Glenn Jacob

Got Research?

An NPR story today tracks the loss of academic jobs in science and medical fields. Only 15% of the PhD’s who have graduated in the past decade will actually get a tenure track job. These fresh PhD’s are working temporary jobs in labs across the country for as little as $40,000 a year. These are some of the best and brightest minds in the United States.

Up until the 1980’s, the U.S. government supported basic research in universities and colleges across the nation. In the 1980’s a new political philosophy emerged and the curtailment of government monies for research began to wane. At times the money has increased temporarily, only to dissipate just as rapidly, further eroding the amount of government sponsored research.

All of this basic research was the genesis for many of the new fields of employment we have today. Biomedical research, pharmaceuticals, energy sources (both repurposed and alternative), computer hardware, software, opticals, nanotechnology, quantum physics, and especially cell phone technology all began with government sponsored research in anonymous college labs.

Private corporations are not going to fund research in any significant manner. They have not done so in the past thirty years.

This report should be a call to arms. We should be having a conversation about how Congress spends our money. However, I fear that our national legislators are unusually nearsighted and are unable to see beyond their next election, which has little to do long term issues and trends of our nation.

We need to get these people to work at their best levels, doing the research they have spent years training to do. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/09/16/343539024/too-few-university-jobs-for-americas-young-scientists>

The Terrible Calculus of ISIS

The drumbeat of war sounds loudly as the world turns its focus on to Iraq and maybe even Syria. The Islamic State, or ISIS according to its previous name, has taken terrorism, regime change, and war to new heights of violent gore. They have executed hundreds or thousands of captured soldiers. They have murdered, kidnapped, raped and sold into slavery persecuted minorities. They have beheaded prized foreign prisoners on digital media.

They oppose Bashar Al-Asad of Syria but that is not good although he is a mass murderer as well. The Islamic State opposes Iran and Hezbollah, enemies of the United States and Israel but this is not good either. What we have is a fanatical group of violent, well-armed men who butcher and maim at will with few strong enough to oppose them.

The permutations and complications are vast enough to fill a dozen books. Consider the list of those directly involved: Syria, Turkey, Kurds, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Hezbollah, Sunni tribes, Shiite tribes and Syrian militias. Add those who are just a half-step removed and list grows to contain the Druze, the Alawities, Israel, Hamas, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Lebanon, Kuwait, Western Europe and the United States. While confined to a specific geographic area, the implications are global.

Even without listing the specifics of every group, tribe and country given above, the idea of a comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS seems remote. There are too many players with too many justifiable agendas for an elegant answer. Whatever the arising coalition chooses to do, the instruments will be blunt and create will many terrible consequences that will highlight the shortcomings of the decisions being made now. A lot of innocent people are going die.

Then again, if the nations of world do nothing, then a lot of innocent people are going to die. What a terrible calculus.

To Criticize Israel

Israel has critics within and critics without.

The United Nations announced this week that Israel may have committed human rights violations during the conflict this past summer. For those who do not follow the United Nations, its agencies, and its history, the body has never failed to condemn the State of Israel in each and every conflict, major or minor.

No mention has been made of the assassination of “collaborators” by Hamas after the ceasefire – the roundups and deaths were caught on film. There has been no declaration of condemnation for the 200,000 dead in Syria or the ten thousands more in Iraq. Muslims can kill Muslims and expect the world body to maintain silence but not when Jews kill Muslims.

In this context, Jews who want to criticize the policies of the State of Israel silence themselves. Words that are given with love, respect and concern are twisted by outside agencies and used as bludgeons to further pummel Israel. This is not a liberal, progressive, or conservative issue. This is a phenomenon known by no other name than Jew-hatred.

As we have witnessed and documented across the globe, Jew-hatred is on the rise again. Much of it has little to do with Israel no matter how vocal the protestations. Will this scourge ever disappear?

American Democracy 2014, part 2

The United States has the best Congress that money can buy. The funny thing about that statement is not the money, which is true, but the idea of the best Congress. The approval ratings for Congress among the polled population of the United States is in the ten’s or teen’s. If we were viewing Congress on Amazon or Zappos, we would not be clicking the “Buy” button.

Congress is not happy with themselves either. They will not sit in the same dining room with each other, nor exchange greetings in the hallway or even acknowledge the others’ existence except as caricatured villains. Why are they unhappy?

They have the same issue their constituents have – they despise the money that funds their legislative seat. Individual senators and representatives must spend hours each day raising campaign money. They must raise between $1,500 to $10,000 each day (analysts disagree on a number) to fund the ever more expensive, longer campaign season. Your legislators sit in a Democratic or a Republican campaign office just off of Capitol Hill every day trolling for money. They will spend more hours asking for money than they will spend legislating according to some commentators.

Almost everybody is unhappy with the system we have now. Almost everyone.

Our national legislators may be compared to hamsters on the wheel in a cage, a very nice cage to be sure. They have to keep going; they have to fill the campaign chest. They also have to write legislation and vote on it. People are on the other end of the phone telling the senators and the representatives how they should vote but it is usually not constituents. Constituents talk to the legislative consultants on staff. Their leadership is telling them how to vote for the sake of the party apparatus, which also needs money. Somewhere, far out there is in the field, is a press secretary telling the constituents that the representative and the senator is doing all he/she can to get it right for them.

The nature of American democracy is that there should be some money involved. People willing to put up money to fund a candidacy is a legitimate test of worth and electability. However, we are far beyond the reasonable test of money in campaigns. The extremely high bar for dollars that we have now has invalidated and corrupted what was once a worthwhile hurdle.

American democracy 2014 is the most expensive Congress that money can buy. We expect Congress to help us when it seems that we need to help them more.

Ray Rice and Wife

Ray Rice has been released from his NFL football team and banned indefinitely from the NFL – this week. Based on previous footage from outside of the elevator, he was banned for two games and then welcomed back into the fold. Only when the footage of the violent left hook took out his fiancé, smashing her head into the side the elevator was he given the boot. Domestic violence has a new face for the moment.

With all of the conversation about domestic violence since the 1970’s (some argue Bela Abzug in the 1960’s) that exposed the terror of such abuse, why is domestic violence still so prevalent?

An article appeared in Aeon online magazine written by Rebecca Onion that examined the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” advice column in the Ladies Home Journal from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. The column was dominated by a man who believed in the pseudo-science of eugenics, Paul Popenoe. He submitted the cases that the Journal considered for publication and all of them were overseen by his counselors. The rock-solid conclusion was that the woman was always to blame.

“Sue” was wrong for denying “Jack” sex after he hit her. She should have known that her refusal would only escalate his anger. Most of the columns that mentioned domestic violence and male anger minimized the violence of these incidents. The woman was seen as the spark of the incident and the one who had to change or compromise to resolve the issue.

Fast forward to Ray Rice and the woman he slugged who is now his wife. Like the dated advice columns, the NFL minimized the incident at the casino. I have no doubt that the original punishment was more of a business decision meant to show while the League was paying attention but that they wanted to move on to other subjects. The focus was business and not about an abused woman and an abusive man.

A comparison between the two teases out the real reaction of a good chunk of American culture – minimize domestic violence and hide it away. Outrage won the day this time although it was a slow and uneven process. Too many times, the woman ends up dead as the man’s anger continues to escalate.

For advocates against domestic violence, we did not win anything this time but a few minutes of media attention. This case demonstrates how thoroughly domestic violence is still tolerated in many neighborhoods of our country. Then as now, wishing it would disappear is a fool’s hope.

“Fit” to print

The United States has a long history of compromised journalism. Yellow journalism in the 1890’s trumpeted pseudo-science, underdog plots, specific politicians, and political parties with outrageous and misleading headlines, unnamed sources, and damning innuendos.All of it was a competition between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst for readership of their respective newspapers.

The famous “muckraking” at the beginning of the 1900’s was an unscrupulous and unsavory methodology for obtaining damning information on politicians and celebrities. Even President Teddy Roosevelt got swept up in the mess in 1906. The impetus behind the muckraking was the corporate interest in the new mass-market magazines, which were lucrative as long as the stories were salacious.

Standing in 2014, the business model is a bit more complicated but the corporate interest in newspapers and magazines remains steady. These are “for-profit” enterprises and the most important desks at these businesses are the advertising desks. No one is surprised when magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Time, which are owned by conglomerates, are accused of killing articles that put their advertisers in a poor a light. The further accusation is that the reporters are told to write stories that highlight their advertising customers with a positive spin. Those who do not comply are terminated. There is enough compelling evidence from a number of unique sources to make one pause.

Accusations of bias have been leveled at New York Times over the Hamas-Israel conflict, which is still ongoing. The tone this time is more than journalistic favoritism of Palestinians. The same accusations have been leveled at the AP and their large bureau in Israel. In this case a former reporter from the bureau details pictures suppressed and articles killed that were disproportionately negative against Gaza and the West Bank. Many media observers see the pattern of the glossy magazines being emulated in the news sheets.

Everything fit to print may not be fit for consumption.

I will leave you this little fact. The AP has not filled its stringer position in Congo. Stringers live in African countries among the inhabitants for $300 a month. The named reporters for the AP live in hotels across the continent at nearly $300 a day and they cover six to ten countries from one city. The AP pays for the big stories but not for the daily investigative journalism that matters more in the long run. It’s a business and therein lies the inherent problem of news consumption in the United States. It’s a business.

A Member of the Tribe

The eulogies are fast and furious as the news of Joan River’s death continues to spread. All of the major internet sites have clips of her appearances and routines from the past fifty years along with remembrances and biographical analyses. There is a lot to say and hope that in the coming days the writers and the commentators will not be able to agree on one single narrative to eulogize her life.

I have a small footnote. Joan Rivers was a real Jew – not a pious Jew, a synagogue Jew, nor an ethnic or cultural Jew. She was a member of the tribe, an offensive term when non-Jews use it but a high compliment when it is bestowed by one Jew upon another. To an outsider, tribalism is a derogatory term reeking of exclusivity and condescension. To proclaim someone a member of the tribe within the Jewish world is to mark that person as being remarkable and proud about being a Jew.

Joan lived a philosophy that many rabbis preach but few rise to embrace. Joan embraced everything Jewish from food and family to politics and Israel. The term “Judaism” is a definition imposed upon Jews by outsiders. There is no “ism”, no specific religion for the Jews. We are a people and the sphere in which we dwell is called “The Jewish World”. Joan embraced this entire sphere, sometimes with high regard and sometimes with low profanities.

She called her career as a comedian a calling. She skewered any and all who dared to flaunt themselves for fame, fortune or power. She skewered herself. She spoke truths with a capital “T” and I believe that these public expositions of truth dressed as jokes were the source of her influence and media power through these past fifty years. This trait alone made her a leading member of the Tribe.

The Symptom or the Source?

From India emerged a story of two women who were gang-raped and then hanged in the middle of the night in a rural hamlet. The local police were slow and hesitant to respond. Outrage across India has been vocal and the State finally stepped in. Arrests have been made. However, the estimate of the moment is that a woman is raped every half hour in India, mostly in the rural areas. Prosecuting one case of rape/murder does not appear to affect this criminal behavior.

The first solution, arrest followed by conviction, has failed to change behavior even though we think it should. Fear of punishment should prevent crime from happening. This is not the best model of morality, not doing something out of fear of getting caught, and it does not work in any case. There is little fear.

The source of the problem is that women are isolated and alone in a largely lawless, violent area. India is unable to impose law and order in these rural areas and therefore rapists will be deterred. Since the rapists cannot be stopped, the better solution is to change the women’s circumstance.

The solution is toilets. Yes, toilets. There are no privies in these rural areas and relieving of human wastes is done in the fields, in the open. Modest women will wait until it is dark to go out into the fields to relieve themselves, some in the middle of night for complete privacy. This circumstance makes women utterly vulnerable and indeed, this is when the rapes usually take place. A non-profit group is now installing outdoor toilets in these rural areas, allowing these women to relieve themselves during the day and under the watchful eyes of family.

The community is given the tools, in this case a sanitary toilet, to protect and police themselves. The land is still lawless but the women are safe. With the immediate threat to life averted, perhaps the Indian government will be able to address the issue of corrupt police forces and crimes against lower castes.

The task of Taking Nude Pics

Over the long weekend in the USA, an Indian hacker released nude pics of A-List celebrities on 4Chan and on Reddit, large social networks. An uproar ensued over privacy, personal rights, and widespread prurient interest in examples of naked females. The hacker is fleeing incarceration and has promised more stills to anyone willing to pay in bitcoins.

Pictures of naked people are “naughty” as the Brits would say. Many artists would argue that eroticism of the human form is a severe and limiting use of the body. The nude body can express a universe of emotion and of ideas that have little to do with sex. This episode has no redeeming artistic value though. The release of these photos is exploitation and profit.

While human life is upheld as the utmost of sacredness, the human body is not treated the same. Judaism does not recognize shame for the naked form nor vanity of its presentation in a non-exploitative circumstance. God gave you this body and because it is God-given even with its flaws and imperfections, the body is inherently good.

The body is a tool. It holds hands and manipulates tools. The body acts out deeds of love and friendship and raises up to meet threats and adversity. This is how we were created.

Modesty is a much maligned virtue these days until someone’s nude pics are posted are the internet against their wishes. Celebrate your bodies with those you love and avoid sharing or even the possibility of sharing with the rest of the world. This advice does not rise to the level of a religious dictate, the suggestion is simple common sense.