Today Barack Obama delivered a strong speech about race and how, in his opinion, this country needs to reconcile its color issues. The man is an inspiring speaker, no doubt. But what of his substance? Do his ideas represent what is best for the future of this country? In some respects, perhaps. In my mind…
Category: Society
Too Many Americans Behind Bars
KHOU in Houston reports that over 1% of the adults in America are in prison – more than China and, tellingly, more than Iran. America is supposed to be the land of the free. So why are so many of our citizens in the pokey? Drugs, in a word. KHOU says: “After 15 years in…
Personal Ethics and Islamophobia
ABC recently placed actors "undercover" in a Waco, Texas bakery to observe Texans’ reactions to public anti-Islamic discrimination. Not surprisingly, the outcomes ran the gamut from Islamophobic to outstanding personal behavior. Our actor, Sabina, walked into the bakery in search of apple strudel. When she reached the counter, an actor posing as a sales clerk…
Housing Density Unnatural
Ezra Klein gets his response to this article by Alex Steffen about as wrong as he possibly could. the amount of density the study’s authors call for is extremely modest. They encourage building new projects at a density of 13 homes per acre, raising the average national density from 7.6 units per acre to 9…
Lessons from 1968
Bob Herbert draws some parallels between 1968 and 2008 today but it seems to me that his message is incomplete. The Vietnam/Iraq comparison is obvious, of course, and somewhat appropriate. But there’s not going to be the equivalent of Tet in Iraq or even Afghanistan, unless we completely take our eye off the ball again,…
Ah, Intellectuals
David Frum recently wrote about what he thinks is a disturbing trend among conservatives, dismissing too intellectual positions without properly understanding them while advancing popular, even common, causes and people instead. While it is true that progressive points of view are given short shrift by conservatives there are often valid reasons for their dismissal. As…
A Primitive, Disgusting Practice
NY Times blogger John Tierney wonders: Should African women be allowed to engage in the practice sometimes called female circumcision? Are critics of this practice, who call it female genital mutilation, justified in trying to outlaw it, or are they guilty of ignorance and cultural imperialism? The topic is to be debated at the American…
Childless and Saving the World
The Daily Mail has an amusing article today about two couples who are doing their part to save the world by not having children. Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of…
Thanksgiving
If you haven’t already read Mark Steyn’s ode to America and Thanksgiving, give it a read. The best bit: …Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to….
SFWA, Scribd.com and ePiracy and why its important
Over the Labor Day weekend there blew up a weird story that involved the Science Fiction Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) and the website scribd.com. For those not in the know (like me), scribd.com allows users to upload text files and share them with users in a collaborative format (not unlike Flikr). Now the problem arose…