Free Republic

Here is but the latest act of submission to Islam by your State Department. A State Department cable has just been sent out with this announcement: The Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) has assembled a range of innovative and traditional tools to support Posts' outreach activities during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Here, in contrast, is the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,...

BOSTON (AP) -- When Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao tried to watch a YouTube clip of Chinese police beating Tibetans, all he got was an error message... ...Mao thought the error -- just after the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters in China -- was too suspicious to be coincidental, so he reported it on a new Harvard-based Web site that tracks online censorship... ...Zittrain started Herdict in February -- a month before China's block began -- to aggregate reports of online inaccessibility and help users detect government censorship on the Web as soon as it happens. Having tracked...

U.S. IT providers continue to push jobs offshore, while Indian firms work to refine the amount of work they complete overseas. Although Congress may force the Indian firms to hire more Americans -- and Indian companies have been telling investors that they may have to indeed do that -- the change won't likely affect the overall trend and the shift in jobs outside the U.S. Okay, so where are U.S. jobs going? What's the data show? Data prepared by Everest Group Inc., a research and outsourcing consulting firm, shows in broad brush fashion the shift of jobs overseas by some...

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor and friend to the national Messiah, has been tapped to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Sunstein was one of the major influences on a young Obama’s attitudes on government regulation and economics, a scary proposition considering the degree to which the Obama administration is attempting to pull us toward Soviet-style communism. According to the Journal, many of those familiar with Sunstein’s work and philosophy have said that his fingerprints are obvious in many of the administration’s policies, including credit card reform and...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Transparency-Access-to-Information/ THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10TH, 2009 AT 6:34 PM Transparency: Access to Information Posted by Michael Fitzpatrick The Federal government is the largest single producer, collector, consumer, and disseminator of information in the United States. Providing meaningful access to this information is a key goal of President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. As part of the Open Government Initiative, the President tasked Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Peter Orszag with issuing an Open Government Directive to Federal agencies. The OMB Directive will be informed by recommendations being...

News to Note, May 23, 2009: A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (READ THE FOLLOWING STORIES AND MUCH MORE BY CLICKING THE EXCERPT LINK AT BOTTOM) 1. ICR: “‘Missing Link’ Ida Is Just Media Hype”The news media has been awash this week in hype over an alleged missing link fossil nicknamed Ida. As it turns out, the fossil wasn’t fraudulent, but the hype definitely was. 2. The Telegraph: “New ‘Super Rats’ Evolve Resistance to Poison”Is this “super rat” an example of evolution in action, or the result of an information-reducing mutation? 3. Gallup: “More Americans ‘Pro-Life’ than...

Chapter 12: Life Requires a Source of Information by Dr. Werner Gitt May 14, 2009 The common factor present in all living organisms, from bacteria to man, is the information contained in all their cells. It has been discovered that nowhere else can a higher statistical packing density of information (see appendix A1.2.3) be found. The information present in living systems falls in the category of “operational information” as discussed in chapter 7. This information is exactly tuned in to the infinitude of life processes and situations, and its origin can be ascribed to creative constructional information (chapter 7). The...

In the Beginning was Information: Some Quantitative Evaluations of Semantics (Ch 10) by Dr. Werner Gitt We can now begin to evaluate semantic information quantitatively, after having considered the essentials at the semantics level in the preceding chapters...

Marklevinshow.com (archived shows as well) Live from 6-8 Eastern RushLimbaugh.com Glennbeck.com I'm sorry folks but these sources actually 'cite' sources and what is happening. Mark Levin, although somewhat abrasive, is a constitutional lawyer and is right-on with his

News to Note, May 2, 2009A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (Read the following stories, and much more by clicking excerpt link at the bottom) 1. LiveScience: “Swine Flu Is Evolution in Action”Swine flu—both the virus itself and the associated paranoia—seems to be sweeping the world. Is it evolution in action? 2. LiveScience: “Some Dinosaurs Survived the Asteroid Impact”The widely taught model of dinosaur extinction doesn’t line up with the latest fossil findings. 3. National Geographic News: “Baby Mammoth CT Scan Reveals Internal Organs”The preserved baby woolly mammoth shows that it died in an “oxygen-deprived environment” that...

Having been following the Swine Flu / H1N1 outbreak for some time, I thought it would be interesting to put together a reference to the various State home pages, as well as references to their Department of Health. It was an elightening experience. Had this been a biological warfare, there are some things that the States could do to make it easier to share information. First, finding the various State home pages was not necessarily straight forward. Using Google, for example, State Universities trumped State Government web pages in the links ranking and it took some digging to find the...

Does Instant Information Promote Market Efficiency? April-26-2009 I have been reading the updated sixth edition of Security Analysis from cover to cover and on more than one occasion, I have stopped to consider the major advantages modern day investors have compared to Graham and Dodd. Investors today have access to a wealth of information that Benjamin Graham lacked during his career. However, more widespread information also would theoretically lead to more market efficiency and reduce opportunities to find mispriced securities. Is it true that the market is more efficient due to the widespread dissemination of information made possible by the...

Information accosts us from all sides and presents itself over a wide range of manifestations: —From messages pounded out by drums in the jungle to telephone conversations by means of communications satellites. —From the computer-controlled processes for producing synthetic materials to the adaptive control of rolling mills. —In printed form from telephone directories to the Bible. —From the technical drawings which specify the construction of a gas-driven engine to the circuit diagram of a large scale integrated computer chip. —From the hormonal system of an organism to the navigational instincts of migrating birds. —From the genome of a bacterium to...

Information in Living Organisms Theorem 28: There is no known law of nature, no known process, and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter... (for remainder, click link below)

... We can now formulate two fundamental properties of information: Property 1: Information is not the thing itself, neither is it a condition, but it is an abstract representation of material realities or conceptual relationships, such as problem formulations, ideas, programs, or algorithms. The representation is in a suitable coding system and the realities could be objects or physical, chemical, or biological conditions. The reality being represented is usually not present at the time and place of the transfer of information, neither can it be observed or measured at that moment. Property 2: Information always plays a substitutionary role. The...

In the Beginning was Information: The Five Levels of the Information Concept ...Because of the philosophical bias, both information and life itself are regarded as purely material phenomena in the evolutionary view. The origin and the nature of life is reduced to physical-chemical causes. In the words of Jean B. de Lamarck (1744–1829), “Life is merely a physical phenomenon. All manifestations of life are based on mechanical, physical, and chemical causes, being properties of organic matter” (Philosophie Zoologique, Paris, 1809, Vol. 1, p. 104 f). The German evolutionist Manfred Eigen expressed a similar view [E2, p. 149]: “The logic of...

3.1 Information: A Fundamental Quantity The trail-blazing discoveries about the nature of energy in the 19th century caused the first technological revolution, when manual labor was replaced on a large scale by technological appliances—machines which could convert energy. In the same way, knowledge concerning the nature of information in our time initiated the second technological revolution where mental “labor” is saved through the use of technological appliances—namely, data processing machines. The concept “information” is not only of prime importance for informatics theories and communication techniques, but it is a fundamental quantity in such wide-ranging sciences as cybernetics, linguistics, biology,...

Preliminary Remarks about the Concept of Information by Dr. Werner Gitt February 26, 2009 By way of introduction, we shall consider a few systems and repeatedly ask the question: What is the reason that such a system can function? 1. The web of a spider: In Figure 1 we see a section of a web of a spider, a Cyrtophora in this case. The mesh size is approximately 0.8 x 1.2 mm. The circle in the left picture indicates the part which has been highly magnified by an electron microscope to provide the right picture. The design and structure of...

Hi everyone, Please check out a new grassroots activism site that I'm trying to build up which would work off of a "cell/viral" model. There is also a FREE weekly newsletter that several others and myself (including some FReepers) are involved with. Please sign up if you'd like the free .pdf newsletter (printable and forwardable - both of which are encouraged). http://conservativesunderground.us/index.html Thanks!

The Congressional Budget Office has released their analysis of the House version of the stimulus bill (H.R. 1). You can read the full analysis in PDF form here, but we thought it would be useful to take some of the budget numbers in the analysis and present them in chart format. Shown below are several different views of the how the dollars for H.R. 1 would be spent over time. Most striking is that in total, the CBO estimates that less than 21% of the funds would be spent in 2009. Apparently, it is a huge crisis which requires swift...

<p>“The commonly cited case for intelligent design appeals to: (a) the irreducible complexity of (b) some aspects of life. But complex arguments invite complex refutations (valid or otherwise), and the claim that only some aspects of life are irreducibly complex implies that others are not, and so the average person remains unconvinced. Here I use another principle—autopoiesis (self-making)—to show that all aspects of life lie beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations. Autopoiesis provides a compelling case for intelligent design in three stages: (i) autopoiesis is universal in all living things, which makes it a pre-requisite for life, not an end product of natural selection; (ii) the inversely-causal, information-driven, structured hierarchy of autopoiesis is not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry; and (iii) there is an unbridgeable abyss between the dirty, mass-action chemistry of the natural environmental and the perfectly-pure, single-molecule precision of biochemistry.”</p>

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – A New Zealand man who bought an MP3 player from a thrift shop in Oklahoma found it held 60 U.S. military files, including names and telephone numbers for American soldiers, a media report said Tuesday...

Pyongyang Bids Korean Wave to Recede North Korean authorities are reportedly cracking down on DVDs of South Korean TV dramas and radios that can tune into South Korean broadcasts to stem the Korean pop culture wave that has belatedly hit the North. A source familiar with North Korean affairs on Wednesday said some 10 episodes of a 30-episode South Korean drama series are normally copied on a DVD in China and smuggled into North Korea. And these spread quickly among North Koreans via the black market. Many North Korean border guards or security officers charged with cracking down on the...

Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance. Not so very long ago, Google disclaimed responsibility for its search results by explaining that these were chosen by a computer algorithm. The disclaimer lives on at Google News, where we are assured that: The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. A few years ago, Google's apparently unimpeachable objectivity got some people very excited, and technology utopians began to herald Google as...

Video: Tito the Builder - What a Guy! He's not Holding Anything Back About Obama

Hedge funds grudgingly to reveal US short positions Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:38pm EDT By Rachelle Younglai and Jennifer Ablan WASHINGTON/NEW YORK Sept 28 (Reuters) - Hedge fund managers are reluctantly preparing to disclose their short positions to U.S. regulators on Monday, a move set to give a rare public glimpse into their secretive trading strategies two weeks later. For shareholders who have blamed short sellers for driving down company stocks, it will be a chance to see who is targeting their firm. It is also an experiment by U.S. securities regulators, putting short sellers briefly on a similar footing...

As the first anniversary of the credit crisis approaches, it's clear that a major part of the problem was a spectacular failure of information, with complex asset-backed securities turning out to be far riskier than anyone thought. But as sophisticated as we consider ourselves, this is just a contemporary example of what might be called the Problem of the Oblong Dice. The first game of dice, played by ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, used astragali, animal ankle bones that are more oblong than square. Yet rolls of the dice got the same score whether the dice ended up on a...

Lead paint in toys. Brain-eating amoeba. Identity theft. Drowning in sand. We know more than ever about the risks all around us. Do we know what disclosing them all is doing to us? I’D LIKE TO SAY that the writing that had the most profound effect on me this year was some classic novel I picked up in my spare time, but in fact it was an Associated Press article. Last June, AP Medical Writer Mike Stobbe wrote a fascinating, harrowing story about large holes dug in beach sand that can collapse "horrifyingly fast" and cause a person in the...

WASHINGTON, March 5, 2008 – China’s announcement that it is increasing its military spending by almost 18 percent is a cause of concern because the nation's government hasn’t been clear about how it will spend the money, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said here today. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, left, responds to a question during a press conference with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen at the Pentagon, March 5, 2008. Defense Dept. photo by Cherie A. Thurlby  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. China’s announcement comes on the heels of the March 3...

Last year’s scamnesty bill had widespread support among the powers-that-be, with the president, the Democrat majority and mainstream media all singing its praises. Yet it went down to defeat, slain by a new-media coalition of talk radio and blogosphere warriors. Working tirelessly to expose the truth and rally the grassroots, they became a David who slew a Goliath. Forty-three years ago it was a different world. Ted Kennedy had co-authored the “Immigration Reform Act of 1965,” which created a situation wherein 85 percent of our immigrants hail from the Third World and Asia. He took to the Senate floor, claimed...

FBI to collect biometric information on British visitors By Tim Shipman in Washington Last Updated: 3:11pm GMT 22/12/2007 British visitors to the US will have details of their physical characteristics added to a new billion dollar database under plans drawn up by the FBI. Fingerprints, iris scans and even details of the way people walk, their scars and the size and shape of their ear lobes will be collected. British intelligence agencies and police will also be able to access the information – giving them potentially more biometric data on British citizens than the Government collects at home. Under the...

One of the fundamental objectives of information warfare is to gain dominance of the information environment, to shape it in such a way that you control the messages your target audience sees. It also means pushing messages that undercut an opponent’s advantage wherever and whenever possible. Getting the message out is often the most difficult task. Using the press and the media, both print and broadcast are the most efficient and effective. Our military stresses that the truth is the best message. In Iraq, this means showing the Iraqis that Al Qaeda is their enemy; that democracy will bring prosperity...

Selling to survive By Anna Fifield Published: November 19 2007 20:07 | Last updated: November 19 2007 20:07 Pak Hyun-yong was, by North Korean standards, an entrepreneur. Too much of an entrepreneur. During the famine that ravaged the country in the late 1990s, Mr Pak watched his family die of starvation – first his younger brother, then his older sister’s children. Then, eventually, his sister too. Somehow he pulled through this period, dubbed by the regime as “the arduous march�, and was spurred into taking some very non-communist, almost subversive action. He began selling noodles. Every day he would...

NEW YORK - Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally. The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users. If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known...

The Chinese military has begun a two-day drill testing a system that provides commanders real-time battlefield data, signaling the continued modernization of the nation’s massive armed forces. The exercise is part of an ambitious effort to improve military information collection systems, one of the main shortfalls of the otherwise rapidly modernizing People’s Liberation Army, the Xinhua news agency reported Sept. 19.

"Nothing there," is what Case Western Reserve University physicists concluded about black holes after spending a year working on complex formulas to calculate the formation of new black holes. In nearly 13 printed pages with a host of calculations, the research may solve the information loss paradox that has perplexed physicists for the past 40 years.Case physicists Tanmay Vachaspati, Dejan Stojkovic and Lawrence M. Krauss report in the article, "Observation of Incipient Black Holes and the Information Loss Problem,” that has been accepted for publication by Physical Review D. "It's complicated and very complex," noted the researchers, regarding both the...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A 22-year-old intern was given the responsibility of safeguarding the personal information of thousands of state employees, a security procedure that ended up backfiring. Social Security numbers of all 64,000 Ohio state employees were stolen last weekend from a state agency intern who left a backup data storage device in his car, Gov. Ted Strickland said.An additional review of data revealed that the storage device also held information on 53,797 participants enrolled in the state's pharmacy benefits management program, as well as names and Social Security numbers of about 75,532 dependents, the governor's office confirmed Saturday. Strickland...

Is the recently posted article entitled  US regains top ranking for technology (US is number 1 in Information Technology) the last word on this subject?Well, it used to be the United States, but now six other nations are ahead of us, according to the Geneva-based World Economic Forum’s 2006-07 Networked Readiness Index. Our entrepreneurs aren’t the problem; it’s the deteriorating political and regulatory environment around them. Thanks to governments that work better with their private innovators, countries like Singapore, Denmark and Finland are better able to exploit emerging technologies and remain in the top five year after year.See: The Global...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms seized an Iranian diplomat as he drove through central Baghdad, officials said Tuesday. Iran said it held the United States responsible for the diplomat's "safety and life." One Iraqi government official said the Iranian diplomat was detained Sunday by an Iraqi army unit that reports directly to the U.S. military. A military spokesman denied any U.S. troops or Iraqis that report to them were involved. "We've checked with our units and it was not an MNF-I (Multi-National Forces - Iraq) unit that participated in that event," said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a...

WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. companies will need to keep track of all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees thanks to new federal rules that go into effect Friday, legal experts say. The rules, approved by the Supreme Court in April, require companies and other entities involved in federal litigation to produce "electronically stored information" as part of the discovery process, when evidence is shared by both sides before a trial. The change makes it more important for companies to know what electronic information they have and where. Under the new rules, an information technology...

In this day of easy internet access, we take for granted our ability to just click and get what ever news we are looking for. In Places where Islam holds sway, simple blogging can get you thrown in jail. How long until my newsletter, already declared hate speech by Google because it does not support homosexual marriage, will get me tossed in jail? We need to be aware of what is happening in places where Islam has taken control. In every bloody conflict around the globe, how many involve Islamics? Asia, Africa, Europe... on and on. This war, it is...

The number of embedded journalists reporting alongside U.S. troops in Iraq has dropped to its lowest level of the war even as the conflict heats up on the streets of Baghdad and in the U.S. political campaign. In the past few weeks, the number of journalists reporting assigned to U.S. military units in Iraq has settled to below two dozen. Late last month, it fell to 11, its lowest, and has rebounded only slightly since. During the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, more than 600 reporters, TV crews and photographers linked up with U.S. and British units. A year ago,...

Marine Didn't Suspect Haditha Wrongdoing ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) - The Marine officer in charge of troops suspected of killing 24 Iraqi men, women and children told investigators he did not initiate an inquiry into the carnage because he did not consider the deaths unusual, The Washington Post reported Saturday. In a sworn statement given to military investigators in March, Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani said: "I thought it was very sad, very unfortunate, but at the time, I did not suspect any wrongdoing from my Marines." Chessani was commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines. "I did...

A few days ago, I received a telephone call at my office wanting to verify the employment of someone. I am not the human resources person, but am in another capacity completely. The name they gave was my middle name and my last name. All the woman on the phone would say is, “This is Kelly from NCO Financial. I need to verify employment for ______ ______.” At that point, I asked what the call was about. Kelly just repeated that she was verifying employment for ______ ______. My middle name is a family sir name, so it could be...

Attorney General Gonzales: Indict the New York Times June 24th, 2006 Within days of the September 11th attacks, the head of Reuters’ worldwide news division, explaining the agency’s refusal to use the word “terrorist,” made the famous fatuous remark that “one man’s freedom terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Reuters, it seemed, wouldn’t be taking sides in America’s war on Islamic jihad, because as journalists, Reuters didn’t believe the American people and our allies are any “better” than our putrid enemies. Such is the repulsive state of the “moral equivalence” mongers in what passes for news journalism, even among those...

WASHINGTON, May 25, 2006 – The Department of Veterans Affairs has begun a thorough examination of policies and procedures after the loss of 26.5 million veterans' personal information, the VA's leader told the House Armed Services Committee today. "I've formed a task force ... to examine comprehensively all of our information security programs and policies to bring about a change in the way we do business," R. James Nicholson said. His testimony today followed the May 22 announcement that a Veterans Affairs employee had taken electronic data home with him, though he was unauthorized to do so. The information was...

WASHINGTON, May 22, 2006 – Veterans Affairs officials today announced the theft of personal information on up to 26.5 million veterans. However, VA Secretary R. James Nicholson stressed there's no indication the information is being used for purposes of fraud. "We at the VA have recently learned that an employee here, a data analyst, took home a considerable amount of electronic data from the VA, which he was not authorized to do," Nicholson said. "His home was burglarized, and this data was stolen." The compromised data includes names, Social Security numbers and birthdates of veterans separating from the military...

Six groups, including the Anaheim-based Council on American Islamic Relations in Southern California, filed a Freedom of Information Act request Monday asking about suspected law enforcement monitoring of Islamic religious institutions. The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California filed the request on behalf of CAIR, the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, area mosques and six leaders in the Muslim community. Four from Orange County include: Muzammil Siddiqi, imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove. Hussam Ayloush, executive director at CAIR. Sabiha Khan, CAIR spokeswoman. Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of...

May 12, 2006 — Americans by nearly a 2-1 ratio call the surveillance of telephone records an acceptable way for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, expressing broad unconcern even if their own calling patterns are scrutinized. Lending support to the administration's defense of its anti-terrorism intelligence efforts, 63 percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say the secret program, disclosed Thursday by USA Today, is justified, while far fewer, 35 percent, call it unjustified. Indeed, 51 percent approve of the way President Bush is handling the protection of privacy rights, while 47 percent disapprove — hardly a...

A push to require all convicted criminals in New York to submit their DNA to a central database is gaining crucial support in Albany, where officials say it could create the most comprehensive DNA collection system in the nation. If the proposal becomes law, it would make New York the only state to require collecting DNA from everyone convicted of felonies and misdemeanors, including youthful offenders convicted in criminal court, officials said. Currently, 43 states require that people convicted of all felonies submit DNA, but none require samples from those convicted of all misdemeanors, and New York has required those...