Free Republic

You hear a lot about the politicization of science, but the real problem is the moralization of science. The New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt has made a compelling case that moral differences drive partisan debates over scientific issues. Dan Kahan and others at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project have identified cultural differences that bias how people assimilate information. Together, Haidt and Kahan’s research suggests that what you believe about a scientific debate signals to like-minded people that you are on their side and are therefore a good and trustworthy person. Unfortunately, this means that the factual accuracy of beliefs...

Only a paltry 15 percent of MSNBC’s programming stuck to “factual reporting, according to Pew. Fox News, by comparison, had a breakdown of 55 percent commentary and opinion and 45 percent "factual reporting."

For release March 13, 2013 Gun Facts Version 6.2 Released 13 Years of Debunking Gun Control Myths San Francisco, CA – March 13, 2013: The latest edition of the de facto desk reference for debunking gun control mythology was released today and marks its thirteenth year in production. See www.GunFacts.info. “Another tragedy, and one again the gun control industry is on the move,” said Guy Smith, editor of Gun Facts. “Yet as in 2000, their rush to crush civil rights meets the brick wall of facts, perspective and reason. The gun control industry won’t get far.” Gun Facts categorizes gun...

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward tells POLITICO Playbook that the White House is muddling the facts on the sequester - "a classic case of distortion and confusion." **SNIP** "The White House pushback is a classic case of distortion and confusion," Woodward said in an email to Playbook. "We unfortunately have seen this too often in recent presidential history... I do not think it is willful. They are just mixed up, surprisingly so."

Warning about "weapons designed for the theater of war," President Obama on Wednesday called for immediate action on a new Federal Assault Weapons Ban. He said that "more of our fellow Americans might still be alive" if the original assault weapons ban, passed in 1994, had not expired in 2004. Last month, in the wake of the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) promised to introduce an updated version of the ban. She too warned of the threat posed by "military weapons." After the nightmare of Newtown, their concern is understandable. Yet...

While President Barack Obama is moving ahead with executive orders and legislation to further tighten gun control in response to the mass murder committed by Adam Lanza at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., neither the toxicology report on Lanza’s corpse nor the police report on his crime have been completed. Lanza attacked the school on Dec. 14, killing 26 people, including 20 children. Before going to the school, he killed his mother at the home where he lived with her. When police arrived at the school during his murder spree, Lanza shot and killed himself. … Despite...

Old truths decay and new ones are born at an astonishing rate.Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. Saccharin causes cancer and a high fiber diet prevents it. Stars cannot be bigger than 150 solar masses.In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong. In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Current). Fact-making...

In the wake of the Newtown school massacre, we've noted a strong uptick in our site traffic by people wanting to find out how different the U.S. might be if the nation adopted Canada's much more restrictive firearms laws. This post gathers all our analysis on that topic from 2011 in one place. Who Kills Who We examine the FBI's data on the race of victims and their killers. We find that the vast majority of offenders prefer to kill their own kind (that evidence is borne out elsewhere, where criminals also seem to prefer killing other criminals!) U.S. vs...

<p>Newt Gingrich said that conservatives will have to accept marriage equality after three more states this year voted to allow same sex marriage and more will likely do the same in the 2014 election.</p> <p>The former Speaker of the House said he didn’t expect gay rights to become the “wave” issue it has, but that he can accept the difference between a marriage in a church and a legal document, reported Huffington Post.</p>

Yesterday morning, Soledad O’Brien had on her CNN show economist John Lott, of More Guns, Less Crime fame (also an NRO contributor). As I’ve discussed before on NRO, O’Brien has a habit of bringing on conservative guests and then spitting out Democratic talking points under the glib guise of a non-partisan moderator calling them to account on the facts.But her encounter with Lott, the video of which you can view below, is a new low: Rather than parroting liberal arguments (which typically involve at least a few facts) in order to confront Lott’s arguments, she merely relates her bewildered sentiments...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The Obama campaign said Tuesday that they care about the truth of their attacks. "We work very hard to get it right. We look at the facts. We vet what we say," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said in an ABC/Yahoo News panel.

Are You Better Off Than You Were at the End of the Bush Administration? A Data-Based Assessment I've heard a lot about the "four years ago" comparison. Four years ago, we were on the cusp of Don Luskin’s famous prediction (“... we're on the brink not of recession, but of accelerating prosperity.”), and Phill Gramm had two months earlier decried the ongoing “mental recession”. [0] It seems to me the more appropriate marker is the last election, in 2008Q4. We can then assess what the data tells us about 2012Q2 vis a vis 2008Q4. Aggregate Measures of Activity and Income...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Even squirrels know enough to store nuts, so that they will have something to eat when food gets scarce. But the welfare state has spawned a whole class of people who spend everything they get when times are good, and look to others to provide for their food and other basic needs when times turn bad. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution prescribes "equal protection of the laws" to all Americans. But what does that mean, if the President of the United States can arbitrarily grant waivers, so that A, B and C have...

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts." -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan Conservatives and liberals may disagree on reasons, motivations, and excuses for Barack Obama's performance, but the facts are still facts. There may be many reasons that a pro football coach goes 1-15, but everyone can agree that his record is still 1-15, right? Well, here are some basic facts about how the country is faring with Barack Obama in the White House. Take a look at the numbers, sans commentary, and make your own judgment about whether Barack Obama deserves...

A quick review of the long and illustrious career of Facts reveals some of the world's most cherished absolutes: Gravity makes things fall down; 2 + 2 = 4; the sky is blue. But for many, Facts' most memorable moments came in simple day-to-day realities, from a child's certainty of its mother's love to the comforting knowledge that a favorite television show would start promptly at 8 p.m. Over the centuries, Facts became such a prevalent part of most people's lives that Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said: "Facts are to the mind what food is to the body." To...

Since when is something we do every day taboo, like profiling? Every American who can think, profiles. If you are looking for a mate, you profile. In fact, if you search for a mate on line, the first thing you do is establish a profile. You profile yourself! When you fill out a resume to look for a job, your resume is a profile. When you show up for the interview, you are being profiled by your potential employer. You beginning to get the picture? The doorman at a trendy bar profiles, and you won't see anybody getting into one...

I spent a little time browsing FBI Crime Stats for 2010(Last year that has been finalized) and made some interesting discoveries. Did you know that 90% of blacks are murdered by blacks, and 83% of whites are murdered by whites? Did you know that there are 14.82 murders per 100K by blacks versus 2.17 per 100K for whites? Per capita there are 7x more murders committed by blacks than whites. I didn’t make this up. It comes directly from the FBI. I just cut the numbers in a more revealing manner.

The president looked at the phone and said "how wonderful"

Rick Santorum - “I wrote the welfare reform bill in the Contract with America. I was the ranking member on that subcommittee. And when I came to the Senate, through a quirk, I ended up managing the bill on the floor of the United States Senate and working with President Clinton and getting a bill signed after he vetoed it twice to end welfare. We bloc-granted the program, got rid of the federal entitlement -- the only one in the history of the country that’s ever been done. And I was the principal author of it in the United States...

The left is hard at work assuring that Santorum remains an "also ran." Rick Santorum wanted people to pay attention to him. Well, he got his way. Now his every utterance is being parsed by the media and he is receiving special scrutiny from progressive pundits, who have been frantically quote-mining for material to use in their obligatory hit pieces. Among the nuggets they have unearthed involves an exchange Santorum had a month ago with a student at Dordt College, a small Christian school in Sioux Center, Iowa. The student cited a 2009 study about the number of people who...

Newt Gingrich broke though taboos against challenging Palestinian Authority double talk and re-writing history, forcing Mitt Romney to admit he is right – but adding that saying so is incendiary.” Gingrich, who is leading the polls for the Republican presidential nomination, angered the Palestinian Authority with his remarks in a televised interview in which he stated that "an invented Palestinian people…are in fact Arabs." PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told reporters in response, “These are extremely trivial, demeaning and ridiculous remarks. Even the most extremist settlers of Israel wouldn’t talk in such a ridiculous way. Our people have been here...

Waxman to Issa: Get Solyndra facts straightBy Ben Geman - 09/27/11 07:32 AM ET Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) is rebutting House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) claim that Waxman helped the now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra secure its $535 million federal loan guarantee. Waxman said in a letter to Issa on Monday that he had no role in the financing. “I am writing to let you know that I had no involvement in the selection of the Solyndra loan. In fact, the first time I met with representatives from Solyndra was in July 2011, when the company’s...

This is the data for calendar year 2003 just released in October 2005 by the Internal Revenue Service. The share of total income taxes paid by the top 1% of wage earners rose to 34.27% from 33.71% in 2002. Their income share (not just wages) rose from 16.12% to 16.77%. However, their average tax rate actually dropped from 27.25% down to 24.31% Think of it this way: less than 3-1/2 dollars out of every $100 paid in income taxes in the United States is paid by someone in the bottom 50% of wage earners. Are the top half millionaires? Noooo,...

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 18, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has estimated that homosexual men account for 61% of the new HIV infections in the United States while they only amount to about 2% of the country’s population. Earlier this month, the CDC released estimates for HIV infections from 2006-2009 showing that new infections remained stable at around 50,000 for each of the four years. Homosexual men accounted for 29,300 of the estimated 48,100 new infections in 2009, and homosexual men aged 13 to 29 accounted for 27% of the new cases. The only group in which...

Well, goodbye Tim Pawlenty, hello Rick Perry. The Texas governor announced that he is running for president on Saturday, just hours before the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa that ended Pawlenty’s presidential aspirations. As has been our custom, we will take a look at some of the assertions made in Perry’s announcement speech and then render a blended Pinocchio rating. “Since June of 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in America. Now think about that. We’re home to less than 10 percent of the population in America, but 40 percent...

Factcheck.org or Truth or Fiction had no matches – Kim More good 'ole stirring of the pot............. Subject: OLD TEXAS BOY DONE HIS RESEARCH Something I am sure of is…. you do not put names on a birth certificate that do not exist at the time of a person’s birth! Th' Dumb Ol' Texas Boy Has Spoken Agin Well ol’ Barry, Barruck, Bubba, Hussein, Moh, Oscar or whatever name he uses these days, he sure is a slick booger. Or, at least, he thinks he is! He done brought out this “long form” birth document for all the world to...

Claim: “Derivatives have no value of their own, yet are a $50 trillion market. Using derivatives, traders can bet on anything.” Inside Job argues that derivatives have no value of its own because its value is derived from another asset. On the other hand: A Reuters special report on derivatives has a good argument: Big companies regularly use derivatives as a form of insurance to guard against jumps in the price of everything from cocoa to interest rates. An airline will buy jet fuel derivatives so that if prices spike, the contract helps to make up the difference in price,...

Runaway spending and deficits continue to grow unabated in part because any attempts to rein them in are relentlessly demagogued by defenders of big government. The latest example is the budget recently authored by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R–WI) and passed by the House of Representatives. Most critics have failed to provide any credible alternative to the House budget. Yet that has not stopped them from relentlessly misrepresenting the House budget with the following myths. Myth #1: The House budget recklessly cuts taxes by $4 trillion. Fact: It cancels a future tax increase. Critics charge that the House...

Did you know:Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room at a dance hall? ►If the entire population of China walked past you -8 abreast, PLA-style- , the procession of humanity would never end because of the rate of reproduction (!)  ►Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors. ►Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite! ►Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. ►The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing. ►The cruise liner, QE 2 moves just six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns. ►A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. ►A goldfish has a memory span of...

“We’re actually producing more oil here than ever.” ~ Barack Obama (05/06/2011) ~The truth: We are producing fewer barrels of oil here than we did in 1951. ~Obama would be correct, if our nation was founded in the year 2003. But of course anyone born before 2003 knows that Obama’s statement is - in fact - not true. For those more interested in truth, than in the shallow words of lying politicians, we are actually producing fewer barrels of oil today than we produced in the year 1951. It’s time to start drilling, and time to stop lying. If Obama...

With all the interests, political grandstanding, and cheap punditry surrounding the union demonstrations in Wisconsin, it’s no surprise that a mythology has developed around Gov. Scott Walker’s proposals. Here are some of the most common myths being propagated, and the countervailing facts. MYTH: Wisconsin is not actually facing a deficit. Rachel Maddow on her February 17 show said, “Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, the state is on track to have a budget surplus this year. I am not kidding.” FACT: Maddow wasn’t kidding, but she was wrong. She evidently derived her conclusion by reading to page...

Rocky Marciano was the only heavyweight champion who never lost a single fight in his whole career-- and, at the time, he seemed the least likely fighter to do that. In many a boxing match, he was battered, bruised and bleeding. One of the reasons Marciano took so much punishment in the ring was that he had shorter arms than most other heavyweights. It was easier for others to hit him than for him to hit them. In a sense, Republicans today are in a similar position in the political arena. With most of the media heavily tilted toward the...

As 2010 draws to a close, do you remember hearing any good news from the mainstream media about climate? Like maybe a headline proclaiming "Record Low 2009 and 2010 Cyclonic Activity Reported: Global Warming Theorists Perplexed"? Or "NASA Studies Report Oceans Entering New Cooling Phase: Alarmists Fear Climate Science Budgets in Peril"? Or even anything bad that isn't blamed on anthropogenic (man-made) global warming--of course other than what is attributed to George W. Bush? (Conveniently, the term "AGW" covers both.) Remember all the media brouhaha about global warming causing hurricanes that commenced following the devastating U.S. 2004 season? Opportunities to...

Introduction I know that Christians are supposed to be the ones who believe a lot of myths. However, the vast majority of atheists believe myths such as religion is the primary cause of wars, and the vast amount of atrocities have been caused by religious people, the Bible has been vastly changed over the centuries, Paul invented Christianity, and the list goes on and on. Find your favorite myth below and read the article so that you won't embarrass yourself in the future. Atheists' Myths Atheists have Proven God Does Not Exist. Right? - Only if that god is not the God...

I'm a California Attorney and have been for the last 25 years and a conservative too. I have to be conservative, because facts, as is so often said, are stubborn things. Many elegant legal theories have been destroyed by one simple ugly fact. An attorney's currency is facts. Sure we attorneys spin facts, dance around facts, try to distort facts; but, facts are what they are whether the trier of facts, such as a jury, is amused by your presentation or not. Juries do get it. And why wouldn't they? They're voters too. I have tried cases before juries. And...

In the recent "dump" of classified documents NewsBusters explains that the search for WMDs was successful... thus undermining WikiLeaks founders position on this topic. I updated my large WMDs post that originally grew out of a debate during the first year of the Iraq conflict with a professor of history from the University of Michigan. Newsbusters info is found here: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2010/10/24/imagine-wikileaks-docs-show-there-were-wmds-iraq Gateway's info on it is here: http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/10/wikileaks-papers-reveal-troops-did-find-wmd-in-iraq/

New York City’s Columbia University, which last year hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the name of its ”academic freedom,” now has decided that “Palestine” is a country and has opened the first U.S. Center for Palestine Studies. Calling itself “one of the world's great educational institutions and a bastion of academic freedom,” the university dedicated the center to the late Edward Said, a “Palestinian” Arab who taught comparative literature at Columbia for 40 years. During the British Mandate, from 1917 until the re-establishment of the State of Israel n 1948, the term Palestine referred to all of what now...

CLICK ON ABOVE LINK FOR COMPLETE EXPLANATION AND CHARTS HERE's A SUMMARY : * 45 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009 * 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959 * The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the OECD * Household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28% since last year * The number of Americans on food stamps surpassed 41 million for the first time ever in June * As of...

I confess--I had never heard the phrase "the Queen of the Sciences" until a few months ago. Even when I read it, it made no sense. They seemed to be talking about geography. What was all this??? Apparently, the wise and scholarly had much more respect for geography a thousand years ago than we do now. Once you start thinking about this decline--from Queen to corpse--you gain new insight into how radical (in the worst sense) our Education Establishment is. These people never saw a fact they didn't want to drop overboard in a deep part of the ocean. So...

Congressional Democrats and the White House will continue their attempts to enact policies they believe will boost the economy—and which are also aimed at persuading voters they are working to make things better. ...And while the economic situation remained dire when President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, most Democrats assumed that the economy would rebound by the time they stood for office this year. A series of disappointing economic reports has made clear that won't be the case. The most recent one came Friday, when the government reported that the economy grew at a much slower pace in...

The following are 50 random facts that show just how dramatically America has changed..

In a new ad, Obama says, "I don’t take money from oil companies." We find the statement misleading: •Obama has accepted more than $213,000 from individuals who work for companies in the oil and gas industry and their spouses. •Two of Obama's bundlers are top executives at oil companies and are listed on his Web site as raising between $50,000 and $100,000 for the presidential hopeful. See this from factchec.org dated March 31, 2008.

This is becoming common - two videos based on data taken directly from my Gun Facts book are on YouTube. Keep up the good work troops! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO83qjMW1fkhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f28a_FAs4ek

Last week the political campaign propaganda season began, and President Obama fired the first shot at Republicans. In an effort to shift the subject from the Gulf oil disaster, the president went into campaign mode (again) when he said, "We can return to the failed economic policies of the past, or we can keep building a stronger future."Unfortunately, the facts do not substantiate the president's claim when we compare December 2008 economic statistics before Obama took office to where we are today.   December 2008 June 2010 National debt $9.5 trillion $13 trillion Gross Domestic Product , or GDP $14.1...

Andrew Sullivan is not a huge fan of Israel; he is entitled to his opinion. However, his latest column about the incident in the waters outside of Gaza makes up the facts. Honestly, in the case of most of the posts Sullivan writes about Israel, Andrew is living in his own reality, where truth and facts do not matter. The Atlantic columnist begins his latest example of creative writing begins with the first paragraph. Maintaining the siege and blockade of Gaza (because its citizens elected a government Israeli abhors), and strafing it with military might over a year ago, is...

The current edition of Gun Facts, the de facto desk reference for firearm policy, has been translated into Latin American Spanish and released on the Gun Facts web site at www.GunFacts.info. “Freedom is not negotiable,” said Guy Smith, author of Gun Facts. “This includes the human right of self-defense. People in Latin America, encouraged by freedoms in the United States, are resisting gun control. It is time for Gun Facts to help refute the anti-freedom factions in the South as it has in the North.” For more than a decade, Gun Facts has debunked common gun control myths. In 118...

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, April 16, 2010 – Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates today disputed claims that the Defense Department was withholding information from the Senate Homeland Security Committee about the Nov. 5 Fort Hood, Texas, shooting incident. “We have no interest in hiding anything,” said Gates, who earlier this week had traveled to Peru, Colombia and then Barbados to discuss regional security issues.“But what [is] most important,” Gates told reporters here, “is this prosecution, and we will cooperate with the committee in every way with that single caveat -- that whatever we provide does not impact the prosecution. That is the...

Starting about 150 years ago, scholars in Europe started rejecting the historical records of Saint Luke. These academics declared that there was no evidence to support the existence of several locations and leaders mentioned in Luke's writings, and therefore, they rejected the entirety of his account. However, I discovered that archaeological finds during the last century have revealed that Luke was a very accurate historian and the two books he authored were absolutely authoritative records of history! One of the greatest archaeologists of all time was Sir William Ramsay. He studied under the famous German historical schools in the mid-nineteenth...

An economist using technical data to evaluate California’s battered economy might agree with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nationally televised declaration Sunday that “the worst is over” for the Golden State. But we doubt this assertion will sit well with most Californians – and it shouldn’t, for reasons both simple and complex. The first reason is that state unemployment remains stubbornly above 12 percent – the worst since the Great Depression – and would be closer to 15 percent if those who had stopped looking for work were tallied. The second reason is that almost all the legislation billed as promoting job...

One would think an entire think-tank university staff is behind Snopes. Not so. It's a couple — husband and wife. Their opinions are considered bible by countless who check out "the facts" by going to Snopes.com. These countless include college profs, Congresspersons, the National Review writers, and masses climbing all over the grassroots.