Letter from a Soldier Re: Ferozk

``If we as a society are ever going to avoid the scourge of war, we have to stop romantizing it. The only logical end begetted by the romance of war is a morbid heartache of a loved one and the silent sorrow of an orphan.``

Couldn`t agree more...add to that generations of enmity and hatred, destroyed spirits, permanently physically and mentally disabled individuals, billions in structural damage, billions in more weapon production...there is not an ounce of romance in war. There are no victors and no heroes.

az

Snakebite Powerful!

AZ

Why The War On Ghosts Was Lost Sadly, it appears that the details of our ``well-done`` census have also become ghostly. Suspiciously, the government has been sitting on detailed breakdown of numbers for several months now, after promising immediate release. Also, the highly-praised, and separately conducted National Demographic and Health Survey of Pakistan, surveying over 20,000 households and finished over a year ago, is also not being handed over for detailed analysis. International consultants think that this is so, because much of the summary census data has been cooked to please international development agencies that important priorities are being addressed - and release of the raw data in its actual form will expose the inconsistencies.

A

His Decision Re: Goga and AzizS

You both make the very valid observation that human societies are based on social and cultural orders and rules that can hardly be compared to the state in which animals exist in nature. My reason for pointing out that homosexual practices exist among other animals is solely to make the observation that since such practices exist in nature, they cannot be considered ``unnatural``. It is for humans to decide whether homosexual behaviour is acceptable within the realm of modern human societies and the ethical premises on which they are based.

Anita

Atlantic Unbound: On Top of the World Re: Ras Siddiqui

Ras, a suggestion - if you really want an off-the-beaten (Karakorum Highway)path experience of the Northern Areas, contact the Aga Khan Foundation about the possibility of writing about their work in the area based on your personal observations of visiting the villages they work in.

I have had the fortunate experience of working with them in the NA for a year, gathering health information on the people. I can only say that I do not have the words to describe all that I experienced. Simply nothing equals trekking through avalanches, crossing glaciers on mule backs, squeezing through mountain passes only a few feet wide on helicopters, moonlit dinners at the foothills of Rakaposhi and Nanga Parbat, picnics by the origin of the mighty Indus, and most of all, the beauty and resilience of the people I met. I keep wanting to go back for more and more.

Anita

Rise and Fall of a Silver Screen Hero Abdul Nadir,

Purani yadeeN yaad delanaiN ka shukriya.

Anita

His Decision Nicely done, Kafir. The HET-1 gene injection as a `cure` really got me thinking. What if?

How would people react - gay and straight? Would we start thinking of homosexuality as a disease again? Would we advise treatment? Enforce it?

Would have liked to know more about why Omar wanted to become straight? Was it purely a reaction to his lover`s leaving?

Re: RanaRansher

Don`t know if this will help, but homosexuality is a common practice in nature, from insects to lower mammals, to intelligent primates (macaques, baboons, chimps etc). It isn`t a practice unique to humans. Psychiatrists no longer regard it as a disease, although a couple of decades ago, they did. It is now considered within the spectrum of normal human behavior. There is almost certainly a genetic predisposition, with genetic expression depending on the environment and early sexual experiences of the child.

A

Denis Halliday on Iraq Thank you Adnan, for keeping this terrible human tragedy in the news.

No compassionate person can fail to come to the conclusion that these sanctions are immoral, inhuman, and criminal. The United States is responsible for hundreds of thousands of needless deaths of innocent people. But let`s also not forget the equally grotesque behavior of Saddam Hussain towards his own people, who every day manages to reach new heights of atrocity. There is the killing last week of Ayotollah Sadr alongwith his two sons, for the simple crime of organizing a congregation in a mosque!

Btw, I think Mr. Halliday, meant to say ``water-borne typhoid``, not typhus which is a totally different disease. Because of the breakdown in the water and sewage system, even many of Saddam`s palaces are in knee-deep sewage, and a huge epidemic of typhoid is raging.

A

The Chowk Jam! re: temporal

Bhai, JB sey tou roz baat ho jati hai. Ab zara garmiaN huN tou aap ki taraf aaeeN.

A

The Chowk Jam! Hey Shandana and Bina,

We`ll be there in August. Let`s all have a party, Kaneez Rahman included.

P.S I have a sneaking suspicion that you are married to my former dentist`s son!!

Anita

The Chowk Jam! I agree with Sohail on this one. I don`t think having a LARGE retreat under the Chowk umbrella is a feasible idea (yet anyway). An evening of Qawalli on the other hand sounds great. The question is where?

Re: Sohail

``I have no qualms about ``exploiting the capitalist markets``. It is BEING exploited that I find revolting.``

But then aren`t you doing to others what you yourself find revolting - or is that what `reformed marxism` means :-)

Re: cheeno

Anita: 5``5, maybe? short-medium length hair, can`t stop talking (remember, l o v i n g l y).

Way off! I am barely 5 feet, with really long hair!

Anita

The Origin of Life Re: Wasiq

You say ``I guess then I am clearly in the camp of those who believe that we arose out of a configuration of molecules that by chance (though the probabilities themselves may be helped tremendously by the properties of the molecules in question) led to a set of molecules that could replicate themselves with great accuracy. I believe fundamentally that there is no qualitative difference between the living and the non-living elements in the universe``.

Wasiq, this is precisely what I am trying to say - that ultimately, in our current state of knowledge, reductionism (materialism) is just as much a BELIEF as vitalism is. Neither has been proven or falsified. This is not to say that
reductionism hasn’t been a spectacular success as a framework within which to explain biological and physicochemical phenomenon - just that it hasn’t delivered the goods yet, as far as explaining what constitutes life and how it all began.

About the origin of life, the devil continues to be in the details. Abstract theorizing can only get one so far. This is why biology is so much more tedious and boring than physics! In this vein, some great questions from you about error-correcting mechanisms in RNA replication.

The best way to explain this, I think, is to look at contemporary organisms in which RNA to RNA replication takes place. This to my knowledge only happens in RNA viruses such as rhinoviruses (common cold virus) and influenza. The replication of these viruses is characterized by very high error rates because their replicases (enzymes) have NO proofreading ability. The error rate is in the order of 1/2500 to 1/10000 nucleotides synthesized. Such a high misincorporation rate results in greater than 99% of viral progeny being defective, despite the fact that these RNA viruses are very small (only a few thousand bases). It also means that no virus can exist as a free agent and depends on parasitizing a cell that can provide the necessary proteins (and error-correcting mechanisms) from the host DNA synthesis machinery. This of course puts a damper on our thinking that RNA viruses could have been the first living organisms - because even modern RNA viruses cannot exist without much outside support. Also, it seems highly improbable that RNA would have during evolution lost self-correcting mechanisms, because a strain that had these would have had a huge survival advantage over the others, in its accurate and independent self-replicating ability.

As for the sense of purpose in replication of genes, and extrapolating to humans I have some half-baked ideas that will take a while to pen down. Am in a hurry, so later.

regards,

A

The Chowk Jam! Re: Cheeno and temporal

``...A little suggestion on costumes: loincloths for men and Xena: Warrior Princess get-ups for the ladies...``

I second this! No contestant can appear in purdah - got to let it all hang out!!!

Anita

The Chowk Jam! Re: SR

``I am presently self-employed and working full time (managing private investments and monitoring a couple of small enterprises), however, being unemployed is my distinct preference.``

INVESTMENTS!!! in other words exploiting the capitalist market, Sohail:-)

Anita

The Origin of Life Re: goga (23)

``Men, at least among the developed nations, have lower life expectancy than women. It is because of the male hormones that make them more prone to infections and heart decease. So even male population succumbs prematurely because of self-replication.``

Goga: well, that is one way of looking at it, especially since testosterone is linked to aggressive behavior and risk-taking, the most common cause of death in young men (violence and accidents), which has a substantial effect on reducing average male life expectancy.

However, what I was referring to was the suggestion (from this paper in Nature) that ``aristocratic`` women from Britain who were childless lived much longer than women with children who had survived the dangers of childbirth. For men, I think it would be hard to show a difference between childless men and men who became fathers. In fact, I suspect that we would find that men who are fathers tend to live longer, so that reproduction confers a survival advantage.

Anita

The Chowk Jam! Re: Cheeno,

Don`t get me started again, yaar...I can`t afford to have the merciless FRK on my wrong side - the bromides may kill him :)

To address the BROADER issue of whether I think it is my right to know if the same person is operating under more than one name (or two people are connected to each other) - I would say only under extenuating circumstances...

Btw, are you a man or a woman? someone called you Ms.

As for temporal bhai`s gladiator suggestion, that, in my opinion is the best one so far. At least we`ll all get to see whose behind the pseudonyms:)

A