Unintended Consequences

Below are some interesting thoughts about immigration from Peter Coy at Bloomberg Businessweek.

The tragedy is that walls hurt those who obey the law more than terrorists, who usually find a way to go over, under, or around them. What’s worse, isolating entire communities and nations because potential terrorists live among them often backfires, engendering more of the hatred that it’s meant to protect against. That’s what makes terrorism so diabolical: Like an autoimmune disease, it provokes civilized societies to behave in self-defeating ways.

Read the rest of the article here.

A Puzzle

 

A few days ago, the above collage came across my Facebook feed.  My first reaction was, “how silly.”  Later, I found myself thinking about it and decided to do a little research.  First, I used Google Images to look for pictures of  “President Obama.”  I found mostly pictures of Obama standing in front of an American flag.  However, there was one picture where he was standing in front of a gold curtain. So I added “Muslim prayer curtain” to the search terms.  There I found a few insulting pictures of Obama.  However, the page mostly contained numerous pictures of recent presidents (at least back to Reagan) standing in front of the same gold curtains.  It turns out the East Room of the White House has been decorated with gold silk curtains since the sixties.  The collage below (Reddit) was also found on this page. I’m not sure why I went to the trouble of learning all this.  I guess I found the picture both amusing, annoying, and puzzling. 

 

It's Complicated

"The Riddle of the Gun"

Sam Harris is probably best known for his first book The End of Faith, a book criticizing religion.  He is also known for asserting that the Koran is a book that encourages and allows the kind of terrorism we have seen recently.  His most recent book Islam and the Future of Tolerance is a dialogue with British Muslim Maajid Nawaz on ways to curb violence.  My favorite of Harris’s books is Waking Up, a book about spirituality, meditation, and oneness.  As you can imagine, Harris has a lot of enemies and some have made threats on his life.  I was curious about his views on guns in the U.S. but not sure I wanted to listen to his 1 ½ hour podcast “The Riddle of the Gun (Revisited).”  It is, in a sense, tedious.  But his views have interesting differences from both pro- and anti-gun proponents speaking on the topic.

He talks a lot on this podcast but basically his view is that for many, guns are a useful tool. He himself owns guns. However, to obtain and use a gun, licensing requirements should be as stringent as the requirements for piloting a plane and background checks are necessary.  He supports the view from NRA’s Wayne LaPierre that armed guards in schools could increase student safety. He sees no reason to ban assault weapons as handguns alone can do so much damage.  Not bad.