Dr Paul Allen

The Dark Knight Rises (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The shooting at the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises will be blamed on many things. One reporter blamed it on violence in movies. Certainly, violence in movies, television, and video games has had a tremendous impact on society. More than 500,000 studies, capped by the latest Dartmouth University study, show that violence in the media influences susceptible youths to commit violence. That said, most people are not susceptible. Most are just desensitized or scared. Another reporter blamed it specifically on the Batman movies . Yet, The Dark Knight Rises is nowhere near as violent as the last Batman movie, and Batman himself tells Catwoman not to shoot to kill in The Dark Knight Rises. The message of The Dark Knight Rises is justice and self-sacrifice. The villains and the killers in the movie are the 'socialist left-wing Occupy Wall Street power to the people' villain Bane and his compatriots, who are clearly sh...

Image via Wikipedia A sign flashed at the Occupy Wall Street protest reads "People Before Profits." It is an effective sign. Who could support Profits Before People? Some Wall Street employees have apparently responded sympathetically to the protestors, trying to understand their demands. But part of the power of the protest lies in its ambiguity. Americans are angry about many issues today. In such a climate it may be more strategic to focus on the common anger than on specificities. The protests are centered on Wall Street because they target political corruption in the finance industry. But the world of finance is very complex. Part of the problem is that it became too complex, so complex that even the financiers themselves couldn't understand the implications or robustness of the financial derivatives they were trading, or even how to properly price them. (They seemed to be particularly challenged with pricing derivatives of sub-prime mortgages.) The problems with...