Eyesite for the mind

Minneapolis’s Center of the American Experiment is a conservative think tank of which John is past chairman, and on whose board I currently sit. Before she undertook her duties as the Star Tribune’s new metro columnist this past spring, Katherine Kersten was the center’s long-time senior fellow. One of Kathy’s brainstorms was a project (then named “E Pluribus,” now renamed “FACT”) directed to Minnesota college students. This week the center announced the rollout of Intellectual Takeout, a site designed to “bring intellectual diversity to Minnesota college campuses by exposing students to conservative free-market ideas that are not always readily available in the classroom.”
Intellectual Takeout is a tremendous resource for students desiring to hear the other side of the party line usually promulgated in high school and college classrooms on subjects related to politics, from economics to the environment to the family and beyond. Please take a moment to check out the site and let students who might have a use for it know of its existence. The AP story on Intellectual Takeout (here) focuses on the Minnesota angle, but this site should be valuable for students beyond Minnesota.
Also debuting this week (I think) is an equally needed site regarding the United Nations, Eye on the UN. The site is the handiwork of editor Anne Bayefsky. I saw Anne speak in St. Paul earlier this year, hoping to discover why I hadn’t heard of her before 9/11. My interpretation of her intellectual evolution is that her long-time advocacy of human rights was refocused after she awakened to the essential perversity of the United Nations at the Durban conference in September 2001 (these are my words, not hers).
Since the Durban conference, Anne has become one of the most formidable critics of the institutional sickness that permeates the United Nations (again, my words, not hers). For the site Anne has enlisted a formidable roster of authors whose work she has made accessible via links to their names. With a click on the name of Claudia Rosett, for example, behold a page with Rosett’s articles since this spring.