As we enter Christians’ Holy Week, which culminates with Easter, the day of Jesus’ resurrection and the beginning of God’s new creation, it’s an apt time to reflect on Christ’s lasting teachings. Prior to Jesus’ incarnation, God had directly communicated His Law through the Ten Commandments. Number 6 reads “Thou shalt not kill.” Of...
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The Daily Mail of London has reported that despite its support for global warming alarmism, Britain’s National Weather Service (U.K. Met Office) has quietly unveiled a report admitting that there has been no warming from January 1997 through August 2012. (Here also are the data sets for the report as well as an analysis...
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Rationality is an essential element for successful thinking and acting. It serves, at bottom, to prevent internal contradictions; it allows us to choose means that are suited to the attainment of our chosen ends. I come not to bury rationality, but to praise it. Yet rationality alone cannot guarantee anyone a successful life. This...
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John Stossel has often said “government can’t do anything better than people in a free market.”  I recognize that lots of readers of The Beacon will agree, so let me throw out one example that I believe counters Stossel’s claim: GPS. Uncle Sam put up those satellites that produce GPS signals, and none of...
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It was one thing for gullible college students in the late 1960s to present themselves for voluntary sterilization as a result of their buying into Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb myth. In keeping with the premise of the annual Darwin Awards, it might be just as well that those so prone to falling for groundless...
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James Delingpole reports in the Telegraph of London that James Lovelock, the “greenest” of the “greens,” now admits that the doomsaying over global warming is wrong. [O]ne of the archest of the world’s arch Greenies – James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis and therefore, more or less, founder of the world’s most powerful...
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Are human beings better suited for individualism or collectivism? The question seems highly relevant to issues of political economy, but it’s one that very few advocates of individual liberty have sought to answer by looking at the anthropological record. This neglect is unfortunate, economist Thomas Mayor suggests, because the evidence indicates that for millennia...
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Today is the second anniversary of President Obama’s signing into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as “ObamaCare.” Despite front-loading benefits in the hope of winning opponents over before the costs start kicking in in 2014, public opinion against the law remains exceptionally high, and is seen increasingly as a...
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We are delighted to announce the publication of the Spring 2012 issue of the Independent Institute’s peer-reviewed journal, The Independent Review. This issue’s articles and book reviews deal with the following questions: What does evidence from hunter-gatherer societies suggest about whether human beings are better adapted for individualism or collectivism? Read the article. What...
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The response to the January 27th article in the Wall Street Journal by sixteen leading scientists, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” has been nothing short of explosive both at the Journal and to my blogging on the matter, “Leading Scientists Debunk Climate Alarmism.” However, the response from the mega-funded alarmist establishment (see...
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