Howard Zinn was born on August 29, 1927 and died on January 27, 2010. His parents were Jewish immigrants. His father, Eddie Zinn, left Austria-Hungary with his brother, Samuel, for the U.S. before the outbreak of World War I. They settled in Brooklyn. His mother, Jenny, emigrated from the Eastern Siberian city of Irkutsk.
His parents were factory workers when they met and married. Although there were no books in the house where they raised their son, to literature by sending 25 cents plus a coupon to the New York Post for each of the 20 volumes of Charles Dickens' collected works. He pursued a study of creative writing at Thomas Jefferson High School in a special program established by the poet Elias Lieberman.
As a young man he served in the Air Force during World War II. He volunteered for service in the Air Force even though he was working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at the time and was eligible for an exemption since his work was considered essential to the war effort. He felt strongly about the war against the fascists. He became a bombardier during that horrific conflict, and was involved in the bombing of Royan, a small town on the Atlantic coast of France. It was known that German troops were bivouacked there. The bombs that he dropped, including napalm, resulted in the deaths of many German soldiers and innocent civilians as well. Twelve hundred bombers flew over this small town and destroyed it. It was a role that he would later regret; the devastating impact that the bombs wrought on the civilian populations of the enemy had a dramatic impact on his view of warfare in general and the politics that drove the decisions made by the government of his country in particular. This highly personal experience would inform his thinking and his activism for the rest of his life.
Later in his career, he was invited by the Smithsonian Institution to a Memorial Day celebration at which he was invited to speak. In his address he said, “World War II was not simply and purely a good war. It was accompanied by too many atrocities on our side – too many bombings of civilian populations. There were too many betrayals of the principles for which the war was supposed to have been fought. I don’t want to honor military heroism; that conceals too much death and suffering. I want to honor those who all these years have opposed the horror of war.” He was surprised to hear applause at the end of his provocative presentation. Another personality of note, Kurt Vonnegut, was present following the firebombing of the German city of Dresden. He was so appalled by what he witnessed that he was inspired to write an anti-war novel entitled, Slaughterhouse-5, a book that received critical acclaim.
Following the War, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights and attended New York University. There, he received his bachelor's degree in 1951. He went on to do graduate work in political science at Columbia University. He finally received his PhD in political science in 1958. Zinn’s doctoral dissertation was on New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's congressional career; it was published in 1959 with the title, LaGuardia in Congress. LaGuardia was a well-loved Mayor of New York City. Zinn depicted him as a liberal Republican who fought for pro-labor legislation and criticized the upper-class bias of his party's economic policies. LaGuardia’s political career had an impact on Zinn’s own viewpoint. In 1965, Zinn published an anthology of New Deal Thought. In his introduction, he argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his leading advisers prevented a possible American social revolution by pursuing the goal of restoring the American middle class to prosperity and, thereby, rejecting a more radical social reform.
Zinn became very active in the Civil Rights Movement. This was inspired, in part, by his position as Chairman of the Department of History and Social Science at Spelman College in Atlanta Georgia. Spelman College was a school for African-American women. He was there for seven years beginning in 1956. While he was there, Zinn became acquainted with the brutal reality of Jim Crow and was dismayed by the federal government's failure to protect the civil rights of African-American citizens. He felt that the federal government should actively protect and defend the civil rights of all its citizens. He challenged the Kennedy Administration in this regard.
Zinn's book entitled, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964) was an in-depth examination of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its similarity to the pre Civil War abolitionist movement.
As a result of his studies and as a cumulative result of his personal experiences, he became convinced that the conventional telling of history left out many crucial events and precluded a broader spectrum of viewpoints and interpretation. He felt that history was ordinarily told from the perspective of the winners and did not serve the vast majority of individuals and their personal struggles. For this reason, he wrote a history that is now widely acclaimed – A People’s History of the United States (1980). Within this tome, Zinn presents historic data that represents pivotal events as seen through the eyes of ordinary people and differs substantially from what is normally portrayed as the truth.
Over the course of his adult life, his passion for the truth and his belief in pacifism was unwavering. He became convinced that nonviolent action was the only reliable path to real change. According to him, “Nonviolent action is not utopian; it is practical as well as moral. It builds on what already exists. It starts not with change in government, but with civil society, with the hearts and minds of people, which is where John Adams said the American Revolution was won. The people can bypass the government and tackle social problems themselves, as has been demonstrated by Havel in Czechoslovakia, Solidarity in Poland and the indigenous in Chiapas, Mexico.”
Zinn became deeply involved in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War and again during the two Gulf Wars. He was deeply disturbed by the fact that following World War II the United States had become involved in major conflicts all around the globe.
He was openly critical of the United States government’s response to the September 11, 2001 attack by terrorists on the World Trade Center in New York – an horrific event that left over three thousand people dead. He strongly believed that the Afghani people suffered terribly in America’s retaliation against the Taliban, who controlled Afghanistan at that time. He felt that the wrong people were targeted.
In order to highlight the devastation wrecked upon the people of Afghanistan as a result of the United Stated military assault on that country following 9/11, Zinn provided concrete examples of the people directly affected in his book entitled, A Power Governments cannot Suppress. The following example illustrates that point.
“In the sprawling mud-brick slum of Qala-ye-Khatir, most men were kneeling in the mosques at morning prayer on November 6, 2001 when a quarter-ton of steel and high explosives hurtled from the sky into the home of Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver. The American bomb detonated, killing Ahmed, his five daughters, one of his wives, and a son. Next door, it demolished the home of Sahib Dad and killed two of his children.”
An additional insight into Zinn’s worldview can be readily found in the following statement, “In my teaching I never concealed my political views: my detestation of war and militarism, my anger at racial inequality, my belief in a democratic socialism, in a rational and just distribution of the world’s wealth. I made clear my abhorrence of any kind of bullying, whether by powerful nations over weaker ones, governments over their citizens, employers over employees, or by anyone, on the Right or Left, who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth.”
Howard Zinn has left behind a substantial legacy of thought and action that reveals the character of the man and his passionate pursuit of peace and social justice.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Fee
The Banks made
38 Billion dollars
from overdraft fees last year...
...balance your checkbooks people !!!
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
On Extraterrestrials
Stephen Hawkings recently said that any space aliens we are likely to encounter would be nomadic in nature. They will be traveling through interstellar space, going from one galactic replenishment opportunity to the next. He says it’s best we avoid contact with them. Extraterrestrials, arriving on Earth, would lead to a scenario not unlike Christopher Columbus landing in the new world. As I recall, it did not go well for the indigenous people of the new world. Apparently Dr. Hawking believes that self-preserving behaviour is selected for by evolution throughout the universe, as it is here on Earth. I, on the other hand, do not have a clue.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Muhammad Yunus - Banker to the Poor
Muhammad Yunus is known as the “Banker to the Poor” and founder of the Grameen Bank. Yunus was born in Bangladesh during the beginning of the Second World War. He was born on June 28, 1940. He grew up on Boxirhat Road in Chittagong, the largest port in Bangladesh and a commercial city with a population of 3 million. Bangladesh is a densely populated region with a population of about 150 million people. His family was relatively prosperous; they lived in a two story house with his father’s jewelry shop on the ground floor.
His family was Muslim by religion. His mother exerted a powerful influence on the young Yunus; he was particularly influenced by her strong sense of compassion and concern for the poor. According to Yunus, his mother dominated his early years. She gave birth to fourteen children; five of them died.
Early in Yunus’ life, the subcontinent was freeing itself from British domination. In 1947 the Pakistan movement for partition reached its peak. Bangladesh was expected to be subsumed by Pakistan. His parents were deeply committed to partition. On August 14, 1947, the Indian subcontinent was granted independence. This was a period of great turmoil and uncertainty. In addition, when Yunus was nine, his mother was stricken with mental illness, a disease that ran in her family. She suffered for some thirty-three years before her death. His father’s reaction to his wife’s chronic and debilitating illness was a model of love, graciousness and perseverance for all that time, and in 1982, his mother passed away.
In 1961 Yunus set up a successful business; until, 1965 when he received a Fulbright scholarship and went to the University of Colorado at Boulder. There he became a student of economics, and was deeply influenced by Professor Georgescu-Roegen, a Rumanian. Yunus described his mentor in the following way, “He also taught me that things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.’”
During his stay in the United States, he was married. In addition, in 1971, the Pakistani army attempted to brutally suppress the Begali Declaration of Independence. Yunus was committed to independence of his homeland from continued Pakistani rule. He became Secretary of the Bangladesh Citizen’s Committee and its chief spokesperson. Finally, on December 16, 1971, Bangladesh won its war of independence – a conflict that resulted in the catastrophic loss of three million Bengali lives. Ten million citizens fled the country during this time of upheaval. Yunus felt duty-bound to return home and participate in the immense task of rebuilding his war-ravaged country.
He became head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. There he soon became disenchanted with traditional economics, for he felt that economic theory did not coincide with the majority of Bengalis living in dire poverty – a country where the illiteracy rate was seventy-five percent. In categorizing his feelings about the role of education, he stated that, “A university must not be an island where academics reach out to higher and higher levels of knowledge without sharing any of these findings. These economists spend all their talents detailing the processes of development and prosperity, but rarely reflect on the origin and development of poverty and hunger. As a result, poverty continues.” Furthermore he felt that, “Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me. How could I go on telling my students make-believe stories in the name of economics? I wanted to become a fugitive from academic life. I need to run away from these theories and from my textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence.”
One of the historic factors that greatly influenced Yunus’ decision to facilitate economic change in his country was the famine that had become pervasive throughout Bangladesh. He therefore took it upon himself to visit poor villages and discover firsthand the nature of their living conditions and real causes for their poverty.
From this study, he came to realize that many Bengali households attempted to increase their economic standing by creating their own small businesses and provide products that are in local demand. He was to discover that one of the main obstacles that faced these individuals was the common practice of usury where unscrupulous lenders would lend money with such exorbitant interest rates that their clients could never free themselves from seemingly endless cycles of indebtedness. The traditional banks offered no relief in this regard.
Yunus summarized his findings in this way - “This is the beginning for almost every Grameen borrower. All her life she has been told that she is no good, that she brings only misery to her family, and that they cannot afford to pay her dowry. Many times she hears her mother or her father tell her she should have been killed at birth, aborted or starved. To her family, she has been another mouth to feed, another dowry to pay. But today, for the first time in her life, an institution has trusted her with a great sum of money. She promises that she will never let down the institution or herself. She will struggle to make sure that every penny is paid back.”
These data inspired Yunus to organize an institution to lend directly to these industrious entrepreneurs. What started with humble beginnings ended with the state-sanctioned Grameen Bank that has a presence all over the world including, Malaysia, Philippines, South Africa and even the United States. The Grameen Bank officially began operations in January of 1977. The operating assumption of the Grameen Bank is that every borrower is honest. Borrowers are required to adhere to a regular repayment schedule. In addition, borrowers are encouraged to enter into groups with the idea that as a member of a group, a borrower will have additional incentive to behave responsibly. Membership in a group also affords each member additional support and encouragement. The bank suffers less that 1% of bad debt. Prior to the bank, less than 1% of borrowers were women in a society where women typically bear the brunt of poverty.
On October 2, 1983, the Grameen Bank was recognized by the government as a separate bank that could also issue home loans. Currently 75% of the shares in the Grameen Bank are the borrowers themselves. As of 1999, 190 million dollars has built 560,000 houses with near perfect repayment. In the 1980s, one hundred branches were added each year. In 1985, a Grameen Branch was set up in the state of Arkansas during the governorship of Bill Clinton. It was called the Good Faith Fund. Branches have also been set up in Oklahoma and Chicago, Illinois. Today the Grameen Bank has about 8 million members (some 40 million individuals counting family members) and has loaned about 8 billion dollars to the poor in Bangladesh. Grameen America is a growing organization in the U.S. that uses the group lending and savings model pioneered by Yunus.
As a result of his monumental efforts, Yunus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2006. The following is an excerpt taken from his acceptance speech -
“If we consider ourselves passengers on “Spaceship Earth,” we will find ourselves on a pilotless journey with no discernible route to follow. If we can convince ourselves that we are actually the crew of this spaceship, and that we must reach a specific socioeconomic destination, then we will continue to approach that destination – even if we make mistakes or take detours along the way.”
In my mind, Yunus demonstrated by his actions the remarkable power of an idea. His solution to the endemic problem of poverty that surrounded in him in his native country of Bangladesh was a simple one, yet it had profound beneficial consequences for many thousands of individual lives and families. In his mind, the primary goal of the Grameen Bank was and continues to be economic development. Its obvious success is a testimonial to the validity of his thinking. His brainchild, has spread beyond the borders of Bangladesh and has found worldwide application.
His family was Muslim by religion. His mother exerted a powerful influence on the young Yunus; he was particularly influenced by her strong sense of compassion and concern for the poor. According to Yunus, his mother dominated his early years. She gave birth to fourteen children; five of them died.
Early in Yunus’ life, the subcontinent was freeing itself from British domination. In 1947 the Pakistan movement for partition reached its peak. Bangladesh was expected to be subsumed by Pakistan. His parents were deeply committed to partition. On August 14, 1947, the Indian subcontinent was granted independence. This was a period of great turmoil and uncertainty. In addition, when Yunus was nine, his mother was stricken with mental illness, a disease that ran in her family. She suffered for some thirty-three years before her death. His father’s reaction to his wife’s chronic and debilitating illness was a model of love, graciousness and perseverance for all that time, and in 1982, his mother passed away.
In 1961 Yunus set up a successful business; until, 1965 when he received a Fulbright scholarship and went to the University of Colorado at Boulder. There he became a student of economics, and was deeply influenced by Professor Georgescu-Roegen, a Rumanian. Yunus described his mentor in the following way, “He also taught me that things are never as complicated as they seem. It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.’”
During his stay in the United States, he was married. In addition, in 1971, the Pakistani army attempted to brutally suppress the Begali Declaration of Independence. Yunus was committed to independence of his homeland from continued Pakistani rule. He became Secretary of the Bangladesh Citizen’s Committee and its chief spokesperson. Finally, on December 16, 1971, Bangladesh won its war of independence – a conflict that resulted in the catastrophic loss of three million Bengali lives. Ten million citizens fled the country during this time of upheaval. Yunus felt duty-bound to return home and participate in the immense task of rebuilding his war-ravaged country.
He became head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University. There he soon became disenchanted with traditional economics, for he felt that economic theory did not coincide with the majority of Bengalis living in dire poverty – a country where the illiteracy rate was seventy-five percent. In categorizing his feelings about the role of education, he stated that, “A university must not be an island where academics reach out to higher and higher levels of knowledge without sharing any of these findings. These economists spend all their talents detailing the processes of development and prosperity, but rarely reflect on the origin and development of poverty and hunger. As a result, poverty continues.” Furthermore he felt that, “Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me. How could I go on telling my students make-believe stories in the name of economics? I wanted to become a fugitive from academic life. I need to run away from these theories and from my textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence.”
One of the historic factors that greatly influenced Yunus’ decision to facilitate economic change in his country was the famine that had become pervasive throughout Bangladesh. He therefore took it upon himself to visit poor villages and discover firsthand the nature of their living conditions and real causes for their poverty.
From this study, he came to realize that many Bengali households attempted to increase their economic standing by creating their own small businesses and provide products that are in local demand. He was to discover that one of the main obstacles that faced these individuals was the common practice of usury where unscrupulous lenders would lend money with such exorbitant interest rates that their clients could never free themselves from seemingly endless cycles of indebtedness. The traditional banks offered no relief in this regard.
Yunus summarized his findings in this way - “This is the beginning for almost every Grameen borrower. All her life she has been told that she is no good, that she brings only misery to her family, and that they cannot afford to pay her dowry. Many times she hears her mother or her father tell her she should have been killed at birth, aborted or starved. To her family, she has been another mouth to feed, another dowry to pay. But today, for the first time in her life, an institution has trusted her with a great sum of money. She promises that she will never let down the institution or herself. She will struggle to make sure that every penny is paid back.”
These data inspired Yunus to organize an institution to lend directly to these industrious entrepreneurs. What started with humble beginnings ended with the state-sanctioned Grameen Bank that has a presence all over the world including, Malaysia, Philippines, South Africa and even the United States. The Grameen Bank officially began operations in January of 1977. The operating assumption of the Grameen Bank is that every borrower is honest. Borrowers are required to adhere to a regular repayment schedule. In addition, borrowers are encouraged to enter into groups with the idea that as a member of a group, a borrower will have additional incentive to behave responsibly. Membership in a group also affords each member additional support and encouragement. The bank suffers less that 1% of bad debt. Prior to the bank, less than 1% of borrowers were women in a society where women typically bear the brunt of poverty.
On October 2, 1983, the Grameen Bank was recognized by the government as a separate bank that could also issue home loans. Currently 75% of the shares in the Grameen Bank are the borrowers themselves. As of 1999, 190 million dollars has built 560,000 houses with near perfect repayment. In the 1980s, one hundred branches were added each year. In 1985, a Grameen Branch was set up in the state of Arkansas during the governorship of Bill Clinton. It was called the Good Faith Fund. Branches have also been set up in Oklahoma and Chicago, Illinois. Today the Grameen Bank has about 8 million members (some 40 million individuals counting family members) and has loaned about 8 billion dollars to the poor in Bangladesh. Grameen America is a growing organization in the U.S. that uses the group lending and savings model pioneered by Yunus.
As a result of his monumental efforts, Yunus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2006. The following is an excerpt taken from his acceptance speech -
“If we consider ourselves passengers on “Spaceship Earth,” we will find ourselves on a pilotless journey with no discernible route to follow. If we can convince ourselves that we are actually the crew of this spaceship, and that we must reach a specific socioeconomic destination, then we will continue to approach that destination – even if we make mistakes or take detours along the way.”
In my mind, Yunus demonstrated by his actions the remarkable power of an idea. His solution to the endemic problem of poverty that surrounded in him in his native country of Bangladesh was a simple one, yet it had profound beneficial consequences for many thousands of individual lives and families. In his mind, the primary goal of the Grameen Bank was and continues to be economic development. Its obvious success is a testimonial to the validity of his thinking. His brainchild, has spread beyond the borders of Bangladesh and has found worldwide application.
Zardoz Speaks
"The gun is good.
The penis is evil.
The penis shoots seeds,
and makes new life to poison
the Earth with a plague of men,
as once it was, but the gun shoots death,
and purifies the Earth of the filth of brutals.
Go forth . . . and kill!"
...ZARDOZ...
Monday, May 10, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust
Oil on canvas by Pablo Picasso 1932
Art is a lie...
that makes us realize the truth
...Pablo Picasso...
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
(25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973)
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
Spinning Lifeboat
We are spinning around on earth at 1,000 mph...
while we are orbiting the sun at 67,000 mph...
while we orbit the milky way galaxy at 483,000 mph...
are you dizzy yet?
Thursday, May 6, 2010
The Problem of Good and Evil
The problem with the concepts of good and evil is not related to their existence in the world of humans; the issue relates to how they are perceived. This is of vital importance for so much of the system of jurisprudence that we rely upon, as an allegedly civilized society, is predicated on our collective beliefs surrounding good and evil, especially the latter.
If evil is defined as an action with the intent to do harm, or an action whose primary intent might be for some other reason but whose implementation would knowingly result in causing harm to others, then evil certainly lives amongst us. Defining an action as evil does not provide any explanation as to what prompted a person(s) or government or group to act in such a way. It is not enough to simply label the perpetrator as evil; that is no explanation at all.
The CEO of a tobacco company who pushes a product that is known to be lethal cannot be put into the same category as a clearly mentally disturbed psychopath suffering from paranoid schizophrenia who has committed a murderous act. It is very convenient to color a perceived enemy, or a foreigner as evil, for they can then be treated without regard to their inherent humanity. It seems that human societies need their demons as well as their heroes to maintain the illusion of cohesiveness. It is expedient to bundle all our inner fears and perceptions regarding evil into demons such as Osama Bin Laden, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, etc. In this way, we don’t have to consider the person, or, more importantly, the fact that each of us is capable of extraordinarily evil acts under the right set of circumstances.
Adolph Hitler has become the symbolic arch-villain. This is understandable given that he was the architect of the horrific plan to exterminate the Jews. Six million individuals died under devastating circumstances as a result of his policy. However, if we proceed to count the bodies – some fifty million individuals – who died violent deaths during World War II, and analyze how they died and under whose hands, the picture of good and evil becomes a bit more murky. When we proceed to count the bodies of civilians including women and children that died excruciating deaths at the hands of Allied (the good guys) bombings, it paints a less than flattering picture of the real nature of human behavior. How many civilians died in a fiery caldron in the city of Dresden Germany as a result of relentless fire-bombing from the sky; how many hapless citizens of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki died of severe radiation exposure that left their skin literally hanging from their limbs – a radiation dose so extreme that it literally wiped out their bone marrow and eviscerated their immune system. Ten thousand children in Hiroshima alone died such a death. How many citizens of Japanese and German cities died as a result of thousand of sorties of Allied bombers? Why don’t we sum up the total of these deaths, or are they irrelevant because we perceive ourselves as being on the side of good. Are these acts not evil acts; if they are not evil, then why not? The answer to me is quite obvious – we were the winners. War has an insidious momentum that pushes the envelope of reason and rational judgment, that shreds our inner sense of humanity and compassion, and that ultimately leads to human depravity and degradation.
The plethora of cop shows and the violence-based video games that provide so much of the cultural backdrop in our society perpetuate this view of the world – as populated by the forces of good and evil. Our prison system (with one of the largest per capita prison population in the world) is, in fact, inhabited by thousands upon thousands of individuals who are mentally disturbed either as a result of genetic disease or of childhoods in which they were horribly abused. We have been known to imprison and execute those who have been shown to be severely mentally compromised. This system of jurisprudence continues in spite of the remarkable breakthroughs currently being made in the area of neuroscience, especially in regard to mental dysfunction and illness.
True justice, in my mind, incorporates a real perception of the human condition and must, by its nature, be responsive to the truth and responsible for its own missteps. In this way, real human progress is possible.
If evil is defined as an action with the intent to do harm, or an action whose primary intent might be for some other reason but whose implementation would knowingly result in causing harm to others, then evil certainly lives amongst us. Defining an action as evil does not provide any explanation as to what prompted a person(s) or government or group to act in such a way. It is not enough to simply label the perpetrator as evil; that is no explanation at all.
The CEO of a tobacco company who pushes a product that is known to be lethal cannot be put into the same category as a clearly mentally disturbed psychopath suffering from paranoid schizophrenia who has committed a murderous act. It is very convenient to color a perceived enemy, or a foreigner as evil, for they can then be treated without regard to their inherent humanity. It seems that human societies need their demons as well as their heroes to maintain the illusion of cohesiveness. It is expedient to bundle all our inner fears and perceptions regarding evil into demons such as Osama Bin Laden, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, etc. In this way, we don’t have to consider the person, or, more importantly, the fact that each of us is capable of extraordinarily evil acts under the right set of circumstances.
Adolph Hitler has become the symbolic arch-villain. This is understandable given that he was the architect of the horrific plan to exterminate the Jews. Six million individuals died under devastating circumstances as a result of his policy. However, if we proceed to count the bodies – some fifty million individuals – who died violent deaths during World War II, and analyze how they died and under whose hands, the picture of good and evil becomes a bit more murky. When we proceed to count the bodies of civilians including women and children that died excruciating deaths at the hands of Allied (the good guys) bombings, it paints a less than flattering picture of the real nature of human behavior. How many civilians died in a fiery caldron in the city of Dresden Germany as a result of relentless fire-bombing from the sky; how many hapless citizens of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki died of severe radiation exposure that left their skin literally hanging from their limbs – a radiation dose so extreme that it literally wiped out their bone marrow and eviscerated their immune system. Ten thousand children in Hiroshima alone died such a death. How many citizens of Japanese and German cities died as a result of thousand of sorties of Allied bombers? Why don’t we sum up the total of these deaths, or are they irrelevant because we perceive ourselves as being on the side of good. Are these acts not evil acts; if they are not evil, then why not? The answer to me is quite obvious – we were the winners. War has an insidious momentum that pushes the envelope of reason and rational judgment, that shreds our inner sense of humanity and compassion, and that ultimately leads to human depravity and degradation.
The plethora of cop shows and the violence-based video games that provide so much of the cultural backdrop in our society perpetuate this view of the world – as populated by the forces of good and evil. Our prison system (with one of the largest per capita prison population in the world) is, in fact, inhabited by thousands upon thousands of individuals who are mentally disturbed either as a result of genetic disease or of childhoods in which they were horribly abused. We have been known to imprison and execute those who have been shown to be severely mentally compromised. This system of jurisprudence continues in spite of the remarkable breakthroughs currently being made in the area of neuroscience, especially in regard to mental dysfunction and illness.
True justice, in my mind, incorporates a real perception of the human condition and must, by its nature, be responsive to the truth and responsible for its own missteps. In this way, real human progress is possible.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Choice
Fifty years ago (1960) the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive. In a world that is clearly overpopulated, it would be in our best interests to offer birth control for free, especially in poor third world countries where the greatest growth in population is occurring.
The combined oral contraceptive pill (COCP), often referred to as the birth-control pill or simply "the pill", is a birth control method that includes a combination of an estrogen (oestrogen) and a progestin (progestogen). When taken by mouth every day, these pills inhibit female fertility. They were first approved for contraceptive use in the United States in 1960, and are a very popular form of birth control. They are currently used by more than 100 million women worldwide and by almost 12 million women in the United States. (read more)
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Four Dead In Ohio
John Filo's iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway, kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller after he was shot dead by the Ohio National Guard.
The Kent State shootings – also known as the May 4 massacre or Kent State massacre – occurred at Kent State University in the city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.
Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, which President Richard Nixon announced in a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.
There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the United States due to a student strike of four million students, and the event further affected the public opinion – at an already socially contentious time – over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War. (read more) (Four dead in Ohio)
The Watchers
Sarcophagus lid of Pakal the Great
Genesis Chapter 6, verses 1-4
In the Biblical Old Testament, the Book of Ezekiel tells of a flying object seen as a fiery whirlwind which when descended to the ground gave the appearance of being made of metal. It is described among other things as a wheel within a wheel containing four occupants, living creatures, whose likeness was that of man. The passage goes on to say that wherever the wheels went the creatures went, and when the living creatures were lifted up the wheels were lifted up. (read more) (see more)
Monday, May 3, 2010
How Dumb are We?
I have become quite unsettled by the destruction of a deep sea oil rig off the Louisiana coast and the resulting catastrophic oil leak that is occurring as I am writing this. Thousands upon thousands of barrels of oil are pouring into the ocean from the bottom up fouling the habitat of so many marvelous creatures with no apparent end in sight. It seems that this rig and others were built with no allowance made for a catastrophe such as this one. We are more than foolish to expect that corporate policy – dedicated to the accruing of endless streams of profit – is going to accommodate the interests of humanity in its calculations.
Are we as a species really that monumentally stupid and short-sighted? Are we that intent upon destroying the natural environment on which we depend? It’s not like we live on a disposable planet and when we use up all its resources and begin to reap the reward of our own imbecility we can merely pack our bags and move to another heavenly body and ravage it in due course.
Do we really intend to continue to allow petty and narrow corporate interests to determine public policy? Oil seems to be more important than our long term survival; than the well being of the marvelous creatures that live right along with us. Our incessant need for stuff made of plastic, for cheap travel, for convenience, for personal self indulgence seems to trump intelligence, thoughtfulness and reason. This, in my mind, makes us dumber than dumb. Dumbness as a concept needs to be redefined in light of human behavior.
Some of us are quite convinced that we are all doomed; because, our fate has been determined for us. Those who passionately profess such a mindset are eagerly expecting some white-frocked messiah to descend upon us, blow his whistle like an irate football empire, cry foul and stop the show. In this way we will be saved from ourselves. It seems that the excesses of the industrial age are converging upon us, and we are faced with some difficult choices. An insistence of maintaining the status quo is no solution at all.
We have pulled the cork out of the genie’s bottle; the wishes that have come true are literally killing us. It is time to engage reason and actually begin to apply the knowledge that has already been gained from science and truly join the twenty-first century.
Are we as a species really that monumentally stupid and short-sighted? Are we that intent upon destroying the natural environment on which we depend? It’s not like we live on a disposable planet and when we use up all its resources and begin to reap the reward of our own imbecility we can merely pack our bags and move to another heavenly body and ravage it in due course.
Do we really intend to continue to allow petty and narrow corporate interests to determine public policy? Oil seems to be more important than our long term survival; than the well being of the marvelous creatures that live right along with us. Our incessant need for stuff made of plastic, for cheap travel, for convenience, for personal self indulgence seems to trump intelligence, thoughtfulness and reason. This, in my mind, makes us dumber than dumb. Dumbness as a concept needs to be redefined in light of human behavior.
Some of us are quite convinced that we are all doomed; because, our fate has been determined for us. Those who passionately profess such a mindset are eagerly expecting some white-frocked messiah to descend upon us, blow his whistle like an irate football empire, cry foul and stop the show. In this way we will be saved from ourselves. It seems that the excesses of the industrial age are converging upon us, and we are faced with some difficult choices. An insistence of maintaining the status quo is no solution at all.
We have pulled the cork out of the genie’s bottle; the wishes that have come true are literally killing us. It is time to engage reason and actually begin to apply the knowledge that has already been gained from science and truly join the twenty-first century.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
The Waking Dream
You are what you think...
think good things.
You create your own reality...
what will you create?
You are completely responsible...
for every person on the planet.
There are no victims...
there are no excuses.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
May day
May 1st 2009
Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles, CA
An immigration rally began peacefully. The right to freedom of peaceful assembly is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution. When police in riot gear arrived and attempted to deny people that right, some took a stand to protect their rights. Then it turned less peaceful ..giving police the authority to forcefully disperse people.
Macarthur Park, Los Angeles, May 1st 2009
A police helicopter hovers above ..a voice over the loudspeaker gives the order to ‘disperse or be arrested’. Police in riot gear charge ..unarmed citizens flee ..some are trampled and beaten ..a peaceful assembly turns into chaos ..bullets fly. This was the scene at Macarthur Park in Los Angeles May 1st 2009 ..but my mind is also receiving images from 1969 ~ People’s Park, Berkeley ..and they don’t look much different. Furthermore, I’m experiencing the same feelings of revulsion that I felt then ..and I'm not the only one ..those early images were burned into the psyche of nearly all the school-age children of my generation. It occurs to me that the ‘class of 2010 is graduating next month ..after attending all four years of high school ..during wartime. Experiencing a culture at war, at this age ..is something you never forget. It becomes part of you ..like the Vietnam War is part of me. I have a built-in mistrust of government ..ongoing problems with authority ..and an uncertain career in ‘conspiracy theory’. History repeats itself, not only when government leaders ignore it ..but also when their minds become so scripted by it ..they can’t do anything different.
People’s Park, Berkeley ~ 1969
Paranoid visions
Undocumented, as in undocumented immigrant, means unknown. Unknown is scary. So we react out of fear of the unknown by building walls, discriminating and incarcerating undocumented immigrants. In other words, criminalizing what we don’t know. I believe that, what we don’t know, or can’t see ..we fill in with our worst nightmares dreams. Pretty soon we’re seeing illegals everywhere .. suffocating us ..overrunning our schools, workplaces and neighborhoods. So, we start encoding these paranoid visions into law. My question is, if undocumented workers are so productive, don’t they deserve some of the same benefits as working citizens ..? Instead of wasting so much energy battling the unknown, I say we get informed. I suggest that we actually document them at the workplace, kind of like an information-only social security number, then start collecting statistics. I’m not talking about legitimizing or prosecuting anyone, I'm talking about getting informed and seeing if it's really as bad as we fear. I suspect not. But I also suspect this may not be so easy to do ..they are just as afraid of us as we are of them.
Friday, April 30, 2010
perfectly rational
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist, whose scientific career spans over forty years. His books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity and he is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for thirty years, taking up the post in 1979 and retiring on 1 October 2009. He is also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes. He has also achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include the runaway best seller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestsellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
Hawking's key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation).
Hawking has a neuro-muscular dystrophy that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a condition that has progressed over the years and has left him almost completely paralysed.
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