The Stirring Elocution of Frederick Douglass

From FEE.org:

At the age of 29 in 1847, he [Frederick Douglass] delivered an address in Syracuse, New York, titled “Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country” in which he outlined a central point of many speeches to come:

There is no conceivable reason why all colored people should not be treated according to the merits of each individual. It is not only the plain duty, but also the interest of us all, to have every colored man take the place for which he is best fitted by education, character, ability, manners, and culture. If others insist on keeping him in any lower and poorer place*, it is not only his injury, but our universal loss. Yet which of our white congregations would take a colored pastor? How many of our New England villages would like to have colored postmasters, or doctors, or lawyers, or teachers in the public schools? A very slight difference in complexion suffices to keep a young man from getting a place as policeman, or fireman, or conductor, even on the horse cars. The trades-unions are closed against him, and so are many of our stores; while those which admit him are obliged to refuse him promotion on account of the unwillingness of white men to serve under him.

…………….

This was a man who could speak with conviction about the importance of character because he possessed it in abundance himself. He understood that slavery was a blot on the character of the country, evidence that a moral renaissance was required. “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous,” he said. Slavery was an equal opportunity curse because it would sooner or later come back to bite even those who seemed to benefit from it: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”  [read more]

*Like the Left today.

These robots can follow how-to diagrams

From Science News.org (Jan. 16):

Robots imbued with a certain kind of common sense may soon be able to follow instructional diagrams to build things.

When studying pictures for assembling IKEA furniture or LEGO villages, humans are naturally good at inferring how to get from A to B. Robots, on the other hand, normally have to be painstakingly programmed with exact instructions for how to move. “Even when you try to teach robots by demonstration, they’re just repeating the exact same motions you show them, not the concept underlying them,” says Dileep George, an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher at the San Francisco company Vicarious AI.

George and colleagues have now designed a robot operating system that can understand the basic ideas conveyed in schematic instructions and translate those ideas into action. These common sense robots, described online January 16 in Science Robotics, could work on a wider variety of tasks under different conditions than machines restricted to explicitly coded instructions or physical demonstrations.

The new robotic system learned more than 500 general concepts, such as “stack green objects on the right” and “arrange objects in a circle,” by studying before and after images for each type of action. When given a new set of instructions with a before-and-after diagram, the fully trained system considers all the concepts it has learned, and chooses and executes the maneuvers that will help it reach its goal. [read more]

Other articles on robots:

• A new AI training program helps robots own their ignorance
• Scientists invent 'self-aware' robot that operates ON ITS OWN and able to REPAIR ITSELF

A rare kind of black hole may be wandering around our Milky Way

From Fox News.com (Jan. 18):

Scientists think that they've spotted a rare, Jupiter-size black hole casually strolling through the Milky Way galaxy.

Of course, scientists can't see any black holes directly — but new research tracking a celestial cloud structure saw strange behavior that may have been caused by just such an invisible object. That data came courtesy of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a set of 66 telescopes scattered across the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

"When I checked the ALMA data for the first time, I was really excited because the observed gas showed obvious orbital motions, which strongly suggest an invisible massive object lurking," lead author Shunya Takekawa, a physicist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, told New Scientist.

Takekawa and his colleagues were using ALMA to study two gas clouds, which the team nicknamed Balloon and Stream for their shapes, during a two-day period in May 2018. During that time, they watched the gas moving strangely, seeming to spin around a center.

That movement allowed the team to calculate that 30,000 times the mass of our sun was packed into an object the size of Jupiter at the center of the movement. Those characteristics, combined with the lack of light coming from the location, suggest that the culprit is medium size for a black hole.  [read more]

I hope the black hole doesn’t enter our solar system. That would not be good at all.

Herbert Marcuse: The Philosopher Behind the Ideology of the Anti-Fascists

From FEE.org:

Marcuse Is of No Use

Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist.

Born in Berlin in 1898, he was drafted into the German Army in 1916 at age 18 and later participated in the Spartacist uprising. Following the war, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, where he would continue to study (and write a paper with Martin Heidegger on Hegel) before arriving at the Institute of Social Research in 1933.

While at the Institute of Social Research—better known today as the Frankfurt School—Marcuse would publish several works on Marx that would abandon the Marxist focus on labor and class struggle and develop the controversial philosophy of critical theory.

Critical theory is defined as “a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it.”

This might sound benign, but in practice, critical theory is the shallow analysis of politics, history, art, and society through the lens of power dynamics. It places the world into a box of oppressor vs. oppressed and insists that those who are oppressed are “good” and those who are oppressors are “evil.”

………………..

Critical Theory in Practice

Marcuse applies this theory in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”—a true example of doublespeak—wherein he argues that free speech and tolerance are only beneficial when they exist in conditions of absolute equality. When there are power differentials at play, which there most certainly always will be, then free speech and tolerance are only beneficial to the already powerful.

He calls tolerance in conditions of inequality “repressive” and argues that it inhibits the political agenda and suppresses the less powerful.

To account for this, Marcuse calls for a “liberating tolerance” that represses the strong and empowers the weak. He explained that a liberating tolerance “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

The problem is that if you view the world through the obfuscated lens of conflict, then you see little other than power dynamics, and the only way to restore power imbalances is to use force. This essentially means that the weak (“the Left”) can do no wrong because they are virtuous, and the powerful (“the Right”) are oppressive no matter what they do, due to their perceived position of dominance. [read more]

Thousands of stars, including the sun, will turn into huge crystals

From CNet.com:

Eventually, the sun will cool off and become a giant crystal floating through space. It's not a bizarre science fiction plot, but the takeaway of new scientific research published this week in the journal Nature.

You may have heard that billions of years down the road the sun will swell to a ravenous red giant star that will eventually swallow Earth. But long after our planet has been ended, the sun will shrink to a cool white dwarf star and then slowly solidify into a massive white crystal, the study says.

That's a lot of bling wasted on the empty vacuum of space.

"All white dwarfs will crystallize at some point in their evolution, although more massive white dwarfs go through the process sooner," Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay from the University of Warwick's Department of Physics in the UK explained in a statement.

"This means that billions of white dwarfs in our galaxy have already completed the process and are essentially crystal spheres in the sky. The sun itself will become a crystal white dwarf in about 10 billion years." [read more]

Cool. I knew about the sun swelling into a red giant star but not turning into a crystal. Glad I won’t be around when the sun swells.

The Ironies of Illegal Immigration

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 10):

Estimates suggest that there are 11 million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are now U.S. citizens.

A recent poll revealed that one-third of Mexicans (34 percent) would like to emigrate to the United States. With Mexico having a population of about 130 million, that amounts to some 44 million would-be immigrants.

Such massive potential emigration into the United States makes no sense.

First, Mexico is a naturally rich country. It ranks 19th in the world in proven oil reserves and is currently the 12th-largest oil producer. Mexico certainly has significantly more natural advantages than do far wealthier per capita Singapore, Taiwan, or Chile.

…………………

Second, popular progressive narratives in both Mexico and the United States cite America for all sorts of pathologies, past and present. The United States is often damned for prior colonialism and imperialism, as well as current racism and xenophobia.

Why, then, would millions of people south of the border leave their own homeland and potentially risk their lives to encounter a strange culture and language, to live in such a purportedly inhospitable place, and to adopt an antithetical system based on supposedly toxic European and Protestant traditions?

The answers to these two paradoxes are as obvious as they are politically incorrect and therefore seldom voiced. Life in Mexico is relatively poor, dangerous, and often unfree. In contrast, the United States is rich, generous, and secure.

……………….

More importantly, millions of Mexican citizens recognize (at least privately) that the United States is not the bogeyman of mostly elite critiques. Instead, it is one of the world’s rare multiracial, equal-opportunity societies. It is generous with its entitlements even to those who cross its border illegally, and far more meritocratic than most of the world’s highly tribal societies.

Maybe that is why millions of impoverished people from Mexico have left their homes in expectation that they will be treated far better as foreign, non-English speakers in a strange land than they will at home by their own government.

Indeed, if the U.S. treated immigrants in the fashion that Mexico does, then Mexican citizens would probably never emigrate to the U.S.

In sum, illegal immigration is both logical and nonsensical. [read more]

Interesting article.

Ex-political consultant Dick Morris has an interesting take on the building the wall. He says if America builds a wall between Mexico and us then that would force the Mexico gov’t to solve its own problems. Otherwise Mexican gov’t wants people to immigrate to America—less people to worry about. I don’t know. He might be right.

How Public Schools Suffer from the Tragedy of the Commons

From FEE.org:

Ownership by All

The idea of public schooling means they are open to the public, and in this way, we might truly call them public. But in a more realistic sense, the “public” in public school means they are owned by everyone and no one. For instance, if local public schools are supported in part by local taxation, then anyone who pays taxes in that district owns part of the school, in a sense. They don’t literally own a brick or a classroom, but in a republic, taxpayers are supposed to have a say in the things they pay for, or in this example, their local public school. In this way, your average public school is owned by everyone in that community. When we factor in the reality that a large part of funding for public education comes from the federal and state levels (as opposed to the local level only), then every taxpayer in an entire state and/or country “owns” the schools. These ISD’s are in reality not so independent after all.

Despite being collectively owned in theory, they are in reality owned by no one, which is another interpretation of the word “public.” This, of course, is the tragedy of the commons: When something is collectively owned, it is simultaneously owned by everyone and no one. Going back to our public school example, would an average tax-paying parent have substantial influence when it came to routine decisions about curriculum, course offerings, athletics, school lunches, etc.? After all, they own part of the school, at least in theory, so it stands to reason they would have a say in making decisions. But this isn’t how it works.

Because schools are “publicly” owned, they can’t possibly cater to the individual desires of each family. Susie’s mom wants a soccer team, Johnny’s dad wants increased funding for the band, and the elderly couple down the road just wants their property taxes to quit increasing. Just as a matter of practicality, publicly-owned services like schools cannot function in the same way that private schools do.

Why Markets Work Better

Although we can’t be certain of anything in this era of media saturation, I doubt whether we would ever see a story debating the legality of teaching Bible literacy courses in a private school. Private schools are funded by the parents of the students (not the abstract “community”), and just like a shopper who chooses Target over Tom Thumb, parents make a willful decision to send their child to a private school where they presumably know what product they are getting. Because an identifiable group of parents pays for the school, they have a substantially increased level of influence within the school. This isn’t to say that every parent will get what he or she wants simply because they write the check, but just as private businesses are subject to market tests of profit and loss, a private school must react promptly to the desires of its patrons if it wishes to stay in business.  [read more]

It’s too bad that today’s Leftists don’t know or understand the tragedy of the commons principle.

When Bill Clinton Tackled Me

From Dick Morris on Dick Morris.com (Jan. 8):

In May of 1990, I was meeting with my client Governor Bill Clinton in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion when he totally lost it. He ran after me as I stormed out of the building and tackled me from behind, drew his fist back and started to punch me. Hillary screamed and held Bill’s arm back. Then she walked me around the grounds of the Mansion trying to calm me down. “Dick, Dick, she said. Don’t leave. Bill needs you. He’s just upset. Don’t go. He only does this to people he loves.”

………………

Bill decided to run for Governor in 1990 and faced only nominal opposition in the Democratic Primary. But people were so tired of him that he began to lose ground to his challenger and it looked like he might lose the election.

I gave him the bad news at a private meeting in May of 1990 and he exploded in anger, cursing and yelling at me. He even accused me of “throwing” the election to help my new Republican friends (I had become a Republican in the interim).

I stormed out of the Governor’s Mansion saying, over my shoulder as I left “OK! I quit! Now I’ll be a fifty state Republican. Go lose this election on your own.”

That’s when I heard his hoof beats behind me and he came up and tackled me. It was why our relationship cooled. He remained my client but no longer my friend.  [read more]

Dick Morris also mentioned this episode briefly in his 2016 book Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary.

Another article about the Clintons by Dick Morris: “How the Clintons Made Money from Huawei”

Russian church head: Smartphones could precede Antichrist

From AP News.com (Jan. 8):

MOSCOW (AP) — The head of the Russian Orthodox Church says the data-gathering capacity of devices such as smartphones risks bringing humanity closer to the arrival of the Antichrist.

In an interview shown Monday on state TV, Patriarch Kirill said the church does not oppose technological progress but is concerned that “someone can know exactly where you are, know exactly what you are interested in, know exactly what you are afraid of” and that such information could be used for centralized control of the world.

“Control from one point is a foreshadowing of the coming of Antichrist, if we talk about the Christian view. Antichrist is the person who will be at the head of the world wide web that controls the entire human race,” he said. [source]

Interesting. He could be right. Not only the Antichrist could use the technology but AI overloads could as well. Or maybe the Antichrist and the AI overloads could join forces. Who knows.

Rights and Non-Rights: A Simple Way to Distinguish the Two

Commentary from Lawrence W. Reed on FEE.org:

“Rights” are in the news these days perhaps as much as they were in George Mason’s time. As a score of politicians prepares to announce their 2020 campaigns for President of the United States, we can expect “rights” to be in the news every day, as they are promised to us one after another. “You have a right” to this or that and “If elected, I’ll make sure you get it” will soon be monotonous refrains.

America is a nation founded on the notion of rights. Our independence was declared in 1776 on a foundation of “unalienable” rights granted to us not by mortal authorities but by the Creator himself. Our ancestors rebelled against the British because they believed that such rights as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were being thwarted by oppressors in London. Our founding documents were put forth specifically for the purposes of securing and protecting rights. Battles both intellectual and physical were fought in the ensuing decades to ensure that rights remained a priority of government or were extended to people not originally included.

……………….

I’ve given this subject some thought over the years and feel confident in providing the reader with a couple of lists to consider. The first one itemizes what I personally think you have a right to; the second is a partial roster of things I personally think you don’t have a right to (and I readily grant that you have every right to disagree with me).

You have a right to:

1. Your life (unless compromised by taking or attempting to take that of another person without a self-defense justification);
2. Your thoughts;
3. Your speech (which is really a verbal or written expression of #2) so long as you don’t steal it from another without permission or credit;
4. Material property you were freely given, that you created yourself, or that you freely traded for;
5. Raise and educate your children as you see fit;
6. Live in peace and freedom so long as you do not threaten the peace and freedom of others.

You do not have a right to:

1. High-speed broadband Internet access;
2. Cheeseburgers, cheap wine (or even expensive wine, for that matter), or an iPhone;
3. Somebody else’s house, car, boat, income, business, or bank account;
4. The labor of another person you’ve not freely contracted with (you can’t enslave somebody, in other words);
5. Medical care from a witch doctor or a skilled surgeon or anybody in between;
6. Taxpayer-funded (i.e., coercively-appropriated) child daycare, college education, contraceptives, colonoscopies, or sports stadiums;
7. Anything that’s not yours, even though you really want it and think you’re entitled to it;
8. Conscript other people’s children into schools you think they should attend;
9. Free stuff in general, unless the rightful owner chooses to offer it;
10. Anything a politician flattered you with by claiming you have a right to it.

Of course, gray areas and reasonable qualifications exist. For example, while I believe you do have a right to raise and educate your own children as you see fit, abuse and neglect are not defensible. But let’s keep our eyes on the big picture, the broad principles here.

Positive vs. Negative Rights

Now, look at those two lists again, carefully. How does the nature of the first list contrast with the nature of the second?

Answer: In the case of the first list, nothing is required of other people except that they leave you alone. For you to have a right to something in the second list, however, requires that other people be compelled to provide that something to you. That’s a monumental difference!

The first list comprises what are often called both “natural rights” and “negative rights”—natural because they derive from our essential nature as unique, sensate individuals and negative because they don’t impose obligations on others beyond a commitment to not violate them. The items in the second are called “positive rights” because others must give them to you or be coerced into doing so if they decline.  [read more]

The Left would disagree with the 2nd list saying they are rights. The Bill of Rights is basically the first list.

The Left Will Make 2019 a Dark Year

From The Daily Signal.com (Jan. 2):

2019 will be a dark year in America.

Thanks to the left’s control of the House of Representatives and the news media, Americans will be kept in a fevered state throughout 2019—with innumerable hearings, exposes, criminal investigations, and possible indictments of those around the president and the president himself.

Truth will not be the point. Defamation will. Anything that might muddy the president, no matter how spurious, no matter how thin the evidence, will be pursued with gusto. The media will drop “bombshell” after “bombshell.” If lives and careers are ruined, so much the better; no one should be associating with this president anyway, as far as the left is concerned.

The Robert Mueller investigation into alleged “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government—which has led to guilty pleas and imprisonment of people around President Donald Trump for offenses having nothing to do with such collusion—is a preview of what lies ahead.

The goal of the left to weaken, disable, and impeach the president is the heart of its mission to undo the 2016 presidential election. If the Republicans had done anything comparable during the Obama administration, the Democrats and the media would not only have charged Republicans with racism—as they labeled all criticism of Barack Obama—they would have howled “fascism.”

And, for once, they wouldn’t have been far from the truth. The misuse of government institutions for political ends is indeed a fascist tactic. But because most media serve as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, there will be no protest from the media, only support.

……………………

….the Democratic Party and the media will do to American political life what it has done to the arts; the universities; the high schools; the Boy Scouts; race relations; religion; the happiness of so many women (misled by feminism regarding marriage and career); the moral fabric of American life (morality reduced to feelings); late-night television; mainstream Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism; pro football; and the sexual innocence of the young: It will poison it.

From the French Revolution to this day, the two great aims of the left have been promising utopia to the malcontented and accumulating as much power as possible. All moral values are subservient to these goals.

After all, what could be more important than “social justice” (the left’s term for everything it advocates); “equality” (of result); women’s liberation from the “sexist oppression” of the “patriarchy”; combatting “white privilege”; fighting the “rape culture” that pervades campuses; saving life on planet Earth from the “existential threat” to it; “resistance” to the “authoritarian,” “fascist,” “white supremacist,” “racist” Trump administration; supplanting national identities and institutions with a “world citizen” identity and international institutions; and undoing the most fundamental built-in identity of the human race, that of male and female, in the name of transgender rights? [read more]

Yea, the author pretty much nailed the prediction.

Just Because We Can Create Genetically Modified Babies Doesn’t Mean We Should

From The Daily Signal.com (Dec. 17):

Two remarkable things took place last month in the world of biotechnology: A Chinese doctor claimed to have created two genetically modified human embryos who were successfully nurtured to birth, and the worldwide scientific community roundly rejected this experiment as a violation of ethics.

In turn, the Chinese government condemned the doctor and called for an immediate investigation.

At issue is a developing biotechnology known as CRISPR-Cas9 that allows scientists to genetically edit cells. The technique holds potential to treat a variety of genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease, as well as even more complex conditions such as cancers and heart disease. Indeed, the doctor says he genetically modified the two children in question (back in their embryonic stage) to make them resistant to HIV.

As promising as that sounds, the deployment of gene-editing to human embryos is rife with ethical questions: concerns about experimentation on minors, human embryo destruction, the creation of life in a lab, “designer babies,” the boundary between therapy and “enhancement,” and interventions in the genome that will be passed on to future generations.

In other words, genetically modified human embryos raise new versions of old bioethical problems, as well as some new ones.

First, countless embryonic human beings were killed in the process that led to the live birth of these two genetically modified children. Like all so-called “assisted reproductive technologies,” many more embryos are created than are implanted and subsequently delivered. The remaining embryonic human beings are either frozen in perpetuity or destroyed. This research poses an immediate threat to the right to life of the unborn.

……………….

We should also care about the dignity of life in its very origins. There is a great danger in creating children in the laboratory, a process that treats human subjects as if objects of technological mastery. That will have profound moral and cultural implications as the science progresses: Societies can come to view human life—all life, modified or not—as something that can easily be toyed with and discarded.

……………….

There’s also the specter of a kind of “brave new world” genetic arms race. Imagine John Edwards’ “Two Americas,” but between the genetic haves and the genetic have-nots. An America where the wealthy (and morally unscrupulous) design super-babies, while everyone else remains “unenhanced.”

As the philosopher Leon Kass has explained, “As bad as it might be to destroy a creature made in God’s image, it might be very much worse to be creating them after images of one’s own.”  [read more]

Hitler and a lot of early progressives liked the idea of eugenics—perfecting the species however they defined what “perfection” is.