Culture

First Amendment defenders will welcome the new rules that tie government money to academic freedom but anyone ringing a cowbell can drown out a speaker and craven administrators would have little incentive to take the risk of stopping them: We can encourage our children and grandchildren to stand up against the stifling political conformity and let them know it’s okay if they’re penalized for their principled stand. As I told my own daughter in a letter when she started college, “Most of your professors will be excellent and you will gain a priceless education from attending college. But a few of your professors will be militant, intolerant disasters, yet they will be ostensibly intelligent and far more articulate than you. Read More ›

Yesterday, a prematurely aged-looking Assange (he is 47) — a founder of Wikileaks and Australian — was arrested by UK Police after the Ecuadorean Embassy he has sought asylum in since 2012 withdrew its protection. The arrest raises questions on dissidents, privacy, protection of legitimate secrets, the public’s right to know more than officials, power brokers and publicists or other gatekeepers want, and more. (Let us not forget the Pentagon Papers and their impact.) Many of these concerns bleed over into how controversial and sometimes unpopular views like ID will be treated going forward — especially regarding freedom of the Internet. So, there is relevance. Again, Daily Mail gives some background: ‘Narcissist’ Julian Assange faces DECADES in US jail after Read More ›

Some say it’s time to consider the zoo hypothesis: “They can see us but we can’t see them. The idea revisits a theory proposed in 1973 by radio astronomer John Ball: Ball went further, proposing that we may live in a metaphorical zoo — a kind of cosmic Eden. The aliens of the galaxy have somehow arranged things so that our planet is shielded from them by one-way bars: They can observe us, but we can’t observe them. One nice thing about this conjecture is that it offers a solution to a long-standing puzzle known as Fermi’s Paradox. Broached nearly 70 years ago by physicist Enrico Fermi, it rests on the fact that the universe is very old. Consequently, if Read More ›