Notes: the spiritual children of Abraham should not battle each other

Some entries in this blog are formal articles. Others, like this one, take more the form of working notes, outlines for later development, or ‘thinking out loud’. Some are complete, and some are just sketches. For now I will label such entries as ‘Notes’.
I am aware of and distressed by the [...]

Game Theory and the American Two-Party Racket

This is a short post. I’m experimenting with various strategies to gain more site visitors. One is to make more short, focused entries like this one, to produce search engine “hits” for a wider range of queries.
Here we refer again to a recurring theme of this site: how American politics is, under the [...]

Flat Tax

Let’s continue to hammer away at one of the core problems with the current presidential race: Republicans and Democrats are both part of the status quo; part of the System that wants to keep people distracted, divided, oppressed, and afraid. They want to keep attention away from ideas that would promote real [...]

America’s Malaise: What is the Real Problem?

In her Huffington Post blog, Middle-East expert and columnist Judith Kipper recently added an article titled “America’s Malaise“. She made some good points. At least it’s good to see someone explicitly addressing the problem. America does suffer from something – you can call it malaise, severe uncertainty, a crisis of confidence, [...]

Politics: Inner and Outer

A fairly little-known fact is that Plato’s Republic, a work often taught in government and political science classes, is really about psychology. If you read the Republic closely, you see that Plato (through the character of Socrates) introduces the ideal State as a metaphor for the human soul. The idea is to, using [...]

Positive Catholic-Muslim Relations

We are seeing more irresponsible and inflammatory statements in the world news media concerning Pope Benedict XVI and Catholic-Islam relations.
Can we just state matters simply? Very well, here are things stated simply:

The problem is not Catholics.
The problem is not Pope Benedict XVI.
The problem is not Islam.
The problem is the news media.

Christians and Muslims in [...]

Bush’s full comments about America’s oil addiction

I disagreed with President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq. And I think I disagree with some comments in his recent State of the Union Address. But that doesn’t mean I disagree with him about **everything** (and that’s an important principle: don’t demonize people, don’t seem them as all good [...]

CNN and Negative News Bias

Open letter to CNN and CNN International:
24 April 2006
Our good friends at CNN and CNN International unfortunately continue to exercise poor judgment in the matter of selection of headlines and regular news stories. A strong negative bias is evident–that is, a narrow focus on stories which portray conflict, aggression and divisiveness.
The most recent illustration [...]