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Much was made about “people power” and the coming of democracy to Central Asia when the repressive government was toppled by street protests in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. While I am a firm believer in the great power of freedom, and predicted a successful Iraqi election, I am uncertain whether such optimism is warranted in Central Asia. What Read More ›

ATLANTA, JAN. 13 – Despite ruling that “fostering critical thinking” about evolution “is a clearly secular purpose,” and agreeing that the Cobb County, Georgia school district had secular, not religious reasons for adopting a textbook sticker dealing with evolution, a federal judge today struck down the sticker as unconstitutional. “Given the tepid defense of the sticker presented by the school Read More ›

ATLANTA, JAN. 13 – The decision by a federal judge in Georgia to overturn a textbook sticker about evolution may have been aided by the school district’s own lawyer, according to the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute. Seth Cooper, an attorney and legal analyst with Discovery Institute, faulted school district lead counsel Linwood Gunn for putting on Read More ›

Original article Wisconsin, long thought of as the state with a Progressive tradition of reforms, has seriously slipped when it comes to election reform. Our democracy is built upon faith that a vote has value and that it not be negated through cheating. When that faith is shaken, we must face the issue openly and clean up the system. Let Read More ›

Knowing what we now know, would you design our tax system, Social Security system, the United Nations and the World Bank as they are designed and now operate? Unless you are brain dead, you would have answered no to all the above. International organizations and government programs were all established to solve a perceived problem at the time of their Read More ›

James Hughes may be a bioethicist and a professor of health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, but his real calling is as an evangelist for the nascent materialist quasi-religion of transhumanism. In this sense, Hughes’ first book, Citizen Cyborg, is not merely a polemic; it is an epistle urging transhumanists to remain true to the tenets of their Read More ›

“What is success?”

So asked a senior federal law-enforcement official at a recent meeting I attended in Washington, D.C. The context was the war on terrorism.

This was not a rhetorical question. The official was mulling over how to measure success in the counter-terror war. He seemed uncertain and appeared to be seeking an answer for himself.

What he did know, however, was that whatever success may be in such a war, domestic law enforcement — by itself, in any case — was not enough.

One significant difficulty is that the culture of law enforcement does not lend itself neatly to dealing with strategic-intelligence issues. Long having been rewarded for “cracking” individual cases and presenting glossy press conferences, law enforcement has been confounded by a murky environment in which to “catch them in the act” is not only extraordinarily difficult, but can also represent a fatally late failure.

To deter terrorists from launching attacks is better than catching them in the act, but as the official asked, “How do we know whether what we do has a deterrence effect?” In other words, how do we know if our homeland-security measures actually deterred attacks — for there have been none since 9/11 — or have the terrorists merely been waiting and preparing for the “right moment” to strike again?

In the absence of hard, measurable data, the official considered the effects of our protective efforts to be marginal at best — psychologically reassuring to the public at large, perhaps, but not particularly central to the core issue of combating terrorists.

So preemption has been offered as the more-effective solution. Since passive, defensive measures alone cannot possibly protect against every single terrorist attack, taking the fight to the terrorists before they can carry out their plans has become more attractive and acceptable.

SEATTLE, JAN. 7 — PBS has pulled from its website a science film examining the theory of intelligent design, after selling the film for two years on its website, and airing it on dozens of PBS stations across the country. “It’s chilling that suddenly in the midst of a national debate over intelligent design PBS, funded by taxpayer dollars, decides Read More ›