Wednesday, September 8, 2010

HOT5 Daily 9/8/2010

1. "Americans Wake Up to Islamism" Pipes emphasizes the important difference between Islam & Islamism.

Representative Sample: 9/11 provided a wake-up call, ending this sense of hopelessness. Americans reacted negatively not just to that day's horrifying violence but also to the Islamists' outrageous insistence on blaming the attacks on U.S. foreign policy and later to blaming violence on the election of Barack Obama, or their blatant denial that the perpetrators were Muslims or intense Muslim support for the attacks.

2. "NASA Is Running Out of Money to Monitor Earth-Destroying Asteroids (Part 1 of 2)" But there's plenty of money for political pork.

Representative Sample: Five years ago, Congress mandated by law that NASA should track 90% of all of the dangerous asteroids and comets that may threaten the Earth by 2020. Just last month, though, the National Academy of Sciences announced that NASA may be out of money to meet this mandate.

3. "So much for our crumbling infrastructure" It's actually in better shape that it has been in years. Links an article that explains.

Representative Sample: We often hear the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling, but state highway conditions are the best they’ve been in 19 years, according to Reason Foundation’s 19th Annual Highway Report.

4. "Burning the Quran is a Good Thing" Some good points.

Representative Sample: for Muslims here in the US, it will be a lesson on freedom of expression. We are not Europe, and a simple display of Islamophobia is not yet a crime.

5. "Escaping Ultra-Orthodox Judaism" Even deep within a religious cocoon, some manage to reason their way out.

Representative Sample: The accumulated weight of all that prohibition, all those centuries of dead words constricting everyday life, must be stifling. And yet, even among the suffocatingly insular world of the haredim, religious dogma and brainwashing doesn't rule the day. Even among the ultra-Orthodox, there are people who see the light of reason

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