Category: politics
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Colin Powell on Muslim-Americans
This past weekend saw Colin Powell endorse Barack Obama for president on NBC’s Meet the Press. However, the most important and touching part of his speech came when he discussed Muslim-Americans: Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some…
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A Capitalist Manifesto and Capitalist Values
“The financial crisis is not the crisis of capitalism. It is the crisis of a system that has distanced itself from the most fundamental values of capitalism, which betrayed the spirit of capitalism.” – Nicolas Sarkozy Two excellent articles on the future of capitalism: A Capitalist Manifesto, Judy Shelton for The Wall Street Journal What…
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World Challenge ’08
Heads up: the finalists for World Challenge ’08 have been announced. Now in its fourth year, World Challenge 08 is a global competition aimed at finding projects or small businesses from around the world that have shown enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level. [The Challenge] is about championing and rewarding projects and business…
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Instinctual vs. Rational Decision–Making
Squeezing the article into a tenuous comparison between Obama and McCain, The Boston Globe has a nonetheless interesting article on recent research into the benefits of, and the differences between, instinctual (gut) decisions and methodical (rational) ones. The crucial skill, scientists are now saying, is the ability to think about your own thinking, or metacognition,…
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James Nachtwey’s Powerful XDR-TB Photography
I try not to link to TED Talks as I believe doing so will just add to the millions around the Internet already doing so (plus, I hope everyone visiting here already subscribes to the TED Talks RSS feed). Today, however, l feel compelled to do so after viewing James Nachtwey’s heartbreaking photographs of people…
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Public Servant Blogs
Listening to Law in Action this week, I noticed that it’s now being broadcast not on BBC Radio 4, but on BBC null. Really though, I was listening to Clive Coleman’s show this week as he profiled (if swiftly) three of the four public servant bloggers that I subscribe to: PC David Copperfield Bystander of…
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The Population Decline
At Long Bets, a project of The Long Now Foundation where he is a board member, Kevin Kelly has predicted that “by 2060 the total population of humans on earth will be less than it is today“. The biggest driver of the shift from large families to small families is communication technology and education. As…
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Obama, Science, and 61 Nobel Laureates
In an open letter to the American people, 61 Nobel Laureates are endorsing Barack Obama for President (pdf). As the largest number of Laureates to ever endorse a candidate for office, surely this will have some influence over the undecided voters (then again, Kerry had 48 and we know what happened there).
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On Bias, Rhetoric, and Cognitive Dissonance
Author of The New York Times’ Consumed column, Rob Walker, dissects a Weekly Standard article discussing the first presidential debate between Obama and McCain to answer the question: what’s the difference between rhetoric and cognitive dissonance? Both can result in points of view that are so biased that they have no connection to reality. But…
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Freedoms Lost and Gained
Intelligent Life asks what freedoms have we gained and lost that matter? Freedom is central to democracy. That fact doesn’t change, but the amount and type of freedom that we have does. And it feels as if it has changed dramatically in the past few years. With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approaching its…