Happy 4th of July! 228 years old. Obligatory reading today are both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the US. There’s also a great op-ed in today’s New York Times talking about the relevance of the Constitution to today’s America. Current favorite president: FDR. Read something about his vision of America. Always remember Lincoln and what he had to say. Of course, now we are talking about a new type of slavery, a mental one. Where is our Thomas Paine?
Idea Lab – Why Are So Many Terrorists Engineers? – NYTimes.com. They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn’t bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don’t be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, “a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs.” They are engineers.