Salt City Sinner

Game of Drones posted on 10/18/2013 by the Salt City Sinner A few Fridays ago, Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager that the Taliban shot in the head for the crime of attending school, met with President Obama. President Obama, you may recall, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for the singular achievement of not being George W. Bush (or, according to the committee, some flimsy fairy-tale about Russia and START). Malala, who has become a powerful voice for women's education worldwide, just happened to have been passed over for a Peace Prize preceding her meeting with Obama. According to Gawker : While thanking the President for his support of education and assistance to Syrian refugees, Yousafzai pressed the President on the issue of drone strikes, a counterterrorism method he supports.  "I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees," Yousafzai said in a statement ...

Since I was a child, Iran has been a regular (and rich) subject of discussion in my household. There's a simple reason for this - on my father's side of the family (the Bernards), the last two generations of Bernards have lived and worked in Iran pretty extensively. My grandfather was actually "knighted" by the last Shah before the Iranian Revolution for his contribution to oil and gas projects in the region. My father went to high school at the American School in Tehran, then later returned to work there as my grandfather had. My dad and my aunt still speak a little Farsi. This is kind of cool: I'm named after my paternal grandfather Charles G. Bernard, AKA Chuck Bernard, AKA whatever the hell this sign (which used to be his) says in Farsi: Due partially to the subject of Iran, I got into a lengthy dust-up in the Facebook discussion group for #OccupySLC , where the ideological demographics can be roughly divided up into one part anarchists/radicals (hello, f...