The Lies in New York’s Assisted Suicide Bill
A Return to Soft on Crime?
New York City Says it – Officially – in English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, French Creole and Italian
Deroy Murdock, senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Real Russia Project, just had a new article out in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
NEW YORK – If you like bilingualism, you will love septalingualism.
Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest brainstorm outstrips his notorious war on trans-fats, both for its audacity and sheer senselessness. America’s largest municipality soon will conduct official business in English and Spanish – which would be bad enough – plus five other foreign languages: Russian, Chinese, Korean, French Creole and Italian.
“This Executive Order will make our city more accessible, while helping us become the most inclusive municipal government in the nation,” Bloomberg crowed as he signed this measure on July 22.
Read More ›Regions And Feds Must Jointly Combat Congestion
A new report by the Congressional Research Service notes that traffic congestion has reached crisis proportions in some places. But, the report notes, not everyone agrees that congestion is a major national problem warranting a federal government response. Because congestion tends to be geographically concentrated in major metropolitan areas, past Congressional action has tended to favor a predominantly state and Read More ›
Who Should Pay for Slavery?
[This title of this article as published in the June 3, 2003 edition of The New York Sun is “An Address to the Members of the New York City Council.”] Members of the City Council, I stand before you today to congratulate you on your efforts to redress the great historical wrong of Slavery. Your pioneering initiative has not only Read More ›
Spending Their Way Out of Debt
NEARLY ALL 50 states are experiencing budget crises, with California in the worst shape, facing a $38.2 billion deficit. Even Arizona has a $1.3 billion shortfall. Washington state has had to close schools. Connecticut is cutting 2,800 public employees. In this context, New York state’s $11.5 billion deficit on a $92 billion budget is only slightly above average, while New Read More ›
Looking Back to Go Forward
Original article [Note: This is an account of the ferry conference that Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Project organized and put on July 1. Unfortunately, the Cascadia Project is not mentioned here, but the group that it launched, the Puget Sound Passenger Ferry Coalition, is.] SEATTLE — With her eyes cast back in a memory and her voice tipped with nostalgia, Gig Read More ›
Designed for Living
Does God exist? You can answer that question in at least two ways, including, notably, “yes.” But how do you argue for that particular answer?
A new cottage industry among the religiously minded is the re-articulation of the so-called “cosmological argument” for the existence of God. Its proofs work backward. They start with visible creation and reason that it can only be the work of an uncreated First Cause. Such proofs were once compelling to educated people. Now the average college graduate can do without them. He doesn’t know exactly why this is so; he simply believes that Darwin and Stephen Hawking have somehow managed to explain creation without reference to a Creator.
Darwin and Hawking, of course, have done no such thing. Science can never answer the question: Why is there something rather than nothing? The universe is a massive fact that does not account for its existence and — some would say, following Goedel’s incompleteness theorems — cannot do so. This does not stop certain astrophysicists from trying to generate whole universes from mathematical equations. But a mathematical model does not tell us why there is a universe to describe in the first place.
If we cannot so easily dismiss the brute fact of the universe, neither can we ignore its appearance of having been designed. As one staunchly atheistic 20th-century astronomer put it: “A common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.” How do you get around such a “common sense” interpretation? Darwin supplied the answer: Any “design” in nature is only apparent, the work of blind mechanisms. All you need to produce the bombardier beetle, for example, is random variations directed by natural selection — and a lot of time.
Read More ›