There are certainly a few kids who need meds in this area. I've met one in my entire life.

It was recommended that I be medicated - my parents used sleep deprivation instead. Thankfully, I was largely home schooled and didn't have to sit still for more than an hour and a half a day. My attention and hyperactivity issues enabled me to see and learn much more - I was distracted but that was the point.

That all said, I recently ran into a guy who helps run Tovatest - which tests for attention problems. He said that their research shows that people's attention ability improves PRIOR to their behavior improving through drugs. Most ADHD kids maximize their learning potential when they DRINK a COKE. Much more stimulant than that and they come down the other side of the curve.

Thank you all for your feedback. Society takes all kinds and we are made richer for it. With regards to Lincoln, somebody once remarked that Obama may be our most well-adjusted president ever - and that probably doesn't recommend him for the job :)

You aren't patronizing the kid. He KNOWS he's not a basketball player on this level. But you are giving him a chance to fulfill a dream to nobody's detriment. Sports are for competition AND sportsmanship. As you rise into the professional levels sportsmanship becomes a civilizing check on the competition, but I believe on the high school level and in so many sports that will never be professional and sportsmanship remains the point throughout. Effort, dedication, team work, confidence etc.... This kid is a sportsman and his achievements in this area were simply recognized by letting him actually score.

And then you have this

Of course they do it now. But there is no salvation in trying to resist, because it is done piecemeal there is no natural point of mass resistance.

Zafar,

I am not a believer in Condi land :) I do support the Alawi setting up their own enclave and getting a share of the oil revenue. I think they could defend themselves just fine and - free from ruling a bunch of Sunnis who hate them (justifiably) - would probably turn out a decent little country.

The Reformation emphasized the group as the largely false 'common good.' What brought out the individual was the English revolution and the New Model Army which discovered it would fracture and be destroyed if people didn't learn to accept different religious takes on Jesus. They agreed to disagree and created a bill of rights. The driver was religion, not athiesm. It disappeared in peacetime - but surfaced again as an enduring concept. My mom wrote a book about it "Liberty, G-d's Gift to Humanity" by Chana Cox and in the slideshow at (http://religiousliberalism.org/).

How do we encourage these concepts? Education, leading by example, helping resistance against expansionary dictators, supporting gray markets in ideas & trade and, when a society has implicit laws, a little military push to topple the 'leadership' all seem reasonable to me.

The cultural belief in individual rights and responsibilities.

Group rights don't work. And fundamental beliefs in another vision - like (and I don't have quite the right words here) dominant religious unity, dominant (by class) economic unity, or dominant racial unity (blacks must believe X and get their slice, Indians Y etc...) or libertineism (no responsibilities) - always result in another outcome.

South Africa's risks come from racial unity. So did Zimbabwe's. I think if we give SA some time, they'll get to a Mugabe. They've been trending that way. Nobody but the ANC has had power.

On the Arab world we talk about defeating Al Qaeda, but it hasn't happened. The ideology of dominant religious unity & compliance are very very strong - and quite contrary to liberal democracy. This might not represent Arab history, but it appears to be today's reality.

I think the meme was very effectively defended. It is the denigration that typifies the elimination of democracy. People vote for something else. Aristotle even wrote about the inevitable movements of democracies into tyrannies. 

I would far prefer to have lived in colonial Hong Kong than one-time democracies like Egypt.

The individual rights buy-in doesn't come from the top down, but the bottom up. Barren rocks are great places for growing them because the bottom that comes buys into the ideas. Voting democracy enshrines the values of the population - and in the absence of bottom-up support for individual rights those values almost always tend to be totalitarian or theocratic in nature. Sometimes, they start anarchic and then turn totalitarian.

Lebanon included what it was thought to need to be an economically viable place. It is  already a tiny place 1/20th the size of Syria - not too large. No objection on the allocation of positions, but it was built that way for a reason.

That reason is that 'democracy' as we know it is not equivalent to voting. When democracy, the majority wins - and sometimes once is the only vote they bother with.

A modern democracy has a twist - individual rights and responsibilities are the building blocks, not the vote.

IMO, the building blocks of democracy are the free press, freedom of assembly and freedom of conscious. They are graduated of course - but Egypt and Syria are near the bottom, while Iraq and Tunisia are somewhat higher, Lebanon higher still and functioning democracies in a whole other world.

True although Dubai may not be a success at anything other than a city in the UAE spending lots of money.

But don't barren rocks tend to add their big populations as their economies grow - not beforehand. If you come with a pre-baked population but no matching commercial world then you have real trouble.

There will be more telemedicine as people look offshore for healthcare. This sort of device will lead the way.

This is innovation in the face of bureaucratic adversity. But imagine if we used these tools in the absence of adversity. 

[continued]

We can't have presidential care for everybody, there aren't enough docs. It would sure cut risks, but so would having your personal vehicle be a APC driven by a chauffeur with extensive risk-avoidance training. 

So, I am all in favor of innovation in delivery to cut unnecessary spending. And I am in all in favor of individuals making that choice for themselves.

Royal care is you get a weekly real home visit for everything without waiting or straining yourself or exposing yourself to other's illnesses in a hospital or clinic. But a person who is healthy doesn't need to see their doc every week, somebody who has acne doesn't need to see them either. 

What they do is give you a convenient (and possibly safer) home visit via Skype. If they have more issues or concerns or don't understand something, they bring you in at normal rates, but refund the skype visit.

I think upgrading people from convenient and simple care for simple problems and then stepping them up a chain of service is quite a good idea actually. People will get seen more often because of the convenience and cost and stepped up when they need to be.

I think the issue of safety for Arab minorities is a key one. But the problem with the 'Alawite state' or an international peace zone is that they would have basically no economy.

I think you need to 'internationalize' the oil fields in northeastern Syria and run the revenues through a third-party (even an accounting firm using who gets a small cut for administration/lease management) and then distribute to the 3-4 Syrian states - Sunni, Turkish, Kurdish and Other.

The Kurds etc... would agree to this initially because it would bring peace faster. And it could be sustained because it secures the peace - if people violate it, they sacrifice the revenues.

These are 

This clinic does Skype visits for a variety of issues. They are only $79.

The 'kid' was homeschooled and did an AP course independently. I happen to know him - I think he did 5 or so in the 8th and 9th grades.

I'm late to this, so sorry if I don't say anything original. I think the names matter most because of the concept that they were named. It speaks to the society and how they could handle the worst horrors of war.

Names anthropomorphize (even today) inanimate objects. The decision to drop the names reflect a decision to dehumanize these objects - to harden them. I think it is something that can only happen with distance. You can't afford to do it when you are dropping them. It is like cracking jokes about airplane crashes.

IMO, the names teach us nothing about the bombs, but quite a bit about the people who dropped them.