Recent Articles of Note

Apropos of a previous post and the comments therein, Victor Davis Hanson takes on the Reality.. and Sham.. of Diversity in Academe.

Arthur C. Clarke opines on Space Elevators :

As its most enthusiastic promoter, I am often asked when I think the first space elevator might be built. My answer has always been: about 50 years after everyone has stopped laughing. Maybe I should now revise it to 25 years.

Though personally I think a "Jacob's Ladder" of successive Rotorvators in ever higher orbits is more practicable.

Christopher Hitchens gives the "objectively pro-Fascist" Anti-War movement a serve :

There are only two serious attempts at swamp-draining currently under way. In Afghanistan and Iraq, agonizingly difficult efforts are in train to build roads, repair hospitals, hand out ballot papers, frame constitutions, encourage newspapers and satellite dishes, and generally evolve some healthy water in which civil-society fish may swim. But in each case, from within the swamp and across the borders, the most poisonous snakes and roaches are being recruited and paid to wreck the process and plunge people back into the ooze. How nice to have a "peace" movement that is either openly on the side of the vermin, or neutral as between them and the cleanup crew, and how delightful to have a press that refers to this partisanship, or this neutrality, as "progressive."

The BBC's science credentials are questioned - by the Guardian(!) :

...his is not a cultural issue, and this is not about alternative science versus western medicine. It is about the far simpler issue of a proper media organisation presenting made-up marketing rubbish as if it was scientific fact.

As opposed to made up political rubbish as anything other than the purest propaganda.