https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-ris...hate/93547

THE RISE OF A MODERATE (AND PERSECUTED) ISLAMIC CALIPHATE
By Sophia Akram

Half a mile from South London’s busy Morden station is the vast complex of Baitul Futuh Mosque, the largest Islamic place of worship in Europe. But the $19 million in donations that went into building the mosque didn’t come from the Sunni or Shia communities that are the largest branches of Islam. Instead, it came from the Ahmadiyya, one of the most persecuted sects of the religion and one that is now emerging as the fastest-growing major strand of Islam.

Founded only in 1889, the relatively new sect that was born in India and is today headquartered in London isn’t recognized as a part of Islam by many traditional Muslims, or by the world’s two largest Muslim-majority nations, Indonesia and Pakistan. But it’s quietly spreading faster than its older cousins, building a new network of Muslim missionaries who are winning over followers of other branches of Islam and people from outside the religion.

Just in 2018, the Ahmadiyya community established 180 new mission offices in 127 countries and built 198 new mosques. An even larger number — 213 — of preexisting mosques belonging to other sects shifted loyalties to the sect in 2018. The number of new members entering the Ahmadiyya fold is increasing each year — the community gained 647,000 new Ahmadis from 129 countries in 2018, compared with 550,000 in 2014, according to data from the headquarters in London.

In all, since 2014, the community has globally gained 2.4 million followers — more than the increase in the population of the U.K. and France in that period. That increase represents, at the minimum, a 13.5 percent growth in the Ahmadiyya population, which today is estimated to be as large as 20 million strong, by independent researchers and by the community’s headquarters. By comparison, the estimated annual growth rate for the Shia sect is 1.6 percent and for Sunni Muslims is 1.7 percent — and a 2011 Pew study showed growth rates are dropping for both.

Unlike traditional Islamic beliefs, the Ahmadiyya sect believes that the Messiah has already come in the person of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who founded the movement and whose aide Hakeem Noor-ud-Din is considered the sect’s first caliph — their supreme political and religious leader. But while that has made them targets of murders and attacks on their mosques, another point of divergence from more mainstream sects is helping them spread. The Ahmadiyya follow a model of international proselytization more common with Christian missionaries than with Shia or Sunni clerics. There are more and more imams graduating from the sect’s Missionary Training College, a seven-year period of schooling that also asks students to take on charitable work in another country. Over the past two years, 416 missionaries have graduated from the college, which had only two branches — in India and Pakistan — until 2017. But in the past year, they’ve opened branches in 11 more countries.

That emphasis on charitable work — from street cleaning in the U.K. to disaster relief after the Houston floods — to grow their influence marks the sect as different from other more conservative streams of Islam that, in West Africa, for instance, are spreading through Arab-funded mosques and religious schools, says Gambian Ahmadiyya imam Abdullah Dibba.

And while the Ahmadiyya are also building mosques and offices in countries where they’re growing, there are no known charges of members of the community spurring radicalism anywhere. The community’s schools promote secular education. The community’s current caliph, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, routinely condemns all acts of terrorism. That track record, attractive both for people seeking a more moderate Islam to follow and for governments that host the community, is part of a conscious practice of steering clear of politics, say clerics.

“Throughout history, we’ve seen when religion and politics mix, it’s never a good idea,” says Mansoor Clarke, an Ahmadi imam at the Baitul Faizullah Mosque.


The sect is growing fastest in Africa — and West Africa in particular. More than 120 of the new mosques that came up in 2018 are in Niger alone. Ghana has an estimated 500,000 Ahmadi Muslims, according to the 2017 book The Ahmadiyya in the Gold Coast, by Indiana University Bloomington history professor John H. Hanson. Sierra Leone, where Clarke has worked as a missionary, has a 700,000-strong Ahmadiyya community out of a total population of 7 million.

That isn’t entirely surprising: Islam as a whole is growing fastest in Africa, with the fraction of Muslims living in sub-Saharan Africa expected to go up from 16 percent to 27 percent between 2015 and 2060, according to a Pew study. But the spread of the Ahmadiyya movement isn’t just because of natural growth in numbers — and it isn’t only physical proselytization they’re relying on. The community has a TV network called MTA International, consisting of four channels — the latest, MTA Africa, was launched in 2016 — that broadcast sermons, prayers, news, cultural programs and talk shows to a global audience.

Imams back that soft TV messaging with hard charitable work on the ground, with foreign Ahmadiyya clerics and volunteers playing a key role in those services, says Dibba, who first joined religious education at the age of 18. Gambians, he says, recognize that there are people coming from different parts of the world, on a voluntary basis, “to live with them, dine with them, travel with them and essentially be brothers standing shoulder to shoulder, crying with them.”

For sure, the community’s expansion faces challenges, especially in Pakistan, home to between 2 and 5 million Ahmadis. There, followers must sign a declaration denouncing the Ahmadiyya Muslim prophet before they can get a passport or ID card. Pakistani law describes them as non-Muslims. More than 90 Ahmadis were killed in attacks on two community mosques in Lahore in 2010. As recently as May 2018, a mob demolished an Ahmadiyya mosque. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan retracted his announcement of Princeton economist Atif Mian, who is Ahmadi, as his finance minister last September after criticism from Sunni leaders. “The status quo of decades-long legal discrimination and everyday bigotry remains intact,” says Rabia 
Mehmood, Pakistan and South Asia researcher at Amnesty International.

But comparatively, the Ahmadiyya community in West Africa — despite discrimination from mainstream Muslim sects — has faced far less persecution, especially from governments, say experts, making the region attractive for the movement’s expansion. Niger, for instance, has been relatively peaceful over the last 30 or 40 years, when it comes to interreligious tensions, says Adeline Masquelier, a professor of anthropology at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies.

Ironically, the only other Muslim movement that today prescribes to the idea of a caliphate is the Islamic State, which recently lost its last stronghold in Syria. But the Ahmadiyya sect couldn’t be more different from the extremist group that first gained notoriety through videotaped beheadings. Clarke credits the Ahmadiyya movement’s caliphs for the sect’s staunch position against extremism. “We haven’t had a single person radicalized, thank God,” he says.

The movement’s apolitical nature means most governments don’t see the Ahmadiyya sect’s practices as a threat to their rule — unlike more militant groups that can galvanize violent mass action. All of which is why, while a particularly brutal Islamic caliphate appears to be on its way out, another more moderate version is on the rise.

That's what I've come up with in place of Generation Z, for two reasons: First, since "Millennials" has pretty much completely replaced "Generation Y" to refer to that generation, calling its next-juniors "Generation Z" no longer makes any sense; second, no one born in 1999 or later (where I fix as its first birth year) has any memory at all of 9/11 (which I assign as the start of a first-time-ever "3 1/2T" which will end with the 2020 election, when a redux of the Civil War Anomaly will occur - indeed, another civil war itself, and a much worse one); and third, the "Marches For Our Lives" were this generation's version of the "Free Speech Movement" on the Berkeley campus in 1964, with David Hogg as its, how shall we say, "less than masculine" leader, as Minister Farrakhan called Michael Jackson (and this generation's disdain for the use of force is clearly tied in with its failure to have witnessed 9/11).

And the Second Civil War will make this an Idealist generation - which they already show all the signs of being.

Roughly every 20 years there is a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn from our vantage point - and twice every 32 years (it happens 15 years after the last time, and then again 17 years before the next), there is what is known as a perihelic opposition of Mars and the Sun, causing Mars to come within about 36 million miles of the earth (at other times it can be up to 250 million miles away).  Every 80 years, these two events come within about a year of each other: There was a perihelic opposition of Mars and the Sun on July 23, 1939, followed by a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on August 15, 1940.  Before that - and of particular interest to Americans, there was a perihelic opposition of Mars and the Sun on June 30, 1860, followed by a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on October 25, 1861.

But wait, it only gets worse: The next perihelic opposition of Mars and the Sun is on October 13, 2020, and the next conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn is December 21, 2020 - much closer together than either of the other two!

Let's not also forget that we are nearing the end of the second saeculum of Prabhat Sarkar's acquisitive age.  The last time the second saeculum of an acquisitive age ended, so did the Middle Ages, amid Europe's peasants' revolts and the fall of the Byzantine Empire - and the peasants and the Turks didn't even have AR-15s, let alone nukes.

Anyone surprised by this? Hottest topic on twitter and all forms of social media, and it's crickets in here.

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Where are the mostly Catholic Northeastern and Rust Belt Democrats who are supposed to step in and rescue the party from the Age-of-Aquarius, pass-the-bean-sprouts, God-is-dead New Left?

It's not as if there aren't enough of them: Joe Manchin, Bob Casey, Joe Sestak, Roy Cooper, Doug Jones, John Bel Edwards, Max Rose (who stole Staten Island's House seat from the Republicans), Conor Lamb, Dan Lipinski, I could go on and on.

Sooner or later, if they get pushed too far, they are going to bolt the Democrats and form a third party - and that will lead to any one of a number of outcomes, most of them bad.

Whenever the term "Gen Z" gets thrown around, it usually refers to the group of people born between around 1997 and 2012, or in other words, those that have very little to no memories of 9/11 but were at school when the Parkland shooting happened (except for those born in 1997-1999, who were already out of school when it happened).

However, when terms like "Homelander" or "Homeland Generation" appear, there are usually three different possibilities it can refer to - born after 9/11, born since 2003, or born since 2005. 

You would occasionally hear of people born in the late 90's, and to some extent, 2000 and 2001, get called Generation Z, but I've almost never heard them referred to as "Homelanders".

It sometimes makes me wonder if Gen Z's official name will be "Homelanders" and if the Gen Z label will fade away overtime.

Here is a reprint of an article I just found and am posting it for discussion purposes only.  I am not sure I agree with all of the thoughts mentioned here, and do believe there are two schools of thought in the Millennial/Boomer debate. With the first one, you have Millennials actually feeling quite generous despite their mostly rotten deal in the economic sphere of life. They tend to be open and feel they can accomplish quite a bit with what they have to work with.  With the second one, you have the Millennials mostly keeping to themselves, buried for hours on end in their smartphones shutting out the outer world as much as possible. Under this scenario one of the main thoughts of the S & H theory this forum is based on would really be called into question. See what you think.


https://www.someecards.com/news/news/peo...ee-boomer/

How a 6,000-Year-Old Dog Cancer Spread Around the World



High in the Himalayas, a heavy-coated dog trots behind the hem of a Buddhist monk’s robes. On the streets of Panama City, another dog collapses into a sliver of shade, escaping the heat of the midday sun. On their bodies a cancer grows. Their tumors each appear unique—their swollen, crumbling contours flush with fresh blood vessels emerging from beneath a tail here or between the legs there. But the cells dividing inside each one, continents apart, are actually the same organism. If you can call a clump of 6,000-year-old cancer cells an organism.

These ancient cells were once part of a dog that roamed the frozen Siberian steppe, a husky-like creature that lived in the time before humans invented the wheel or the plow. Then they mutated, finding a way to evade the canine immune system, a way to outlive their body by finding another. This cancer-cum-sexually transmitted dog parasite still thrives today, the only remnant of that now-extinct Siberian dog race. For millennia, it has been jumping between bodies, spreading like a virus around the world. Canine transmissible venereal tumor, or CTVT, is now found in modern dogs from Malawi to Melbourne to Minneapolis. It’s the longest-lived cancer known to humans. But until now, no one had looked deeply into its DNA to trace its evolutionary origins and discover the secrets of its viral success.
For the past decade and a half, veterinarians from nearly every country on the planet have been gathering the material to do that—shaving off slices of these tumors as they’ve come across them, sealing them up in test tubes, and shipping them off to the laboratory of Elizabeth Murchison at the University of Cambridge, in the UK. Murchison is perhaps better known for her work investigating a different contagious cancer that nearly crashed the world’s population of Tasmanian devils.

Now her team has used their massive collection of dog tumor samples to create the first-ever genetic map of CTVT. Published today in Science, it not only traces these cells’ prolific colonization of human’s best friend, it also begins to unravel the mystery of the cancer’s bizarre evolutionary success, offering a glimpse of how humans might one day tame their own.

“Human tumors don’t have much time to evolve—years, maybe decades—so they exhibit very strong competition,” says Adrian Baez-Ortega, a PhD student in Murchison’s lab and the study’s lead author. Within a human tumor, different mutations create sub-groups of cells that compete with one another for survival. Blast it with chemotherapy, and any resistant cells will outlive the susceptible ones, allowing certain mutations to dominate the tumor.

.....

For a cancer to become contagious, it has to clear two serious barriers. First, the cancer cells themselves have to find a way to physically get from one individual to another. (This is different, to be clear, from infectious pathogens which can cause cancers, like HPV.) And second, the cells have to be able to evade the immune system of the new host once they get there. Tasmanian devils pass their cancer around through the violent face-biting that typifies their fierce mating rituals. Dogs spread theirs through sexual contact—the tumors grow on the animals’ organs and shed cells during the act.

.....

(my comment: HIV/AIDS, often spread by sexual contact in humans, makes people vulnerable to such a cancer as Kaposi's sarcoma).

.....

If scientists ever have to grapple with a human patient-hopping cancer, understanding CTVT’s genetic evolution will be an invaluable asset. But for now, the genetic map has more to teach them about how to treat the cancers people already have.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-6000-y...ket-newtab

Thought it would be interesting for all of you to think about some things out of the past you might like to see a comeback in. Perhaps it's the hula hoop, some type of short-lived fashion or food craze, anything nostalgic is fair game.  I shall begin by giving two things I would like to see come back into vogue; rooming houses and dance halls. The former as an antidote to the barbaric cost of housing in many areas; the latter as an antidote to the extremely uptight world we have become.

This is the first day of August, and unlike when I was growing up back in the 1950s, most school-age children and college students will be returning to their classrooms before the month is out. For most of the 20th Century the traditional school start date was the day after Labor Day, and some even waited until the following week to begin classes. But this is no longer the case, even though the school calendars don't require any more actual classroom days than was the case when start dates were later. In fact college often didn't resume classes until mid-September. And high school and college sports now start before Labor Day.

And while there have been petitions in some areas to return the start date to after Labor Day, most have been unsuccessful; the city of Chicago being one of the rare exceptions. It is hotter and better swimming weather in late August that in late May and early June, but for some reason you can't tell that to a school board. On the Internet I have found articles actually suggesting shortening the school year to eight months, starting around October 1 and running through May. But I seriously doubt that the PTB would ever go for it.

For the past three decades the trend seems to have been for parents to be pressured to instill in their kids that their determination, focus and strong will can more mountains. Kids really can't be kids and have lots of playtime the way we did back when I was growing up. And yet I often wonder whether the student loan crisis is making folks long for the days when even an eighth grade education was sufficient to get you somewhere. The businesses that are hurting with the earlier start dates are those such as public swimming pools, campgrounds and amusement parks which often end up shortening their seasons and closing just when often the weather is at its hottest, because they are unable to find lifeguards and other essential staff once school resumes.

Many school districts will cry wolf when it comes to lack of funding, and very often have threatened to shorten class time as a result. But in reality the only time that happens is when there is a teachers' and school employees' strike, which in itself has gotten less frequent in recent years. Somehow they always managed to find the money somewhere. And is the increasing emphasis on more and more education really worth it in the long run, when often folks might be approaching 30 before they become full-time workers and begin families? Would love to hear your thoughts on all of this.