Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees? Engineering is not a profession most people associate with religion. The concrete trade of buildings and bridges seems grounded in the secular principles of science. But the failed attack this Christmas by mechanical engineer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a reminder that the combination has a long history of producing violent radicals. The anecdotal evidence has always been strong. The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Mohamed Atta, was an architectural engineer.
Khalid Sheikh Mohamed got his degree in mechanical engineering. Two of the three founders of Lashkar-e-Taibi, the group believed to be behind the Mumbai attacks, were professors at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore. A paper (PDF) released this summer by two sociologists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, adds empirical evidence to this observation. So what's with all the terrorist-engineers? What else might account for the radical, violent politics of so many former engineering students? Paradox of Libertarianism. By Jim Manzi I’ve been attending a fascinating series of monthly dinners here in Washington, in which liberals and libertarians exchange ideas.
One thing that has become clear to me through these dinners is that there are two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits. I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism. Obviously, one can hold both of these beliefs simultaneously, and many people do. Liberty-as-means libertarianism sees the world in an evolutionary framework: societies evolve rules, norms, laws and so forth in order to adapt and survive in a complex and changing external environment.
Start with a practical question: should prostitution be legal? The brutal truth about America’s healthcare. In the week that Britain's National Health Service was held aloft by Republicans as an "evil and Orwellian" example of everything that is wrong with free healthcare, these extraordinary scenes in Inglewood, California yesterday provided a sobering reminder of exactly why President Barack Obama is trying to reform the US system.
The LA Forum, the arena that once hosted sell-out Madonna concerts, has been transformed – for eight days only – into a vast field hospital. In America, the offer of free healthcare is so rare, that news of the magical medical kingdom spread rapidly and long lines of prospective patients snaked around the venue for the chance of getting everyday treatments that many British people take for granted. In the first two days, more than 1,500 men, women and children received free treatments worth $503,000 (£304,000). Christine Smith arrived at 3am in the hope of seeing a dentist for the first time since she turned 18. Healthcare compared Health spending as a share of GDP. Sex laws: Unjust and ineffective. What a Japanese community festival tells us about America's. This time every summer I begin to suspect myself of going soft and becoming optimistic and sentimental.
The mood passes, I need hardly add, but while it is upon me, it amounts to a real thing. On the first weekend of every August, in Palo Alto, Calif., the Japanese community opens the doors of its temple and school in order to invite guests and outsiders to celebrate the Obon Festival. Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Arguably, a collection of essays. Ancestor-oriented celebrations are not exactly my thing, but there is a very calm and charming way in which the Japanese use this particular moment in the lunar calendar to remember those who have preceded them and to make the occasion a general fiesta. (I suppose the nearest regional equivalent would be the Mexican Day of the Dead.) This tendency toward the exquisite is also to be noticed—or have I become completely absurd?
—in the very young and the very old. And my point? Why markets can’t cure healthcare. Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer to our health care problems — indeed, the only answer — is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view reflects the lessons of economic theory. Not so. One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs.
Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument. There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” Between those two factors, health care just doesn’t work as a standard market story. Why Sarah Palin really quit us. How I lost my health insurance at the hairstylist's. You show up two weeks later than you should have to the hairstylist (pretty common when you are constantly pressed for time) and instead of the usual lecture about the color of your roots, she turns you around in the chair and says: "I look at people’s skin tones all day long and try to decide the best coloring for their hair, and I can tell you this: gray is not a normal human skin tone.
Get out of here right now and go see your doctor. " For some reason, though she is not the first person to note you don’t look your best lately, this is the one thing that manages to penetrate the fatigue-fog and you do as you are told. You call on the way, check in, sit down in the crowded waiting room resigned to waiting for a couple of hours, and a mere minute later the doctor, passing by the glassed in sliding windows on the other side of the wall catches sight of you, comes out, and demands to know: "How did you get so anemic?
" You say, "I am? " Sure enough, he’s right; they do, the very next day. Betraying the Planet. What the Nixon tapes tell us about the Republican Party. I wonder sometimes whether the Nixon tapes really will just continue to be the gift that never stops giving. I was in college when Richard Milhous Nixon was first elected president, and I can still remember the profound sense of loathing and disgust that I experienced at the mere sight, let alone the sound, of him and of his most especially repellent sidekick Henry Kissinger. Wiser and older people tell you that the passions of your youth will dry up and that a more sere and autumnal condition will overtake you as maturity advances, but the thought of the Nixon gang in the White House still infuses me with a pure and undiluted hatred and makes me consider throwing up things that I don't even remember having eaten.
Just take a look at the most recent harvest from the tapes that the Nixon Presidential Library has released from the early months of 1973. What connects Obama's pronouncements on head scarves and th. There is a fascinating connection between what President Barack Obama said about head scarves for women in his June 4 speech in Cairo and the argument over the released Guantanamo detainees who have since been found, or found again, in the ranks of the Taliban and al-Qaida. Don't try to guess, but do please read on. Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Arguably, a collection of essays. Ever since former Vice President Dick Cheney made the most of the New York Times headline of May 21, using Defense Department statistics to suggest that one in seven Guantanamo graduates had "returned to terrorism or militant activity," there has been a huge row about whether this is true and, if it is, why it is.
Might it not be the case, for example, that an innocent person put through the Guantanamo experience might become "radicalized" and decide to join the ranks of jihad for the first time? As Wanda Sykes showed, comedians aren't funny when they try. As a gnarled and grizzled veteran of the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner (it must be almost three decades since I first tuxed up and attended one), I see no reason to miss the chance to comment on the Wanda Sykes phenomenon. This is because I think it may actually tell us something about the American and international press and its over-ripe relationship to the new president of the United States. Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Arguably, a collection of essays.
As he showed at the Al Smith dinner last year—the one minor round in the entire campaign that went decisively to John McCain—Barack Obama may be graceful and charming on the podium, but he is not a natural wit. And on May 9 Obama made the same point in a different way: by pausing for a smile-break to mark his every punchline. Now, Wanda Sykes didn't get this point at all. Not laughing yet? Wrong Tomorrow - pundits vs. time. We don't need government protection from controversial idea. Recent weeks have seen a sort of unofficial race among various governments to see who can most righteously ban whom from whose territory and on what complacent grounds. Last week, the Canadian authorities announced that British Member of Parliament George Galloway would not be permitted to keep his appointment for a speaking tour he had arranged in Toronto and Ottawa. Canada's immigration minister, Jason Kenney, said that the ban had more to do with actions than with words.
Galloway had indeed, on a recent trip to Gaza, called for the Egyptian armed forces to overthrow the government of President Hosni Mubarak. But it was the announced purpose of Galloway's trip to the Gaza Strip—the delivery of a convoy of material aid to the Hamas leadership—that prompted Kenney to deny him permission to land, on the grounds that he had delivered "aid and resources to … a banned illegal terrorist organization. " A U.N. resolution seeks to criminalize opinions that differ with. The Muslim religion makes unusually large claims for itself. All religions do this, of course, in that they claim to know and to be able to interpret the wishes of a supreme being. But Islam affirms itself as the last and final revelation of God's word, the consummation of all the mere glimpses of the truth vouchsafed to all the foregoing faiths, available by way of the unimprovable, immaculate text of "the recitation," or Quran.
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Arguably, a collection of essays. If there sometimes seems to be something implicitly absolutist or even totalitarian in such a claim, it may result not from a fundamentalist reading of the holy book but from the religion itself. Though it is written tongue-in-cheek in the language of human rights and of opposition to discrimination, the nonbinding U.N. Yes, I think we can see where we are going with that. You see how the trick is pulled? Is Zimbabwe a rogue state? The situation in Zimbabwe has now reached the point where the international community would be entirely justified in using force to put Robert Mugabe under arrest and place him on trial.
Why do I say this now? Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Arguably, a collection of essays. Mugabe's crimes were frightful enough before, to be sure. But they were the crimes of an elected government, and it wasn't absolutely clear that they exceeded the threshold at which intervention can be justified or, rather, mandated. Essentially, there are four such criteria.
One is genocide, which, according to the signatories of the Genocide Convention (the United States is one), necessitates immediate action either to prevent or to punish the perpetrators. Another is aggression against the sovereignty of neighboring states, including occupation of their territory. The dialectic between "rogue" and "failed" is not always easy to measure. Keep Your Identity Small. February 2009 I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums? What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it.
All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? But this isn't true. I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. Notes. Why I'm not sorry that George W. Bush served two terms as p.
Yes, yes, I was on the downtown streets of Washington bright and early, mingling with the bright-eyed and the wide-eyed. Yes, by all means I was there on the Mall Sunday afternoon, feeling no more moist than the next person but not much less moist, either (and getting a strange lump in the throat at the rendition of—funny how these things work—"American Pie").
And yes, that was me at the ball given by The Root, making a mild fool of myself as I boogied chubbily on down to the strains of Biz Markie, DJ to the capital's black elite. Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of Arguably, a collection of essays. I wouldn't reconsider my vote for Barack Hussein Obama, in other words, and when he takes the oath, I hope to have a ringside seat. In Oliver Stone's not very good but surprisingly well-received film W., there is an unnoticed omission, or rather there is an event that does not occur on-screen. The Fundamental Problem With Libertarianism. I was once a Libertarian. I'm not any more. Libertarian ideas are revolutionary. I've been told that Trotsky once said "Every revolutionary should study chess. " Few Libertarians would consider Trotsky's opinion on anything, but Trotsky overthrew a powerful government, so I figure his opinions on revolution are informed opinions.
The best book on chess that Libertarians should read is The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank, which left me certain after many years that I was absolutely no Libertarian, and more than that, embarrassed to have ever been one. They've done so with the support of Libertarian think tanks all over Washington. They forget the arguments because they have no real interest in them; they serve only as justifications.
The end, of course, is policy decisions which benefit business. It takes work to achieve political change. There's already a lot of money in Libertarian think tanks; it comes from business. Update: Couple tweets accused me of knocking over a straw man here. The bill for the Bush administration. The last thing we need is a Clinton in charge of foreign policy. Fidel Castro gets religion. THE SHALLOWEST GENERATION. The New Trough. Bill Ayers: "What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been."
The End of Arrogance: America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role. Philip Pullman on the pointless menace of censorship. Let’s Play Palin VP Bingo! Palin Claimed Dinosaurs And People Coexisted. Sarah Palin CBS Interview. The Long Now Foundation. The Difference Between Liberals And Conservatives.
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? A personal history of apl. Barack Obama - Campaign for Democratic Nomination. Resisting Authority: A Personal Account of the Milgram Obedience.