Posts tagged as "usa" - Chris Hardie

It's interesting to me that the phrase "for national security reasons," offered by the U.S. government and governments around the world to justify various uncomfortable activities (withholding information from or spying on its citizens, demanding cooperation from corporations in legal gray areas, etc.) is so commonly used and so consistently effective. It's effectiveness is based on an apparently safe assumption that the American people largely subscribe to at least one of two world-views: 1) The needs...

This rant may eventually turn into a podcast segment, but I haven't had time for that and I can't wait any longer. The news has been all the buzz lately: Only 54% of Richmond Community Schools students graduated in 2006, putting us in the bottom 7% of Indiana high schools. There's the commentary on the school system's reaction, great thoughts on what to do and how the community can be more involved. And I'm sure some good things will come out of all of the discussion that is being generated. But...

How can we claim to know so much about a world of which we've seen so little? Countries I've visited (4% of the total): And that's not quite fair, since I've been to one small part of many of those places. U.S. States I can remember going to (60% of the total): How about you? (And please, if you are an acquaintance and want to correct me on any of these, please do - my memory isn't so good for the U.S. States in particular.)

In my eighth grade English class, Mr. Sweeney asked us to write a persuasive essay and then deliver it to the rest of the class convincingly. The United States had just sent its military to the Middle East to expel the Iraqi forces that had invaded Kuwait, and that was a hot topic of discussion and controversy. As a part of these events, the head pastor at my church had recently delivered a sermon on what constitutes a "just war." It was a good sermon - contemplative, balanced, and challenging...

Last week I was invited to have lunch with Senator Bayh on Monday of this week, apparently as one of a number of Hoosier bloggers that received the same offer. I wasn't able to make it and was okay with that at the time, but after reading the Indiana Blog Review's roundup of narratives and reflections from those who did, it sounds like it was an event worth attending. In any case, thanks to the Senator and his staff for the invitation, my compliments on taking the time to hear what we have to say.

Wednesday night I attended a screening of The Ambassador, a documentary about John Dimitri Negroponte, currently the U.S. Director of National Intelligence and formerly U.S. ambassador to Honduras, the United Nations and Iraq. Negroponte has been a controversial figure due to his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair and human rights violations in Honduras, and the film took on those controversies by documenting Negroponte's career as a diplomat, his public and private statements about the accusations...

Bruce Schneier has saved future bureaucrats some time and written the core text of the 2015 US Congressional report on the impacts of the REAL ID Act. The report will find that the creation of this national ID card back in 2005 introduced unnecessary security risks, compounded existing data privacy issues, incurred extraordinary costs to implement and maintain, represented a troubling power grab by the federal government over state systems for issuing identification, and, perhaps worst of all, was passed...

Dave Pollard has a post up about conflict resolution. After a few paragraphs castigating the ability of the U.S. legal system and its agents to resolve conflicts, he talks about how to resolve peer-to-peer conflicts. It's interesting to me that the examples he gives of conflicts involving opposing worldviews pitted family members against each other (which seems about right for most of the kinds of conflict you mentioned), and yet one conclusion he made was that more carefully chosen communities...