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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on 18 August 2015 proposed regulations to reduce emissions of methane. These regulations would be the first to directly restrict methane emissions by the oil and gas industry; they build on a 2012 rule that sought to curb volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract natural gas. Combined, the two regulations could reduce the oil and gas sector’s methane emissions by up to 30% by 2025, compared with 2012 levels, EPA says. The proposed EPA regs are part of a larger effort by the White House to reduce national methane emissions...

The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution. Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed. The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family...

Leaving aside the NSA snooping, which is apparently legal (if worrisome), it is easy to view the three scandals rocking the Obama administration -- Benghazi, IRS, and Department of Justice -- as disconnected instances of the abuse of power. But this is not necessarily so. Although apparently unrelated to each other in their planning and execution, the three controversies exhibit a shared sensibility -- and possess a common root. Each reflects a cardinal tenet of the powerfully reinforced brand of left-liberalism inculcated on university campuses in this country. {SNIP} The administration’s misleading of the public reflects a teaching that is...

The Common Core English/language arts criteria call for students to spend only half of their class time studying literature, and only 30 percent of their class time by their junior and senior years in high school. Under Common Core, classics such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” are of no more academic value than the pages of the Federal Register or the Federal Reserve archives — or a pro-Obamacare opinion essay in The New Yorker. Audio and video transcripts, along with “alternative literacies” that are more “relevant” to today’s students (pop song lyrics, for example),...

More home buyers who want to tear down an existing home and rebuild on the same lot are doing so without wrecking balls and bulldozers. "Deconstruction" [with tax credits] is a growing trend in the West Coast housing market. WSJ's Monika Vosough reports.

No wonder Whoopi Goldberg said what she said. She can’t help it. She is a victim. She is a victim of the liberal propaganda she believes in. That same propaganda that is based on emptying the words of our language of any moral meaning. So when it comes to applying moral meaning to words, she is confused. “Rape-rape” or “just rape”? “I don’t necessarily want my 13-year old to have sex with a 45-year old man.” What does that phrase mean? She probably wouldn’t be able to tell. Does she say that it is not “necessity” that tells her what...

To judge how important assimilation is to senators John McCain (R.- Ariz.) and Ted Kennedy (D.-Mass.), peruse their immigration bill, now before the Senate. “Assimilation” appears only once in this legislation, and not until the 343rd of 347 pages. “Americanization” never emerges. Too bad the most sweeping immigration measure since 1986 shortchanges assimilation. Whether America ultimately absorbs 12,000 or all 12 million illegal aliens estimated to live here, it will be better for them and this nation if they speak, study, and vote in English, understand America’s Constitution and political culture, respect our history and civic traditions, and honor our...

The Dirty Dozen: America’s Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses Occidental College’s The Phallus ranked the most bizarre class of ’06 -’07 HERNDON, VA – As college costs soar through the roof—averaging above $31,000 a year for tuition, room & board—today’s college students study adultery, the male genital, and Native American feminism. The Dirty Dozen highlights the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nation’s colleges and universities. The growth of these courses gobbles up tons of money and resources and ignores scholarship from conservatives. For instance, books and speeches from the...

Deconstructing Clinton is a lot easier than parsing sentences. Language has its own structure and rules, what we call grammar and syntax. It is these things that allow us to communicate efficiently with each other, even when we are not schooled in the rules of language. But in Clinton’s post-modernist world there are no rules because there is no reality. Existence is a matter of opinion and reality is what I think it ought to be. In such a world facts are fiction and fiction is reality with each reality being as good as any other. Hence whatever I say...

August 21 Posting Right is Wrong and Up is Down For 35 years now, self styled 'Progressive' have spared no effort to re-define our culture. We're told that 'All cultures are equal'. Hence, the terrorists are given equal moral footing with the state of Israel. The aggressor is painted in lovely hues while the besieged are condemned for 'disproportionate' response.

John Tierney in the New York Times took up that old favorite question of why university professors are so liberal. ...the profs do read the New York Times, so they were glad to write in to Mr. Tierney suggesting some possible explanations for the lack of conservatives in the academy. In his column he shared them with us. They are as follows: 1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake. 2. Conservatives do not care about the social good. 3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages. 4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure. Tentatively,...

Relative thinking The death of Jacques Derrida prompted a flood of barbed jokes and criticism of the so-called "anything goes" branch of philosophical thought with which he was most closely identified. What is it about relativism that gets us so hot under the collar? Richard Lea investigatesThursday November 18, 2004 Jacques Derrida: deep thinker or truth thief? An announcement from president Jacques Chirac, an attack in the New York Times, a series of puzzled obituaries and a torrent of jokes about deconstructing mortality. "Naturally the coverage of Derrida's death was mixed," says AC Grayling, reader in philosophy at Birkbeck College,...

Jacques Derrida a website Voyage ends at age 74

Telling "Truths"By Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | June 16, 2003 PONTEFICATIONS  THE CLINTONS WERE OUR FIRST PoMo PRESIDENCY, and their legacy is an increasingly Post-Modernist, Deconstructed America in which fact and fiction, truth and lie, honesty and dishonesty, right and wrong, good and evil are deliberately fuzzed, blurred and rendered irrelevant. In truth, one of the only three statements for which President Bill Clinton will be remembered in the books of quotations is his lawyerly sophism: “It all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Without ever giving the Clintons their due for this cultural and moral vandalism, the Arts and...

Camus as Conservative: A post 9/11 reassessment of the work of Albert Camus Murray Soupcoff The Guardian -- that last fanatical bastion of English left-wing obstinacy and foolishness -- published a unique book review honouring the latest Penguin edition of The Plague, the enduring fictional allegory of human suffering and sacrifice, written by French existentialist novelist Albert Camus. It was particularly surprising that The Guardian, of all publications, would publish what was really a revised introduction to the latest English-language edition of The Plague, since Camus' unique philosophical and political point of view was always so different from that of...

Telling "Truths"By Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | June 16, 2003 PONTEFICATIONS  THE CLINTONS WERE OUR FIRST PoMo PRESIDENCY, and their legacy is an increasingly Post-Modernist, Deconstructed America in which fact and fiction, truth and lie, honesty and dishonesty, right and wrong, good and evil are deliberately fuzzed, blurred and rendered irrelevant. In truth, one of the only three statements for which President Bill Clinton will be remembered in the books of quotations is his lawyerly sophism: “It all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Without ever giving the Clintons their due for this cultural and moral vandalism, the Arts and...

THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE WITHOUT DUALISM by Elizabeth NewmanBoth modernism's disinterested spectator and postmodernism's deconstructed self lead to the gnostic belief that we are in bondage to the world. Biblically informed myth offers an escape. That theology and science have been haunted by epistemological dualisms is an unremarkable claim. Current postmodern efforts to think beyond such dualisms as objectivism versus relativism include recent attention to knowledge as socially constructed, communitarian, and nonfoundational. Such efforts share the assumption that knowing and doing are internally related. Thus theology and science, like all knowledge, emerge from the practices of concrete, historical communities rather than...

  Richard Gere stunned fellow liberals Monday by suggesting that President Bush is doing a better job of fighting AIDS than President Bill Clinton did. Introduced by Sharon Stone at a fund-raiser at Cipriani 42nd Street for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, the "Chicago" star hailed Bush for his State of the Union proposal to contribute $15 billion toward the AIDS battle in Africa and the Caribbean. Gere then addressed the track record of Bush's predecessor in the White House. "I'm sorry, Sen. [Hillary] Clinton, but your husband did nothing about AIDS for eight years," Gere said. GERE...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- Slick Willie doesn't fit. Bill Clinton was more like Velcro, a president who couldn't escape controversy, said Margaret Scranton, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock political science professor teaching the state's first college course devoted to Clinton. The class began Thursday evening at the university's administrative offices. "When we thought of Reagan, we often thought of Teflon," Scranton told the class of 25 students. "But I have often used the term Velcro to describe what happens to Bill Clinton," she said. "All of us know that Clinton is a controversial president. ... People have...