As usual, when something is obstructing me from blogging, I like to let my readers know what’s going on. Over the last week, my internet access at home has been totally out of service. I’ve had few opportunities to get online at all, much less invest the time and energy necessary to write a piece on here that’s worth reading. I’m hoping that regular access will be restored sometime in the next couple of days. If it continues, I’ll update readers with any new information.
Author: Benjamin Studebaker
Why ISIS is Beheading Americans and What We Can Do About It
Two American journalists have now been beheaded by the Islamic State–James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Vice President Joe Biden has already declared that he wants to follow ISIS to “the gates of hell.” But why is ISIS doing this, and what should the United States do about it?
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The Threat of Ebola is Massively Overstated
In recent months, Americans have taken a hysterically fearful attitude toward Ebola, an extremely unpleasant viral disease that kills most of the people it infects in a remarkably gruesome way (vomiting, diarrhea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, sometimes with internal and/or external bleeding). Multiple US congressmen have expressed fears that Latin American immigrants will carry Ebola into the United States from Mexico. Nevertheless, Ebola poses virtually no threat to people living in the western hemisphere, and even the threat it poses to Africans is overstated.
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How the United States Invented a New Kind of Corruption
It’s easily forgotten that the US constitution was written to address the defects of a very specific kind of government–the 18th century European absolute monarchy. The trouble is that when we design our states to solve one very specific kind of problem, we often over-correct and create precisely the opposite sort of problem. Our minds are too aware of our recent experience. We get myopic, we fail to see how our solutions to yesterday’s problems contain within them the beginnings of tomorrow’s problems. This piece aims to detail how America’s answer to absolutism has contained within itself the foundation for many of our current political woes.
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2 Questions about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
In case you’ve been living under a rock, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge involves donating to the ALS Association and/or dumping a bucket of ice water over one’s head to raise awareness for ALS, a rare neurodegenerative disease. One can then challenge additional people to take the ice bucket challenge, raising donations and awareness for the disease:
It seems there are two kinds of people these days–people who are enthusiastically participating in the ALS ice bucket challenge and people who think it’s stupid and annoying. To answer this question, we need to ask two more.
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Benjamin Studebaker 