Tag: Science

The Progressive Paradigms Lost

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by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine 

The progressive mind functions in terms of fossilized paradigms into which every crisis and problem are fitted, no matter how many qualifying or contradictory facts are left behind. These paradigms are part of a worldview, a picture of human existence that gives it coherence and meaning, and a narrative that gives people an identity and a morality. With these paradigms we can sort out the good from the bad, the saved from the damned, the political goals we should pursue, the ones we should avoid––and who gets the power to decide. Continue reading “The Progressive Paradigms Lost” →

The Anti-Empirical Left

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Science is ignored when it doesn’t support politically correct policy.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

President Obama entered office promising to restore the sanctity of science. Instead, a fresh war against science, statistics, and reason is being waged on behalf of politically correct politics.

After the Sandy Hook tragedy, the president attempted to convert national outrage into new gun-control legislation. Specifically, he focused on curtailing semi-automatic “assault” rifles. But there is no statistical evidence that such guns — semi-automatic rifles that have mostly cosmetic changes to appear similar to banned military-style fully automatic assault weapons — lead to increased gun-related crimes.

The promiscuous availability of illegal handguns does. Handguns are used in the vast majority of all gun related violent crime — and in such cases they are often obtained illegally. Yet the day-to-day enforcement of existing handgun statutes is far more difficult than the widely publicized passing of new laws.

Late-term abortions used to be justified in part by an argument dating back to the 1970s that fetuses were not yet “human.” But emerging science has allowed premature babies five months old or younger to survive outside the womb. Brain waves of fetuses can be monitored at just six weeks after conception. Such facts may be unwelcome to many, given the political controversy over Continue reading “The Anti-Empirical Left” →

Obama’s Pseudo-Scientism

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Too hot? Too cold? Regardless, it must be global warming.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

President Obama came to California. He saw a drought. He announced the cause to be global warming and left. How accurate was the president’s diagnosis of harmful, man-made climate change in stopping rain and snow? First, a bit of a reminder about what the president has called “settled science.”

Until 1982 “settled science” decreed that stomach ulcers were a result of bad diet, too much gastric acid, or undue stress. Then Australian scientists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren shocked the medical community with an unlikely thesis: The real culprit for peptic ulcers more often was infection by the Gram-negative bacterium H. pylori, a common but sometimes dangerous agent in the gut that could be treated with antibiotics. The practice of gastroenterology was turned upside down. Continue reading “Obama’s Pseudo-Scientism” →

Flat-Earth Democrats

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by Bruce S. Thornton

FrontPage Magazine

The victims of the tornado that hit Moore Oklahoma had not even been counted when Democrat politicians made fools of themselves by trying to link the disaster to global warming and Republicans. Continue reading “Flat-Earth Democrats” →

It Was the Power, Stupid!

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by Victor Davis Hanson

PJ Media

I. Power — Always Was and Always Will Be

In my dumber days, between 2001-2008, I used to wonder why the Left relentlessly hammered the war on terror (e.g., renditions, tribunals, predators, preventative detention, Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay) when these measures had not only proven quite useful in preventing another 9/11-like attack, but had been sanctioned by both the Congress and the courts. In those ancient times, I was not as cynical as I am now. Continue reading “It Was the Power, Stupid!” →

“Nature Fakery”

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by Bruce S. Thornton

Defining Ideas

At the turn of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt became embroiled in a public controversy over how some writers and naturalists described the natural world in overly anthropomorphic and sentimental terms. Continue reading ““Nature Fakery”” →

A Eulogy for “Selective Death”

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by Terry Scambray

New Oxford Review

A review of What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and  Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 179 pp.) Continue reading “A Eulogy for “Selective Death”” →

Who Really Is “Anti-Science”?

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by Bruce S. Thornton

FrontPage Magazine

In any national election we can depend on the usual liberal ad hominemattacks on Republicans and their candidates. Continue reading “Who Really Is “Anti-Science”?” →

God Is Not Dead

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A Review of Cornelius Hunter’s trilogy.

by Terry Scambray

The Chesterton Review

Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Brazos Press, 2001, 189 pp.)
Darwin’s Proof: The Triumph of Religion over Science (Brazos Press, 2003, 168 pp.)
Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism (Brazos Press, 2007, 170 pp.) Continue reading “God Is Not Dead” →

On Reminding the Politicians Who’s the Boss

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by Bruce S. Thornton

RightNetwork.com

The Democrats and their tribunes in the mainstream media weren’t too happy about the House of Representatives reading aloud the Constitution. Continue reading “On Reminding the Politicians Who’s the Boss” →