Science & Technology

A recent YouTube video, “Kids React to Old Computers,” is a fun and profound way to mark the rapid advance of computer technology. Children interviewed for the video have a variety of reactions to the Apple II, an innovative machine in its day—it was introduced in 1977—but now useful mainly as a museum piece.

Under the control of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex)—Mexico’s State Run Oil Monopoly—oil production has declined to levels not seen since 1995. Fortunately for the people of Mexico, producers in the United States, operating in relative freedom, have, during that same time, massively increased their production of crude. Mexico may soon begin importing crude from the United States.

If scientists rationally judge that they can make headway against ALS and other devastating diseases by engaging in embryonic stem cell research, that is what they should do—and those who voluntarily (and non-sacrificially) fund such research are morally virtuous in doing so.

Individuals’ lives and bodies belong to them, not to the government. Individuals have a moral right to seek out and use the drugs of their choice for pain management (and for any other purpose), and politicians and bureaucrats are morally wrong—indeed, they are detestable—when they violate those rights.

The cause of this problem for the EU is not the shale gas revolution in the United States; rather, the cause of the problem is the lack of such a revolution in Europe—and the cause of that problem is European policies that stifle energy production.

Although environmentalists sometimes couch their policies in terms of improving the world for human benefit, fundamentally the environmentalist movement regards humankind as a blight on the earth whose productive activities are inherently immoral. Most recently, the Guardian reports a “plan to engineer a shorter, smaller human race to cope with climate change.”

Unfortunately, this week’s response by House Republicans—to sue Obama—demonstrates that they are more interested in poking the President than in defunding and ultimately repealing the rights-violating laws that are throttling the ability of doctors, insurers, and patients to act according to their reasoned judgment.

That ObamaCare pervasively violates the rights of individuals to control their own wealth and to freely negotiate terms of health insurance and health care on a free market is bad enough; that ObamaCare does so via ambiguous, nonobjective statutes is even worse. ObamaCare substantially empowers the executive branch and hordes of bureaucrats to create whatever health policies they wish.

Recently Udall announced he was sponsoring the so-called “Not My Boss’s Business Act” to overturn the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision and again force businesses to provide employees with health insurance covering the full spectrum of birth control mandated by ObamaCare.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has built a beautiful and technologically innovative house—at taxpayers’ expense. Although the technology in the house appears to work well—as NIST boasted in a recent media release—government should not have built the house, and the house is not economical to operate.