A View from the Right Science, POLITICS, & Religion

My friend Todd Fichter is quite peeved at NPR political correspondent and Fox News contributor Mara Liasson. He believes she is using the term “isolationist” in an inaccurate and unfair way. I haven’t been following the issue, but I believe the proper use of terminology is important for any discussion or debate, so I agreed […]

What do a crowded theater and anti-war pamphleteering have in common? What do they have to do with your First Amendment rights? Stay with me, and all will be made clear…. It seems whenever one has a discussion about First Amendment rights (well, often, anyways), inevitably someone brings up the bit about shouting fire in […]

Since at least the 1970s, we’ve been warned that the world is at, or close to reaching, “peak oil“. As you can probably guess, the term indicates reaching some sort of limit. According to Wikipedia, “Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the […]

I’ve read Ann Coulter’s first four books, now, having recently completed How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter. (Yeah, I know, I’m way behind.) If you’re unfamiliar with the book, it is a compilation of many of her columns through 2003 (or maybe early 2004). I wouldn’t […]

Last time, I wrote about various, highly unusual characteristics of the Milky Way Galaxy and of the Sun that allow for life to exist in this particular, small, local region of space. Before that, I posted about the many factors in the very structure of the universe that must be (and are, obviously) extremely fine-tuned […]

“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.” — Arno Penzias, physicist who shares the Nobel prize for physics for discovering […]

“One would have to conclude either that the features of the universe invoked in support of the Anthropic Principle are only coincidences or that the universe was indeed tailor-made for life. I will leave it to the theologians to ascertain the identity of the tailor!” — Bernard Carr, cosmologist and professor of mathematics & astronomy […]

The other day I posted about the Texas Revolution of 1836, giving some facts to counter the position that America’s early settlers were just a bunch of greedy, unscrupulous, white land-grabbers who “stole” their land from the Mexicans (and Native Americans). On the contrary, the Anglos had mostly been invited in by the Mexican government […]

If you listen to guys like Howard Zinn and others of the “anti-America” crowd, you’ll hear a lot of complaining about America’s “imperialist” ambitions and the way the American government and society have horribly treated various (usually) non-white groups, stolen their land, etc. The 19th-century notions of American expansionism and “Manifest Destiny” — i.e., that […]

The issue of slavery, in particular that which existed in early America, is a sore subject. A shameful shadow is cast over American history because of its part in continuing this abominable practice. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s/60s was made necessary because of the nation’s failure to fully integrate non-whites into society even […]