Steve Clemons says that Barack Obama just threw his “key Muslim advisor under the bus” by allowing his “volunteer national coordinator for Muslim American affairs” to resign after being rather tenuously linked to radical Islam. In 2000, Mr. Asbahi briefly served on the board of Allied Assets Advisors Fund, a Delaware-registered trust. Its other board members…
Category: Society
CyberPunks, an Apt Name
Mattathias Schwartz’s article in the NY Times magazine serves as a brief peek into the anarchic world of Internet trolls and hackers, people who are generally considered the enemy by business computing professionals like myself. There’s a freedom, or the perception of it, on the Net that doesn’t exist anywhere else in quite the same…
Church Shootings Sad, Indicative
Sunday’s shooting at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was an event that proves even the places that are most sacred to us are not inviolable, that we must be ever-vigilant if we’re to keep evil at bay. If only that were possible in this world. Jim David Adkisson was by several accounts an unstable individual…
The Internet->Stupidity Connection
Nick Carr says that the Internet is making us a stupid society incapable of – or unwilling to – focusing on the internalization of large bodies of information. He blames the web and its many instantaneous answers to questions we have. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at…
Second-Guessing Witnesses
The SF Chronicle says: The town of Turlock and much of the rest of the nation was shocked when a 27-year-old man beat and stomped his 2-year-old son to death on a rural road. But what was nearly as stunning for many people was that none of the motorists and their passengers who stopped and…
Obama’s Father’s Day Message
Barack Obama to black men: "Fatherhood doesn’t end at conception." Right on. If Obama is to deliver on his promise of positive change, that’s perhaps the area in which he can do the most good. More: “Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,”…
The Forgotten War
Libby Spencer at Newshoggers and Bob Barr have something in common: both realize that America’s War on Drugs is a waste of both resources and lives. Libby brings up two facts that the feds don’t want us dwelling on: deaths attributable to the abuse of legal pharmaceutical drugs are three times greater than illegal ones,…
Defending Judicial Activism
Mark at Publius Endures wrote a couple of keen posts about the gay marriage decision in California and the role of the judiciary in controlling the law. In the first, Mark defends judicial activism by quoting extensively from Alexander Hamilton’s writings in the Federalist Papers. Interesting reading. The constitutional republic that is the United States,…
Self-selecting DNA
Michael Medved writes that the idea that Americans have an inherent – even Darwinistic – advantage over other peoples is gaining additional respect in the scientific community as a result of new research. The reason? Immigrants who self-selected themselves have a greater tendency to exhibit risk-taking and inventive skills. Perhaps. But I wonder if we’ve…
Obama: Sense and Nonsense
Inside every candidate there are multiple personalities, each of whom run the show in turn, depending on who the audience is. Barack Obama is no different than any other. He’s touched on personal responsibility before and he does it well by not trying to pull any punches, as in Gary, Indiana today: "You should have…