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Interesting study cited on The Monkey Cage website about the effect headscarves have on people's perception of women. The effects are dramatic and a bit unsettling.

In this study, subjects were randomly assigned to view a picture of a woman or a picture of this same woman wearing a headscarf in the style of some Islamic women. Here are the two pictures:

Here is a link to the results of the study (scroll down a bit).

UPDATE:  CNN has a piece on Iraqi women now being forced to wear headscarves in Basra - something that did not happen under Sadham's brutal, but secular, rule.  Often the penalty is death.

Posted by Edd at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Great is thy name, my Lord I mention your name with pure heart, thou Lord of all worlds; Blessed and Holy thy name my Lord, the High the mighty, king of worlds of Sublime Light, whose power is infinite thou, the brilliant and the inexhaustible Light.
From the a-Ginza Raba, The Great Treasure, a book of the Mandaean Sebians

Some Background

The ecology of religion appears much less resilient than nature's vast ecosystem. In those complex ecosystems throughout the world various species die out silently, their passing camouflage by the very web that shielded them for centuries. Other species hunker down waiting for the right time to regenerate and flourish when the environment becomes more inviting. Or they adapt into a new species and the branch off into a new story.

But when the last believer dies, so does the faith. The living faith becomes a story about believers who once thrived, but are no more. In time it becomes the stuff of historians. Perhaps a footnote for a while. Finally, the faith is deposited in an archive in a vast library and forgotten. Perhaps the sound a dying faith makes is the sound of a book closing for the last time.
In a generation or two we may witness such a death, we may hear such a sound - when and if the last Mandaean dies in isolation and obscurity. But that need not happen, if action is taken now.

Mandaeans, or Gnostics as we have come to call them in the west, are a small religious sect that has lived for countless generations in Iraq. They are neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Moslem. Their faith and rituals do dip into the various tributaries of the old biblical traditions, but they are often considered not "people of the book", which threatens their annihilation today more than ever. Mandaeans have a particular reverence for John the Baptist, who they believe is one of their great teachers, and baptism itself is the central, recurrent rite - the healing nature of water is their currency.

They speak a dialect of Aramaic - the same language that Jesus, John the Baptist and other Jews of that day spoke. Although they have lived in Iraq since long before there was an Iraq, they still think of the Holy Land as their homeland.

For many generations the Mandaeans carved out a life in Iraq that was not easy, but it worked well enough. They are pacifists, and as such, they prohibit self-defense, which denied them a safe enclave. In harmony with their relationship to nature and water, the Mandaeans do not believe it is possible to "own land".  As a people, they are noted for their remarkable thirst for knowledge and the art of jewelry making, especially gifted in their skills with gold.

Their lives were particularly difficult under Saddam. They, like many other religious sects, were not spared the hostility and brutality of that regime. But still, they did have a life; they sustained their communities, continued to practice their faith clandestinely. They may not have thrived during that regime, but they were able to be together.  All that changed when our administration introduced shock and awe into Iraq, when we toppled the regime, and opened the floodgates of intolerance and bigotry - floodgates that had kept that torrent from consuming the country.

As in any war in the midst of unspeakable suffering, it was the most vulnerable who suffered most. And the Mandaeans were some of the most vulnerable.

The Current State of Affairs

There was a time when their numbers in Iraq reached as high as sixty thousand. Today, they number perhaps less than three thousand. Over twelve thousand are refugees - many stranded in Syria, and Jordan. Here and there they find themselves, unable to work, they often are living on what little money they were able to garner from the sale of the gold they would have used to create beautiful works of art. The scattering of Mandaeans in the past four years has brought this unique and ancient ethno-religion to the brink of extinction, since micro-communities have been created across the globe rather than larger, viable communities in one or two central countries of refuge.

Through the years, a small community has made it into the United States.
 
The reason that so few have been able to emigrate to our country is still unclear. Perhaps it is just the incredibly inhuman ways of the bureaucracy. Perhaps it lies in the relative safety of saying no to those who wish to come here. More likely though, is that the voice of this faith is already becoming muted - that in the course of their Diaspora they are already beginning to become invisible. Maybe we are beginning to see a book closing and will soon hear the sound as well.

And then again, perhaps not. Perhaps these peaceful and productive people will find a new home in America. Perhaps we as a people will begin to see that we are obliged to own what we have broken. Obliged to make whole what we have torn apart. Perhaps it is time to help sustain these people, allow them to keep their books open, and their culture nourished with more peaceful waters.

Links to Learning

For more information about Mandaeans and their plight go to these links below:

Professor Nathaniel Deutsch from Swarthmore College wrote an op-ed piece for the NYT.

American Public Medium's, The Story, highlighted one particular Mandaean.

Swarthmore College's War News Radio has an insightful piece here that includes an interview with Professor Deutsch.

Posted by Edd at 7:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most TV programs about the generation divide between today's parents and their teenage kids are designed to scare the beejeezus out of the parents, and bore the pants off the kids. Frontline's program, Growing Up Online, does neither, which is why it is an important bit of documentary for all parties concerned.

It seems that each generation struggles with the distinctions among three crucial aspects of identity and persona - the public, the personal and the private. We have written about these distinctions before, but what this film brings into sharp relief is just how much technology plays into how we construct those three - sometimes overlapping - identities.

The film actually is fair and balanced. It shows some of the pitfalls and promises in store for our children, who take the Internet, and Facebook, and MySpace for granted every bit as much as we took TV for granted. Whatever technology is on the scene when we arrive has always been on the scene.

One intriguing backstory in the film, though, is how comfortable the adults are speaking on camera about how uncomfortable they are with their children posting pictures and video clips of themselves online. Odd how each generation sees new technology as disruptive instead of cumulative.

But all that is a bit abstract. This is an important documentary for any parent with young children and teenagers to watch - carefully.

Question: Do you know where your kids are?

Answer: Yes. They are online...and IMing...and Txting...and Gaming...

Posted by Edd at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Breathing Earth is a mesmerizing simulation of the earth in real time - the number of births and deaths, and the amount of CO2 that each country is pouring into the atmosphere. Such simulations really capture both the interconnectivity that is our essential reality, and another essential reality - that the developed world is literally sucking up all the air on the planet.

A third condition that is equally alarming is to see the birth rates and death rates in various parts of the world. The earth is not rotating on its axis orbiting the sun. It/we are careening on the edge of an invisible abyss. Now more than ever we must begin to see our world as one incredibly fragile breathing village.

Posted by Edd at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a delightful story in the annals of developmental psychology in which the psychologist, Jean Piaget, gave a series of high-level seminars in France. In each of these seminars America was duly represented. None of the Americans knew each other, and each of them enrolled in different seminars at different times during the year. Yet each one posed the same question to Professor Piaget, worded in almost the exact same way.

When the question finally arrived in each seminar, Piaget and his colleagues laughed good-naturedly as he said, "Aahh, the American Question!"

There was a time -- not too long ago -- when it was common to see two trainers leading a group through a demanding workshop. Embedded in the agenda was time for reflection, to regroup, and even to have the participants go through the demanding process of unlearning the way things used to be done in order to allow for new learnings to emerge. When the ubiquitous four-box matrix was drawn on the flip chart -- be it about grief, resurrection, job loss, dealing with change -- the consultants knew they could count on each other to help draw out the wisdom that was already in the room.

Today it is rare to find two consultants leading a group through a workshop. What's happened? If the Olympic motto is "swifter, higher, stronger", then America's is "faster, cheaper, better". The claim is that market forces are at work. Better minds than mine may be able to justify the four-fold process of these forces that led us to the predicament we are in today.

My take is this is how it works. The workshop initially was imagined to include two consultants working with twenty participants in a day long off-site for senior managers. Then someone in the organization realized that "off" site means not on-site. And beans began to be counted. And so the questions began.

Can we have the off-site on-site? No problem.

Next someone realized that there are two trainers in the plan.
Can we develop a program with only one trainer? No problem.

Well since we are having the off-site on site, it might be a good idea for the participants to keep their pagers on during the training, just in case an emergency develops. No problem.

Well now, since the participants will be using their pagers and cell phones during the training, they won't be giving their full attention to the material. Perhaps we could add more participants to the training in order to keep the level of involvement at one hundred percent.

Can we add another twenty participants to the training? No problem.

Geez, now that we have doubled the number of participants in the training, maybe we can cut the time needed to provide the training in half and still provide one hundred percent of the material. Can we make the full day, off-site on-site a half-day, off-site on-site? No problem.

Great! Now that we are investing only a half day to the training maybe even more people in the organization will have time to take the training. Can we add another forty people to the training? No problem.

With eighty participants in the training -- all with pagers -- it seems likely that only about half of them will be able to pay attention to the material at any given time. Maybe we only need about half of the trainer's attention.

Can we pay the trainer half of the fee we agreed on? No problem.

Since only half the trainer is going to be present for only half the time that the training is scheduled for, can we develop half a matrix for half the participants? No problem.

Now that the matrix is half the size, we really don't need to take a whole half day. Can we provide the off-site on-site in two hours instead? No problem.

Given that we now have twice as many participants doing the training in a quarter of the time, we really don't need half the trainer's attention in the room. Can we provide two quarter day off-site on-site trainings with half the matrix at the same time? No problem.

Gee, now that we have so many participants in the training for such a short amount of time and all of them multi-tasking, can we create a web-based module of the training? No problem.

Fabulous. Now that we have the training on the web can we create a multi-media presentation with one quarter of the matrix that will take one sixteenth the bandwidth? No problem.

Well, since the training is on the web now, can we develop a virtual trainer who takes up one thirty-second of the presentation? No problem.

Since this is all going to be on the web, can we present about one-sixteenth of the one quarter of the matrix with just the trainer's voice? No problem.

Wonderful. There's just one more thing. HR needs some evaluation data from the workshop. Can we have a full evaluation of the one quarter of the one half of the whole day on-site off-site? No problem.
Since we are going to outsource the full evaluation of the one quarter of the one half of the whole day on-site off-site, could we use one half of the full evaluation with a focus group consisting of one-quarter of the original twenty senior managers? No problem.

Usually, we do a six-month follow-up to see how effective the workshop has been, but since we already have a focus group in place, can we give the follow-up at the same time as we do the evaluation? No problem.

Now then. Back to the American Question. In each of the seminars an American scholar asked Professor Piaget, "Is there any way to speed up the development of children?" The professor and his colleagues laughed good-naturedly because no one other than an American would have formulated such a question in that context. His answer was that yes there are ways to speed up the process, but the cost is dear. He pointed out that it is possible to train a seal to do tricks, but it is not possible for a trained seal to ever be just a seal again once the training is completed.

Posted by Edd at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not sure where these photos came from exactly. They were forward to me by my father, and they were forwarded to him by a friend of his. Near as I can tell they are from Shuttle Mission STS-120 that launched last November. The NASA website does not have photos nearly as clear as these. Just astonishing to think that these folks are working away hundreds of miles above.

Check them out here.

Posted by Edd at 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)