After losing all four limbs to a roadside bomb on Easter Sunday 2009, U.S. Army infantryman Brendan Marrocco doesn’t even come close to showing the kind of emotional cracks to his confidence many others would surely face, including me. To look at photos of Marrocco, 23 during his year-long rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is to witness a strength of character and...

How long does it take to correct a wrong? On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.  Two months later, President Franklin Roosevelt signed United States Executive Order 9066;an order that moved approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans into 10 internment camps located in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. FBI Director J. Edgar...

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  – Matthew 7:12, (King James) The Bible “I won’t tolerate racial profiling… We must enforce the law evenly, and without regard to skin color, accent, or social status. We must prove the alarmists and the cynics wrong.”  – Jan Brewer, Arizona state governor Since signing Senate Bill 1070 into law last...

There’s a signature moment in the 1976 film Network in which a drunk and dispirited Howard Beale who – after losing his news anchor job – abandons his script, looks straight into the camera and, in an astounding bit of prescience, begins his sermon from the mount. “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. …It’s like...

“Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.”- derived from Ayn Rand Regarding The Golden Rule – one aspect of the Five Steps of Principled Reasoning by The Josephson Institute outlined in the last post, one reader wrote, “The problem is that all ethics is contextual for personality, hierarchy (not all issues are...

There’s a scene at the beginning of the Albert Brooks comedy Defending Your Life in which our angst-ridden hero is celebrating his birthday with a brand new BMW. Putting his dream car through its paces with Barbara Streisand blaring over his stereo, he makes a tight turn and all his CD’s slide off the passenger seat.  Leaning over to pick them...

“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. The words of Dr. King were meant to inspire us to grow beyond hatred, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive...

A conversation with a friend led to this question:  is it unethical to be cynical? On the surface it would seem that one can hold most any outlook on life they choose without much disruption to their moral sense.  It’s an outlook, not an action and ethics is about what we do, not how we view life. But let’s take a closer...

In honor of the baseball playoffs, I offer this story, as it appeared in May, 2008. In the early 1940’s, Norman Corwin was nearly as well known as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much admired. Author Ray Bradbury calls Corwin, “…the greatest director, the greatest writer and the greatest producer in the history of radio.  His brilliant dramas, fantasies, and documentaries...

When it comes to apologia, creative people have the edge on most of us regarding imaginative rationalizations.  However, sometimes the more creative they are, the more cockamamie the reasoning. Thirty-one years after he fled the United States after pleading guilty to having had sex with a 13-year-old girl, Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland and is being held for...