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  • Who Is a Jew in England? (Joe)

    Potentially misleading subject adapted from the headline of this NYT article.  An Orthodox Jewish high school in London is refusing to admit a Jewish student who is not, by Orthodox standards, Jewish, because he is not Jewish.  Predictably, there's a court challenge.  By my definition, the kid is obviously Jewish: his father is Jewish, his mother converted to Judaism in a progressive synagogue, he was raised and identifies as Jewish.  By the orthodox church's definition, he isn't because his mother converted in a progressive synagogue.

    I was surprised, when reading the article, to see that the appellate court ruled that the school's decision was was based on race, rather than religion, and therefore constitutes unlawful discrimination.  An appeal from that to the high court follows, so we'll see what winds up happening.  Without doing any actual research on the specific issue, I'm pretty sure that in the U.S. a court would or could not decide that question based on the first amendment's religion clauses, and I'm nearly certain that a court would refuse to do so based on the internal-affairs doctrine.  Under the internal-affairs doctrine, courts (at least federal courts) do not exercise jurisdiction over the internal affairs of religious organizations, and will not define religion or decide internal religious affairs if they can avoid it. 

    You can see the problem: a court tells a Jewish organization or entity how it must define its Jewish membership.  First amendment principles, which I find normatively attractive, do not favor government dictating religious issues.  This is apparently a contentious issue within the Jewish community.  Government deciding religious matters threatens secularism and pluralism.  Yes, the school's decision is offensive, and yes, a court order can remedy this student's problem.  But at the same time, it can't settle the debate in the community, and is likely to only exacerbate tensions.  This demonstrates the limits of law in settling important cultural matters.

    A further complication is that Britain has publicly financed religious schools that are allowed to give preference to applicants within their own faiths, which I assume would be unconstitutional in the U.S.  Once the government starts getting involved, where does/can it draw the involvement-uninvolvement line?  If it's not secular, I don't see how this can work.

  • Health Care Reform -the Cliffs Notes Edition (Sujatha)

    The bill passed yesterday that Pres.Obama was ecstatic enough to personally email me about it at 1:03 am. And here I thought that only Hillary Clinton got 3 am calls.
    Here is the  section by section summary link  of the HR 3962, the Affordable Health Care For America Act

    All's  well and good,even with a restrictive clause on abortion funding in order to get the conservative Blue Dog Democrats to not derail the bill. But little things niggle.
    Such as errors in the statement of intent to ensure that insurance companies will be required to pay out at least 85% of the plan money towards treatment of the enrollee.

    "Sec. 102. Ensuring value and lower premiums. Amends the Public Health Service Act to require health
    insurance issuers in the small and large group market to meet a medical loss ratio of not less than 85%, effective for plan years beginning January 1, 2010. Directs the Secretary to require that plans in the individual market also meet a medical loss ratio of not less than 85% so long as it does not destabilize the existing individual market. If plans exceed that limit, rebates to enrollees are required. In determining the methodology for the medical loss ratio, the Secretary is to design it to ensure adequate participation by issuers, competition in the market, and value for consumers."

    A better summary  would have said "If plans do not meet the minimum medical loss ratio, rebates to enrollees are required." This is a section summary, so one would have to read the actual bill for the specific language, which I haven't.

    But there is a whole box of goodies, most of which take effect on Jan 1, 2010. No more pre-existing condition based denials, no more rescission, no lifetime caps, immediate provision for a large group of high-risk uninsured till the proposed Health Insurance Exchange (aka Public Option, if I'm not mistaken) comes into existence, etc., etc.

    In the spirit of not lettling the perfect be the enemy of the good, we have a bill, warts and all, passed in the House of Representatives. The next milestone will be the Senate Health Care bill and debate- the next blockbuster thriller.
    Stay tuned for the epic battle 'Duel in the Sun', starring  Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, Olympia Snowe, Evan Bayh et al.
    (Teaser: Will Bayh block debate, even though he said he wouldn't? Will the GOP and Joe Liarman succeed in thwarting the efforts of Harry Reid  to get the bill out the door? Will it Snowe or won't it?)

    Other Links:

    Generate a side-by-side comparison of all the different flavors of Health Care Reform proposals.

    Ezra Klein's summary of How the Big Bad Insurance Companies work.

    Wendell Potter, ex-CIGNA executive's testimony to Congress regarding health insurance company practices.

  • Ansel Adams in Color

    During our childhood, for many years and even more hours, my sister and I used to pore over a book of photography that our father had brought home when I was probably six or seven years old and my sister two or three. The collection consisted of black and white pictures from all over the world. We were entranced by The Family of Man whose content took us to remote corners of the world inhabited by landscapes and people we never expected to see in real life. What we did not know at the time because we  paid scant attention to the names of the photographers, that it was our first exposure to the famous Ansel Adams, many of whose photos were included in the collection. The fact that black and white images of deserts, stark mountains, rivers and canyons in far away America (none of Adams' photos in the book featured anything live other than trees) fascinated two very young children at an age when color pictures of people and animals usually appear more interesting, says something about the hypnotic quality of his photography. That copy of The Family of Man of our childhood became tattered due to our love for it.  About fifteen years ago, my sister and I each obtained a new edition of the book in order to preserve our fond nostalgia. (This exceptional book of photography has been continuously in print since 1955.)

    Photographs like those that my sister and I admired, have made Black & White the signature colors of Adams' photographic legacy. But Adams also took color pictures, many in fact, mostly as remunerative commissions for commercial outfits. He had planned to put together a book of his color photos a few years before his death but never got around to finishing the project. In 1993 a book was published showcasing that other half of his work, Ansel Adams in Color, which has now been reprinted in 2009. A review of the book appears in this month's Smithsonian Magazine. (See photo gallery here) The color photos in the hands of the consummate shutterbug are terrific also. But many viewers (and the photographer himself) insist that Adams' artististic brilliance is far more spectacular in the works where he utilized his beloved palette of just two shades - black and white.

    "I can get – for me – a far greater sense of 'color' through a well planned and executed black-and-white image than I have ever achieved with color photography," he [Adams] wrote in 1967. For Adams, who could translate sunlight's blinding spectrum into binary code perhaps more accurately than anyone before or since, there was "an infinite scale of values" in monochrome. Color was mere reality, the lumpy world given for everyone to look at, before artists began the difficult and honorable job of trying to perfect it in shades of gray. 

    Ansel-Adams-Jeffrey-Pine-10
    Ansel-adams-yosemite

    Two similar photos by Ansel Adams, one in color and the other black & white.

  • Label? Diagnosis? Ill-Defined Something? (Joe)

    Interesting NYT article about the movement for the 2012 DSM-V to get rid of "Asperger's syndrome," as well as "pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified," and make everything fall within the autism spectrum.  Link.

  • A puzzle on gay marriage (prasad)

    1. Roughly equal parts of the country want gay marriage, civil unions without marriage, and no legal recognition whatsoever. I’m assuming the second category is what ‘swings’ in marriage votes as in California or Maine.
    2. Ad campaigns that cleverly use the words ‘gay’ and ‘children’ in the same sentence seem, at least for now, to be effective against marriage equality
    3. The number of people who’re fine with gay adoption and fertility treatments is rather larger than the number who want marriage.

    Now point 2. suggests to me people who’re willing to suffer consenting adults doing as they please, but who draw the line at imposing externalities upon children, perhaps until there is conclusive research. This has been seen in Europe; Belgium for instance made same sex marriage legal before gay adoption.

    Point 3 instead suggests those who don’t think teh ghey destroys childhoods or seduces and corrupts youth, but who want to feel superior to gay folk, people whose psychologies are well described by John Holbo:

    What makes these arguments so weird is the mildness of the underlying opposition to homosexuals and homosexuality – the implicit inclination to be basically tolerant. ‘C’mon, gays, you know you’re ok, and we know you’re ok, and you even know that we know you’re ok, but we don’t like it, so can’t there be some way that we can insist on us being a little better than you? It can be a small thing. Symbolic, but slightly inconvenient for you, so people know it’s also serious?’

    I’d like to know what the relative fraction of these sub-populations is! Going by the data-points given,it seems like at least ten percent of America is comfortable with gays adopting, but not with gays marrying. That would suggest 3. (not 2.), but I don’t understand why *this* population would have unusual difficulty with gay marriage being “taught in public schools”, whatever that means.

    What is going on here? What are these people thinking? Might there be low-hanging fruit with outreach efforts aiming to bring marriage and adoption views into harmony? Obviously some people will decide to disapprove of both gay marriage and adoption, but it’s plausible to me they’d be outnumbered by those who’d move the opposite way. Even if not, gay adoption isn’t a particularly hot or touchy issue, so taking that hit for a boost on gay marriage might be worthwhile. In any case, the constitutional hurdles involved in restricting a sub-population from adopting or seeking reproductive treatments are rather higher…

    [Actually, never mind. It might just be a significant Rove-effect, though the media hasn’t emphasized one; did evangelicals turn out in disproportionate numbers in Maine? In any case, it seems like targeting the bizarro anti-marriage pro-adoption ten percent might be useful]

  • “I am them!”

    Sounds like something straight out of ancient Hindu philosophy. Well, you realize you are drunk, you are driving and not very well; naturally, it's time to lapse into metaphysics or at the very least, some commendable drunken clarity.

  • Proving allegiance in hostile times – saving the Lost Battalion

    A poignant war story, more than six decades old, describes the desperation and anxiety of Japanese Americans during World War II.  Citizens of the US, they had to prove their loyalty to their country in those uncertain times of suspicion and hostility. Sometimes that involved acts of conspicuous courage and valor.

    The Lost Battalion
    Even 65 years later, Astro Tortolano thinks almost daily of his struggle to survive in the Vosges Mountains of northern France in October 1944.

    Surrounded by German soldiers after stumbling into a trap, Tortolano and about 280 men in the 1st Battalion of the Texas 141st Infantry Regiment of the 36th Infantry Division rationed food and bullets. They fended off Nazi assaults. They thought all hope of surviving was lost.

    Six days into the crisis, different soldiers — members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team — broke through enemy lines and led Tortolano and the surviving 211 members of the 1st battalion to safety.

    “I'll be forever thankful,” the now 88-year-old said. “I've never forgotten how they saved us.”

    Tortolano and 39 members of the 442nd and 141st reunited at Houston's Hyatt Regency Hotel Sunday for a special dinner hosted by the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation to honor them.

    The aging veterans, many in their late 80s and 90s, flew in from all over the country this weekend for a possible last meeting between the “Lost Battalion” and their saviors — men in the now legendary 442nd, made up of Asian-Americans, mostly of Japanese descent.

    When they met each other, they embraced and swapped stories of old times. And on Sunday, together possibly one last time, they remembered all that they had been through in 1944.

    The majority of soldiers in the 442nd were known as Nisei, sons of Japanese immigrants in the United States.

    Even with relatives being forced into relocation camps around the U.S., roughly 4,000 men initially agreed to fill the 442nd's ranks in 1943. The 442nd was united by a common bond: At a time of deep discrimination against Japanese-Americans, its members wanted to prove that they were Americans through and through.

    “We were proud to do this,” said George Sakato, 88, a California native who joined the military when he was 20. “We wanted to serve our country.”

    Shipped overseas after a few weeks of training, the 442nd saw some of the war's fiercest fighting. Members were sent to North Africa and saw intense battles in Italy. There, they developed their fearsome reputation as a respected fighting force.

    Before long they were ordered to France. Having absorbed other Nisei from a sister battalion, that is where the 442nd encountered the Lost Battalion.

    • •••

    The rest of the story here.

  • The real reason why Pakistan is fragile

    Staying on the topic of Pakistan for one more day – this time I bring you a book review by Indian journalist Manoj Joshi. Written by Pakistani born author Farzana Shaikh, the book examines the underlying causes of Pakistan's political and existential turmoil. According to the author, turning its back on the country's multicultural south Asian past and a deliberate (and sometimes conflicted) attempt to redefine itself as a militant (and military) Arabized Muslim nation may have played a role in precipitating an identity crisis in Pakistan. Created more than sixty years ago by the partition of British India, during the Cold War of the last century, Pakistan was used by the United States as its client state in South Asia as a buffer against both the former Soviet Union's influence in the region as well as India's socialist leaning "non-aligned" international stance. Should Pakistan once more reclaim its softer south Asian roots to counter the artificially imposed Arabic influence? Does making peace (even an uneasy one) with India offer Pakistan an option to settle the upheaval at home? Who knows? In politics things don't always work out the way common sense dictates.

    In this context I will share with A.B. readers something very odd that I heard nearly a decade ago. In September, 2000 my husband and I were on a vacation in the beautiful state of Goa on the western Indian coast. One morning I woke up at an unholy early hour due to jet lag. With nothing else to do and the hotel's dining room not yet open for breakfast, I sat listening to an early morning TV interview with an Indian engineer who was also an amateur astrologer. The man made various predictions about world affairs. Two of them have stuck in my memory.  He said that in the upcoming US elections the following November (remember this was the year 2000), Al Gore would be the winner but there might be some "problems" with the results. The other prediction he made was that in 2013, India and Pakistan will form a loose federation with a common currency and that most hostilities between the two countries will cease. I don't believe in either homeopathy or astrology but stranger things have happened. Now on to Manoj's review.

    Making Sense of Pakistan
    Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan     (New Delhi/London, Foundation/Hurst, 2009)

    Review by Manoj Joshi (Mail Today - November 1, 2009)

    The uncertain national identity and contested relationship to Islam lie behind Pakistan’s social and political upheavals, says Farzana Shaikh.

    INDIA HAS had difficult relations with Pakistan since inception, but that is understandable given our history. But today there is a widespread sense of exasperation in relation to that country across the world, as well as a sense of alarm. Just what is this country of 160 million people, some of great talent and industry, all about ? Farzana Shaikh’s book title provides perhaps the most comprehensive and well argued answer.

    Shaikh, an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs ( Chatham House) in London concludes that the country’s uncertain national identity and contested relationship to Islam lie behind its social and political upheavals and its uncertainty as a nation. As she perceptively notes, the problem is not with Islam itself, but with “ the uncertainty about its influence over Pakistan’s identity as well as with the lack of consensus over the very terms of Islam.” She goes on to add, that it is the arguments and the fights over the “ multiple meanings of Islam” that result in the “ doubts about the meaning of Pakistan and the significance of being Pakistani.” India, of course, looms large in the Pakistani consciousness. As Shaikh has noted, “ much of the uncertainty over Pakistan’s identity stems from the nagging question of whether its identity is fundamentally dependent on India.” Fear of Indian hegemony, political, economic and cultural, has kept Pakistan in a campaign mode against India. To maintain effective parity against its much larger neighbour, Pakistan has sought external alliances, spent an unconscionably great amount of money on defence, made nuclear weapons and finally unleashed a covert war with the help of Islamist jihadis. In fact Shaikh sees Islamabad’s Afghan policy as yet another attempt to shore up its fragile identity by seeking parity with India in the form of assuming the role of a regional hegemon.

    In some ways the book takes off where her first book, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India 1860- 1947 , ended. In answering the question "Why Pakistan?” she has argued that two rival discourses of Islam — the communitarian and the Islamist — have struggled “for ascendancy in defining Pakistan’s national identity.” The first was the discourse visible in the secularist politicians like Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim middle- class of central India who played such a key role in the founding of the state. The second is the Islamist discourse “grounded in a religious and at times radical reading of Islam.” The tension between the two yield many ambiguities, but there are also uncertainties associated with the fact that Partition was the consequence of an endgame gone awry, for which the principal political actors of the time — Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and others are responsible.

    The problems in defining Pakistan spills over naturally into the other question “Who is a Pakistani?” Shaikh points out, that the definition of ‘the Pakistani’ is still “deeply contested.” It is not just the microscopic Hindu and Sikh minority, the Ahmediya community or even the mohajir whose "Pakistaniness” is questioned, Shia Muslims who comprise anywhere up to 20 per cent of the country’s population are looked on with suspicion. Today, with the radicalisation of the Deobandis, even the Ahle Sunnat or Barelwis are feeling the heat. This of course, does not take into account the alienation of the Pashtuns, the Baloch, Sindhis and the residents of the Northern Areas of occupied Kashmir.

    (more…)

  • A Shifting of Battlefronts? (Sujatha)

    606px-Pakistan-Waziristan-Map Something rather strange was evident from the reports of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit last week to Pakistan. The articles suggest that her visit was not met with garlands and roses, but howls of protest and bitterness. What happened to the much-vaunted bonhomie of 'Amerika-Pakistan Bhai- Bhai"?

    In a nutshell, reality struck and realpolitik happened. As President Obama mulls over the request for 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to fight what is increasingly turning out to be an unwinnable counter-insurgency and guerrilla war, recent press articles have been highlighting the strain that this has placed on the US-Pak relationship, with  barely any pious lip-service to the usual  'Indo-Pak rivalry' pablum.

    Now is the time for plain-speaking. Mrs.Clinton was never one to mince words:

    "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that Pakistan squandered opportunities over the years to kill or capture leaders of the al-Qaida terrorist network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
    While U.S. officials have said they believe Osama bin Laden and senior lieutenants have been hiding in the rugged terrain along the border with Afghanistan, Clinton's unusually blunt comments went further as she suggested that Pakistan's government has done too little to act against al-Qaida's top echelon."
    …
    ""With the country reeling from Wednesday's devastating bombing that killed at least 105 people in Peshawar, Clinton also engaged in an intense give-and-take with students at the Government College of Lahore. She insisted that inaction by the government would have ceded ground to terrorists.
    "If you want to see your territory shrink, that's your choice," she said, adding that she believed it would be a bad choice.
    Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters that Clinton planned to meet late Thursday with the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to get an update on the offensive that began Oct. 17 against Taliban forces in a portion of the tribal areas near the Afghan border."

    The shrinkage of effective control of the Pak-Afghan border has been a problem dating back farther in time than any of the controlling interests in the area care to remember. Nobody rules those zones, no country can claim complete sovereign control over them, just the warring tribal factions that have made their homes there for the last few centuries.

    The Pakistani military has been happy to play along with the tribes when it suits, or encourage the decimation of inconvenient leaders and 'collateral damages' indirectly through the numerous drone airstrikes run by the US. It increases the hatred of the US, in that approximately a third of those killed are civilians, per some reports. The Taliban and AlQaeda inflate the numbers of the innnocents, the better to encourage fresh recruits. A fairly detailed analysis of how Pakistan pulls the punches is available here on a post by Manoj Joshi (Ruchira's brother-in-law, and a journalist)

    Further credence to just how deep the wound runs in those areas is evident in this interview with reporter David Rohde, who recently managed to escape after being held hostage by one of the tribal warlords of the Haqqani faction. 

    So, it's no surprise that Clinton's attempts to charm the Pakistani women fell flat:

    “Frankly, it was a waste of my time,” said one assistant professor from the Fatima Jinnah Women’s University (FJWU) in Rawalpindi, who asked not to be named. “[Clinton] wasn’t interested in hearing the about the layman’s problems or the reality of our daily lives.”

    That caused many, such as Shazia Marri, the information minister of the Sindh province, to leave the meeting frustrated that their concerns were not heard.

    “Emancipated women in Pakistan have a clear point of view that did not come across,” she said."
    …
    "Many women, including Zainab Azmat, a resident of the South Waziristan tribal agency, currently lecturing at Peshawar’s Institute of Management Sciences (IMS), complained that Clinton’s answers were too “reserved.” Ms. Azmat added that the intention of the meeting was unclear. “Why were we here? What did they want us to ask? What did they want to convey to us?” she asked."

    Was it a waste of the women's time? Or a clear message to Pakistani powers-that-be that old equations no longer hold?

    The Secretary of State of the United States didn't need to indulge in face time that could have been handled by lesser diplomats. This may very well have been her sole respite from realpolitik, a vestige of holding on to personal relationships built during her days as First Lady, a sort of pre-emptive mea-culpa for what is going to happen to the comfortable world of these women.

    "You had one 9/11, we are facing 9/11's everyday", to paraphrase one of the indignant 'townhallers' who came to meet her.

    The "war on terror' (pardon the usage of a now-obsolete term) is now expanding in fronts, moving like a not-so-stealthy cancer from the hills of Waziristan into the once-safer cities and urban areas of Pakistan. Who knows where it is headed next?

  • Mad Men in 60 Seconds (prasad)