Leftist Historian Howard Zinn's New Posthumous Released Second Volume

The Internet Is Not .gov’s to Regulate

Cato@Liberty - Imagine that Congress passed a law setting up a procedure that could require ordinary citizens like you to remove telephone numbers from your phone book or from the “contacts” list in your phone. What about a policy that cut off the phone lines to an entire building because some of its tenants used the phone to plot thefts or fraud? Would it be okay with you if the user of the numbers coming out of your phone records or the tenants of the cut-off building had been adjudged “rogue” users of the phone?

Cutting off phone lines is the closest familiar parallel to what Congress is considering in two bills nicknamed  “SOPA” and “PIPA”—the “Stop Online Piracy Act” and the “PROTECT IP Act.”

One of the major ideas behind SOPA and PIPA is to cut Internet sites that violate copyright out of the domain name system. No longer could typing “elcato.org” get you to the Web site you wanted to visit. Much of the debate has been about the legal process for determining whether to strike out a domain name. The practical burdens on the law-abiding Internet service provider would be large. “Blacking out” an entire building—just like a Web site—would cut off the lawful communications right along with the unlawful ones. It’s through-the-looking-glass information control, with enormous potential to obstruct entirely lawful communications and impinge on First Amendment rights.

The Internet is not the government’s to regulate. It is an agreement on a set of protocols—a language that computers use to talk to one another. That language is the envelope in which our communications—our First-Amendment-protected speech—travels in hundreds of different forms.

Under the better view—the view of freedom behind opposition to SOPA and PIPA—these things are not the government’s to regulate.

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Joe Knows Cake......

 Navy Specialist ready Vice President Joe Biden for a portion of cake and ice cream at First Lady Michelle Obama's White House Birthday celebration Tuesday Night. Biden wowed the guest by besting his record of eating 7 wax candles from the cake, two more than last year.

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The Lost Fossils of Charles Darwin

LONDON – British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years. Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.

The first slide pulled out of the dusty corner at the British Geological Survey turned out to be one of the specimens collected by Darwin during his famous expedition on the HMS Beagle, which changed the young Cambridge graduate's career and laid the foundation for his subsequent work on evolution."It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the paleontologist said, adding he soon realized it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen. The slides -- "stunning works of art," according to Falcon-Lang -- contain bits of fossil wood and plants ground into thin sheets and affixed to glass in order to be studied under microscopes. Some of the slides are half a foot long (15 centimeters), "great big chunks of glass," Falcon-Lang said.

"How these things got overlooked for so long is a bit of a mystery itself," he mused, speculating that perhaps it was because Darwin was not widely known in 1846 so the collection might not have been given "the proper curatorial care.".....Read More

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Eleanor Roosevelt She Ain't

Arianna To MO: Watch The Bel Air Trips

The Radio Equalizer: From our establishment media friends, nearly every criticism of Michelle Obama these days is blamed on the usual vast, right-wing conspiracy. But what happens when objections come from the left?

During the most recent edition of Both Sides Now with Huffington and Matalin, co-host Arianna Huffington used the airwaves to let Michelle know she has appeared indifferent to suffering in America, focusing instead on hobnobbing with wealthy donors in Bel Air and elsewhere. She wondered, why not visit South-Central Los Angeles during one of these fundraising trips?

I'd love Michelle to be more like Eleanor Roosevelt right now, because the country needs an Eleanor Roosevelt who's going to go around and at the same time that she's doing fundraisers in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, she should go to South Central [Los Angeles], I mean, if I were Michelle Obama right now, I would not go anywhere for a fundraiser without going and seeing the places where there is pain, where there is struggle, where there is homelessness, where there is unemployment. - ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

This begs the question: is ALL criticism of Michelle Obama off-limits to our media friends, even when it comes from the left? And within the gushing "progressive" movement, is she above even constructive advice? Expect the usual approach from the left to this type of development: silence.

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Educational Crash Course #92

Another Installment of Diogenes'
Public Service Educational Series:

"Psychoanalysis 101"

Next in Series: 'Anger Management' 
with Michelle Obama

Class Dismissed!
Educational Crash Course Series Archive

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The Iron Lady Shall Live On

"She has the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula."
President Mitterand of France

Hollywood is not known for sympathetic portrayals of political figures, often injecting rumored or unproven incidents and fictional conversations. So when a left-wing Hollywood star sets aside her dignity to portray a right-wing heroine, odds are the result will irritate everyone. But surprisingly, 'The Iron Lady' is far better than I ever expected, particularly given that virtually the entire entertainment community from the east coast to Hollywood is liberal, a bias gleefully acknowledged by Meryl Streep, who gives an convincing performance as three-term British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. “I'm an actor and, you know, politically we're all on the other side.”

When Margaret Thatcher was first elected to Parliament in 1959, she entered a House of Commons that had 630 members, of whom 25 were female, which is about 24 more women than you would think were ever in any House of Commons during her political life should you see The Iron Lady. The filmmakers have resolved whatever dilemma they had with Mrs.Thatcher as heroine by presenting her life as a feminist struggle. There are no other visible female members of Parliament, only a sea of men. Being female was a liability, although class was the greater obstacle for Thatcher. She was so very lower middle class, a grocer's daughter who never quite lost her regional accent, never mind her chemistry degree from Oxford and her successful studies as a tax lawyer.

The framework of the film is Mrs. Thatcher in her declining years. She appears to have multi-infarct dementia, a decline of memory and intellectual faculties caused by tiny strokes, and believes her husband Denis to still be alive. One of history's ironic gifts to the left is that their greatest opponents, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both after leaving office suffered from a mental disease. Nothing in the film tries to derive any advantage from this, but the choice to play out her extraordinary life over three days of this decline, after she had ceased to be a public player, is telling when you consider other legitimate angles that might have been chosen.

The year before Thatcher became prime minister, the country was in chaos, the dead unburied, doctors on strike, no bread one day, no newspapers the next. Thatcher reshaped society with secret strike votes for unions, privatized industry (except for the health service and the BBC) and lower taxes, which under the Labor Party could be as high as 98 per cent. She stood her ground and never flinched. Thus her great quote that doesn't make the film: “To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only this to say, ‘You turn if you want; the lady's not for turning. 

The film gives a moving glimpse of Thatcher's middle-England pillow-plumping kindness as she worries about Denis. She was the Iron Lady in power suits and evening gowns, even as she played a pivotal role in defeating Communism. But she remains more: a kind woman who forever overlooked the cruelty of her own children toward her and the cruelty of the world's caricatures. Now in her final years, she concentrates on small acts of kindness, real or imaginary.

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The Margaret Thatcher Foundation
Access to thousands of documents—many of them previously unpublished—relating to Margaret Thatcher and world events during the last thirty years.

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