QOTW

Freespeechers 17 Comments

Some people want to banish this conversation from polite company, but doing so does not ban the conversation from occurring; it just bans polite conversationalists from adding their influence to the debate. The greatest beneficiaries of this approach are groups at the fringe who live to incite people to violence. – Jerry Bowyer

h/t EBD

It’s Time To Elect Our Judges

entitlement generation Political Animal 35 Comments

As they’ve decided they run the country anyway;

This morning, Federal Court of Canada Justice Anne Mactavish delivered a sharply worded judgement slamming a decision, made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet, to deny some refugee claimants the benefits of Canada’s publicly funded health care system.

Except that they aren’t “refugees”.
And they’re “benefits” not available to us.
Here’s her contact info.

How’s That Hopey Changey Thing Working Out For Ya?

Forward! Political Animal The One 16 Comments

Michael Goodwin;

The Quinnipiac poll showing that Obama is now considered the worst president since World War II offers him no silver lining. There were 12 choices and the voting wasn’t close — he got the highest “worst” vote, 33 percent, with George W. Bush the next worst, at 28 percent.
Jimmy Carter, routinely mocked as a disaster, drew only 8 percent. Even Richard Nixon did better, seen as the bottom of the barrel by only 13 percent of those surveyed. And we know how Nixon’s tenure ended.
Too bad America didn’t come to its senses sooner. Indeed, the Q poll shows a huge amount of buyers’ remorse, with 45 percent saying Mitt Romney would have been a better president, while only 38 percent think Obama was the right choice in 2012. Mulligan, anyone?

And half of those work in media.
h/t EBD, north of 60

Those Moderate Muslims!

Religion Of Submission Terrorism 37 Comments

Rome will be conquered next, says leader of ‘Islamic State’

“This is my advice to you. If you hold to it you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills.”
Having claimed the title of “caliph”, Baghdadi appealed to “judges and those who have military and managerial and service skills, and doctors and engineers in all fields.”
He also called on jihadi fighters to escalate fighting in the holy month of Ramadan, which began on Sunday. “In this virtuous month or in any other month, there is no deed better than jihad in the path of Allah, so take advantage of this opportunity and walk the path of you righteous predecessors,” he said. “So to arms, to arms, soldiers of the Islamic s, fight, fight.”

We’re “Rome”, by the way.
h/t JB, who adds: “The following caught my eye in this story — it about sums up what we need to know about this movement!‘Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the ‘Islamic State’ stretching across Iraq and Syria, … holds a PhD in Islamic studies'”

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 29 Comments

Nature;

When a team of cosmologists announced at a press conference in March that they had detected gravitational waves generated in the first instants after the Big Bang, the origins of the Universe were once again major news. The reported discovery created a worldwide sensation in the scientific community, the media and the public at large. […] Now, serious flaws in the analysis have been revealed that transform the sure detection into no detection. The search for gravitational waves must begin anew. The problem is that other effects, including light scattering from dust and the synchrotron radiation generated by electrons moving around galactic magnetic fields within our own Galaxy, can also produce these twists.
[…]
The BICEP2 incident has also revealed a truth about inflationary theory. The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and the detection of gravitational waves was the ‘smoking gun’ proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. Such is the nature of normal science. Yet some proponents of inflation who celebrated the BICEP2 announcement already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible?
The answer given by proponents is alarming: the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests. First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over all possible bubbles in the multi­verse, every­thing that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable.

It’s like climate science on a universal scale.

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