Enacting speech codes on college campuses is one of those causes that leftists pursue to win arguments on which they cannot prevail democratically. It all sounds so reasonable and humane, avoiding "hurtful words", based on race, gender, etc., etc. But, in the end, the codes are really about stifling dissent. They almost always are applied against conservatives. If, indeed, a conservative tries to use a speech code against an "offensive" liberal, the judges (all liberals) will likely throw the case out, or maybe even reverse the case to target the party complaining.

From the beginning it should have been obvious that speech codes are inherently opposed to the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. The courts are now weighing in, and not a moment too soon. The Alliance Defense Fund deserves special congratulations for its leadership on these matters. A victory in the Third District court can now be applied elsewhere in the country.

It was both scary and pathetic at the Discovery Channel in Maryland today when an environmental terrorist took hostages in an attempt to force the television network to show more programs on Malthus and Darwin and to rail against over-population and global warming.

Oddly missing from initial news accounts was any mention of Darwin. But, in James J. Lee's manifesto, emerges this clear demand: "Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!!"

Another odd thing is that the Discovery Channel probably runs more programs about Darwinian evolution than any other network, even PBS. Indeed, if I close my eyes and try to visualize "Discovery Channel" the image that forms is of a cartoon amphibian crawling out of the primordial pond, growing simian legs, making fire and developing into a TV news anchor.

In the news stories of the Columbine massacre several years ago the Darwin angle also was missed, though it had been explicit in the rants of the young killer/suicides. Now it's Mr. Lee's turn to have his message revised.

Isn't it time to "follow the money" on science scams in academia? In the end, taxpayers are the suckers and that is a fit subject for public inquiry.

For example, evolutionary psychology includes the assertion that Darwinian evolution accounts for human morality. But that claim was dealt a hard blow last week when one of its leading exponents, Prof. Marc Hauser of Harvard, was exposed as a fraud. The monkey research he conducted didn't show at all what what he said it did. This isn't Climate Gate, but it's a scandal.

Dr. Hauser probably can escape permanent damage to his employment prospects if he explains that his genes made him cheat. In the history of hominids, after all, shaking down taxpayers is a well-established behavior to enhance reproductive advantage.

What no one in the media apparently bothered to check was the cost of Prof. Hauser's bogus research. Looking at National Science Foundation grants online, it seems to have been $504,000. Shouldn't the Inspector General at the NSF be asking Harvard for the government's money back?

The follow-up question is, how much of this goes on in academia? And why does Big Science, alone among American institutions, get to police itself? We have headline investigations if some Congressman misuses his per diem allowance on a junket to Ouagadougou. Total waste, maybe $300. In comparison, is 500K for rigged university research merely chimp change?

There are still cars zipping around America's bluer neighborhoods with bumper strips from way back in 2003: "No War for Oil."

That was the Iraq war, of course. There is no need to belabor the memories of the marches, the snide TV and radio commentaries, the alternative media fits about the supposed conspiracy. The idea that George W. Bush and his evil buddy, Dick Cheney, were sending American boys to die for oil was simply taken as a proven truth.

Only now, seven years later, as US combat troops leave Iraq, is oil production in Iraq finally back to its pre-war levels of production of 2.5 million barrels a day and easing upwards. Electricity production is doing better, but not great.

And the US oil companies that benefitted? Well, Exxon is there, but the biggest players are the Chinese. Does anyone remember the Chinese sending any troops to Iraq? Or the Russians?

Hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars have been spent on the Iraq war. By no conceivable accounting will anyone in the U.S. get that much back in Iraqi oil revenue--ever.

The Iraqis, meanwhile, do have oil as their big economic hope. The country's reserves are nearly those of Saudi Arabia and already supply 90 percent of government revenue. The big danger, simultaneously, is that oil will corrupt a country already steeped in traditions of corruption.

But it is long past time for those "No War for Oil" bumper strips to come off, don't you think?

(George Gilder addresses Wired's September cover story, "The Web is Dead", by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolf.)

May I be so bold as to contradict my old friends at Wired? I would suggest
that they have the picture wildly upside down. What is dying is not the
Web but television and the Internet. The onrush of video bits as a share
of traffic is irrelevant to the prospects of the web, which is measured
not by bulk traffic but by information entropy: by impressions,
transactions, and servers. The video flood, however, is deadly to the
Internet with its ungainly TCP aks-naks, buffers and security patches,
multi-layered latency and dropped links. It is the Internet that must die
as a result of the dominance of video traffic.

Video will kill the cumbrous, porous seven layer Internet model just as
the rise of voice killed the old best efforts, asynchronous,
non-deterministic telegraph network. As my friend Henry Gau ingeniously
explains, the rise of voice communications with their needs for
deterministic synchrony required a new Bell infrastructure to replace the
old Western Union tap-tap. Similarly video's needs for deterministic
synchronous delivery precisely parallel the previous demands of voice
streams when they became the prevailing form of traffic early in the last
century with the rise of telephony.

Who will build this network remains in question but the floods of video
all the way down from the server through the living room to the desktop to
the handset cannot be handled by some Microsoft, Symantec, or Cisco patch
on the old Internet.

Continue reading "Internet's Dead, Not the Web" »

Amtrak not only has had a monopoly on passenger rail in America, it has abused the franchise. The problem now is so serious that many observers have grown skeptical about any realistic future for passenger rail in this country. But don't give up. It is legal now for private companies, in certain circumstances, to bid against Amtrak management, and that is beginning to happen. Don Phillips, in the new Trains magazine (I cannot find the link; sorry) has the story from Virginia.


An old-fashioned rail battle erupts in the nation's capital

Boardman admits he was asleep at the switch

By Don Phillips

The great railroad battles of the last 180 years have been etched into the American consciousness. High school and college students know the names: Gould, Rockefeller, Huntington, Brosnan. There was the first railroad battle, over whether the new Baltimore & Ohio or the C&O Canal would get through the narrow gap at Point of Rocks, Md. There were numerous bitter strikes, including the great Pullman strike and a nationwide railroad strike that began at the still-standing roundhouse at Martinsburg, W.Va., both in the 19th century.

Continue reading "Private Competition at Last in Passenger Rail" »

The New York Times, as usual, leads the attack on the federal court ruling Monday against US Government funding for embryonic stem cell research (mainly through the National Institutes of Health), and as usual the reporting is tendentious.

"This decision has the potential to do serious damage to one of the most promising areas of biomedical research," says Dr. Francis Collins, director of NIH.

In a companion article ("The Two Plaintiffs at Center for the Ban on Stem Cell Use"), the Times employs innuendo to raise personal questions about the lead researchers who brought the case, Dr. James L. Shirley and Dr. Theresa Deisher. It is one of those stories that sounds worrying until you read it again and realize how empty the charges are. (Basically, the plaintiffs have had disputes with colleagues. Big surprise.) In other words, just because the Times runs a negative article about someone doesn't mean there is any content to the charges. The truth is that the scientists who are plaintiffs have put their careers at risk by taking on the Government and especially the likes of powerful funders at NIH--not to mention biased journalists. They are, in short, very courageous.

In a third article, "Stem Cell Biology and its Complications," way down the page, long after we read how people with diabetes and other ravaging diseases are distressed by possible funding cuts for cures, the Times admits, "Yet despite the high hopes for embryonic stem cells, progresss has been slow--so far there are no treatments with the cells." (Emphasis added.) After all these years and who know how much much money: "no treatments with the (embryonic stem) cells."

Finally, the Times leaps in with a fourth article, an editorial deploring the decision, "Wrong Direction on Stem Cells." Expect attacks by columnists to follow.

The plaintiffs would have no chance against that kind of stacked journalistic deck. Fortunately, they apparently have a better case in court.

Ideology is largely responsible for the insistence on embryonic stem cell research to the relative exclusion of other stem cell approaches. It is another case of Big Science and its journalists enablers acting like Big Brother.

Talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas supposedly are going to take place shortly. Poor Benjamin Netanyahu has to behave as if he really believes success is possible, even if, in truth, the possibility is slight to none.

George Gilder of Discovery Institute, and author of The Israel Test, spoke a few days ago upon return from a recent trip.

This short video is part of of his trip report.

The news about the court victory for critics of embryonic stem cell research is huge, though it is not being played that way. You can be sure it would have been a bigger story if the case had been won by the government.

Nonetheless, it is in the first section of most papers and even on page one of the Wall Street Journal (above the fold). Theresa Deisher of Seattle is one of the plaintiffs who sued the Obama Administration over the matter. She kindly sent us a copy of the ruling, found here.

Obviously, the Administration will appeal. But they have been called out and the pro-life issues now have a legal force lacking before. It is amazing and grand that Deisher and company have shown what citizens can do--on the right side.

The Journal story says the ruling "was cheered by some Christian groups as a defense of human life" (imagine that), but "denounced by scientists who called it a major setback for medical research."

But it is not a setback for science. Deisher is a scientist in the field and Wesley J. Smith, senior fellow of Discovery Institute, has pointed out repeatedly that you don't need human embryos to get scientific progress using stem cells. Furthermore, evidence suggests that human embryos are bad candidates for research in the field.

Embryonic Stem Cells are wonderful candidates, of course, for the effort to pit human life defenders against people who long for medical advances. Judge Royce Lambert of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. has thrown a monkey wrench into that strategy.

The Screwtape Letters, a novel of C. S. Lewis, is both satirical and instructional, maybe at once the funniest of Lewis' works and also the most trenchant. It has converted people, and amused many more. How many works of theological interest can say as much? (Just now I can't think of any). Published during World War II, Screwtape seems to remain fresh and accessible--and every few years its schema is reused for some other purpose, the sincerest form of flattery, as they say.

Screwtape seems like a natural for stage adaptation and has been performed by several writer/producers/actors before Max McLean. But it is McLean who has excelled. He presently has a bravura, small cast performance at the Westside Theater Off-Broadway in New York. The production has been favorably noticed in the World and The Wall Street Journal ("One hell of a good show"), among other places. But I particularly enjoyed a recent sizable back-story treatment by Retta Blaney in the estimable high church Anglican (Episcopal) journal, The Living Church (July 25 issue).

For what is worth, my opinion is that Screwtape would make an outstanding film and gain millions of new fans where it now wins thousands. The letters from the minor devil, Screwtape, to his agent, Toadpipe, are an indirect means to describe for us sympathetically and humorously the devil's "patient", a young man whose soul Screwtape intends to corrupt. It could be entertaining to follow the patient on the big screen.

There are at least two or three friendly film makers who should be looking at the possibility.

McLean, who himself plays Screwtape on stage--in a gaudy gold and red brocade smoking jacket--says his greatest difficulty was getting Lewis' long sentences into script bites that won't gag an actor on stage. He seems to have pulled it off and also to have reduced what would have been several hours of drama into a lively 90 minutes. "We have twice as much content as most shows and we're half as long," he says. "I feel audiences want to delve into the meatiness of the piece."

The play has been extended in New York into October. I am going to try to see it before then, but if I (and you) can't, McLean will have another national road show this winter (he's had at least one before the New York opening). Then maybe a movie?