Free Republic

Mending America’s broken tax code Published: April 13 2009 19:16 | Last updated: April 13 2009 19:16 The approach of tax-filing day on April 15 invariably lowers spirits in the United States. Many taxpayers expect a refund when they have finished their calculations, but even this does little to improve the mood. The system’s surreal complexity is enough to defeat candidates for senior positions in the Treasury, let alone Joe the Plumber. Struggling with it arouses the suspicion that the income tax code is chiefly an instrument of political repression – a reminder of who is in charge. Ceaseless meddling...

Motive Mongering: Does It Belong in Science? Feb 26, 2009 — Amanda Gefter, a book reviewer and science editor, felt the need to warn the world about the creationists. She wrote a blog entry at New Scientist called “How to spot a hidden religious agenda.” In addition, Gefter listed concepts and emphases that she felt betray a hidden agenda: an emphasis on complex molecular machines, the reference to quantum physics in support of free will, and calls for “academic freedom” (which she says can be translated as “the acceptance of creationism”). Lastly, she disclaimed any connection between the truth of...

Darwinists Topple Darwin’s Tree of Life Darwin’s “Tree of Life” is a myth. It’s based on circular reasoning. It is a pattern imposed on the data, not a fact emerging from the evidence. We should give up the search for a single tree of life (TOL) as a record of the history of life on earth, because it is a “quixotic pursuit” unlikely to succeed – and the evidence is against it. Who said this? Not creationists, but a new member of the National Academy of Sciences in his inaugural paper for the academy’s Proceedings.1 W. Ford Doolittle and Eric...

Why the Failure to Understand the Global Financial System? Some readers may take issue with the headline, but bear me out. /snip Contrast the 1987 panic with our credit meltdown. The 1987 crash was a single country event, in transparent markets (equities and equity futures). This crisis revolves around multiple over the counter markets (asset backed securities, including securitized auto, student, residential and commercial real estate loans, CDOs, CLOs, CDS) that were originated and sold around the world. The authorities have an weak to non-existent picture of trading volumes and prices. In addition. they also do not have a good...

Wall Street crisis: Is this the death knell for derivatives? On page 62 of last year's accounts, under the heading "off balance sheet arrangements" Lehman had derivative contracts with a face value of $738bn Nils Pratley guardian.co.uk, Monday September 15 2008 09:18 BST If this is the death of Wall Street as we know it, the tombstone will read: killed by complexity. Derivatives in their baffling modern forms – collateralised debt obligations, credit default swaps and so on – lie at the heart of the failure of Lehman, Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, and even our own Northern Rock. The...

Understanding of Dark Pools is Elusive, Reports Traders Magazine Survey June 17, 2008 By Nina Mehta The dark pool landscape is changing so rapidly that a large portion of buyside traders can't keep up with some of the developments. According to a Traders Magazine electronic survey, 38 percent of buyside traders said they were not aware that some dark pools send out or receive information about resident orders. Nor were they aware that some dark pools send and receive electronic immediate-or-cancel orders from other venues. Dark pools are now stepping up efforts to cater to different buyside constituencies through their...

June 12, 2008, 9:00 a.m. Science Without ExperimentsThere are no black-and-white answers when we face integrated complexity. By Jim Manzi The idea that that Republicans and conservatives are waging a “war on science” has become a staple of Democratic rhetoric. Hillary Clinton frequently referenced this in her campaign speeches. Chris Mooney, who wrote a book by this name, has an article on it in a recent issue of The New Republic. Daniel Engber has a three-part series on this topic in Slate. This idea has become widespread among liberals — and, unfortunately, many scientists. Mooney’s thesis is that it’s...

Study Questions 'Cost Of Complexity' In Evolution A new study, in mice, showed that most mutations only do affect a few traits. (Credit: iStockphoto/Emilia Stasiak) ScienceDaily(Apr. 1, 2008) — Higher organisms do not have a "cost of complexity" -- or slowdown in the evolution of complex traits -- according to a report by researchers at Yale and Washington University in Nature. Biologists have long puzzled over the relationship between evolution of complex traits and the randomness of mutations in genes. Some have proposed that a "cost of complexity" makes it more difficult to evolve a complicated trait by random mutations,...

THERE’S SOMETHING QUAINT about the earliest paintings in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. In these religious paintings, you know who is important because of their relative size. The big people are the important ones. The little ones are less important. That seems like a nice simple way to organise the world. Or rather, there’s almost no sense of the world as a real place in these early paintings. That’s partly because the background is gold leaf. At most the figures exist in some very sketchy religious architecture, or they’re assigned little frames, like fragments of a comic strip. They don’t actually have...

Ice sheet complexity leaves sea level rise uncertain 13:41 16 March 2007 NewScientist.com news service Catherine Brahic Ice shed from the giant sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland is responsible for just 12% of the current rate of global sea level rise, according to a new review. The authors emphasise that it is now clear that the ice caps are losing ice faster than it is being replenished by snowfall. But exactly why this is happening remains unknown, making it difficult to predict the extent of future sea level rises. The remaining 88% of the current rise is due to the...

WASHINGTON, March 15, 2007 – Some areas in Iraq are involved in a civil war, according to a report titled “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq” that the Defense Department released yesterday. The quarterly report to Congress goes on to agree with the January 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, however, that the term “civil war” does not adequately convey the complexity of the conflict in Iraq or the fact that different parts of the country have different challenges. Most of the information in the report is from January, before the new joint Iraqi-coalition strategy had time to gel, DoD officials...

With trouble brewing in Kansas again, this new book from "Icons of Evolution" author is timely: ***** The latest in a series of cogent and provocative reference books to the current controversies of our age. The Politically Incorrect Guide series (or, as we like to call them, the PIG books) have dealt with—in order—American History, Islam and the Crusades, Science, and Women, Sex, and Feminism, and later on this year we’ll see a guide to English and American Literature. Each of the books contains clear, no-nonsense explanations of these important subjects—each and every one free of the usual academic cant...

DJIBOUTI, April 24, 2006 – The complexity of operations in the Horn of Africa boggles the mind. A person may be tempted to throw his hands up and decide that conditions are too dire, the people are too many, the politics are too tangled to make any changes in the region. But that person would be wrong, said Navy Rear Adm. Richard Hunt, commander of Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa. Hunt leads a small command dedicated to improving lives in the region so the people do not embrace extremist ideologies or shelter terrorists. The command includes Djibouti -...

New research chips away at the "irreducible complexity" argument behind intelligent design. Lehigh biochemistry professor Michael Behe and his cronies in the intelligent design community have attempted to poke holes in evolutionary theory using an idea dubbed "irreducible complexity"—the notion that complex systems with interdependent parts could not have evolved through Darwinian trial and error and must be the work of a creator, since the absence of any single part makes the whole system void. However, a paper published in the April 7th issue of Science provides the first experimental proof that "irreducible complexity" is a misnomer, and that even...

The new 10th Anniversary edition of the book that still has Darwin Fundies running scared. With a new afterword. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743290313/ "A persuasive book. It will speak to the layman and perhaps even to professional evolutionists as well, if they are able to suspend for a little while their own judgment about origins, the ultimate black box." -- The Washington Times "An argument of great originality, elegance, and intellectual power. . . . No one can propose to defend Darwin without meeting the challenges set out in this superbly written and compelling book." -- David Berlinski, author of A Tour of...

Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost has an outstanding article on the "God of the Gaps." Joe explains in easily understandable terms that the notion "actually encompasses four different views based on distinctions between a “science gap” (a gap in our current scientific knowledge) and a “nature gap” (a break in the continuous cause-effect chain of natural process) that may or may not be bridged by miraculous-appearing theistic action." As technology advances, our science gaps close, but more science gaps often rise up to take their place. For example, we once thought that an electron was a sub-atomic particle that...

Charles Darwin, the 19th century geologist who wrote the treatise 'The Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection' defined evolution as "descent with modification". Darwin hypothesized that all forms of life descended from a common ancestor, branching out over time into various unique life forms, due primarily to a process called natural selection. However, the fossil record shows that all of the major animal groups (phyla) appeared fully formed about 540 million years ago, and virtually no transitional life forms have been discovered which suggest that they evolved from earlier forms. This sudden eruption of multiple, complex organisms is...

The Plot to Kill Evolution [Article Review: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design] Wired Magazine has joined the crusade against reasonable science. Their October 2004 issue emblazoned “The Plot to Kill Evolution” across the cover. The article, “The Crusade Against Evolution” was largely a one-sided look at the so-called “evolution vs. creation” debate. The author seemed to try, but largely failed, to contain his pro-evolution bias. At least they talked to some intelligent design (ID) supporters and allowed one proponent to write his own piece, providing some balance. The article quotes physicist, and ardent atheist, Lawrence Krauss as saying “By no definition...

The Law of the Conservation of Problems We have all used a number of laws describing the nature of the Universe, the nature of Man, and the nature of Society to make sense out of what we experience in everyday life. The Law of Unintended Consequences describes how any given decision can create results that were not in the original plans, even if the decision produced the desired results. The Law of Diminishing Returns describes how actions can produce lessened returns over time. The model I am proposing can explain a lot about the complexity and stress of modern life....

Stephen Wolfram on Natural Selection Excerpts from A New Kind of Science, ©2002, Stephen Wolfram, LLC The basic notion that organisms tend to evolve to achieve a maximum fitness has certainly in the past been very useful in providing a general framework for understanding the historical progression of species, and in yielding specific explanations for various fairly simple properties of particular species. But in present-day thinking about biology the notion has tended to be taken to an extreme, so that especially among those not in daily contact with detailed data on biological systems it has come to be assumed that...