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
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]
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]
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