I've seen a lot of hemming and hawing about how the villainous Karl Rove and his band of toads flooded the zone and dragged "their guy" Tillis across the finish line in yesterday's North Carolina primary. Thom Tillis was the establishment's pick, and he won- just under 46% per the last county updates I've seen. However, the establishment is what it is, and how it has enjoyed wins in important primaries, both Senatorial and Presidential, isn't thanks to their spending or some deal in a smoke-filled room. It is far simpler than that.

How can I say this? Because over 54% of Republican primary voters did not vote for Tillis. Had these other voters consolidated behind a single candidate, as the establishment always does even if they have to switch gears to do so (see the maneuvering to push Christie out and test Bush), Brannon or Harris would be the one facing Senator Hagan.

Conservatives jump from candidate to candidate in a lot of these races, and the more who throw their hat into the ring, the further it dilutes their voice in the primary. When the wife and I go out for ice cream, she's pretty set in her ways. A salted caramel option will always get her eye. If that is unavailable, then butter pecan sounds good. But that's the limit for her.

I am terribly indecisive. I know I want something new, different, interesting, and unfortunately I'm left with almost three dozen choices to pick from. While I'm still trying to figure out what I want, she's already enjoying her ice cream. This isn't a conspiracy between her and the ice cream shop. It's my simple inability to focus on one enjoyable choice.

Part of the problem here is the ego of the various conservative/TP candidates, and I don't mean that in a maligning way. Many of them really believe they (and only they) can really shake things up. After all, you trust your own judgement over others, right? With so many admirably determined individuals vying for attention and desperate to break through, the boring, noxious establishment character sits back and waits for the inevitable: the verbal slip ups, the RINO circular firing squad, the shovels, and the vote splitting on election day.

When conservatives start treating primaries the way the establishment long has, their fortunes can and will change. But until then, they are left fighting over the best flavor while losing their say.

Posted by: CAC at 08:07 AM | Comments (264)
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Three guesses who our esteemed Senate Majority Leader blames for Global Warming Climate Change™ ...

Charles and David Koch are one of the “main causes” of climate change, charged Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the Senate floor.

“While the Koch brothers admit to not being experts on the matter, these billionaire oil tycoons are certainly… experts at contributing to climate change. That’s what they do very well. They are one of the main causes of this. Not a cause, the main cause,” Reid said.

Emmanuel Goldstein emails, "Sheesh, Harry, don't you think this hating on the Kochs is a bit excessive?"

"Not at all," replies Reid:

“Charles and David Koch are waging a war against anything that protects the environment. I know that sounds absurd, but it’s true,” Reid said. “In the Senate now we are considering an energy efficiency bill. Who’s working against that more than anyone else? The Koch brothers.”

Actually, no, it's absurd.

And while we're on the topic of "climate" "denying", here are a couple of related podcasts from the archives:

* Marc Morano from Climate Depot

* Jim Lakely from The Heartland Institute

Posted by: andy at 12:43 PM | Comments (278)
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Yesterday, the media went wild for the release of a new global warming report suggesting that climate change is here and it's causing extreme weather events. The broadcast newscasts devoted a combined 10 minutes to the issue. ABC World News led with it and the other two had it second in their newscasts.

Among President Obama's statements about climate change that were broadcast on ABC was this curious claim: "We also have a chance to turn back these rising temperatures if we take some bold actions now."

This caught my eye, because not even global warming believers think warming is reversible. Here's NPR, for example:

Turning off the carbon dioxide emissions won't stop global warming.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years."

That report is from five years ago, by the way. So this isn't new. The scientists who fret about warming don't talk about reversing anything, but that isn't stopping Obama from trying to con Americans into supporting his prosperity-destroying environmental policies.

The NPR report is not an outlier. Here's the much-lauded lefty site Think Progress, with a piece last year on "The Dangerous Myth That Climate Change Is Reversible":

We’d have to drop total global emissions to zero now and for the rest of the century just to lower concentrations enough to stop temperatures from rising. Again, even in this implausible scenario, we still aren’t talking about reversing climate change, just stopping it — or, more technically, stopping the temperature rise.

So even folks who fear global warming don't think the U.S. can do anything to stop it. For that matter, even EPA chief Gina McCarthy testified that it is "unlikely" that EPA regulation will have a meaningful impact on climate change.

Claiming that global warming is reversible is the carrot to the warmists' stick. But it's just not true according to their own scientists. They say that warming is here to stay and that it's going to get worse. Obama should not be given a free pass saying otherwise to justify his policy preferences.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:57 AM | Comments (434)
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• Climate Change Is Real. Too Bad Accurate Climate Models Aren't
  
• The Fool's Golden State
  
• Hospital CEO: Obamacare Has Not Reduced ER Visits
  
• MSNBC Host Doubles Down On Stupid
  
• Crist Claims He Left The Republican Party Because They're Racist
  
• Another Survey Confirms Journalists Are Overwhelmingly Liberal
  
• A Third State Abandons Obamacare Exchange
  
• Obama Using Meteorologists To Help Roll Out New Climate Change Report
  
• Yuppie, Get Your Gun
  
• Republicans Lead Generic Ballot, Looking Better Than 2010
  
• Rutgers Manages To Further Embarrass Themselves Following The Condi Rice Debacle
  
• SCOTUS Refuses To Hear Major Second Amendment Case
  
• Huntsman Open To Another Presidential Run
  
• Al Sharpton Vs. The Teleprompter
  
• Clay Aiken Winning His Primary Race As Of This Morning
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:45 AM | Comments (255)
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Happy Wednesday.

A federal judge held that the slow-going, super-secret state investigation into conservative groups in Wisconsin likely violates their First Amendment rights, and so put a stop to the investigation for now.

Buzzfeed's Adrian Carrasquillo, who has been on top of the scant info the Obama Administration has been leaking about the upcoming deportation memo, has more on the Democrats' immigration strategy ahead of the election in November.

The RNC is looking at implementing new rules for the 2016 debates.

WaPo had a pretty amazing profile of Sen. Scott.

EPA IG charges that a "rogue law enforcement agency" within the EPA has been blocking investigations.

Local governments are looking at what the Supreme Court's recent legislative prayer decision means for them.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:42 AM | Comments (249)
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You'll get the AOSQDD dregs and you'll be grateful for them. Just consider this pre-season practice for the camps.

Global Warming Climate Change Getting a New Name: 'Climate Disruption'

Of course whatever you call it hasn't been happening for almost two decades now.

When the Going Gets Tough, Obama Goes Birther

Most people think of Obama as inept but likable; I think inept and mean-spirited is closer to the truth. As he has so often recently, Obama attacked Fox News. He seems to think that he might have had a successful presidency, if only Fox had gotten with the program:

Let's face it, Fox, you will miss me when I'm gone. It will be harder to convince the American people that Hillary was born in Kenya.

The only person trying to keep birtherism alive is Obama, as it suits his purposes to portray his critics as a bunch of wingnuts. But Fox News was not the source of birtherism, Obama himself was. For close to twenty years, his official literary bio said that he was born in Kenya. Also-this is pure speculation - I suspect the main reason why Obama's college and law school records are a state secret is that he applied as a foreign student born in Kenya, and received favored treatment as such.

Did They Learn Nothing from Poltergeist?!

A 4,500-year-old American Indian burial ground-one of the richest and best preserved found in California in the past century-has been paved over for a multimillion dollar housing development in the Bay Area. And archeologists are pissed.

Of course it's my understanding that ghosts fizzle out after a few hundred years. And archeologists can be kept at bay by elaborate man-traps, ancient religious cults, and strictly enforced government regulations. So they're good.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:37 PM | Comments (682)
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Welcome back again to the show that never ends, the carousel that oversells we call the primaries.

Tonight, we will focus on the results out of North Carolina.

Follow us along on our glorious, shiny AOSHQDD.COM site for the race to see who takes on Senator Kay Hagan, and right here for the latest on several interesting congressional races (below the fold).

NC-Senate:

Once a winner has been declared, name will go here:
Thom Tillis will win the primary. Question is now 40%...

Hit 40%? YES

more...

Posted by: CAC at 03:19 PM | Comments (480)
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For those of you haters, here's an open thread. more...

Posted by: CAC at 03:05 PM | Comments (93)
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Interesting interview, even if you don't watch the show, with creator Jonathan Nolan and producer Greg Plageman.

The interview begins by noting that reality has caught up with the show, at least in a few places. The show's premise -- that after 9/11, the government created an ultra-powerful data collection and analysis computer to identify possible terrorists, and this computer spies on everybody 24/7 -- seemed to just be a fantasy premise when the show started.

But the Snowden leaks have established much of this as true (at least in basic outline).

The thing the creators realized is that collecting many millions of terabytes of information is an almost useless thing, unless you have the ability to actually analyze it all. So they postulated that the computer in the show, called "The Machine," has some kind of artificial intelligence, either "weak AI" or "strong AI" (also called AGI, for Artificial General Intelligence, contrasted with weak AI's ability to simulate intelligence but only when performing a specific, narrow task.)

Incidentally, the show is currently hinting at the question discussed here: if a machine is capable of simulating true intelligence (as a computer will ultimately surely be capable of simulating), doesn't that mean the computer is actually intelligent, period? Is there such a thing as simulated intelligence-- or is it always the case that if a machine can simulate having a "mind," it really does, by necessity, have a mind?

Interesting, the show never explicitly discusses AI, I don't think. (Well, in the last episode, it was mentioned.) So for three years they've been presenting a computer that was at least "weak AI" and moving towards "strong AI" without actually having a conversation about it.

Nolan says he knows from tech insiders that AGI is being vigorously worked on, and he predicts that someone will create it in ten years. That used to seem ridiculous to me but now that feels about right.

Here are a few parts from the interview. Note that the other guy here, Greg Plageman, refers to Jonathan Nolan as "Jonah," because, I guess, that's the name he goes by in real life.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:51 PM | Comments (132)
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I guess "deserving" is the theme of the day.

The two dead teenagers were aged 16 and 14.

As regards "deserving:" I don't know if a 14 year old "deserves" to die for a burglary which doesn't seem to include violence, but the homeowner was well within his rights to shoot the bastards.

I think these two ideas get conflated by people who can't, or won't, keep them separate.

Do I think a 14 year old "deserved" to die so young?

No, but that doesn't mean the homeowner was at fault, either. The 14 year old put himself in an extraordinarily dangerous position, and made life hell for his victims. He also, surely, scared the crap out of his victims.

And the reason that burglary (and especially home invasion) is historically a major crime is because a burglar, if happened upon by a homeowner, is likely to respond with violence, even if he had never planned violence as part of his intended crime.

The homeowner had the right to shoot the burglars. (Actually it seems like it was the homeowner's brother who shot, as she'd invited her brother to stay with her after being burglarized just one week ago.)

It's an outcome that isn't optimal, but the homeowner isn't charged with making sure those burlgarizing her home get precisely what they "deserve." She is permitted to exercise a defense of her person and her home, and she did so. She is not a court of law dealing with questions like "deserving" at the safe remove of reading about a crime on paper.

She is a frightened woman, terrified in her own home by invaders, and her first right (and only true duty) is defense of the self.

She did that.

And speaking of "deserving" -- does she deserve years of prosecutorial abuse for merely defending herself and her home?

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:34 PM | Comments (360)
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