This is the 5000th entry published on Secondhand Smoke. I started this blog at the suggestion of a friend, who opined correctly that my then Website was too static. “If you want people to come to your site,” he told me, “it has to change every day.” And he set me up on Blogger, from where I posted until invited to Read More ›
WITH its vivid introduction, “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States,” the “9/11 Commission Report” became an instant best-seller and a National Book Award finalist. Unchallenged in its objective history of the circumstances and failures leading up to the horrors of 9/11, except by inevitable conspiracy theorists, it set forth a wide-ranging series Read More ›
George Orwell once quipped that “no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.” Orwell, who penned the classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, was undoubtedly aware that the best stories — especially science fiction — are those that contain just enough truth to have the air of plausibility. If one were to believe the news media, 2010 was a banner Read More ›
This article, published by The Huffington Post, mentions Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture Senior Fellow David Berlinski: Indeed, David Berlinski, the author of The Devil’s Delusion, was, although an agnostic, on the religion side of one of the debates against Dawkins and tore large holes in evolution that Dawkins and Maynard-Smith struggled to address. The rest of the Read More ›
“What [President Barack Obama] is doing to the U.S. energy economy couldn’t be done with a nuclear bomb,” says author George Gilder, who adds that if “Newt [Gingrich] wasn’t such a jerk” he’d make a great president. Over the past 40 years, Gilder Gilder has been not just one of the most influential public intellectuals but one of the most Read More ›
Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder had an interview with ReasonTV. Click here to access the YouTube video of the interview.
This article, published by Science Insider, quotes Casey Luskin of Discovery Institute: Casey Luskin, policy analyst at the Discovery Institute, says that is standard practice with events and films that feature the organization’s members. The center claimed that AFA was in breach of the terms of a contract that required it to seek CSC’s “approval prior to issuing any press Read More ›
Walking is good exercise. Getting a half- hour walk every day is regularly recommended by health professionals, and I have been trying to follow that advice. Most of the time, I just go out for a walk in my neighborhood and follow one of two routines: one, ponder the events of the day and try to think through any current Read More ›
LOS ANGELES – The state-run California Science Center (CSC) has paid $110,000 to settle a lawsuit by American Freedom Alliance (AFA) against CSC for violating AFA’s First Amendment free speech rights to advocate intelligent design (ID). As part of the settlement, the CSC also has invited AFA to present the ID event it previously cancelled. CSC rented its IMAX theater Read More ›
What did the writer of Genesis mean by “the first day”? Is it a literal week or a series of time periods? If I believe that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, am I denying the authority of Scripture? In response to the continuing controversy over the interpretation of the creation narrative in Genesis, John Lennox proposes a succinct Read More ›