The Guardian: Mother Teresa to become saint amid criticism over miracles and missionaries

According to his 2003 book, Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict, based on the testimonies of scores of people who worked with the Missionaries of Charity, the medical care given to sick and dying people was negligible. Syringes were reused without sterilisation, pain relief was non-existent or inadequate, and conditions were unhygienic. Meanwhile, Mother Teresa spent much of her time travelling around the world in a private plane to meet political leaders.

Similar criticisms were made by the late writer Christopher Hitchens in his book, The Missionary Position. Mother Teresa was, he wrote, a “religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermoniser, and an accomplice of worldly secular powers”.

The focus of the nun’s work, he said, was “not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection”. [...]

The investigative journalist Donal Macintyre spent a week working undercover in a Missionaries of Charity home for disabled children in Kolkata in 2005. In an article in the New Statesman, he described pitiful scenes. “For the most part, the care the children received was inept, unprofessional and, in some cases, rough and dangerous.”

Three years ago, a study by academics at the University of Montreal concluded that the Vatican had ignored Mother Teresa’s “rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding … abortion, contraception and divorce.”

read the article 

Salon: What’s really backward? From India to France, millions are rising up against the effects of Western domination

Colonialism made us feel backward. It was always Europe that was advanced and enlightened, and it was always the East that was backward and wretched. Rather than honestly say that they had come to plunder, the colonial rulers said that they had come to school the East — it needed to be civilized. Every European colonizer used the phrase — the French called it mission civilisatrice, the Portuguese called it missão civilizadora and the English called it liberalism. [...]

Fanon considers the problem of backwardness as it re-emerges after independence. The masses’ victory does not come with the sensation of a new beginning. They have thrown out the colonizers, but they now find that “they have been robbed of all these things” that modernity had promised them — running water, surely, but also freedom of political action. Two or three years after independence, Fanon writes, the people begin to feel that “it wasn’t worth while” to fight the colonizers, and “that nothing could really change.” Fanon sees this resentment. It marks his text. “The enlightened observer takes note,” writes Fanon, “of the existence of a kind of burnt-down house after the fire has been put out, which still threatens to burst into flames again.” [...]

The colonial gaze descends upon women in burkhas or burkinis or in anything that resembles — as far as the colonizer is concerned — backwardness. Real backwardness — poverty, disease, illiteracy — is set aside. It is the false backwardness — backward religions — that must be condemned. This colonizer sees in the woman a threat to his civilization. He wants to tell her what to do. She cannot make up her own mind. Not long ago the colonial patriarch told white women not to wear bikinis. Now the colonial patriarch tells women to wear bikinis. It is always the colonial patriarch who must decide. He is the only voice of freedom. It is his mission civilisatrice.

read the article 

Quartz: It’s not just you. Time really does seem to fly by faster as we age

There are several theories that attempt to explain why our perception of time speeds up as we get older. One idea is a gradual alteration of our internal biological clocks. The slowing of our metabolism as we get older matches the slowing of our heartbeat and our breathing. Children’s biological pacemakers beat more quickly, meaning that they experience more biological markers (heartbeats, breaths) in a fixed period of time, making it feel like more time has passed.

Another theory suggests that the passage of time we perceive is related to the amount of new perceptual information we absorb. With lots of new stimuli, our brains take longer to process the information, so the period of time feels longer. This would help to explain the “slow motion perception” often reported in the moments before an accident. The unfamiliar circumstances mean there is so much new information to take in.

In fact, it may be that when faced with new situations our brains record more richly detailed memories, so that it is our recollection of the event that appears slower rather than the event itself. This has been shown to be the case experimentally for subjects experiencing free fall. [...]

We commonly think of our lives in terms of decades—our 20s, our 30s, and so on—which suggests an equal weight to each period. However, on the logarithmic scale, we perceive different periods of time as the same length. The following differences in age would be perceived the same under this theory: five to ten, ten to 20, 20 to 40, and 40 to 80.

read the article 

Land of Maps: World Abortion Laws (Provided by Women on Waves)

see the original post

The Atlantic: Donald Trump and the Politics of Fear

The critics who accuse Trump of cheap fear-mongering may be failing to recognize that the fear percolating in society is real, and somewhat justified; politicians who fail to validate it risk falling out of step with the zeitgeist. They are likely right, however, that ratcheting up fear helps Trump. This is the way fear works, according to social scientists: It makes people hold more tightly to what they have and regard the unfamiliar more warily. It makes them want to be protected. The fear reaction is a universal one to which everyone is susceptible. It might even be the only way Trump could win. [...]

Trump’s audience of conservative-leaning voters may be particularly susceptible to fear-based appeals. Researchers have found that those who are more sensitive to threats and more wary of the unfamiliar tend to be more politically conservative. “The common basis for all the various components of the conservative attitude syndrome is a generalized susceptibility to experiencing threat or anxiety in the face of uncertainty,” the British psychologist G.D. Wilson wrote in his 1973 book, The Psychology of Conservatism. In other words, an innate fear of uncertainty tends to correlate to people’s level of conservatism. [...]

Many have argued that fear and nativism in politics are driven by people’s economic insecurity, as struggling members of the majority find themselves in competition with immigrants for jobs and wages. But Bennett does not believe that to be the case. Nativism, he notes, was relatively low during the Great Depression, and rises in nativist sentiment haven’t generally correlated with periods of economic strain. Rather, they have correlated with large-scale increases in foreign immigration, which natives tend to view as a threat to the nation’s safety and culture. (Recent studies have also found a strong correlation between increases in anti-immigrant sentiment and increases in immigration.) It’s not desperation that makes people turn on the other—it’s diversity. [...]

Another form of fear also runs through American politics in the 20th century: the fear of foreign ideology, from anarchism to fascism to Marxism, that solidified into the Cold War fear of communism. Bennett believes that Trump has combined the fear of foreign ideology with fear of foreign immigration in a novel way, with his twin emphases on Islamist terror and Mexican migrants. This, he says, may be why Trump has done better than many fear-fueled politicians. [...]

In research conducted for MoveOn, Shenker, the linguistics consultant, found that the idea of Trump as a threat was the most persuasive case against him among swing voters. “The single most damning case against Trump, across the various measurements and using his own words and actions as evidence, is that as President he would escalate the likelihood of catastrophic violent conflict from without and within, posing a serious threat to the future of the United States,” her team wrote in a memo outlining their findings. This message, they noted, was far more effective than emphasizing Trump’s “misogyny” or depicting his economic record as bad for working people.

read the article 

FiveThirtyEight: Gun Deaths In America

This interactive graphic is part of our project exploring the more than 33,000 annual gun deaths in America and what it would take to bring that number down. See our stories on suicides among middle-age men, homicides of young black men and accidental deaths, or explore the menu for more coverage.

The data in this interactive graphic comes primarily from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Multiple Cause of Death database, which is derived from death certificates from all 50 states and the District of Columbia and is widely considered the most comprehensive estimate of firearm deaths. In keeping with the CDC’s practice, deaths of non-U.S. residents that take place in the U.S. (about 50 per year) are excluded. All figures are averages from the years 2012 to 2014, except for police shootings of civilians, which are from 2014.

read the article 

CityLab: Traveling Between Berlin and Munich Is About to Get a Whole Lot Easier

Reducing the 505 kilometer (314 mile) journey to just over 4 hours, down from 6 hours and 15 minutes, will finally offer genuinely fast land transit across one of Central Europe’s most important routes. When the convenience of downtown-to-downtown travel is factored in, the high-speed rail link (trains will eventuall run at speeds of up to 300 kilometers per hour) will give planes and highways a run for their money.

The plan might sound like a classic example of often cited German efficiency, if it weren’t for the fact that the country has had to wait quite a while for the link. In fact, they’ve had to wait no less than 26 years. [...]

The project took so long for two reasons. Firstly, it was slowed down by a mixture of political jockeying and funding hurdles. A fight between two of Germany’s federal states—Saxony and Thuringia—over whose territory would host the new route provided several years delay, while funding dried up just before the millennium, leaving the track site growing weeds for a protracted seven-year hiatus.

here is, however, another more understandable reason. The terrain the new line needed to cross was by no means easy. The Thuringian Forest is, despite its name, actually a low mountain range, albeit one whose flanks are heavily wooded. It lies midway between Berlin and Bavaria, a broad bar of rough country that looks almost as if it was expressly designed to keep the two regions separate. Crossing this area with high-speed tracks meant constructing 29 new railway viaducts and 22 tunnels, one of which is 8 kilometers (or about 5 miles) long. Given the landscape, it’s not surprising that the new stretch of track cost €10 billion ($11.15 billion). Even now, the electrified track isn’t running at full speed—it still needs further testing with slower trains, whose speeds will steadily be increased until they are permitted to hit the full 300 km per hour in December 2017.

read the article