Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

The Muslim leader who was heading an “Tolerance in Islam” conference in Turkey was attacked by one of the attendees.

10:51 pm

Islamic good will: The Muslim leader who was heading an “Tolerance in Islam” conference was attacked by one of the attendees. With video of the attack.

In response to the attack, Morou [sic] said, “I am fine now, the damage is moral… We are here to speak about tolerance, but those people are ignorant of true Islam. I don’t know what his [the attacker’s] political orientation is, and regardless, this is not part of Islam.”

And in what part of Islam do we not see this kind of violence and intolerance?

Leave a comment

Gibson Guitars has struck a deal with the federal government to avoid prosecution for the use of banned wood.

9:48 am

Extortion does work! Gibson Guitars has struck a deal with the federal government to avoid prosecution for the use of banned wood.

The company will pay a $300,000 fine under a criminal enforcement agreement that defers prosecution for criminal violations of the Lacey Act. Another $50,000 fine will go to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation “to be used to promote the conservation, identification and propagation of protected tree species used in the musical instrument industry and the forests where those species are found.”

Notice the political payoff to an outside environmental group. How nice. I wish my cause could get funding this way, by having the U.S. government threaten companies I don’t like and force them to give me money.

4 comments

More signs that the Voyager 1 spacecraft is about to enter interstellar space.

2:27 pm

More signs that the Voyager 1 spacecraft is about to enter interstellar space.

For the last seven years, Voyager 1 has been exploring the outer layer of the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. In one day, on July 28, data from Voyager 1’s cosmic ray instrument showed the level of high-energy cosmic rays originating from outside our solar system jumped by five percent. During the last half of that same day, the level of lower-energy particles originating from inside our solar system dropped by half. However, in three days, the levels had recovered to near their previous levels.

A third key sign is the direction of the magnetic field, and scientists are eagerly analyzing the data to see whether that has, indeed, changed direction. Scientists expect that all three of these signs will have changed when Voyager 1 has crossed into interstellar space. A preliminary analysis of the latest magnetic field data is expected to be available in the next month.

Based on this report, expect scientists to announce that Voyager 1 has left the solar system sometime before the end of the year.

Leave a comment

Archeologists are disputing the age of a jawbone found in a cave in England.

12:37 pm

The uncertainty of science: Archeologists are disputing the age of a jawbone found in a cave in England.

Both sides of the debate agree that there is a lot riding on the outcome. “What is at stake is the entire [prehistory] of Neandertals and early modern humans in Europe,” Pettitt says. Apart from the Kents Cavern fossil and some 43,000- to 45,000-year-old teeth from Italy whose status as modern human or Neandertal is currently also debated, the oldest undisputed human fossils in Europe are about only 40,000 years old and come from a site in Romania. If modern humans really made it all the way to northwest Europe by 41,500 years ago or even earlier, it would mean that they entered Europe much earlier than once thought and also spread across the continent very rapidly. It would also increase the overlap between modern humans and the Neandertals, who already lived in Europe, and who went extinct sometime between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago. What’s more, such an overlap could make it more likely that Neandertals, who made sophisticated ornaments and tools in their last years, copied these techniques from modern humans rather than inventing them on their own.

Leave a comment

When asked in a survey if they would discriminate against conservatives, the academic community freely admitted that it would gladly do so.

10:31 am

The tolerance of the left: When asked in a survey if they would discriminate against conservatives, the academic community freely admitted that they would gladly do so.

One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).” More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”

Then there’s this:

Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers found that conservatives fear that revealing their political identity will have negative consequences. This is why New York University-based psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-described centrist, has compared the experience of being a conservative graduate student to being a closeted gay student in the 1980s.

In 2011, Mr. Haidt addressed this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — the same group that Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammer surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind” examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000 academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals. Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any conservatives in the house, just three hands — 0.3 percent — went up.

This is “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said.

What is horrifying to me is that this prejudiced behavior is taking place within our society’s supposingly most educated community., the place where thoughtful, rational debate is supposed to be cherished and honored. How can we have a just and fair-minded culture if our elite education system is home to this kind of close-minded and hateful bigotry?

2 comments

A Chick-Fil-A was covered with graffiti last night reading “Tastes like Hate” in anticipation of the gay community’s “National Same-Sex Kiss Day.”

10:04 am

Leftwing civility: A Chick-Fil-A was covered with graffiti last night reading “Tastes like Hate,” in anticipation of the gay community’s “National Same-Sex Kiss Day.”

As the lead commenter for this article noted

As a gay man I want to say sorry for what “my” people have done. Im so ashamed of being gay for the first time in my life. This is getting out of control. These gays are giving me a bad name. Not everyone is gonna like or except gays. Hell we dont like alot of straight people. We all have our own opinion. Like I told everyone, if they dont like your opinions then dont eat at Chick-Fil-A. Eat at KFG or churches. Again Im sorry for what the gay community is doing. They should all be ashamed of themselves….

Leave a comment

Alan Boyle at NBC tonight reports that Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada are the winning companies in the competition to provide human ferrying services to ISS.

6:20 pm

Alan Boyle at NBC tonight reports that Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada are the winning companies in the competition to provide human ferrying services to ISS, to be announced officially by NASA tomorrow.

The report does not provide dollar numbers. This Wall Street Journal story says that Boeing and SpaceX will be the prime contractors, which suggests that Sierra Nevada will be getting a smaller award.

One comment

The just released Pew poll which shows Obama with a 10 point lead oversampled Democrats by 19 points.

3:23 pm

Here we go again: The just released Pew poll which shows Obama with a 10 point lead oversampled Democrats by 19 points!

This is disgraceful work, and should discredit Pew as a pollster. There is no chance in hell that Democrats are going to outvote Republicans by 19 points come November. They didn’t even do that in 2008, when Obama won handily. For Pew to release a poll with a sampling that badly skewed smacks of incompetence, fraud, political manipulation, or a willingness to deny reality.

4 comments

A pro-life Catholic group announced today it will openly defy the new pro-abortion mandate imposed by the Obama administration.

9:27 am

We’ve only just begun: A pro-life Catholic group announced today it will openly defy the new pro-abortion mandate imposed by the Obama administration.

“The unjust and unconstitutional HHS mandate, against which Priests for Life and 57 other plaintiffs have sued the federal government, takes effect today. We at Priests for Life do not qualify for the year that the government has offered certain groups to ‘adapt’ to the mandate. And we are not ‘religious’ enough for this Administration,” he explained. “But regardless of all that, we do not adapt to injustice; we oppose it.

“Therefore today, on behalf of our organization and on behalf of myself personally, I announce our conscientious objection to this mandate,” he said. “Priests for Life has the highest respect for civil government and advocates the observance of all just laws. But this policy is unjust, and today I reaffirm our intention to disobey it.”

Leave a comment

Fooling the media

7:27 pm

Fooling the media.

“I knew that bloggers would print anything, so I thought, what if, as an experiment, I tried to prove that they will literally print anything?” he says. “Instead of trying to get press to benefit myself, I just wanted to get any press for any reason as a joke.”

He used Help a Reporter Out (HARO), a free service that puts sources in touch with reporters. Basically, a reporter sends a query, and a slew of people wanting to comment on the story email back. He decided to respond to each and every query he got, whether or not he knew anything about the topic. He didn’t even do it himself — he enlisted an assistant to use his name in order to field as many requests as humanly possible.

He expected it to take a few months of meticulous navigation, but he found himself with more requests than he could handle in a matter of weeks. On Reuters, he became the poster child for “Generation Yikes.” On ABC News, he was one of a new breed of long-suffering insomniacs. At CBS, he made up an embarrassing office story, at MSNBC he pretended someone sneezed on him while working at Burger King. At Manitouboats.com, he offered helpful tips for winterizing your boat. The capstone came in the form of a New York Times piece on vinyl records — naturally, Holiday doesn’t collect vinyl records.

He started out trying to prove that bloggers don’t do the proper background checks on their sources, and instead ended up proving that it is professional journalists who don’t.

One comment
1 … 670 671 672 673 674 … 844