The picture below is of a clock manufactured by a 14 year old Muslim male, named Ahmed Mohamed.  Regardless of his skin color, name and religion the school’s administration had every rational reason to be concerned.  I like how quick people were to attribute it to prejudice, Islamophobia, etc.  Remember Columbine, those guys brought propane bombs to their high school.

On another note – has no one in the Obama Administration watched Homeland or American Sniper??  By inviting the kid to the White House and to Facebook headquarters is just what Carrie Mathison has been worried about.  Now the kid will be on the inside of security just like Nicholas Brody.  Al- Qaeda or Isis merely switches out his clock for an explosive device.  I hope to hell they sweep that case.  Okay, I’m just playing the paranoid conspiracy theorist here to make a point. I don’t actually  believe that’s what this is.

Come on people, if you take a device that looks like this to school, you should expect to be questioned.  Add to that  – if you’re Muslim and your name is Ahmed Mohamed that will not surprisingly make other alarms go off in peoples’ heads. It’s unfortunate, but as long as Islamic extremists continue killing non-Muslims, this is the level of concern we have to live with .

What the hell was that Donald Trump speech in Texas about?  It is impressive that he can do all that with a few notes on a piece of paper.  But then again, he spent the first 30 minutes talking about himself and praising or criticizing others.  You gotta (okay, you don’t gotta) admit that he makes it all sound do-able.  But when he described how he’d tell and strong-arm Ford Motor Company not to locate a plant in Mexico, I was reminded that Republicans have been bemoaning that President Obama has been doing just that with miles per gallon requirements, alternative energy, etc. Republicans holler “get the government out of our business” and yet they were applauding Trump’s story.  It sounded more like something Bernie Sanders would say, didn’t it? – making those evil companies do what we say is best for them.

I am a bit of a smart-ass, a sarcastic sense of humor and enjoy humor out of people or things that I think take themselves too seriously.  Recently, I tried to search for and buy the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (incorrectly, but commonly known as the Confederate Flag).  On that day, a Google search returned with “your search returned no results”, which angered me.  So I went to a Yahoo search and found a place that was selling them.  I ordered 24 bandanas and sent them to friends and family with a note that FOCM recognized their inner rebel with this bandana, long a symbol of southern pride, defiance and states’ rights.  A friend and fellow lover of American history and in particular the Civil War, mailed flag back to me with this note:

Dear Good Friend,

Thank you, Chris, for your generous gift.  In regard for your feelings however I find it better to return it to you rather than have it suffer the ignominious fate it undoubtedly would be subjected to in my hands. Besides, the flagpole in front of my house has room for only one flag.  It looks similar to your gift – it has bars and stars and vibrant red, white and blue colors.  But rather than stand for slavery, racism, rebellion and regionalism, this flag stands for something completely different.  It represents ONE country, One union, while respecting difference of opinion. More succinctly put into Latin: “e pluribus unum”. It represents constant effort (which during these political times seems a Sisyphean task) toward a more perfect union, conserving the noble foundations of this country while always progressing to be better. 

If your gift stands for any “heritage” it is this: Never in world history have traitors been welcomed so generously back into their country, who then treated that generosity with such disdain, arrogance and defiance. 

In friendship,

I truly appreciated this response and think it is a great one.  America is truly the greatest country because of its acceptance of freedom of speech which allows me to be a smart-ass, poke fun at others and to be humbled by a friend who points out the seriousness of America’s over-arching principles.

Let me see if I understand this correctly:

After Dylan Roof killed people at the church in Charleston, SC, investigation into his motive resulted in finding his “manifesto” in which he indicated he was inspired by the Trayvon Martin case and wanted to start a race war.  It was instantly labeled a “hate crime.”

When Vester Lee Flanagan killed the two news reporters in Virginia, investigation found in his “manifesto” that he indicated he was inspired by the Charleston shooting, including : “As for Dylann Roof? You (deleted)! You want a race war (deleted)? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE …”  This still has not been labeled a hate crime.  Why not?

Both are: a man of one race, killing people of another race, documenting that he wants a race war.

Am I missing something?

So, it finally happened to me – I got tired of watching Fox News for all my TV-obtained news.  I know my mother will never do this and please don’t tell her I did, she may disown me.  I know a lot of you will say, wow, you finally got it?!  Well it seemed to be unbalanced, like the media extension of the Republican party.  So now I’m watching MSNBC at noon, sitting in for Andrea Mitchell and am surprised to see that Luke Russert is doing a great job of delivering balanced news.  He was aggressive in talking with Hillary’s spokesperson about the email issue.  I was expecting to see news about Cecil the Lion and why we shouldn’t put criminals in jail, not putting murderers to death, allowing 3rd trimester abortions and supporting Jerry Brown’s banning of the word “alien”.

I know I will go back to Fox News but I will continue with adding in news shows from other networks.

What TV network news do you watch most?

Other news sources: I get probably 1/2 my news online.  Every morning I log on to google.com/news and read the news stories that way and on my Iphone I use Google News and USA Today apps.

Where do you get most of your news?

I’m curious as to the origin of some ideas from politicians.  The latest from Hillary is that it should be free for anyone to attend a public university.

I have a problem with that – it will cost ~$350 billion dollars, which means we’ll see taxes go way, way up.

And the other problem is the blatant hypocrisy, which Hillary pulls off without shame over and over again.  She criticized “for-profit” universities. (Side note, since when did it become evil to make a profit? that’s how capitalism works HELLO!?)

But in criticizing “for-profit” universities, is she forgetting that she benefited financially from Bill receiving more than $16 million from 2010 to 2014 as honorary chancellor of Laureate Education, a for-profit education company.

I guess they’re not just all Clinton ideas; Bernie Sanders has them, too – make college free, make all entry level jobs pay at least $15/hour.  Why stop at that, give everyone free electric mopeds, free internet, free cable TV.  Profit is evil, we must find people making a profit and stop them (dripping with sarcasm).  Oh wait, hey, maybe we make it a requirement that ex-Presidents cannot be compensated for speeches. #freexpresidentspeeches

Really?! Commemorating the 1 year anniversary of the death of a criminal in Ferguson, MO – really?!?!

What the hell is wrong with our country?  A teen-ager steals cigars from a store, pushes the store owner, then attacks a police officer in his car, goes for the policeman’s gun, runs off, then turns back around and charges at the police officer.

Yes, his family and friends should get together and remember their son and friend on such a day.  But his friend shot at police – that’s how he “honored” his friend.

If someone can find the news of that day or around then, I watched Eric Holder at a press conference, and he said “all lives matter”.  But one week later people were villified for saying that.

I think that poverty of today isn’t like the poverty of the past – in America, our poor people are overweight from the availability of cheap, fast (unhealthy food), so they’re not like the thin, emaciated, starving people of Sudan.  In America, 98% of homes have a color TV, 78% of American teens have a cellphone.  I don’ t mean to make light of people living in poverty, but the quality of life for those living in poverty in America is vastly better than it was in the 1950’s.

Is it because of the expansion of government programs?  It could be.  But when I see that 31% of of the households receiving food stamps earned any income from a job that tells me there’s not enough incentive to work.  I know this firsthand.  When I was in between jobs and collecting unemployment, I had enough money to cover my bills plus a little extra.  Oh and my loving landlord didn’t charge me rent while I was unemployed, which helped a lot.  I thought I’d get the 99 weeks of Obama unemployment, but little did I know at the time, unemployment is state run.  The election of a Republican Governor in NC resulted in changes such that you only get 20 weeks unemployment in NC.  Well, what do you think happened?  When the unemployment ran out, I made getting a job a much higher priority and started a job 4 weeks later.

The moral to this story is when you pay people enough to not work, they’re going to …… wait for it…… drum roll……. not work.  When you give people incentive to work or disincentivize (possibly not a real word) the avoidance of work, they will work.

I saw this article by Charles Camosy, bioethics Professor at Fordham University and thought it was quite interesting.  Below is an excerpt and the link to the full article:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0730-camosy-cecil-the-lion-planned-parenthood-20150730-story.html#page=1

Consider the views of those who care deeply about animal rights. What drives them? Animals are helpless creatures, often subject to terrible violence, and they cannot speak for themselves. Their dignity and value are quite inconvenient for those who want to exploit them, and their needs are pushed to the margins of our culture. Indeed, we are rarely forced to confront the dignity of animals, especially animals we eat. This is what drives the passion of activists in their attempts to speak for voiceless animals. And in their zeal to bring us face to face with animal suffering, tellingly, they regularly use undercover videos. These videos have been quite successful in bringing some terrible realities to light – for example, the conditions of chickens in the worst factory farms.

Anti-abortion activists are driven in similar ways. Prenatal children are also helpless and often subject to terrible violence. They obviously cannot speak for themselves. Their dignity and value are inconvenient for those who want abortion to be broadly legal and who want to use fetal tissue for research. They too are largely invisible, though this is changing because of ultrasound imagery and smartphone applications that can listen to a baby’s heartbeat in the womb. Words like “fetus,” “tissue” and “products of conception” help keep the reality of abortion at bay. But as we have now seen with the Planned Parenthood story, anti-abortion activists have also been successful in using undercover videos in bringing terrible reality to light – what in one setting is called the “products of conception” in another is a “baby bump,” and the antiseptic “tissue” means functioning organs.

This is not to say the two issues are morally equivalent. They aren’t. But the moral dispositions and motivations of animal rights and anti-abortion activists are actually quite similar.

The reductive left-right battle positions assumed this week may not survive much longer, at least on these two issues.  One in five young people in Britain (ages 16 to 24) are on vegan or vegetarian diets, and 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. are disproportionately skeptical of medical research on animals. At the same time, millennials are more likely to be anti-abortion than their elders. According to National Journal, for instance, 52% of 18- to 29-year-olds support banning abortion beyond 20 weeks while only 44% of those over 50 support such a ban.

Instead of animal rights advocates and anti-abortion advocates snarkily dismissing each other, they might find that their similar values can start a sophisticated and useful moral debate. Everyone loses in the culture wars—especially the vulnerable and voiceless.

Charles Camosy teaches bioethics at Fordham University. He is author of For Love of Animals and Beyond the Abortion Wars. Twitter: @nohiddenmagenta