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Express Tribune
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
War and human civilisation: a moral paradox
Listen to article The question might sound naive to bellicists, yet it is pertinent in this age of admirable human development and scientific advancements around the world: Can, despite all the claims of human knowledgibility and maturity of consciousness, the raging wars in Gaza and Ukraine be justified, particularly when the war casualties impact the innocent children and women? After all, what type of future is being bequeathed to the generations to come? Would they not think that the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, consciousness, scientific progress and human development cannot guarantee a world sans barbarism which human civilisation claims to have left far behind? Such wars seem to be the telltale signs of human regression towards the Stone Age with animalistic instincts as the law of the jungle. Such bloodshed and genocide with carte blanche remind me of Mark Twain's satirical essay, The Damned Human Race, wherein he proposes a theory and corroborates it with historical details that man is not the highest point of evolution, rather arguably the lowest. He says that unlike humans, animals kill only for a reason, not for fun or greed; they don't conduct wars because they don't possess any religion or patriotism. Similarly, in the second voyage of The Gulliver's Travels by J Swift, on the Gulliver's proposal to the Brobdingnagian king to use gunpowder against the enemies, the king appallingly summarises the human civilisation: "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth." The so-called guardians designated to keeping or restoring peace on this earthly planet, like the League of Nations and the United Nations Organization, had and have proved incapable of implementing their existential writ the world over. As the former had failed in stopping WWII from happening and died its natural death, the latter too would follow suit if it fails to stop either of the above wars because such wars can balloon into a world war. These institutions had been established to be proactive to defang the impunity of any group, organisation or country to threaten the world peace, but their inertness shows that peaceful human existence would soon become extinct as it has already become an endangered species due to the species' own self- or auto-destruct practices. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres branded the war "the deadliest of conflicts" in decades. Speaking of Israeli carte blanche, he highlighted that Israel killed 196 humanitarians, including 175 UN staffers; most of them belonged to the Palestine relief agency UNRWA. "More women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades," says an Oxfam study published on 30th September 2024. Now the question is not "Will the UN act to play its role in stopping genocide in Gaza?" as it has long been answered with a resounding NO. Instead, the very question arising from the pyre of disappointment with the UN has matured into a philosophical, moral and deeply political one: Is the UN helpless against the impunity of the US and Israel? "To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide - the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews - the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another," said Arundhati Roy in her acceptance speech on receiving the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. "If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today," she said, calling a spade a spade. The justification of Israel's egregious human rights violations against Palestinian civilians by labelling the October 7 attack by Hamas as a terrorist attack reminds me of one of the Aesop's fables wherein a wolf cooks up false rationale to attack the lamb. It would not be wrong to say that the world is under the siege of exploitative capitalistic pursuits. "The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe," says Arundhati Roy in the speech.
The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Climate
- The Guardian
Augusta National finds place in heart of city after ravages of Hurricane Helene
Hurricane Helene made landfall in the early hours of Friday 27 September, in Big Bend, Florida. Meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center had been watching it building for a week, as it moved away from Nicaragua, up past Grand Cayman, Cancún, and Cuba, and the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, had declared a state of emergency on the Tuesday afternoon. 'The current forecast for Hurricane Helene suggests this storm will impact every part of our state,' Kemp said, but in Augusta, over in the east of the state, people felt safe, they hadn't had a hurricane here in almost 100 years, and this one was forecast to pass it by. Until it took a turn north-northeast, and started to accelerate. It hit the city at a hundred miles an hour, the anemometers at Augusta airport stopped working at 82mph, right around the time the power went down. 'Augusta ended up sitting under the absolute worst part of the storm,' reported the National Weather Service. It wasn't just the wind – evermore than 12 inches of rain, an entire winter's worth, fell in the space of a few hours. People talk about how the pop-and-flash of the power lines going down lit up the sky. When it was over, more than 30 people had died in the city and the surrounding counties, 11 people were killed by falling trees, which crushed cars, trailers, and houses, and many more of cardiac and respiratory failure during the power outage that followed, often because their medical equipment couldn't function, 362 homes were destroyed, more than 3,000 suffered what was described as 'major damage'. Six months on, the city is still recovering. The authorities have had to clear almost 3 million cubic yards of debris from the city streets, and the work is still going on in the suburbs, especially out by Tobacco Road. In the streets around Augusta National, the fences are gap-toothed, the panels cracked and scattered, and giant rootballs, ripped out of the ground, squat on front lawns like Brobdingnagian dustballs, plenty of houses are still under tarpaulins, the entire process has been slowed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency's decision to cut off relief funding in February. In years gone by, Augusta has often seemed ambivalent about the National golf club, which sits up on the hill just outside the centre. But it was glad to have it now. In the days immediately after the Hurricane, the club pumped money into the city, culminating in a $5m donation to local relief aid. The chairman, Fred Ridley, has done a good job of improving relations with the local community, his big announcement this year was about the redevelopment of the municipal golf course, The Patch, and the establishment of a new community education centre, both in partnership with Tiger Woods. 'I'm most proud of how our organisation pitched in with the Augusta community and really helped out because there were many, many people, many of our people were out of their homes for a number of weeks,' Ridley said. 'No electricity, no water for a while.' People remember who was there when the city needed help, which local restaurants were the ones to start handing out free hot meals, and which stores were the ones to put up the prices of badly needed essentials. Ridley made sure that Augusta National played its part, and they've been rewarded for it with renewed goodwill this spring, when most locals are happy to have it back. There is a stark contrast with the club's reaction after the ice storm that hit the city in 2014, when their biggest worry was how the 17th was going to play after the Eisenhower Tree fell down. Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion The course has lost plenty more this year, most of them tall loblolly pines which walled it all off from the outside world, and divided the fairways from one another. Stand outside the clubhouse now and you can see all the way through to the 15th green, and from the 11th tee-box, you can even see right over into the Augusta Country Club next door. Even Gary Player, who's been coming here for the best part of 70 years, can't recall the last time that was possible. Their guess is that at least a few hundred of fallen trees had to be removed from property. They've put in plenty of new ones, but they're still growing. It means the course will play a little differently this year. 'There are a couple of tee shots that are maybe a little less visually intimidating now,' said Rory McIlroy. On the 10th, for instance, players tend to shoot for the camera tower down at the bottom of the hill. 'You used to not be able to see it, but now you can see that pretty clearly, which means visually it looks like you don't have to turn the ball as much as you used to.' And on 3rd, there's more room up the right side, 'where a couple of the overhanging trees aren't there any more.' It may even open up a couple of shots. 'I have heard a few things. Somebody did tell me you can hit a high cut over the cabins on 10,' said Jon Rahm. 'I don't believe it.' You notice it on the 1st most of all, the opening shot passes by a line of eight new trees in between three or four that made it through the storm. They're snaggled and toothpick skinny, their upper reaches sheared clean by the wind, a lasting reminder that there are some things beyond even Augusta National's control.
Boston Globe
11-02-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Trump's $30 trillion debt disaster
In sum, candidate Trump tossed out proposals to cut federal income taxes for upward of 150 million filers at a 10-year cost of $12 trillion. Such relief would amount to about 32 percent of the country's income tax revenue over that period, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and it would reduce total federal revenue collections from all sources to just $55 trillion. Meanwhile, the CBO's spending baseline totals about $89 trillion over the same 10-year period ending in fiscal 2035. So either Trump is looking to add a staggering $34 trillion to the nation's already towering $36 trillion of existing debt or he means to slash spending by truly massive amounts. Well, it's obviously not the latter. The president has increase spending for defense, security assistance to other countries, homeland security, law enforcement, and border control, which under current policy would amount to about $12 trillion over 10 years. And whether they acknowledge it or not, Trump administration staffers can't cut net interest expense or legally protected military and civilian employee pensions, which will cost upward of $16 trillion over the next decade. Advertisement The problem, of course, is that these programs alone add up to $70 trillion, or nearly 80 percent of the CBO spending baseline. So even if the Trump administration massively slashed the rest of the federal government — including Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Labor, Interior, Energy, and Transportation — the red ink would still total far more than $30 trillion through 2035. Either way you cut it, this amounts to plunging into a paroxysm of fiscal madness. Yet the alternative routes often advocated by MAGA partisans — taking the ax to fraud and waste or spurring accelerated economic growth with tax cuts and deregulation — simply won't make a dent in the Brobdingnagian magnitude of the nation's debt spiral. And I do mean massive. The CBO never says the quiet part out loud, but its current long-term outlook has the public debt hitting 166 percent of the country's gross domestic product by mid-century. The quiet part it doesn't publish is that 166 percent of GDP is equal to a stunning $150 trillion of public debt. Needless to say, long before the debt hits this staggering figure, the whole financial system would implode. Every remnant of America as we know it would go down the tubes. So as helpful as the Department of Government Efficiency campaign against waste and inefficiency might be, it is virtually irrelevant when it comes to staunching a public debt that is hurtling fast toward catastrophe. I recently recommended a plan to the DOGE commission in my book 'How to Cut $2 Trillion' that would save $85 billion per year in agency staff and overhead costs. But to get there, one would need to embrace a strict libertarian policy menu calling for the elimination of 16 agencies entirely, including the FBI, Education Department, USAID, and the national endowments for arts, humanities, and democracy; shrink another nine departments by 50 percent, including the EPA, FAA, NASA, and IRS; and trim the rest of the nondefense agencies by 34 percent, which would require reducing the 1.05 million staff at the Veterans Administration, Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and the Justice and Interior departments, among others, by 360,000 employees. Advertisement That is, the Trumpian fiscal framework starts with a $30 trillion-plus deficit over the next decade. Yet all of the above sweeping retrenchments of Washington as we know it would not save even $1 trillion over the same period. Likewise, the 'growth' illusion has been the GOP's go-to fiscal subterfuge for several decades. But given that the US economy is now crushed under a burden of $101 trillion of public and private debt, eking out sustainable real growth above the already optimistic CBO assumptions simply isn't in the cards. Between the pre-crisis peak in 2007 and the fourth quarter of 2024, for instance, real GDP rose by 1.9 percent per year, and that included the benefit of both the Bush tax cuts being renewed in 2012 and the huge Trump tax cuts being added in 2017. Still, the CBO now assumes growth will average 2.4 percent over the next decade — notwithstanding the headwinds of the soaring debt burdens and the fact that the Federal Reserve is out of dry powder and will be in no position to restart the printing presses any time soon. Besides, even 3 percent annual growth would only boost revenue by about $2.5 trillion over the decade, at best. Advertisement I also recommended In short, I don't see any route by which Trump's second time at bat would generate anything less than $30 trillion of added debt over the next decade. And that would be an outright calamity. David Stockman is a board member of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration.
