Archive for 2017
January 25, 2017
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: One night stands: women regret them, men regret not having more, and evolution is to blame.
BIG ASTRONOMY: Plasma tidal wave may tell us if black holes destroy information.
A laser-driven tidal wave could test a question that has long plagued physics: is the information inside a black hole lost forever or somehow preserved through the mysterious machinations of quantum mechanics?
The defining feature of a black hole is thought to be that anything that crosses the event horizon – the proverbial point of no return – can never escape and is lost forever.
But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes aren’t truly black. If a virtual particle pair pops into existence near the event horizon, and one falls in, the black hole must lose a tiny bit of mass in the form of energy. So black holes will radiate tiny amounts of energy – dubbed Hawking radiation – and evaporate over time. The bigger the black hole, the longer it takes to evaporate.
So what happens to everything that has fallen into the black hole? Logic dictates it, too, should be lost. But quantum mechanics holds that information must be conserved and cannot be lost – hence the paradox.
Perhaps most intriguing is the possibility that the laws of physics could allow for paradoxes.
MESSAGE TO THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER: You’re six inches from declaring Chick-fil-A a hate crime. We’ll let you know when we care what you think.
Even funnier is that the SPLC seems to have blocked him for that tweet.
NOTHING SHORT OF STUNNING: Judge Slams Obama DOJ’s ‘Unethical Conduct’ in Amnesty Case.
Breitbart Texas reported in May of 2016 that U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen slammed U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, writing that their “conduct is certainly not worthy of any department whose name includes the word ‘Justice’.” He added, “Suffice it to say, the citizens of all fifty states, their counsel, the affected aliens and the judiciary all deserve better.” He opined that the DOJ “purports to represent all Americans—not just those who are in favor of whatever actions the Department is seeking to prosecute or defend. The end result never justifies misconduct.” Hanen issued a 28-page memorandum opinion and order and lambasted federal government officials for misleading the Court during the executive amnesty litigation.
At the time of the May 2016 order, Hanen noted that the DOJ “has now admitted making statements that clearly did not match the facts. It has admitted that the lawyers who made these statements had knowledge of the truth when they made these misstatements.” The DOJ provided only the explanation that its lawyers “lost focus” or that the “fact[s] receded in memory or awareness.” He opined that the misrepresentations were made on “multiple occasions” and started at “the very first hearing this Court held.” He said he was mislead both in writing and in statements made in open court.
The Judge issued an order that the federal government misled the Court and the plaintiff states in the amnesty case about when it would begin to implement the DAPA program and would amend the DACA program. The Court ordered the government to file by June 10, 2016, a list of every individual, their names and addresses, of those who were granted these benefits.
Hanen called the government’s conduct “intentionally deceptive” and ordered U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to file a comprehensive plan “to prevent this unethical conduct from ever occurring again.” He added, Lynch must make sure that “Justice Department trial lawyers tell the truth—the entire truth.” He also barred the DOJ lawyers who had appeared in the case from ever appearing before his court again.
The Obama Administration had a lousy court record, but this one might take the scandal-free cake.
WHY ARE LEFTIST POLITICAL PARTIES SUCH CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY AND VIOLENCE? Edmonton police charge man in women’s rally incident. “Rebel founder Ezra Levant wrote an editorial online with the headline ‘Find the Thug’ and offered a $1,000 bounty for information to help find the man. On Tuesday, Edmonton police said Dion Bews, 34, has been charged with assault and uttering threats.”
I’M GLAD PEOPLE ARE STANDING UP TO SEXISM: NYT Piece on Dads Bumbling as Wives March Gets Roasted: ‘Breaking news: Fathers care for their kids!’ It’s funny how the more progressive media outlets are, the more invested they seem to be in 1950s gender stereotypes.
LOVE TRUMPS HATE: 3 White Men Leave Black DC Waitress $450 Tip With Note: ‘Not Race. Not Gender. Just American.’
As someone said recently, “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.”
JIM GERAGHTY: An Obama Insider’s Lament.
“I was forced to ask myself, would he really have used religious language to convince voters of something he did not believe?” Wear writes. “If the president did believe in and support same-sex marriage in 2007 or even earlier, his repeated assertions that he did not were a direct rebuke to the type of politics he said was possible. To let stand the claim that he supported gay marriage all along is to choose political gain over the integrity of the president’s own words.”
Rarely will you hear a participant in a winning presidential campaign describe the victorious effort so scathingly. Wear cringes at Democratic National Convention speakers “almost comically excited about abortion.” The cynicism of the endeavor grates on him. “Data-driven politics is incompatible with an aspirational politics. It is willing to sacrifice a broader coalition for a few bucks, a dozen hours of free airtime and an angrier base.” He’s clearly uncomfortable with the effort to paint Republican opponents into extreme, theocratic monsters: “Too often the White House would not seek to marginalize the most offensive voices but to prop them up. . . . One former aide to Obama summarized the 2012 campaign’s ‘basic message’ to voters was that ‘Mitt Romney hates you.’”
Community agitators gotta agitate, I suppose, but the far worse offense was our Fourth Estate’s willing complicity.
OBAMA’S PARTING GIFT: Trillion-Dollar Deficits As Far As The Eye Can See.
To be fair, the spending problem didn’t originate with Obama. To be even more fair, the last President who tried to do something about our entitlement crisis — George W. Bush’s push for partial privatization of Social Security — was excoriated by Obama’s fellow Democrats for the attempt.
UPDATE: From the comments, “State Department freezes Obama’s $221m gift to Palestinians.“
LABOUR’S LOVE LOST: Britain’s Populist UKIP Party on Track to Pull Off a Major Upset in Labour Stronghold.
The future is looking bright for Britain’s populist and patriotic U.K. Independence Party. According to a new poll, the party’s new leader — Paul Nuttall — is on track to win the by-election in Stoke Central on February 23. That’s significant because Stoke is one of Britain’s most important Labour strongholds. If the socialists lose their parliamentary seat to UKIP, it’s a sure sign that a populist revolution is coming in the next national elections.
A UKIP win there would put a little Fear of God into Tory MPs still on the Brexit fence.
REST IN PEACE: Mary Tyler Moore, dead at 80.
Her absolutely winning personality dazzled on the small screen, but her most lasting impact might have been in TV production company, MTM Enterprises. The company was responsible for classics like Lou Grant, WKRP, The Bob Newhart Show, Hill Street Blues, and of course The Mary Tyler Moore Show among too many others to list.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Safest Way To Fall. “As physical therapists we talk a lot about preventing falls, but what we don’t talk about is what to do when you actually do fall.”
OVERREGULATION: How Virginia’s Hospital Licensing Laws Led to an Infant’s Death.
According to the report, 35 states have similar requirements.
PANIC AT THE EPA! Trump Erasing Climate Change Data from EPA Servers.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW. Robotic Fabricator Could Change the Way Buildings Are Constructed.
DR HELEN: Misandry and Child Abuse Flourish Among ‘Elites’ Who Want Revenge.
To be clear, this is elites looking for revenge for the harm they feel Trump will do them.
MYRON MAGNET: Trump’s revolution has been a long time brewing.
As Amity Shlaes shows in her 2008 book The Forgotten Man, that term, which Franklin Roosevelt applied to the man on the breadline in the Great Depression, “the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” more properly applies to those unhappy-if-silent taxpayers who funded the New Deal’s social-welfare schemes. And these are the forerunners of the Tea Partiers, another key class of Trump voter: the widow on a fixed income whose property-tax payment helps house a public-sector retiree comfortably but whose inexorable rise is making her own paid-off home unaffordable; the retiree whose IRA savings the Great Recession eroded or who can no longer get an adequate income from safe bond investments, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policies; the small businessman or farmer ruined by undemocratic government regulation lacking even the pretense of due process; the ex-soldier abandoned by a dysfunctional Veterans Administration; the parent disgusted with public schools that impose ideologies she abhors on her children, while leaving them inadequately educated; and all those sincere believers in God or traditional values whom Obama dismissed as clinging desperately to outmoded pieties, as the arc of history, which the elite professor-president claimed to understand and direct according to his politically correct enlightenment, swirled them down the drain.
Read the whole thing.
CLAIM: Corruption worsens under populist leaders.
After eight years of Obama’s “scandal-free” administration, I’m just hoping for some honest reporting.
Well, “hope” might be too strong a word.
CHEATING? Judge says Aetna dropped out of some Obamacare markets to help win its merger fight.
Aetna announced it would pull out of most of the state exchanges where it sold health insurance under the Affordable Care Act last August, citing financial losses. But a U.S. District Court judge who rejected the company’s proposed merger with Humana on Monday revealed in his opinion that profitability wasn’t the only concern driving the company’s decision — Aetna also exited several markets as part of an effort to “improve its litigation position.”
U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates wrote that Aetna, pushing for a $37 billion merger with Humana since summer of 2015, decided to leave 17 counties in three states in order to improve the likelihood that the deal would be approved — including one where the business was doing well. Florida was the company’s third most-profitable exchange market in 2015 and the beginning of 2016.
If ObamaCare had allowed for a single, nationwide market for health insurance instead of further entrenching the country’s 51 little insurance fiefdoms, then gamesmanship like this wouldn’t be possible.