There has been much hand-wringing over the decline of traditional media. Katherine Mangu-Ward consoles those who fear a post-paper media environment and offers some helpful suggestions; in The Freeman Online, Ed Lopez asks whether the decline of newspapers is a market failure and explains why it isn’t. He shows that this is a case...
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Today, the Court decided Ontario v. Quon. At issue was the right of the City of Ontario to read text messages sent by its employee’s on City-issued pagers. In a nutshell, the City issued employees pagers, noticed that the number of messages sent exceeded the plan (although the employees personally paid for overages), and thus...
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At least since 9/11, the Democrats have, if anything, been even worse than the Republicans in their push for a national ID. I recall the Bush administration, very early on, dismissing this totalitarian idea, although Bush soon enough signed the Real ID Act into law, with the support of hawkish and anti-immigration conservatives. But...
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With the enormous expansion of the welfare state with the passage of Obamacare, C.S. Lewis’s insightful essay on the dangers, dehumanization, and immorality of welfare/therapeutic statism, “Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” (from his book, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics) is especially timely and noteworthy. Here are...
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In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Google co-founder Sergey Brin elaborated on what was apparently primarily his decision for Google to withdraw from mainland China. Mr. Brin immigrated with his family to the U.S. at the age of 6: The 36-year-old co-founder said he was moved by growing evidence in China of...
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The United Nations’ IPCC has just announced that it is appointing an “independent committee” to investigate itself, clearly part of a deliberate campaign of damage control to combat the unraveling of the credibility for its claims of climate alarmism (see here and here). Trust in the IPCC has been disintegrating with the cascade of...
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James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar is a thrill to see, and various commentators have judged the film for whatever ideological message they have found in it, but what struck me most is that the Na’vi people, in defending their land on Pandora from the imperialist exploitation by the humans, are engaging in one of the...
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As reported in the London Daily Mail, Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal in which leaked email documents reveal that IPCC scientists were manipulating data, has now made a series of major admissions, including the following: * Data for the IPCC’s vital “hockey stick graph” used by climate alarmists...
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The remarkable and haunting, independent, 2009, science fiction short film, 2081: Everyone Will Finally Be Equal, is based on the Kurt Vonnegut short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” from his book, Welcome to the Monkey House, and is now available on DVD. Vonnegut’s powerful and incisive story critiques egalitarian statism in which “equality” is the only...
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In the fallout from Climategate, the Times of London reports that Great Britain’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington has now become highly critical of the dismissive and disreputable tactics and exaggerated claims of climate alarmists within the scientific community. Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made...
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