Author Archives: Editors

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party

Posted on by
Reply

Did ” defund the police” and BLM scared white America to vote Republican in local elections?

New York representative denies Movement for Black Lives and Green New Deal cost seats.

The truce is over. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence”, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging.

“If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.”

Full article

posted by f, Sheikh

Vulnerable Yet Vital

Posted on by
Reply

The dance of love and lore between grandparent and grandchild is at the center, not the fringes, of our evolutionary story.

On an evolutionary timescale, Homo sapiens emerged only quite recently. Yet in that short time, we have evolved a particularly weird life history, with a much longer childhood and old age than other animals. In particular, we’re very different from our closest primate relatives. By at least age seven, chimpanzees provide as much food as they consume, and they rarely live past 50 – there’s no chimp equivalent of human menopause. Even in forager cultures, where growing up is accelerated, children aren’t self-sufficient until they’re at least 15. What’s more, even in communities without access to modern medicine, if you make it past childhood you might well live into your 70s. We live some 20 years longer than chimpanzees and, except for a few whale species, particularly orcas, we are the only mammals who systematically outlive our fertility.

The extended childhood is especially puzzling because, as parents know, children are expensive, and that was true long before college tuition and summer camp. Adults have always had to feed and protect the young, and early human brain development uses up a tremendous amount of energy – more than 60 per cent of four-year-olds’ calories go to the brain at rest, compared with around 20 per cent for adults. Humans also have babies every couple of years, much more frequently than chimps, so they stack up even more of those helpless, hungry-brained children.

Chimpanzee mothers do almost all the childrearing. But humans evolved exceptionally extended and varied sources of caregiving to deal with their costly babies, including fathers who take care of the kids, post-menopausal grandmothers, and ‘alloparents’ – other people who help to raise children. Prairie-vole dads, orca-whale grandmothers and rhesus-monkey alloparents also help to raise babies, but these kinds of care are rare among mammals. No other species except humans appears to have all three kinds of care.

These changes in life history evolved at the same time as dramatic changes in human brains and minds. We have many more neurons than other primates. And we developed striking abilities to learn and invent, communicate and cooperate, and create and transmit culture. New analyses of fossil records show that humans evolved their large brains and distinctive capacities in parallel with their longer childhood and old age. Our unique human vulnerabilities somehow emerged in concert with our unique human strengths. Just how are these two kinds of changes related? Researchers from biology, psychology and anthropology have recently begun to work together in order to answer these questions – answers that help to explain what makes us distinctively human.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-childhood-and-old-age-are-key-to-our-human-capacities?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=71c4f05265-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_11_08_11_17&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-71c4f05265-69109725http://www.thinkersforumusablog.org/wp-admin/post-new.php

France and Muslims Live on One Earth: From Animosity to Politics of Reason

Posted on by
Reply

France and Muslims Live on One Earth:  From Animosity to Politics of Reason

Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

President Macron claimed “Islam is in crisis” and striving to overshadow the freedom and justice of the French Republic when the teacher showed a caricatures of the Prophet of Islam to his students.  His remarks painted a portrait of degradation of the Prophet of Islam and indifference in restraining the turbulent human ingenuity. Agreeably, the insanity of perpetuated mockery and reactionary respondents have no place in the 21st century realm of reason and religious tolerance and human unity as if we the mankind has lost all of our values and culture of reasoned maturity.

While experiencing the pains, horrors and unthinkable human casualties at a time of COVID-19 Pandemic in France and worldwide, we cannot look for fearsome and ferocious religious dogmatism. True knowledge of Faith is benevolent, not cruelty and retaliation. All genuine civilized people cannot support perversion from reality and killings of innocent civilians. There are observed traces of ignorance and emotional pains when Muslims react to such political indoctrinated and despotic statements of insult. Situations of crises should unleash healthy rethinking that one must be rational, and exercise dignity of human character, soul and reasoned temper. Muslim societies urgently need Thinking People, not dead conscious leaders, public demonstrations and denunciations to blame others. Ostensibly, Thinking People cannot be defeated; they can cope with diverse problems and can change difficult situations into plausible outcomes. If Muslims are strong in faith and practice moral and spiritual codes of conduct, they could manage most of the current problems of indifference and absurd global politics. Human unity, peace and societal tranquility live in the conception of good.  There is a lot of evil and a lot of good in the creed of optimism.

Sharif checkmates Pakistani establishment

Posted on by
Reply

( forwarded by Dr. Ehtisham)Gradually the PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf) government is losing its grip on power, as the political opposition not only has pushed it on to the back foot but has also weakened the military establishment’s control of the power chessboard.

On Sunday, the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), and alliance of opposition parties, held its third massive public gathering, this time in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province. As expected, the PDM leaders while addressing the crowd directly blamed the establishment for backing an inept government and accused it of rigging the ballot.

However, it was former prime minister Nawaz Sharif who again blamed General Qamar Javed Bajwa and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lieutenant-General Faiz Hameed for overthrowing his government and bringing Imran Khan to power through a rigged political discourse.

By naming Bajwa and Faiz, Sharif successfully created the narrative that he is not against any institution but only a few individuals. He was right on the money, as he not only criticized the generals for meddling in politics but also raised the issues relevant to Balochistan province.

However, this time it was his daughter Maryam Nawaz who stole the show by highlighting the issue of enforced disappearances in Balochistan. While addressing the public gathering, she called on to the stage a woman whose three brothers had gone missing. She showed the face of that woman to the public and roared, “Have some shame, think what happens to you if your kids going missing.”

She was of course referring to the military establishment, and perhaps she won the hearts of many in Balochistan.

A calm and composed Maryam highlighting the issue of enforced disappearances and directly criticizing the establishment are signs that Pakistan has changed. Someone had to break the chains of fear and slavery and challenge those who have been responsible for creating a manipulative social and political order to keep their hegemony intact, and who else but a mainstream party based in Punjab could have challenged the deep state so effectively?

A thrice-elected prime minister addressing PDM rallies from his base in England accusing the establishment of manipulating the social and political order while his daughter showed solidarity with the relatives of the missing persons of Balochistan has surely brought the small provinces closer to Punjab. At the same time, the unprecedented brave stance of Sharif and Maryam has put the establishment under immense pressure.

Meanwhile, the detailed verdict of the Supreme Court of Pakistan on the presidential reference against Justice Qazi Faez Isa has also left the hybrid regime red-faced. The highest court in its detailed judgment declared that the reference against Isa was baseless and not according to the constitution.

Now that Isa, a bold and upstanding judge, has been given a clean chit, the government is facing the embarrassment of losing its case against him, further weakening this hybrid regime.

The panic among the ranks of the PTI government and in the establishment is visible. In Karachi, the chief of Sindh provincial police was kidnapped by the Rangers, a paramilitary federal law enforcement organization, and was forced to register a case against Maryam Nawaz and her husband for chanting slogans of “respect my vote” at the grave of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The move backfired within hours as the entire Sindh police department stood by their chief and submitted applications for leave. General Bajwa, the Chief of Army Staff, himself had to call on Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), and the Sindh police chief to ease the situation.

Then on Saturday, a journalist with Geo News went missing after he aired surveillance-camera footage of Rangers breaking down the door of Maryam’s hotel room. That move also backfired, as after immense pressure from the public the journalist was released within 22 hours.

On Sunday in Quetta, Internet and mobile-phone services were suspended by the Balochistan government to disrupt live broadcasting of the PDM public gathering on social media, but this move also backfired, as not only did the opposition somehow manage to show the gathering live, but Sharif was able to deliver his speech from London.

This series of failures by the establishment while both Sharif and Maryam fearlessly take on the military elite indicates that the winds have changed in Pakistan’s power corridors. Both Bajwa and Faiz have been weakened to the point that they are now being criticized openly by the opposition parties.

After all, no general can afford controversies and public anger against him. Even dictators like Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf were not able to bear the pressure of public criticism and resentment against them. So it will also be not possible for either Bajwa or Faiz to withstand the pressure against them.

Under these circumstances when the establishment itself is on the back foot, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government will not be able to launch a crackdown against the opposition and dissident journalists. This means Khan’s fate is decided and he at any moment could be sacrificed to save the establishment from the growing criticism of the public.

However, the question is, will Sharif be content to see the removal of Imran Khan only? The answer is a clear no, as he and Maryam have both adopted a stance from where they cannot retreat, as public expectations are now too high.

And why should they change their stance of bringing Bajwa and Faiz to accountability, that too at a time when their narrative of civilian supremacy is becoming popular across the entire country? A fresh election may not suit the PPP, but it will suit all the other opposition parties, and that is why they have put their stakes with Sharif, who has nothing to lose at the moment.

The attempt to remove Sharif and Maryam from the political scene has backfired, and the establishment’s doctrine of running a controlled democracy has collapsed, as the miserable economic condition of the masses has created huge resentment against Imran Khan and his backers.

The image of Khan created through the media may still be relevant in the posh areas of the country, but in the downtown areas and in the middle-class localities of the cities and towns, his image has been tarnished by his lack of ability to govern the country and inability to stop inflation and revive the economy.

The global players who supported the de facto coup against Sharif have distanced themselves from the PTI government and its backers. Perhaps it is time for those who rigged the political discourse to ask themselves what they achieved by meddling in politics. It was a game that could never have been won by the establishment, as Sharif was not an ordinary political leader.

A shrewd person like Sharif would never have taken the risk of going all out against the establishment unless he was certain that he was going to win this battle. He had the history of infrastructure mega-projects, electricity projects and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to his credit, and it was impossible for any other political party or dictator to match his performance.

It was not difficult to understand that the way elections were rigged there were no chances of bringing political stability back. Perhaps the generals who launched the Naya Pakistan project were unaware that they were inflicting political and economic turmoil on the country.

Now it is not only about new elections and sending Imran Khan and his backers packing but it is about redefining the political and social contracts between the citizens and the state. Even if the joint opposition settles for less, at least Maryam and Sharif will not settle for anything less than the removal of Khan and his few remaining supporters and devising new ways of doing business, where every institution will work under its defined constitutional role.

This is a checkmate by Sharif and for now, there is no way out for the establishment but to go back to its constitutional role of protecting the geographical borders of the country and leaving everything else to the elected representatives of the country.

Imad Zafar is a journalist and columnist/commentator for newspapers. He is associated with TV channels, radio, newspapers, news agencies, and political, policy and media related think-tanks.

Asia Times Financial is now live. Linking accurate news, insightful analysis and local knowledge with the ATF China Bond 50 Index, the world’s first benchmark cross sector Chinese Bond Indices. Read ATF now.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/sharif-checkmates-pakistani-establishment/ 

posted by f. sheikh