URLs du Jour

2020-04-22

  • Yes, finally, it's Earth Day. Today's image is one of Getty's oh-so-precious, you'll think better of me because I'm so sensitive offerings.

    Meanwhile, at Reason, Ron Bailey celebrates in his own way: Earth Day Turns 50. He looks at the predictions made back in 1970 by the "Catastrophists" and the "Prometheans". Examples of the former:

    Harrison Brown of the National Academy of Sciences published a chart in the September 1970 issue of Scientific American projecting that humanity would run out of copper shortly after 2000; lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990. Brown claimed that his estimates took into account the possibilities that "new reserves will be discovered by exploration or created by innovation." The February 2, 1970, issue of Time quoted the ecologist Kenneth Watt: "By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won't be any more crude oil."

    And in January 1970, Life magazine warned: "In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution."

    We wish urban dwellers had handy gas masks to wear.


  • Kevin D. Williamson has some thoughts on that Harvard Magazine article (see yesterday if necessary): The War on Homeschooling.

    [Anti-homeschooler Elizabeth] Bartholet is pretty open about her program, which has less to do with ensuring equal educational opportunity across socioeconomic groups (ho, ho!) and more to do with extending the surveillance state, lest unsupervised proles make child-rearing decisions at odds with the priorities Bartholet would prefer to see enforced.

    The conception of the public schools as a coercive and homogenizing moral force is fundamental to the mandatory-education project — our very first public-education law (known by the wonderfully evocative title “Old Deluder Satan Act”) was explicitly anti-Catholic in its intent, as were many of the public-education laws (Blaine amendments, etc.). Like our Puritan forebears, contemporary progressives believe that what keeps the infidels from the One True Faith is mostly ignorance, which can be cured through coercive indoctrination.

    Wikipedia on the Old Deluder Satan Act here.


  • At the Federalist, Neal Pollack offers his Brilliant Nine-Phase Retractable Plan For Reopening The Nation.

    My plan operates in phases. In Phase One, we must re-open essential businesses, plus the local gourmet shop in my hometown of Mount Winchester that sells duck confit. However, no one must get within six feet of the open storefronts. Shopkeepers must shoot pre-purchased goods out of a T-shirt cannon, and we can only catch them if we’re wearing gloves.

    If we leave our houses, we must allow medical authorities to stick a three-foot swab up our noses and a two-foot swab in our ears. If these tests prove inconclusive, then we must take the SAT, even if we haven’t studied.

    Preschools should re-open, but without teachers. Grade schools should remain closed. High schools should remain open, but only for sophomores and juniors, and only if they maintain strict gender-neutral bathroom policies. Students are allowed to make out behind the bleachers, but only if they remain six feet apart. Trigonometry classes will be canceled, because everyone hates them.

    Neal provides the expertise and wisdom we need in these trying times.


  • And moving on to an even funnier story, from the Free Beacon: CBS Anchor Tells Stacey Abrams She's 'Extremely Qualified' to be Vice President.

    CBS This Morning anchor and Barack Obama donor Gayle King gushed over Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams on Tuesday morning, saying the former state legislator and failed gubernatorial candidate is "extremely qualified" to be vice president of the United States.

    Abrams is openly lobbying to serve as Joe Biden's running mate come November, despite never being elected to any office beyond the state legislature. As she touted her voting rights work and "competence and skills and willingness to serve," King cut in to praise her as ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

    As someone said on Twitter: Stacey Abrams in 2020 is far less qualified than Sarah Palin was in 2008.

    But we should be grateful to Gayle King for reminding us (yet again) that CBS News is pretty much an uncompensated offshoot of the Democratic National Committee.


  • And Jonah Goldberg shares his Cataclysmic Feelings. Specifically, he looks at a recent podcast that considered Richard Feynman's idea, which appeared in Chapter 1 of Volume 1 of his Lectures on Physics:

    If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

    This question was posed in a recent podcast to a bunch of Modern Deep Thinkers. The results were… not as good as Feynman's. Unexcerptable, so I urge you even more than usual to Read The Whole Thing.