My hour-long appearance on Robert Pratt’s Pratt on Texas radio show is now available here.
We had a long discussion about the lack of thoughtful skepticism in today’s intellectual society.
Phil Berardelli, who periodically comments here and who is a veteran science journalist who worked for the journal Science for a number of years, has written a very cogent four part essay on the subject of climate change for the think tank Capital Research Center.
Berardelli very carefully outlines the uncertainties that dominate our knowledge of the Earth’s climate, while explaining clearly why consensus is never what good science relies upon. As he notes,
Science is not primarily about proof; science is about disproof. Nothing in science, absolutely nothing, should ever be taken at face value. This view isn’t new; it’s age old.
Read it all, especially if you are one of the people who reads my writing and questions my skepticism about much of what I see in the climate field, especially coming from NASA and NOAA. Berardelli illustrates how doubt and skepticism are the hallmarks of science, and should always be honored, not denigrated with slurs like “denier.”
Full disclosure: Phil Berardelli was also my editor when I did a weekly column for UPI called Space Watch for six months in 2005.
Saudi Arabia has launched a military strike against Yemen’s defense ministry.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the attacks were air or missile strikes, but they came following reports that Iran had manufactured the ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Shiite rebels toward the Saudi capital a week ago.
Remnants of the missile bore “Iranian markings,” the top US Air Force official in the Mideast said Friday, backing the kingdom’s earlier allegations.
This isn’t that much of a surprise, considering the recent purge in Saudi Arabia as well as the recent reports of both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait warning their citizens to leave Lebanon. The military strike today in Yemen appears to therefore merely be a precursor of a more significant escalation.
Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today expressed strong disappointment with the repeated delays in the the launch of SLS and Orion, noting that the problems could lead to Congress considering “other options.”
“After all these years, after billions of dollars spent, we are facing more delays and cost overruns,” Smith said. While he noted that some delays were caused by factors out of NASA’s control, like a tornado that damaged the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans in February, “many of the problems are self-inflicted.”
“It is very disappointing to hear about delays caused by poor execution, when the U.S. taxpayer has invested so much in these programs,” he added.
Smith, who announced Nov. 2 he would not run for reelection next year after more than three decades in the House, including serving as chairman of the science committee since 2013, warned about eroding support for the programs should there be additional delays. “NASA and the contractors should not assume future delays and cost overruns will have no consequences,” he said. “If delays continue, if costs rise, and if foreseeable technical challenges arise, no one should assume the U.S. taxpayers or their representatives will tolerate this forever.”
“The more setbacks SLS and Orion face, the more support builds for other options,” he said, not elaborating on what those options would be.
Smith is part of the establishment in Congress that has been supporting SLS and Orion blindly for years. Unfortunately, he is retiring this year, and the other members of his committee did not seem as bothered by SLS’s endless delays.
This week’s collection of stories illustrating the fascist culture that permeates today’s academic community actually includes some good news. (My last fascist academia post can be seen here.)
First the bad:
The first story illustrates that this intolerance is not limited to the left. In this case a conservative university kicked out a speaker with more moderate views.
Nonetheless, the majority of these attacks on freedom of speech continue to come from the left or from left-leaning organizations. The last story indicates the trends, which include a significant shift towards violence and a disrespect for property rights.
Now for the good news.
In the first story we see a rare example of someone experiencing bad consequences for their bad fascist behavior. If only this would happen more often. In the second story the theatrical community, including the normally very leftwing partisan Dramatists Guild of America (!), has actually come out against censorship, even if that censorship involves opinions that attack modern liberal sacred cows, such as the racist Black Lives Matter movement. This action is so out of the norm that I am somewhat speechless.
The election results from Tuesday, where Democrats won most of the significant races, has produced a lot of commentary, from both conservatives and liberals, about its significance.
To me, however, these results merely confirmed the increasingly regional nature of today’s partisan politics. This story, about a victory by a Democrat state senator candidate that puts the Democrats in complete control of Washington’s legislature, illustrates this best.
Dhingra’s victory in Washington state over Republican Jinyoung Englund means the West Coast is now the solid center of the resistance, with Democrats controlling legislatures and governorships from Seattle down to San Diego.
The Democratic victories on Tuesday all took place in areas where they strongly dominate (the coasts and urban centers), thus merely solidifying their control over those localized regions. I expect that future elections will show Republicans solidifying their control over their own regions (which is the rest of the country). In other words, people are beginning to choose sides, and we are heading to a regional and political divide that can only be solved in one of two ways: The U.S. splits, or a civil war (in the literal sense) breaks out.
Capitalism in space: ISRO officials said yesterday that the agency plans to double its launch rate next year, while also shifting as much of its space manufacturing effort to the private sector.
Currently, the space agency launches 9 to 10 spacecraft built by it every year. Dr K Sivan, director of Thiruvananthapuram-based Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, said, “Isro is targeting to double the number of launches from 9-10 to 18-19 launches per year.”
On outsourcing of jobs to the private industry, Isro chairman A S Kiran Kumar said the space agency does as much activity as possible with the industry. “Wherever it’s possible to get things done through the industry, we are doing and it will only increase in the coming days because we need to do more frequent activities,” he told a news agency. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted language is patently false. India has never launched 9 spacecraft in a year. Last year it set a record with 7 launches. This false overstatement casts some doubt to me of the sincerity of the second claim, that the agency wishes to shift as much responsibility to the private sector as possible. Government agencies rarely give up power. In the U.S. the decision by NASA to shift from NASA-built rockets to commercially-built rockets took decades (occurring reluctantly in 2008 after years of lobbying), and even a decade after that decision the transition is hardly guaranteed.
Nonetheless, that ISRO officials are setting a goal of 18-19 launches a year indicates that they truly do want to compete with the big launch players.
Capitalism in space: A new study shows that the commercial private cargo capsules are far more efficient then the space shuttle was in delivering cargo to ISS.
According to the new research paper by Edgar Zapata, who works at Kennedy Space Center, the supply services offered by SpaceX and Orbital ATK have cost NASA two to three times less than if the space agency had continued to fly the space shuttle. For his analysis, Zapata attempted to make an “apples to apples” comparison between the commercial vehicles, through June 2017, and the space shuttle.
Specifically, the analysis of development and operational expenses, as well as vehicle failures, found that SpaceX had cost NASA about $89,000 per kg of cargo delivered to the space station. By the same methodology, he found Orbital ATK had cost $135,000 per kg. Had the shuttle continued to fly, and deliver cargo via its Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, it would have cost $272,000 per kg.
…The detailed study then attempts to calculate the costs of the commercial cargo and crew programs combined, comparing that total to continued shuttle flights, which could carry both supplies and astronauts at the same time. Zapata’s best estimate is that the commercial programs cost only about 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost NASA to continue the space shuttle program.
The benefits of the private programs go beyond cost savings, however. With multiple providers, NASA now has redundancy in case of a failure of supply lines to the space station. And there are indirect benefits as well, especially from supporting the efforts of US companies to develop new spacefaring technologies.
None of this is really news. There was once a time in the U.S. where these facts were understood without much thought. Americans once knew that private enterprise, competition, and freedom always work better than government-imposed projects. Today however we live in a post-freedom America, where the idea of depending on Americans to use their innovative talents freely to get things done is considered oppressive and racist, and must be squelched by a much wiser government.
Only hours after initiating service, a driverless shuttle in Las Vegas crashed.
No one was hurt, nor is the accident described in any detail at the link. However, I think this incident highlights a reality about driverless cars: Either every vehicle on the road must be one, or none of the vehicles on the road can be one. It will be almost impossible to program a driverless car to handle the unpredictability of human drivers. If we want to leave the driving to computers (which I don’t), we will have to ban humans from driving.
Such a ban will be a terrible loss of freedom. And not surprisingly, I think the whole a push for driverless vehicles is a push in that direction.
I found a second article that describes the incident as caused by a truck driver backing into the shuttle, thus blaming the human driver (who was given a ticket by the way) and using the incident to argue against human drivers.
Link here. The analysis here is the best I’ve seen, and suggests once again that we might be seeing a significant shift taking place within the Arab Middle East.
It is in the context of Saudi Arabia’s reassessment of its interests and realignment of strategic posture in recent years that the dramatic events of the past few days in the kingdom must be seen.
Saturday’s sudden announcement that a new anti-corruption panel headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the near simultaneous announcement of the arrest of more than two dozen royal family members, cabinet ministers and prominent businessmen is predominantly being presented as a power seizure by the crown prince. Amid widespread rumors that King Salman will soon abdicate the throne to his son, it is reasonable for the 32-year-old crown prince to work to neutralize all power centers that could threaten his ascension to the throne.
But there is clearly also something strategically more significant going on. While many of the officials arrested over the weekend threaten Mohammed’s power, they aren’t the only ones that he has purged. In September Mohammed arrested some 30 senior Wahhabist clerics and intellectuals. And Saturday’s arrest of the princes, cabinet ministers and business leaders was followed up by further arrests of senior Wahhabist clerics.
At the same time, Mohammed has been promoting clerics who espouse tolerance for other religions, including Judaism and Christianity. He has removed the Saudi religious police’s power to conduct arrests and he has taken seemingly credible steps to finally lift the kingdom-wide prohibition on women driving.
There’s a lot more, including details about how the Obama administration was dishonestly aiding the wrong side. Read it all
The EPA has approved the release of lab-grown male mosquitoes, carrying a bacteria that prevents reproduction, in 20 states.
MosquitoMate will rear the Wolbachia-infected A. albopictus mosquitoes in its laboratories, and then sort males from females. Then the laboratory males, which don’t bite, will be released at treatment sites. When these males mate with wild females, which do not carry the same strain of Wolbachia, the resulting fertilized eggs don’t hatch because the paternal chromosomes do not form properly.
The company says that over time, as more of the Wolbachia-infected males are released and breed with the wild partners, the pest population of A. albopictus mosquitoes dwindles. Other insects, including other species of mosquito, are not harmed by the practice, says Stephen Dobson, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and founder of MosquitoMate.
While caution should always be exercised when introducing something like this into the environment, I honestly can’t see any downside to this work. The lab-grown mosquitoes cannot spread, as they cannot reproduce, even as their introduction reduces the mosquito population.
Nonetheless, no one should be surprised that this project has met with political resistance in many places.
In a case that appears similar to the dispute in Hawaii over the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope, Canada’s Supreme Court this week ruled against a local tribe in its more than quarter century battle to block the construction of a nearby ski resort.
The Ktunaxa Nation had opposed a resort on Crown land near their community in southeastern British Columbia, arguing that it would affect a grizzly-bear habitat and drive away the Grizzly Bear Spirit essential to their faith.
But, in a line that stunned some academic observers, seven judges of nine said that they looked on the religious-freedom claim under Section 2(a) of the Charter of Rights no differently than if it were made by non-Indigenous. They said the Ktunaxa claim fell entirely outside of the Canadian notion of freedom of religion, as established in previous Charter cases, which protects only the right to hold and manifest beliefs.
“In short, the Charter protects the freedom to worship, but does not protect the spiritual focal point of worship,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice Malcolm Rowe wrote for the seven judges. The court also affirmed that, while developers and government need to consult with Indigenous peoples and accommodate their concerns, the First Nations possess no veto power over development.
What I find interesting about this story is that the developer first proposed this ski resort in 1991, and has spent 26 years consulting and then fighting with the local tribes. Talk about stick-to-it-ness! Moreover, the insincerity and delaying tactics of one tribe are revealed by this quote:
It was only in 2009, the Supreme Court said, as the proposal appeared on the verge of approval, that the Ktunaxa first mentioned the Grizzly Bear Spirit and said that no accommodation was possible.
It is important to note that the land in question is privately owned by the resort, and that the tribe essentially wanted a full veto over the rights of that private owner to use their land as they wished. The Supreme Court ruled that the tribe does not have that right. Had it agreed to this demand, the court would have essentially given the tribe the power to rule over everyone else in Canada, on almost any issue the tribe wished. All they would have had to do is to come up with some religious excuse (as it appears they did here).
Hat tip Peter Arzenshek.
Time to post this week’s list of stories outlining the fascist culture of the modern American campus. Since my last update, the stories have been more mixed, as there have not been many scheduled speaking events that would have prompted the brownshirts to move in and squelch our first amendment right to freedom of speech.
The last story needs highlighting because it illustrates the close-minded and willfully ignorant aspects of this college movement. These students are proud of their refusal to listen to other points of view, and want to encourage all students to stick their fingers in their ears and scream “La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!” as loudly as possible to anything they disagree with. Worse, these are students, who are at the university to learn something. Instead, these know-nothing thugs are working so that everyone else will remain as ignorant as they are.
There was one small piece of good news: UCLA backs down from free speech confrontation. What happened is that UCLA has agreed to not charge the college’s Republican club exorbitant security fees for an upcoming Ben Shapiro speech.
The Bruin Republicans had protested the potential fee – charged if more than 30 percent of the audience is from outside the campus – as a tax on their free speech.
“Given UCLA’s commitment to free speech, and to avoid any appearance to the contrary,” said campus spokesman Tod Tamberg in an email, “UCLA has decided to also pay the basic security costs for this event. UCLA will be adopting this approach going forward while it reviews its current policy to ensure that it continues to be a useful planning tool for UCLA and registered student organizations.”
The sad part is that the university has to spend so much for security, illustrating how out of favor free speech remains at UCLA. Everyone expects the campus to erupt in violence simply because a conservative might get up and say something.
The stock of Elon Musk’s Tesla electric car company crashed this week, dropping 7% on Wednesday, with the revelation that the Republican tax plan proposes eliminating the $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric car.
Its share price fell more than seven per cent to about $296 apiece from Wednesday’s $321. The draft law emerged as the Elon-Musk-led automaker announced its worst-ever quarter, recording a $671m loss and admitting it had not met its production target for its new Model 3 car, producing just 220 of them against its 1,500 target.
Economists believe that the tax credit is a key driver for electric car sales, and cite the example of when the state of Georgia cut its $5,000 tax credit and saw sales of electric cars slump from 1,400 a month to just 100 a month in response.
What this story highlights is that electric cars are simply not economical at this time, and that the government is distorting the market by pushing them. Without government aid, practically no one would buy them.
It would be far better for everyone to let the market decide. Not only would this save us tax dollars, it would allow the industry to focus its innovative efforts on upgrades that are cost effective and profitable, rather than on pie-in-the-sky fantasies that actually do no good at all.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette for pointing me to this story.
The new colonial movement: The student engineers who built Ghana’s first satellite, GhanaSat-1 and launched in July, are pushing their government to establish the legal framework for future space activities in that country.
Student engineers behind the successful launch of Ghana’s first satellite into orbit have appealed to the government to set up a multi-stakeholder committee to come up with an act, the Ghana outer space act, a key requirement that would enable the country to ratify and sign the United Nations Outer Space Treaty.
They said if the country signed and ratified the treaty, it would give investors the signal and confidence that the country was ready for them to come and establish space science facilities.
The description in the article of what these students want suggests they do not quite understand the ramifications of all the UN space treaties, because it appears they also want Ghana to become signatories to them all. This would be a big mistake. While every country that launches satellites is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty, very few have signed the Moon Treaty, as its language puts far more serious restrictions on property rights.
Intriguing: The Saudi state minister for Gulf affairs has called for the “topplng” of Hezbollah, condemning that organization as “a party of Satan.”
He also said that “The coming developments will definitely be astonishing.”
While there have always been strong differences and hostility among the many Arab nations and movements in the Middle East, rarely have these differences been expressed so publicly and forcefully. Read the whole article. The things this powerful official says could not be said if he did not have the support of his government. I wonder if this indicates some major shifts are about to occur in the Arab world.
Quite boring. Factional bickering yesterday between Democrats and Republicans dominated the nomination hearing of Congressman Jim Bridenstine (R-Oklahoma) for NASA administrator.
Today’s contentious nomination hearing for Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) to be NASA Administrator was split along partisan lines. Democratic Senators questioned his credentials and viewpoints about climate change, sexual harassment and other issues that could affect how he runs the agency and its personnel. Republicans defended him and chafed at the tenor of the hearing. The committee could vote as early as next week on whether to send the nomination to the full Senate.
I did not watch the hearing because I knew this would be what I’d see and I didn’t want to be bored for two hours. It ain’t news anymore to find Democrats opposing anything proposed by the Republicans. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter. Bridenstine will almost certainly be approved along partisan lines in the Senate, and nothing I have read about him suggests he is going to do anything significant or radical. He has made it clear, both in recent interviews and articles as well as his testimony yesterday as reported by numerous articles that he does not wish to rock the boat. He supports all of NASA’s current programs, commercial space, SLS/Orion, climate research, everything. I do not expect him to make any radical changes in the direction NASA is going.
In fact, the people who will change NASA are not even in the government. I expect the actions of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to have far greater impact in the coming years, with politicians and bureaucrats in NASA forced to follow them, as they have been forced to follow Musk during the past half decade.
The Russians are prosecuting another manager at Vostochny for stealing more than $10 million.
[O]ut of 765 million rubles ($13 million) allocated under the contract with Federal State Unitary Enterprise Spetsstroytekhnologii, Tolstikov had only 100 million rubles ($1.7 million) left. The rest, according to him, he spent for construction trailers for workers.
It is amazing anything has been built at Vostochny. This case is in addition to the more than half dozen other embezzlement cases totaling almost $200 million, a very significant amount of money in Russia as well as a significant portion of the spaceport’s entire construction budget.
The opponents of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) have filed an appeal to the Hawaiian supreme court of the telescope’s permit approval.
The strategy is delay, delay, delay, so that the consortium building TMT will be forced to abandon Hawaii. And with the help of the Hawaiian government, run by Democrats, it appears this strategy will work.
Reason 4,320,333 why I do not use Google: Some users of Google Docs yesterday were blocked by the company from their files because of “terms of service violations.”
In response to some of these reports, a Google employee tweeted that the team handling Google Docs was looking into the matter. Later Tuesday, Google said in a statement that it had “made a code push that incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive, which caused those documents to be automatically blocked. A fix is in place and all users should have full access to their docs.”
Although the error appeared to be a technical glitch, the fact that Google is capable of identifying “bad” Google Docs at all is a reminder: Much of what you upload, receive or type to Google is monitored. While many people may be aware that Gmail scans your emails — for instance, so that its smart-reply feature can figure out what responses to suggest — this policy extends to other Google products, too.
Here’s what this story reveals: Google monitors the content of the files that people store on Google Docs. Google has also developed software that can decide if some of that content is acceptable or unacceptable, to Google. Google can then block access to those supposedly private files, thus giving it the power to silence the work of anyone the company doesn’t like.
Sounds peachy-keen, doesn’t it?
North Korea announced yesterday a new program to accelerate the development of home-built space satellites and orbital rockets.
North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun published a commentary laying out the country’s plans to send more satellites into space over the next five years. The program “can contribute to improving the economy and people’s lives,” the article reads. “It is a global trend to seek economic development through space programs,” the October 31 piece said. “According to our five-year plan for space development, we will launch more working satellites, such as geostationary ones.” Geostationary satellites orbit the Earth about 38,500 kilometers (22,000 miles) over a fixed position over the equator and revolve from west to east like the Earth.
It is hard to know how realistic this program is, and how much of it is actually a cover for North Korea’s ICBM development efforts.
The coming dark age: A national survey has found that today’s universities no longer teach a well-rounded education but instead allow their students to skip important subjects so that their education is “thin and patchy.”
The group evaluated more than 1,100 colleges and universities based on their requirements in seven “key areas of knowledge”: composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. history, economics, mathematics and science. The results showed that 66.5 percent of the schools required only three or fewer of those subjects.
This leads to a “thin and patchy education,” the report states. “Students may have dozens or even hundreds of courses from which to choose, many of them highly specialized niche courses,” it states. “Once distribution requirements become too loose, students almost inevitably graduate with an odd list of random, unconnected courses and, all too often, serious gaps in their basic skills and knowledge.”
Additional key findings include that fewer than 18 percent of colleges and universities require a foundational course in U.S. government or history, and only about 3 percent of the institutions require students to take a basic economics class.
Read it all. It is quite depressing, but also not surprising. It also suggests that parents and their high school children need to demand more from colleges, and reject those colleges that are failing in providing the basics of a college education.
The Trump administration has come to a settlement with the lawsuits filed by tea party groups over their harassment by the IRS during the Obama administration.
The government apologized Thursday for illegally targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny and agreed to settlements with hundreds of organizations snared in the targeting, bringing to a close one of the more embarrassing episodes of the Obama administration.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the IRS owed the groups an apology after years of poor treatment and even longer refusal to concede bad behavior. He placed blame on “the last administration,” saying the targeting that went on under President Obama “was wrong and should never have occurred.”
One of the settlement agreements, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., officially admits that the IRS singled out groups because of their political beliefs, in defiance of the law. The other settlement, in a class-action lawsuit in Ohio, includes a “generous” payout to more than 400 groups snared, according to a lawyer involved.
The amount of the settlement was not released.
Meanwhile, John Koskinen remains head of the IRS, despite a long documented record of stone-walling and obstruction of justice. If the Trump administration is really sincere about fixing this proglem so that it won’t happen again, why has Trump not fired him?
Working for the Democratic Party: An email from an IRS agent, recently uncovered by lawyers representing tea party groups in a class action lawsuit, clearly shows that the Obama administration targeted for harassment conservative groups, based solely on their party affiliation.
[T]he April 1, 2011, email from Elizabeth C. Kastenberg, an official in the agency’s exempt organizations division, says it was explicitly the organizations’ politics that landed them on the target list. “These cases are held back primarily because of their political party affiliation rather than specifically any political activities,” Ms. Kastenberg wrote in an alert to other IRS employees, including her supervisor.
Edward Greim, the attorney for NorCal Tea Party Patriots and hundreds of other groups that are part of the class-action lawsuit, said that was a major admission. “What Kastenberg was saying was they have all different activities, and so there’s no ‘political activities’ that cut across this group. Instead, it’s really their political party affiliation they have in common,” he said. [emphasis mine]
In other words, the IRS decided to demand inappropriate information from these Republican organizations, merely because they were Republican, contradicting utterly the claim by the agency that they were only checking to make sure that these groups, based on their activities, should get non-profit status.
The Trump Justice Department has cleared the FBI informant with direct knowledge of the Clinton-Russian uranium bribery scandal.
The informant worked undercover to investigate bribery and intrigue in the Russian nuclear industry during the Obama administration and was, until Wednesday, bound by a gag order from speaking about what he knew. According to sources at the Department of Justice, the informant is now cleared to testify about a wide range of issues including, specifically, the Clinton Foundation. The informant worked undercover to investigate bribery and intrigue in the Russian nuclear industry during the Obama administration and was, until Wednesday, bound by a gag order from speaking about what he knew.
According to sources at the Department of Justice, the informant is now cleared to testify about a wide range of issues including, specifically, the Clinton Foundation. In a statement, DOJ spokesman Ian Prior told media outlets: “As of tonight, the Department of Justice has authorized the informant to disclose to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as one member of each of their staffs, any information or documents he has concerning alleged corruption or bribery involving transactions in the uranium market, including but not limited to anything related to Vadim Mikerin, Rosatom, Tenex, Uranium One, or the Clinton Foundation.”
The article says the informant will testify Wednesday night before Congress, but also notes that it is unclear as yet how or where that testimony will be given. More details about the scandal here.
If this person reveals as much as the news stories have suggested, it could very well finally shatter the protection the press and the left have given the Clinton since Bill Clinton’s problems as president in the 1990s. What I am sensing is that the Democratic Party might possibly be considering throwing the Clintons to the wolves in an effort to keep the wolves off of it.
Then again, I tend to be a wide-eyed optimist.
Time for another update on the growing movement on American campuses to squelch freedom of speech. The stories below highlight some of the more egregious examples since my last update.
Note also that I am making a point to identify the university in every headline I link to. If you have children who are about to pick a college, a quick search here at Behind the Black will tell you where a college stands on the first amendment and free speech.
No one should be surprised that three of these stories come out of California, which in recent years has become increasingly hostile to the concept of dissent.
All is not bad news, however. The Board of Regents that runs the University of Wisconsin two weeks ago approved a new policy that would suspend and expel students who disrupt speeches and presentations on campus.
This tidbit from the story reveals once again which political party today believes in free speech, and which political party does not.
The new Wisconsin policy mirrors Republican legislation the state Assembly passed in June, though the Senate has yet to act on the bill. Regents President John Robert Behling told the board before Friday’s vote that adopting the policy ahead of the legislation shows “a responsiveness to what’s going on in the Capitol, which helps build relationships.”
Republican Gov. Scott Walker appointed all but two of the board’s 18 members. State public schools Superintendent Tony Evers and Wisconsin Technical College System Board President Mark Tyler are automatically regents by virtue of their offices.
Evers, a Democrat running against Walker in next year’s gubernatorial election, cast the only dissenting vote. He accused the regents of sacrificing free speech to curry favor with Republican lawmakers.
The coming dark age: The American Indian student group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is protesting a statue of Abraham Lincoln because “he owned slaves” and because there were Indian wars during his administration.
The activist group is now demanding a disclaimer be put up saying Lincoln was complicit in the murder of Native Americans.
Why would they be so angry about Lincoln?
“Everyone thinks of Lincoln as the great, you know, freer of slaves, but let’s be real: He owned slaves, and as natives, we want people to know that he ordered the execution of native men,” said one of the protesters.
For a college student to believe that Lincoln owned slaves is to illustrate an appalling level of ignorance. Moreover, the claim that Lincoln “executed” Indians is to also demonstrate an almost incomprehensible ignorance of the history of the American west. The author at the link gives an accurate though simplified history lesson:
During the war, Minnesota was in a state of chaos due to soldiers abandoning their posts and armies moving east to join the main war effort. On top of that, the Office of Indian Affairs was mired in corruption that was exacerbated by wartime negligence. As a result, money promised to the Sioux tribe in Minnesota in exchange for its land wasn’t coming through, and many of its people starved.
This led to a bloody uprising called the “Dakota War,” which the U.S. government eventually put down.
Over 300 Sioux were sentenced to death for connection to the rebellion. Lincoln saw this as extreme, however, and pardoned all but 38 of the alleged perpetrators, whom he believed were guilty of the worst crimes such as rape and murder.
It was the largest mass hanging in American history, but it could have been much worse if not for Lincoln’s compassion. He believed that the Sioux were getting a raw deal, but needed to ensure peace on America’s borders in a time when the future of the United States was seriously in question.
Par for the course: IARC, the agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) that focuses on cancer research, has apparently faked data so that it could make the claim — in opposition to every other published paper in the world — that a commonly used weedkiller causes cancer.
This detail about the man in charge might explain what happened:
The chairman of the IARC sub-group tasked with reviewing evidence of glyphosate’s effect on laboratory animals was Charles Jameson, an American toxicologist. In testimony as part of personal-injury lawsuits against Monsanto in the United States, Jameson told lawyers for Monsanto he did not know when, why or by whom the edits had been made.
Monsanto is facing multiple legal claims in the U.S. from plaintiffs who allege glyphosate gave them or their loved ones cancer. Jameson is an expert witness for the plaintiffs. He did not respond to questions for this article. [emphasis mine]
If you want to read the whole ugly story, go to the second link above. This report cites numerous examples where IARC clearly fudged their reports to hide the fact that their conclusions were consistently debunked by other research.
An Iranian judge has sentenced an Iranian scientist to execution in 20 days.
The scientist, who appears to have mostly worked in Sweden, was convicted of spying for Israel. He in turn says he was railroaded because he refused to spy on his colleagues for the Iranian intelligence service.
What baffles me here is that he was arrested when returned to Iran for a short visit. He must have known that going back was going to put him in great risk. Why do it?
Link here. While most of the discussion about the missile threat from North Korea has focused on the possibility of it detonating a nuclear bomb high enough to cause an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would disable most electronic equipment, this article notes that they could much more easily do almost as much harm by simply using their ballistic missiles to fill low-Earth-orbit (LEO) space with space junk, thus disabling much of the world’s military surveillance and reconnaissance satellites.
I am not sure how much of a threat this might be, but I find the article somewhat worrisome because it proposes something that seems quite reasonable and doable, with the technology that North Korea appears to have, right this minute.
