RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Department of Homeland Security deputy assistant secretary had no answers for Congress last week when questioned about the U.S. visa waiver program, leaving Republicans worried that “DHS seems clueless about what is going on with potential threats to our security.”

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing last Thursday to address the vulnerabilities of the U.S. visa waiver program, and assess what the U.S. government has done to prevent terrorists from abusing the VWP.

Established in 1986, the VWP allows nationals of certain countries to enter the U.S. as temporary visitors (nonimmigrants) for up to 90 days without having to obtain a visa or undergo an in-person interview at a U.S. consulate. Currently, nationals of 38 countries can enter the U.S. without first obtaining a visa under the VWP.

Attention has been directed toward the VWP of late because of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. At least five of the attackers were French nationals and one was a Belgian national. Nationals of both France and Belgium are able to enter the U.S. under the VWP.

Thousands of Westerners have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria or Iraq to fight with extremist groups. Individuals from VWP program countries who return could then enter the U.S. by taking advantage of the VWP.

President Obama talks a lot about the scientific method. On climate change, he has often invoked the idea of a great divide between those on the progressive left, such as himself, who believe in “settled science” and thus a looming man-caused climatological disaster, and those, presumably on the Neanderthal Right, who are slaves to superstition, ideology, prejudice, and self-interest—and thus deny that the planet is rapidly warming due to inordinate human-induced releases of excessive carbon.

Obama’s view of science is reductionist. It relies on count-em-up numbers: if more university professors (not known to be an especially independent or courageous cohort) believe in dangerous man-caused climate change than doubt it or its seriousness, and if climate change fits a larger progressive agenda, then it becomes factual.

Would we assume thereby that Newton, Galileo, and Darwin were all exemplars of groupthink, and worked through consensus and collegiality, especially with the support of status-quo institutions and universities, in advancing majority-held theories?

When Obama signed legislation in his first weeks in office enabling human stem cell research, he pontificated that his act was about ensuring “that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” Aside from the fact that there were and are methodologies of harvesting stem cells without resort to embryonic protocols, the president’s entire approach to science, data, and the inductive method is to privilege ideology and subordinate facts.

On a New Yorker panel nearly a dozen years ago, in the wake of the publication of his novel Snow, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk set forth an emphatic credo. “Our moral duty,” he said, “is to pay attention to the humanity of everybody.” And since the subject of the panel was “Literature and Politics,” this comment was altogether in keeping with Pamuk’s remarks elsewhere, on the responsibility of the novelist: “I strongly feel that the art of the novel is based on the human capacity, though it is a limited capacity, to be able to identify with the ‘other.’ .  .  . It requires imagination, a sort of morality, a self-imposed goal of understanding this person who is different from us.”

But in 2004, this anodyne and conventional literary conviction, addressed to the New Yorker’s loyal audience, rang out with an unexpectedly unsettling force. The motivations and influences and inmost desires and doubts and dreams and fevered schemes of invented characters in a novel, however pleasing or villainous, make up the very essence of what we derive from storytelling. We want to understand Isabel Archer and Mr. Kurtz (who are so different from us), we want to know them to the deeps of their marrow. The glory of literary modernism especially— the revelatory dazzle of Joyce and Proust and Woolf — turns precisely on this psychological probing into hidden consciousness. It was a shock, then, to learn that Pamuk’s “everybody,” his requirement of imagination, his “goal of understanding this person who is different from us,” his vaunted “humanity” — all this was meant to reach well beyond his primary literary argument. It was meant to include terrorists. Are not terrorists a portion of humanity? A challenge came from a fellow panelist: What about suicide bombers, are they to be similarly understood by the humanely embracing imagination? Pamuk’s response was quick and sharp and dismissive: “We have to base our judgment on moral essential things rather than on what we see on TV the other night.”

We have recently started a not for profit resource site http://militarybases.co that displays all the U.S. military bases on an interactive map.

Militarybases.co is a novel resource for interactive maps that display military bases operated by the U.S. either locally or abroad conveniently along with data points such as: historical info, base facilities, housing, weather, driving instructions and pictures of the bases involved.

Militarybases.co cover different army branches such as air force, navy, marine, coast guard and regular army installations. We aim to be a resource for elementary, secondary and college students who want to learn and absorb information regarding our countries military infrastructure and for families of service men and woman as well as those on active duty to get more information on their next deployment location.

The site is useful in many ways as it can be used for research for geopolitical issues in terms of arms deployment of the US forces accross the globe, it can also be used by families of service men and woman to find their way around the bases where their loved ones serve to protect our country. It can also be used as classroom material for elementary, secondary or even college eductation.

The site is a resource for data points on housing, weather, driving directions, base facilities and even historical information of ALL U.S. military bases either on our soil or abroad. We currently have over 500+ bases listed and expanding day by day.