Dr. Benjamin Carson has been a busy man ever since he spoke at the National
Prayer Breakfast. Although many of us knew him before, the national platform at the
breakfast exposed him and his message to many more people and has catapulted this
neurosurgeon into numerous media and speaking opportunities.

Some of his critics argue that a medical doctor should not be speaking on
economic and political issues. He has a quick retort: “It’s not brain surgery.” He believes
that resolving many of the nation’s problems require careful analysis along with common
sense. His proposed solutions for the tax system and health care resonate with the
American people.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, he proposed a thought
experiment. Right now we are what he calls a “pinnacle nation.” England was that in a
previous century. Rome was that in the first century.

He says we should imagine what it would take to bring down a pinnacle country
like the United States. He says you could set out to destroy the nation in four simple
steps. First, create division among the people. Second, encourage a culture of ridicule
for basic morality. Third, undermine the nation’s financial stability through excessive
government debt. Finally, weaken the military.

He then observed: “coincidentally, those are the very things happening right
now.” He also adds that much of this just didn’t start in the last 4-5 years. The question
he poses is whether we can stop it or “must we inexorably follow the same kind of path
that other pinnacle nations have followed before their destruction?”

That is a good question. Anyone who has studied the rise and fall of nations
knows that most of these nations and empires fell from within. Moral rot and bad policies
preceded the collapse of the nation.

The message from Dr. Benjamin Carson is popular because the American people
know something is wrong and applaud a courageous brain surgeon for saying so

Last week, President Obama appeared on Israeli television to calm the fears of
those living Israel. He said he would not stand back and allow Iran to acquire a nuclear
weapon.

He said: “I have been crystal clear about my position on Iran possessing a nuclear
weapon. That is a red line for us. It is not only something that would be dangerous for
Israel. It would be dangerous for the world.” He also estimated that Iran was at least a
year away from successfully developing a nuclear weapon.

The words might have meant to be comforting to some, but I suspect many
believe that Iran will go nuclear one way or the other. Israel might take the first step in
trying to stop Iran’s attempt to develop a nuclear bomb. There is no certainty they will be
successful in stopping Iran’s nuclear program.

If Iran is allowed to go nuclear, expect lots of other nuclear dominoes to fall.
Other Muslim countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey will follow suit. In fact,
they might not even have to invest in a nuclear program. They can probably obtain
nuclear weapons from countries like North Korea and Pakistan that already have them.

The irony of this did not escape the notice of Mark Steyn. In a recent column,
he noted that the per capita GDP of Pakistan is about $1,200. The GDP of North Korea
is a lot less. “By comparison Sweden’s is about $58,000 and the Netherlands’ about
$50,000. But North Korea is a nuclear power and the Netherlands isn’t, and has no plans
to become one.”

Countries like North Korea and Pakistan may be economically backward, but they
exert disproportionate military power because they have nuclear weapons. No wonder
Iran (along with other Muslim countries) want to go nuclear.

The president and his foreign policy team may say they want to keep Iran from
getting nuclear weapons, but they must

Some have remarked that common sense doesn’t seem to be very common
anymore. That’s one way of saying that common sense seems to be in short supply. I
notice this each week as I cover news stories that cause me to shake my head in disbelief.
What do I mean? Here are just a half dozen examples of a nation that seems to have lost
its common sense.

You know you live in a nation that has lost its common sense when an elementary
school in Michigan confiscates homemade cupcakes from a third-grade student because
he put green Army soldiers on them.

You know you live in a nation that has lost its common sense when you must
show identification to board a plane, cash a check or rent a video, but do not need to
show any ID to vote for people who will serve in Congress.

You know you live in a nation that has lost its common sense when a Maryland
grade school suspends a seven-year-old boy for two days because he points a breakfast
pastry that looks a bit like a gun and says “Bang, bang.”

You know you live in a nation that has lost its common sense when members of
Congress pass a 2700 page bill that will affect all of our lives and yet few admit they
even read the legislation.

You know you live in a nation that has lost its common sense when it requires
parental permission to go on a field trip or take an aspirin, but not to get an abortion.

You know you live in a nation that has lost its common sense when the federal
government considers whether to ban certain firearms and high capacity magazines while
sending Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter jets to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

These are just a few examples that suggest that something is wrong in this
country. We can come up with more examples. But these are sufficient to remind us that
common sense isn’t so common anymore, especially among our leaders in education and
government. It’s time that rational people with an ounce of common sense spoke up and
challenged this foolishness.

The program begins with these words: “You are being watched. The government
has a secret system: a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because
I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything.”

The program I am talking about is the CBS series, Person of Interest. The creator
of the program Jonathan Nolan hit a cultural nerve about our increasing lack of privacy.
In her article about the program, Susan Karlin reminds us that the storyline is fiction
but based upon real-life source material that Jonathan Nolan cited in his interview with
her. He got some of his ideas from books like The Watchers: The Rise of America’s
Surveillance State and from the government’s defunct Total Information Awareness
Office.

This isn’t the first time Jonathan Nolan has raised the question of surveillance in
the scripts he has written. When he co-wrote the script for the movie The Dark Knight,
he inserted a scene where Batman turns all of the Gotham City cell phones into tracking
devices so he can find the location of The Joker.

According to Susan Karlin, “Nolan got a taste of encroaching surveillance while
growing up in the North London neighborhood of Highgate. ‘Scotland Yard began
putting cameras up everywhere,’ he recalls of a time long before local phone hacking
scandals erupted. ‘There were cameras out on street corners; English police employed
cameras. When I moved to the States at 12, there weren’t any cameras. Now you’re
seeing some cities catching up. In Manhattan, they counted 5,000 in 2005. In 2010, the
number was uncountable.’” When you add all the cell phone cameras in the population to
these other cameras, you can easily see we have lost our privacy.

The popularity of the television program is no doubt due to many factors, in
addition to concerns about privacy and surveillance. Whatever the reasons, it has struck a
nerve and caused us to once again think about Big Brother.

A few weeks ago, I talked about the comments by the Washington Post outgoing
ombudsman who argued that pro-family groups “have no right to coverage” because
their views on homosexuality are wrong. His argument was that his paper shouldn’t feel
obligated to get a comment from a person who believes in traditional marriage any more
than they should feel obligated to get a comment from a racist.

This argument is not only being put forward in the media but also in legislatures.
John Stonestreet recently wrote about comments from a state senator in Colorado. During
the debate on whether to enact a law permitting “civil unions,” the question arose about
the impact such a law would have on religious freedom.

The state senator said that anyone wanting a religious exemption should “get thee
to a nunnery.” He added, “Go live a monastic life away from modern life . . . away from
the people you can’t see as equals to yourself. Away from the stream of commerce where
you might have to serve them, or employ them, or rent banquet halls to them. Go some
place and be as judgmental as you like. Go inside your church, establish separate water
fountains, if you want. But don’t claim that free exercise of religion requires the state
of Colorado to establish separate water fountains for her citizens.” Another legislator
compared religious freedom advocates to the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, and the Taliban.

The reference to separate water fountains is a reference to the racist Jim Crow
laws of the past. It equates moral objections to homosexuality to racist policies and
ignores the pro-family argument that these are different. Civil rights proponents and
African-American pastors who fought for civil rights for minorities reject the argument
that gay rights are the same thing as giving civil rights to blacks.

Unfortunately, some media elites and political elites equate the two and therefore
argue we don’t deserve fair coverage or religious exemptions.

By now I think most of us know that we shouldn’t believe everything we read on the Internet. But it is still good to remind ourselves of the need to have discernment when we read what someone posts on a blog. Lee Siegel is the author of the book, Against the Machine: How the Web is Reshaping Culture and Commerce—and why it Matters. His chapter on “The Emperor’s New Modem” is full of examples of why we should not believe everything we read in blogs.

There are hundreds of millions of blogs in existence. There are political blogs, cultural blogs, and personal blogs. There are blogs devoted to every profession and every hobby one could imagine. While there are many that are very helpful and useful, we should also remember that they can also be full of error. Often rumor quickly turns into fact.

A number of years ago, Matt Drudge falsely claimed that John Kerry had an affair with an intern on Capitol Hill who then fled to Africa. After the tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004, the Internet was teeming with photographs and video clips of the event that proved false. A blogger’s false report of one of the traders at an investment group caused the company’s stock to plunge significantly.

Blogs succeed because of the way they are ranked rather than because they present fair and accurate information. Consider this analysis from the book, Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.“Blogging turns out to be the best way to secure a high Google ranking . . . . Blogs get updated all the time, which most websites do not, so blogs get more search engine attention.” Sadly what often gets the most attention is what is sensational, perhaps even outrageous. And the more attention and the more links, the higher a particular blog rises on the rankings.

When we do go to blogs and websites, we should be aware these issues. The Internet often rewards bloggers who are controversial, outrageous, and often inaccurate. Enjoy the blogs you read, but please exercise some discernment. I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

In his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr reminds us that most of us have never
“paused to ponder, must less question, the media revolution that has been playing out
all around us, in our homes, our workplaces, our schools.” Until recently, the history of
media has been a “tale of fragmentation.”

For example, books and newspapers were limited to text and images. They
couldn’t handle visual images or sounds. Radio, telephones, and tape players were
limited to sounds, but they could not display text except in small quantities.
If you wanted to use numbers, you needed a calculator. There wasn’t an all-purpose
technology or medium that could handle all of this together.

The distribution of this media was also fragmented. If your business was words,
you printed them on paper. If you wanted to distribute songs, you recorded them onto
vinyl records or magnetic tape. If you wanted to sell movies, you wound them onto
spools of film or videotape. And if you wanted to distribute television programs and
commercials, you broadcast them through the air or sent them down coaxial cables.

Once information was digitized, it changed everything. These old boundaries of
media began to disappear. The special purpose tools of production and distribution were
replaced by all purpose tools like computers and the Internet. And these new platforms
allowed for less expensive distribution.

When these new technologies arrived, the old ones didn’t disappear. We still buy
books and go to movies and listen to the radio. But we can also see that the new
technologies are increasingly replacing the old technologies.

People (especially young people) are more likely to read a book on an iPad or a
Kindle. They are more likely to watch a television program on their computer or smart
phone. Most of us are more likely to take pictures with a digital camera rather than use a
film camera. And more and more of us are likely to look up an address or phone number
online instead of grabbing the White Pages or the Yellow Pages.

These are just a few changes unfolding before our eyes in the media revolution.
I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.

Andy Kessler argues that one of the most important innovations in technology is
Facebook’s “Like” button. He believes that is the major reason the stock for Facebook
has become so valuable. Now I don’t blame you for being skeptical that something as
simple as a “Like” button could have so much impact. So let me explain.

Essentially the button took much of the guesswork out of advertising. Perhaps
you have heard the adage about advertising that goes something like this. Advertisers
know that only half of their ads are effective, but no one knows which half. This is less of
a problem if you are spending a small amount on any ad. But what if you are spending
$3.5 million for a 30-second Super Bowl commercial?

Social media is changing the world. The business model is changing. It used to be
that advertisers would broadcast ads to lots of people, knowing that only some of them
are interested in the product or service. Now more of them are working to entice millions
of people to a particular spot (webpage, Facebook page) and then sell them something
else.

Originally, advertisers didn’t see the value in running an ad next to the pictures
you just posted on Facebook of your birthday party. Then Facebook rolled out the Like
button and that changed everything. Andy Kessler put it this way. “With the Like button,
Facebook is like Bob Eubanks on The Newlywed Game, who promised contestants ‘a
prize chosen especially for you.’” Essentially advertisers can direct an ad that is chosen
especially for you.

Facebook is affecting the way advertising will be done in the future. Consider that
Procter & Gamble announced a layoff of 1,600 people because the company was
trimming its $10 billion annual ad budget. Why? The CEO told analysts that “things like
Facebook and Google” can be “much more efficient.”

This is just a glimpse of the future brought about by the Facebook Like button.
I’m Kerby Anderson, and that’s my point of view.