The Flashlight, Jan. 26- February 1, 2008
THE FLASHLIGHT
January 26 – February 1, 2008
No Peace without Justice, no Justice without the Facts
The World: Trends in Welfare
The Economist, 1-26, pp. 27-29.
Prosperity: Outside of the Middle East, the world has been growing more prosperous and peaceful. Between 1999 and 2004, 135 million people escaped poverty: more people, more quickly than at any time in history.
Literacy: Of people aged 15 to 25, three-fourths were illiterate in 1970. Today, nine-tenths are literate.
Fertility (number of children born in the lifetime of a woman) in Asia and the Pacific: 2.1 children now. In the world as a whole, the decline was from 4.8 in 1970 to 2.6 in 1995. The main exception, with high fertility, is sub-Saharan Africa.
Violence: International wars peaked in 1970, and have declined since. After 1990, the number of civil wars rapidly dropped. But since 2001 the Middle East has suffered more violence and fatalities than all the rest of the world put together.
Science and the Islamic World
Free Inquiry. Published by the Council for Secular Humanism, February-March, 2008. By Dr. Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani professor of physics, pp. 33-40.
Of all the countries in the world engaged in scientific research, during the period 1997 to early 2007, Muslim countries had 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population compared with a world average of 40.7 and for the OECD (most of the industrialized West), an average of 139.3 per thousand.
The author reports that for seven centuries no major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world. “Most universities in Islamic countries have a starkly inferior quality of teaching and learning, a tenuous connection of curriculum to job skills, and research that is low in both quality and quantity.”
Only four states have many foreign scientists in residence – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates – and these are far ahead of other Arab states.
The author adds, “With well over a billion Muslims and extensive mineral resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge?”
The most important cause of this situation, says the author, is the restriction of academic and cultural freedom on campuses in most Muslim countries. There is widespread failure to cultivate scientific habits of mind, namely, the demand that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, unmindful of authority. Scientific method is alien to unreformed religious thought. Absolute authority comes from above in these societies. The exceptional individual asks questions only with difficulty. The penalties for disbelief of religious ideas are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and religious leaders hold that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.
[The journal Free Inquiry may be difficult to find. For a hard copy of the full text of this article, you may consult Mary Matossian at mary@matossian.net.]
Iraq
CBS 1-27, 60 Minutes. Interview with George Piro, FBI interrogator for Saddam Hussein in an American prison in Iraq. In accordance with FBI policy, Saddam was not tortured or subjected to “harsh interrogation methods.” He and his interrogator spent many hours a day together in his cell for over five months. The interrogator was of Lebanese descent and a fluent Arabic speaker. He learned that:Saddam Hussein did not expect George W. Bush to stage a land invasion of Iraq. But he planned undercover resistance in advance. He refused to admit that he had destroyed all his WMDs because he feared what Iran might do. He admitted that he ordered poison gas to be used against the Kurds, saying it was “necessary.”
NYTimes. 2-1. Kurdish power is waning in Iraq as Arab anger rises. Kurds have close ties to the US and the technical competence to run government agencies. Both Sunni and Shia Arabs resent the Kurdish effort to seize control of oil-rich Kirkuk and gain more in the division of oil revenues of the whole country.
Israel/ Palestine
Amos Elon, “Olmert and Israel: The Change,” The New York Review of Books, February 14, 2008, pp. 23-26.
The demographic trends in Israel pose a threat to the existence of the Jewish state. About 25% of the population is Arab. The Arabs in Israel have a higher fertility rate than the Israeli Jews. The effort to persuade more Jews around the world to immigrate to Israel is no longer producing satisfactory results. Hence, a two-state solution is necessary [so that Arabs within Israel have a place to go].
The author reports at length on the settlement movement, funded not only privately, but surreptitiously by the Jewish state. He says, “There is no public record showing that Palestinians whose land has been requisitioned have received compensation by the Israeli government. There are now 250,000 Jews in illegal settlements on the West Bank.
IN 1948, the Jews seized 78% of the land of Israel. Since then they have been steadily encroaching on the remaining 22% left to the Palestinians.
The United States
Economy
CNN 1-28. The US national debt is three trillion dollars.
CNN 1-20. The Federal Reserve lowered the interest rate by .50%. [Correction on previous issue of The Searchlight: the Fed reduced the interest rate by .75%]
CBS 1-27. House prices are down 20%.
NYT 2-1. In the month of January there was a net loss of 17,000 non-farm jobs. This was the deepest decline since August, 2003.
The South Carolina Democratic Primary
CNN 1-26. Obama won the South Carolina primary by a landslide: 55% of the votes to 27% for Clinton. His support was heterogeneous as to education and social class. It included many young people. Obama claimed the advantage of being for big changes and resisting the influence of Washington lobbyists. He affirmed that in politics the ends do not justify the means: the means count. He said that he did not want to tell people what they want to hear, but what they need to know.
The turnout for the primary was half a million voters, which is huge for a primary here.
Obama’s victory speech is S.C. is available on You Tube. In the video one can see the age and racial diversity of his audience. In the first part of the speech the audience chanted “USA! USA!” and in the second part, “Yes We Can!, Yes We Can!”.
Half the voters in South Carolina were black. 80% of them
voted for Obama. About 25% of the white voters did so.
After the landslide vote was reported. Caroline Kennedy, daughter of Pres. John Kennedy, endorsed Obama. NYT 1-28. Senator Ted Kennedy and his son, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, also endorsed Obama. So did Senators John Kerry and Patrick Leahy.
Three of the children of Robert Kennedy, Robert Jr., Kathleen, and Kerry, endorsed Hilary Clinton.
The Florida Republican Primary
CNN 1-29, Sen. John McCain won by 36%. Romney was second with 30%. After a weak finish in third place, Giuliani withdrew from the race and endorsed McCain. McCain won because of his “authenticity” and not his positions on issues.
CNN 1-30. Edwards is quitting the presidential race.
The Los Angeles Democratic Debate
CNN 1-31. Hilary is ahead in the polls, but Obama is rising and has momentum. Since Edwards dropped out, Obama in the polls now has risen to 6-7% less than Clinton.
During the debate both Clinton and Obama opposed the continuation of the Iraq War and the long term presence of American troops and bases. Obama claimed priority from opposing the Iraq
from the beginning; he said that on Day One he would not just be ready, but right. Hilary said that after the first Bush president, it took a Clinton to clean up; and after the second Bush president, it would take another Clinton to clean up.
W Post 2-1. After the debate it was reported that since the South Carolina primary, Obama had raised $32 million dollars. He will be able to place TV ads in 24 of the 27 Super Tuesday states; Clinton is only placing ads in 12 of these states.
January 26 – February 1, 2008
No Peace without Justice, no Justice without the Facts
The World: Trends in Welfare
The Economist, 1-26, pp. 27-29.
Prosperity: Outside of the Middle East, the world has been growing more prosperous and peaceful. Between 1999 and 2004, 135 million people escaped poverty: more people, more quickly than at any time in history.
Literacy: Of people aged 15 to 25, three-fourths were illiterate in 1970. Today, nine-tenths are literate.
Fertility (number of children born in the lifetime of a woman) in Asia and the Pacific: 2.1 children now. In the world as a whole, the decline was from 4.8 in 1970 to 2.6 in 1995. The main exception, with high fertility, is sub-Saharan Africa.
Violence: International wars peaked in 1970, and have declined since. After 1990, the number of civil wars rapidly dropped. But since 2001 the Middle East has suffered more violence and fatalities than all the rest of the world put together.
Science and the Islamic World
Free Inquiry. Published by the Council for Secular Humanism, February-March, 2008. By Dr. Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani professor of physics, pp. 33-40.
Of all the countries in the world engaged in scientific research, during the period 1997 to early 2007, Muslim countries had 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population compared with a world average of 40.7 and for the OECD (most of the industrialized West), an average of 139.3 per thousand.
The author reports that for seven centuries no major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world. “Most universities in Islamic countries have a starkly inferior quality of teaching and learning, a tenuous connection of curriculum to job skills, and research that is low in both quality and quantity.”
Only four states have many foreign scientists in residence – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates – and these are far ahead of other Arab states.
The author adds, “With well over a billion Muslims and extensive mineral resources, why is the Islamic world disengaged from science and the process of creating new knowledge?”
The most important cause of this situation, says the author, is the restriction of academic and cultural freedom on campuses in most Muslim countries. There is widespread failure to cultivate scientific habits of mind, namely, the demand that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, unmindful of authority. Scientific method is alien to unreformed religious thought. Absolute authority comes from above in these societies. The exceptional individual asks questions only with difficulty. The penalties for disbelief of religious ideas are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and religious leaders hold that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.
[The journal Free Inquiry may be difficult to find. For a hard copy of the full text of this article, you may consult Mary Matossian at mary@matossian.net.]
Iraq
CBS 1-27, 60 Minutes. Interview with George Piro, FBI interrogator for Saddam Hussein in an American prison in Iraq. In accordance with FBI policy, Saddam was not tortured or subjected to “harsh interrogation methods.” He and his interrogator spent many hours a day together in his cell for over five months. The interrogator was of Lebanese descent and a fluent Arabic speaker. He learned that:Saddam Hussein did not expect George W. Bush to stage a land invasion of Iraq. But he planned undercover resistance in advance. He refused to admit that he had destroyed all his WMDs because he feared what Iran might do. He admitted that he ordered poison gas to be used against the Kurds, saying it was “necessary.”
NYTimes. 2-1. Kurdish power is waning in Iraq as Arab anger rises. Kurds have close ties to the US and the technical competence to run government agencies. Both Sunni and Shia Arabs resent the Kurdish effort to seize control of oil-rich Kirkuk and gain more in the division of oil revenues of the whole country.
Israel/ Palestine
Amos Elon, “Olmert and Israel: The Change,” The New York Review of Books, February 14, 2008, pp. 23-26.
The demographic trends in Israel pose a threat to the existence of the Jewish state. About 25% of the population is Arab. The Arabs in Israel have a higher fertility rate than the Israeli Jews. The effort to persuade more Jews around the world to immigrate to Israel is no longer producing satisfactory results. Hence, a two-state solution is necessary [so that Arabs within Israel have a place to go].
The author reports at length on the settlement movement, funded not only privately, but surreptitiously by the Jewish state. He says, “There is no public record showing that Palestinians whose land has been requisitioned have received compensation by the Israeli government. There are now 250,000 Jews in illegal settlements on the West Bank.
IN 1948, the Jews seized 78% of the land of Israel. Since then they have been steadily encroaching on the remaining 22% left to the Palestinians.
The United States
Economy
CNN 1-28. The US national debt is three trillion dollars.
CNN 1-20. The Federal Reserve lowered the interest rate by .50%. [Correction on previous issue of The Searchlight: the Fed reduced the interest rate by .75%]
CBS 1-27. House prices are down 20%.
NYT 2-1. In the month of January there was a net loss of 17,000 non-farm jobs. This was the deepest decline since August, 2003.
The South Carolina Democratic Primary
CNN 1-26. Obama won the South Carolina primary by a landslide: 55% of the votes to 27% for Clinton. His support was heterogeneous as to education and social class. It included many young people. Obama claimed the advantage of being for big changes and resisting the influence of Washington lobbyists. He affirmed that in politics the ends do not justify the means: the means count. He said that he did not want to tell people what they want to hear, but what they need to know.
The turnout for the primary was half a million voters, which is huge for a primary here.
Obama’s victory speech is S.C. is available on You Tube. In the video one can see the age and racial diversity of his audience. In the first part of the speech the audience chanted “USA! USA!” and in the second part, “Yes We Can!, Yes We Can!”.
Half the voters in South Carolina were black. 80% of them
voted for Obama. About 25% of the white voters did so.
After the landslide vote was reported. Caroline Kennedy, daughter of Pres. John Kennedy, endorsed Obama. NYT 1-28. Senator Ted Kennedy and his son, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, also endorsed Obama. So did Senators John Kerry and Patrick Leahy.
Three of the children of Robert Kennedy, Robert Jr., Kathleen, and Kerry, endorsed Hilary Clinton.
The Florida Republican Primary
CNN 1-29, Sen. John McCain won by 36%. Romney was second with 30%. After a weak finish in third place, Giuliani withdrew from the race and endorsed McCain. McCain won because of his “authenticity” and not his positions on issues.
CNN 1-30. Edwards is quitting the presidential race.
The Los Angeles Democratic Debate
CNN 1-31. Hilary is ahead in the polls, but Obama is rising and has momentum. Since Edwards dropped out, Obama in the polls now has risen to 6-7% less than Clinton.
During the debate both Clinton and Obama opposed the continuation of the Iraq War and the long term presence of American troops and bases. Obama claimed priority from opposing the Iraq
from the beginning; he said that on Day One he would not just be ready, but right. Hilary said that after the first Bush president, it took a Clinton to clean up; and after the second Bush president, it would take another Clinton to clean up.
W Post 2-1. After the debate it was reported that since the South Carolina primary, Obama had raised $32 million dollars. He will be able to place TV ads in 24 of the 27 Super Tuesday states; Clinton is only placing ads in 12 of these states.
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