• 76% Of Uninsured Unaware Of Obamacare Signup Deadline
  
• ATF Lost Track Of Dozens Of Its Own Weapons
  
• Only A Democrat Can Get Away With Saying Something Like This
  
• Rubio's Speech On Cuba And Venezuela
  
• CNN Staffers Glad Piers Morgan Is Gone
  
• Dems Lost VA Special Election Last Night
  
• Concealed Weapons Laws Have Changed America Regardless Of The National Debate On Gun Control
  
• Can't File Your Taxes? Blame Obamacare
  
• Biden Not To Fond Of Voter ID Laws
  
• Is Hillary Clinton's Past Fair Game? Yes.
  
• Hipsters Now Getting Facial Hair Transplants
  
• Ashton Kutcher Speaks Out Against Regulatory Burdens
  
• Men Arrested For Sexually Abusing Cows
  

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:54 AM | Comments (202)
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Here's a quick jolt of DOOM to send you off with the metallic taste of defeat, despair, and ruin in your mouth.

California is so boned: San Jose, in the heart of high-tech silicon valley, is being pushed to the brink by lavish pension and benefit costs.

Detroit has passed the "boned" stage and is now lying in state in a casket in the parlor. Visitors are encouraged to donate money to the pension fund in lieu of flowers.

Number of NJ retirees who have $100K+ pensions climbs 75 percent in three years.

Megan McArdle thinks the collapse of the Mt Gox echange will spell DOOM for Bitcoin, but I don't agree. Mt Gox is just an exchange, and there are other exchanges. The currency has always been wildly volatile, but it fills a niche. And even if the currency itself does collapse, other digital cryptocurrencies will rise to take its place because the demand is there. (The Mt Gox CEO responds with a non-response.)

More on the demise of the Mt Gox Bitcoin exchange. There's a reason that trust networks are a necessary part of a viable currency regime.

E. J. Dionne has probably never read so much as a paragraph of anything by Mises or Hayek. I think we can take that as a given. But then, there is a long-standing disdain for the Austrian School of economics in both the academic world and the public-policy world. Yet the love for Keynesianism (or modern variants thereof) continues unabated in those precincts, despite a century of miserable failure of the Keynesian principles. If you're struck by the parallels with Marxist theory, well...you're not alone. It's just more proof to me that for a leftist, ideology trumps everything else, even personal well-being.

Twinkies Bankruptcy Raises Specter of U.S. Pension Fund Failures. Wait, what? more...

Posted by: Monty at 05:02 AM | Comments (224)
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Uh oh! Guess what day it is.

Josh Kraushaar thinks Sen. Paul is the frontrunner for 2016.

The Clinton library is out of excuses for withholding about 33,000 pages of records from the Clinton White House. Under the law, the 12-year exemption from disclosure expired last year.

I wrote about this on twitter briefly yesterday. A former Gitmo detainee, now the director of a UK "human rights" group was arrested for participating in some way with terrorism in Syria. Of course, his lefty apologists are still confused.

DCCC memo: Dems are ready to go on offense over Obamacare. Hah. Bring it on.

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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (293)
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Multiple layers of painstaking fact-checking editorial oversight.

So, some scientists at MIT had invented a program called "SCIgen" to generate, by computer, random scientific-sounding papers. They did this for amusement.

But people (especially in China, apparently) have been using the program to generate papers and then submit them to actual scientific publishers' subscription services.

“The papers are quite easy to spot,” says Labbé, who has built a website where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen. His detection technique, described in a study published in Scientometrics in 2012, involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen. Shortly before that paper was published, Labbé informed the IEEE of 85 fake papers he had found. Monika Stickel, director of corporate communications at IEEE, says that the publisher “took immediate action to remove the papers” and “refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future”. In December 2013, Labbé informed the IEEE of another batch of apparent SCIgen articles he had found. Last week, those were also taken down, but the web pages for the removed articles give no explanation for their absence.

Ruth Francis, UK head of communications at Springer, says that the company has contacted editors, and is trying to contact authors, about the issues surrounding the articles that are coming down. The relevant conference proceedings were peer reviewed, she confirms — making it more mystifying that the papers were accepted.

It's possible the reviewers chalked up the computerese nonsense to a language barrier, figuring the "scientist" who wrote them spoke Chinese as a first language and was struggling with the English language. But this only goes so far, because, ultimately, these papers didn't make sense in any language. Because they were gibbrerish.

Labbé (the guy who built the tool for finding these fakes) wanted to prove how easy it was to spoof the system so he created a fake scientist named "Antkare."

Labbé is no stranger to fake studies. In April 2010, he used SCIgen to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare. Labbé showed how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database, boosting Ike Antkare’s h-index, a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the world's 21st most highly cited scientist.

Why? Why would 120 fake, gibberish, nonsense papers be submitted to these publishers? And how did they make it onto the system?

Well possibly this is a prank, or an attempt to prove how easy it is to get nonsense published, as Labbé already proved.

Or, possibly:

Apparently, in science, one gross method of ranking your authority is by counting up the number of times you're cited in other scientific papers.

So, what if you could just spam a lot of fictitious, gibberish papers and get them into "the system" (the subscription services) citing you a whole bunch of times? Then your crude bean-counting ranking goes up.

Posted by: Ace at 07:29 AM | Comments (302)
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The administration presented its proposed Fiscal Year 2015 Defense Department Budget this week and it sent shockwaves through the national security world. While the Ryan-Murray budget deal eased the impact of the sequester cuts somewhat, we are now seeing the full impact of previous rounds of Obama defense reductions and it's not pretty.

The Army will have its numbers cut to levels not seen since prior to WWII. Other cuts include retirement of the Air Force's venerable A-10 Warthog and the Navy will begin the process of losing a carrier, temporarily cut its cruiser fleet in half and reduce the number of Littoral Combat Ships ordered from 52 hulls to 32 over the life of the project.

This is all just the administration's proposal and still has to pass Congress. But that's trickier than it has been in the past with the decline of the hawkish wing of the GOP and the rise of budget cutters.

And beyond the domestic impact of the budget fight there's the reason for all of this...foreign threats.

To navigate these murky and turbulent waters I spoke with defense analyst Bryan McGrath. Bryan is a retired naval officer who spent more than 25 years on active duty and was the lead strategist/author of the Navy's 2007 Maritime Strategy. Since his retirement he's written on defense issues in several places including the Navy oriented blog, Information Dissemination and is currently Managing Director of the defense industry consulting firm The FerryBridge Group. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Among the topics discussed:
-How we've gotten to this point in budgeting

-The realities of our political system drive up defense spending by putting parochial interests ahead of sound decision making.

-The political challenge for the Republican coalition that is becoming less hawkish and more budget conscious (with bonus John McCain bashing).

-The non-interventionist case for investing in sea power and for dealing with the expected next big challenge...China.

It runs about 30 minutes but it's time well spent if defense issues and how they impact the intra-GOP battles are of any interest to you.

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Posted by: DrewM at 11:38 AM | Comments (300)
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I'll be on the road for the next week so the ONT will be a bit...unsettled. So expect the not so expected.

Thought For the Day: Anger Is Not an Agenda

Anger is not an agenda. And outrage, as a habit, is not even conservative. Outrage, resentment, and intolerance are gargoyles of the Left. For us, optimism is not just a message - it's a principle. American conservatism, at its core, is about gratitude, and cooperation, and trust, and above all hope.

It is also about inclusion. Successful political movements are about identifying converts, not heretics. This, too, is part of the challenge before us.

-- Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)

Do Conservatives Keep "Falling in Love With Bad Boys" in Politics?

Matt Lewis:

Political candidates who pick the right enemies are too often supported, regardless of their failings. Most recently, we have seen this in the effort to oust Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell, of course, is no conservative hero, but conservatives were too quick to latch onto a flawed replacement.

Matt Bevin's campaign has been plagued with mistakes and odd revelations (did he really go to MIT?), the most recent of which is that he signed a letter in support of TARP. Bevin's in a different category from Trump and Nugent, but conservatives are supporting him for many of the same reasons, including the fact that he has the right enemy. For a lot of conservatives, it's better the devil you don't know than the devil you do.

Jazz Shaw:

No matter how much you may love to hear some people set their own hair on fire and spout out some really over the top, world class invective, Matt's point is a fair one. Winning in politics involves, well. winning, and there are still some lines that are only crossed at significant risk. Some actors on the political stage tend to cross - or completely shatter -those lines, and while the entertainment value is high, they risk becoming clowns in the eyes of many voters who may be more cautious. And when you endorse the clown, you become part of the circus by default.

Andrew Klavan on Purity vs Strategy

All my sympathies, in other words, are with the tea party. And I would truly love to see the RINO's skewered on their own horns.

And yet. In general, Tea Party candidates tend to do well in congressional races where small, homogenous districts are in play. In Senate races where you need votes across an entire state, a primary victory for someone like Christine O'Donnell or Todd Akin may briefly fill the conservative heart with joy, but the loss of a Senate seat that could have been won is simply too high a price to pay for that momentary triumph.

We need to talk this out with good sense and without pompous ranting. Politics is the art of the possible. Writing belligerently purist articles, blog posts or comments is relatively easy. Winning elections is hard. Barack Obama is one of the most destructive presidents this country has ever seen, but a talented politician. If stopping him in his tracks requires stomaching some RINO's here and there, it seems a no brainer: It must be done.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:16 PM | Comments (850)
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Just letting y'all's know.

I forget what the heck is even going on in Justified though I know it's pretty major. Boyd's going down to Mexico, I think, with the Crowes to try to kill Cousin Johnny; we know he's not going to kill Cousin Johnny. Cousin Johnny is to Boyd as Boyd is to Raylan. He's the thorn to the rose. The rose wouldn't be the rose without it.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure we know yet what Art is going to do about Raylan's minor admission of maybe having arranged someone's assassination by the Detroit mob. A punch in the mouth seems letting Raylan off pretty easy.

Raylan's hot-ass wife will continue to only be referred to in the third person because she's on The Following. So, we lose on that.

I have no idea what's going on on Person of Interest. I know it was getting very interesting before all the winter hiatuses, with the introduction of a rival Machine (?), but I don't know when they'll be returning to that plotline. Probably just for the season-ending arc.

Posted by: Ace at 05:32 PM | Comments (126)
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So here's what happened.

American Atheists -- a fairly obnoxious atheist organization (I don't say all atheists are obnoxious, being something of an atheist myself, but some are obnoxious) -- requested a booth at CPAC.

CPAC, out of, in my mind, a good impulse towards tolerance of dissent and appreciation for the idea that a man possessed of the truth need fear no rivals, agreed to let them buy a booth at CPAC.

Well, apparently CPAC either got spooked by convention-goer outrage or realized, belatedly, just how obnoxious American Atheists were. And also, how partisan: you'll notice their billboards targeting political figures include no Democrats. As they wished to snark about people who believed in God, or claimed to, they could have noted Bill Clinton leaving church shortly after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.

CPAC rescinded permission to have a booth at the convention, and refunded American Atheists' money.

Now, here's my take. You are of course free to disagree with it.

Let's get the obvious things out of the way first: Of course CPAC has the legal right to deny this group a booth.

Furthermore, beyond the mere legal right to exclude them, they also have a perfectly acceptable justification for exercising this right: American Atheists is a fairly rudely atheist organization, and furthermore a politicized one, zealously attacking Republican figures but no Democratic ones.

So, just based on CPAC's name -- the Conservative Political Action Conference -- they're perfectly within both right and reason to exclude American Atheists.

Nevertheless, I don't think there's any harm in -- and often a great benefit to -- being more tolerant of dissent (even obnoxious dissent) than you actually need to be.

So while I don't fault CPAC for rescinding its permission, I do think the better thing to do would have been to just let American Atheists take their booth.

What would have happened? Honestly, let's game this out. How many Christians at CPAC (or other believers) would have been, even for a moment, thrown into doubt by the obnoxious, juvenile, We Don't Believe In God But We're Going To Make An Ersatz Church Out Of Atheism tribalistic chanting?

You all know the number: Zero. Point. Zero.

American Atheists were trolling CPAC. CPAC has the right to eject the troll -- I eject trolls -- but I can't help thinking the better play would have been to let the troll come, and then be ignored, and basically waste his time and money manning a booth that people either ignore, or come towards in order to argue with them, or just gawk at. Like zoo animals.

In other words: Let the asshole take the rap of being the asshole, you know?

In general, I do think it's 100% true that a man possessed of the truth need fear no rival. So this type of thing, to me, reads as "scared."

I know CPAC isn't actually scared. I know most Christians are not scared by these goofs. But whenever someone endeavors to keep someone from getting his words out, there is the natural suspicion that accrues that someone, somewhere, is afraid of those words getting out. Like he fears that a great and insightful point will be made.

If you're not scared, act like you're not scared. If you think these guys are dopes -- which, again, even I do, and I don't even believe in God -- they act like you think they're dopes.

Don't act like you think you have something to fear from them.

Now here's what I think is going on. I may be wrong. This is my guess. I don't know, because no one's exactly clear about motives in situations like this.

I think the idea which is wrongly in play, on the right and left but mostly the left, is that anyone, anywhere, who represents a point of view contrary to one's own, essentially "represents" one, in some way, and that's how his errant thought somehow reflects on oneself, and that's why so many people get upset by this sort of thing.

There's are two Emo Jagoffs from American Atheists at CPAC? Well, that besmirches CPAC; in some way, just by being there, they "represent" the other CPAC attendees, and therefore they must be excluded, so that they are not taken as "representing" the values of CPAC.

Note that of all the reasons to claim that someone else's speech or someone else's beliefs or someone else's actions are one's own personal concern, this argument that that other person "reflects" on one is both the weakest sort of claim, and also the broadest.

It is the argument of last resort of someone who just wants someone to Shut Up but can't think of any better reason to argue he should shut up.

When, for example, those idiots at the Science Fiction Writers of America drove out a couple of old hands in the filed on trumped up, silly claims of "sexism," what was their thought process?

Almost certainly something like this: "If I permit those Sexists in my organization, they 'reflect' on me, and they besmirch my values with their own Sexism. Therefore, it is definitely My Business what these men say, and the only way I can keep their Sexism from directly harming my life is to purge them from the organization."

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:33 PM | Comments (510)
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Background and more at Hot Air.

Hot Air also provides a written transcript-- read that if you can't watch the video, but favor the video. It's well delivered.

For those who loved Rubio, but then became deeply disappointed -- let him remind you why you used to like him.

Thanks to @aoshqDOOM (Monty).

Meanwhile, Michael C. Moynihan poses some hypothetical questions:

A pro-Chavez academic writing in The Nation argued that the massive street demonstrations across the country “have far more to do with returning economic and political elites to power than with their downfall.” The Guardian headlined a news story: “Venezuela's hardliner reappears as Nicolas Maduro expels US officials.” That hardliner wasn’t Maduro, whose government is arresting regime opponents and strangling the free press, but Leopoldo Lopez, the opposition leader currently languishing in jail....

ItÂ’s a thought experiment I often present to the Western Chavista... [What if] Prime Minister David Cameron, President Barack Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel--pick your the imperialist lackey!--arrested an opposition leader who had organized peaceful street protests? Or if the CIA shut off the internet in politically restive cities like Berkeley and Brooklyn; blocked Twitter traffic it found politically suspect; and took over PBS, forcing it to broadcast only pro-administration agitprop, never allowing the opposition party to traduce the government across public airwaves?...

Perhaps reactions would be muted if motorcycle gangs loyal to President George W. Bush circled anti-Iraq War protests physically attacking--and occasionally murdering--demonstrators. How about if a judge ruled against President ObamaÂ’s domestic spying apparatus and, in return, the White House ordered that judge thrown in prison?

Moynihan has more, obviously.

The chilling thing that separates, in my mind, the leftist from the liberal is the former's "By any means necessary" ethic. They are willing to defend -- and perpetrate themselves -- true evil because, they assert, their mission is so intrinsically good that its accomplishment will redeem all sins (including the sin of murder).

It's a scary mentality. Anyone who has convinced himself that a little bit of murder in the service of preferred politics is excusable should proudly accept membership in the club which he has joined. And that club includes Stalin, Mao, Osama bin Ladin, and, yes, Hitler.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (384)
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Jim Geraghty objects to the silly notion that Americans "reject" British people for their Britishness. This is of course silly; Americans tend to love British people. As someone (perhaps Geraghty) notes, we automatically assign an additional 20 points of IQ to anyone speaking with a British accent.

Charles C.W. Cooke has a simpler reason for Americans not liking Piers Morgan: For the same reason British people don't like Piers Morgan. He's an insufferable twit (sp?).

[I]nsofar as Morgan has made an impression on the country at all, his brief foray into American television appears to have served primarily to extend the territory in which he has thus far rendered himself unpopular. Back in the old country, Morgan’s name is synonymous with arrogance and with overreach, and he is known less for his interviewing skills and show-business acumen than for allegedly hacking the telephones of celebrities; for retaliating against even minor criticism by siccing paparazzi on the speaker; for having published “calculated and malicious” fake photographs of British soldiers abusing prisoners; and for considering nothing whatsoever to be more sacred than his insatiable ambition.

On a British talk show, guests were playing a game in which they were invited to define words. Steven Fry was offered the word "countryside."

This is a home-run slow pitch; the only question is whom you wish to make the target of the joke. Fry chose Piers Morgan.

Thanks to @slublog for that.

Back to Cooke:

The definition of “countryside,” Stephen Fry once quipped on the BBC, is “to kill Piers Morgan.” The audience roared. Americans are merely coming late to a story at which the Brits have been rolling their eyes for years.

...

Given that Morgan is an obviously repugnant personality, that he willfully fails to grapple with the topics at hand, and that he is physically incapable of allowing a guest to upstage him, he was always going to have his work cut out.

In some sense, he always did. Confused as to why people weren’t laughing at his ill-timed joke on the television series, Have I Got News for You, Morgan complained in 1996 that “last week Eddie Izzard said it and everyone roared with laughter as if it was hilarious.” “Yes,” the satirist Ian Hislop retorted, but “people like him.”

Piers Morgan was a tabloid editor, more notorious than famous. That's... something. It is a job. It is a competitive field. So it's something, to be the top editor at a London tabloid.

But is that really enough to justify this level of arrogance?

John Lott noted how very rude and arrogant Morgan was during his interviews with him-- so rude, in fact, a pro-gun-control liberal wrote Lott to tell him he had behaved with admirable restraint, and he'd be buying Lott's book to read the arguments Morgan hadn't permitted him to make.

Who is this guy? What the hell has he done, exactly, to justify this level of self-regard?

There are people who are on TV because they are accomplished in some other field; then there are people who are on TV because they went into TV.

Piers seems to be of the latter sort. Yes, he was a tabloid editor; but his career there is marked by scandal. The hacking scandal, the faked pictures.

Even if he were a great tabloid editor, I think most people would say that being such is not precisely the summit of human aspiration.

But he wasn't even that.

So he's one of those guys who's on TV who wants you to take him very seriously because he's on TV.

His backup argument would be: You should listen to me, because I'm not just on TV, but I'm good at TV. Like Rush Limbaugh is, undoubtedly, good at talk radio.

But he's not good at TV. He never was. His ratings have been disappointing throughout his term, before they turned downright bad.

So why exactly does Piers Morgan think anyone should listen to him?

I've linked the below about five times already but here we go again: Below, Adam Carolla goofs on Piers Morgan, just as his show was starting.

Carolla's problem is that Piers Morgan is filled with swagger and arrogance, but actually has very little to swagger about.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 AM | Comments (411)
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