Brian Gongol
Applause appears to be due to Bill Proenza, the head of the National Hurricane Center, who's risking his job to tell the public that he thinks one of the most important hurricane-tracking satellites is on its last legs. His bosses at NOAA appear to disagree strongly enough to directly contradict Proenza with a press release on their website. It's hard for us to know from the outside who's really right in this matter, but here's a quick logical experiment: Why would a rational person do something that puts his job at risk unless he really believed he was right?
Google's going to build a data center in Council Bluffs. While it's nice to hear about a firm like Google coming to Iowa, it's unsettling to hear that they're getting a big set of tax breaks to do it...especially at a time when Iowa has more than doubled tuition rates at our state universities in the last decade.
Britain's outgoing Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has given a speech in which he's suggested that government should do some fact-checking on the stuff that appears in the newspapers. That should be scary to Americans who realize that we have lots of people in the political and cultural elite who think that everything European is more sophisticated than what we do here. There will be Americans on both left and right who will think, "Hey, Tony Blair has a point here." And that's a real threat to the First Amendment.
What happens when politicians get too much power and have no sense of self-control? "Seven Insane Soviet Projects." At the polar opposite of that example of bad government is the very pleasing news that America leads the world in employee ownership of their own companies. What a great testament to the power of capitalism: We've done more to remove the worker/owner gap than any socialist country ever has.
Online bonus: Some thoughts on spreading that message of capitalism and freedom to the rest of the world.
Keywords in this show:
Blair, Tony •
capitalism •
civil-works projects •
Council Bluffs •
economic-development incentives •
employee ownership •
First Amendment •
freedom of the press •
Google •
hurricanes •
National Hurricane Center •
NOAA •
Proenza, Bill •
satellites •
socialism •
Soviet Union •
totalitarianism •
weather forecasting