Archimedes’ Hot Tub

As the media’s Super Bowl-like lead-up to 9/11 continues, I found myself listening to an NPR piece on al Qaeda. The broadcaster interviewed an expert at the Rand Corp. who was saying bristling things about how it had spread to many different countries and through its ‘affiliates’ was more dangerous now than ever. She made this network of networks out to be a kind of process innovation for terrorists, making it impossible to stop. I found myself thinking that I was hearing something out of Ralph Ellison or Pynchon, where paranoid people make things true by saying implying the rest of us can’t really see the truth. “It’s al Qaeda, stupid. Just because we’ve wiped out almost all of its leadership and cut off its access to funding doesn’t mean it isn’t more dangerous than ever.”

I thought of Scott Atran, who told the Beyond 9/11 conference I attended in Cambridge England two weeks ago that “never have so few people with so few actual means caused so much fear in so many.” His narrative of al Qaeda is that the story is largely over for the group. The uprisings in places like Egypt have usurped its role in the Arab world. Atran says it has less than 100 followers worldwide, not the 4,000 being bandied about on NPR. The experts on NPR said that al Qaeda was attracting better educated recruits these days; Atran’s research suggests the opposite — that more of its recruits are poorly educated now. Perhaps I trust him more because I was able to see his research, laid out in his book “Talking to the Enemy.” Maybe it was context — he was able to talk for 90 minutes and then answer questions for another 90. But I found his perspective more accurate.
I must blog about his talk. I am behind on posting things from that fascinating event.

Two of my fellow Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellows were in the New York Times. One, Juliet Eilperin, had her book “Demon Fish” reviewed by the other, Sandy Blakeslee. It’s a clever review that gets at the heart of yet another human-driven problem: sharks are disappearing at our hands. A lot of the reason is shark-fin soup, though shark fins are tasteless. There’s also the fear factor, that sharks sometimes kill swimmers, even though it happens that Christmas tree ornaments are more dangerous than sharks.

Business Week wrote this piece on the imminent collapse of the U.S. Post Office in May, but it’s in the top five stories this week.

The funny thing is, I like the Post Office. I think it’s more more efficient than its physical world rivals, especially for packages sent to people who live outside urban centers. I write letters more than I used to, in some kind of homage to the tactile act of using pen and paper. I also like getting mail, and I think I like more than I like getting email or Facebook friends. Finally, I think, perhaps wrongly, that it increases friction to keep paying bills by paper. Banks like to claim that online banking is more secure, but I suspect it is also more attacked. I also fret that the more online accounts I have, the more vulnerable I am.

By chance, the Boston Globe ran this piece about writing letters in the digital age today.

Not sure I’d pay $60 a year to keep having things mailed to me, but I already decline 5 percent discounts on some bills in order to keep writing checks.

Feriha Peracha runs perhaps the world’s most unusual boarding school: it’s for 162 child warriors who fought for the Taliban in Pakistan.

More than 58 percent of the children, who range in age from 12 to 17, were abducted.  But 41 percent volunteered to join the Taliban, some to get food. The rest were given over by their families.
All attend Sabaoon, which means the first ray of light at dawn. Her school is in an undisclosed location in the Pakistani province called Swat, about 150 miles west of Islamabad. Peracha presented some of her experience with these boys at a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship seminar called Beyond 9/11.
The school began in late 2007. Peracha, a psychologist whose program is funded primarily by UNICEF and protected by the Pakistani military, attempts to deradicalize them, and reintegrate them into Pakistani society.
It’s dangerous work – she carries it out despite last year’s assassination of a colleague, Mohammad Farooq Khan.
So far 32 of the 162 boys have graduated from Sabaoon and gone on to college or back to society. She says 95 percent of them will have been reintegrated into society by May 2012. A few of them will not be reintegrated into society. Her research shows that in Swat, what drives these children into extremism is not religious faith but poverty. She says for these children, Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs  was not met, even the most basic physiological ones, food, water, warmth and rest.
Despite these life situations, about a third of the boys had complete high school. Another third had dropped out, while 35 percent took Koran lessons either at home or in mosques, where they would get a meal a day.
***
Listening to her talk about Pakistan’s poor reminds me of The Clash’s ‘public service announcement with guitars,’ Know Your Rights. The three are:

1. the right not to be killed,
2. the right to food money and
3. the right to free speech.

Though in The Clash song and apparently in Pakistan there are exceptions to these rights.

Patron journalism is all the rage right now, and as part of the trend I’m attending a seminar called “Beyond 9/11″ organized by the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion. It’s off to a spectacular start. We assembled journalists listened to Notre Dame historian Scott Appleby  talk us through some of the consequences of that event on international relations. He outlined five main consequences of 9/11:

• Religion can no longer be ignored in global affairs. He noted that Henry Kissinger didn’t once discuss religion in his memoirs. The implication is that leaders in the post-9/11 world will not do the same thing.
• Western leaders suffer from secular myopia. Whether in the avowedly religious U.S. or the distinctly secular nations of Western Europe, Western leaders view global politics through lenses like realism and liberalism, which give no role to religion. Our public/private distinction on the state and religion is a minority characteristic, and it prevents us from understanding most of the world’s countries.
• Religious peace-building is on the rise. In the Philippines and elsewhere, religious ideas are being harnessed to encourage peaceful behavior, not war.
• There is real dialogue across faiths. Lots of interfaith initiatives have occurred and do help people of different faiths feel less hostile towards one another.
• There is such a thing as ‘healthy’ religion. That is, religion is not just a problem or a soft kind of story, and does not have to be reported that way. Appleby thinks that healthy religious behavior should be reported as a ‘hard’ news story.

He stimulated good conversation and likely provides a set-up for the next few days, as we discuss the world 10 years after 9-11.  I’m excited to be here.

You might think religion is gone from the mainstream arts. But Everett Hamner posts a list of the 10 best books of religion in American literature in the first decade of the century, and it seems to be a good one. I note that it does not include Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” though Pynchon always challenges us to think about religion in the modern world. Maybe they just couldn’t wade through it, or, like me, find the narrator off-putting (a problem in a 1,000-page novel).
I ran across this post in Christian Century, which highlighted it as a list of best religiously-themed fiction of the first decade of the century.

With the U.S. stock market acting like the malleable oracle we forget it is, a few reads on economic behavior I found useful.

Buffett tells it like it is. Will Congress actually listen?
Don Peck’s book excerpt in The Atlantic suggests not (has to be the least possessing lead I’ve seen in a major publication in some time, but grit your teeth and keep reading — it gets more interesting).
Nouriel Roubini proclaims that capitalism is dead. Why he’s invoking Marx instead of Schumpeter one can only guess.

Happy to see one of my students get a byline for work done in the course (see Breakers return to Harvard). Hope it’s the first of many for him!

Teaching hasn’t completely derailed my freelance life — I published this piece on radar for cars in the Boston Globe on Monday. (Teaching does slow my penchant for posting on this blog).

It’s almost funny to watch the negotiating tactics being tried by the Democrats and Republicans over the debt ceiling. Boehner walking out of the negotiations is a textbook hardball tactic, and can be very effective if the other side really wants to get a deal done. But which way to do a deal? On the one hand, looking at poll data suggests the vast moderate middle would rather see a deal with some increase in tax revenue than a debt default. So you stay the course, if you’re the Democrats, knowing that the Republicans will have to come around.

But there are other polls with other results, like this CBS poll from April suggesting that most Americans don’t want to raise the debt limit, and this brand new poll showing 63 percent of Americans plan to vote for a non-incumbent Representative in 2012, a record, and one seen as likely to affect Democrats more than Republicans.

So is Boehner’s action posturing, to protect Republicans from the rage of their most vocal supporters? Or if the nation goes into default on ’some things,’ will the Republicans face the ire of everyone else come 2012?

It will be interesting to see how the Democrats respond. Today’s paper had a comment from Boehner about how dealing with the White House is like dealing with a bowl of jello. That sounds like wishful thinking on Boehner’s part. But maybe he’ll be prophetic, and the White House will cave on taxes. Politicians tend to do hard things only when they absolutely have to, so we’ll probably have to wait until August 1st to find out.