May 23, 2014 | Philosophy
Imagine if NYC was deserted by everyone who lived there and it was taken over by nature? What would it look like?https://youtube.com/watch?v=WYf2c-b-iuQ%3FBBC has an awesome photo series by Christopher Payne produced by Michael Maher on this...It's one of New York's best kept secrets. Lying in plain sight of the city is an island which no one has inhabited for more than 50 years. North Brother Island was once a quarantine station for patients with infectious diseases. It then provided accommodation for returning World War Two veterans and finally was a rehabilitation centre for drug-addicted youths. But in 1963 the complex was shut down and abandoned. Left behind was a campus of buildings, many of which have now been reclaimed by vegetation and nesting birds.The photographer Christopher Payne was granted rare permission to visit the island over the course of a number of years. His images are now on display in the book: "North Brother Island. The Last Unknown Place in New York City.''
May 21, 2014 | Politics
Courtesy of Nick Gillespie at Reason.com:
The Daily Beast's Eli Lake reports that Libya, the site of an American-enabled kinetic-action-lead-from-behind-super-duper NATO triumph that somehow led to U.S. Amb. Chris Stevens being croaked by really irate YouTube consumers, is now packed with more domestic terrorists than your neighborhood Tea Party HQ:
In the nearly 20 months since the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks, al Qaeda operatives and allied terrorists have flocked to Libya, making the fragile North African country a hub for those seeking to wage jihad from north Africa, current and former U.S. counterterrorism officials tell The Daily Beast.Not only does al Qaeda host Ansar al-Sharia, one of the militias responsible for the Benghazi attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. But U.S. intelligence now assesses that leaders from at least three regional al Qaeda affiliates—al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and members of the organization of Al-Mulathameen Brigade loyal to Algerian terrorist, Mokhtar BelMokhtar—have all established havens in the lawless regions of Libya outside the control of the central government.One U.S. military contractor working on counter-terrorism in Africa summed up the situation in Libya today as simply, “Scumbag Woodstock.” The country has attracted that star-studded roster of notorious terrorists and fanatics seeking to wage war on the West.
The piece provides additional insight on how the events in Benghazi reveal the abysmal lack of a sound foreign policy. You can read the whole thing here.
May 21, 2014 | Politics
The Wall Street Journal published a piece by Caleb Rossiter titled, "Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change." The author, a self-admitted leftist, concedes that today's environmental movement is no longer concerned with global warming...er...climate change, but rather de-industrialization at any cost. He notes the substantial role electricity and fossil fuels have played in making life on Earth happier, longer, and healthier, but the author also reveals the inherent contempt for humanity within the environmental movement. In this regard, Rossiter could not have picked a better title for the piece...
Every year environmental groups celebrate a night when institutions in developed countries (including my own university) turn off their lights as a protest against fossil fuels. They say their goal is to get America and Europe to look from space like Africa: dark, because of minimal energy use.But that is the opposite of what's desired by Africans I know. They want Africa at night to look like the developed world, with lights in every little village and with healthy people, living longer lives, sitting by those lights. Real years added to real lives should trump the minimal impact that African carbon emissions could have on a theoretical catastrophe.
You can read the whole thing here.
May 5, 2014 | Sci-Tech
Paul Mulshine at the Star Ledger on Freeman Dyson:
Freeman Dyson is a physicist who has been teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since Albert Einstein was there. When Einstein died in 1955, there was an opening for the title of "most brilliant physicist on the planet." Dyson has filled it.[...] in the late 1970s, he got involved with early research on climate change at the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn.That research, which involved scientists from many disciplines, was based on experimentation. The scientists studied such questions as how atmospheric carbon dioxide interacts with plant life and the role of clouds in warming.But that approach lost out to the computer-modeling approach favored by climate scientists. And that approach was flawed from the beginning, Dyson said."I just think they don’t understand the climate," he said of climatologists. "Their computer models are full of fudge factors."
[...]Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models was borne out by recent reports of a study by Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Great Britain that showed global temperatures were flat between 2000 and 2010 — even though we humans poured record amounts of CO-2 into the atmosphere during that decade.That was vindication for a man who was termed "a civil heretic" in a New York Times Magazine article on his contrarian views. Dyson embraces that label, with its implication that what he opposes is a religious movement. So does his fellow Princeton physicist and fellow skeptic, William Happer."There are people who just need a cause that’s bigger than themselves," said Happer. "Then they can feel virtuous and say other people are not virtuous."To show how uncivil this crowd can get, Happer e-mailed me an article about an Australian professor who proposes — quite seriously — the death penalty for heretics such as Dyson. As did Galileo, they can get a reprieve if they recant.
[...]In fact, there’s more solid evidence for the beneficial effects of CO-2 than the negative effects, he said. So why does the public hear only one side of this debate? Because the media do an awful job of reporting it.
[...]The problem, said Dyson, is that the consensus is based on those computer models. Computers are great for analyzing what happened in the past, he said, but not so good at figuring out what will happen in the future. But a lot of scientists have built their careers on them. Hence the hatred for dissenters. [Climatologists are no Einsteins, says his successor | NJ.com]
Apr 23, 2014 | Politics, Sci-Tech
From NBC News:Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the "composted" body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and '70s by taking on the role of a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie. With his long beard and gap-toothed smile, Einhorn — who nicknamed himself "Unicorn" because his German-Jewish last name translates to "one horn" —advocated flower power, peace and free love to his fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. He also claimed to have helped found Earth Day.But the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark side. When his girlfriend of five years, Helen "Holly" Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn't come back to pick them up.[...]Although Einhorn was only the master of ceremonies at the first Earth Day event, he maintains that Earth Day was his idea and that he's responsible for launching it. Understandably, Earth Day's organizers have distanced themselves from his name, citing Gaylord Nelson, an environmental activist and former Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator who died in 2005, as Earth Day's official founder and organizer. [Remy Melina, Earth Day leader killed, composted girlfriend - LiveScience | NBC News]
Apr 19, 2014 | Politics
Bundy and the Rule of Law | National Review Online
Cliven Bundy is in the wrong. He is nevertheless a sympathetic figure, and the concerns raised by the standoff in Nevada transcend the illegality of his conduct.[...]Lincoln’s speech [addressing Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln defended his suspension of the writ] does justify law-breaking in extraordinary circumstances. I’d construe his argument as follows: Even if what I have done is unlawful, it was necessary because it was done for the higher purpose of preserving the system that protects our liberties—under dire circumstances where violating the law was more faithful to the Constitution than obeying it would have been.[...]The underlying assumption of our belief in the rule of law is that we are talking about law in the American tradition: provisions that obligate everyone equally and that are enforced dispassionately by a chief executive who takes seriously the constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully. The rule of law is not the whim of a man who himself serially violates the laws he finds inconvenient and who, under a distortion of the “prosecutorial discretion” doctrine, gives a pass to his favored constituencies while punishing his opposition. The rule of law is the orderly foundation of our free society; when it devolves into a vexatious process by which ideologues wielding power undertake to tame those whose activities they disfavor, it is not the rule of law anymore.The legitimacy of law and our commitment to uphold it hinge on our sense that the law and its execution are just. As John Hinderaker points out, concerns about the desert tortoise—the predicate for taking lawful action against Nevada ranchers under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—turn out to be pretextual. The ideologues who run the government only want to enforce the ESA against a disfavored class, the ranchers.If you’re a well-connected Democrat who needs similar land for a solar project, the Obama administration will not only refrain from enforcing the ESA against you; it will transport the tortoises to the ranchers’ location in order to manufacture a better pretext for using the law to harass the ranchers.When law becomes a politicized weapon rather than a reflection of society’s shared principles, one can no longer expect it to be revered in a manner befitting “political religion.” And when the officials trusted to execute law faithfully violate laws regularly, they lose their presumption of legitimacy. Much of the public is not going to see the Feds versus Bundy as the Law versus the Outlaw; we are more apt to see it as the Bully versus the Small Fry.
Apr 13, 2014 | Politics
Rob Lowe on the Problems With Being Pretty - NYTimes.com
You’ve compared loyalty to a political party to recreational drug use. You’ve been sober for several years now, so what did you mean by that? I find them both highly overrated. Each day another state makes it O.K. for my 18-year-old — any 18-year-old — to go and buy pot like he’s buying a Pepsi-Cola, and so let’s face it: In the United States, recreational drug use is sort of acceptable. Belonging to one party is acceptable. But my days of just ticking the party box are long over. I judge the candidates for who they are.
So what do you believe? My thing is personal freedoms, freedoms for the individual to love whom they want, do with what they want. In fact, I want the government out of almost everything.
Apr 11, 2014 | Politics
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Here's What I Would Have Said at Brandeis - WSJ.com
The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect.So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.
Apr 11, 2014 | Politics
Jimmy Fallon's Surprising Centrist Style - The Daily Beast
From slow jamming the news with Obama to playing musical instruments with Palin, Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show has become the late night destination for red and blue alike.
[...]
When Jimmy Fallon took over six weeks ago, the fear was he would join the chorus and pick a side—one that skews younger and more liberal—thereby closing the only avenue conservative politicians trust to appear on in the late night realm. But Fallon and those advising him are far too savvy and smart for that line of thinking. The new Tonight Show host—who has gotten off to as good a start as anyone could have imagined—has embraced the Johnny Carson mantra of being an equal opportunity offender in an effort to not potentially alienate half his audience.
[...] what Jimmy Fallon has accomplished in terms of political perception is nothing short of amazing: Being embraced by members of both parties as a non-political, non-partisan host who can make even the most polarizing politician appealing—funny, in some cases—even to his or her biggest detractors.
In the nasty world of Letterman/Stewart/Colbert -- Jimmy Fallon, like Johnny Carson, is a class act.
Apr 11, 2014 | Politics
Daniel Greenfield commenting on the Mozilla (makers of the Firefox browser) CEO who was fired in The Left Isn’t Pro-Gay — It’s Pro-Power | FrontPage Magazine:
The left does not care about gay marriage. In most left-wing regimes, homosexuality was persecuted. It was illegal in the USSR. Gay men were locked up in Cuba and are still targeted in China. Nicolas Maduro, the current hero of the left, openly uses homophobic language without any criticism from his Western admirers. It goes without saying that homosexuality is criminalized throughout the Muslim world.Engels viewed homosexuality as a perversion born out of the bourgeois way of life that would be eliminated under socialism. The Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States stated that homosexuality “is a product of the decay of capitalism” and vowed that once the revolution took place, a “struggle will be waged to eliminate it and reform homosexuals.”The left’s shift on this issue, as on many issues, was purely tactical. The left’s leading lights were racists who jumped into civil rights. They were sexists who became feminists. They were advocates for the working class who despised the idea of working for a living.The culture war does not emerge from the left’s deeply held beliefs. Its leaders could care less about the things that they pretend to care about. It emerges instead from the need to maintain a constant state of domestic conflict.[...]
Every gang needs to hurt and terrorize people in order to feel its power. [...] The purpose of these purges is not to make the country more tolerant, but to make it more afraid. The message of the Eich purge is not, “accept gay marriage,” it’s “don’t question us.” As many have pointed out, Eich had the same view of gay marriage at the time he made that donation as Obama and Hillary.[...]The left is a totalitarian movement that inverts everything it touches. It fights against poverty by making more men poor. It helps black people by keeping them down, and it promotes tolerance through displays of intolerance. Its endgame is simply raw power. It wants as much of it as it can get its hands on.
[...]The left constantly takes stands, but it believes in nothing. Like all totalitarian movements, it worships at the feet of the bronze bull of power. It believes in the virtue of its outrage, the might of its rhetoric and the pleasure of trampling an enemy underfoot. Every one of its beliefs are baseless and expendable in the name of its true god of power.The right has sold its moral birthright in the hopes of being tolerated by a movement with no morals or beliefs except in the virtue of its own intolerance. It strategically embraces the left’s ideas and hopes that this process will eventually lead to a truce.It can’t and it won’t.The left does not hate the right because of gay marriage. It does not hate the right because it thinks that the right is racist, sexist, transphobic, semaphoric or plasmatic. It hates the right because it is not of the left. The right stands in the way of its absolute power. These two things are enough to be hated.
Apr 3, 2014 | Business, Philosophy, Politics
Writes Charles Koch is chairman and CEO of Koch Industries in I'm Fighting to Restore a Free Society - WSJ.com:
[...] The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson warned that this could happen. "The natural progress of things," Jefferson wrote, "is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." He knew that no government could possibly run citizens' lives for the better. The more government tries to control, the greater the disaster, as shown by the current health-care debacle. Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.Instead of encouraging free and open debate, collectivists strive to discredit and intimidate opponents. They engage in character assassination. (I should know, as the almost daily target of their attacks.) [...]Rather than try to understand my vision for a free society or accurately report the facts about Koch Industries, our critics would have you believe we're "un-American" and trying to "rig the system," that we're against "environmental protection" or eager to "end workplace safety standards." These falsehoods remind me of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." Here are some facts about my philosophy and our company:Koch companies employ 60,000 Americans, who make many thousands of products that Americans want and need. According to government figures, our employees and the 143,000 additional American jobs they support generate nearly $11.7 billion in compensation and benefits. About one-third of our U.S.-based employees are union members.[...]
Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people's lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal.If more businesses (and elected officials) were to embrace a vision of creating real value for people in a principled way, our nation would be far better off—not just today, but for generations to come. I'm dedicated to fighting for that vision. I'm convinced most Americans believe it's worth fighting for, too.
Mar 31, 2014 | Education
From Raising Children with Exalted Ambition and Depth of Soul:
I am appalled by the state of American education. I am appalled not primarily by the crowded classrooms, decrepit buildings, unmotivated, unionized teachers, severed arts programs, drugs, violence, or many-children-left-behind, but by that which should be the central, fundamental, defining element of any school – the education. Even those schools with richly appointed, sprawling campuses, dedicated faculty with PhD’s, and reputations for academic excellence backed by test scores to prove them still suffer from the same basic pedagogical problem. Education, the actual “learning” that goes on within the walls of our schools, has come to consist primarily, almost exclusively, of mindlessmemorization.From the causes of WWI, to Newton’s laws of motion, to types of literary devices, to the formulas for area, etc., etc. etc., we are asked to memorize, and regurgitate, and study, and memorize, and regurgitate…and forget. Today’s schools are failing utterly to provide children with a real, functional, life-enhancing, lasting education. That is why I sympathize with the widely popular rallying cry well captured in this viral video, of people who “love education” but “hate school,” and the message, “We will not let exam results decide our fate.” They recognize that their education is bankrupt, and they refuse to define themselves by the schools’ standards of success.But sadly, this rallying cry and most of those like it are not a rejection of education in its current, empty, memorization-driven state – they reject education as such. The idea that school must “change with the times,” that education is fundamentally for “getting a job” or “satisfying society’s needs,” that our “different genes” mean we must be educated by “different means,” that Google, Twitter, and Facebook are as legitimate means of personal development and self expression as any schooling, betray a basic hostility to the very concept of education. This should not be surprising, given that those sounding the call are victims of the very educational system they decry. How could they know any better?What a real education actually looks like, what basic purpose it serves, what it does to enhance the life of an individual, why it is essential to life as a mature and thriving adult – these are enormously complex issues. But for my own peace of mind, I want at least to offer some food for thought, and a rallying cry of my own: Protest the “education” in today’s schools, but not education in and of itself.What does a real education provide?
Discover Miss Van Damme's answer at her excellent blog Pygmalion of the Soul.
Mar 31, 2014 | Education
By having central government bureaucrats dictate how, what and why students learn, the innovation, entrepreneurship, and diversity of a "grass roots" education (i.e., Montessori, i.e., Home Schooling) -- where education is tailored to the needs of the student as directed by the parent -- will be eliminated. This is the key political argument against the so-called "common core" initiative.In "Building the Machine" viewers receive a "big picture" overview of the Common Core States Standards Initiative (CCSSI) and its effects on their children's education. "Building the Machine" compiles interviews from leading educational experts, including members of the Common Core Validation Committee. Find out more about the Common Core: http://www.hslda.org/CommonCore
