Category Archives: Freedom

Islamic terrorists want an Islamic holy war. They believe in a clash of civilizations and want to unite all Muslims in a war against the West.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who founded al-Qaeda in Iraq, said before he was killed:

The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.

Their propaganda recalls an old prophecy that Islamic armies will rise up to meet the forces of “Rome” (or the West) on the fields of Dabiq in Syria. Victory in Dabiq will signal the caliphate’s conquest of the West.

This all seems scary until you realize that the number of Islamic state terrorists is estimated at between 80,000 and 100,000. Recent estimates have put it at closer to between 15,000 and 20,000. If we take the highest estimate, that’s still at least 16,000 less than the current population of Peoria, Illinois.

In other words, they have a problem: there are not many of them. The final battle they want isn’t going to look very good if they can be defeated by the population of Peoria.

How are they trying to deal with this recruiting problem?

Students from Texas Tech University build a house for Habitat for Humanity in 2010. (

In 1954, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif ran an experiment that could not be repeated today. Sherif was investigating prejudice and contesting Freud’s model of prejudice as an acting out of unresolved childhood conflicts.

At the Robbers Cave Boy Scout camp, Sherif wanted to test whether he could take a group of people, without any inherently hostile attitudes towards each other, and create conflict by introducing competition.

What Sherif found was not only that he could, but that he could also resolve the conflict if he introduced a shared goal. As I talk to people about politics and work for change, I always try to remember the importance of fighting with someone on something.

Recently, I got into a discussion with some conservatives about whether Paul Ryan was a Muslim-loving socialist RINO.

I love these types of discussions because it gives me the chance to ask questions like:

What does it take to be a real Republican these days?

Things then get weird because people haven’t really thought about it much. They just seem to know it when they see it. So I continue the conversation and then ask questions like, which of our presidents were libtards? You know, the term that some on the right love to throw around.

Here’s my (surprisingly long) list.

Elyria 5th-grade teacher Dawn Neely Randall finally spoke out over fears of reprisal against the 20 hours of tests designed for Ohio public school students.

From her Facebook post:

Well, I did it. I addressed our school board. I had packets for each member as well as our superintendent and walked them through sample PARCC passages that had no clear articulation through the grades and shared with them information straight from the website that proved that the maturity matrix of many passages were well beyond the students’ grade levels.

Randall encouraged the school board to stand up to Columbus and for Elyria students. The Lorain County Chronicle featured her story here.

Chris Christie said on Monday: You know it’s much more important what you think as a parent than what you think as a public official. And that’s what we do. But I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the […]

Here in Cincinnati we’ve been engaged in a fight to not become the largest metropolitan region (2.1 million people) in the country without an abortion clinic. When someone posted an update about the fight to one of our local politics forums, it attracted comments like the following painting right-to-lifers as “pro […]

Go to  2237 Pennsylvania Avenue, Charleston, WV on Google Maps.

It’s right across the street from Freedom Industries. Switch to street view and you can see Freedom.

John McCain just seems bitter lately.

First, he lost the election and now he’s starting down the Dick Cheney, grumpy ex-Vice President road of griping and swiping.

This week McCain came out and said Obama wasn’t taking enough of a stand against the current Iranian government.

Since Republicans keep playing partisan politics as they have egregiously for the past 8 years (and further, the past 8 years have just been the worst), I think the Democrats should start pushing bills through Congress that will be very difficult to vote against. Here’s my list: The Banking Responsibility […]

President Bush and the neo-conservatives have argued for some time for waterboarding and intelligence techniques to elicit information from detainees.

The argument Bush uses is very similar to the following: we’ve got to give intelligence experts the tools they need in order to extract information to prevent terrorist attacks.