(CNN) -- The Obama administration has unveiled a plan to spend millions of dollars to stem the tide of undocumented children streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border, announcing a coordinated government-wide response to the situation Friday.

<snip>

The Obama administration has accused syndicates in Latin America of waging a deliberate campaign of misinformation that has caused people in poor Central American countries and Mexico to risk their lives to head for the United States, where they expect to stay.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the administration is addressing the problem in several ways.

"We're going to open up some additional detention facilities that can accommodate adults that show up on the border with their children. And we're going to deploy some additional resources to work through their immigration cases more quickly, so they're not held in that detention facility for a long time, and hopefully be quickly returned to their home country," Earnest said.

(much more at link)

Following widespread speculation that the move was imminent, German Federal Prosecutor Harald Range on Wednesday announced he is launching a formal investigation into allegations that the NSA spied on Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile telephone communications.

SPIEGEL had reported on Monday that the federal prosecutor was close to opening formal proceedings. On Wednesday, Range informed the Legal Committee of the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament, of the pending investigation.

The move marks the next significant chapter in the spying scandal surrounding America's signals intelligence authority, the National Security Agency. It is also the first formal act taken by a German government agency in response to the revelations made public by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The probe could further exacerbate trans-Atlantic relations that have been deeply burdened by the scandal.

The Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe opened two "monitoring processes" last year to review the allegations. The first focused on the mass spying of Germans' data by the NSA and the second targeted allegations -- first reported by SPIEGEL in October -- that Merkel's mobile phone had been tapped.

Germany's federal prosecutor has opened an investigation over alleged snooping by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on Angela Merkel's mobile phone.

"I informed parliament's legal affairs committee that I have started a preliminary investigation over tapping of a mobile phone of the chancellor," Harald Range said.

The long-anticipated inquiry, which follows allegations last year that US spies had eavesdropped on the German chancellor's mobile in the past, is against unnamed persons, Range said after addressing the committee.

However, he said he had decided against opening an investigation into claims of wider NSA surveillance against German citizens.

BERLIN -- German federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into the alleged monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone by the U.S. National Security Agency, they said Wednesday.

Chief Prosecutor Harald Range has been mulling for months whether to open a formal probe of the Merkel allegations that emerged in October. The revelations cooled relations between Berlin and Washington, prompting Merkel to accuse the U.S. of a grave breach of trust and President Barack Obama to pledge he would not allow America's massive communications surveillance capability to damage relations with Germany or other close allies.

Range's office said he opened an investigation Tuesday into persons unknown regarding Merkel's phone, a move that could again complicate matters diplomatically.

"Extensive preliminary investigations have established that sufficient factual evidence exists that unknown members of U.S. intelligence services spied on the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel," Range's office said.

Gish Gallop

The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time. The term was coined by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. Sam Harris describes the technique as "starting 10 fires in 10 minutes."

The formal debating term for this is spreading. It arose as a way to throw as much rubbish into five minutes as possible. In response, some debate judges now limit number of arguments as well as time. However, in places where debating judges aren't there to call bullshit on the practice (like the Internet) such techniques are remarkably common.

Argumentum ad tl;dr

A related distraction technique, familiar to readers of A Storehouse of Knowledge, involves swamping an opponent in long-winded screeds of text to artificially inflate the appearance of depth and quality of information presented. Quite often, the actual content of several paragraphs can be summed up in a sentence. While the Gish Gallop floods an opponent with many, but relatively short points, argumentum ad tl;dr flings text walls so massive and impenetrable that even Victor Hugo would blush. Both tactics, however, have exactly the same purpose: to bury and obfuscate the core points that need to be discussed under a quantity of superfluous information. A user might well think that these techniques show that they know what they're talking about, but in the end they act simply as distractions. Note that both are different (but not mutually exclusive) from argumentum ad nauseam, which bolsters the apparent credibility of the argument simply by repeating the same thing over and over and over and over again.

For example, Jason Lisle's blog posts and "research paper" about the anisotropic synchrony convention prattle on endlessly about relativistic physics, hiding the fact that his fundamental assumptions were, to say the least, a little far-fetched. Similarly, engineer Dewey Larson has written numerous books on his theories about matter, going on for pages and pages about the need for critical thinking and letting evidence fit hypotheses, when what he actually proposes in these weighty self-published tomes can be summed up in one sentence.

[center]Pioneer Fund Assets Divided; New Leadership Appointed[/center]

In October 2012, Jean-Philippe Rushton, a Canadian psychology professor and probably the most important race scientist in North America, died of cancer. At the time of his death, Rushton was running the Pioneer Fund, a grant-making entity founded in the 1930s by Americans with Nazi sympathies. In recent decades, Pioneer has been the only major foundation devoted to subsidizing race science and eugenics research, areas of science that are now fully discredited.

Under Rushton, the Pioneer Fund gave out very few grants, concentrating its disbursements on prominent race scientists such as Jared Taylor of the white nationalist group, American Renaissance. Rushton also headed the Charles Darwin Research Institute, located in Port Huron, Mich., an online outfit that distributed his racist research. Rushton’s most infamous study concluded that brain and genital size were inversely related, suggesting that black people are less intelligent than whites and more highly sexualized. Sometime in the last year, the website for the Charles Darwin Research Institute went offline.

<snip>

{richard} Lynn {rushton's successor} is a professor emeritus in psychology at the University of Ulster whose personal webpage lists as interests sex and race differences and eugenics (the “science,” much admired by the German Nazis, of selectively breeding human beings to create “better” people). He runs his own outfit, the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Pioneer grants over the years. The institute appears to be primarily an online effort and is registered to an address near London.

The Pioneer website said that Rushton had left the Charles Darwin Research Institute in the control of his son, Stephen Rushton, an associate professor of education at the University of South Florida. The younger Rushton had served on Pioneer’s board for several years. The Pioneer Fund website further said that Rushton had done so “in the expectation that his son would support research of the kind,” meaning race science, “that had been supported by the Pioneer Fund.” The website said that Stephen Rushton had then “transferred the assets of the Charles Darwin Research Institute to the JSP Education Foundation (JSP stands for John Stephen Philippe).” Lynn and Rushton were listed as contacts for the fund.

<snip; there's a little more at the link in the title.>

{emphasis was added}