Suppose you buy a nice condo, and a terrorist magnet moves in next door? Even worse, the government places her next to you because you live in a secure, gated community. Do you have any recourse to this? Does the safety of your family or value of your property make you think about this, or do you accept the risk based on a strong, principled stand?

I found the immigration story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali compelling because even as a recepient of the generous immigration policy of the Netherlands, she supports limiting free immigration.

After becoming controversial in Holland, she had her citizenship revoked (maybe temporarily) and was offered a job with the American Enterprise Institute in DC. So I expect that we’ll be hearing more from her from the conservative forums of the US.

There were favorable stories in the WSJ and Salon demonstrating her wide appeal among both the liberals and conservatives, but fundamentally for the sake of discussion:

I will be out of town from today until Sunday evening.  I am traveling up to New Jersey with my girlfriend to her relatives and my relatives along the way.  I will probably not have a chance to check gimme-five or my email, but you can send fan mail to george AT this domain dot com and I’ll maybe respond if I get around to it.  Peace out until then!

President Bush just signed a tax cut extension, with additional provisions mostly directed at investor-related taxes. A short summary follows:

• Extends tax breaks on capital gains and dividends
• This is fine…
• Alters the exemption range for the Alternative Minimum Tax
• According to the New York Times: “Most of the beneficiaries are likely to be married couples with children who own their homes and make $75,000 to $500,000 a year.”
• Allows anyone to convert to a Roth IRA, regardless of income.
• Before, if you made too much money, you were not allowed to use a Roth IRA. Now, you are allowed to convert.
• Initially this will raise a small amount of money, however, in the long run, this is going to cost the government billions in tax dollars because Roth IRAs are not taxed after the money is put in.
• This will also mostly benefit richer Americans.

Another quote from the New York Times article on the tax cut:

The Tax Policy Center, a nonprofit venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, two policy and research groups in Washington, estimated yesterday that 80 percent of the tax savings would flow to the top 10 percent of taxpayers and that almost a fifth of the benefits will go to the top one-tenth of 1 percent.

The Da Vinci Code Movie, which should be in theatres soon, has sparked a lot of controversy. This is because in the story, it says that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children together, and that Jesus still has heirs alive today.

The Catholic Church has been going crazy, in particular, about this movie. I have already heard multiple Catholic priests on the radio during commercials talking about how absurd the Da Vinci Code is.

This is going way too far. Dan Brown writes that the Da Vinci Code is FICTION, not fact. If Dan Brown wanted to attack the Catholic church, he would not have wrote that his book was simply fictional. James and the Giant Peach was a great, fictional book too. However, it defied the laws of gravity. Does this mean that physicists should call for it to be banned from theatres?

Censorship is a dirty thing. When I was in high school, I was a member of the Freedom to Read Club, and we fought against a group called PABBIS (Parents Against Bad Books in Schools) who wanted everything banned from books about sexual education to Where’s Waldo (no joke!). Asking that this movie be censored, especially considering that it is openly a FICTIONAL STORY, is ridiculous.

It’s disgusting when people throw cigarette butts on the ground. It happens all the time. Many people throw cigarette butts out the car window, toss them to the side when walking down the street, and treat them as if it’s perfectly ok to put them anywhere. One extreme example is when my girlfriend and I were sitting in a restaurant. While we were waiting for our food, a man who was smoking a cigarette finished smoking and threw it on the ground IN THE RESTAURANT, and walked away.

Obviously, that last example was pretty extreme, but the point still remains that there are a lot of smokers out there that feel they can throw their cigarettes wherever they choose. How is this different from littering? When someone crumples up a bag and throws it on the ground, the general consensus in society is that it’s pretty awful. But when someone throws a cigarette butt out the window of a car, it’s not a big deal to the average person.

Why?