‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Well, maybe. The past week has seen statues and monuments whose subjects were linked to racism defaced or destroyed in the UK, UK and Australia. The memory cleansing movement also reached the University of Southern California (USC), with a slightly different twist. The USC […]
The author of the Harry Potter series has ignited a firestorm on Twitter over her ‘transphobic’ views. Skepticism about allowing teenagers to transition to a different gender came from an unexpected source lastweek: J.K. Rowling, the author of the fabulously successful Harry Potter series. She had been provoked by a Twitterstorm over her tweet mocking a […]
If you can remember that long ago, the only protesters defying Covid-19 lockdowns in the United States were small crowds of roughnecks from flyover country waving flags and brandishing placards at State capitals. Nonetheless, petty incidents like this still outraged bioethicists and public health experts. Writing in PennLive, a Pennsylvania blog, four of them, including the […]
America’s police have killed 5,360 people over the last five years: 2,412 White, 1,262 Black, 887 Hispanic and 799 unknown or “other.” On Monday night, the Black Lives Matter protest came to the sleepy beach town of Huntington Beach, California: about 500 protesters, most of them white, denouncing police brutality against black men. A diverse […]
Will SpaceX be the first step towards colonising the solar system? On Saturday, May 30, American astronauts flew into orbit on an American-made space vehicle for the first time since 2011. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carried Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, both veterans of the old Space Shuttle program, inside the Dragon capsule, and once […]
A psychiatrist questions the scientific and medical basis for current treatments of gender dysphoria. Dr Paul McHugh is one of America’s leading psychiatrists. The article below is his testimony to the US Supreme Court in the case of R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. An employee of the funeral home, […]
The new Michael Moore film ‘Planet of the Humans’ inadvertently reveals a silver lining to the dark coronavirus cloud, at least in the eyes of the filmmakers. Executive producer Michael Moore and his writer, director, editor and narrator Jeff Gibbs have confounded fellow left leaning political activists by hitting out at the renewable energy industry. […]
Partners in the sex business. You can tell something about a person by the company she keeps, and the same applies to organisations. Marie Stopes International, a high profile British birth control non-profit, was outed in The Mail on Sunday recently for receiving cash and goods worth 7.5 million pounds from American porn tycoon Phil Harvey over the past […]
Xenophobia is passé. Now we are being taught anthropophobia, or fear of other people. Fear is a powerful emotion: it is sometimes rational, but it can cloud our reasoning. A number of fallacies pervade the Covid-19 debate. One is the fallacy of the missing denominator: we are told that X number of people have died […]
Both countries and companies have taken advantage of the misery of the Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, the loneliness and the misery of millions to burnish their image. China has donated masks and ventilators; companies have offered free stuff like online yoga lessons, audiobooks, museum tours, movies and software. Great PR! But the most audacious offering […]
The shutdown of the American economy by government decree should end. The lasting and far-reaching harms caused by this authoritarian precedent far outweigh those caused by the COVID-19 virus. The American people—individuals, families, businesses—must decide for themselves how and when to reopen society and return to their daily lives. Neither the Trump administration nor Congress […]
Just four days after going under coronavirus shutdown, Magna, Utah, was at the epicenter of a 5.7 earthquake on March 18. Greg Schulz, a Magna municipal administrator quipped, “I have a standing order: if we have another Horseman of the Apocalypse ride over the hill, I’m shooting him.” A sense of humor can be a potent […]
Swedish nurses’ conscience case rejected by European Court of Human Rights. Ellinor Grimmark and Linda Steen, two Swedish nurses who have been denied midwife posts for refusing to carry out abortions, have now lost their legal bid to take Sweden to court for violating their beliefs after they took their case to the European Court […]
The world over, commitment to democratic values is worryingly weak. For those old enough or educated enough to remember, humanity still lives very much in the shadow of the bloody 20th century (the most murderous in human history) with its failed political ideologies and the resulting huge loss of life. It was democracy that won […]
The T.C. Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland was established by a £20,000 donation from Thomas Charles Beirne, a devout Catholic businessman and Papal Knight who was warden of the University from 1928 to 1941. The vast tract of beautiful riverside land on which the university sits in St Lucia was donated by pioneering doctor […]