Britannia Radio

Dear Reader, Below is the TOS Blog commentary from the past week. Visit the blog for the latest posts and readers' comments, and feel free to forward this email to friends who might appreciate it. How Detroit Became Starnesville from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged by Zachary Huffman What killed Detroit is collectivism—the notion that the collective (i.e., the “community” or the “union” or the “city” or the like) is the unit of moral and political concern, and thus that individuals and business have a moral duty to serve the collective. Read More... BYU Engineers Develop Promising Spinal Disc Replacement by Derrick Nantz Biomedical Engineers at Brigham Young University have developed a cutting-edge artificial spinal disc that mimics the function of a natural disc. They hope their innovation will help those suffering from severe back problem.Read More... Praise Stem-Cell Burgers for Benefit to People Not “Environment” by Slade Mendenhall People should proudly use the resources they need to pursue their lives and happiness. If people choose to eat stem-cell burgers, it should be because doing so makes economic or nutritional sense, not because they feel guilty about eating regular beef. Read More... Europa Report Offers Fine Cinematic Sci-Fi but Vile Moral Premises by Ari Armstrong Europa Report conveys the message that astronauts should sacrifice their values and lives in order to advance the knowledge of others. The company releasing the film, Magnet, summarizes it in three words: “Fear. Sacrifice. Contact.” Read More... Newark Seeks to Use Eminent Domain to Extort Principal Reductions from Lenders by Michael A. LaFerrara The proposed use of eminent domain to seize mortgages is an attack on the sanctity of contracts, a bedrock of rule of law and economic freedom. It highlights the open-ended danger of eminent domain and the need to end the rights-violating practice as such. Read More... Judge Preposterously Seeks to Forbid Uber Car Service from Using iPhones by Ari Armstrong It is outrageous that a city judge and city bureaucrats can limit Uber’s use of technology to serve the company’s clients—all of whom happily sign up for the service, and all of whom are free to stop doing so whenever they please. Read More... Sony’s Video Headsets Radically Improve Surgeons’ Ability to See Inside Patients by Derrick Nantz Sony has recently developed a “head-mount image processing unit” for surgeons that gives them real-time, high-definition video of the inside of a patient during surgery. It receives and processes video from a small surgical camera.Read More... Profit-driven Engineers Create Robots that Save Lives by Adam Jensen A young robotics company has found that keeping people out of harm’s way is great business. The company, Robotex, builds robots designed to (among other things) help emergency responders handle dangerous situations via remote control. Read More...