quanta ...: 01.10

1.28.2010

Howard Zinn

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/27/howard-zinn-dead-author-o_n_439350.html

Howard Zinn died of a heart attack yesterday at the age of 87. I never saw him in person but he profoundly impacted my view of our times, our world. I may not have agreed with everything he said, but everything he said and wrote made me pause and think.

It is fitting to quote from his speech from 2005 at Spelman College which had fired him back in 1963.

My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself -- whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.

1.17.2010

A different take on free markets

Raj Patel: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

Raj Patel talks about the west exporting free markets as if "they are the natural houses of liberty ad freedom." He quotes a very interesting thought experiment from Jerry Cohen

Imagine a world where everyone is given little tickets and on those tickets are freedoms or rights; say the right to visit your ailing aunt, drive a red sports car, the right to good health insurance. You don't have to use those tickets, but you cannot exercise a right unless you own a ticket that says it. In the world we live in, Jerry Cohen suggests, those tickets are replaced by dollar bills. In a free market, the more money we have, the more rights we have.

Freedom therefore, is a function of wealth. This is a very astute observation and is indeed the model that the modern day communist party in China has discovered. You can setup a free market and not offer political rights.

Some other interesting points:

If african american women in the United States were a country, their mortality rates would be worse than Uzbekistan.

There are systems of development and models of governance in developing countries that are much more sustainable than those that are advocated by free markets.

We need to recognize that we are not consumers of democracy, but its citizens.

1.14.2010

Contractors in US wars

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=122444062

Nice interview.

The US govt covers the cost of insuring employees of private contractors in war-zones and also reimburses the insurance company if the employee is injured and needs medical attention.

</head scratching fact>

1.10.2010

Why we'll never see the end of it

Bomb plot suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, appeared in a Detroit federal court on Friday.

Look closely at the picture of this 23 year old who's now sitting in a prison somewhere in Detroit. It is tough, but stop thinking for a moment what he tried to do which would have ruined 100's of families had he succeeded. Instead, think about him and any other kid in Detroit or any other place in this country, where a 23 year old got caught up in drugs, became part of an armed robbery, or worse, went into a school with a gun on a shooting spree. It just takes a couple of such incidents for us to start blaming the neighborhoods, schools, internet, or whatever else it is in the society that is causing young people to go astray. No one says, "hey lets bomb the living daylights out of the neighborhood where this guy grew up", or lets get rid of the mayor of the city, the governor of the state, or government of the country.

No one pauses and wonders about the enormity or the roots of a problem that can skew the basic sense of right and wrong in every impressionable 23-year-old to such an extent. He has done this, therefore he is evil, and so is every other person who comes from where he came from or looks like him.

It is a social problem when someone amongst us harms us, it is terrorism when someone from another country harms us. Hence by definition, we will never think of a social remedy for the problem we call terrorism. Which may really be the only way to look at it if it ever can be solved.