Author Archive

Soda Taxes Hurt the Poor and Don’t Work

May 26, 2019

“Sin tax proponents have shifted gears by arguing that taxation is mainly aimed at compensating society for the drains sinners impose on the public healthcare budget and reducing the harm consumers do to themselves. With this new push, the limits of what defines a sin steadily are being expanded.”  — “‘Sin Tax’ Costs Outweigh Benefits” […]

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Necessary Conditions for Reliability in Radiometric Dating

May 19, 2019

“Each timepiece has its own purposes and limitations…. When used outside of its intended purposes or limitations, any dating technique can produce incorrect and unreliable results. When used within its intended purposes and limitations, radiometric dating can and does serve as a reliable and trustworthy tool, just as satellite pictures and Doppler radar do in […]

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Responding to Trump Derangement Syndrome

May 12, 2019

My friend Todd was recently involved in a brief Facebook thread, responding to a post from a mutual FB friend — well, Todd knows him much better than I do — and one other. Knowing that Todd comes from a much more libertarian perspective than I do and is more critical of the administration, I […]

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Trump Puts Offshore Drilling Plans on Indefinite Hold

May 5, 2019

“By the time the court rules, that may be discombobulating to our plan.” — Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt to the Wall Street Journal I wrote early last year about then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s “new draft offshore oil and gas plan” which would make “over 90 percent of the total OCS acreage […]

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Translating Astrophysics

April 28, 2019

It seems we have had a spate of recent discoveries in astrophysics and cosmology that got some attention in the popular press. The biggest one, of course, was the first image of an actual black hole — highlighted by its surrounding accretion disk, of course. That image became so popular that it was “honored” to […]

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The Ten Commandments on Easter?

April 21, 2019

“Then the Day of Unleavened Bread came when the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover meal for us, so we can eat it.”… So they went and found [the guest room] just as He had told them, and they prepared the Passover.”  — Luke […]

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How to Build a Totalitarian State That the People Love

April 14, 2019

“Its prophetic voice has remained surprisingly contemporary, both in its particular forecasts and in its general tone of semiserious alarm.”  — author/editor/publisher Martin Green Something a little different for you today… In 1946, Aldous Huxley wrote a Forward to the new edition of his Brave New World (1932). It was part retrospective, in which he […]

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How the “Equality Act” Could Make Your Life Hell

April 7, 2019

“[The Equality Act is the] most extreme threat to religious freedom, free speech, privacy, and to women’s rights that has ever been proposed by Congress. [It] will be used as a wrecking ball to churches, religious organizations, religious freedom, and free speech.”  — Liberty Counsel The Equality Act has been around for several years, and […]

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Brief Takeaways re the “No Collusion” Letter

March 31, 2019

“The collusion delusion is over.”  — President Donald Trump For three years now, America has been caught up in the “Russian collusion” investigation into Donald Trump and his presidential campaign. Roughly the past two of those years have been under the direction of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Plenty of people — both among those involved […]

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Measuring Astronomical Distances

March 24, 2019

“If the distances are wrong, then an object may appear small and dim not because it is incredibly distant, but because it really is small and dim. And faulty distances mean that any theory based on them — such as the big bang — is faulty too!”  — Andrew Rigg, freelance journalist and amateur astronomer, […]

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