What you’re reading here is the outgrowth of a few years to web-posted materials that I created following the words of the immortal David Brinkley, “Everyone is Entitled to My Opinion.” I was ever so glad for the invention of blogging software which relieved me of the tedium of HTML coding just to crank this stuff out for all of you.
I write mainly on what seems obvious to me, but whose implications may not be so to everybody else. As I look back over the last couple of years’ posts, there are a few consistent themes, including these:
The invention and deployment of technology is wonderful, beneficial, and life-threatening all at the same time, and it’s up to us to decide which of its attributes will dominate in our lives;
The Internet, specifically, is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year fountain of benefit to us and to humanity, and hence is subject ot the most aggressive exploitation by thieves and charlatains, and both the private sector and the government are totally behind the power curve in securing and protecting this resource from these vermin;
Electronic voting machines are technological failures of the first water, and are the greatest threat to our democracy since Hitler;
Most of the Federal government’s efforts to protect us from terrorist menaces are misdirected and ill-conceived, caused first by a lack of imagination by incompetent crony-appointees, and second by the last administration’s ideological blinders which prevent them from seeing any useful purpose for any governmental action at all and hence see government programs as just targets for looting;
Islamic terrorists are a fringe element of Islam, which is as noble and peaceful a religion as Christianity, and the terrorists who range themselves against us are driven far more by nationalism and by economic and cultural impoverishment than by religious fervor, and the last Administration’s intellectual failure to comprehend this is leading us into the greatest foreign policy failures in the last 200 years;
The US needs to be engaged fully with the rest of the world in a peer relationship based on mutual respect, and we need to devise a coherent and nuanced foreign policy to implement this engagement;
Freedom of the press and personal privacy are two of the greatest gifts handed to us without cost to us but bathed in the blood of our forebears, and seemingly valuing history but little we are in danger of losing them through lack of attention-span and unwillingness to force into submission those who would take them from us, especially in the name of “combating terrorism.”
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