“Western nations appear to have fallen out of love with free speech.”
Actually, it ain’t the west that has rejected free speech, but a large percentage of the modern intellectual community, often liberal, that has decided that speech is only free if it doesn’t offend anyone. Which of course means that, under that definition, there is no such thing.
The McCarthyism of the left: The blacklisting of Meatloaf, merely because he is a Republican.
What does this tell us? In the Oklahoma primary last week Barack Obama only garnered 57% of the vote, and actually lost in 15 counties, 12 to a pro-life activist and 3 to a state’s Democratic senate candidate from 2010.
What it tells me is that there is a much stronger upwelling of hostility to Obama than anyone in the political world right now imagines. Granted, this is Oklahoma, a very conservative state. Nonetheless, for a sitting President to do this poorly among voters in his own party does not bode well for that President — or his party — come November.
Good for them: Two Democratic senators have introduced legislation that would repeal the indefinite detention of Americans authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 that was passed in November.
My only complaint is this: Why did these same two senators, along with 81 other senators and 283 House members vote for this unconstitutional obscenity in the first place?
We’ve only just begun: Ave Maria University has now sued the Obama administration over the government’s mandate that the university provide contraceptives at no charge to its employees.
The Senate’s tea party caucus yesterday proposed a budget plan aimed at balancing the federal budget by 2017.
The news article gives a broad outline of the plan, including some basic changes to several entitlement programs, a freezing of government spending at 2008 levels, and the elimination of four government agencies and the privatization of the TSA. A detailed look will probably find that some of these proposals are poorly thought out or impractical. However, at least these senators are proposing something, unlike the Democrats, who in the Senate have not even introduced a budget for more than three years.
Rather than bow to political correctness, the Houston Astros have decided to use their original Colt uniform — with revolver — on the uniforms the team will wear in celebrating its fifieth anniversary this April.
The detailed look at the robotic satellite refueling demo that is taking place on ISS this week.
From Consumer Reports: “Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it’s broken.”
Another wise business choice by the Obama administration, which gave this electric car company just over a half billion dollars in federal subsidies to develop this plug-in hybrid car.
Researchers have completed the first comprehensive map of the entire ocean-floor debris field of the Titanic.
More Kepler results: From the abstract of a preprint paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website:
The mean eccentricity of the Kepler candidates decreases with decreasing planet size indicating that smaller planets are preferentially found in low-eccentricity orbits.
In other words, the smaller a planet is, the more likely its orbit will be circular like the Earth’s. This result is encouraging news for the search for life on other worlds. Before Kepler, astronomers had found that the orbits of most exoplanets were far more eccentric than the orbits of the planets in our solar system, a condition that scientists thought was unfriendly for the development of life. These new results counter that conclusion. The orbits of the planets in our solar system might not be as unusual as first thought.
Engineers’ dreams: A proposal to use a thousand mile long magnetic track to accelerate passengers into space.
