Jul 26, 2014 | Politics, Sci-Tech
From To make elite schools ‘fair,’ city will punish poor Asians | New York Post:
New York’s specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant and the equally storied Bronx High School of Science, along with Brooklyn Technical High School and five smaller schools, have produced 14 Nobel laureates — more than most countries.
For more than 70 years, admission to these schools has been based upon a competitive examination of math, verbal and logical reasoning skills. In 1971, the state legislature, heading off city efforts to scrap the merit selection test as culturally biased against minorities, reaffirmed that admission to the schools be based on the competitive exam.
But now, troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil-rights complaint challenging the admissions process. A bill in Albany to eliminate the test requirement has garnered the support of Sheldon Silver, the powerful Assembly speaker.
And new Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son, Dante, attends Brooklyn Tech, has called for changing the admissions criteria. The mayor argues that relying solely on the test creates a “rich-get-richer” dynamic that benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive test preparation.
As Ting’s story illustrates, however, the reality is just the opposite. It’s not affluent whites, but rather the city’s burgeoning population of Asian-American immigrants — a group that, despite its successes, remains disproportionately poor and working-class — whose children have aced the exam in overwhelming numbers.
And, ironically, the more “holistic” and subjective admissions criteria that de Blasio and the NAACP favor would be much more likely to benefit children of the city’s professional elite than African-American and Latino applicants — while penalizing lower-middle-class Asian-American kids like Ting. The result would not be a specialized high school student body that “looks like New York,” but rather one that looks more like Bill de Blasio’s upscale Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Ironic?
To modern “progressive” elites, though, the story is intolerable, starting with the hard work. These liberal elites seem particularly troubled by the Asian-American work ethic and the difficult questions that it raises about the role of culture in group success.
While the advancement of Asian students has come overwhelmingly at the expense of more affluent whites, it has also had an undeniable impact on black and Latino students, whose foothold at these schools, small to begin with, has all but vanished.
[…]
Subjective selection criteria also inevitably favor the affluent and connected — as a comptroller’s audit of the screened-school admissions process revealed. The study found that most of the schools examined did not follow their stated selection criteria and could not explain the criteria that they actually did use.
[…]
Critics of the SHSAT will reply that something must be done about declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the specialized high schools. The answer, however, can never be to lower objective standards.
Adopting this cynical approach would do no favors for black and Latino children, while opening the door to discrimination against Asian kids like Ting. It is not the specialized schools’ emphasis on merit, but rather the advocates’ defeatist worldview that is truly — and tragically — wrongheaded.
Jul 25, 2014 | Politics
From Israel must be permitted to crush Hamas – The Washington Post:
“Life in Gaza is miserable now, but if Israel is permitted to prevail, circumstances can improve markedly. U.S.- and Canadian-trained security forces of the Palestinian Authority can take over key crossings and patrol Gaza’s porous border with Egypt. Rather than be funneled into Hamas’s war chest, international aid can be transferred directly to the civilian population to repair war damage and stimulate economic growth. Terrorist groups and their state patrons …can be put on notice: The game has changed unalterably.
And by letting Israel regain its security with regard to Gaza — with all the pain it entails — the United States and its allies will be safeguarding their own. Though bitter, the fighting between Israel and Hamas raging in Gaza’s alleyways is merely part of the far vaster struggle between rational nations and the al-Qaeda and Islamic State-like forces seeking their destruction. Relative to that global conflict, Operation Protective Edge may seem small, but it is nevertheless pivotal. To ensure that it concludes with a categorical Israeli win is in the world’s fundamental interest. To guarantee peace, this war must be given a chance.”
Jul 21, 2014 | Politics
MZJ Music is proud to present the world premiere of the BOSTON TEA PARTY OPERA at the 18th annual New York International Fringe Festival – FringeNYC, a production of The Present Company:
New love blooms – and old loyalty dies,
as Sam Adams leads a rebellion
against an Empire’s high taxes, heavy-handedness and invasions of privacy.
A mythic, modern version of the moment Americans discovered their identity as a people.
This epic but accessible music-drama rides the line between traditional opera and modern musical theater. The show features an interracial cast, and touches upon the controversial yet ever-evolving meaning of the term “Tea Party.” The Boston Tea Party Opera invites the audience to compare the patterns of injustice and oppression suffered by the American colonists leading up to the Revolutionary War—and similar patterns unfolding in America today. The comical and satirical elements of the show are directed not at the scrappy Americans, but at those who kneel to the King’s Empire.
Portions of the show were recently presented at StageFest 2014 in Jersey City, and at the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum in Boston.
The show is created and directed by Matthew Zachary Johnson, faculty at Mannes College the New School for Music. Johnson is the composer of a body of often-performed works for saxophone, including Scherzo, Grand Sonata, and the instrumental soliloquy Serenade. According to About.com classical guide Aaron Green, “If this is the direction classical music is heading, well, I’d say the future will be full of wonderful music.”
Choreography is a significant part of the show, with poetic gestural dance used to communicate the major events including the Boston Massacre and the culminating Tea Party itself. Choreographer Karen Gayle—an alum of Toronto Dance Theater and Alvin Ailey American Dance Center—serves on the faculty at Steps on Broadway, Ballet Hispanico, and the New Dance Group. She is also the choreographer and host of Deante Dance, a series of modern dance based fitness videos, and Street Fusion, an instructional street jazz and hip hop DVD.
The Boston Tea Party Opera will be premiering at: Venue #13: Sheen Center – THE LORETTO, 18 Bleecker St (at Elizabeth). Show Times: Sat 8/9 @ 8:15pm – opening night! Wed 8/13 @ 4:15pm (talk back following this performance); Sat 8/16 @ Noon; Mon 8/18 @ 4:45pm; Fri 8/22 @ 5:15pm. Tickets: $18 on sale starting July 18. For tickets visit www.FringeNYC.org. For more information about the show, go to www.bostonteapartyopera.com
Jun 24, 2014 | Sci-Tech
From Your Guide To The Best (And Worst) Sleep Positions:
Jun 13, 2014 | Politics
From IRS Claims to Have Lost Over 2 Years of Lerner Emails | House Committee on Ways & Means:
Washington, DC – Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) issued the following statement regarding the Internal Revenue Service informing the Committee that they have lost Lois Lerner emails from a period of January 2009 – April 2011. Due to a supposed computer crash, the agency only has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame. The IRS claims it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.
“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to Congressional inquiries. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General.
“Just a short time ago, Commissioner Koskinen promised to produce all Lerner documents. It appears now that was an empty promise. Frankly, these are the critical years of the targeting of conservative groups that could explain who knew what when, and what, if any, coordination there was between agencies. Instead, because of this loss of documents, we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone. This failure of the IRS requires the White House, which promised to get to the bottom of this, to do an Administration-wide search and production of any emails to or from Lois Lerner. The Administration has repeatedly referred us back to the IRS for production of materials. It is clear that is wholly insufficient when it comes to determining the full scope of the violation of taxpayer rights.”
Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr., M.D. (R-LA) added, “In the course of the Committee’s investigation, the Administration repeatedly claimed we were getting access to all relevant IRS documents. Only now – thirteen months into the investigation – the IRS reveals that key emails from the time of the targeting have been lost. And they bury that fact deep in an unrelated letter on a Friday afternoon. In that same letter, they urge Congress to end the investigations into IRS wrongdoing. This is not the transparency promised to the American people. If there is no smidgeon of corruption what is the Administration hiding?”
More like deleted.
I wonder what would happen if a citizen told the IRS that all their records were lost in a computer crash? Shame the IRS never heard of making backups. Perhaps they used the computer consultants in charge of running the Obamacare website. Or, perhaps the NSA will have them!
Jun 12, 2014 | Politics
From US spy agencies heard Benghazi attackers using State Dept. cell phones to call terrorist leaders | Fox News:
The terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 used cell phones, seized from State Department personnel during the attacks, and U.S. spy agencies overheard them contacting more senior terrorist leaders to report on the success of the operation, multiple sources confirmed to Fox News.
The disclosure is important because it adds to the body of evidence establishing that senior U.S. officials in the Obama administration knew early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and not a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video that had gone awry, as the administration claimed for several weeks after the attacks.
Eric Stahl, who recently retired as a major in the U.S. Air Force, served as commander and pilot of the C-17 aircraft that was used to transport the corpses of the four casualties from the Benghazi attacks – then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods – as well as the assault’s survivors from Tripoli to the safety of an American military base in Ramstein, Germany.
In an exclusive interview on Fox News’ “Special Report,” Stahl said members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff who raced to the scene of the attacks were “confused” by the administration’s repeated implication of the video as a trigger for the attacks, because “they knew during the attack…who was doing the attacking.” Asked how, Stahl told anchor Bret Baier: “Right after they left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the [CIA] safehouse, they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers’ higher ups.”
[…]
Stahl also contended that given his crew’s alert status and location, they could have reached Benghazi in time to have played a role in rescuing the victims of the assault, and ferrying them to safety in Germany, had they been asked to do so. “We were on a 45-day deployment to Ramstein air base,” he told Fox News. “And we were there basically to pick up priority missions, last-minute missions that needed to be accomplished.”
“You would’ve thought that we would have had a little bit more of an alert posture on 9/11,” Stahl added. “A hurried-up timeline probably would take us [an] hour-and-a-half to get off the ground and three hours and fifteen minutes to get down there. So we could’ve gone down there and gotten them easily.”
Jun 12, 2014 | Politics
Claudio Caluori blazes down the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup track in Fort William, Scotland. Watch as he rides through the Scottish Countryside, boosting off big jumps and flying down some gorgeous single track!
Jun 12, 2014 | Education
Writes Campbell Brown in A historic victory for America’s kids – NY Daily News on the Vergara v. California decision:
The case began with courageous students, because they had to endure the nightmare: grossly incompetent teachers, mainly in poor and minority schools, protected by state laws. And when the court ruling thundered down Tuesday, the impact was profoundly clear: Students, you win.
[…] Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu said the evidence of the deleterious effect of ineffective teachers on students is so compelling that it “shocks the conscience” — a line that instantly gave voice to countless parents.The court found that the nine student plaintiffs and their team had proven both of their points. One, that California’s laws directly cause students to be unreasonably exposed to grossly ineffective teachers. And two, that poor and minority students, in particular, are saddled with those teachers. The ruling was so complete that the judge declared every state law in question unconstitutional:
–California teachers are permitted to earn lifetime employment after a mere 18 months in class, well before they could truly earn that status or even be properly evaluated for it. The upshot, said the judge, is that “both students and teachers are unfairly, unnecessarily and for no legally cognizable reasons (let alone a compelling one) disadvantaged.”
-The dismissal process for grossly ineffective teachers in California is so complex and costly that it does not work; many districts do not even bother trying. That leaves thousands of underperforming teachers knowingly remaining in front of students. The judge blasted the system as so problematic that it turned dismissal into an illusion.
-California’s “last-in, first-out” law gives top priority in a time of layoffs to ineffective teachers if they have seniority while better teachers with fewer years are sent packing. The judge called that a lose-lose situation, supported by logic that was “unfathomable.”
[…]
It should never have come to this: Students taking on the powerful governments and teachers unions, all to challenge laws that inexplicably and directly lead to a worse public education.
Jun 12, 2014 | Education
Writes Campbell Brown in A historic victory for America’s kids – NY Daily News on the Vergara v. California decision:
The case began with courageous students, because they had to endure the nightmare: grossly incompetent teachers, mainly in poor and minority schools, protected by state laws. And when the court ruling thundered down Tuesday, the impact was profoundly clear: Students, you win.
[…] Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu said the evidence of the deleterious effect of ineffective teachers on students is so compelling that it “shocks the conscience” — a line that instantly gave voice to countless parents.The court found that the nine student plaintiffs and their team had proven both of their points. One, that California’s laws directly cause students to be unreasonably exposed to grossly ineffective teachers. And two, that poor and minority students, in particular, are saddled with those teachers. The ruling was so complete that the judge declared every state law in question unconstitutional:
–California teachers are permitted to earn lifetime employment after a mere 18 months in class, well before they could truly earn that status or even be properly evaluated for it. The upshot, said the judge, is that “both students and teachers are unfairly, unnecessarily and for no legally cognizable reasons (let alone a compelling one) disadvantaged.”
-The dismissal process for grossly ineffective teachers in California is so complex and costly that it does not work; many districts do not even bother trying. That leaves thousands of underperforming teachers knowingly remaining in front of students. The judge blasted the system as so problematic that it turned dismissal into an illusion.
-California’s “last-in, first-out” law gives top priority in a time of layoffs to ineffective teachers if they have seniority while better teachers with fewer years are sent packing. The judge called that a lose-lose situation, supported by logic that was “unfathomable.”
[…]
It should never have come to this: Students taking on the powerful governments and teachers unions, all to challenge laws that inexplicably and directly lead to a worse public education.
Jun 10, 2014 | Education
From Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer: The Myth of the Climate Change ‘97%’ – WSJ:
Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists,” he added, “tell us this is urgent.”
Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.”
Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.
One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.
Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” but left out “dangerous”—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.
[…]
In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.
Mr. Cook’s work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found “only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.
[…]
There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.
Jun 5, 2014 | Philosophy
Elmo the Dog is a Chihuahua and a Staffy mix. He is also a little greedy…
Jun 3, 2014 | Politics
From Objectivist Summer Conference:
Due to high demand, we are expanding Young Adult pricing to include full-time students of any age. With this pricing, you’ll get access to all the talks and panels offered at OCON 2014 for only $15 a day! Just make sure you have a valid student I.D. with you when checking in at the conference.
Jun 3, 2014 | Politics
Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden would not get a fair trial – and Kerry is wrong | Comment is free | theguardian.com
As Snowden told Brian Williams on NBC later that night and Snowden’s lawyer told me the next morning, he would have no chance whatsoever to come home and make his case – in public or in court.
Snowden would come back home to a jail cell – and not just an ordinary cell-block but isolation in solitary confinement, not just for months like Chelsea Manning but for the rest of his sentence, and probably the rest of his life. His legal adviser, Ben Wizner, told me that he estimates Snowden’s chance of being allowed out on bail as zero. (I was out on bond, speaking against the Vietnam war, the whole 23 months I was under indictment).
More importantly, the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing. Legal scholars have strongly argued that the US supreme court – which has never yet addressed the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the American public – should find the use of it overbroad and unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense. The Espionage Act, as applied to whistleblowers, violates the First Amendment, is what they’re saying.
[…]
John Kerry’s challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry’s slanderous and despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Jun 3, 2014 | Politics
Today’s letters: My life, my choice how to end it | National Post
Absolutely yes — because the only proper function of government is to protect individual rights, and one’s right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness logically implies the right to end one’s own life if one no longer wants to live, or else freely contract someone to do so (assuming one is an adult when such a right would kick in). The religious enemies of individual rights believe one’s life belongs to a mystical entity and thus one should endure unbearable pain until this entity allegedly decides when one’s life should end, which is irrational and immoral. — Glenn Woiceshyn, Calgary.
Jun 1, 2014 | Philosophy
Dance battle between Monfils and Lokoli at French Open Roland Garros
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AO3IQtW8Dlc%3Frel%3D0
May 31, 2014 | Culture
Dr. Brian P. Simpson, author of Markets Don’t Fail! (Lexington Books, 2005) and an economist at National University in San Diego, CA, has written a new book on the business cycle and a free monetary and banking system. The book shows how government interference—particularly in the monetary and banking system—causes the business cycle, including the recessions, depressions, and financial crises that are a part of it. The book also shows how establishing a free market in money and banking can virtually eliminate the business cycle.
This book is a major contribution to the monetary, banking, and business cycle literature. It builds on the business cycle theory developed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. The two-volume book is published by Palgrave Macmillan and is titled Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle, with subtitles of Integrating Theory and Practice for volume one and Remedies and Alternative Theories for volume two. Volume one was published in April. Volume two is due out in July.
Part one of volume one shows how manipulations of the supply of money and credit by the government are the primary cause of the cycle. Part two applies the theory to over 100 years of U.S. history to illustrate the explanatory power of the theory. The author uses extensive quantities of data to make his case, including data for interest rates, the rate of profit in the economy, the money supply, the velocity of money, industrial production, GDP/GNP, gross national revenue (a more comprehensive measure of spending and output than GDP/GNP), and more. He shows how the theory explains the Great Depression, the Great Recession, the recession of the early 1980s, and all episodes of the cycle in the U.S. since 1900. In addition, he goes back to 18th century France and the Mississippi Bubble to demonstrate the explanatory power of the theory.
Part one of volume two critiques alternative theories of the cycle, including Keynes’s theories of depressions and fluctuations, Keynesian “sticky” price and wage theory, and real business cycle theory. Part two shows what a free market in money and banking would look like, provides an outline to transition to a free market in money and banking, and gives a detailed explanation of why it would lead to greater stability in the monetary and banking system and raise the rate of economic progress in the economy.
Here are links to the two volumes:
Volume 1: http://us.macmillan.com/moneybankingandthebusinesscycle/BrianPSimpson
Volume 2: http://us.macmillan.com/moneybankingandthebusinesscycle-1/BrianPSimpson
It is also available at Amazon at a discounted price.
Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle: Volume I: Integrating Theory and Practice: 1
Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle: Volume II: Remedies and Alternative Theories
The book is highly recommended for anyone interested in free-market ideas or monetary, banking, and business cycle theory. Economics professors will find both volumes excellent for courses on “macroeconomics,” money and banking, Austrian economics, or the business cycle. Both volumes would also be great additions to the collections of university libraries and libraries of free-market institutions.
May 31, 2014 | Philosophy, Politics
by Michael Hurd
Should courts excuse Muslim men who beat up their wives on account of freedom of religious practices and beliefs? Do religious and cultural “sensitivity” count more than individual rights?
It seems incredible that we even must consider such questions, but the indiscriminate, unthinking tolerance of our times has brought us here.
Consider this most recent news headline:
NYC Muslim Beats Wife to Death, Lawyer says Beating Women is “Customary” in his Culture.
The story reports:
A Pakistani immigrant beat his wife to death in their Brooklyn home after she made the mistake of cooking him lentils for dinner instead of the hearty meal of goat meat that he craved, according to court papers.
Noor Hussain, 75, was so outraged over the vegetarian fare that he pummeled his wife, Nazar Hussain, 66, with a stick until she was a “bloody mess,” according to prosecutors and court papers.
Defense attorney Julie Clark admitted Hussain beat his wife — but argued that he is guilty of only manslaughter because he didn’t intend to kill her. In Pakistan, Clark said, beating one’s wife is customary.
“He comes from a culture where he thinks this is appropriate conduct, where he can hit his wife,” Clark said in her opening statements at the Brooklyn Supreme Court bench trial. “He culturally believed he had the right to hit his wife and discipline his wife.” [Source: Daniel Greenfield, FrontPageMag.com 5-23-14]
This is what happens when you erase the concepts “right,” “wrong” and objective from your conceptual vocabulary.
If it’s true that there’s no such thing as right or wrong, then we have no standard for making a law in the first place. You cannot protect people’s “rights” unless you first establish — and choose to stand by — some concept of “right” (and “wrong”) in the first place.
The defense attorney in this case is saying, “There’s no legitimate or objective basis for claiming this man’s religion or cultural tradition is any better or worse than any other.” If his religion says it’s OK to beat up his wife, rape her, hold her hostage, or anything else he feels like doing — well, who are we to judge otherwise? And if his religion teaches this is OK, then we have to change the law because it’s his religion. So we’ll have a double standard for people who practice this irrational religion in favor of those who do not. Oops — we’re not supposed to call one’s religion (at least not a politically correct one, such as Islam) “irrational,” because that’s rude, mean and judgmental.
By the way, what does it mean to “culturally believe” something as opposed to merely “believe” it? Are we so divorced from responsibility for the content of our own minds, thoughts and emotions that we can now claim (at least if we’re Muslim) that our culture (i.e. millions of other people) literally do our thinking for us?
Sooner or later, rotten ideas come home to roost. Subjectivists in psychology and its parent field, philosophy, have made this claim for decades: What’s true for you isn’t true for me. They’re not just talking about legitimate options and preferences; they’re talking about everything. Physical abuse, rape, torture, initiation of violence? Well, if that’s all you know, or if that’s how you were raised, it’s an excuse for whatever you do.
According to this ideological view: The fact that each of us has our own mind proves that there’s no one reality, no provably correct right or wrong, not in any context. Here you have it, now playing out in courts we’re counting on to protect us from brute force initiated by others.
You can laugh at philosophy as well as psychology, and claim these fields have no relevance to your daily life. But conclusions in these areas have life or death meaning for what government will do or not do to you; or permit done to you.
Oddly silent in all this are the feminists and other opponents of domestic violence against women. Will Hillary Clinton come out against this? Not if it offends Muslims. Will our current president, Barack Obama? This man loves Islam. This is the man who once said, “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
Seriously, Barack? Try living for five minutes under Sharia (Islamic) law, and see how much overlap you will find between that and America.
OK, you’ve got your cultural sensitivity. You’ve got your diversity for its own sake, and you’ve got the emotional sense that, “I’m compassionate, I don’t judge anybody else ever, not for any reason. Now people can like me. Look at what a sensitive, gentle and completely non-judgmental human being I am.” It has been my observation that people who claim to uphold these views don’t necessarily mean them, but badly want to be seen as meaning them. A tiny number of intellectuals and judicial officials actually do hold these incredibly insane viewpoints, and they’re paving the way to death and destruction throughout the free world, so long as the rest of us remain silent and/or stupid.
You can’t have your justice and eat it too. You can’t claim that Sharia law — the Muslim approach to “justice” which upholds such atrocities as this Brooklyn defense — is morally equivalent to, or “overlaps” the American, individual rights-based approach to justice. In areas of differing principles, you have to choose one, or the other, but not both.
So what’s your choice?
May 31, 2014 | Sci-Tech
Solar power is pretty awesome — when its use is determined by free minds in a free-market.
However…
Why The Solar Roadway Is A Terrible Idea
COST
Solar Roadways seem to take the problem of generating solar power, and put it into conditions that maximize cost.
[…]
I may have missed a few points. Read this.
Those solar-panel-covered shade structures that are popping up in church parking lots all over Tucson are looking smarter by the minute. The solar panels are mass-produced in China for a couple dollars a watt, and the structures are simple cantilevered steel I-beam ramadas. No fancy computers are needed, no worries about damage from tires, no hacking into can happen, and they are not blocked by pedestrians, cars, trees or buses.
Save your $5 for a good cause.
Under capitalism, in the “long run”, it is the rational decisions that eventually win. If people wish to put their own money into making roads solar, that is their right. Not a smart choice given the present context; but their choice none the less.
