Free Republic

WASHINGTON – The $93 million website launched to process customers through the new ObamaCare marketplace may experience significant technical glitches for months, computer software experts told FoxNews.com. “I wouldn’t rule out that possibility,” said George Edwards, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Southern California. It all depends on when they identify the bugs, where they are, and if they can be resolved easily, he said -- all while the site is running and open to millions of customers. “[It's] like trying to repair a car while someone is driving it,” he told FoxNews.com.

**SNIP** ‘Global COOLING!’ In a recent story from the UK’s Mail on Sunday, David Rose made the claim that Earth was now heading toward global cooling with the headline “And now it’s global COOLING! Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year.” In 2012, a satellite image of the Arctic ice sheet showed the lowest extent of sea ice on record. In 2013, however, the sea ice saw a rebound, measuring 6.09 million square kilometres – still 1.13 million kilometres below the 1981 to 2010 average. So while 2013 was indeed an increase, it...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — If you're confused about the Affordable Care Act, you won't get any answers from central Florida health departments. That's because people who are hired to answer your questions won't be allowed to work there. Critics told Channel 9's Mark Joyella it's just another way Gov. Rick Scott is blocking the president's plan for national health care. Change is confusing, and the government wants the Affordable Care Act to come with plenty of help. When the online health care marketplace opens in October, you'll be able to go to a CVS drugstore and find a trained expert who...

WASHINGTON—An all-star panel of retired military officers, intelligence agents, and national security experts officially launched the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi with an all-day conference Monday in Washington. The event, organized by Accuracy in Media, took place at the Heritage Foundation and included panel discussions, public questions, and a speech from Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. The 13-member commission finished with a closed door session to discuss its sole purpose: to find the truth about the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Speakers charged members of both political parties with incompetence...

Expected Western strikes on Syria will target the military, intelligence services and possibly sites with symbolic regime links, but will not alter the balance of power in the country, experts say. The raids, if they go ahead, would be aimed at punishing President Bashar al-Assad's regime and sending him a message rather than wiping out his military capacity and handing the rebels a decisive advantage, they say. "Specific targets should include the Damascus-area headquarters, barracks and support facilities of the fourth and Republican Guard armoured divisions, two units heavily involved in the bombardment of civilian areas," said Jeffrey White of...

The White House has kicked off several federal projects aimed at influencing how Americans react to certain policy reforms, going so far as to solicit behavior experts to join a British-style “Behavioral Insights Team” to help nudge voters into accepting key political programs. “Behavioral sciences can be used to help design public policies that work better, cost less and help people to achieve their goals,” a document on the government program states, Fox News reported. The document, emailed by White House senior adviser Maya Shankar and obtained by Fox News, also seeks applicants to join the federal government’s behavior modification...

Even Obama's experts say his gun control policies won't work. According to an internal Department of Justice memorandum, a gun ban, like the one being debated right now in Congress, will not work without a mandatory gun buyback, and "universal" background checks will not work without requiring gun registration. Call Congress at 202-224-3121 and tell them to reject President Obama's gun control agenda -- and to get serious about prosecuting criminals and fixing our broken mental health system.

Let's look at experts. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was a mathematician and scientist. Newton has to be the greatest and most influential scientist who has ever lived. He laid the foundation for classical mechanics, and his genius transformed our understanding of science, particularly in the areas of physics, mathematics and astronomy. What's not widely known is that Newton spent most of his waking hours on alchemy; his experiments included trying to turn lead into gold. Though he wrote volumes on alchemy, after his death Britain's Royal Society deemed that they were "not fit to be printed." Lord William Thomson Kelvin...

One lone trustee objected to the institution’s betrayal of Andrew Carnegie. As Lagemann reports, a Cornell professor presented to the board a proposal that it focus, not on building libraries, but on spreading library science, which would lead to “advancing popular intellectual progress” (read: “smartening up the slack-jawed yokels”). The lonely dissenter, trustee James Bertram, argued that if the board consented to this recommendation, it "would contravene Carnegie’s clear and known wish 'to give libraries to communities and [to] leave the communities absolutely free to manage them any way they might see fit.'” Because Bertram spoke the truth, the trustees...

U.S. President Barack Obama said last week that the Al-Qaeda was “on a path to defeat,” but Seth Jones, a former U.S. Special Operations Command senior adviser, says the evidence he has collected points to the contrary. Jones recently wrote a book called “Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11”, .... Jones spoke with the U.S. News website last week about his theory of “waves” of violence from Al-Qaeda and what needs to be done to prevent the next cycle. “When you look at fatality data, what you see is three major waves of activity,” he...

Of course I am paraphrasing Goering’s famous quote about “culture” – and I also recognise that in a personal capacity I am usually willing to trust the doctor who repairs my hernia or the plumber who fixes my boiler because the chances are they know more about hernias and boilers than I do for they are dealing with them every day. No, the “experts” I would love to threaten are the ones beloved of the media because they need a gap filled in the programme or on the page. Moreover the “expert” is usually produced to push an agenda favoured...

Last week, Nancy Pelosi insisted that extending unemployment benefits would, er, save or create 600,000 jobs, and insisted that experts in macroeconomics told her so. Who are the economic experts that advise Pelosi? According to Roll Call, Pelosi hauled a few of them up to Capitol Hill to support her economic policy, but didn’t disclose her relationship with at least one of them: In May 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to a podium in the Capitol to introduce a half-dozen economic experts she had convened for a meeting on how to jump-start the economy. The group had met for several...

Under President Obama, the Peter Principle appears to have been elevated to policy, at least in the case of architects of an American intelligence disaster. The International Atomic Energy Agency will soon release a report on Iran's nuclear program. The findings have been leaking for days now -- and come as no surprise to those who have long-harbored well-grounded suspicions of Iran's intentions. Iran is close to achieving nuclear breakthrough: the ability to begin cranking out nuclear weapons. The Western world (not just Israel, the surrounded outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East) will now face a theocratic regime...

Climate experts: Expect more weather disastersNovember 1, 2011 7:35 AM (AP) WASHINGTON - Freakish weather disasters — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press. The final draft of the report from a panel of the world's top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars. The report says...

In this world of Photoshop and online scams, it pays to have a hearty dose of skepticism at reports of something strange — including an albino fetal shark with one eye smack in the middle of its nose like a Cyclops. But the Cyclops shark, sliced from the belly of a pregnant mama dusky shark caught by a commercial fisherman in the Gulf of California earlier this summer, is by all reports the real thing. Shark researchers have examined the preserved creature and found that its single eye is made of functional optical tissue, they said last week. It's unlikely,...

Manhattan and the Bronx would be uninhabitable if the accident-prone Indian Point nuke plant suffered a Chernobyl-like disaster, an environmental group charged Monday. A massive radiation release similar to the 1986 catastrophe in Ukraine could also contaminate Brooklyn and chunks of Queens and Staten Island, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The more you learn about Indian Point, the more you know it must close," said Robert Kennedy Jr., a senior attorney at NRDC. "It's too old, it's near too many people, and it's just too vulnerable to fire, earthquake and attack." The doomsday scenario comes...

When asked what posed the greatest challenge to statesmen, Harold Macmillan, the former British prime minister, responded, "Events, my dear boy, events." That's because events tend to throw everybody off their plan. For example, Hurricane Irene ended President Obama's vacation early. And the hurricane's steady deterioration upset the plans of news producers who anticipated something more dramatic for their wall-to-wall coverage. In a similar fashion, Obama and his advisors predicted the economy would do better -- much better -- than it has, and those predictions were wrong. The president blames events: the European debt crisis, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami,...

"The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands... The power of the legislative, being derived from the people... [is] only to make laws, and not to make legislators." — John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government”Here, however, is a paradox of sovereignty: The sovereign people, possessing the right to be governed as they choose, might find the exercise of that right tiresome and so might choose to be governed in perpetuity by a despot they cannot subsequently remove. Congress did something like that in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. The point...

Since the anti-obesity campaign is allegedly motivated by scientific findings, it would seem reasonable and prudent to make doubly sure that those claims are factual and trustworthy. Yet, we continue to find that the case against obesity is significantly flawed. Not only are the claims of an obesity epidemic often wildly exaggerated, but the science linking weight to unfavourable mortality outcomes is also frequently nonexistent or distorted.

OTTAWA, Ontario, February 28, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a recent parliamentary session on a bill relating to sexual offenses against children, psychology experts claimed that pedophilia is a “sexual orientation” comparable to homosexuality or heterosexuality, a definition that was questioned by one Member of Parliament who was present. Bill C-54, an Act to Amend the Criminal Code, seeks to increase or impose mandatory minimum penalties or punishment on sexual offenders of children for particular crimes. Parliamentary discussion on February 14 centered on the mandatory minimum imprisonment and how offenders respond to treatment. Dr. Vernon Quinsey and Dr. Hubert Van Gijseghem,...