Do a search for “mass shootings” with virtually any search engine (Chrome, Google, Yahoo, etc.) and you will find the references at the top of the lists will be about mass shootings in the United States. Many Americans believe in “American exceptionalism.” And indeed America is exceptional in the rate that they turn guns on each other to settle personal grievances, but also, and horrifyingly, on total strangers with whom the shooter has never had any previous contact.
Continue reading How Technology Can Help Put an End to America’s Plague of Mass ShootingsCategory Archives: Politics
How Computing Could Help Put an End to Wars. All Wars. Everywhere in the World.
The outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine has riveted the world’s attention on the unthinkable, a major war on the European continent. Although it has been some 77 years since the last major war in Europe ended, to anyone paying attention its outbreak should have come as no surprise. War appears to be inherent in human nature. So invoking it seems to be inevitable as long as human beings have the material means and political ability to put it into practice.
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The Constitution of the United States of America—Extraordinary Ordinary Things
I am an American. I say this with no overtones of pride or regret. It is simply a statement of fact. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1942 and grew up in Los Angeles, California. I have been living in Brussels, Belgium since 1974.
The reason I mention all this is because being an American living abroad, I am considered to be somewhat of an expert on the United States, its history, its laws, its customs, etc. I am frequently solicited by my non-American friends and acquaintances to explain something they have recently heard about this wondrous country across the ocean because they simply don’t have the background to understand it. I say this sheepishly because Europeans know more about my native country than most people in my native country know about theirs. They also care more about my native country than most people in my native country care about theirs.
A key element in things they have heard about the United States in recent years (particularly since the advent of Donald J. Trump) has to do with the vaunted U.S. Constitution, officially known as the Constitution of the United States of America.
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