Tax subsidy critic Michael Moore receives Michigan tax subsidy he criticized
by Michelle, HOT AIR:
The Mackinac Center of Michigan exposes crockumentarian Michael Moore’s embrace of government tax subsidies for a deep-pocketed private business.
His business.
Moore applied for and will receive the tax goodies while sitting on Michigan’s Film Office Advisory Council:
[...]
Falk’s fallacy
idnet.com.au:
[...]
Even if Dr Falk were right to assert “randomness” as the generator of specified diversity here, a paper by D. J. Smith estimates the size of the shape space involved as between 10^10 and 10^16, which equates to less than 54 bits of information. On page 294 of his book, Dr. Meyer stipulates 500 bits as the maximum that could be generated by undirected processes. (Dr. Meyer also modestly restricts his COI law to non-biological processes, which would exclude the generation of antibody diversity.)
We must conclude that Dr. Falk has failed to offer a genuine counterexample to Dr. Meyer’s claim about the very limited power of unintelligent processes to generate specified complexity.
Chicago cools to Barack Obama, its hometown boy
The Sunday Times:
The state of Illinois has been hit hard by the economic crisis, with unemployment at 10.8%. Gordy’s, which has been going for more than half a century, is the only shop left on the street, apart from the liquor store. Boarded-up windows are plastered with posters declaring bankruptcy, mortgage foreclosure, or auction.
Obama desperately tried to woo back these people last week with his first state of the union speech as his popularity slumped to below 50%. It was seen as critical after the shock of losing the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy, in Democrat hands for 50 years, to Scott Brown, a former male model.
“Obama came to power because the American people were suffering from a bad case of charismaphilia,” said Milt Rosenberg, a social psychologist who hosts a radio show in Chicago. “But after a year of profligate spending and programmes, the public really didn’t want, like healthcare, the bloom is off the rose.”
[...]
What’s the matter with you Americans?
by King Banaian, HOT AIR:
The notion that we know enough to know what is in someone else’s best interest is evidence of this fallacy, and I have found over the succeeding decades there are many academics that fall into it. Applied in the political sphere, it takes the form of “why does the public not understand what we are trying to do?” We heard it in President Obama’s State of the Union address last week in his claim that his failure on health care was “not explaining it more clearly to the American people.” It characterizes the thoughts of Thomas Frank in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?, a book that I found alternately patronizing and pathetic, arguing that it must be false consciousness or hypnotizing demagoguery that leads the working class of Kansas, once home of agricultural Wobblies, to now vote consistently conservative.
That meme is now everywhere. David Brooks calls tea partiers anti-intellectual and Frank Rich calls them comatose. Responding to the election of Scott Brown, the BBC carries a column by David Runciman, a British academic political scientist of high birth (how else to describe someone whose Wikipedia entry notes his viscountcy?) that cannot understand why town halls are filled with people repulsed by Democrats health care reform. It’s to help them, dears!
[...]
Ailes defends Sarah Palin and also notes “We’re winning”
HAHAHAHAHA! See ya Huffy and Buffy …
How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War
by Raymond Ibrahim, Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2010):
Islam must seem a paradoxical religion to non-Muslims. On the one hand, it is constantly being portrayed as the religion of peace; on the other, its adherents are responsible for the majority of terror attacks around the world. Apologists for Islam emphasize that it is a faith built upon high ethical standards; others stress that it is a religion of the law. Islam’s dual notions of truth and falsehood further reveal its paradoxical nature: While the Qur’an is against believers deceiving other believers — for “surely God guides not him who is prodigal and a liar”[1] — deception directed at non-Muslims, generally known in Arabic as taqiyya, also has Qur’anic support and falls within the legal category of things that are permissible for Muslims.
Taqiyya offers two basic uses. The better known revolves around dissembling over one’s religious identity when in fear of persecution. Such has been the historical usage of taqiyya among Shi’i communities whenever and wherever their Sunni rivals have outnumbered and thus threatened them. Conversely, Sunni Muslims, far from suffering persecution have, whenever capability allowed, waged jihad against the realm of unbelief; and it is here that they have deployed taqiyya — not as dissimulation but as active deceit. In fact, deceit, which is doctrinally grounded in Islam, is often depicted as being equal — sometimes superior — to other universal military virtues, such as courage, fortitude, or self-sacrifice.
Yet if Muslims are exhorted to be truthful, how can deceit not only be prevalent but have divine sanction?
[...]
Dutch MP’s trial reminiscent of reporter’s post-9/11 writings
By SALIM MANSUR:
The demand by Europe’s officialdom — Canada’s officialdom is on the same page — that “free speech” must also meet the requirements of “responsible speech” when the subject is Islam is tantamount to repudiating Europe’s history that made her the cradle of the modern world of science and democracy.
The Wilders trial is indicative of Europe’s bleak future, as Fallaci had warned. This trial amounts to appeasing official Islam, which has demanded “defamation of religions,” according to a resolution adopted in the UN General Assembly in March 2008, be prohibited.
Moreover, in trying Wilders, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal has conceded space to the Islamists by accommodating, in practical terms, their demand for acceptance of Shariah (Islamic law) within secular society.
This can only mean abandoning those Muslims, especially women, who escaped from Islamic countries seeking freedom. They will become vulnerable once again to Islamists enforcing Shariah rule inside enclaves where Muslims reside within Europe.
[...]
Leftist priorities
Obama’s War on Science: Trillions for a Hoax, but Not One Cent for NASA’s Moon Mission
‘Rev’ Wright, where are you?
Sunday Morning Services: One Year On, President Obama Still Can’t Find a Church
The Holder hangover (and whence it comes)
Posted by Scott, Power Line:
Speaking at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania during the presidential campaign in June 2008, Barack Obama addressed the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision granting Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their confinement through habeas corpus proceedings in federal court. Obama asserted that the “principle of habeas corpus, that a state can’t just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process — that’s the essence of who we are.” He explained:
I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday.
Obama’s comments derive from what I facetiously call “the higher wisdom” that fueled his campaign and that is now operative in his administration. Attorney General Eric Holder perfectly reflects it.
[...]
Nightmare in the Middle East
By RALPH PETERS, NY Post:
Whatever planet Earth may find in short supply in 2010, violence and misrule will remain abundant, from the most-recent round of Muslim-vs.-Christian massacres in Nigeria to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez’s delight in unleashing his thugs on students marching for freedom.
But no region — not even sub-Saharan Africa — competes with the greater Middle East when it comes to wanton savagery, thwarted opportunities and the danger posed to innocent populations around the world. With fanatical terrorists of unprecedented brutality, Islamist extremists pursuing nuclear weapons, rogue regimes, disintegrating states and threats of genocide against Israel, the lands of heat and dust between the Nile and the Indus form a realm of deadly failure that will haunt the civilized world throughout our lifetimes.
A survey of the region’s key countries — and problems — doesn’t offer much good news for the Obama Administration’s naive foreign policy efforts:
[...]
Global warming science implodes overseas: American media silent
Rick Moran, AT:
The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens – yes dozens – of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the “consensus” of 2500 of the world’s climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.
We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.
Glaciergate, tempgate, icegate, and now, disappearing Amazon forests not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus “science” on was written by a food safety advocate according to this Christopher Booker piece in the Telegraph :
[...]
Like I said, elitists are all the same
Actual Bloomberg Headline: “Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows”
The Ideologue
BY Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard:
President Obama’s greatest need is to escape the ideological grip of congressional Democrats and the liberal base of the Democratic party (they’re one and the same). But he either doesn’t recognize this or, as a conventional liberal himself, isn’t so inclined. This self-inflicted difficulty has put Obama in worse political straits than President Clinton faced after the Republican landslide of 1994.
Certainly there was nothing in Obama’s State of the Union address last week to indicate he understands the fix he’s in or has devised a credible way to get out of it. His message, though he didn’t put it in quite these words, was that he’d rather fight for unpopular liberal policies than switch to broadly appealing centrist ones.
A bad omen for Obama and Democrats was the pleased-as-punch response of Capitol Hill’s top Republican, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “It makes my job a little easier than if he were moving to the middle and picking up people,” McConnell says. “I naïvely thought he was going to do a course correction.”
McConnell characterizes the Obama strategy as: “Ignore the public, we know what’s best, full speed ahead.”
[...]
Lying for Darwin
ENV:
Over the past couple of months at Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution Is True, he and Matthew Cobb have written several blog posts attacking Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell — by my count, five posts. The most recent by Coyne accuses Meyer of dishonesty:
Meyer does not mean well. He is spreading lies and confusing people by distorting real science. Is that the unfortunate result of “meaning well”? Do you think that because somebody is a “Christian brother,” he’s incapable of lying for Jesus?
Isn’t it strange, though, that for all the persistent attacks on Meyer, in quite personal terms, Professor Coyne hasn’t dared to actually read Steve’s book? That’s obvious because Coyne’s throwaway summary of its contents — Signature “maintains that cells must have been designed by God because they’re too complex to have evolved” — is an absurd misrepresentation. Even someone who had only read reviews of the book would know as much.
[...]
Let’s Talk About Political Correctness!
Sarah Hoyt, Classical Values:
Political correctness deliberately – IMHO – conflates race and culture so you can’t point at cultures as dysfunctional and so that anyone criticizing a foreign culture can be called racist. This is nonsense. If I adopted a two year old from Haiti tomorrow (which I’d do in a heartbeat if there were a way to do it quickly and at a cost we could afford) he or she would likely grow up to be a science-fiction geek, with an interest in writing or music or art. Impossible not to be in this household. He or she would know everything about science fiction conventions and be familiar with people wearing Spock ears. People carrying magic wands would not even begin to worry him or her. Voodoo, otoh, would be a shock when encountered because memories – if any – would be long gone. He or she would speak English, not the peculiar French of the isle. And though he or she might have – would have! – the natural bend for math or science or literature, or whatever of his or her biological parents, this could be – and often is – molded and changed by living with an adoptive family . I know enough dyslexic writers and scientists who work really hard at their math to know natural ability is only part of the picture.
[...]
H/T: Instapundit
Perpetual adolescence
David Warren:
[...]
The great German poet, J.W. von Goethe, achieved something similar with his own original contribution to the genre of the “coming of age novel” — The Sufferings of Young Werther, in 1774. It not only triggered the suicides of innumerable overwrought young dandies across the Europe of his day, but launched the German Romantic movement.
Still, what for Goethe had been the over-talented expression of a passing phase in youth — ironically disavowed even within the novel — was for Salinger the embodiment of a permanent worldview. The latter’s paranoid demonization of “the Phonies” is echoed in the 1950s Jimmy-Dean cults of rebellion, in every hippie tract against “the Squares,” and to this day in delusionary ideas about how the world works, among our leftwing “intellectuals.”
Indeed, one cannot look through the list of President Obama’s strange and demented policy czars without spotting so many Holden Caulfields, nor escape their ever-presence among the talking heads of MSNBC. And in watching the president’s State of the Union address this week, I had the distinct impression of a man whose big-government vision rests less in Marxism than in the faux-naïf of “a catcher in the rye.”
UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
Telegraph [UK]:
The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.
The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC’s report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
[...]
Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. The entire AGW trope is a massive, ideologically driven shakedowm. Call in the law. What a farce.
Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen
Ben Webster, Times [UK]:
The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.
The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.
[...]
RELATED:
Conrad Black: Myths of the Quiet Revolution
Conrad Black, NP:
Last month, I wrote a column about the state of Quebec, in which I urged nationalists to stop griping about the past and learn to appreciate their province’s earned status in one of the most successful countries in the world. A few weeks later, there appeared in these pages a rebuttal from Quebec historian Éric Bédard, who scolded me for arguing that (in his words) “Quebec nationalists are spoiled children and crybabies who are never satisfied with the generosity shown to them by their older English Canadian brothers.”
In fact, I argued no such thing.
[...]
So, whatever happened to Copenhagen?
Rex Murphy:
A little (a very little) global warming humour:
Q. How is the recently concluded Copenhagen climate conference like the Medieval Warm Period?
A. They both may be seen to disappear when it serves a noble purpose.
Well, I warned it was very little. But, then again, global warming is a very earnest, if not positively sullen topic, and to mine even an atom of a joke from all of the frenzied evangelism of self-appointed environmentalist groups, the grim coven that ran the now celebrated labs in East Anglia, or from our modern day catastrophist Savonarola, Al Gore, is too much even for the most deep-mining humourist.
But however doomed the effort, it is worth the strain to re-summon the spectre of the Copenhagen festival. The prelude to the event was a blizzard, a windstorm, a tsunami of worldwide press attention. The myriad and extremely well-orchestrated voices of climate alarmism had warned the world of its importance. Copenhagen was make or break for the planet. It was do or die. Either Copenhagen would prove to be a greater Kyoto, a summit that crafted binding resolutions on the carbon-belching nations of the world, or it would be but a little while that we passed the “tipping point,” and poor Mother Gaia and her shielding atmosphere would be sent inexorably on the path to ecological doom. Island states would be deluged, a new tropics would settle over our northern climes, millions would be displaced or worse and rogue mankind would have missed its last best chance to halt the sultry drift into global ruin.
[...]
Whither Wend We, And Why?
The View From 1776:
Reader Robert Good looks at what may be driving the president.
Obama Doesn’t Care About Health Care Reform
By Robert GoodObama doesn’t even care about the well-being of the Democratic Party. He urges the Democrats on as they put their majorities at risk trying to pass a God-awful bill that the American public doesn’t want. Comedians have even joked that he is some kind of secret agent of the Republicans.
What’s going on? Obama has bigger fish to fry.
[...]
U.S. Uses Wrong Approach to Spot Radicals
By: Walid Phares:
The U.S. Defense report on the Fort Hood terror act raises “serious questions” about whether the military is prepared for similar attacks, particularly “multiple, simultaneous incidents.”
In my book, “Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America,” published half a decade ago, I sternly warned about the strategic determination of jihadists, al-Qaida and beyond, to target the U.S. homeland, not just in terms of terrorizing the public, but in the framework of a chain of strikes widening gradually until it would evolve to coordinated, simultaneous attacks.
In 2006-2007, I served on the then Task Force on Future Terrorism of the Department of Homeland Security and developed an analysis clearly showing the path to come.
My briefings to several entities and agencies in the defense sector clearly argued that implanting, growing, and triggering homegrown jihadists to strike at U.S. national security is at the heart of the enemy’s strategy. I even projected the existence of a “war room” that directs these operations; Imam al-Awlaki’s example of multiple operatives’ coordination is only a small fragment of what it would be like.
[...]
Foreign contributions to Obama campaign should be investigated
Clarice Feldman, AT
One of the oft remarked upon ironies of Obama’s untoward attack on the Supreme Court ruling declaring unconstitutional the foreclosing of corporate and union contributions to political campaigns was his unwarranted claim that the decision opened up the floodgates for foreign contributions to US political campaigns.It doesn’t. The section banning foreign contributions remains untouched by this decision.
The charge is ironic because Obama’s campaign disabled a track back feature on its website which did permit such contributions to be made through pre-paid credit cards purchased around the globe.
[...]
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