Dominican friars aren't known for their musical performances. Or, at the least, you might expect medieval chants over American bluegrass. But they're performing bluegrass all right . . at the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville TN.
Their name, "Hillbilly Thomists," is a reference to Thomas Aquinas who lived around 1200 AD in Britain, an influential monk.
In the words of one fan, "Their folksy music is at once complex and lovely with lyrics rich in poetry and Scripture."
At the presidential debate last week, one of the candidates said of migrants in Ohio: "They're eating cats/dogs." Yikes. It stirred up controversy.
Media fact-checkers denied it, some calling the claim a "racist smear." How are they sure about that? CBS was sure because the mayor of Springfield OH said there's no police report about it. But of course that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
What should CBS have done to find out the truth, given its massive resources? They should have done the work of journalism: sent a reporter to the area to interview the eyewitness and the neighbors, find the visual evidence, conduct background research.
That's what investigative journalist Christopher Rufo did. His team found the party who posted the relevant video and went to the site, found a grill matching that in the video, confirmed the location by knot patterns in the fence, matched voice patterns, and much more.
Conclusion: "Our interview with the eyewitness matched the details of the original video and was unambiguous in its conclusion: “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill. They was barbecuing the damn cat!”
Get the rest of the story, the video, and detail corrections from "Fact Checking the Fact Checkers"
Follow up to this post
"Starships need to fly. The more we [SpaceX] fly safely, the faster we learn; the faster we learn, the sooner we realize full and rapid rocket reuse."
Like some of you, I'm anxious for test flight #5 of Starship. What's holding it up?
Well, it's not SpaceX. "The Starship and Super Heavy vehicles for Flight 5 have been ready to launch since the first week of August."
"Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork (photo) to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware. This should never happen and directly threatens America’s position as the leader in space."
The FAA estimated a late September launch, but now has delayed it to late November. "[T]he licensing process has been repeatedly derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd."
Does the government have other issues going on here? A future post topic.
from SpaceX
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Go here for SpaceX's video of the spacewalk along with their real time comments.
"A lot of us work here because we want to do this," says a narrator of the video. Gillis and Menon were the ones who really did get to do this, the first time in space for any SpaceX employee.
Civilian and commander of the mission, Jared Isaacman, paid for it out of his personal wealth. It could be called "space tourism," but it's not like going on a cruise. It's brutal out there.
Temperature can go from 250 degrees above zero (in the sun) down to 250 degrees below (in Earth's shadow). There's radiation, and zero breathable air. Their spacesuits have to protect from all of that, while keeping the astronauts comfortable enough to function.
"It's kind of like a suit of armor made of fabric," said SpaceX's principal spacesuit engineer. He explains its design in a video posted on X.
At the age of 41, he has his own Wikipedia page. He's rich, so he has the money to do what he's always wanted to do: be an astronaut. Jared Isaacson started his own successful companies, and funded and organized the mission called Polaris Dawn.
Four civilians (photo) launched last Tuesday, but not for NASA or any other national space program. SpaceX took them 870 miles into space where Jared and SpaceX engineer Sara Gillis did an EVA (extravehicular activity), the first ever for civilians.
Their "spacewalk" didn't involve a tether, but rather they kept in contact with their vehicle, Crew Dragon Resilience, the whole time. Just for this mission, a new hatch called "Skywalker" replaced the capsule's normal ISS docking port to enable the EVA.
They tested their spacesuits and Starlink laser-based communications, conducted over 30 science experiments, and returned to Earth safely yesterday. Two more Polaris Project missions will follow.
from Space
(cont'd tomorrow, the EVA and the spacesuits)
Follow up to this post
In spite of Maduro's threats, X (Twitter) would not comply with his demand that they censor his political opponents. So a much higher penalty was set.
X is banned in Brazil. Some citizens might want to switch to a VPN (virtual private network) to get around the ban and continue reading X, but that strategy is squelched as well. A justice speaking for their Supreme Court announced that anyone doing that will be fined US$8900/day--more than the average yearly salary.
The CEO of X says, “This is a sad day for X users around the world, especially those in Brazil, who are being denied access to our platform. I wish it did not have to come to this – it breaks my heart.” She added that Brazil's constitution forbids censorship.
X's legal representative in country was threatened with imprisonment so she resigned, and even then all her bank accounts were frozen.
Both in America and in other countries, we take the freedom to speak for granted. But it's gotten to the point where we'll have to fight for that freedom because: "Just about every tinpot dictator on the planet wants to stamp out our right to hear alternative voices . ."
from Mind Matters
If socialism is called by another name, like "democratic socialism," is it better?
Will the outcomes be good if people actually vote for it in an election? No, the outcomes still won't be good.
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Freer
market reforms during the 1990's opened the door to optimism. Mr. Lim's
parents had no hope for a better future, but his own generation saw
that grinding poverty as rice farmers was no longer the only option:
they saw freedom to improve their lives.
From
1995 to 2017 Cambodia's economy grew at an average rate of 7.7% per
year. (To compare, good growth in the U.S. used to be about 3% per year.) In 2007
the poverty rate was still about 47%, but by 2014 it was at 14%.
One of our political parties wants us to try Socialism policies in America, a theme that comes up every four years in our national election. It's not a new idea. Other countries have tried socialism, and we don't want their results. The story of what happened in Cambodia is the theme of this week's posts, re-posts from five years ago on this blog.
"Following the examples of Stalin and Mao, Pol Pot brutally murdered more than one million Cambodians in the infamous Killing Fields of
1975-1979 as he implemented his vision of communist utopia. He
abolished private property, money, prices, commerce, and even cities—a full descent into barbarism.
"Death
sentences were levied against any number of “class enemies.” Simply
being a former civil servant, student, artist, or capitalist of any
variety—including a “street noodle vendor or a motorcycle taxi driver”—was enough to earn a spot in one of Pol Pot’s mass graves."
from FEE
(cont'd tomorrow)
(cont'd from yesterday's post)
UATX was founded to be the right kind of university, where truth is pursued with respect for each other, with humility, with honesty. As one of the founders, Bari Weiss, put it, "grievance and resentment define the current cultural moment. It’s a dead end. We must get back to gratitude."
In his convocation address, President Kanelos didn't just complain about the degraded state of our existing universities. He tried to clearly express what this new one was created to do.
"We are returning to the very roots of the Western . . civilization that brought forward these extraordinary institutions called universities.
"This university is dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth."
"Human beings have freedom and agency, and . . we will learn how to use our freedom well. [Our] purpose is not simply knowledge, but wisdom."
Hopefully this new attempt at higher education will help to create a new generation of Americans dedicated not to grievance and resentment (photo), but to goodness and truth and beauty.
Follow up to this post
As Konstantin said, "there are people whose brains have been broken by an excess of education who believe that our history is evil, that we do not deserve to be great . . that we must be punished for the sins of our ancestors. To them our past is abominable, our present must be spent apologizing, and our future is managed decline."
It's a disaster to this country and to the West that our colleges and universities, yes, are "breaking brains." Peter Boghossian (yesterday's post) said that they're beyond recovery, that the system should be burned to the ground.
But a few people decided to try to return sanity to our higher education system, and Boghossian joined them in the effort. They created the University of Austin to be different, not woke, and they just opened their doors to the Class of 2028 last week.
New president Pano Kanelos explained three years ago why they want to do this: our universities today tend to pursue emotional comfort rather than pursue knowing truth, the essential goal for a university.
"We can't wait for universities to fix themselves. So we're starting a new one."
from Free Press
(cont'd tomorrow)
Follow up to these posts
In an interview video, Peter Boghossian has the time (one hour+) to explain the poor condition of our woke elite universities from his point of view as an insider who spent ten years teaching at that level.
Freedom of speech, valued so highly by Americans until about five minutes ago, is no longer valued by some--because there's an overruling agenda. Under the banner of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), no diversity is allowed. He says the intolerance is ubiquitous; it's practiced at all American and all Western universities.
It got so widespread and embedded because the scholarly peer-reviewed journals became intolerant years and years ago. Only one point of view could be published.
What should we do in America with an education system that has gone off the rails, that is impervious to reason, where craziness and madness (his words) prevail? He doesn't engage in wishful thinking: "Burn it to the ground."
Follow up tomorrow
Konstantin Kisin was born in Moscow, but came to Britain at the age of 12 with his parents. Naturally, he has a somewhat different point of view than the average Brit. He's grateful to be there, and published An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West.
It seems to him that his adopted country has turned to "self-loathing." As an "anti-woke" comedian, he offers a different POV.
Did you doubt it when you heard that social media censors speech? Or when you heard that the current American administration was pushing them to do it, because the government we have now wants to silence some of us?
If so, doubt no more. Mark Zuckerberg (photo), founder and CEO of Meta, confirms it in a letter he wrote to the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives:
"In 2021, senior officials from the . . White House repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content . . and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree." There were other subjects, too, that the government wanted censored.
Meta cooperated with the government to violate the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing free speech. Zuckerberg seems to admit it, now that the House of Representatives is investigating.
