Fountain in the footprint of the WTC North Tower (May 2019) Click to embiggen. Atanu Dey
Twenty-three years ago on September 11th, a great big catastrophe hit the world. The US suffered a direct hit that was bad enough in terms of death and destruction. But the reaction by the US military-industrial complex was orders of magnitude more devastating to the world. Trillions of dollars worth of arms and ammunition was unleashed on millions of innocent civilians while protecting the guilty.
A few days later on Sept 17th, 2001, I wrote a piece on my UC Berkeley blog (which is no longer online.) I reproduced that piece on this blog: The Looking Glass War.
I am generally not impressed by the many hugely popular media celebrities on YouTube and on social media. Many of them are, IMNSHO, overexposed midwits and in some cases they are positively harmful because their millions of followers don’t have the cognitive capacity to distinguish chalk from cheese.
I could be accused of being elitist and correctly so for observing that the masses are stupid. The wise and the intelligent have never been in the majority.
All opinions are not equally valid or justified. People (present company not exempted) are more often wrong than right. The saving grace is that most of us don’t have the enormous reach that celebrities have, and therefore our ability to mislead is severely limited. Continue reading “Civil War Inevitable: Musk”
TL;DR. The world is getting increasing unequal in wealth, income and consumption. That’s great. I prefer to live in an increasingly unequal world than in a world of equality because an unequal world is a better world than a world characterized by equality.
But let me stress that a world with more inequality is preferable to a world with less inequality is an empirical fact, not a necessary logical fact. Here’s why.
Our present world is unimaginably wealthier than the world was any time of the past, as I claimed in the first part of this essay. I believe the future will be even more unimaginably wealthier than the present. The causal factors that led to the present explosion of wealth will continue to not only operate in the future but will intensify. Continue reading “Wealth, Income, Consumption & Utility – Part 2”
It’s Ganesh Chaturthi season again. Therefore it is time for the annual post. Of the 330 million devas of the Hindu dharma, Ganesha is my favorite for a variety of reasons, chief among them being that my interests closely mirror his.
He likes food; he likes reading and writing; he loves music; likes traveling; he is lazy and is easily bribed, and so on. Ganesha is always depicted with food. After the sage Vyasa composed the Mahabharata, he dictated the massive 100,000 verses to Ganesha as the scribe. Continue reading “Ganesh Chaturthi”
Thomas Hobbes (born 1588 CE) had a dismal view of humans living “in a state of nature.” In his famous book Leviathan (published 1651 CE) he characterized human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” From all the evidence we have it appears that he was, to a first approximation, absolutely correct about the human condition.
Human beings — species homo sapience — have been around for approximately 300,000 years. Taking a generation to be 25 years, we have had 12,000 generations of human beings prior to our own. An estimated 100 billion of us have ever lived, including the present 8 billion. Continue reading “Wealth, Income, Consumption & Utility – Part 1”
I was introduced to Philip Glass’s music through the movie Koyaanisqatsi which I saw in 1984 in Cupertino, CA. I absolutely loved his style.
Next came the music for the movie Mishima. Rarely a week goes by for me without listening to Glass. Brilliant stuff. He’s done the music for quite a few movies, including the movie Kundun, which is a biopic of the 14th Dalai Lama. Continue reading “Glassworks”
I explained previously (see part 1 and part 2) that I’m a Hindu because I was born to the dharma and not to a religion. My starting off as a Hindu is an accident of birth, not something that I rationally decided on. But I have had ample opportunities to learn about the dharmas and the three major world religions — and rejected the religions only after rational consideration. I was born a Hindu but I continue to be follow dharma even after I know about the religions.
As an adherent of the dharmic traditions, I don’t believe in any god and I am not religious. Therefore I’m an atheist by the very definition of the term — one who does not believe in any god or gods. I am also an agnostic. Continue reading “Why I am a Hindu – Part 3”
Are there any examples of governments that only protect negative rights? Reader Sambaran asked that question in the latest AMA.
It may be useful to review what is meant by negative rights, and what distinguished them from positive rights. Negative rights are rights that require others (including the government) to refrain from interfering with an individual’s actions. It is a “freedom from” something. The right to life, liberty, private property, etc. are examples of negative rights. It is freedom from coercion by others. In the securing of negative rights, people are not required to take any action — merely refrain from acting in certain ways. Continue reading “Negative Rights and Minimalist State”
Practical Engineering is a channel I follow on YouTube. The host, Grady, is a brilliant engineer and explainer of things engineered. Consider for instance a video he uploaded yesterday. In it, he talks about the Dallas High Five Interchange.
I have taken that interchange scores of times. My friend Yoga has a home in Allen, TX — a suburb about 30 miles north of Dallas on highway 75.
And there’s a Costco about 10 miles south from Allen on 75 in Plano, TX. Wherever I am in the US, I visit a Costco every week. I get everything from Costco: food, drink, clothes, furniture, fridge, washer/dryer, TV, computers. I even got my most recent car from Costco. As I say, if you can’t get it at Costco, you can do without it. Continue reading “Texas Interchanges”
The title of this series of posts, “Why I am a Hindu”, is a nod to Bertrand Russell’s “Why I am Not a Christian”, a pamphlet published in 1927, based on a talk he gave earlier that year. About him, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says —
. . . Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of modern analytic philosophy. His famous paradox, theory of types and work with A.N. Whitehead on Principia Mathematica invigorated the study of logic throughout the twentieth century . In the public mind, he was famous as much for his evangelical atheism as for his contributions to technical philosophy.
We all are idiots compared to him. No offense to the geniuses (none) who are reading this post.
I feel a strong kinship with Russell. In the brains department I’m of course a minnow compared to the whale that he was. The kinship is purely in our emotional makeup. He could have been describing me when he wrote in his biography —
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.Continue reading “Why I am a Hindu – Part 2”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 