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Index for this page...(Be aware some links below may have expired.)
All The Following Items Were Posted On March 1, 2005 1. William James (1842-1910) American Pragmatist Philosopher
From What Pragmatism Means. More information about William James in the Academy. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) German Existentialist philosopher
From Twilight of the Idols: Expeditions of an Untimely Man. More information about Friedrich Nietzsche in the Academy. 3. Marcus Aurelius (121-180 A.D.) Roman Moral Philosopher
From Meditations. More information about Marcus Aurelius in the Academy. 4. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Physicist and Philosopher of Science
From The World As I See It. More information about Albert Einstein in the Academy. 5. Al-Ghazali (1059-1111) Medieval Islamic Philosopher
From The Main Problems of Abu Nasr Al-Paraba. More information about Al-Ghazali in the Academy.
FOR THE RECORD 1. Warning: DO NOT Use Your Toilet Brush For Personal Hygiene! A flushable toilet brush that warns users, "Do not use for personal hygiene" has been identified as the nation's wackiest warning label in an annual contest sponsored by a consumer watchdog group. The Wacky Warning Label Contest, now in its eighth year, is conducted by Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch (M-LAW). Its purpose is to publicize how lawsuits, and concern about lawsuits, have led manufacturers and marketers to go to extreme, even loony, efforts to try to avoid frivolous lawsuits. M-LAW argues that lawsuit abuse has "many negative effects on families, job providers and communities. Excessive litigation has robbed consumers of needed products and services and has added a hidden "lawsuit tax" onto countless other products and services." The winners were chosen from literally hundreds of absurd and weird warning labels submitted by consumers to M-Law. All were from products manufactured in the United States.
"Warning labels are a sign of our lawsuit-plagued times," said Robert B. Dorigo Jones, M-LAW president. "From the moment we raise our head in the morning off pillows that bear those famous 'Do Not Remove' warnings, to when we drop back in bed at night, we are overwhelmed with warnings. Plaintiff's lawyers who file the lawsuits that prompt these warnings argue they are making us safer, but the warnings have become so long that few of us read them anymore -- even the ones we should read. "Hopefully, M-LAW's Wacky Warning Label Contest will motivate everyone to read their warnings again, and maybe even motivate judges to get tougher on frivolous lawsuits." M-LAW describes itself as "a non-partisan, non-profit organization working to increase public awareness of how the litigation explosion is hurting America. M-LAW is dedicated to restoring common sense and personal responsibility to the courts." Source: M-LAW - http://www.mlaw.org/wwl/index.html (Thanks to James W. Harris of the Advocates for Self-Government and The Liberator Online for the above information. If you would like a free subscription to the Liberator Online, visit: http://www.self-gov.org/liberator/maintain.html.) 2. Countdown to Dan's Departure: MRC's Documentation of Rather's Record of Liberal Bias The Media Research Center (MRC) has posted two resources for those interested in quotes and reporting which demonstrate Dan Rather's liberal record: "Dan Rather's Legacy of Outrageous Liberal Bias," a special four-page Notable Quotables, put together by the MRC's Rich Noyes, with more than 45 quotes from Rather's career. Four of the quotes are accompanied by RealPlayer video clips. There is also an Adobe Acrobat PDF which matches the printed version. "The Dan Rather File," an exhaustive library of more than 200 quotes and 15 video clips documenting the slanted approach that typified Rather's career. The special Web section provides a breakdown of quotes by year and into 28 topic categories. The MRC's Michael Chapman also added links to our "Dan's Downfall: Forged Documents" collection, and collated a list of Rather's "Corny in Kansas' Rather-isms" and "Rather Lame Denials of Bias." Plus, the special Rather section features links to past "Worst of the Week" reports, as well as "Media Reality Checks" and "CyberAlert" articles dealing with Rather's bias. Source: MRC CyberAlerts - http://www.mediaresearch.org 3. Hillary May Back 'Another' 2008 Candidate Early Hillary's dilemma is a serious one. So serious, we hear from New York Democratic circles, she and husband Bill may come out soon to back another Democrat as "their" 2008 candidate. Are they serious? Here's the reasoning. Hillary is focusing on her re-election race for Senate in 2006. Hillary is a clear favorite to win re-election. She has done her homework for her constituents and remains quite popular in New York. But she is leaving nothing to chance. Republicans are planning a massive effort to cripple Hillary in New York. While focusing on re-election, openly running for the presidency could undermine her efforts in New York. A prominent New York Democratic insider tells NewsMax to expect Hillary and Bill to back another presidential candidate early -- as a placeholder for Hillary if and when she decides to enter the race after 2006. The way the presidential election cycle now works, it's a four-year game, one source tells us. Hillary can't just decide to enter after 2006. By then, early Democratic candidates will have locked up key political power brokers in early primary states, big donors and the best campaign operatives. Hillary also has to move now to outflank a growing faction in her own party that wants to stop her presidential ambitions. This faction includes new DNC chief Howard Dean, who openly detests the Clintons. It's no secret that Dean was backed by the Kennedy-Kerry clique, as well as Al Gore, all of whom strongly oppose Hillary. One scenario has retired General Wesley Clark back in the race again. Hillary and Bill backed Clark as their stalking horse to stop Howard Dean. This time Clark could become the meet-up place for Clintonistas -- until Hillary makes her bold move after re-election. Buckle up, friends. We're in for one helluva a primary fight in the Democratic race! Source: Insider Report from NewsMax.com (If you are not an e-mail subscriber, get Insider Report and other breaking news alerts by Clicking Here.) 4. Very Disturbing! Millions of U.S. High School Students Oppose Free Speech The First Amendment and the freedoms it protects are not appreciated -- indeed, are actively opposed -- by millions of American high school students, according to a just-released major survey. Among the survey's findings:
These and more shocking results are from a just-released survey of 112,003 high school students across America. The survey was commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and conducted last spring by the University of Connecticut. The survey found not only weak support for fundamental First Amendment freedoms. It also found deep student ignorance and apathy about the meaning and importance of the First Amendment -- the cornerstone of American liberties. Half of the students wrongly believe the government can legally restrict indecent material on the Internet. 75 percent mistakenly believe it is illegal to deface the American flag. "High school students tend to express little appreciation for the First Amendment," the study found. "Nearly three-fourths (73 percent) either say they don't know how they feel about the First Amendment, or they take it for granted." Hodding Carter, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sponsored the survey, said "these results are not only disturbing, they are dangerous... Ignorance about the basis of this free society is a danger to our nation's future." Mike Maidenberg, Pulitzer Prize-winning publisher and vice president of the Knight foundation, called the survey a "wake-up call... If there is not a future to the First Amendment, then this is a very different kind of country." Ominously, the results of this survey closely match the feelings of adults towards the First Amendment found in other surveys in recent years. Sources: Future of the First Amendment web site: http://firstamendment.jideas.org/ and Future of the First Amendment press release: http://firstamendment.jideas.org/professionals/news_release.php (Thanks to James W. Harris of the Advocates for Self-Government and The Liberator Online for the above information. If you would like a free subscription to the Liberator Online, visit: http://www.self-gov.org/liberator/maintain.html.) "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." -- James Madison (Fourth U.S. President, known as "the Father of the Constitution"), 1794.
Some interesting & provocative articles on other websites: Anti-intellectualism among the academic elite, by Walter E. Williams: Dr. Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, has been excoriated for suggesting that innate differences between men and women might be one of the reasons fewer women succeed in the higher reaches of science and math. Adding insult to injury, he also questioned the role of sex discrimination in the small number of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities. Ayn Rand's Contribution to the Cause of Freedom, by Roderick T. Long: Today marks the centenary of Ayn Rand's birth. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2nd, 1905, Rand would go on to become one of the 20th century's foremost voices for human freedom. After living through the Russian Revolution, and the economic chaos and political repression that came in its wake&emdash;events she would later dramatize in her novel We the Living&emdash;Rand fled the Soviet Union for the United States in 1926 to begin her career as screenwriter, playwright, and novelist. Dividing her time between Hollywood and New York, the fiercely anticommunist Rand began to develop a philosophy of ethical and political individualism, and to make the acquaintance of such leaders of the libertarian "Old Right" as John Flynn, Henry Hazlitt, Rose Wilder Lane, H.L. Mencken, Isabel Paterson, Leonard Read, and a fellow refugee from European totalitarianism, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Just too taboo to talk about, By JOHN STOSSEL: Two weeks ago, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, spoke at an academic conference on women and minorities in science. He discussed possible reasons that fewer women than men attain top positions in science. He mentioned discrimination. He mentioned the demands of family life. And he said there might be innate differences between women and men. He called for more research. The fury. Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out midway and so did not hear Summers' comment, later quoted in The Harvard Crimson, that he'd like to be proved wrong on the innate-differences theory. The New Right, by John Lewis, Ph.D.: The evidence of the past two decades is unimpeachable: the political right in America no longer stands for individual rights, limited government and capitalism. The "rightists" now advocate expanding the welfare state, increasing government intrusion into our intimate private affairs, and sacrificing American lives to foreign paupers. They call it "advancing the cause of freedom." Lecture causes dispute - UNLV accused of limiting free speech, By RICHARD LAKE: A UNLV professor under fire for comments he made about homosexuals during a class lecture last year demanded Friday that the university stop threatening to punish him. "I have done absolutely nothing wrong," said the professor, Hans Hoppe, a conservative libertarian economist with almost 20 years teaching experience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, on Hoppe's behalf, sent a letter to UNLV officials alleging that the university violated Hoppe's free speech rights and his right to academic freedom. Of child molesters and hysteria, By Nicholas Stix: Apparently, a new child molester is roaming the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, New York &endash; me! I say that, because on January 11, a girl of about 11 years of age walking on the other side of the street kept nervously looking over her shoulder at me. When I sought to comfort her with a kindly smile, and perhaps a nod, she became even more alarmed. At the PTA meeting that night at my son's school, a parent insisted to me, "If a child feels intimidated, then an incident occurred." Salem witch trials, here we come! Students see profs as liberal: With the prevailing trend in academia leaning to the left, as many students and professors noted, Notre Dame's always Catholic and often conservative tone can sometimes lead to tension within departments and even between professors and their students. Last semester, philosophy professor Kenneth Sayre taught a class called Environmental Philosophy. Subjects discussed included Western consumerism, global warming, Alaskan oil-drilling and other controversial subjects. Sayre said that although he generally keeps his political views in the background in his more conventional philosophy classes, this class soon developed a different tone. We Have Nothing to Fear But Bush Himself, by Paul Craig Roberts: Suppose you are the party responsible for invading a country under totally false pretenses. Suppose you had totally unrealistic expectations about the consequences of your gratuitous aggression. What do you do when, instead of being greeted with flowers, you find your army is tied down by insurgents and you have no face-saving way to get out of the morass? If you are the moronic Bush administration, you blame someone else. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Cheney and Bush blame Syria and Iran for the troubles that they brought upon themselves. The Iraqi insurgency, say the Five Morons, is the fault of Syria and Iran. Metaphysics, Science, Homsexuality - Are we talking biology or choice?, by John Derbyshire: I have been getting an exceptional quantity of mail -- paper mail, not e-mail -- about a piece I wrote for National Review last December. The piece, titled "Our Crisis of Foundations," was a loose rumination on current metaphysical confusions in the Western world. Not many of my correspondents were interested in metaphysics. What mainly caught their eyes, and what they wanted to take issue with, were the following two sentences: ... Coffee May Help Prevent Liver Cancer: Researchers in Japan have discovered some eye-opening news about coffee: It may help prevent the most common type of liver cancer. A study of more than 90,000 Japanese found that people who drank coffee daily or nearly every day had half the liver cancer risk of those who never drank coffee. The protective effect occurred in people who drank one to two cups a day and increased at three to four cups. Hunger for Dictatorship - War to export democracy may wreck our own, by Scott McConnell: Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, "the Sixties" (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials -- all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do. The Lynne Stewart Verdict - Stretching the Definition of "Terrorism" to New Limits, by Elaine Cassel: On February 10, after thirteen days of deliberations, a federal jury in New York City returned a guilty verdict in the case of 65-year-old attorney Lynne Stewart. The jury found Stewart guilty on five counts of defrauding the government, conspiracy, and providing support for terrorism. ...The eavesdropping on attorney-client communications that led to this prosecution would have been unimaginable before September 11. I will argue that this eavesdropping has a serious cost in inhibiting defense attorney's ability to zealously represent their clients. This cost is of a constitutional dimension: The Sixth Amendment's right to counsel cannot be served while the government is a third party present at attorney-client meetings. The War in Iraq - How Catholic conservatives got it wrong, by Peter Dula: H. Richard Niebuhr once wrote that the first question of ethics is not "What should I do?" but "What is going on?" The Baghdad version of that principle might be, "What the hell is going on?" It is a question that comes to me when I wake up to a car bomb or fall asleep to the sound of mortar fire. I was asking it when a Kurdish colleague took me to see the memorial at Halabja, where Saddam gassed five thousand villagers. I asked it again last March when 223 Shi'a pilgrims died in Karbala. Summers's logic shouldn't be overlooked, By Laura Hamilton: Lawrence Summers of Harvard University and Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado at Boulder have each sparked media fervor with remarks that were, to say the least, incendiary. Summers provoked liberals by suggesting that the gender disparity in tenured positions in math, science, and engineering could be due, in part, to innate differences in aptitude; Churchill provoked conservatives by suggesting that America deserved 9/11 and the terrorists behaved nobly. Federal Criminal Law - Expediency over Principle, By William L. Anderson: For the past few weeks, I have been following the Richard Scrushy trial in Birmingham, Alabama. Like so many other highly-publicized trials, this one has had its media drama, the hype, and all of the other things that come with high-profile cases -- sans murder -- and it provides part of the "bread and circuses" that the public and news media seem to demand these days. What's next for liberalism?, by John Leo: Question for the day: if liberalism isn't dead, then why are autopsies performed so regularly? In the latest examination of the much-probed cadaver, the New Republic's editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, recalls that John Kenneth Galbraith, in the early 1960s, pronounced American conservatism dead, citing as heavy evidence that conservatism was "bookless" or bereft of new ideas. Peretz writes, "It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying." Liberals, he says, are not inspired by any vision of the good society; the liberal agenda consists of wanting to spend more, while conservatives want to spend less. And the lack of new ideas and the absence of influential liberal thinkers, he says, are obvious. Academic Freedom and the Future of Civilization, by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.: The attack on Hans-Hermann Hoppe draws attention to an institution that hangs by a thread in our state-managed times: academic freedom. The attackers and the victims come from both right and left in a continuing cycle of aggression and retaliation that began with the politicization of the university environment, and will continue so long as academic institutions are used as tools of political propaganda and indoctrination.
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