Report: New York Investigators Obtain Fraudulent Ballots 97 Percent of Time | National Review Online

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/367278/report-new-york-investigators-obtain-fraudulent-ballots-97-percent-time-john-fund

New York City's Department of Investigation (DOI) has just shown how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. Its undercover agents were able to obtain ballots for city elections a total of 61 times — 39 times using the names of dead people, 14 times using the names of incarcerated felons, and eight times using the names of non-residents. On only two occasions, or about 3 percent of the time, were the agents stopped by polling-place officials. In one of the two cases, an investigator was stopped only because the felon he was trying to vote in the name of was the son of the election official he was dealing with.
Ballot security in checking birth dates or signatures was so sloppy that young undercover agents were able to vote using the name of someone three times their age who had died. As the New York Post reports: "A 24-year female was able to access the ballot at a Manhattan poll site in November under the name of a deceased female who was born in 1923 and died in April 25, 2012 — and would have been 89 on Election Day." All of the agents who got ballots wrote in the names of fictitious candidates so as not to actually influence election outcomes.

Ancestral Magnitudes | Unscrewing The Inscrutable

http://www.brentrasmussen.net/uti/node/79

"My grandfather wasn't no monkey!", "You think we came from slime?!", and "man, if you want to believe your great^100 grandpa was a rock, be my guest...but it's STUPID!".
....
Great to the 100th?  Well, yes, that would be pretty stupid.  A monkey? Slime? Rocks as ancestors? Clearly you don't have an adequate grasp of either the actual concept of evolutionary ancestry or of the significant time factors involved.

I figure at 20 years per generation, 100 generations of grandfathers would equate to twenty centuries.  That means the grandpa you're talking about was a contemporary of rabba Yeshua bar Yosseff just 2,000 years ago.  Not quite an adequate evolutionary time-scale and certainly far from the mark when talking about the origin of life on Earth. But even 100 years ago, 16 years per generation was more the norm as it was with my grandparents and many of their ancestors.  That would have put your great^100 grandpa in the time of another wildly exaggerated hero, King Arthur, in about the 5th century of the common era.
Increasing the multiple, your great^1,000 grandpa would have had even shorter generation gaps, being about 14 or 15 years apart on average. He would have been a Paleolithic nomad in about 13,000 BCE, just shortly before the foundation of the most ancient cities like Jericho and Damascus.  He still would have been fully human and already a member of the only surviving human species, Homo sapiens. 
Your great^10,000 grandpa and grandma would have been everyone else's great to the Nth grandparents too.  (Everyone alive today that is) He would still have been definitely human and visibly different from his Neanderthal neighbors.  Whether he would be considered Homo sapiens yet 140,000 years ago or still classified as H. antessesor or heidelbergensis doesn't really matter.  All are still obviously people and no more ape-like than any of the more isolated aboriginal primitives still around today.
Your great^100,000 grandpa might now be called Homo ergaster or erectus having lived some 1.3 million years ago, reconstructed by a forensic artist below.
And his great^10,000 grandfather would have been called Homo habilis or rudolfensis.  Any or all of them would have appeared to be a bit more ape-like than the most monkey-faced modern guy, but he still would have been definitely human, especially when compared to the other fully bi-pedal apes that were wandering around a million and-a-half to a couple million years ago.  If you were to put your erectine or habiline grandpa on a crowded pew in your church, he would have looked like an ape-man.  But if you saw him amongst his natural neighbors, the paranthropines, you would have seen him as nothing less than a man.  However, the generations would be shorter, now being something like 13 or 12 years apart on average.
Your great^1 million grandpa on the other hand is quite a leap away from Homo erectus.  A lot can happen in 900,000 generations and the world was much different 10 million years ago.  There were no definite humans yet, but there were other hominids even though none of them could walk on two legs for very long.  There were creatures similar to modern gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, but they were different than the ones we have today.  One of the orangs for example stood as much as 8 feet tall.  And the space between generations would have been only eight to ten years and much less as time goes on in reverse.
At six or seven years between generations, your great^10 million grandpa would have been barely recognizable as a primate, looking almost as much like a squirrel.  And he might have witnessed the demise of the dinosaurs, or he would have grown up in the harsh wasteland that was the wake of the KT impact for so many years.  Now the generation gap really begins to close.  For most of the Mesozoic era and a long time before that, the age difference between father and son would only be about a year.
Your great^100 million grandpa was a shrew-like mammal darting through the Jurassic underbrush 170 million years ago. The amniotic sacs his children were born in didn't have quite the same integrity that his grandfather's birth-sacs had.  Although leathery and easily torn, they would still have been considered egg "shells" much like some snakes are born in today.  This grandpa would have been mammalian, but not yet placental.
Your great^1 billion grandpa would have lived under water along with everything else, including trilobites and some really alien beasties a few hundred million years ago and at least a couple hundred million years before the first dinosaur.  The generation gap is now a monthly rather than yearly division.  But for most of the last half-billion years of our genealogy, that wasn't the case.  In 400 million years, your ancestors went from toothy swimming worms like conodonts and pikia and became crossopterygiian fish and then tetrapoidal amphibians, synapsid reptiles and even amniotic proto-mammalian cynodonts.  But the generations before that were infinitely less interesting.
The world of your great^10 billion grandfather wasn't much different from that which was already described, although there were a lot fewer trilobites then.  And he wasn't a swimming worm yet.  He would have been a roundworm, if he would have been considered a worm at all.  He may have looked more like a jellyfish with a sense of direction. Before that, he may have been something even simpler, like a microbial sponge, but still definitely a metazoic animal even if he wasn't really a "he" in the sense of discernible gender anymore.
Your great^100 billion grandfather may not have been an animal yet, but a sort of co-op of bacteria living inside a single membrane: The mitochondrion, Golgi apparatus, nucleus, and other bacterial endosymbionts, all of which have their own individual ancestry.
Your great^1 trillion grandfather would have been various bacteria before they learned to cooperate in a single eukaryotic cell.
And your great^10 trillion grandfather would have been bacterial too.
Your great^100 trillion grandfather may have been an even simpler chemosynthetic protien in an inhospitable world unrecognizable as Earth. Even earlier, with 'generations' now coming every few minutes and represented by chemical hypercycles, your 'ancestors', for lack of a better word, would have been macromolecular cycles in which the end result of a given chemical reaction is the constituents to fuel the next leg, which ultimately circles back around to any one reaction. This is the earliest we can go back in terms of proto-biology (Abiogenesis) and it's chock full of speculation at that. We are now at just over 4 Billion years ago.
Those substances in turn came from the smaller planetoids and dust grains which formed the earth itself starting five billion years ago.
Although the concept of 'ancestors' and 'generations' no longer has meaning, your ancestral molecules can be found in volatile ices and hydrocarbon tars making up cometary bodies in the Solar Nebula before the earth congealed. And much of the material in your body, the minerals for example would have been present in the solar nebula as "just rocks".
The material which condensed into a disk to form our solar system including the earth was a combination of interstellar hydrogen and heavier elements such as nitrogen or oxygen. These heavier elements, each and every atom, were cooked up inside a large star[s] and released in a super nova. You are made of stardust.
The primordial elements Hydrogen and Helium which made up the first massive stars themselves? That was produced in the Big Bang in a process called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.

Fools and knaves: New York Times edition | Power Line

Link: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/12/fools-and-knaves-new-york-times-edition.php

In short, the Times story does not pass the smell test. I continue to be amazed by the MSM taking the Times seriously and parroting its reports as if they are gospel.

The New York Times’ revisionist account of Benghazi | Power Line

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/12/the-new-york-times-revisionist-account-of-benghazi.php

The Times bases its claim that neither al Qaeda nor any other international terrorist group had a role in the attack on its view that Ansar al-Shariah is a "purely local extremist organization." But Peter King, a member and former chairman of the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, points out that Ansar al-Shariah is widely believed to be an affiliate terror group of Al Qaeda. King accuses the Times of engaging in mere semantics, and he is probably right.

The Times' claim that the Benghazi attack "was fueled in large part by anger" at the video about Islam also seems unpersuasive. Greg Hicks, the deputy to Ambassador Christopher Stevens who was killed in the attack testified to Congress that the video was "a non-event in Libya." Moreover, an independent review of more than 4,000 social media postings from Benghazi found no reference to the video until the day after the attack.
The New York Times seems to have uncovered social media references to the video that precede the Sept. 11 attack. Even so, the relative absence of such references undermines its claim that the video played a significant role in the attack.
I don't mean to deny that some of those who attacked the U.S. compound were influenced by the video. But the Times' own reporting shows that a "grave" threat to American interests in Benghazi predates the controversy over the video. The failure of the Obama administration, and especially Hillary Clinton, to prepare to meet that threat remains indisputable.
The Times stops short of claiming that the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi was "spontaneous." It says, instead, that the attack was not "meticulously planned."
That may or may not be true. But the quality of the planning — good enough, as it turned out — seems irrelevant. Again, what matters is that the State Department should have been prepared for the attack and taken action accordingly. This the New York Times does not dispute.

Fwd: FW: Breaking News: Alexander Rebuts Obama's Zimmerman/Martin Statement

Alexander Rebuts Obama's Zimmerman/Martin Statement By Mark Alexander · July 19, 2013       "It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him." --Thomas Jefferson (1785) Barack Hussein Obama walked into a White House press briefing Friday afternoon, unannounced. He used the briefing to deliver his political assessment of the Zimmerman/Martin case. I have published two comprehensive critiques of this case, "Race Hustlers and Double Standards" last week, and "What Democrats Won't Say About Race" this week. Those columns challenge the Left's promotion and intentional distortion of the case as race bait, to maintain the unyielding sycophantic support of 95 percent of black voters. Without that low-information voter constituency, Democrats would win few congressional elections, and Obama would not be president. Below, I rebut the key points of Obama's latest effort to politicize the Zimmerman/Martin case. O: I gave a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday, but watching the debate over the course of the last week I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit. A: In other words, there is more political capital to be squeezed out of Martin's death. O: I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle's, to the family of Trayvon Martin. A: How about Obama offering thoughts and prayers to George Zimmerman and his family, whose lives Obama, et al., turned upside down by politicizing this case 16 months ago. Otherwise, there never would have been a trial as there was no basis for the charges -- and the jury and virtually every legal expert agree. O: There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. ... There are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. ... There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. A: Obama is referencing an unfortunate stereotype, unfortunate because that stereotype is well earned. Black males between the ages of 16 and 35 commit a grossly disproportionate share of crime across our nation. Until that changes, the stereotype profile will not change, nor should it. Most people of all races have decent instincts about threats to their person or property, and they respond accordingly. The problem is not that a particular demographic of our society is subject to increased scrutiny, the problem is that demographic has earned that scrutiny. O: The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case. A: The racial disparity in arrests and convictions of blacks is commensurate with the racial disparity of crimes committed by blacks. To suggest otherwise is flatly disingenuous. O: Now, this isn't to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It's not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. A: They are not "disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system," they are disproportionately involved in crime. And then in the same sentence Obama suggests "it's not to make excuses," he asserts "historical context" as the excuse. Post Your Opinion O: We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history. A: Actually NOT. The "violence, poverty and dysfunction" can be traced to decades of liberal social policy, which created the urban poverty plantations upon which generations of poor blacks have been enslaved, and which have become breeding grounds for an unprecedented culture of violence besetting our whole nation. O: Now, the question for me at least, and I think, for a lot of folks is, where do we take this? A: Apparently, to the political bank. O: I think it's important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government -- the criminal code. And law enforcement has traditionally done it at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels. A: Then why did Obama federalize the case in the first place? Obviously he thought they would win this case. Now, he is attempting to punt the blame back to "the state and local levels." O: Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it'd be productive for the Justice Department, governors [and] mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists. A: But Obama and his NeoCom cadres fomented the distrust in this case, as they do with every political opening -- and to suggest now that he will step in with training to correct the situation is arrogant and ludicrous. We already know that Obama thinks police "act stupidly." O: I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations. A: Florida's "stand your ground" law, as well as those of 22 other states, do not encourage tragedies, they prevent them. O: I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? A: No. Zimmerman did not attack Martin. Martin attacked Zimmerman, case closed. And for the record, more blacks, as a percentage of the population in Florida, have invoked the "stand your ground" defense than whites or Hispanics -- or even "white Hispanics." Post Your Opinion O: We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them? A: The best place to start would be to reverse the liberal social policies that created the problem. O: Finally, I think it's going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. A: Start with your own soul, Obama, if you haven't completely sold it out. O: You know, there has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have. A: Obama launched the Zimmerman/Martin "conversation on race" so on this point, he is correct. O: Finally, ask yourself ... am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can; am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy. A: This from the titular head of the Democrat Party, which has turned Martin Luther King's challenge about color and character upside down. Indeed, for Obama and the Left, color trumps character. Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis Mark Alexander Publisher, The Patriot Post

Evolution vs God | Confessions Of A YEC

http://confessionsofayec.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/evolution-vs-god/

There are a couple of things that stood out for me.

Kinds

The creationist adherence to the word 'kinds' is as meaningless as it is annoying. Biologically, it has no definition and that gives Comfort infinite weasel room. At one point he asks for an observable example of one animal changing. A few examples of speciation are given. PZ Myers gives the best one, which is a fish type in a lake in Africa (http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2012/349485/). The predictable response is 'but they are still fish'.
Well, of course they're still freaking fish you moron!
The fish species given in the example have changed to a different fish with different attributes and characteristics and don't inter mate. Comfort knows this is how Evolution works and is simply pandering to something that requires such a long period of time that it is only possible for us to show the smaller step of a species changing into a different sub-species.

On Free Speech, Sarah Palin and Mark Steyn are Right | National Review Online

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/366989/free-speech-sarah-palin-and-mark-steyn-are-right-david-french

A legal victory is hollow indeed if no one chooses to exercise his right to free speech because he lives in an atmosphere of intimidation and reprisal. It's even more hollow when the intimidation and reprisals are so effective that they've banished formerly mainstream thought to the outer edges of public life.
Stigma tends to defeat dogma. In other words, mockery and condescension tend to defeat sincere statements of belief. Our kids are literally mocked into liberalism. So in the battle to maintain the free exchange of ideas, I wholeheartedly endorse the Palins, Steyns, and others who retreat not an inch and instead stigmatize the stigma — and by doing so show other conservatives there's nothing to fear.

Ideas: Evaluating Controversial Claims

http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2013/12/evaluating-controversial-claims.html

There are at least four different ways in which an interested observer can decide whether or not to believe the claim.

1. Partisanship. If you support the policy, believe the claim. If you don't, don't. This is probably the most common approach.

2. Evaluate the arguments for yourself. This is  the most entertaining and educational approach but no more reliable than the first—and likely to give the same answer. There is always controversy about the claim among people better equipped to evaluate it than the random observer, although one side or both may try to deny it. In the case of global warming, the relevant claim is not merely that temperatures are going up, or that the reason is human activity, or that they can be expected to go up by enough to cause serious net costs, but all of those plus the additional claim that there are ways of reducing the increase that are worth their cost. To evaluate all of that you need a reasonably expert knowledge of climatology, statistics, ecology, economics, and probably two or three other fields I have not thought of. Since you don't have all that, you end up believing whichever arguments you want to believe.

3. The argument from authority. You try to figure out what the consensus of the people who are experts is or what some authoritative source of information says. An outsider trying to figure out what professionals in a field believe is at risk of overvaluing whatever position has the most support from public sources of information, such as the mass media, or has done the best job of getting its supporters onto the committees of scientific organizations that put out public statements. And even if he could figure it out for one field, that isn't sufficient. Again taking the global warming case, it is not enough to know what the consensus of the climatologists is, even if you can separate the facts from the puffery on that subject. Climatologists are not economists, so  could be correct about the expected temperature increase and wrong about the magnitude or even the sign of its consequences. Economists are not ecologists, so might show the costs they are looking at to be insignificant while missing the effects of climate change on other species. I discussed problems with this approach at greater length in an earlier post.

4. Prediction. Once such a controversy has been going for a while, partisans have a track record. If they have made confident predictions that turned out to be wrong, that is good evidence that they are either dishonest or arguing from an incorrect theory. Figuring out whether the arguments for a theory are right or wrong is much harder than finding out what that theory predicted. Sometimes all the latter takes is  a book or article by its supporters written a few years back.

The clearest case is the population hysteria of the 1960's. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, published in 1968, confidently predicted mass famine in the third world over the next decade, with hundred of millions of people starving to death. Not only did it not happen, the real world moved in the opposite direction, with calorie consumption per capita in the third world going up, not down. That is very strong evidence that Ehrlich can not be trusted. It is somewhat weaker evidence that the movement of which he was part, whose members generally took him and his arguments seriously, can not be trusted.

Patterico's Pontifications � Ken White on Free Speech

http://patterico.com/2013/12/21/ken-white-on-free-speech/

6. Companies make decisions about hiring and firing based on both money and company culture. Sometimes these decisions are "right" in the sense that the decisions accurately predict what outcome will please the most customers and advertisers and keep revenues up. Sometimes the decisions are New Coke. Often the stated reasons for the decisions are hypocritical bullshit, as in the case of A&E. That's the way it works. Discussions about corporate decisions in the wake of controversy are dominated by (1) people who normally excoriate corporate decision-making but suddenly applaud it when the outcome suits their political beliefs, and (2) people who normally celebrate the market and promote the privilege of corporate decision-making but suddenly find it unpalatable when it produces a result that offends their politics. Some of the people applauding A&E are people who last week were furious at the concept that companies have First Amendment rights. Some of the people trying to conflate A&E and the government are people who last week were vigorously arguing that companies should not have to insure birth control if it offends their religious sensibilities.

Discovery Institute tries to "swift-boat" Judge Jones | NCSE

http://ncse.com/creationism/general/discovery-institute-tries-to-swift-boat-judge-jones

From the outset, an impartial observer might have expected that Judge Jones would be predisposed toward the Bush-endorsed concept of ID. Let's see what else the Times found out.

But Judge Jones is praised by people on both sides of the aisle as a man of integrity and intellect who takes seriously his charge to be above partisanship. He appears to define himself less by his party affiliation than by his connection to the Pennsylvania coal town where he still lives, and to a family that grabbed education as a rope to climb out of the anthracite mines, and never let go. Clifford A. Rieders, a lawyer in Williamsport who is past president of the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association, said he had found Judge Jones to be "moderate, thoughtful" and "universally well regarded."

"I think that his connections are not so politicized, nor is he so ambitious that he would be influenced in any way by those kinds of considerations," said Mr. Rieders, a Democrat.

Mr. Ridge called him a "renaissance man" and "the right kind of person to be presiding over a trial of such emotional and historic importance." He added, "I don't think he goes in with a point of view based on anything prior. I really don't. I think he loves the challenge."

And all this testimony came in before the decision was rendered.

Six Myths About Renewable Energy - WSJ.com

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324432404579052900100464562?mod=djemITP_h

MYTH NO. 1: Renewables Are an Insignificant Source of Power

One of the most persistent criticisms of renewables is that they account for a fraction of the U.S. electricity system—despite years of federal subsidies and breakneck growth.

When looking at "newer" renewable energies such as wind and solar power, that's largely true. Wind accounts for about 5% of generation capacity and a little over 4% of U.S. electricity production, or roughly one-tenth what coal provides.

But the criticism overlooks one important point: Conventional hydroelectric power, such as the Hoover Dam, is also renewable energy. Taken together, hydroelectric and other sources—biomass, geothermal, solar and wind—combined to account for 12% of U.S. electricity production last year, and close to 14% so far this year. The entire nuclear fleet provides about 19%.

....

MYTH NO. 2: Renewables Can Replace All Fossil Fuels

The flip side of critiques of renewable energy is boosterism. A handful of proponents describe a future where 100% of energy needs can be met affordably and reliably by renewables.

....

In other words, there's no technical reason renewable energy can't provide 80% of the power in the U.S. by midcentury. But there are a host of challenges that would have to be met first.

....

MYTH NO. 3: Renewables Are Too Expensive

Forget about problems down the road. Another criticsm of renewables in the here and now: They're expensive ways to generate electricity.

....

But there are two big issues to bear in mind. First, costs are falling fast—thanks largely to technological advances such as larger wind turbines and cheaper components for solar-power arrays—so in some places, solar and wind power can cost even less.

....

MYTH NO. 4: Variability Dooms Renewable Energy

The sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow, so wind farms and solar arrays generally punch below their weight. A 100-megawatt wind farm will generate on average the equivalent of 34 megawatts of power that's available full time.

....

Still, things are improving rapidly. Consider the situation with wind power. Curtailments have fallen steadily in recent years as system operators have gotten better at using forecasting and integrating wind power. Investment in new transmission lines has also picked up pace, enabling wind farms in isolated locations to offer power more readily to a wider area.

....

MYTH NO. 5: Cheap Natural Gas Is the Enemy of Renewable Energy

With the boom in U.S. natural-gas production, many concluded that renewable energies would be battered by a relatively clean, cheap fuel source. While natural gas has transformed the electricity sector, gas and renewables are actually complementary, not rivals.

....

Granted, cheap natural gas makes it difficult for wind power to compete without federal subsidies. But researchers are finding that gas and wind complement each other as part of a balanced electricity-generation portfolio.

....

MYTH NO. 6: Renewable Energy Means Millions of Green Jobs

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama touted the prospect that investing in clean energy could produce five million "green jobs." The idea of creating jobs helped underpin the $90 billion clean-energy stimulus in 2009 and later efforts, and remains a staple of administration rhetoric.

But renewable energy has not been the job creator that its boosters envisioned. While the amount of wind and solar power has more than doubled since President Obama took office, renewable-energy jobs have not.

....

Direct-employment numbers from renewable energies are clearer. In 2012, the wind industry said it employed about 81,000, the solar industry employed about 119,000, and geothermal energy may have employed about 20,000. The Hydropower Association estimates the sector employs between 200,000 and 300,000 people today.

Minimum Wage Hammers Youth - Phil Kerpen

http://townhall.com/columnists/philkerpen/2013/12/18/minimum-wage-hammers-youth-n1764747/page/full

Since 1948, when the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it, 20 percent teenage unemployment has been mostly unthinkable. It didn't happen for a single month from 1948 until May of 1975, when the mark was reached for a brief fourth month stretch against the backdrop of an increasing minimum wage.
It happened again for just over two years from October 1981 to November 1983 (and briefly again for two months in 1985) - just after the 1977 minimum wage increase was fully phased in - a 45 percent jump from $2.30 to $3.35.
We saw 20 percent teen unemployment again for eight out of twelve months in 1992 following the 27 percent increase in the minimum wage that took effect in 1990 and 1991.
And we've been living with it now for by far the longest period in history: every single month since November 2008 - right in the middle of the three-step increase in the minimum wage that raised it more than 40 percent. That's five full years. The peak of 27.1 percent teenage unemployment came in October 2009 - just two months after the last minimum wage spike took effect.
Unemployment among workers aged 20 to 24 has been above 10 percent even longer than teenage unemployment has been above 20. We have, in effect, an entire generation in which millions of people are reaching age 25 without significant work experience.

Craig’s Five Ways, Part One – EvolutionBlog

http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2013/12/18/craigs-five-ways-part-one/

So let's have a look. After a few paragraphs of chest-thumping, Craig gets down to business. He even helpfully numbers his arguments:

1. God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe. Given the scientific evidence we have about our universe and its origins, and bolstered by arguments presented by philosophers for centuries, it is highly probable that the universe had an absolute beginning. Since the universe, like everything else, could not have merely popped into being without a cause, there must exist a transcendent reality beyond time and space that brought the universe into existence. This entity must therefore be enormously powerful. Only a transcendent, unembodied mind suitably fits that description.

This is all very muddled. Here are some words and phrases in that argument that need some serious clarification before we can make sense of what Craig is even claiming: "our universe", "absolute beginning", "cause", "transcendent reality" and "beyond time and space."
Science tells us that our universe came into being with a massive explosion called the Big Bang. It tells us almost nothing about what might have caused the Big Bang to occur. For that matter, since our notions of time and space also came into existence with the Big Bang, it is not so clear what it even means to talk about a cause for the universe. In our normal understanding of the terms, causes must come before effects. For that to be meaningful, you must have a notion of time with which to work.
It is one thing to say that our little corner of the universe had a beginning with the Big Bang, but we have little basis at all even for speculating about what might have come before. In some of his public presentations, Craig abuses a theorem due to Borde, Guth and Vilenkin regarding the origins of the universe to add a scientific gloss to his assertions, but he is simply wrong to do so.
...
In short, Craig is just making things up when he says that God is the most likely explanation for the existence of the universe. He has no solid basis at all for making such a claim.

2. God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe. Contemporary physics has established that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent, interactive life. That is to say, in order for intelligent, interactive life to exist, the fundamental constants and quantities of nature must fall into an incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range. There are three competing explanations of this remarkable fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. The first two are highly implausible, given the independence of the fundamental constants and quantities from nature's laws and the desperate maneuvers needed to save the hypothesis of chance. That leaves design as the best explanation.

This is just more groundless assertion. Let us leave aside the question of just how-fine-tuned the universe really is. The fact remains that this is even more of an argument from ignorance than the first. To say the life-permitting range is "incomprehensibly narrow" implies both that we know precisely what the life-permitting range is and that we know the range of possible values of which that is a subset. Moreover, chance is an entirely plausible explanation for fine-tuning if our universe is just one part of a vast multiverse. That's probably what Craig has in mind in referring to "desperate maneuvers," but in doing so he is just replacing argument with rhetoric.
The multiverse idea is speculative, but it receives considerable support from several lines of thought in modern astronomy and is a perfectly mainstream idea among physicists and cosmologists. In this it differs considerably from the invented-from-whole-cloth notion of a God to turn the dials. On what possible basis does Craig decide that the former idea is a desperate maneuver, while the latter is a plausible explanation?

Not to say God's been disproved, merely that the alleged proof isn't a real proof.

The Voter-ID ‘Dent’ That Wasn’t

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/363548/print

The article begins by noting that three prominent Texans — state judge Sandra Watts, state senator Wendy Davis, and state attorney general Greg Abbott — all had photo IDs that did not quite match their names on official voter rolls, and so all had to sign affidavits before they could vote. But . . . they all could and did vote.

Jim Wright — another Texan, whom the Times helpfully identifies as a former U.S. Speaker of the House — had an expired driver's license, and so he had to produce a birth certificate. But . . . he also voted.

So, when all is said and done, where's the "dent"?

It's worth noting that these four voter-ID "victims" are hardly the poor, minority voters that the Left asserts are targeted by these laws. To the contrary, all four are white and quite prominent, one a Republican. They not only got to vote, they were alerted to discrepancies in their voter registrations that they can now get corrected.

This is the new Jim Crow?

It does, however, note, "Officials also said there was little traffic at the offices set up by the state to provide free voter-ID documents for those without another approved form of identification." So, in other words, the state had conscientiously prepared for the contingency of people needing voter-ID documents, and had set up offices to provide them for free. That's a good thing, right? And what's more, it turns out that there was really no problem after all. Contrary to the hysterical claims of those opposing voter-ID requirements, there apparently are not large numbers of Texas voters who lack identification.
Yet the article proceeds to speculate that problems might arise in a better-publicized election with higher voter turnout. Why? Because those elections might attract the "more casual voter."
Well, that's one way to put it. The other way to put it is that there is more likely to be fraud. But in any event, it is a good thing that this week's low-turnout, "trial run" election ran so smoothly, right?
The Times article acknowledges that the Texas election provided no evidence that women were affected more than men — the latest fear raised by voter-ID critics. And, looking again at the four horror stories that began the article, we see two men and two women as the "victims." That does not sound very disproportionate.

Dean Weingarten: I am Pulling for George Zimmerman

I am Pulling for George Zimmerman

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2013/12/i-am-pulling-for-george-zimmerman.html

But those who push racial animosity do not give up.  His life will never be the same again.   Under the intense pressure of the personal attacks, death threats, and media scrutiny, his marriage crumbles.   It happens.   It has happened to a great many.   As part of that process, his wife plays the "domestic violence" card that has become ubiquitous in divorce proceedings.   But George is not a quitter.   He does not accept the false charges.   His wife recants.  The charges are dropped.  George prevails.

George finds solace in the arms of a physically attractive woman.   She tries to shop her attachment to the old media, who are not willing to pay enough.  George discovers that physical attractiveness does not guarantee a golden character.   George makes a wise decision to break off the relationship.   The woman  tries to play the "domestic violence" card again.  George has learned, and is wiser.  He calls the police himself.   Later, the girlfriend recants in a notarized statement to George's lawyer.   The charges are dropped and George gets his guns back.   George prevails again.

He may well need his guns.   Due to the old media assault, a third of the country think that George is a crazed killer.  The New Black Panthers who posted a reward for George, dead or alive, have never been prosecuted.  Maybe that has something to do with a Department of Justice, run by Eric Holder...

New Szostak protocell is closest approximation to origin of life and Darwinian evolution so far - The Panda's Thumb

Link: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/12/new-szostak-pro.html

This is the first time that nonenzymatic RNA copying succeeded inside a fatty acid vesicle. The big obstacle has always been that magnesium ion Mg2+ was necessary for RNA copying, but two negative side-effects of high Mg2+ levels frustrated success. Firstly, high Mg2+ levels break down the simple, fatty acid membranes that probably surrounded the first living cells. Secondly, Mg2+ catalyses degradation of single-stranded RNA. After a long trial-and-error process, Szostak et al. discovered that citrate removes these two side-effects. Citrate efficiently protects fatty acid membranes from the disruptive effects of high Mg2+ ion concentrations, while both allowing RNA copying and protecting single-stranded RNA from Mg2+-catalyzed degradation.

A working version of a complete protocell has not yet been achieved in a laboratory setting. Other problems need to be solved, such as the fact that citrate is not a plausible prebiotic component: it needs to be replaced by an alternative component. Finally, at a certain level of complexity, a third main component of the cell would be helpful: chemical energy (metabolism). Nevertheless, conceptually and practically, the Szostak protocell is the closest approximation so far to the origin of life forms which have the potential to evolve.

And from the comments:

Do follow the link under the picture (above). There are some really cool animations there.

For those of use who don't stare through a microscope each day, it's hard to remember that these are not "static" structures, like our skin or bones or organs, or like static pictures on a page. These are instead fairly loosely (or at least dynamically) held individual molecules, that are always in random thermally generated Brownian motion. Once you see the parts of the assemblage all wiggling about, it becomes much more plausible to imagine them interacting in some fashion.
When all we see are static pictures or drawings, explaining how this large molecule fits like a key into this other large molecule, it becomes reasonable to ask, "Well, how did the cell know to grab molecule "A" and stick it to molecule "B"?". With only the static drawings, it looks like a well defined key in an unchanging lock. Even simple animations often just show the static "key" molecule approaching the static "lock" molecule, in a well controlled manner, turning the lock, and then moving on. Even animations of the assembly or copying of DNA or RNA typically show precise, "intentional" motions of the molecules in question.
But, looking at animations like these, it becomes more clear that we're talking about relatively flexible structures all wiggling about, all bumping into each other, in relatively rapid and random ways, and that, occasionally, two of those flexible structures will stick together in certain ways. Given the nature of those structures, two molecules are more likely to stick together in one way than in another.
Looked at another way, we (the lay public) tend to imagine these molecular parts acting as we see desecrate objects acting around us in our daily lives. We don't have the personal experience of parts (molecules) where the environment (water) is on the same scale as we are, and where the interactive forces between molecules bumping into each other is on the same order of energy as the forces holding the parts together.
It's like the difference between walking from one exhibit to another in a relatively sparsely populated museum, and trying to move from one side of a densely populated train platform to another, where you are literally check to jowl with all the other people all constantly bumping into each other.
Detailed, dynamic animations like these are wonderful teaching tools to better show what is really going on.

Yes, the colorful drawings of molecular machines are very pretty, and very impressive, but ultimately rather misleading.

Minimum Wage Primer

Minimum Wage Primer

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23914

With recent calls for increasing the minimum wage, Americans need to understand how it impacts labor markets and whether it works as an antipoverty tool, says Ben Gitis, a policy analyst at the American Action Forum.

• The federal minimum wage was first introduced in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
• The Labor Department had found that nearly 25 percent of children were working 60 hours a week for a median weekly wage of $4 ($1.14 per hour, in today's dollars).

Today, proponents of increasing the minimum wage cite its effectiveness as an antipoverty tool. However:

• Very few people earn the minimum wage. In fact, minimum wage workers account for only 1.9 percent of all wage and salary workers.
• In 2011, 78.7 percent of minimum wage earners were not in poverty.

Moreover, increasing the minimum wage could actually increase the income gap, rather than decrease it, as proponents claim. This is because there is a disproportionate number of people earning the minimum wage who are teenagers in families with incomes well above the national average.

• In 2011, 36.6 percent of people working hourly minimum wage (or below) jobs were teenagers living at home, whose families had average incomes of $103,964.30.
• Increasing the minimum wage could limit earnings for the jobless while increasing earnings for others.

The minimum wage assists very few people who actually are in need. Increasing it would not alleviate poverty, but would actually increase poverty and give higher wages to families who need it least.
Source: Ben Gitis, "Primer: Minimum Wage and Combating Poverty," American Action Forum, December 3, 2013.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent - Reason.com

Link: http://reason.com/archives/2013/12/17/guilty-until-proven-innocent

Last February, one year after the encounter, the other shoe dropped: Yu was informed that Walker had filed charges of "nonconsensual sexual contact" against him through the college disciplinary system. Two and a half weeks later, a hearing was held before a panel of three faculty members. Yu was not allowed an attorney; his request to call his roommate and Walker's roommate as witnesses was denied after the campus "gender equity compliance investigator" said that the roommates had emailed him but had "nothing useful" to offer. While the records from the hearing are sealed, Yu claims his attempts to cross-examine his accuser were repeatedly stymied. Many of his questions (including ones about Walker's friendly messages, which she had earlier told the investigator she sent out of "fear") were barred as "irrelevant"; he says that when he was allowed to question Walker, she would start crying and give evasive or nonresponsive answers. Yu was found guilty and summarily expelled from Vassar.

The federal war on campus rape is unfolding amid a revival of what Katie Roiphe, in her landmark 1994 book The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus, dubbed "rape-crisis feminism"-a loosely defined ideology that views sexual violence as the cornerstone of male oppression of women, expands the definition of rape to include a wide range of sexual acts involving no physical force or threat, and elevates the truth of women's claims of sexual victimization to nearly untouchable status. This brand of feminism seemed in retreat a few years ago, particularly after a hoax at Duke University drew attention to the danger of presuming guilt. (In 2007, the alleged rape of a stripper by three Duke lacrosse players sparked local and national outrage-until the case was dismissed and the young men declared innocent.) Yet in 2013, the concept made a strong comeback with a sexual assault case that gained national visibility in January and went to trial in March. This one was in Steubenville, Ohio.

 

The Tweetable Guide To Media Myths And Left-wing Violence

Link: http://minx.cc/?post=345725

On Twitter, I reviewed the media's history of convenient speculation and outright lies when it comes to the perpetrators of violence. 

Time after time, blame conservatives and "The Right".
Time after time, be wrong.
Such consistency is a rare gift.

New Szostak protocell is closest approximation to origin of life and Darwinian evolution so far - The Panda's Thumb

Link: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2013/12/new-szostak-pro.html

This is the first time that nonenzymatic RNA copying succeeded inside a fatty acid vesicle. The big obstacle has always been that magnesium ion Mg2+ was necessary for RNA copying, but two negative side-effects of high Mg2+ levels frustrated success. Firstly, high Mg2+ levels break down the simple, fatty acid membranes that probably surrounded the first living cells. Secondly, Mg2+ catalyses degradation of single-stranded RNA. After a long trial-and-error process, Szostak et al. discovered that citrate removes these two side-effects. Citrate efficiently protects fatty acid membranes from the disruptive effects of high Mg2+ ion concentrations, while both allowing RNA copying and protecting single-stranded RNA from Mg2+-catalyzed degradation.

and

A working version of a complete protocell has not yet been achieved in a laboratory setting. Other problems need to be solved, such as the fact that citrate is not a plausible prebiotic component: it needs to be replaced by an alternative component. Finally, at a certain level of complexity, a third main component of the cell would be helpful: chemical energy (metabolism). Nevertheless, conceptually and practically, the Szostak protocell is the closest approximation so far to the origin of life forms which have the potential to evolve.

From the comments:

Do follow the link under the picture (above). There are some really cool animations there.
For those of use who don't stare through a microscope each day, it's hard to remember that these are not "static" structures, like our skin or bones or organs, or like static pictures on a page. These are instead fairly loosely (or at least dynamically) held individual molecules, that are always in random thermally generated Brownian motion. Once you see the parts of the assemblage all wiggling about, it becomes much more plausible to imagine them interacting in some fashion.
When all we see are static pictures or drawings, explaining how this large molecule fits like a key into this other large molecule, it becomes reasonable to ask, "Well, how did the cell know to grab molecule "A" and stick it to molecule "B"?". With only the static drawings, it looks like a well defined key in an unchanging lock. Even simple animations often just show the static "key" molecule approaching the static "lock" molecule, in a well controlled manner, turning the lock, and then moving on. Even animations of the assembly or copying of DNA or RNA typically show precise, "intentional" motions of the molecules in question.
But, looking at animations like these, it becomes more clear that we're talking about relatively flexible structures all wiggling about, all bumping into each other, in relatively rapid and random ways, and that, occasionally, two of those flexible structures will stick together in certain ways. Given the nature of those structures, two molecules are more likely to stick together in one way than in another.
Looked at another way, we (the lay public) tend to imagine these molecular parts acting as we see desecrate objects acting around us in our daily lives. We don't have the personal experience of parts (molecules) where the environment (water) is on the same scale as we are, and where the interactive forces between molecules bumping into each other is on the same order of energy as the forces holding the parts together.
It's like the difference between walking from one exhibit to another in a relatively sparsely populated museum, and trying to move from one side of a densely populated train platform to another, where you are literally check to jowl with all the other people all constantly bumping into each other.
Detailed, dynamic animations like these are wonderful teaching tools to better show what is really going on.