US and Russia.

Pakistani Author Wins International Literary Prize

via www.guardian.co.uk
A novel hailed as finding "shimmering love" among the bigotries and injustices of the Asian area of an English town yesterday won a share of a £16,000 international literary prize. Maps for Lost Lovers, which took Nadeem Aslam 11 years to write, was declared in San Francisco as joint winner of the annual Kiriyama award, which aims to raise understanding of the peoples of the Pacific rim and south Asian diaspora. He has said that he lived on prize money and grants while writing Maps for Lost Lovers in borrowed flats in Hudders field, Edinburgh, Leicester and Reading. It got him longlisted for last year's Booker prize - and for the Literary Review's bad sex award. He currently lives in north London.

Pakistan born Photographer Wins Pulitzer Prize
-via www.chron.com
Adrees Latif, 34, a Pakistani-by-birth photojournalist has won the Pulitzer prize for his photography for Reuters in Myanmar. Adrees's photograph of the fatal shooting of a fellow journalist, the Japanese videographer Kenji Nagai, won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. Monks and nuns were under fire for their protests against the Burmese government in 2007 when Latif sneaked in among the fold to document the unrest. Foreign journalists were not allowed inside the country, so the Reuters photographer went without media credentials. Adrees Latif grew up in Houston, where his parents still live. Born in Pakistan, Latif moved to Houston with his family at age 7. Latif worked at The Houston Post, then as a freelancer at the Houston Chronicle, before moving to Los Angeles to work for Reuters. While working in Houston, he earned a degree in journalism from the University of Houston in 1999. He later moved to Bangkok, where he lives with his wife and daughter, covering international news for Reuters

Pakistan: I love Musharraf

Miss Pakistan 2007: I love Musharraf, I love Musharraf

Miss Pakistan World 2007 Mahleej Sarkari, talking exclusively to Business Plus in the programme “Newsline+ with Rana Mubashir”, declared her unconditional love for
President Pervez Musharraf.
She said she would like to go on a date with the president of Pakistan. “I love Musharraf, I love Musharraf, I love Musharraf, and it would be an honour and privilege for me to meet him in person and talk to him,” she said.“I like the President because he has a charming personality and a charisma that attracts me towards him,” Mahleej said. She said that she has been crowned as Miss Pakistan World 2007 in a beauty pageant in Canada.
Mahleej comes from the province of Balochistan.
“In President Musharraf’s tenure women of Pakistan have been given a lot of rights. His contribution towards building a better image of Pakistan throughout the world has turned me into a huge fan of his. I truly admire, respect and love him for all he is worth,” she said.

Pakistan Today

Pakistan has now become immune to “prophecies of doom”.

Pakistan has now become immune to “prophecies of doom”. Pakistanis are sick of “do more” lectures from a 3rd rate country that piggy-backs on superpowers to get a kick out of beating up vulnerable populations.

Two million Muslim kids died destroying the USSR. Today, Pakistan is suffering because of the failed policies of Britain and the USA. The blowback faced by many is because of the short sighted policies of London and Washington.

Faced similar issues during the First Afghan war when Russian agents would blow up civilians in Pakistan as reprisal for the American-Pakistan’s war against the USSR. It was the KGB-Khad-RAW then. The same players are at it again. The problems faced by Pakistan are the making of RAW (Indian intelligence services) and their cohorts in Afghanistan. When the US planted an anti-Pakistan government in Kabul, Mr. Karzai (the mayor of Kabul) threatened Pakistan to cover his incompetence and inept narco-warlord government.

Pakistan helped the US as a friend, not as a paymaster. No amount of money is enough for lost Pakistani lives. It is insensitive to place a Dollar value on the heads of 700 Pakistani soldiers who lost their lives fighting the terrorists. It is crass to place a monetary value on the hundreds of Pakistani civilians who died because Pakistan has been supporting the American war in Afghanistan. Neither the government, nor the people nor the president of Pakistan are indentured servants of anyone. Pakistan was helping the US as a friend and an ally.

In the article also fails to mention that for the past 60 years, Pakistan has been supporting American policies, and was the founding member of SEATO and CENTO. Pakistan was a cold war ally fighting the USSR and the defeat of the “Evil Empire” in Pakistan led to the implosion of the USSR. 2 million Pakistanis, Afghans and other died in defeating the USSR in the 90s. Back then Pakistan paid more than $450 for F-16s. It is a matter of historical record that Pakistan never got ht money back and did not get the planes either. Then one wonders why there is anti-Americanism in the world!

For helping the US in Afghanistan, an anti-Pakistan government was installed in Kabul that proliferated drugs and failed to take control of the country!! It is articles like this that perpetuates a feeling of un-appreciation among Pakistanis, and reinforces the image of ingrate Americans. This ungratefulness, and the “do more” mantra creates anti-Americanism in South Asia. Because of its persistently, invective, biased and bad reporting, the paper is fast becoming irrelevant as far is news is concerned.

For all of President Musharraf’s faults, Pakistan is forging ahead with a 7% growth rate and record foreign reserves. Pakistan is the fourth largest state in the world, and a nuclear state advancing at a phenomenal rate of economic growth. She has motorways that can only be the envy of South Asia, and is building bullet trains and huge new cities in Baluchistan and Sindh. Pakistan is attracting huge investments in automobile and technology. Just in the past few weeks Dubai based companies are investing $26 Billion Dollars in two islands.

FTA with China will be a boon to Pakistani and Chinese industrialists who are setting up 6 Chinese industrial zones in Pakistan to build and then export Chinese goods from Pakistani soil. Powers outside Pakistan want to destroy this friendship.

Pakistan will move ahead and is moving ahead.