Monday, March 27, 2006

The Israel Lobby Controversy?

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/787/op35.htm

The recent paper, "The Israel Lobby" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, has sparked considerable outrage and controversy and a flurry of responses in newspapers ranging from Forward to the NY Sun. One of the more interesting critiques is that by Joseph Massad, Professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia, who was a prime target of the David Horowitz attack on those liberal academics whom he charged with violating students' academic freedom.

Web sites for both the full article and Massad's response are posted above.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Tackling Diversity?

* Tackling Diversity

Barnard’s biannual Town Hall and the Allies Series, a six-week long
discussion on race and class privilege, drew students from all
corners of the Columbia campus Tuesday night to address issues of
inclusion and diversity, which were made more...
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/03/22/442100016a60b

...............................................

Perhaps we need to focus some attention on these issues at Brooklyn College, too. Our faculty Multicultural Action Committee used to take on such things a decade or more ago, but I have not heard of such of late.

I was startled by the publication in one of our student papers a few weeks ago of the offensive cartoons that have stirred such distress in the Muslim community generally. We had a lively discussion in one of my classes on this issue which I think was useful for us to begin to clarify the deeply emotional schisms that are threatening world peace now with culture wars, here, there and elsewhere. Needless to say we are living in a most dangerous world, as 9/11 taught us here in NYC. And it looks as if we are in the process of watching a global power shift as India and China move into positions of economic as well as military power and the traditionally dominant West (Europe and the U.S.) are facing being down graded as wannabe empire builders or dominant economic forces. The U.S. is now being challenged around the world -- by Russia, Iran, North Korea - but nearer at home by the South American and14 Caribbean nations. It may be a difficult adjustment to make as our economy falters and the competition for vital resources mounts. Russia has just concluded a deal to direct two natural gas lines to China, may negotiate an oil pipe line there as well -- and showed what it could do several months back when it turned off the natural gas to the Ukraine and and some other major European countries by extension.

This is no time to insult anyone as we seek to calm things down and reestablish the rule of law and respect for human rights!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

The New Jobless

Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Poorly educated black men are becoming more disconnected
from mainstream society, even as other groups make gains.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html?th&emc=th

..................

The report here is a heart breaker. I am sure that anyone who rides the subways has notice fathers traveling with young children during the daytime. I assume, as is the case with a family in my own building, that these are unemployed fathers now caring for their young children while their wives work to support their families.

We have made some steps forward in opening up employment for women and minorities once barred from the professions and higher level jobs. But far too many are now still caught in a trap of minimal pay jobs -- or none at all!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Monday, March 13, 2006

Our Prisons as a Growth Industry?

Betting on Colleges, Correctional Facilities

Washington Post - United States
... The number of US prisoners increased at an average annual rate of 3.4
percent from 1995 to 2004, according to the Justice Department.

....................................

Odd to see that our prisons and colleges are viewed as growth industries. And how sad that such reflects the two directions in which young people in our society are headed. I believe that we now have the largest percentage of prisoners of any nation, having pulled ahead of the former Soviet Union -- 1/4 of the world's prison population with only 1/20 of its total -- and growing!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Killing Cancer Patients to Make a Killing

A Cancer Drug's Big Price Rise Disturbs Doctors and Patients
By ALEX BERENSON
The price of cancer medicines is soaring, but the increases
tend to have little relation to the cost of developing or
making the drugs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/12price.html?th&emc=th


...................................

It is now an increasingly well known fact that our drug manufacturers are making outrageous profits on phony grounds. They will claim, for instance, that they must introduce new drugs at high prices because of the costs for research -- such research in fact largely being the result of federally funded programs for same.

This present report even outdoes, however, the recent Medicare rip-offs in process in which the Bush administration introduced a muddled melange of private medicine funding programs which are now barring many elderly from being able to purchase their necessary medications because no limits were placed on the pricing of drugs by their manufacturers or reduced prices allowed for bulk buying such as those that control prices in Canada and other nations serious about their health programs.

It is unimaginable to discover that cancer drug producing companies are now being allowed to make such outrageous profits on long established drugs to the point of barring many who need them to live from being unable to purchase them. This is murder under the cover of 'free enterprise'.

As I recall, Robert Nozick, recently deceased Harvard philosopher, proposed some such originator's right to charge whatever for cancer drugs in his notorious libertarian screed, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Now fact seems to have caught up with outrageous fantasy! This move, however, goes far beyond Nozick's defense of an inventor's rights to unrestrained profits. It suggests that one can buy a drug developed a half century ago and then multiply its price 10 fold or more? Needless to say this is a prime example of the failure of our corporation dominated government to protect the public from the most elementary and and horrifying of hazards -- cancer and those who would exploit those faced with dying from it!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Saturday, March 11, 2006

* Iraq hangs 13 for insurgency role *

* Iraq hangs 13 for insurgency role *
Iraq hangs 13 people accused of taking part in the insurgency for the first time since the US-led invasion.
Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/4790990.stm

..............................

I don't find this report in our American press. It is disconcerting to learn that we have exported to Iraq precisely that feature lingering in our American republic which is deplored by most civilized, developed democracies as a hang over from barbaric days of yore. The death penalty has been abolished in Europe and is increasingly being so by nations that have seen it cruelly used to intimidate political opponents by corrupt and brutal regimes.

How despicable for us to have reintroduced it to Iraq to 'get' Saddam Hussein. One anticipates, given the disorderly conditions there, that we shall see an increasing blood bath of assassinations and executions as the competing factions use this barbaric device to punish their enemies -- or even those suspected of being enemies from the description given by this BBC report. Shame!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Friday, March 10, 2006

Academic Testing Systems Are Fraudulent

Company's Errors on SAT Scores Raise New Qualms About
Testing
By KAREN W. ARENSON and DIANA B. HENRIQUES
Mistakes by a large testing company raised questions about
the reliability of high-stakes standardized tests at all
levels of education.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/10/education/10sat.html?th&emc=th


..................................

We have known for more than half a century that our formal academic testing systems are a fraud -- sometimes literally so. Back when I was a prep school student my English teacher was chair of the SAT committee that devised the tests for college admission. My math teacher was on the math committee. Both gave us short courses on how to test well on these things -- short cuts for getting answers (read the answers first; don't ponder a question that delays one, when to guess, etc., etc.). Our school tended to have a number of results in the top 15 -- not 15 percent but top fifteen scores in the nation! Most private schools devote much time prepping students for 'the tests' through vocabulary drills and updates of techniques on how to beat the system. I tell my own college students some of the tricks and they are amazed to learn that ability is not the primary testing need here, but rather skills that can be taught in test taking.

Then there was the great LSAT cheat game to which some of my students alerted me. I checked with two law school deans who confirmed that they knew of this loophole that allowed cheating and I asked the LSAT officials why they did not close it. They said they could not afford to do so.

I was personally a beneficiary of the system which undoubtedly did much to help win me scholarships both in college and a national fellowship for graduate school. I was part of a testing program for GRE exams given to college sophomores. We were all nearer our high school years of math and grammar and such that were being tested and we all got super scores -- top 1% which were counted and which we could use for our post college studies. Whee for those on the inner tracks who can afford such testing luxuries! Woe to those left out of THE SYSTEM! Shame!

All this testing mania dates back to an animal psychologist who displaced John Dewey as the primary educational theorist in this country with his application of rat testing techniques to educating kids - Edward Thorndike:

http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Thorndike.htm

--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Monday, March 06, 2006

* Amnesty attacks 'dire' Iraq abuse *

* Amnesty attacks 'dire' Iraq abuse *
Thousands of detainees in Iraq are still being denied basic rights with torture rife, an Amnesty report says.
Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/4777214.stm


[The BBC report on npr this a.m. cited a comment to the effect that the abuses now in Iraq are in measure with those under Saddam Hussein previously. Some gain! Ed Kent]
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Neo-Darwinianism?

By all reports Darwin was a compassionate man who even delayed reporting his conclusion that evolution involved survival of the fittest for several decades with concern for the social (religious) disruptions that his theory might evoke.

However, one must fear today that what has been established as the way of nature's evolution over the eons of time since life emerged on earth now be converted to a social/political/economic norm. I recall the distress voiced by a newly nominated Indian chief justice at a Columbia University Faculty Human Rights seminar some decades back that India as a nation, while following Gandhi's self-help ideals, was abandoning the poorest and most desperate segments of its population to fend for themselves while its growing middle class prospered.

Most recently the Chinese at the People's Republic annual conference have announced the need for an effort to bolster the rural left-behinds with support programs redirected from the prosperity of its increasingly affluent urban populations.

The European countries that have prided themselves on their social support programs may be finding themselves outflanked in global economic competition by those developing nations which are exploiting their workers mercilessly in the production of lower cost goods. And certainly U.S. pols seem bent on reducing support for those in need while boosting massively the incomes and wealth of our already super rich. Are we seeing here an international trend -- rich nations exploiting poor, rich residents despising and defrauding poverty stricken ones -- emerging as a commendable ideal?

Emblematic in my experience have been the numbers of persons -- elderly or otherwise less well off economically -- who walk away from pharmacy windows without the life-preserving medications which are too expensive for them to afford. For each who walks away, I would imagine there are a number more who have not even tried when faced with a choice between food, lodgings, and essential medications.

If there is in fact a (benign) intelligent designer, I would not imagine that such a neo-Darwinian norm will win his/her praise and support. I am reminded of some of the Hebrew prophets who predicted the divine wrath and punishment that would befall those who let greed and cruelty rule their nations. Perhaps there is a neo-Darwinian equivalent also lying ahead in the destruction of our environments and blind exploitation of the resources that have enabled us to achieve such wealth and the potential for benefiting all mankind -- which we are now threatening with destruction through our blind greed?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Torture Is TORTURE!!!

* Guantanamo man tells of 'torture' *
A Kuwaiti held at Guantanamo since 2002 criticises the US regime at the military camp, in a rare BBC interview.
Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/world/americas/4769604.stmcc

..........................

As one who had the horrors of WW2 Nazi and Japanese abuses of persons engraved in my consciousness as a very young child, I am appalled by the perpetration of torture (with always laughing Rumsfeld) by my own country. I gather that the word "torture" is freely being used in news reports around the world in place of the euphemisms substituted here even by our responsible journals. Needess to say such atrocities both place our own at risk and offer justifications to the worst of regimes out there to use this one of two non-derogable (no exceptions allowed) abuses of human rights (the other being slavery). Where are the protesters -- particularly among us faculty who know of such things? Ed Kent
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Brutal Treatment of Muslim Detainees in Brooklyn, NY

"U.S. Is Settling Detainee's Suit in 9/11 Sweep" (NY Times, February 27, 2006)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/nyregion/28detain.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1141102800&en=7ec5f7a8aa796941&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin

More than a year ago Paul Moses, Pulitzer Prize winner, formerly of Newsday and now a member of our Brooklyn College English Department and a student list advisor, broke the nightmare story of the arrest and brutal incarceration of hundreds of NYC Muslims in our Brooklyn Metropolitan detention center:

http://www.bloggernews.net/2006/01/brooklyn-gulag-vicims-return-to-sue.html

Most have now been released after having been subjected to the same sorts of mistreatment publicized at Abu Ghraib and even caught on film by security cameras here in Brooklyn. The U.S. government has been reluctant to admit blame for this mistreatment, but as the Times article yesterday reported, a number of the guards and supervisors have been reprimanded and subjected to minor penalties and at least one victim desperately now in need of medical care has won a $300,000 award against the government.

The crimes committed by those detained -- all Muslims -- were not terrorism -- they were simply picked up and held without charges as Muslim Arab suspects. A number were eventually forced to plead to minor crimes as a means to escape the brutalities to which they were being subjected. Ehab Elmaghraby, his health broken, who won the first award for damages cited by the Times, now lives with his parents in Alexandria, Egypt. He had run a restaurant here in NYC. He claims that after a year of brutal treatment, he and others were forced to plead guilty to minor crimes as a condition of release and his American wife, faced with intimidation by the authorities, left him -- thus removing his grounds for resident status here in the States.

As one who has worked extensively with naturalization for the College, I am well aware of the problems that non citizens have in establishing their residence rights here -- refugee status applications, delays in renewal of work and study visas by our underfunded governmental agencies, etc.

We lost one of our finest students, Neemarie Alam, for whom we had fought for continued resident status here where her brother and sister are citizens and where she had grown up, attended Stuyvesant High School, and planned a medical career paralleling that of her doctor parents who had applied for family refugee status from Bangladesh. Despite our successful appeal on Nee's behalf, recognizing the threat of such incarceration for her parents following upon the denial of their refugee application post 9/11, Nee got her family to Canada where she is now on board for citizenship and has resumed her studies in a Canadian university. Her younger brother and sister, as American citizens born in this country, can travel back and forth between Canada and the U.S., but Nee who loves pizza, rock, and NYC may not return.

Frankly, as an American I am appalled by such torture and abuses being instituted boldly by the Bush administration which is horribly discrediting American democracy.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net