Free Republic

Seriously, there is no climate crisis. Readers of WND have known this for at least 20 years, like a great many other things. Yet Democrats aim to make themselves even more unpopular by spending $439 billion over several years on climate change and renewable energy plans that haven't worked since the 1970s under Jimmy Carter. (The U.S. Department of Defense requested $495.6 billion for Fiscal Year 2015). Democrats have forgotten about Solyndra. How many different ways can we explain that humans are incapable of and are not affecting the climate of the Earth? It starts with a failure to understand...

An atheist that I was dialoging with a while back tried to support his disbelief in Jesus through the use of the “Spiderman fallacy”, which is a contrived argument that has been defined in the following way by Urban Dictionary:(Courtesy of Robin Schumacher)Archaeologists 1,000 years from now unearth a collection of Spiderman comics. From the background art, they can tell it takes place in New York City. NYC is an actual place, as confirmed by archaeology. However, this does not mean that Spiderman existed.Often used to illustrate the flaw in the assertion by evangelical Christians that archaeologists unearthing biblical cities...

neither muzzle velocity nor muzzle energy has anything to do with the definition of "assault weapons," which hinges on military-style features such as folding stocks, pistol grips, and barrel shrouds. And while all so-called assault weapons accept detachable magazines, many guns that accept detachabale magazines do not fall into this arbitrary category because they lack the features that offend politicians like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who sponsored the federal "assault weapon" ban that expired in 2004 and has been pushing a revised version since the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, last month. To give you a sense of how silly...

On Friday morning, with Hurricane Irma having wrecked the islands of Saint Martin and Barbuda, CNBC published a story cheerily laying out the silver lining embedded in the tropical disasters: Hurricanes Harvey and Irma actually will lead to increased economic activity over the long run, New York Fed President William Dudley said in an interview.Speaking just as Irma is about to start battering Florida as a Category 4 storm, Dudley said the initial impact in both human and economic costs will be harmful. But in the long run, economies tend to snap back from such major events."Those effects tend...

I've often said that being an economist must be one of the most frustrating professions. You spend your life fighting against economic fallacies, and as you're lying in the hospital about to expire, the reporter on TV talks about all the jobs some natural disaster is going to create. These days, the most dangerous economic error is the condemnation of "price gouging." Even in my own Facebook feed I found people up in arms about high prices in the wake of an emergency. Evidently many hundreds of complaints about the practice have been filed with the Houston authorities, with more...

Today we face a challenging political climate, but the climate crisis shouldn’t be political. It is not only the greatest existential crisis we face: it is also causing a global health emergency, where the stakes are life and death.

Men are more likely to guess the endings of complex TV crime dramas because women are distracted by the emotion of the story, claims a leading psychologist. Dr David Lewis has said that men remain detached while watching detective dramas such as ITV’s The Secret and BBC1’s Undercover and pick up on hints about the ending that women miss. Dr Lewis said: ‘A man is much more likely to look at that and say “ah ha!” A woman, because she is focused on the emotions, is less likely to spot these things designed to give you a hint. ‘Women tend...

If you have ever debated with hard-line Church of Christ members you are probably aware that many of them will resort to using some very fallacious tactics in defending their truth claims. One ex-Church of Christ writer from the site chocd.org correctly claims… The Church of Christ denomination uses four main tactics in debating their pet doctrines. These tactics are generally used by all cultic groups. They are: 1. Change the subject 2. Take scripture out of context 3. Straw man arguments 4. Ad hominem attacks (attacking you instead of the issue) The way to counter these tactics is very...

The quote of the day comes from pages 476-477 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics:At one time, it was believed that importing more than was exported impoverished a nation because the difference between import and exports had to be paid in gold, and the loss of gold was seen as a loss of national wealth. However, as early as 1776, Adam Smith’s classic The Wealth of Nations argued that the real wealth of a nation consists of its goods and services, not its gold supply.\ Too many people have yet to grasp the full implications of...

Author Insights: Legalizing Medical Marijuana May Reduce Opioid Deaths BY BRIDGET M. KUEHN on AUGUST 26, 2014 Marcus A. Bachhuber, MD, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and colleagues found that states that legalize marijuana experience lower rates of opioid deaths, on average, compared with states that don’t allow medical marijuana. Image: University of Pennsylvania Opioid-overdose deaths increased in states across the country between 1999 and 2010, but states that legalized medical marijuana saw less-steep increases than those without, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week. Growing use...

Since Colorado voters legalized pot in 2012, prohibition supporters have warned that recreational marijuana will lead to a scourge of “drugged divers” on the state’s roads. They often point out that when the state legalized medical marijuana in 2001, there was a surge in drivers found to have smoked pot. They also point to studies showing that in other states that have legalized pot for medical purposes, we’ve seen an increase in the number of drivers testing positive for the drug who were involved in fatal car accidents. The anti-pot group SAM recently pointed out that even before the first...

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/06/146835-obama-declares-war-straw-men-celebrates-triumphant-victory/

:: Card Stacking :: MythBuster III: Rational or Ridiculous?- By: Larry Walker, Jr. -Card stacking, or selective omission, is one of the seven propaganda techniques identified by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. It involves only presenting information that is positive to an idea or proposal and omitting information contrary to it. Card stacking is used in almost all forms of propaganda, and is extremely effective in convincing the public. Although the majority of information presented by the card stacking approach is true, it is dangerous because it omits important information. The best way to deal with card stacking is...

You Didn’t Build That!- By: Larry Walker, Jr. -The "framework" is not a person, natural or legal, to whom a debt can be owed, "institutions" do not act, "society" has no mind, no will, and makes no contributions. Only persons do these things. Imputing responsibility and credit for accumulated wealth, current production and well-being to entities that have no mind and no will is nonsense. It is a variant of the notorious fallacy of composition. ~ Anthony de Jasay *The fallacy of composition arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is...

One of the most pernicious fallacies is the idea that because money was “invested” (spent) by the government, and some benefits were purportedly achieved, the benefits prove the worth of such expenditures. For example, President George Bush said, “My administration has worked with Congress to invest in gas-saving technologies like advanced batteries and hydrogen fuel cells…” And more recently, President Obama has claimed that government investment is responsible for “…creating the Internet that allowed Microsoft and Google and Facebook to thrive.” Assuming that these investments were worthwhile is a fallacy, because alternatives were not tried.

By: Larry Walker, Jr.Tax Fallacy II, 95% B.S.According to the Tax Policy Center, there were 151 million tax units in 2009 (excluding dependents of other tax units). Out of those 151 million tax units, 65.6 million, or 43.4% had zero or negative tax liabilities here. This confirms that only 56.6% of those who file income tax returns actually pay income taxes. But that's not the end of the story.According to the IRS Statistics of Income Report here, at the end of 2008, there were 9.2 million tax units who filed tax returns with additional taxes due. At the end of...

By: Larry Walker, Jr. [Updated]Barack Obama - "I gave 95% of all Working Families a tax cut..." Really?First of all 43.4% of Americans don't pay any income taxes. That leaves the rest of us. So did 95% of the 56.6% who actually pay income taxes get a tax cut? I doubt it, but even if that were true, it's not 95% of all Americans (or 'working families', whatever that means).Is a refundable tax credit the same as a tax cut?But the real fallacy lies in the fact that refundable tax credits are not tax cuts, but rather, they are subsidies....

The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday. Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004. Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth...

LOGIC AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF PROTESTANTISMby Brian W. Harrison As an active Protestant in my mid-twenties I began to feel that I might have a vocation to become a minister. The trouble was that while I had quite definite convictions about the things that most Christians have traditionally held in common—the sort of thing C.S. Lewis termed "mere Christianity." I had had some firsthand experience with several denominations (Presbyterian, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist) and was far from certain as to which of them (if any) had an overall advantage over the others. So I began to think, study, search, and pray....

One recent anti-Rudy poster stated the following: "And if Rudy does get the nod, expect the MSM to open up the hype floodgates on the cross-dressing and the gay stuff -- oh, not condemning of course (wink) but how it's a big change, how will this play in the South, does this mean gay marriage is A-OK for the GOP." MY REPLY: And if they do it will be countered with images of Rudy's heroism during and after 9/11 and most Americans will be DISGUSTED - at the MSM, NOT at RUDY. The issue in 2008 will be the WOT...