With its ruthless dictator, network of forced labour camps and iron grip of its ruling party, North Korea is the last country one might expect to see a middle-aged woman berating a policeman for demanding a bribe.
Airport security: two alternatives to full-body scanners
Amid privacy concerns sparked by the move to triple the number of full-body scanners in US airports, some groups are pushing for alternative technologies they say could provide the same, or better, level of screening without the privacy issues.
Body Scanners More Dangerous Than Feds Admit
The growing outrage over the Transportation Security Administration’s new policy of backscatter scanning of airline passengers and “enhanced pat-downs” brings to mind these wise words from President Ronald Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.’”
So, what is all the concern really about — will these radiation scanners increase your risk of cancer or other diseases? A group of scientists and professors from the University of California at San Francisco voiced their concern to Obama’s science and technology adviser John Holdren in a well-stated letter back in April.
Why Unhappy People Become Liberals
According to polls — Pew Research Center, the National Science Foundation — and studies such as Arthur Brooks’s Gross National Happiness, conservative Americans are happier than liberal Americans.
Liberals respond this way: “If we’re unhappier, it’s because we are more upset than conservatives over the plight of those less fortunate than ourselves.”
Utopia: Dream & Nightmare
Utopias in America, from the first Puritan settlements to the communes of the 1960s, share the goal of removal from the heart of civilization to the wilderness in order to establish a new social order. Communities with European roots embraced the equalizing demands and freedoms of the New World’s open frontier, even as the new country claimed the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right. Though their inspirations varied—theocracy, millenialism, socialism, theosophism, behaviorism—they all reflected the American dream of a better world, now.
Margaret Thatcher
Welcome to the official website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the largest contemporary history site of its kind.This site offers free access to thousands of documents—many of them previously unpublished—relating to Margaret Thatcher and world events during the last thirty years.
God Bless Barack Obama
I suppose that heading is a bit startling coming from me this fall Sunday but I mean it. In literature, deus ex machina refers to a plot device which resolves what appears to pose an intractable problem. And, as I explain, I think Obama is ours — a character who appears out of nowhere with a cast of appointees so preposterous and an agenda so irrational and offensive to Americans that he has shocked us out of our torpor, inducing millions of us out of our comfy chairs and to the barricades.
Taking Liberty-How Private Property is being Abolished in America
Taking Liberty is a comprehensive look at the lower 48 states showing, region by region,
how the Environmental Movement is rapidly abolishing Private Property in America.
Franz Kafka and the Nightmare of Bureaucracy
Kafka took some early stabs at writing a novel, but none of them really worked out. In 1903, he started The Child and the City. He abandoned it, and the manuscripts have since disappeared. He tried to collaborate with Max Brod on a work called Richard and Samuel, but that didn’t work out either. The fragment “Wedding Preparations in the Country” was supposed to be much longer than it was, but he gave up on it. Therefore, when talking about Kafka’s novels, we always have to start with Amerika. Although like his other attempts it remains unfinished, enough of it exists for us to recognize it as a novel, and so it is here we begin.