Robert Brustein, writing in The New Republic, sees a similarity between the speech police on modern university campuses and the Islamic radicals who are killing everyone with whom they disagree.
Burning and banning newspapers is not to be equated with beheading blasphemers or blowing up dissidents. But the same temperament that issues a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses, or threatens Danish cartoonists with death for insulting Islam, animates the American passion, on behalf of political or religious pressure groups, for suppressing offensive speech. People who believe their feelings have been hurt share the same DNA as those who believe their faith has been insulted. Both groups demand or inflict punishment considerably in excess of the original offense.
Freedom of expression is a fragile right, one that is so easily lost in the zeal to defend orthodoxy. We must work tirelessly to safeguard it — and that means tolerating some speech that we find offensive.
U.S. News & World Report gives a fascinating glimpse into the revamped training that is turning out a larger number of Special Operations soldiers. But the military is not sacrificing quality for quantity.
It is a challenging task to quickly expand the country’s most elite units—whose members are carefully chosen and groomed at great expense—without jeopardizing the force’s high mental and physical capabilities. Special operators want to avoid at all cost repeating the Vietnam-era experience in which rapid expansion led to lower standards and a crisis in morale and reputation.
The training includes — in addition to the usual physical, mental, and psychological development — very realistic role playing involving civilians hired to mimic real challenges. In one case involving a “suicide bomber,” the scenario was so realistic that one of the trainees beat up the pretend bad guy.
I’ll bet the career spec ops guys have some real stories to tell about some of their missions.
An article in Popular Science ponders the possibility of space diving — jumping from a craft sixty miles above the earth, and plummeting earthward for several minutes in a specially designed suit, finally parachuting safely to the ground. Researchers working on the idea believe that, with the right equipment, it would be possible for an astronaut to safely dive from full orbit, 150 miles up. Such a plunge would “essentially turn their divers into human meteorites.”
One of those working on this project, Jonathan Clark, has a very personal interest in this idea: his wife Laurel died in the breakup of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.
Never mind the cost of getting up there in the first place — what would this hobby do to your life insurance rates?
The global warming political juggernaut has gained so much momentum in recent years, that anyone who questions it is dismissed as a crank, on the same par with Holocaust deniers. But there are critics out there, with credentials that earn them the right to be heard. Unfortunately, according to Debra Saunders, there is an orchestrated campaign to keep them silent.
Politicians . . . have begun to stifle state climatologists who are not global-warming boosters — oddly with little complaint that evil politicians are trying to censor noble scientists.
On a similar note, Australia’s Quandrant Magazineeditorializes that there are still so many uncertainties about the scope and causes of global warming that we ought to be at least a little skeptical about the rush to embrace “scientific consensus.”
It seems unlikely that a largish number of respectable and well-qualified scientists should be collectively wrong about such an important matter—except that there are very many in this consensus who are not climate experts or experienced in the very difficult art of modelling climate change. (They are comparable to those epidemiologists who confidently make assertions in matters of population and disease without ever having seriously studied statistics and demography.) And there are historical examples of the consensus of qualified scientists being wrong—Thomas Kuhn’s well-known work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the classic discussion of this issue. It is, after all, not so many years since the scientific consensus denied what is now known as the geological reality of tectonic plates.
If you’re not familiar with Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, you should be. Kuhn argues that science progresses in uneven fits and starts, burdened by a lot of prejudicial baggage masquerading as “scientific consensus.” It is often the lone skeptic who is willing to challenge the prevailing wisdom and consider different explanations, who ends up making the breakthrough discoveries.
Kuhn was required reading when I was in graduate school. Given the current politicization of the global warming issue, I wonder if that’s still the case.
One of my all-time Enya favorites is Caribbean Blue. Although I’ll have to admit, I usually have a hard time understanding the visual storyline in a lot of these music videos. Anyway, enjoy the music!
I’m taking off all next week for a solo backpacking trip in Colorado. To get an idea of the territory I’ll be traversing, read this travelogue from a couple who made the trek a few years ago. It’s in the vicinity of Wolf Creek Pass.
Joshua Muravchik speculates in a Wall Street Journal editorial that we are on the brink of a major war in the Middle East. The irrational actions of Syria, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah can only be interpreted as the strutting of tyrants who think they have their enemies on the ropes, and are itching to finish the job.
But the outcome may be predetermined:
Democracies, it is now well established, do not go to war with each other. But they often get into wars with non-democracies. Overwhelmingly the non-democracy starts the war; nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, it is the democratic side that wins. In other words, dictators consistently underestimate the strength of democracies, and democracies provoke war through their love of peace, which the dictators mistake for weakness.
Today, this same dynamic is creating a moment of great danger. The radicals are becoming reckless, asserting themselves for little reason beyond the conviction that they can. They are very likely to overreach. It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which a single match–say a terrible terror attack from Gaza–could ignite a chain reaction. Israel could handle Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, albeit with painful losses all around, but if Iran intervened rather than see its regional assets eliminated, could the U.S. stay out?
A five-acre lake in southern Chile suddenly vanished recently, leaving behind several large chunks of ice that once floated on the water. Scientists believe that a fissure must have opened up under the lake, allowing the water to drain out.
Or maybe global warming is much, much worse than we thought.
A Wall Street Journal editorial notes several examples of reform taking place on college campuses across the country, as students, alumni, parents, and other supporters are pushing back against the radicalism that has run the show for the last few decades.
Colleges and universities have largely brought this stakeholder activism on themselves–when they decided to become instruments of fashionable politics instead of repositories of knowledge.
MSNBC (surprise!) has performed a valuable public service in investigating the political campaign contributions of 144 journalists. Of the 144, all but 17 gave to Democratic or left-leaning organizations or candidates. The investigators not only uncovered the contribution details, but made an effort to interview the journalists and/or their editors to get explanations on how these contributions squared with the their claim of “journalistic objectivity.” The answers (among those who dared to respond) were often embarrassing.
Personally, I really don’t care if journalists give time or cash to political causes. It’s a free country, and they are citizens just like me, so they should be allowed to trumpet whatever cause they want. All I ask for in return is two things:
(1) Don’t lie to me and pretend that you’re an “objective journalist” who “doesn’t take sides.” Everybody takes sides, buddy, so just step up and admit it.
(2) Make more than a token effort to give exposure to other points of view besides your own. Create an atmosphere of truly open and lively debate, and let the viewer/reader learn from the exchange.
It’s not the fact that journalists have biases that bothers people. It’s the haughty, self-righteous — and laughable — claim of impartiality, while closing the door on other points of view, that is so disgusting.
Maybe, just maybe, they’re finally beginning to get the message.
Glenn Reynolds, linking to several other sources, rails against our current political class–Democrat and Republican–so hopelessly out of touch with ordinary Americans. Glenn endorses this assessment from one commentator:
The root problem is a bipartisan inability – or refusal – to adopt policies supported by clear majorities of the American people. Those policies for the most part involve a significantly lower level of government activism, whereas the political class for the most part seeks only a higher level.
While I agree completely that the political class is out of touch with Americans, I don’t think the problem is entirely one-sided. Don’t forget — it is the American voters who put these bozos in power, and keep them there term after term. Read any typical “man on the street” interview of voters trying to size up the candidates, and it’s glaringly obvious they don’t have a clue where the candidates stand on the issues. They don’t even know what the issues are to start with. Instead, they evaluate the candidates on the basis of vague values like “we need change,” or “he feels our pain.” Such mushy criteria can be easily manipulated by well-oiled political machines.
If Americans feel their politicians are out of touch, I suggest they consider the possibility that they themselves are out of touch with how our system of government is supposed to work. Voters who take the time and trouble to educate themselves on what really matters, and hold up candidates against that standard, will elect politicians who share their respect for limited government. Voters who form their opinions on the basis of thirty-second sound bites and water-cooler chit-chat are ill-prepared to elect the kind of leaders our republic needs.
Americans get exactly the political class they deserve — no more, no less.
Actually, it has been the longest day since this time last year — at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere.
June 20-21 is start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere but simultaneously the start of winter in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s also the longest day of sunlight for places in the Northern Hemisphere and the shortest day for cities south of the equator.
Oddly enough, it’s not necessarily the day when the sun rises the earliest or sets the latest. Depending on the latitude, it can rise earlier or set later several days either side of June 21.
Complicated, I know. Read the article to get the whole story.
Here is some interesting information that astronomers are learning about the latest “dwarf planet” in our solar system, Eris. Includes a very blurry photo of the planet and its moon.
A Canadian scientist presents evidence that the greatest threat to our planet over the next several decades is not from global warming, but global cooling, due to the interaction of solar cycles and cosmic rays from deep space. His conclusion:
Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.
BTW, this guy is not some fringe nut case. His credentials are impressive.
According to a recent study from the Culture and Media Institute, heavy viewers of television (four or more hours per day) are more liberal in their political, cultural, and moral outlook than those who watch little or no television. Film critic and commentator Michael Medved goes through the details, then offers some theories why this strong coorelation exists:
People who see themselves as alone in the world, with no network of spouses or fellow congregants, frequently turn to government as a source of support and comfort—just as they’d turn to television as a source of phony companionship. It makes sense that loneliness and helplessness and disconnection would breed both liberalism and heavy TV viewing; just as a vibrant family life, and communal participation, would produce less television and more conservative self-reliance.
This observation certainly holds true in our case. Through most of the years that we were raising our children, we did not have a television in our home. Even now that we have a TV, we rarely watch it. And we’re about as conservative as they come.
Recently we have commented on the increasing militancy of atheists, who have published a number of best-selling books attacking Christianity and promoting the benefits of skepticism (see here and here).
Atheist Karl Reitz has taken his fellow atheists to task, arguing that their campaign to debunk faith could end up opening the door to far more misery than religion has ever created.
Even if the secular authors’ ire is well-justified, we are never going to live in a world in which the vast majority of people don’t have faith in something, whether that something is God or Government. As an atheist I feel much less threatened by someone who is willing to put off perfection by relegating it to another place than I do by someone who thinks they can create it here and now. In other words, I think that the chance that a religion will “poison everything” is indirectly proportional to the length of time the proponents of the religion think it will take to perfect this world. Therefore, nothing scares me more than the demagogue who promises to immediately do just that. Without traditional religion, I think we would have a lot of demagogues in this mold.
According to Advertising Age, CNN is only drawing 383,000 viewers a day on average, actually less than many of the larger blogs.
By comparison, Instapundit averages 190,000 a day. Huffpo gets 600,000 unique visitors every day.
Unfortunately for Glenn Reynolds, he’s getting nowhere near the 400 million in ad revenue CNN is getting for its poor performance.
That kind of revenue disparity is a signal for change. Instapundit’s demographic is almost certainly more interesting than CNN’s which averages nears 60 years old.
I’ve worked in the corporate world long enough now to develop my own cynicism regarding mission statements. Every new re-org or CEO seems to require a new mission statement — while the vast majority of the worker bees just keep on doing their jobs, oblivious to the high-falutin’ corporate mumbo-jumbo being foisted on them by the demigods above them.
So it was with great pleasure that I read this critique on “the plague of mission statements” by Kati Irons.
I wanted to write a piece about funny mission statements, but what I quickly realized is that while almost all mission statements are laughable in some way, they’re rarely funny. A perfect example is the Mission Statement Generator found on Dilbert.com. The idea of the Generator is hysterical. They’ve programmed in every business buzz word you can imagine like “proactively”, “seven-habits conforming”, “empowerment”, and “paradigm shift”, and then the little generator spits out complete mission statements, ready for cutting and pasting into your annual report.
Getting to the bottom line:
If a company really expects their employees to “live” their mission then they need to make a mission statement their employees can actually DO.
It’s about time somebody, er, cracked down on crime.
Police blame a woman named Butts for stealing toilet paper from a central Iowa courthouse, and while they’re chuckling, the theft charge could put her in prison.
“She’s facing potentially three years of incarceration for three rolls of toilet paper,” Chief Lon Walker said, stifling a laugh as he talked to KCCI-TV about Suzanne Marie Butts. “See, I can’t say it with a straight face.”
Unless, of course, a lenient judge wipes her record clean.
Here is a gripping account of the Ranger assault on Pointe-du-Huc, June 6, 1944, told by two men who played a key role in its success. Their mission was to take out a battery of large artillery pieces that would have wreaked havoc on the incoming invasion force.
After two days, only 90 of the original 225 Rangers who had led the assault on Pointe-du-Hoc were still able to man their positions.
A little factoid to make this event more relevant to today’s video generation: This assault is commemorated in the popular first-person shooter game, Call of Duty 2.
Like most other states these days, Kansas has taken the plunge into casino gambling. The casinos haven’t been built yet, but officials are already getting worried about the rise in the number of gambling addicts they know will soon follow.
A 2004 study by GVC Marquette for the Wichita Downtown Development Corp. concluded that a Wichita casino could produce 5,200 to 7,800 pathological gamblers within 50 miles of the city.
According to Duane Olberding, clinical coordinator at the Recovery Center at St. Francis Health Center in Topeka and past president of the Kansas Coalition on Problem Gambling, the state will need a significant increase in the number of counselors to deal with the social problems created by more accessible gambling venues.
“For one thing there’s a high probability of suicide, so you have to be monitoring that all the time,” he said. “A lot of crisis intervention is done, bringing family in, getting the patient off credit cards and bank accounts. And you have to know about the law because they’re usually in legal trouble.”
Cases exist in Kansas where addiction to gambling has led to murder, embezzlement and many other crimes.
Bankruptcies, lost job productivity, spousal and child abuse are other costs to society, counselors said.
If the state already knows that increased gambling will have this kind of negative impact on its citizens, then why is it actively promoting it? States used to outlaw this sort of activity precisely because of these deleterious effects. Now it officially sanctions it? I don’t get it.
Of course, the state is merely responding to the wishes of a sizable element of the electorate who love to play the slots and tables. In the end, no amount of legislation is going to prevent the people from doing what they want to do.
It’s a sad commentary on the condition of our national psyche.
Victor Davis Hanson recounts some of the blunders, foul-ups, oversights, and general incompetence that accompanied the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day and its aftermath, mistakes that cost thousands of lives. He draws a lesson for those who can’t stomach the current conflict.
The Normandy campaign reminds us that war is by nature horrific, fraught with foolish error – and only won by the side that commits the least number of mistakes. Our grandfathers knew that. So they pressed on as best they could, convinced that they needn’t be perfect, only good enough, to win.
The American lesson of D-Day and its aftermath was how to overcome occasional abject stupidity while never giving up in the face of an utterly savage enemy. We need to remember that now more than ever.
Sixty-three years ago, the largest invasion force in history crossed the English Channel and stormed Fortress Europe. Kerry Byrne offers a stirring memorial to the men who accomplished that feat.
He adds this side-note regarding today’s flippant use of the pejorative “Nazi”:
It’s become trendy in recent years to compare certain American politicians to Nazis. But show me the ovens, the gas chambers or the factories where the skins of ethnic minorities are turned into lampshades and maybe we can talk. Otherwise, zip it, donkey.
I had an uncle who went ashore on D-Day, was promptly captured, and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. My hat goes off to him and all the others who sacrificed so much to defeat tyranny — and to those who are still sacrificing today.
Byrne concludes:
It’s amazing what can be done, and how quickly it can be done, when the nation’s very survival is at stake, and when the nation is united.
Sadly, a condition that we can’t seem to grasp today.
Robert Blechman offers this commentary on Jay Rosen’s web article, “A Blog is a Little First Amendment Machine”:
Blogging reverses the media flow from “one to many” into “many to one.” Blogging in the future may also incorporate aspects of video conferencing, with real time content delivery and response. This ability will allow the blogging information commons to emulate the give-and-take environment that Postman lauds in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Conversations won’t be limited to 30 or 60 minute timeslots, and all participants will have the ability to post questions and get responses. Instant recall of any video or audio piece from the internet “memory well” will hold speakers accountable for what they say and do and what they have said and have done.
As a blogger myself, I heartily agree with Rosen’s assessment. The main stream media doesn’t know what’s hitting them and when their reading and viewing public disappears almost entirely, they will still be scratching their heads in consternation and wonder.
The Wichita State Shockers have won their regional tournament, fighting back from an opening loss to win four straight, including the final two over Arizona.
Playing at home in front of wildly partisan sell-out crowds helped.
Next up: UC-Irvine in a super-regional this weekend, also here in Wichita. Already sold out.
