8 August 2007 >> Damian Thompson, a columnist with London’s Telegraph, recently wrote about Indoctrinate U, calling the film “a documentary that all of you should see.”

Mr. Thompson covered this film project in a piece published by the Telegraph two years ago, back when the working title was “Ministry of Truth.”

11 July 2007 @ 7:11AM >> A new Zogby poll indicates that Americans are becoming aware of the problem of political bias in academia. Saying that “a majority of Americans believe the political bias of college professors is a serious problem,” the poll adds that a full 39% consider the problem to be “very serious.”

26 June 2007 >> A reader recently sent me a link to a very well-done simulation that shows how political mapmakers analyze party registrations on a house-by-house basis to draw district boundaries favorable to keeping incumbents in office. The process, called gerrymandering, has been used by both parties over the years, and is proof that abusing power to extend power is a corruption of character not limited to any particular party or ideology.

There are few things that have the potential to unite Americans of all political persuasions, but ending practices like earmarks and gerrymandering should be among the top—if only they got sufficient attention.

20 June 2007 @ 8:18AM >> As Hollywood gears up the hype machine to promote Michael Moore’s most recent political advertisement, it would be wise to remember that entrusting your health to government bureaucrats does have its risks. A look at Canada’s government-run system shows what happens to those who fall through the cracks: permanent, life-altering damage or even death.

Free Market Cure, a newly-launched website, provides some facts you might not see in Moore’s film. The site already contains four short videos covering healthcare issues, with more to come.

8 June 2007 @ 6:13PM >> The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is an organization that defends the free speech and free thought rights of professors and students alike, regardless of religion, ideology, or the popularity of the opinions under attack. FIRE is to college campuses what the ACLU used to be to society at large.

Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s president, recently offered me the opportunity to post a message to The Torch, the organization’s blog:

When I came up with the idea to do a documentary about the suppression of speech on college campuses, literally the first phone call I made was to FIRE. That was before I’d ever even picked up a digital video camera, so I really had no business thinking I could make a film. A lot of people seemed to agree.

There’s more over at The Torch.

31 May 2007 @ 12:38PM >> I always thought that a “Tunnel of Oppression” was nothing more than a brilliant parody concocted by the minds of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But I guess I was wrong. And just where will you find a “Tunnel of Oppression” out in the world beyond South Park? Why, on a college campus, of course! (Quite many of them, it seems.)

If you’re having trouble imaging what a “Tunnel of Oppression” might look like, here are some videos to get you started. (One question, though: why does it have to be a tunnel, exactly?)

This education in political correctness has been brought to you by today’s Quote of the Day, courtesy of John Derbyshire:

I have this flash mental image of a stranger showing up on an American campus and asking someone for directions to the Dean’s office. “Sure: you keep right going here, turn left at the Museum of Tolerance, past the Office of Diversity Awareness, cross over Peace Plaza, hang another left at the Matthew Shepard memorial, around behind the Tunnel of Oppression, and it’s right there, next to the Global Warming Awareness study hall...”

22 May 2007 @ 9:30AM >> “Edwards charges $55,000 to speak to UC Davis students about poverty“

14 May 2007 >> From Ann Althouse:

I keep reading about how hybrid cars and compact fluorescent lightbulbs can reduce the production of greenhouse gases, but I have yet to see an article about the savings that could be achieved if we were to stop delivery of newspapers and magazines and do all of our news reading on line.

13 May 2007 @ 7:04PM >> The people in this video don’t sound like they are in the mood for compromise on immigration legislation. To put it mildly.

12 May 2007 @ 1:48PM >> It turns out that my friend Karol Sheinin grew up with two of the six men accused of plotting a terrorist attack on Fort Dix:

When Elvis and Dritan Duka, two of the three brothers arrested on terrorism charges in Fort Dix, were kids, they were neighborhood bullies. When they got a little older, they became drug dealers.

How do I know? They grew up in my neighborhood, my brother and his friends used to brawl with them on a fairly regular basis. My brother’s best friend’s mom was friends with their mom. Then they moved to New Jersey and became Jihadis. Of all possible paths for the Duka kids, that one didn’t seem the most likely.

10 May 2007 @ 8:18AM >> In a fascinating and in-depth piece from The Wall Street Journal, the president of the Rousseau Institute in Paris wonders whether France’s decline will accelerate to an unstoppable fall—or whether newly-elected French President Nicholas Sarkozy can save the Fifth Republic.

1 May 2007 @ 8:53AM >> &When Iran needs help building two nuclear reactors, where do the mullahs go to place the ad?

To their acquaintances at The New York Times Company, of course!

Update: A reader has alerted me to the fact that the ad also appeared in a recent issue of The Economist (page 111 of the April 28th, 2007 edition, on the lower-righthand side). I would have expected The Economist to exercise better judgment than that.

All this reminds me of the statement “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them,” which is attributed to Vladimir Lenin. Although in this case, it’s not rope, it’s radioactive fuel. And we’re teaching Iran how enrich it, perhaps so it may one day end up in a nuclear bomb.

26 April 2007 @ 7:15PM >> Well, I was moderately aware that classroom indoctrination inspired a movie, but until now, I didn’t realize that it also inspired a high-energy rock song.

Thanks to The Right Brothers for volunteering to put up a special page to make their song freely available for Brain Terminal readers.

25 April 2007 >> Well, not quite Cops...better.

Michael J. Totten’s latest dispatch from Iraq, “Meet the Iraqi Police in Kirkuk,” contains a compelling four-minute video taken after Iraqi police arrested the driver of a vehicle whose passenger was shooting at a crowd. The video is half-way down the page, embedded in one of Totten’s characteristically vivid reports.

Totten is a groundbreaking reporter—calling him a blogger seems to diminish the stature of his work—who writes (and now films) from all over the Middle East thanks to contributions from people who find his work valuable. If you think as highly of his work as I do, please dump a few coins in the tip jar at the end of his post.

23 April 2007 @ 8:44AM >> In this Front Page Magazine interview, I discuss the inspiration behind my first video, Protesting the Protesters; politics, human rights, the global Jihad & the Middle East; McCain/Feingold and Michael Moore (there is a connection!); the one-party state of Hollywood and academia; and, finally, my upcoming film Indoctrinate U.

28 March 2007 >> Over at the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, Cinnamon Stillwell has an interesting analysis of critics’ reaction to the movie 300, which she notes was “the highest-grossing March opening ever and third-highest opening for an R-rated feature”:

While critics described the film as overly violent, juvenile, stupid, macho, right-wing, race-baiting and, according to Stephen Whitty of the Newark Star-Ledger, an expression of “Saturday-matinee xenophobia,” “300” clearly has resonated with the masses.

Read more for her theory why.

24 March 2007 @ 10:54AM >> In Canada, decisions about health care services are made by political appointees. So naturally, the provisioning of such services becomes politicized.

Few people know this more acutely than Janice Fraser. She needed a bladder operation but was told that, under Canada’s strictly regulated national health system, the hospital was only allowed to perform 12 such operations a year. At her position on the waiting list, she’d have to wait nearly three years. Janice wasn’t going to be able to wait that long; she was running the risk of wearing an external urine bag for the rest of her life.

So Janice hoped that she’d be able to make a personal appeal to Ontario’s Health Minister, a man named George Smitherman. Unfortunately for Janice, Smitherman didn’t have time to meet with her. He was too busy meeting with other constituents, including a man living as Susan Gapka. The time Gapka spent with the Health Minister helped convince him to support government coverage of sex change operations.

Two Women, a new short film by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg (the executive producers of Indoctrinate U) shows how putting health care decision-making in the hands of politicians yields decisions that are politically motivated. Instead of serving individuals like Janice, politicians would rather pick up votes in blocks by catering to interest groups.

For Janice Fraser, who did not belong to a politically correct interest group, the results were tragic.

9 March 2007 @ 8:18AM >> When the weather doesn’t fit the script, you don’t hear about it so much.

27 February 2007 >> Despite the frequent attempts to claim otherwise, the scientific community does not unanimously believe in man-made global warming. And now, more than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition to that effect, stating:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

13 February 2007 @ 7:45AM >> Apparently, Al Gore is capable of singlehandedly combating global warming just by his mere presence.

A couple years ago, I gathered evidence of his ability to do this myself.

If global warming is man-made, maybe the solution is simply to clone Al Gore and to place the clones strategically around the planet.

5 February 2007 @ 3:54PM >> Every year, seven times as many Americans are killed by doctors’ sloppy handwriting than are killed in Iraq.

27 January 2007 @ 5:38AM >> For some reason, most Manhattanites I know reflexively oppose Wal-Mart setting up shop in our slender island borough. However, there are at least three women here who don’t. And, as if by coincidence, they all managed to simultaneously occupy the same room.

26 January 2007 @ 9:22AM >> Pajamas Media has their 2008 presidential straw poll. Pretend you’re in Chicago: vote early, and vote often!

(No purchase necessary. You may vote multiple times, but not more than once a week. Void where prohibited.)

22 January 2007 @ 7:02AM >> From Briefing.com:

On Friday, it was reported that the December US federal budget showed a surplus of $44.5 billion. This was well above the expected $24 billion.

The twelve month trailing deficit is now down to $208 billion.

This is amazing. The US federal deficit is now down to just 1.5% of GDP (through fourth quarter estimates).

At the end of 2003 the deficit was running at over 3.8% of GDP and was in excess of $420 billion. The forecasts were for “$400 to $500 billion yearly deficits as far as the eye can see.”

That conventional wisdom has been proved COMPLETELY WRONG. Yet, the belief seems to linger on. There are continued constant references to the “huge budget deficits” in the press on nearly a non-stop basis.

The fact is, the accumulated deficit as a percentage of GDP has fallen from 75% in 1994 to about 61% today. The deficit is shrinking not just on a current year basis, but also as a burden to future generations.

This improvement is even more remarkable considering that the Iraq war is costing approximately $100 billion per year, and that reconstruction costs for Katrina are also in the past twelve months’ data.

If not for these factors, the deficit would be nearly in balance and certainly less than 1% of GDP.

Furthermore, when state budget surpluses are taken into account, the current US government deficit is closer to just 1% of GDP. This consolidate figure including state budgets is actually a better measure of the fiscal health of US government overall and is more accurate in terms of comparing to other countries.

Speaking of which, Italy, Germany, Japan, and France continue to run deficits in excess of 3% of GDP. That is far higher than the US percentage of 1.5%, or 1% for all government. Italy’s accumulated deficit is 100%, Japan’s is 100%, and the EU as a whole is close to 65%.

It can easily be argued that there is in fact no current budget crisis in the US.

This is not to say that curtailing the deficit further would not make sense. Nor is it to ignore the long-term problems posed by the need to fund social security or Medicare. Those are budget issues that need to be addressed.

Nevertheless, the clamor over the current deficit is blown way out of proportion. It may simply be lingering pessimism in the press, or it may be supported by those advocating tax hikes.

Or, it may be that the people advocating tax hikes have a lot of allies in the press, and that both camps have an ideological vested interest in convincing people that the economy is in the tank and the federal government needs to grow even further.

I suspect the economic gloom and doom in the press will continue...at least until the next time a Democrat occupies the White House, when the same economic situation that prevails today will suddenly be reported as positive news.

18 January 2007 @ 9:02AM >> On July 27, 1997, the Senate voted by a margin of 95-0 that the United States would not sign a treaty structured like the Kyoto Protocol. That treaty, which proponents claimed would improve the environment, had harsher economic penalties for the United States than it did for countries like China, even though 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China.

As a result of the Senate’s lopsided vote, President Clinton never bothered to submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification. So it seems a bit strange that the Associated Press would claim:

The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after taking office in 2001.

First of all, the United States was never bound by Kyoto. And the reason the U.S. was never bound by Kyoto is because the treaty was never ratified. President Clinton never even submitted it for ratification. Why didn’t he? Because every Senator—Republican and Democrat alike—who voted on the 1997 resolution made it clear that they would oppose ratifying Kyoto.

All of this took place years before President Bush was in office, but it seems that AP is more concerned with blaming Bush than getting its facts straight.

(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.)

8 January 2007 @ 1:05PM >> A while back, I wrote about the Microsoft tax, the fee included in the price of nearly every personal computer that covers the cost of Microsoft Windows. The thing is, not everyone uses Windows. Some people (like me) use Macs, and therefore avoid the Microsoft tax altogether. But others use alternative operating systems like Linux.

Most people who use Linux manually install it on machines that came with Microsoft Windows pre-installed at the factory. If they remove Windows altogether, then they’ve ended up paying for a product that they’re not using. One intrepid Linux user tried to get a refund from Dell after removing Windows from his computer. Believe it or not, he was successful, and he outlines the steps that others can follow to avoid paying the Microsoft tax.

17 December 2006 @ 9:49AM >> According to a government report, daily use of the Internet has become more common among Americans than newspaper reading.

28 November 2006 >> How much longer must women endure the suffrage?

23 November 2006 @ 10:13AM >> ...because there are folks like this in the world.

31 October 2006 @ 9:52AM >> It seems that New York Times readers complain of the paper’s political agenda so frequently when canceling subscriptions that customer service operators actually have a code for recording that type of complaint.

The Times may continue the charade of claiming to be a non-biased source of information, but (former) readers apparently know better. Perhaps that’s why circulation of the Times fell another 3.5% in just six months. You can fool some of the people some of the time...