General Motors is now dead. The company’s corpse will be owned and driven mainly by the bad guys who destroyed the U.S. auto industry: government and the labor union. As reported in The Wall Street Journal (see the first link above), the U.S. government will own 60%, the Canadian government will own 12.5%, and a […]
My blog has famous quotations of Patrick Henry here and on the sidebar of the main page. Here are two more that are a little less famous. “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, […]
The Epistemology Behind this Quintessential Travesty of Justice Yesterday President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. That Obama would nominate such an individual could be inferred from this passage from Obama’s remarks on Justice Souter on May 1st: Now, the process of selecting someone to replace Justice Souter is among my most serious […]
In his speech on national security on Thursday, President Obama said this: I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence, I bear responsibility for keeping this country safe, and I reject the assertion that these are […]
Because some people deserve it. If Osama bin Laden is captured, he deserves to be tortured before he is executed. A day of excruciating torture for each of the more than 3,000 victims on 9/11 would be getting off easy. Torture and execution as punishment for murder is not cruel. It is just. In fact, […]
My paper, “Past Longevity as Evidence for the Future,” appears in the new issue (Vol. 76, No. 1) of Philosophy of Science, a leading mainstream academic journal of philosophy. The abstract and acknowledgment—including my acknowledgment of the epistemology of Ayn Rand—are here, on the Web site of the University of Chicago Press. (Update, 6/29/2011: Read […]
On May 1, his 92nd day in office, the nation’s leader said this: And finally, we shall endeavor to take this year the first step on the way to an organic economic development, working on the fundamental principle that there can be no recovery which does not begin at the root of national economic life, […]
Yesterday evening, Obama held a press conference marking his first 100 days as President. But I want to comment on this statement he made yesterday morning at a Town Hall in Arnold, Missouri: We’re going to continue to help our schools meet high standards and close achievement gaps. The notion of ‘closing achievement gaps’ has […]
Much has been written, in the past few weeks, on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s report entitled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” Some bloggers, including me, held off on writing about this news immediately because the report is so irrational that it seemed like a spoof […]
On the occasion of “Earth Day” (April 22), it is instructive to remind ourselves of the ideology underlying environmentalism. This post is from a page that has been on my Web site since September 2007. This is the third from the last paragraph of Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human […]