According to published reports, China is planning on adding new censorship regulations covering blogs and webcasts (HT). President Hu Jintao says the government needs to take these steps to “purify” the Internet, leading to “a more healthy and active Internet environment,” according to the Xinhua news agency. Estimates put the number of Internet police manning the “Great Firewall of China” at 30,000-40,000. To see if those cops are looking at a particular website, test it at GreatFirewallOfChina.org. You can also...

Coming soon to a theater near you (hopefully) – Evan Coyne Maloney’s Indoctrinate U. From the film’s website: At colleges and universities across the nation, from Berkeley and Stanford to Yale and Bucknell, the charismatic filmmaker uncovers academics who use classrooms as political soapboxes, students who must parrot their professors’ politics to get good grades, and administrators who censor diversity of thought and opinion. With flair and wit, Maloney poses tough questions to America’s academics and university administrators — who...

Last week, Acton’s Rome office, Istituto Acton, held a conference entitled “The Religious Dimension of Human Freedom” at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. (See this Zenit piece for a brief, if unexciting, summary of the event.) In addition to the news angle concerning China, I’d like to say that all three speakers agreed on one point – the rivalry between Church and State on the claims of primary human attachments. This e as no surprise to students of...

Google recently announced that it has purchased the Trendalyzer software from Gapminder, a Swedish non-profit (HT: Slashdot). Trendalyzer is the brain-child of professor Hans Rosling, who was lecturing on international development “when it struck him that statistics were an underexploited resource, often presented in an prehensible fashion. To solve the problem he developed – along with his son – a new kind of software.” One interesting aspect of this purchase is that the software’s inventor won’t profit from its sale,...

From the “we had to destroy the village to save it” department, check out this item from the Huffington Post by Dave Johnson, “A Global Warming Suggestion: Fewer Babies.” It’s pretty indefatigable logic: if there are no people to be affected by environmental catastrophe, then the problem has been avoided. Johnson writes, “Yes, hundreds of millions of people will face water shortages and starvation by 2080 — but only if those hundreds of millions of people are alive in the...

I grew up in the South. I also grew up during the Jim Crow era. I asked a lot of questions and made a lot of white folks very angry when I did. I hated the “separate but equal” hypocrisy and I was never, in my heart of hearts, sympathetic with the illogic of racism as I knew it. As a teen I was called into the senior pastor’s office and told to stop spreading racial unrest among the youth...

The nearly decade-long battle between the European Union and Microsoft took another turn earlier this month, as the EU Commission offered a fresh threat to Microsoft: Submit to our demands or face stiff new penalties. The item at issue is an aspect of the 2004 ruling against Microsoft, in which “the Commission fined Microsoft and ordered it to provide petitors with information allowing them to develop workgroup server software interoperable Windows desktop operating system.” That ruling is still under appeal...

The nation which hosted a large conference ing Holocaust deniers last year is now full of righteous indignation over historical inaccuracies in the film ‘300’. As Azadeh Moaveni reports from her daily travels in Tehran, “Iranians buzzed with resentment at the film’s depictions of Persians, adamant that the movie was secretly funded by the U.S. government to prepare Americans for going to war against Iran.” (HT: Disorganizational Behavior) No word yet on whether the Athenians are upset over being called...

Kevin noted earlier this week that the UK has issued a paper bill featuring Adam Smith. I also received notice this week that the Adam Smith Review is planning a conference in January of 2009, celebrating the semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary of the publication of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The conference announcement notes that scholarship has e to appreciate the importance of Smith’s moral philosophy for his overall intellectual project.” For more on just how Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments...

In this week’s Acton Commentary, I examine recent events surrounding the conflict amongst evangelicals over global warming political activism. In “Evangelical Environmentalism’s Moral Imperative,” pare the shape of the argument to the debate over the last decade on the topic of poverty. In the same way that conservatives were accused of not caring for the poor because they opposed an expansive welfare state, critics of climate change politics are being portrayed as not caring for the environment. To the extent...