All Things Not Considered

Two Parties, One Philosophy

Every four years the American public is witness to a spurious contest that determines the next occupant of the Oval Office. This contest is usually between few presidential candidates that have been meticulously picked for us by interest groups and a complicit media. Invariably, the choice comes down to a Republican and a Democrat who we are told stand on opposing sides of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, the continuum between the two ends of that spectrum doesn’t span but a few measly political inches. The truth of the matter is neither Republicans nor Democrats show much difference in their respective strategies. A closer look at their stands and visions for the country and the world show more confluence than divergence.

True to form, the 2008 elections are dutifully following that blueprint. Tawdrily wrapped in the rhetoric of Leadership, platitudes of Hope, and clichés of Change, McCain’s, Obama’s, and Clinton's visions for the next four years are not that different from each other. Although they profess to have a different path for America, a deeper analysis of the facts shows that the all espouse a bigger and more controlling government, a militaristic foreign policy, and a laissez-faire attitude towards the greedy corporate world.

Through the hip, the hype, and the hoopla of this year’s election, the media has conveniently forgotten to scrutinize the candidates’ records and their detailed plans on how to tackle the real problems of this country. Our economy is in recession. We have disseminated our workforce and weakened our middle class by outsourcing our manufacturing sector. We have signed trade agreements that disproportionately benefit the corporations at the expense of the American people. The top 1% of the population has more wealth than the bottom 95% combined, creating in the process a two-class society, the have and the have not. Our infrastructure has started to show its age and the neglect we have shown it. The corrosion of our healthcare and educational systems has left hordes of people in desolation. Our national debt is over nine trillion dollars and our currency is at a historical low. But fear not, because we still stand and proudly conjure the Reagan’s years of trickle-down economics. We grant stupendous tax breaks to the wealthiest of the wealthy; we keep lowering interest rates while we keep increasing federal expenditures.

Our politicians have turned politics into a lifetime profession. They actively seek corporate lobbies to finance their perpetual elections. In return they wilt to their power and sign just about any legislation into law that would continue to fill up their coffers. Case in point, NAFTA, CAFTA, and other trade agreements we have with China and Japan do not benefit your average American nor do they promote the overall health of our economy. One does not have to go far to see the effects of such treaties. The empty factories and abandoned warehouses in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are testimony to these agreements and their nefarious consequences.

One of our biggest drains on our budget is the war in Iraq. Based on their new book “The Three Trillion Dollar War”, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Economist Linda Bilmes estimate that the true cost of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq will exceed the $3 trillion mark. Neither candidate has clearly stated an exit strategy. Even the most liberal candidate, Barack Obama, has consistently voted to approve every war appropriation the Republicans have sent to the senate floor. A total amount that now exceeds $300 billions. Moreover, and to the chagrin of many of their followers, neither Obama nor Clinton will be able to extricate the U.S from the morass that Iraq has become. As Colin Powel said “You break it, you own it.”  Indeed we have broken quite a few things in that country in the past 5 years. It will take some time to get our troops out of there and no matter how much demagoguery is thrown at us; we know it will take years and not weeks before we are out.

McCain brazenly avers that his doctrine will follow on footsteps of Bush’s. But unlike Bush, he is already telling us to be ready for more wars and for a century long stay in  Iraq if needed. Clinton and Obama are a bit more careful in this regard, although they adhere to the empire-building strategy of the Neo-Cons, they are careful on how they couch their words. The only real difference between the two camps in this regard is in the geography of the war and not the war itself. While McCain will push the American intervention into Iran, Syria, and even Lebanon, Obama and Clinton will focus more on the Balkans and Eastern Europe. To the Democrats, Russia is still the monster and both Democratic candidates were pretty firm in their ultimatum to Putin and Medvedev as it relates to the newly created state of Kosovo.

Our current military budget is over $1 trillion dollar. To put it in perspective, our military spending exceeds all the other nations military budgets put together. We spend 10 times what China, the second top military spender, earmarks for the country’s military expenditures. While we envisage spending that much money to sustain our military-industrial complex, we are just as busy borrowing money from China and the Middle East to fund our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the Foreign Affairs magazine of July 2007, Obama said: “We must use this moment both to rebuild our military and to prepare it for the missions of the future. . . . We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines. . . .”

In their edition of November 2007, Clinton said:

To help our forces recover from Iraq and prepare them to confront the full range of twenty-first-century threats, I will work to expand and modernize the military so that fighting wars no longer comes at the expense of deployments for long-term deterrence, military readiness, or responses to urgent needs at home.”

The above quotes only reinforce the view that even the candidates from the soi-disant peacenik party have no concrete plans to change much to this militaristic doctrine. It’s more of the same old interventionist and expansionist strategy that is founded on a military spending only the few can benefit.

This leaves us with a pretty tough question to answer. What does a conscientious elector to do? My answer would be to get involved, get educated, and informed and then cast your vote for the least egregious option. Let us not forget that it is our complacency that drove our leaders to become so detached from the reality of their own constituencies.

A Sisyphean Challenge

The Danish cartoons are once again in the news along with the tumult of the sanctimonious harangues on one side and the ill-advised street riots on the other. This is a sequel that restarted when the Jyllands-Posten and 15 other Danish papers decided to reprint a denigrating. While the theme of the 2005 episode was ‘Freedom to Blasphemy’, this latest one was ‘Solidarity and Defiance.’ Personally, I think the underlying theme to both is simply naked provocation, guised racism, and a childish game of intellectual ‘fart-counter-fart.’ A game as old as time where the only useless result it engenders is a stench that wafts up to our noses and drives us away from where we need to be: The round-table of discourse, of joint understanding, and mutual respect.

I am a Moroccan nonbeliever and I don’t have of a ‘religious’ dog in this fight. However, out of a sense of fairness, social equity, and moral justice I just couldn’t sit it out. It is true that I was irked when I heard of the republication of the prints, but I was equally irate when I saw the riots and heard of the misplaced public comments that ensued. This behavior will only alienate the Muslim minorities at best and vilify them and their religion at worst.

This past week, true to form, the neo-cons and some members of the European far right wing punditry weren’t a bit derelict in their propagandist obligations to stoke the fire under this controversy. And so we had to endure their calls for ‘Freedom of speech’, ‘Freedom to Blasphemy’, ‘War of ideology’, ‘East vs. West’, and the proverbial ‘The Clash of Civilizations.’ However, these same experts were remiss in their duties to be fair and just when they conveniently and temporarily spurned their own laws to support their spurious arguments.

For the record, in France, Spain, Belgium, Germany, and Austria it is against the law to deny that the Jewish or Armenian holocausts took place. On February 20, 2006, an Austrian court convicted British historian David Irving for making a speech where he claimed that some hitherto reported events about the holocaust didn’t actually take place thus breaking the law and getting a 3-year jail sentence for it. Here’s another rhetorical tidbit: How do you think the Jewish community would react if a newspaper in the US decides to print a caricature of an Israeli president drooling over few dollar bills? Well, there will be outrage, accusations, indignation, and all rightfully so. So why is it OK to protect the rights of some to desecrate while deny it to others? Why the double standard?

This is an absurd Tragicomedy, a progeny of some deep ethnic and religious differences that have since eroded the foundation of discourse and have widened and deepened the chasm between the ‘us’ and ‘them.’ To make matters worse, extremists in the Muslim world pull no punches in their senseless drive to galvanize the populist movement around their hateful, dogmatic, and acerbic message. They will do so even if they have to resort to unethical and morally outrageous deceptions. Equal to the task, the right-wingers in the West will resort to whichever means to drive their own ideological agenda or secure some profitable dividends. Freedom of speech is then decoupled from civic responsibility; moral decency and justice are replaced by xenophobia and hypocrisy.

It’s time to rethink these failed strategies and reconsider these fundamentally flawed preconceptions of each other. It’s time for the West to take an active role in the true enfranchisement of the Muslim minorities. It’s time to openly accept their cultural differences, learn and understand their ethnic and religious backgrounds, and allow them the benefit of the doubt. It is also time for the Muslim minorities to take a serious step toward a complete and genuine assimilation and integration within their host countries. It’s time to open up the intellectual sarcophagus where they have buried themselves for centuries and allow for some much needed fresh air to chase away a rather stale interpretation of the world. More importantly, we all need to revisit our respective definitions and interpretation of Tolerance. In his book “The Open Society and its Enemies Vol 1” Karl Popper convincingly proved that we couldn’t be tolerant of the intolerant. If we were, intolerance would invariably annihilate the tolerant as well as Tolerance itself. This is pretty much a call both sides need to seriously heed not just for the sake of human progress but also and more importantly for the sake and the future existence of humanity.

According to the Greek mythology, there was king by the name of Sisyphus who throughout his years had developed a reputation for being greedy, envious, and cunning. To punish him for his bad deeds, the Gods decided to put a curse on him. He was to roll a rock up a mountain only to have it roll all the way down. He was to endlessly repeat this futile endeavor Ad infinitum. Sometimes I feel that we, in a way, embody the myth of Sisyphus. In our quest to continually better each other and ourselves, we have been cursed with the apparent chimera of racial unity. We keep striving to climb the mount of human consonance and societal harmony, but over an over again we find ourselves at the bottom of it. But in the words of Albert Camus as they relate to our fateful Greek hero ‘…the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ Indeed, Hope is eternal.

Terror In Casablanca - Part I

These past two weeks Casablanca has once again witnessed more suicide bombings that inflicted much harm to many civilians as well as some members of the police city department. Although the modus operandi of these murderers doesn't quite mesh with the common characteristics of Al Qaeda's, there just might be a link that ties in all these odious incidents together. It is not the equipment they have been using or the locations they have picked but the common thread is the neighborhoods where they have come from.

Most of these aimless hearts belong to the fundamentalist group called Takfir or Takfir Wal Hijra. According to their philosophy, anybody who doesn't religiously - no pun intended - adhere to their strict interpretation of the teachings of Islam is an apostate and therefore a kafir. Their aim is to purify the political system and restore the spirit of the Islamic community (Umma) to the country.

So the questions we have to tackle are: How did this problem originate? And what can we do about it?

The first question seems a bit easier to answer but further thought and analysis will prove otherwise, rather quickly. There are many reasons why this movement has taken root and has successfully mushroomed in the outskirts of many cosmopolitan centers in the Maghreb in general and Morocco in particular.

Sociological Most of these people are landless peasants who were driven out of their rural environment and out of desperation and need, have settled around old and abandoned quarries in the outskirts of big cities like Casablanca, Tangiers, Meknes, Fes, and Marrakech. These shantytowns have no electricity, no running water, and no semblance of urban character. These people feel they have been shunned and pushed aside by a society that in large despises them and even questions their citizenship.

Psychological This urban and sociological disintegration has marginalized them to the point where they feel no bond to the greater society. As outcasts and societal pariahs, they feel like a black and dirty spot on the Moroccan cultural tapestry. A spot that unmistakably identifies them as a victim and stigmatizes them as an inferior member of the social order.

I am usually asked what I like about America. My usual response is: Alternatives. There's nothing worse than not having alternatives or options. Just imagine you have a job that you hate but you can't go anywhere because nobody will take you. How would you feel? Well take that and multiply it by 10, maybe 100. That's what they feel in those makeshift shelters that have become their permanent lives. That's the reason why militant Islam seems like a good way out. But we will get back to that later.

Economical From a macroeconomic level, there's an undeniable collusion between the Moroccan government and various financial and world trade institutions to render the economy a market based one. This results in harsher economic conditions, public sector gentrification, and a paradigm shift in the citizen-state relationship. Moroccans, who have gotten used to a modicum of state sponsored economic stability, do now see it eroding to the global economic conditions imposed by the foreign investors.

On a microeconomic level, many people in Morocco are in a financial tailspin. The prices keep climbing while salaries stagnate. Unless you are well networked and have some financial gravitas or some serious name recognition, opportunities will be rare to come by, if nonexistent.

For these culturally and sociologically marginalized folks, life is a lot tougher. They usually lack the education and the skills that could help them better their lives and lift them out of their misery. They don't have the means to invest and their networks are more often than not just as financially destitute as they are.

Political The political machine has conveniently forgotten about this people. While the focus is on foreign investment, urbanization, and economic development, the side effects continue to pop up with gentrification, rural exodus, a widening gap between the have and the have-nots, and, case in point, the emergence of newer class of poor.

To a certain extent, the politicos have adopted the "ignore the nuisance and it might disappear strategy." This is very much akin to a person ignoring their rotten toe because they don't want to consider the possibility that it could be cancerous or diabetic and might need amputation. So instead of dealing with the problem, they opt to just forget about it and delegate the task to the immune system to carry the internal struggle and hopefully the complete annihilation of the disease.

In this case, these people know their predicament and they also know that not much is being done to rectify the most nefarious of ailments they face.

Religious Enter the religion. They are many people out there who prey on social and cultural victims of economic segregation to basically indoctrinate them into their ideological system and to serve their own twisted goals.

The late, and great, Kurt Vonnegut used to call them Psychopathic Personalities, or PP's for short. These are predators of the highest caliber. They combine all the aforementioned categories and intertwine them with a religious thread to strengthen and legitimize the cause, its necessity, its timeliness, and of course its relative and absolute importance.

Let's not forget that these soldiers of God are not the most educated and most intellectually skeptical bunch in the lot to start with. Couple that with their hapless existence, feelings of dread, psychological inferiority, and cultural Marginalization and you see how they use a sectarian idea of Islam to turn against the society and the system.

What can we do?

There are some possible solutions to this problem. And we better work hard in making them work because the alternative is not an alternative. I will post some possible solutions in the second part of this article.

Leonhard Euler

Sunday, April 15, is the 300th birthday of Leonhard Euler (pronounced "oiler"), one of the top three mathematicians to have ever lived, the other two being Friedrich Gauss and Isaac Newton.

Euler gave the world a new foundation in calculus, algebra, number theory, graph theory, geometry, and applied math. He defined modern trigonometry and co-invented the calculus of varations. He is universally regarded as the most prolific mathematician in history and the best algorist ever. He was supreme at discrete mathematics, he created the function notation f(x) along with the e for the base of natural logarithm. Amicable numbers had been known for two thousand years before Euler, and in all that time only 3 pairs were discovered. Euler found 59 more. He Co-discovered the Euler-Maclaurin formula that facilitates calculation of integrals, sums, and series. Euler also developed the first method to estimate the orbit of the moon and he settled a dispute involving 50 decimal places of a long convergent series. He accomplished both these mathematical feats while he was totally blind.

With so many theorems and discoveries attached to his name, Euler will always be remembered for this particular equation:

It is called Euler’s identity and recognized as the most beautiful and most remarkable formula in mathematics.

Euler was a deeply religious man who believed in ‘the divine inspiration of scripture" and never shied away from confronting and arguing with the ‘Freethinkers." There’s a famous story that recounts a brief encounter between Euler and the French philosopher Denis Diderot in St Petersburg academy. The object of the meeting was for both learned men to argue the existence of God. The story goes on to say that Euler barged into the room and said: "Sir, , hence God exists - Reply!" 

Diderot not knowing math and embarrassed by the sarcastic laughter around him, apologized and asked to leave Russia. A request that was promptly honored by the Empress Catherine the Great, who was supposedly present during this brief monologue. This story has been repeated so often that it has gained credibility in the process. But in reality it is and it remains an uncorroborated tale. Diderot was a great philosopher but he was also an accomplished mathematician.  It is very unlikely that he would have stood there without an equally witty retort back to Euler.

Maps - GDP & Wealth

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is commonly used as an indicator of the economic health of a country, as well as to gauge a country's standard of living and also its productivity.

This map depicts the pictorial view of the countries of the world based on their Gross Domestic Product and their comparative currency exchange rates. It basically indicates a person’s international purchasing power based on where they live and where they want to spend their money. For some, the money will gain value when they move. But others will see their money devaluate as they take it out of their own countries.

Wealth, or GDP, is highest in Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland. It is lowest in Ethiopia, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Open population map for comparison

The 'Don Imus Controversy' – A Circus of Inconsequence

When Don Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" this week, he seemed to think nothing of it. It was just another one of those lame jokes that has earned him the title of "equal opportunity offender."

I have never developed a liking for the Imus show. Although his political views and analysis are often spot on. His sophomoric humor, his tireless tirades, and his vitriolic remarks sap the validity and strength off the more serious comments.

Although his latest remarks were meant to be humorous, I am not here to defend him or condone his behavior. His remarks are simply thoughtless, unarguably objectionable, and utterly despicable. What I would like to focus on instead is the wave of protest that ensued. A wave that further exemplifies the underlying trend of glaring media sensationalism and blatant hypocrisy.

After the story broke, Imus went on a damage control campaign. He took advantage of every opportunity he was given to express his regrets and earnestly apologize for his faux pas. Almost every show or program he attended, featured Reverend Sharpton or Reverend Jesse Jackson to represent the views or comments of the black community. Neither one of them accepted the apology and both were adamant that Imus needed be fired for what he said.

What I find rather hypocritical is for the media to consider Sharpton and Jackson as the purveyors of wisdom and arbiters of decency. This is the same Jesse Jackson who referred to New York City as "Hymietown" and the same Reverend Sharpton who stood by the side of Tawana Brawley as she lied about her racist story and sold it to the rest of America. Moreover, What have both men done to stop the black rappers from denigrating and demeaning black women with their lyrics and video clips? If Sharpton, Jackson, and other black leaders want to address this issue in a credible manner, they ought to turn their attention to where the problem originates. Don Imus was wrong, but he was thoughtlessly aping black rappers who continue to be glorified for their insidious ‘poetry’ towards women.

Imus is getting his deserved punishment through a fierce public flogging, but like everybody else; he too deserves a second chance. He has repeatedly apologized and has sounded and looked contrite. It’s time to turn the page and move on, there are bigger and more important issues facing this country today.

Universcale

Have you ever wondered how a proton, the most fundamental component of matter, compares in size to a neutron, or to an amino acid? Have you ever wondered how the solar system's size compares to the Orion Nebula's? Universcale is a cool website that uses the ‘meter’ as the measuring stick to compare different objects that range from the infinitesimally small to the stupendously large.  Universcale is a great educational tool that provides a perspective of things that conceptually are hard to imagine on a single scale.

A great learning experience.

Pay Per Cheat

What if there was a way that would absolve you of any guilt if you happen to slip and cheat on your partner? Well, if you are the cheating type, you can rejoice. There’s a website that will actually "help you because you can’t help yourself." When you happen to fall to temptation and commit a bad deed, you increase jealousy, hate, and ill will in the world. But don’t feel bad, because when you pay a small fee to this website, you, in a way, atone for your sin and you indirectly reward someone else for being honest and faithful.

This concept made me think of other ways where it could surely make a difference. Imagine if we had a website for the corrupt government officials they can use to expunge their guilt by paying for all their nefarious decisions that caused human despair in and outside of their countries. I will bet you that the atonement money from this current administration alone would feed millions of people and alleviate much duress off many innocent people all over this world.

I know this is a utopian dream for neither one of them thinks they have done anything wrong. They are wrapped up in their imperialistic ambitions and any action they take is duly justified in light of their ‘noble’ and ‘idealistic’ goals. But as McNamara has showed recently, exceptions, or you might term them miracles, do happen. Maybe, just maybe, some of them will get to a certain age where their guilty conscience will drive them to make amends and atone for their costly blunders.

Faith, Citizenship, and Identity

This is the result of a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. Based on the question, it seems like Moslems, regardless of where they reside, identify with their religion more than their countries’ citizenship. Conversely, the Christians consider themselves more of citizens than members of their religion.

Many Christians in the US identify more with their religion than with their country. This distribution is rather skewed when compared to the European countries. One is left to wonder as to the reasons behind this and to the relationships between secularism, secularization, modernism, and of course, religion.

• Why is it that invariably, Moslems identify with Islam more than their country of residence?
• Why is it that the US numbers are statistically different than other countries in the West?
• Why is the Moslems distribution in France more balanced than any other place?
• What does this tell us about the Moslem/Christian dialog around current and future issues?

These and other questions will be addressed in a future article on this blog. Stay tuned.

Injustice in the Justice Department?

In defining Justice, the French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu said:

"Justice is a relation of suitability, which actually exists between two things. This relationship is always the same, by whatever being it is perceived, whether by God, or by an angel, or finally by a man.”

Justice is after all the pillar upon which our laws are based. These laws in turn, determine the extent and limitations of our personal freedoms. I am not here to lecture judge Alberto Gonzales on the philosophical or practical meanings of Justice for he is far more adept at explaining it than I could ever be. However, looking at the current situation in the Justice department, one has to wonder how much justice and fairness is still left unpolluted by the heavy dark cloud of dishonesty that lingers around the attorney general. A cloud that has thickened after eight US prosecutors were recently let go.

US Attorneys serve four-year terms coincidental to the presidency and are retained or dismissed at the end of their terms at the pleasure of the President of the United States. It is not unusual for the US attorney general to clean house when a new administration takes over. It is however, unprecedented to oust eight US prosecutors after a disastrous mid-term election. What makes this firing more suspicious is a succession of contradictory statements from judge Alberto Gonzales himself.

First the judge said that the firing were performance related. We later find out that all eight US attorneys had no blemishes on their performances. One of victims of this purge is Mr. Iglesias. He was actually ranked as a high performer by the none other than the White House. Second, We are told that the judge was never involved in the decision making process. Emails from the department show that he attended a meeting that started the firing process. Third, we are told that the White House never knew about the firing nor was it involved. Emails and records contradict that statement as well. Last, we are told the firing were not politically motivated. But when we learn about the Republicans senators and the influential party members who have complained about these US attorneys to the White House, we can easily deduce the main reason behind the firing.

Montesquieu also said:

“Men are capable of unjust actions because it is in their interest to do them, and they prefer their own satisfaction to that of others. They always act with reference to themselves -- no one is gratuitously wicked; there must be a determinant reason, and this reason is always a reason of self-interest.”

It is factually obvious that the Justice Department has been politicized to support the causes that are near and dear to the Republican Party. Furthermore, these facts have eroded people’s faith and respect for this judicial institution. It is time to let judge Gonzales go because this country needs a credible attorney general who has the confidence of the American people and the backing of the House and the Senate.