Joe Biden’s Oval Office speech Wednesday, July 24th, was more powerful than those who hate him may realize. It was powerful for a simple reason: it focused on the importance of four forgotten American virtues: truth, character, decency and democracy. It was a speech about what Joe Biden ran on in 2019, saving the soul of
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There is a sudden movement in the Western World to take smartphones away from kids. It started in the summer of 2022 when social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at New York University, the father of two adolescents, was writing a book about what he called “the pervasive negative effects of the internet and social media on
The headline in a CNN story that appeared a little after noon on Wednesday, June 26th, was brutal: “Children are dying of starvation in their parents’ arms as famine spreads through Gaza.” The details were heartbreaking. One nine year old boy, said CNN, is “clearly wasted from severe malnutrition and suffering from dehydration. His blue
On Tuesday, June 18th, a new word showed up in the vocabulary of the Middle-East war: “inevitable.” Nearly every expert in Israel from the country’s military leaders to its newsletter writers said that an all-out war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah was inevitable. And who is Hezbollah? Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah is a part of Iran’s “Axis
In the wake of Covid, are Americans losing their minds? Sort of. We are going crazy for animal stories. Why? It could be because stories of insanity among humans are just too hard for us to take. In the Associated Press’s list of the 31 oddest stories of the week, fully 16—more than half—were tales about
The Internet has been under constant attack for the last 20 years as the source of all of our emotional woes, from depression, cyberbullying, and suicide to negative body image. The anti-Internet attack has been so fierce that nine states have tried to ban social media access for kids under sixteen or to require the
We have reached a dire moment. At 2 am Sunday morning, March 14, Iran launched a swarm of between 300 and 350 suicide drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles at Israel. Israel’s Stunner missiles, Arrow missiles, and Iron Dome missiles, with help from the French and Americans, knocked 99% of these weapons out of the sky.
Taiwan’s defense chief, Chiu Kuo-Cheng, has revealed that American troops are permanently stationed in Taiwan. Our soldiers are there to train Taiwan’s military in the use of things like drones. However, some of those troops are less than two miles from China’s border. A headline in London’s The Express warns that this puts the “world” on
Nikki Haley competed against Donald Trump in primaries in 29 states and territories over the last five months and won only in two—Vermont and Washington, DC. So, Wednesday morning, March 6th, Haley gave a speech suspending her campaign. Haley’s words mark a profound change in the Republican party and in America’s kind of politics. In her
There is a fight in America between those who want Russia to win its loathsome war in Ukraine and those who want Russia to lose. The top cheer leader for a Russian victory is former President Donald Trump. Mr. Trump controls the Republicans in Congress. A bill to give $38 billion to Ukraine has passed
The Senate Judiciary Committee, under Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Lindsey Graham, held a hearing Wednesday, January 31, that the Committee advertised as “the first time a group of Big Tech CEOs will testify on online child sexual exploitation.” The CEOs included Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, TikTok’s Shou Chew, X’s Linda Yaccarino, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and
England’s Morrisons, a 470-store British supermarket chain, has tried something innovative but disturbing. In a few of its stores over the Christmas season, it installed a robotic intrusion detector designed to act as a night watchman on construction sites, in mines, and on farms. Morrisons tried this machine to detect, not trespassers, but shoplifters. The robotic
The big question is whether it will cause World War III. Early Wednesday morning, at 3 pm in the afternoon Iranian time, a suicide bomber a mile from the modest grave of Lieutenant General Qasem Soleimani in southeastern Iran’s Kerman province blew himself up. Then, 20 minutes later, as people crowded to the explosion’s site to
There are new fears that the war in the Middle East between Hamas and Israel could spill over into a wider conflict. And there is reason to fear that, in the end, the conflict could go nuclear and kill us all. Here’s what’s happened in the last few days. Early on Saturday, December 23, a
A new survey from LendingTree, the online loan comparison service, looked at accident rates of 30 auto brands and found that the brand with the most accidents per 1,000 drivers was Tesla. Other brands high on the list of accidents per 1,000 drivers were Dodge Ram and Subaru. When it came to driving incidents, a
The Wall Street journal has published a story that may explain many of the mysteries of the war against Hamas in Gaza. The Journal reveals something the Israelis are keeping secret. The Israeli military has built five water pumps near the coastal Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City and has been experimenting with flooding Hamas’ 310
There’s a Muslim phrase you need to know if you’re going to understand the war in Gaza and Israel. It’s a phrase that militant Islamic Jihadists have used from Chechnya to Lebanon: “We love death more than you love life.” Keep that in mind as you watch the latest news on the Israel-Hamas war. Israel
We all know what happened Saturday. Or we think we know. Gaza fired what it said were 5,000 rockets at civilian targets in Israel. And Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel using a massive bulldozer to tear a hole in the smart fence draped with razor wire that separates Gaza from southern Israel. Over 1,500 invaders streamed through. Some of
On Tuesday September 21st, Target announced that it was closing nine stores in four states in October because of a new form of organized crime—smash and grab robberies, flash robberies. The sort of robberies that hit a Wawa convenience store in Philadelphia on Sunday September 24, when it was invaded by between 50 and 100
In 1968 Pope Paul VI established a Global Peace Day. A New Year’s Day on which the Pope gives a speech “reflecting the signs of our times.” Wednesday August 9th, the Vatican put out an announcement about the speech the pope will give at next year’s Peace Day, coming up on January 1st, just four months
Something startling is happening to aging. 90,000 Americans have reached the age of 100. Which means that you, too, may live that long. But how? Publicity for a new book on longevity has brought a 2012 study back into the news. In that study, researchers from Yeshiva University looked at 250 people 98 to