Malalai Joya denounces occupation of Afghanistan

There is a very interesting interview at Voltaire Net with this Afghan MP who was suspended for her progressive views and opposition to imperialist occupation and talibanization under it.

Some excerpts follow:

The aim of the war was never to create democracy and justice nor to uproot the terrorist groups. The war’s only purpose has been to perpetuate the occupation, install military bases and safeguard the takeover of a region that has substantial natural resources.

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Look at the UN bombardments. In May 2009 in my own province more than 150 civilians were killed.

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The base text [of the Afghan Constitution] might very well declare equality between men and women but the country is ruled by Sharia law. The so-called democracy of the official Constitution is systematically flouted. It’s only there as a token to attract international aid, which is then usually embezzled.

Today Afghanistan is a country where women – often girls as young as 14 or 15 years – fleeing their conjugal home to escape extreme violence, are considered criminal and are imprisoned. Yes, there’s an increase in the number of girls returning to school, but the records don’t take into account the girls who have to leave school again, due to threats to their safety and pressure from their families to get married.

Suicide has become the ultimate weapon of desperate young women, who are aware that there are alternatives but know that they will never have the right to them.

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All of the troops must leave and the militia of the warlords must be dismantled. Democracy can’t be established by an occupying force that does nothing more than spread out and strengthen the Talibanization of my country.

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Democratic parties and associations are more often than not fighting in secret. Let’s not forget that the Constitution bans the existence of all non-religious parties whose frame of reference does not include the Qur’an.

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There are so many faceless heroes and heroines. Their battle is in their towns and villages. Why does no single western leader recognise the existence of a progressive movement that could emerge and play a role?

March 8: a century of struggles.

It seems that the first March 8 demonstrations were held on this day in 1913, with women all across Europe marching for peace. There had been some attempts earlier to create an International Working Women's Day by the incipient feminist movement but it was this event which started the tradition, later revived in the 1960s.

Working women's demonstrations on this day in 1917 were one of the main triggers of the Russian Revolution, and hence the festivity became official in the USSR.

8 March 1932 Soviet poster

Today women across the World still use this day to meet each other and state their demands. It is not yet a holiday in most countries though. It should.

8 March 2010 Basque demo (Gasteiz)

In this little country today, the major unions have stated that the draconian "reforms" promoted by the FMI, EU and local capitalists (with total subservience of the "socialist" government and parliament majority) are to only cause more precariousness among working women, already a very discriminated sector.

The struggle continues. Today like a century ago social justice remains to be implemented.

Mice without father live longer and other genetic news

Various genetic news have called my attention today.


From the latest PLoS ONE:

Bad prospects for genetic-association medicine.

Yudi Pawitan et al. throw cold water to the hopes of getting simple Mendelian gene-disease associations and even discovering them at all:

Assuming similar allele frequencies and effect sizes of the currently validated SNPs, complex phenotypes such as type-2 diabetes would need approximately 800 variants to explain its 40% heritability. Much smaller numbers of variants are needed if we assume rare-variants but higher penetrance models. We estimate that up to 50,000 cases and an equal number of controls are needed to discover 800 common low-penetrant variants among the top 5000 SNPs. Under common and rare low-penetrance models, the very large studies required to discover the numerous variants are probably at the limit of practical feasibility.

Eigenvectors versus Principal Components.

Jun Zhang et al. argue that Laplacian eigenvector analysis and their LAPSTRUCT method provides better analysis of population structure than the "classical" but somewhat limited Principal Components Analysis (PCA).


From Human Reproduction:

Two mothers, no father mice live even longer.

M. Kawahara and T. Kono found that two-mother (2M) mice live some 20% longer on average than normal mice, having smaller and more slender bodies and much better antioxidative processes. They argue that this may be caused by a gene at chromosome 9, which is generally activated at pregnancy to act by the father side, but in this case, without father, the epigenetics is activated differently resulting in these sturdier and smaller mice (all female, of course).

This story (found originally at Science Daily) made me recall the radical feminist S.C.U.M. Manifesto by the late Valerie Solanas and her defense of a female-only humankind. The technology for in vitro female-female reproduction is available (and has been for long) but illegal in humans for obvious ideological reasons (patriarchy, homophobia). On light of these results and the widespread desire for longer and healthier lives, one wonders if Ms. Solanas was not more correct than even she herself believed.

All three papers are freely available (links in text).
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More Islamist abuses in Obama's Empire

Afghanistan would be laughable if it would not be for so much people suffering under the Neotaliban rule supported by the USA-NATO occupation force. The last brutality is the approval of a communalist law allowing Shia (but not Sunni) men to rape their wives once eavery four days (that's the kind of Torah mentality they have: all regulated, even sex - but of course women's opinions do not matter). This is sold as some sort of "multiculturalism" because it would acknowledge differences between Sunni and Shia sharia traditions.

Of course Afghan women do not buy. And have gone out to the streets of Kabul to protest in the weirdest kind of feminist parade I've ever witnessed (all them covering their heads and chanting "Allah u akbar": "God is great").

After the demo they were attacked by stone-throwing super-macho counter-demonstrators (all men) that yelled "Death to the Christians' slaves". Like if Christians had not supported the same kind of patriarchal abuses in the very recent past. I was born under a Christian fundamentalist regime, I know what I am talking about: that same kind of laws allowing rape in marriage were in effect until many years after the death of Ayatollah Franco.

What I don't think that was allowed anymore back then (fascism after all is a "modern" phenomenon, even if reactionary and spiteful) was what still happens in the favorite ally of the USA in the region: the ultra-fascist mafious tyranny known as Saudi Arabia. As you surely know the situation of women's rights in the "Muslim Vatican" (with 27 million subjects and many more foreign de-facto slaves) is worse than imaginable. But you may not know that fathers can arrange marriages for their minor daughters with whomever they want, even if these girls are still as young as 8 years old. This is the case of a young girl from an impoverished family (yes there is poor people in Saudia, indeed - and not all are outcasts with foreign passports) who has been forcibly married by her father to an 80 years old pervert. The mother appealed in court, causing some controversy in the retrograde realm, but the father's decission was upheld.

And this is the kind of abuses we are asked to watch indifferent in a world that knows no real borders anymore. In these cases I always think that a little bit of Stalinism would not be in excess in such areas. It's not bigotry: I am just appalled that human rights are smashed by superstitious ideologies (aka religions). Obviously it must be Arabs who solve Arab problems and Afghans who solve Afghan problems but some internationalist support for those fighting for the rights and dignity of Humankind is never in excess. If instead of supporting the bigots and machos there, we would arm the feminists, then at least we would know we are doing something of use. But we (our governments) arm the nazis and ignore the humanists and that has no pardon.
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