Free Republic

The Left is less a political movement than a neurotic clown collective arrogantly spouting toxic imbecility. Often, yours truly has expounded (okay, ranted) upon the term “narrative,” which is just an artful euphemism for “lie.” A device drawn from fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, it facilitates lying by eliding the need for providing the facts and proving the truth of one’s assertions. Consequently, it is a boon to propagandists, who can harp on a “narrative” ad nauseum to provoke and persuade the public to do as the purveyor of the lie seeks. For the Left, one oft used word signaling...

Politics hide corruption in complexity. Congress passes bills of thousands of pages and the implication and damage are hidden until the effects are made part of what must be dealt with on a daily basis. Our legal system has become a corrupted labyrinth of exclusions and exceptions with confusing motions filed by both sides as cases move through the system. The final judgments make us scratch our heads wondering how they came to a judgment. We do not know because the process is so complex that only one with special knowledge can understand how the judgment was reached. The battle...

Intelligent Design Passes Peer Review Life Is Fine-Tuned In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins defined biology as “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Though our generation’s arch-atheist recognizes the tendency of human intuition to attribute things wonderful and complex to the work of a designer, he goes on to argue that life is not designed at all. His prior commitment to a worldview that understands the universe to be the product of eons of accidents and natural selection only imitates design is reflected in the book’s title:...

Video LinkJust watch 15 seconds of this video and you will be hooked. It is mind-blowingCan you imagine that evolutionists tell us that this stuff just invented itself out of nothing, out of randomness?They tell us it is not designed with forethought and careful planning by a designer...

Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are........needed, and the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!

Moore’s Law: Life is Older than Earth Itself — “A Process that Began Billions of Years Before the Formation of Our Solar System” Posted on Sep 24, 2018  As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The regression suggests that if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with homo sapiens, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, negating Drakes Equation.Our Solar...

Carson is an acclaimed neurosurgeon who oversees a large government agency for which he has no particular qualifications and in this way represents the grand theme of the Trump administration. He, like the president, came to power by promising that an outsider would have the "common sense" it takes to cure what ails us. And so, while conservative gadfly Armstrong Williams played host to this party at the Monocle restaurant, it was Carson everyone came to see. "There's never been a time in the history of the world where a society became divided like this and did well," Carson said...

Fewer than half of physicians are aware of the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA), and most of those who do know about it probably wish it would go away. Nevertheless, this law will determine how Medicare reimburses doctors, starting in 2019. ... CMS won’t release its final MACRA rule ... CMS recenty changed the timeline ...

Controlling Blood Pressure Requires an Irreducibly Complex System Howard Glicksman September 22, 2015 12:32 PM | Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News & Views is delighted to present this series, "The Designed Body." Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization. The body is a multi-cellular organism that requires the circulation of blood within its cardiovascular system to give...

We're no longer a nation of laws, we're a nation of men, specifically those men who were the first to figure out legitimacy is no longer a serious constraint, and there are no other constraints. Absent legitimacy it's a sprint to whatever irreducible power center presents itself. As in any other no-rules fight, the violent prevail over the peaceful and the homicidal prevail over the violent. This isn't mere looting, major assets, even national assets, are in play. Mexico for example, one of the most violent countries on earth, is conquering—not merging with, conquering—the southwestern US. National borders are always...

Gene Complexity Eludes a Simple Definition by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * In the early days of molecular genetics in the 1960s and ’70s, it was widely held that a gene could be defined as a single entity that encodes the information to make a protein. However, as genetic studies have progressed, our understanding of what defines a gene has become incredibly more complicated.1 We still hear evolutionists claim “this and that creature have the same genes and are therefore related through common descent in evolution,” but in light of recent genetic studies, this claim is grossly oversimplified.

Mind-Boggling Complexity in the Fruit Fly Transcriptome by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * The humble fruit fly that has been at the heart of genetic studies for nearly 100 years continues to amaze scientists and defy simplistic evolutionary predictions. A research team recently evaluated the diversity of gene expression across the insect's genome in much greater detail than previous studies, and the results revealed incredible complexity and design.1 One of the key features that is emerging across the spectrum of research in plant and animal genomes is the fact that nearly all DNA is expressed (copied into RNA).2 This expressed RNA...

Chapter 1 - What is the 29th day? Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. Dwight D Eisenhower (1890 - 1969) - Military Leader, President of the United States This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Polonius' advice to Laertes, in Hamlet William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English playwright Something has happened in the 21st century which has never happened before. It is...

Jon Stewart pointed out something interesting: how often President Obama or his underlings tell us how complicated or complex the job is. So I did some searching on the White House web site to see how often such words appear in various speeches and remarks. Below is a partial summary, going back only through April. (Emphases added.) "There are some complicating factors... That is very, very complex... It's the breadth and the complexity of the disaggregation of the oil, which I don't think was accounted for and anticipated in any plans. It's very complex. It's one of the hardest things...

Chapter 1 - What is the 29th day? Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. Dwight D Eisenhower (1890 - 1969) - Military Leader, President of the United States Editorial (unpublished) Something has happened in the 21st century which has never happened before. It is as significant as the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. It is frightening us because we do not know exactly what it is or why it has happened. What is worse, nobody else seems to...

WASHINGTON, April 13, 2010 – The hurdles to be overcome in Afghanistan are no simple matter, the director of communications for NATO and U.S. forces there told reporters traveling with Navy Adm. Mike Mullen when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visited earlier this month. “Afghanistan is a complicated place,” Navy Rear Adm. Greg Smith said. Smith and others working in Kabul spoke of the complex “human terrain” of Afghanistan and the challenges facing the coalition as forces work to provide security and to train Afghans to take over responsibility for the mission. Knowing the players and how...

If the tax code were straightforward and simple, April 15 would be just another lovely spring date. But as April 15 approaches like an incoming monsoon, millions of Americans brace for the pain of writing checks to the IRS. Even worse, this annual discomfort begins even earlier, as taxpayers generate a cyclone of documents just to calculate their tax liability. America’s excruciatingly complex tax-compliance regime deepens the aggravation of sending hard-earned cash to Washington for virtual incineration by Congress. Completing tax forms required 7.75 billion hours of human labor in fiscal year 2008, according to the latest RegInfo.gov data. That...

Soon - if it hasn’t happened already - the lines will cross. Increasing complexity will cross decreasing time to master it. As a result, cars will accelerate uncontrollably, airliners will crash, our phones will reveal our location, and our health care will be managed by computers.

The future of investing: academics predict more complexity By Maik Rodewald Published: October 11 2009 10:21 | Last updated: October 11 2009 10:21 “A theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” If one applies Albert Einstein’s words to a colourful basket of theses from leading US academics about the future of investing, it could look like this: Andrew Lo of MIT’s Sloan School of Management provides the foundation of the theory. For one of America’s current academic superstars, it is pretty clear how the future must look: “We need to solve investors’ biggest problem – uncertain outcomes...

The late great astronomer Carl Sagan was once famously lampooned by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show for saying “billions and billions” on the hit PBS show Cosmos in a unique voice when describing astronomical distances. Well, we are beyond astronomy now, beyond billions and billions and into the unreal realm of trillions. The Federal Reserve recently announced that it was injecting another $1 trillion into the financial system. China owns U.S. Treasuries to the tune of 1.4 trillion rapidly weakening dollars. On April 2, Congress approved President Barack Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget. New estimates from Congressional Budget Office project...