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Travis Air Force Base and surrounding land in Solano County, Calif. Image: Google Maps Since 2017, a shadowy Silicon Valley company has bought up 52,000 acres of farmland around Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, Calif., totaling about $800 million.Flannery Associates is a company run by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former Goldman Sachs trader. Beyond that, nothing much is known of the company except that some of the most famous names in Silicon Valley have invested in a project being promoted by Flannery. Some backers include Marc Andreessen, Powell Jobs, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn co-founder Reid...

This week, the left-wing organization Swords into Plowshares began the process of melting down the statue of Robert E. Lee that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia. The images from the ordeal contain deep spiritual significance. A profound sense of foreboding washed over my heart when I saw the bronze face of the Southern hero, glowing red hot moments before annihilation. What the Leftists did to the statue of Lee is a vision of what they want to do to the rest of the country. The destruction of a nation’s symbols, the elimination of the reminders of its past, is a key...

If you're planning to go to the 2014 Annual Fall Meeting of the American Physical Society in Illinois this Saturday, you might be in for a bit of a surprise with the final talk of the day. Because that's when plasma physicist Dr John Brandenburg will present his theory that an ancient civilisation on Mars was wiped out by a nuclear attack from another alien race. In his bizarre theory, Dr Brandenburg says ancient Martians known as Cydonians and Utopians were massacred in the attack - and evidence of the genocide can still be seen today. Back in 2011 the...

When construction began in 1956 on Brazil’s new capital, everything about it pointed to the country’s ambitions as a rising global power. Its architect Oscar Niemeyer designed curving, futuristic government palaces, embodying hopes for a utopian modernity. Brasília rose in just 41 months, laid out in the shape of an airplane, a seeming reflection of the nation’s impatience to soar. But the sparkling new capital was a monument to Brazil’s past. For all its modernist appeal, it was one more expression of the country’s long and troubled attachment to the concept of a giant paternalistic state, responsible for managing the...

FEMINIST CELEB: We need ‘Euthanasia Vans’ to drive around and get rid of all the old people Katie Hopkins suggests that we create “euthanasia vans” that drives door-to-door and kills off the elderly. “We just have far too many old people,” the feminist says. “It’s ridiculous to be living in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people.” According to Hopkins, this can be carried out stylistically, you know, with a flair. “Euthanasia vans — just like ice-cream vans — that would come to your home,” Hopkins says “It would all be perfectly charming. They might...

Have you ever been verbally assaulted by someone on the political left with a ferocity you didn’t quite understand? Have you seen it happen to friends and colleagues, or watched in horror as the media establishment does it to a public figure? At some point or other, nearly everyone on the political right has witnessed or been the victim of an attack designed not to elucidate facts, but rather to paint him or her as a villain. My attention was recently drawn to a typical such calumny from a Facebook exchange: Republicans hate anything that isn’t white, wealthy, and christian...

I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to...

Yesterday afternoon, President Barack Obama told his Economic Recovery Advisory Board: "I realize that we are facing an untenable fiscal situation. What I won't do is cut back on investments like education." Meanwhile what our Commander in Chief is very willing to cut is defense. In Bob Woodard's new book Obama's War , the President is reported telling Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: "I am not spending a trillion dollars" on war costs. And he told Vice President Joe Biden exactly why: "I can't lose the whole Democratic Party." Since 1960, federal spending on education has tripled while test scores...

Okay, demanders of equality, you've won! We know you never bought into this "equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome" idea. Let's just cut to the chase and make the world and all those who inhabit it equal. Let's just wave a wand, and presto change-o! We now live in The United States of Equality. Let the income of Bill Gates be equal to that of the woman scrubbing the toilets at the Microsoft building. Let's just cut to the chase and get to the reality of the Utopia of Equality. Bill Gates and the toilet-cleaner are now receiving the...

WALTER CRONKITE PROMOTES DEMOCRATIC FEDERAL WORLD GOVERNMENT (Received W.F.A.'s Norman Cousins Global Governance Award on 19 October 1999} I am greatly honored to receive this award for two reasons: first, I believe as Norman Cousins did that the first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world; second, I feel sentimental about this award because half a century ago Norman offered me a job as spokesman and Washington lobbyist for the World Federalist organization, which was then in its infancy. I...

According to Thomas Jefferson, “When the government fears the people, there is Liberty. When the people fear the government, there is Tyranny." If you can imagine a continuum between such Liberty and Tyranny, where exactly do you believe America is today? Now I know that the American Left will tell you that thoughts of tyranny or too much government control is nothing more than hyperbole. With intensity at least as great as those protesting the growth in government, Obama, Pelosi, the Democrat National Committee go to great lengths to convince us all that the Tea Parties and Townhalls are not...

A Conservative History of the American Leftby Daniel J. Flynn To catch the current Obamania, we need to see its original old script. For as Daniel J. Flynn documents so brilliantly in "A Conservative History of the American Left," Obamaesqe "Change" and "Hope" rhetoric resurfaces with every generation. Flynn's account puts the modern Obama movement in historical perspective. In fact, Chapter 21, "Meet the New Left, Same as the Old Left" introduces Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, sixties bomb-throwing fanatics from whose living room Obama recently launched his political career. Says Flynn of these sixties "intellectuals" who now see Obama...

At the recent World Science Festival in New York City, Ray Kurzweil outlined why he is certain that the future isn’t as dreary as it’s been painted, and why we are closer to the incredible than we think: Exponential upward curves can be deceptively gradual in the beginning. But when things start happening, they happen fast. Here are a selection of his predicted trajectories for these “miracles” based on his educated assessment of where science and technology is at in the present. · Within 5 years the exponential progress in nanoengineering will make Solar power cost-competitive with fossil fuels ·...

An intellectual is someone who thinks ideas matter more than people. If people get in the way of ideas they must be swept aside and, if necessary, put in concentration camps or killed. To intellectuals, individuals as such are not interesting and do not matter. Indeed individualism is a hindrance to the pursuit of ideals in an absolute sense. The individual, with his quirks and quiddities, his mixture of good and bad, intelligence and stupidity, longing for justice but anxiety to promote his own selfish interests, does not fit into a utopian community. Hence utopians, if they are in earnest,...

One reason so many Americans despise politicians is because of the contempt that many politicians have for their fellow Americans. A case in point is the way the Massachusetts legislature used a procedural ruse to deny the voters even a chance to vote on the issue of same-sex marriage. Recall that in 2003 four of seven Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justices declared gay marriage a constitutional right. In response, opponents collected 170,000 signatures to support a ballot measure to amend the state constitution to make clear that marriage is between a man and a woman. But to get on the...

I guess I just don't get out much anymore. There's supposed to be this big Humanist Shin-Dig coming up in Berlin, with the 112 most important people in the whole wide world (MIPITWWW), and I don't hear about until three days before the kickoff. I haven't even heard of any of these 112 MIPITWWW. (Well, I have heard of one of them). This is how Dropping Knowledge describes the participants: "dropping knowledge is bringing together 112 visionaries whose innovative, creative or humanistic impact on the international public can deliver fresh ideas, perspectives, approaches and new solutions." It gets better...here's some...

Sigmund Freud was the fellow who had the copyright on the ego, the id and the superego. He was also the guy who managed to turn the couch, formerly just another piece of over-stuffed Viennese furniture, into a legitimate business expense. But even he acknowledged that he was unable to decipher what it was that women wanted. Strangely enough, that happens to be one question to which I actually know the answer. Women want men to be manly chaps, strong and virile, while at the same time they want us to be completely open and in touch with our emotions....

“If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons." --Winston Churchill Christopher Hitchens has been an eloquent voice arguing for the military liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. There, we've made a “favorable reference” to the aging Marxist ideologue. Horsefeathers took note of the fact that even when he urged America on vs. Saddam, Hitchens never uttered a word of appreciation or encouragement to Israel, a country at the front line of the war against Islamo-fascism, long before the U.S. confronted Saddam. In fact, for years, Hitchens went out...

The Lessons of 11 September 2001 A.D. Many will write over the next few days regarding the events of 3 years ago. Most such writings, no matter how good they are, will fall into a fairly predictable set of bounds and few will be truly challenging or discomforting. Well, so much for that. I will launch straight into what I believe to be the most critical lessons learned from the events of 11 September 2001 as well as their precursors and their aftermath. Lesson 1: Silence the Utopians As early as 1943, Western liberal intellectual utopians were hard at work...

Bush job approval on handling Iraq now at 51% PRINCETON, NJ -- A majority of Americans continue to support U.S. military involvement in Iraq, and a slight majority now say they approve of the way President George W. Bush is handling the situation there. Views of the Iraq situation are partisan, with almost 9 in 10 Republicans supporting the war, while two-thirds of Democrats oppose it. Other segments of the American population who give more than average support to the U.S. involvement in Iraq include conservatives, men, and whites. Half of Americans believe that the Iraq situation is an...