Ninety miles from the South Eastern tip of the United States, Liberty has no stead. In order for Liberty to exist and thrive, Tyranny must be identified, recognized, confronted and extinguished.
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Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Networks Censor Any Sound Bites of Obama's 'Harshest Critic' Rick Perry
All three network morning shows on Tuesday noted how President Obama agreed to meet with Governor Rick Perry to discuss the illegal immigration crisis, all labeling the Texas Republican to be the "harshest" and "strongest" "big critic" of the commander-in-chief's mishandling of the chaos on the border. The only problem was that none of the broadcasts featured a single second of Perry actually voicing that criticism. [Listen to the audio]
On ABC's Good Morning America, White House correspondent Jon Karl summarized Perry's recent condemnation of Obama's lack of action on the issue: "Perry has been one of the harshest critics here. On This Week he said he doesn't believe the President really cares whether or not the border is secure." Co-host George Stephanopoulos chimed in: "Yeah, he suggested there might even be a conspiracy to have more kids come over."
Rather than simply play an accurate clip of what Perry actually said on their network's own Sunday show, Karl and Stephanopoulos were content to portray him as some kind of conspiracy theorist. On CBS This Morning, White House correspondent Bill Plante proclaimed: "Perry, who could be a Republican presidential candidate, has been one of the President's strongest critics on immigration." Again, there was no clip of Perry speaking, but Plante did find time to scold the Governor for rejecting a brief frivolous photo-op initially offered by Obama: "The White House reached out to Perry after he turned down an airport greeting, even though Perry has come to the airport in the past when the President has come to Texas." On NBC's Today, correspondent Peter Alexander declared:
On ABC's Good Morning America, White House correspondent Jon Karl summarized Perry's recent condemnation of Obama's lack of action on the issue: "Perry has been one of the harshest critics here. On This Week he said he doesn't believe the President really cares whether or not the border is secure." Co-host George Stephanopoulos chimed in: "Yeah, he suggested there might even be a conspiracy to have more kids come over."
Rather than simply play an accurate clip of what Perry actually said on their network's own Sunday show, Karl and Stephanopoulos were content to portray him as some kind of conspiracy theorist. On CBS This Morning, White House correspondent Bill Plante proclaimed: "Perry, who could be a Republican presidential candidate, has been one of the President's strongest critics on immigration." Again, there was no clip of Perry speaking, but Plante did find time to scold the Governor for rejecting a brief frivolous photo-op initially offered by Obama: "The White House reached out to Perry after he turned down an airport greeting, even though Perry has come to the airport in the past when the President has come to Texas." On NBC's Today, correspondent Peter Alexander declared:
Hobby Lobby Decision Creates Small Island of Freedom in Ocean of Statism - by Ron Paul
This week, supporters of religious freedom cheered the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. The Court was correct to protect business owners from being forced to violate their religious beliefs by paying for contraceptives. However, the decision was very limited in scope and application.
The Court’s decision only applies to certain types of businesses, for example, “closely-held corporations” that have a “sincere” religious objection to paying for contraceptive coverage. Presumably, federal courts or bureaucrats will determine if a business’s religious objection to the mandate is “sincere” or not and therefore eligible for an opt-out from one Obamacare mandate.
Opponents of the Court’s decision are correct that a religious objection does not justify a special exemption from the Obamacare contraception mandate, but that is because all businesses should be exempt from all federal mandates. Federal laws imposing mandates on private businesses violate the business owners’ rights of property and contract.
Mandated benefits such as those in Obamacare also harm
The Court’s decision only applies to certain types of businesses, for example, “closely-held corporations” that have a “sincere” religious objection to paying for contraceptive coverage. Presumably, federal courts or bureaucrats will determine if a business’s religious objection to the mandate is “sincere” or not and therefore eligible for an opt-out from one Obamacare mandate.
Opponents of the Court’s decision are correct that a religious objection does not justify a special exemption from the Obamacare contraception mandate, but that is because all businesses should be exempt from all federal mandates. Federal laws imposing mandates on private businesses violate the business owners’ rights of property and contract.
Mandated benefits such as those in Obamacare also harm
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Over 120 Science Journal Papers Pulled for Being Total Gibberish
If you ever find yourself scratching your head over the complicated articles in science and math journals,
don't feel too bad about yourself. Because there's a chance that whatever you're attempting to read is actually 100 percent, Grade A, peer-reviewed bullshit.
Earlier this week, Nature revealed that scientific journal publishers Springer and IEEE are both removing over 120 published papers after discovering that every single one is nothing more than fancy-sounding gibberish. The fairly egregious oversight was discovered by French computer scientist Cyril Labbé, who's spent the past two years cataloguing the collection of computer-generated drivel.
How could something like this possibly get past publishers? Part of the genius of the computer-generated scam is that, at least to the untrained eye, the papers sound like they could be plausible. For instance, one of the papers published as a proceeding from a 2013 engineering conference in China (which supposedly reviews all potential articles "for merits and contents") is titled "TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce." Vague, sure, but it's certainly not absurd. Then comes the abstract:
In recent years, much research has been devoted to the construction of public-private key pairs; on the other hand, few have synthesized the visualization of the producer-consumer problem. Given the current status of efficient archetypes, leading analysts famously desires the emulation of congestion control, which embodies the key principles of hardware and architecture. In our research, we concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact.
Nothing but big, fancy words in absolutely absurd orders. Interestingly, the entire reason the papers exist in the first place is because of an MIT-made program called SCIgen, a piece of software created in 2005 for the sole purpose of proving that conferences constantly accept nonsensical papers. And, of course, "to maximize amusement." Anyone can download it and use it, so no one is quite sure exactly who is behind the gibberish discovered thus far—and real scientists names are used as the supposed "authors."
Sixteen of the papers were published by Springer while over 100 of the bizarre culprits were put out by the IEEE, and since all papers are supposedly peer-reviewed, the publishers are having a hard time explaining exactly how this happened. And it definitely doesn't have anything to do with collecting more publishing fees, nor sir.[Nature]
don't feel too bad about yourself. Because there's a chance that whatever you're attempting to read is actually 100 percent, Grade A, peer-reviewed bullshit.
Earlier this week, Nature revealed that scientific journal publishers Springer and IEEE are both removing over 120 published papers after discovering that every single one is nothing more than fancy-sounding gibberish. The fairly egregious oversight was discovered by French computer scientist Cyril Labbé, who's spent the past two years cataloguing the collection of computer-generated drivel.
How could something like this possibly get past publishers? Part of the genius of the computer-generated scam is that, at least to the untrained eye, the papers sound like they could be plausible. For instance, one of the papers published as a proceeding from a 2013 engineering conference in China (which supposedly reviews all potential articles "for merits and contents") is titled "TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce." Vague, sure, but it's certainly not absurd. Then comes the abstract:
In recent years, much research has been devoted to the construction of public-private key pairs; on the other hand, few have synthesized the visualization of the producer-consumer problem. Given the current status of efficient archetypes, leading analysts famously desires the emulation of congestion control, which embodies the key principles of hardware and architecture. In our research, we concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact.
Nothing but big, fancy words in absolutely absurd orders. Interestingly, the entire reason the papers exist in the first place is because of an MIT-made program called SCIgen, a piece of software created in 2005 for the sole purpose of proving that conferences constantly accept nonsensical papers. And, of course, "to maximize amusement." Anyone can download it and use it, so no one is quite sure exactly who is behind the gibberish discovered thus far—and real scientists names are used as the supposed "authors."
Sixteen of the papers were published by Springer while over 100 of the bizarre culprits were put out by the IEEE, and since all papers are supposedly peer-reviewed, the publishers are having a hard time explaining exactly how this happened. And it definitely doesn't have anything to do with collecting more publishing fees, nor sir.[Nature]
Where Do I Want To See Lois Lerner?
Lois Lerner is the tip of the iceberg. Obama and his cronies have filled every crevice of government with these strident ideologues, who believe that whatever they do in order to project Obama's vision of America and protect him from the law is their most noble purpose in life.
The NSA Said Edward Snowden Had No Access to Surveillance Intercepts. They Lied.
For more than a year, NSA officials have insisted that although Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, he didn't have access to the actual surveillance intercepts themselves. It turns out they were lying.1 In fact, he provided the Washington Post with a cache of 22,000 intercept reports containing 160,000 individual intercepts. The Post has spent months reviewing these files and estimates that 11 percent of the intercepted accounts belonged to NSA targets and the remaining 89 percent were "incidental" collections from bystanders.
So was all of this worth it? The Post's review illustrates just how hard it is to make that judgment:
Among the most valuable contents—which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations—are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.
…If Snowden's sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 "transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year's collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden's sample, the office's figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.
The whole story is worth a read in order to get a more detailed description of what these intercepts looked like and who they ended up targeting. In some ways, the Snowden intercepts show that the NSA is fairly fastidious about minimizing data on US persons. In other ways, however, the NSA plainly stretches to the limit—and probably beyond—the rules for defining who is and isn't a US person. Click the link for more.
1Naturally, the NSA has an explanation:
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about "raw" intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.
"We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic…" Litt said. "Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden was able to circumvent that in any way.”
Silly intelligence committee members. They should have specifically asked about access to processed content.
Jesus. If someone in Congress isn't seriously pissed off about this obvious evasion, they might as well just hang up their oversight spurs and disband.
So was all of this worth it? The Post's review illustrates just how hard it is to make that judgment:
Among the most valuable contents—which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations—are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.
…If Snowden's sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 "transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year's collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden's sample, the office's figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.
The whole story is worth a read in order to get a more detailed description of what these intercepts looked like and who they ended up targeting. In some ways, the Snowden intercepts show that the NSA is fairly fastidious about minimizing data on US persons. In other ways, however, the NSA plainly stretches to the limit—and probably beyond—the rules for defining who is and isn't a US person. Click the link for more.
1Naturally, the NSA has an explanation:
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about "raw" intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.
"We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic…" Litt said. "Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden was able to circumvent that in any way.”
Silly intelligence committee members. They should have specifically asked about access to processed content.
Jesus. If someone in Congress isn't seriously pissed off about this obvious evasion, they might as well just hang up their oversight spurs and disband.
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