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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 ›

What is Somaliland? Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know. Very few people know, and that is the beginning of the problem. Somaliland is not Somalia, but is a part of what used to be Somalia — and it may or may not be an independent country. As you may recall, Somalia was the country in which the famous “Black Read More ›

KOB TV ran this news story on Wed. Jan 5, 2005 about PBS station KNME’s decision to ban “Unlocking the Mystery of Life.” Click here to read more.

William Tucker is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute

Today President George Bush will fly to Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, then drive 15 miles northwest to address a crowd at the Gateway Center in Collinsville, which is right next door to Edwardsville, the epicenter of America’s tort crisis.

Madison County, Illinois, has earned all this attention by becoming the nation’s number-one “judicial hellhole,” as the American Tort Reform Association has coined the phrase. “It’s a place where the judicial system has broken down,” says Sherman “Tiger” Joyce, executive director of the American Tort Reform Association.

Actually, Dickie Scruggs, the Pascagoula, Mississippi attorney who started the original $275 billion Medicaid/tobacco lawsuit (and collected several billion in the process) put it better. Speaking before an asbestos conference sponsored by Prudential Securities in 2002, Scruggs — who at least has a streak of honesty — described what he called “magic jurisdictions” in this way:

[W]hat I call the “magic jurisdiction,”…[is] where the judiciary is elected with verdict money. The trial lawyers have established relationships with the judges that are elected; they’re State Court judges; they’re popul[ists]. They’ve got large populations of voters who are in on the deal, they’re getting their [piece] in many cases. And so, it’s a political force in their jurisdiction, and it’s almost impossible to get a fair trial if you’re a defendant in some of these places. The plaintiff lawyer walks in there and writes the number on the blackboard, and the first juror meets the last one coming out the door with that amount of money.… The cases are not won in the courtroom. They’re won on the back roads long before the case goes to trial. Any lawyer fresh out of law school can walk in there and win the case, so it doesn’t matter what the evidence or the law is.

Madison County is one of those little rotten boroughs that — with the help of the trial lawyers — has turned lawsuits into a cottage industry. At last count close to 20 percent of the asbestos lawsuits in the nation were being heard before a single Illinois state judge in Madison. Out-of-state corporations as diverse as Prudential, Ford, AIG, Philip Morris, General Motors, and dozens of others have had to troop down to Madison County before judges and juries obviously intent on stripping them of their worldly goods.

In one particularly ironic case, Judge Nicholas Byron decided in 2003, without benefit of jury, that Philip Morris and its parent company, the Altria Group, had tricked the class of Illinois smokers out of $10.1 billion worth of damages by selling them Marlboro Lights, which plaintiff attorneys said fooled smokers into thinking they were less dangerous than Marlboro regulars. Judge Byron demanded that Altria post a $12 billion bond just to appeal the case to the state supreme court. Altria said it would have to declare bankruptcy.

The decision set off fire alarms in the offices of 49 other state attorney generals, who immediately rushed down to Madison to intervene. What’s the problem? Most states have now built their entire budgets around the Master Tobacco Settlement of 1998, which promises the states $275 billion over the next twenty years. Since Philip Morris pays the lion’s share of this settlement, bankrupting the company in Madison County would set off a financial crisis in 49 other states. Judge Byron finally lowered the bond to $6 billion but the case is still under review by the Illinois Supreme Court.

SEATTLE, JAN. 4 — KNME, a local PBS station in Albuquerque New Mexico, has banned “Unlocking the Mystery of Life,” a science documentary about intelligent design. According to KNME’s website the program was originally scheduled to air Friday, Jan. 7 at 9pm, and it was still listed there on Monday afternoon. According to New Mexico scientist Phil Robinson who worked Read More ›

The debate over teaching students about the genesis of life is heating up again, with a Seattle organization emerging as one of its key figures. Started in 1996, the Center for Science and Culture, inside the non-profit Discovery Institute in downtown Seattle, is a relative newcomer in the decades-old tussle over evolutionary theory. But its heft is considerable. The center Read More ›

Do you know how long you will live? Do you know how long the average American will live 50 years from now? Do you know what birthrates will be for the next 50 years? Do you know the rate of immigration for the next 50 years? Do you know the rate of economic growth for the next 50 years?

Of course, neither you nor anyone else the answer to any of the above questions. However, those who tell you we do not need to change Social Security or need only make minor adjustments to the existing system can honestly do so if they know the answers to the above questions — which they do not.

Let’s start with what we do know. The present Social Security system is a “pay-as-you-go” system, in which the taxes paid by workers and their employers are used to fund the monthly benefit checks for the existing retirees. We know that in 1950 there were 16.5 workers paying Social Security taxes for every retired person receiving benefits. We know there are now only about 3.3 workers for each person receiving benefits and there probably will only be 2.2 workers for each benefit recipient 25 years from now in 2030, if we continue with the existing system. We also know the so-called Social Security Trust Fund actually contains no money, because Congress has spent all the money (the surplus from the Social Security tax over actual outlays) on other things since the program’s 1937 inception.

To fully understand the problem, let us go back to what we do not know.