The Big Think

Have discovered an interesting website (new? or new to me?) called theBigThink.com.  Haven't explored it yet but what I've already come across is Floyd Abrams, the attorney who defended the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 in which the paper published secret reports on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There's a 40-minute video conversation with him on the US constitution’s First Amendment. It was Jefferson who insisted on it. He had been in France at the time the Constitution was adopted, and in 1798 was appalled when Congress passed a Sedition Act making it a crime to speak ill, falsely, of the President.  When the First Amendment was adopted this Act was struck down.  There’s much more, including “Where Does Freedom of Speech End?” and “Is Wikileaks Like the Pentagon Papers?”.  .

Elsewhere on the site, Stephen Hawking bangs his colonising space drum again, see next.  It was this that led me to the site in the first place. I hope I won't regret advertising this site on my blog as I have a suspicion, having looked at the credentials of the “experts”, that it might have a slightly right-wing bias to it.  We'll see.