Month: June 2018

Trucks can be used for so much more than transporting goods from one place to another. They can be transformed into restaurants, mobile health clinics … even a concert hall. That’s what two young pianists have done with their truck as they work to make classical music more accessible to a wider range of audiences. The Concert Truck Nick Luby came up with the idea for the Concert Truck, says his partner, Susan Zhang. “He went sailing with his grandfather,” she says. “When they would dock, they would go to certain churches where he could practice (piano). While he was practicing, people would gather because they were curious about what he was playing.” Though people can listen to music anywhere, on radio, TV or on their earphones with MP3 players, Luby says nothing is like listening to live music. “When you listen to live music there is energy they just can’t get from recordings.” He adds, “It brings people together. For me it makes life worth living.” But for Zhang, the idea of using a truck to bring live music to different locations was a bit unsettling at first. “When he came to me with the idea, I thought he was…

by Jason Hopkins   Several energy companies have begun the process required for drilling in ANWR, a remote Alaskan province long barred from petroleum exploration. SAExploration and two Alaska native companies — Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and the Kaktovik Inupiat Corporation — have applied to conduct seismic work next winter in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, otherwise known as ANWR. The application is a major development since Congress passed legislation in 2017 opening Alaska’s northwest region to energy development. SAExploration stated that “this partnership is dedicated to minimizing the effect of our operations on the environment,” adding that it would utilize small vehicles, sleds and biodegradable lubricants to avoid ecological damage. A provision in the GOP-led tax cuts President Donald Trump signed into law in December put to rest a decades-long battle over ANWR. Since the 1980s, Democrats and other environmental groups resisted calls to open ANWR to oil and gas exploration. Empowered with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski was able to push through legislation that authorized a portion of the refuge, known as the 1002 Area, up for exploration. Murkowski — a Republican who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and has been a longtime supporter of…

This is Chapter 1 (“The Media Revolution of 1517”) from America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power, by Richard A. Viguerie and David Franke “What is past is prologue,” and conservatives can learn valuable lessons from this long-ago media revolution—lessons we can use today as we battle the new media monopolies of the Left. In the Sixteenth Century, the new technology was the printing press, and its first media star was Martin Luther—with a wicked sense of humor, you might call him the Rush Limbaugh of that day.  We learn the importance of being first to use the new technology.  Being No. 2 (the Catholic Counter-Revolution) is better than not using the new technology, thus assigning yourself to the ash-heap of history.  But you can’t eradicate the new mass movement (the Protestant Reformation) that was established by being there first. As you read this chapter, and later as you read chapters 4 through 7, consider how this historic lesson repeated itself, in a different form of course, with the conservative media revolution of the 1960s—how conservatives were the first to use the new and alternative media, how liberals later caught up, but how the conservatives could no…