Selling Pets Is Forbidden. So Blowing Up Women with Downs Syndrome In A Crowded Pet Market Is OK.

Baghdad’s fragile peace was shattered yesterday when explosives strapped to two women with Down’s syndrome were detonated by remote control in crowded pet markets, killing at least 91 people in the worst attacks that the capital had experienced for almost a year.

Sunni fundamentalists consider the selling of pets to be haram — forbidden on religious grounds.

Though the use of women in warfare violates religious taboos, Al-Qaeda has increasingly used women as suicide bombers because they can conceal explosives beneath their black robes and usually escape the rigorous body searches to which men are subjected.

The (London) Times' Martin Fletcher reports

Large Increase of Rapes in Kenya

"At any time of unrest, of violence, or rioting, women and children are targeted... People are fighting and the weakest ones get abused."

The BBC's Stephanie Holmes reports

The Face of FGM.

A 9-month-old is comforted following her circumcision.

A new study published by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that women who have had Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) are significantly more likely to experience difficulties during childbirth and that their babies are more likely to die as a result of the practice.

Indonesian supporters, however, claim that girls like the one pictured can look forward to "a stabilized libido, a husband who thinks she is pretty, and a balanced psychology." It's all here in the New York Times Magazine.

Shaking The Tree
"The real story of Jena and the Jena 6 is quite different from what the national media presented. It's time to set the record straight."

From the Christian Science Monitor, this report by Jena Times Assistant Editor Craig Franklin:

"By now, almost everyone in America has heard of Jena, La., because they've all heard the story of the 'Jena 6.' White students hanging nooses barely punished, a schoolyard fight, excessive punishment for the six black attackers, racist local officials, public outrage and protests – the outside media made sure everyone knew the basics.

"There's just one problem: The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice."

In light of recent research on the difficulty of countering false information in the news media, it should be interesting to see how this develops.

The Psychology of Believing News Reports

Conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi.

While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

The Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam reports

Black Balled

"The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism."

So says Nobel Prize-winning DNA pioneer James Watson, seeking to clarify remarks that eventually earned him a suspension from his research institution, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, NY.

In a recent (London) Times interview, Dr. Watson was quoted as saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."

The remarks drew sharp criticism, and following the suspension, he stated: "This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers."

Read the BBC News' report here

One Vote Under God:
The Role of Faith in the 2008 Election Campaigns

Abortion. Education. Religious extremism and its ties to terrorism. All of these are central to life in today's America, and all -- or nearly all -- of the candidates have been forthright in their opinions on these issues and, in many cases, how they relate to their faith.

One Vote Under God is an incredibly useful interactive database that tracks the 2008 presidential candidates on topics ranging from their strategies for targeting 'values voters' to their stances on issues typically informed by faith. An invaluable tool to evaluate candidates' positions on a wide variety of key subjects, One Vote Under God is just a small part of the fascinating website based on the "Faces of Faith In America" Journalism Initiative of the Carnegie and Knight Foundations.

Text edited from the One Vote Under God website

Harvard Coop In the Doghouse

The 125-year-old campus bookstore The Harvard Coop is facing some stiff competition from online book retailers. So much so that students trying to do some comparison shopping could find themselves bounced out of the store.

The situation escalated recently when Coop management had police eject a group of students who were writing down ISBN numbers and prices from the bookstore shelves. The "offenders" work for the student-run CrimsonReading.org, a website that provides information on where textbooks can be found for the lowest price.

All along, the Coop has maintained that the ISBNs are its intellectual property. But the director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, along with another Berkman Fellow and a Harvard law student, beg to differ: "The Coop neither authored the ISBN numbers on its books nor compiled them in an original selection or arrangement," the trio writes. "Locking competitors out from price comparison is not part of copyright's aim. While some courts have protected the creativity of price estimates, they haven't allowed companies to exclude others from learning market prices or catalog part numbers."

The (London) Times' Carol Sarler tells religious pundits to stop all the jibber jabber.

Read The Times' Carol Sarler here

Meanwhile, Paul Kurtz responds to similar requests for humanists and sundry godless types to keep it down: "Let’s be fair: Until now, it has been virtually impossible to get a fair hearing for critical comment upon uncontested religious claims."

Read Kurtz' editorial at the Council for Secular Humanism

Justice Is Served... Eventually

Mississippi: James Ford Seale, a 72-year-old ex-policeman and former Ku Klux Klansman, has been jailed for life over the 1964 abduction and killing of two black teenagers.

During the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of black people were killed by whites who wanted to retain racial segregation. Few of the crimes were solved, partly because some of the perpetrators were protected by state and local officials. The FBI is re-opening several cases from the civil rights era before suspects die.

Read More Here

Evil 101

"Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us—under the right circumstances."

The infamous "Stanford Prison Experiment" was aborted in less than a week due to its character-imploding power. Along with Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority—the "shock experiments"— the investigation is considered one of the most important pieces of research demonstrating a core tenet of social psychology: external situations can lead us to behave in ways that we would not, could not, predict.

American Scientist Online features details in Robert Levine's review of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil," by Philip Zimbardo

Also, Discover Magazine Online has this excerpt

India's Prosperity Enables Sex Selection

Increased consumer choice is one of the hallmarks of the new India. Tragically, it is being applied, with almost industrial efficiency, to depress the female birth rate.

BBC's Nick Bryant reports

Appearances by Bill Clinton and Karl Rove generated a good deal of buzz for this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, the week-long series of open air chats with some of the world's most inspired thinkers and inspiring speakers.

Other highlights include Thomas Friedman's take on the enormity of being Green, and Richard Branson discussing his plans for privatized space travel. You can download or view streaming video at the links below... While you're there, take some time to peruse the entire Aspen Ideas Festival 2007 Audio/Video Library.


Thomas Friedman: Green is the New Red, White, and Blue
A Conversation with Richard Branson
In Conversation with Karl Rove
Bill Clinton Discusses His Work Around the World

Dying Breeders

Over the years a blind eye has been turned to the practice of polygamy in the United States. But the trial of a Fundamentalist Mormon for assisting in the rape of a minor could change all that.

Of all the difficult public relations campaigns in the world, this must be among the toughest: to sell polygamy, the practice of keeping more than one wife by one man, as a deeply Christian, rewarding activity that frees the women as much as it forwards the spiritual standing of the man.

But that is the challenge Anne Wilde has taken up, as a sort of unofficial spokeswoman for the polygamists of Utah.

Wilde was the second wife of Ogden Kraut. She keeps stressing that she feels that being a polygamist gave her more, not less, independence as a woman; and although her husband was a patriarch, part of his role as head of the family was to treat his wives with respect.

Wilde's purpose is made particularly tough because polygamy gets a consistently bad press, fuelled by events in some polygamist communities that appear to be anything but celestial.

Warren Jeffs, the "Prophet" of a polygamist community in Utah, has recently been charged with assisting the statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl, who had allegedly been forced into a spiritual marriage with her cousin, and ordered to "multiply and replenish the earth."

In other words, procreate, or risk eternal damnation.

Jeff's lawyers argue that to commit him to trial would be to continue the persecution Utah's polygamists have suffered since the late 19th century.

Read the full article by EdiPilkington at Guardian Unlimited

Missing Think
Evidence that psychology, like biology, is conserved between human and nonhuman species augurs a shake-up for science and society

Back in 1974, an unusual report from Jane Goodall at the Gombe Stream Wildlife Research Centre in Tanzania caught the public eye. Chimpanzees had committed infanticide and were engaging in war. Not only were they acting in unanticipated ways, chimpanzees were acting like humans.

Since then, what we know about ourselves and other species has changed substantially. We now recognize that species other than humans engage in an array of behaviors that bring variety and depth to life: dolphins teach cultural customs to their young, octopi demonstrate diverse personalities, and rats show a sense of humor.

Once at odds with the conventions of her discipline, Goodall's interpretations today are supported by decades of research in neurobiology. They are part of a broad conceptual framework that has coalesced around the idea that psychology, like biology, is conserved among animals.

Ethologists studying animal behavior with close links to humans, however, have long made it a principle not to infer humanlike mental states from humanlike behavior and, until recently, many scientists in the field frowned upon any discussion of animal mental states.

Read the full article by G.iA.iBradshaw and RobertiM.iSapolsky at American Scientist Online

Lancelot Link: Mindless Saturday Morning Fodder... Or The Window Into Our Primoridal Selves?

Mounting evidence suggests that human beings are hard-wired to appreciate music. Now researchers want to know why our ancestors evolved music in the first place.

Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, for example, have scanned musicians' brains and found that the "chills" that they feel when they hear stirring passages of music result from activity in the same parts of the brain stimulated by food and sex.

As evidence mounts that we're somehow hard-wired to be musical, some thinkers are turning their attention to the next logical question: How did that come to be? The benefits of our affinity for food (nutrition) and sex (procreation) are easy enough to explain, but music is trickier.

Some suggest that music originated as a way for males to impress and attract females. In many bird species, for example, males sing to impress females. Depending on the species, females will tend toward the males with the broadest repertoire or the most complex or unique songs.

The foremost defender of that model today is GeoffreyiMiller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico. Miller argues that in prehistoric communities, singing and dancing might have worked-as they do today in some Native American cultures -- as proxies for hunting and warfare. The ability to come up with imaginative melodies and rhythms would connote intelligence and creativity, and the long, arduous dances would be proof of one's endurance-the sort of traits that a choosy female would like to see in her offspring.

Even today, Miller argues, music retains some of its old procreative roots. Looking at 6,000 recent jazz, rock, and classical albums, Miller found that 90 percent were produced by men, and that those male musicians tended to reach their peak musical production around age 30, which he notes, is also the peak of male sexual activity.

Miller points in particular to the example of JimiiHendrix. Miller has written that, despite dying at 27,iHendrix had "sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the United States, Germany, and Sweden. Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more." To Miller, it was Hendrix'sistatus as a music-maker rather than his fame or charisma that gave him this sexual allure.

Edited from the article byiDrakeiBennettifor the Boston Globe. Read it here in its original, expanded form