What happened with Hurricane Katrina was the American electorate was forced to look at what lay behind the veneer of chest-beating. We all saw the consequences of having terrible government leadership.
The United States is at a critical juncture in time. Our government is riddled with historic debt, and the limited resources of philanthropic and non-profit efforts cannot meet the scale of social challenges we face with necessary force.
History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilise and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government.
Because government has tremendous power, it attracts people who are eager to game the system, obtaining by force of law what they could never achieve through consensus.
Jobs are disappearing from every sector of the economy, from engineering to health care workers, forcing hundreds of thousands of families into unemployment and low-paying jobs.
In this most powerful nation in the world, lack of access to health care should not force local and state governments, companies and workers into bankruptcy, while causing unnecessary illness and hospitalization.
The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.
Do any of us actually want to live in a world where your boss can decide that he or she is morally opposed to mental health care? What if your employer was morally opposed to getting x-rays or antibiotics? How about just being forced to disclose your...
America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, profess...
While my mother tried to stem my truancy, it would be a complete stranger - an Army Officer in the Special Forces home on leave - who would be the mentor to drive home my mother's goal of getting me educated. His name was Saul Hassan.
The defense of our democracy against the forces that threaten it from without has made some of its failures to function at home glaringly apparent.
It accumulates over the years and I've led so many bands of my own now and forced myself into new situations... You would hope that you play better and better - until you just get too feeble to do it anymore.
Do you force your kids to pay attention to what's going on, or do you let them live their lives outside of it? My hope is that my child is a strong activist. That would make me most proud.
History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them.
In the coming era of manned space exploration by the private sector, market forces will spur development and yield new, low-cost space technologies. If the history of private aviation is any guide, private development efforts will be safer, too.
Music pulled me like a gravitational force. I entered college as a physics major but left as a Bachelor of Music, a degree with the same practical application as, say, one in the History of Chinese Poetry.
Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.
I don't think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.
One-third of Americans have already been forced to change their lifestyle because their disposable income is gone. A guy can't go to the corner bar after a rough day at work to have a beer, that's gone to oil!
All of us at reddit work here because we think that reddit is a community like none other. We think it can be a powerful force to change the world for the better.
It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.
