Nevada GOPer On Syrian Refugees: 'I'll Fly To Paris And Shoot 'Em' Myself
By Caitlin MacNeal | Published December 7, 2015, 10:58 AM EST


Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R) last month dismissed a statement from Nevada Republicans calling for the state to bar refugees from Syria, and said that she is prepared to travel to Paris to shoot Syrian refugees herself.

During her weekly show on Las Vegas radio station KWDN, Fiore discussed why she did not sign onto the statement from Republican members of the state assembly opposing resettling Syrian refugees in Nevada. Fiore recounted a conversation with Nevada GOP political consultant Chuck Muth, who asked her why she didn't sign onto the statement.

"What--are you kidding me? I’m about to fly to Paris and shoot ‘em in the head myself!" Fiore said she told Muth when asked why she didn't join the statement on Syrian refugees.

"I am not OK with Syrian refugees. I’m not OK with terrorists. I’m OK with putting them down, blacking them out, just put a piece of brass in their ocular cavity and end their miserable life. I'm good with that," she continued.


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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/michele-fiore-syrian-refugees-shoot-em

Florida Man Gets Year in Jail For Running over Baby Ducks with a Lawn Mower
By Lydia Price | 07/27/2015 AT 02:00 PM EDT

Do not hire this man to mow your lawn.

John Scott Falbo II, 24, who used to work for a landscaping company, intentionally ran over nine ducklings on May 2 in Wellington, Florida.

On Thursday, Falbo was sentenced to a year in Palm Beach County Jail and three years probation for both the duck massacre and separate charges of domestic battery. Falbo was ordered to complete 10 hours of community service every month after he is released from jail and receives a mental health evaluation. Falbo will also be prohibited from owning any animals.

"They were in my path so I just kept mowing," Falbo said, according to the police report.

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http://www.people.com/article/man-kills-ducklings-lawnmower

Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum
David A. Brady, Harold G. White, Paul March, James T. Lawrence, and Frank J. Davies
NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas 77058

This paper describes the eight-day August 2013 test campaign designed to investigate and demonstrate viability of using classical magnetoplasmadynamics to obtain a propulsive momentum transfer via the quantum vacuum virtual plasma. This paper will not address the physics of the quantum vacuum plasma thruster, but instead will describe the test integration, test operations, and the results obtained from the test campaign.

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Thrust was observed on both test articles, even though one of the test articles was designed with the expectation that it would not produce thrust. Specifically, one test article contained internal physical modifications that were designed to produce thrust, while the other did not (with the latter being referred to as the “null” test article).

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http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140006052.pdf

NASA confirms that the ‘impossible’ EmDrive thruster really works, after new tests
By Rick Stella — November 3, 2015

Engineer Roger Shawyer’s controversial EmDrive thruster jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech.

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http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/researchers-conduct-successful-new-tests-of-emdrive/#ixzz3qYZoCwPd

NASA confirms ‘impossible’ thruster actually works, could revolutionize space travel
By Drew Prindle — August 1, 2014

When Roger Shawyer first unveiled his EmDrive thruster back around 2003, the scientific community laughed at him. They said it was impossible, that it was based on a flawed concept, and couldn’t work because it goes against the laws of conservation of momentum. But somehow, despite all of the reasons it shouldn’t work, it does.

Scientists at NASA just confirmed it.

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http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/nasa-confirms-impossible-space-drive-actually-works-revolutionize-space-travel/#ixzz3qYauUeve

Warp Drives and Scientific Reasoning
Posted on May 26, 2015 by Sean Carroll

A bit ago, the news streams were once again abuzz with claims that NASA was investigating amazing space drives that violate the laws of physics. And it’s true! If we grant that “NASA” includes “any person employed by NASA,” and “investigating” is defined as “wasting time and money thinking about.”

I say “again” because it was only a few years ago that news spread about a NASA effort aimed at a warp drive, a way to truly break the speed-of-light limit. Of course there are no realistic scenarios along those lines, so the investigators didn’t have any tangible results to present. Instead, they did the next best thing, releasing an artist’s conception of what a space ship powered by their (wholly imaginary) warp drive would look like. (What remains unclear is how the warpiness of the drive affected the design of their fantasy vessel.)

The more recent “news” is not actually about warp drive at all. It’s about propellantless space drives — which are, if anything, even less believable than the warp drives. (There is a whole zoo of nomenclature devoted to categorizing all of the non-existent technologies of this general ilk, which I won’t bother to keep straight.) Warp drives at least inspired by some respectable science — Miguel Alcubierre’s energy-condition-violating spacetime. The “propellantless” stuff, on the other hand, just says “Laws of physics? Screw em.”

You may have heard of a little thing called Newton’s Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you want to go forward, you have to push on something or propel something backwards. The plucky NASA engineers in question aren’t hampered by such musty old ideas. As others have pointed out, what they’re proposing is very much like saying that you can sit in your car and start it moving by pushing on the steering wheel.

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http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/05/26/warp-drives-and-scientific-reasoning/

A Response to the “Drone Papers”: AUMF Targeting is a Deliberate Process with Robust Political Accountability
By Adam Klein | Thursday, October 15, 2015, 5:40 PM

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But if the concern is the process for approving these strikes—“how the U.S. Government decides to assassinate people”—then the Drone Papers should reassure rather than alarm.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/response-drone-papers-aumf-targeting-deliberate-process-robust-political-accountability

The Assassination Complex
Jeremy Scahill | Oct. 15 2015

From his first days as commander in chief, the drone has been President Barack Obama’s weapon of choice, used by the military and the CIA to hunt down and kill the people his administration has deemed — through secretive processes, without indictment or trial — worthy of execution. There has been intense focus on the technology of remote killing, but that often serves as a surrogate for what should be a broader examination of the state’s power over life and death.

Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination.” This has allowed proponents of the drone wars to rebrand assassinations with more palatable characterizations, such as the term du jour, “targeted killings.”

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The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source said.

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https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/

September 28, 2015
Ben Carson’s Scientific Ignorance
By Lawrence M. Krauss


For a man with an impressive educational C.V., Ben Carson makes a lot of intellectual missteps. In his September 16th debate performance, he displayed a profound lack of foreign-policy knowledge; last Sunday, when he said, on “Meet the Press,” that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” he may have seriously crippled his campaign. Still, there’s one area in which Carson’s credentials have seemed unimpeachable. Many people assume that, as a successful surgeon, he has a solid knowledge of technical, medical, and scientific issues.

With the wide release of video from a speech that Carson made to his fellow Seventh-Day Adventists in 2012, however, it’s becoming clear that there are significant gaps. In the speech, he made statements on subjects ranging from evolution to the Big Bang that suggest he never learned or chooses to ignore basic, well-tested scientific concepts. In attempting to refute the Big Bang, for example—which he characterized as a “ridiculous” idea—Carson said:

You have all these highfalutin scientists, and they’re saying that there was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now, these are the same scientists who go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization. So, now you’re going to have this big explosion, and everything becomes perfectly organized. When you ask them about it, they say, “Well we can explain this based on probability theory, because if there’s enough big explosions, over a long enough period of time, billions and billions of years, one of them will be the perfect explosion”…. What you’re telling me is, if I blow a hurricane through a junkyard enough times, over billions and billions of years, eventually, after one of those hurricanes, there will be a 747 fully loaded and ready to fly.

He continued, “It’s even more ridiculous than that, because our solar system, not to mention the universe outside of that, is extraordinarily well organized, to the point where we can predict seventy years away when a comet is coming. Now, [for] that type of organization to just come out of an explosion? I mean, you want to talk about fairy tales, that is amazing.” Finally, he argued that the observed motion of the planets in our solar system would be impossible if there had been a Big Bang.

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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ben-carsons-scientific-ignorance

College kid who put noose on Ole Miss civil rights statue gets prison for sick stunt
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / Thursday, September 17, 2015, 3:12 PM


JACKSON, Miss. — A former University of Mississippi student who admitted helping place a noose on a statue of a civil rights activist is going to prison.

A federal judge sentenced Graeme Phillip Harris on Thursday to six months in prison beginning Jan. 4, and 12 months’ supervised release. Harris’ lawyer argued he didn’t deserve jail time.

Harris pleaded guilty in June to a misdemeanor charge of using a threat of force to intimidate African-American students and employees. Prosecutors say he and two other former students placed a noose on the statue of James Meredith, a black man who integrated Ole Miss amid rioting in 1962.

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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/college-kid-put-noose-ole-statue-prison-article-1.2364583

GOP committee chair opens hearing by suggesting Planned Parenthood funding helped kill his parents
David Edwards | 29 Sep 2015 at 11:33 ET

House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) suggested on Monday that both of his parents might be alive if the government had used Planned Parenthood funding for cancer research.

At a hearing inspired by anti-Planned Parenthood videos, Chaffetz opened by choking up as he explained that both of his parents had died from cancer.

“Cancer in this country kills about 1,500 people a day — a day,” the chairman noted. “And yet, our federal government only spends $5 billion to fight it. If they were shooting 1,500 people a day, if there were rockets coming in, we would be fighting this with everything we’ve got.”

“We don’t spend enough on cancer,” he continued. “And the reason I’m passionate about the hearing today is we’ve got a lot of health care providers who in their hearts know they are trying to provide good.”

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http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/gop-committee-chair-opens-hearing-by-suggesting-planned-parenthood-funding-helped-kill-his-parents/

Singular y'all: a "devious Yankee rumor"?
December 31, 2009 @ 12:10 am

From reader EG:

I am writing you because I encountered the perplexing singular y'all while watching trailers for Disney's newest film, The Princess and the Frog. Now, not being a Southerner I can't attest to my own usage of "y'all," but my linguistic intuition is in accord with your Language Log posting "Out of the y'all zone" (9/18/2005), namely that y'all is generally not used to address singular individuals, but plural and occasionally implied plurals. […] In the cited trailer, Tiana uses singular y'all three times. Addressing the frog with evident dismay, she says "So what now? I reckon y'all want a kiss." at 0:32. And then again, at 2:14, when the frog is dismayed that she will not kiss him after her apparent offer, she retorts "I didn't expect y'all to answer!" In the intervening time, she does refer to him (using apparently less careless or emotionally influenced wording) as standard second person singular "you." Finally, "Y'all don't look that much different… but how'd you get way up there?" 3:13. This last example is perhaps the most perplexing of all, as it contains both forms.

Both the Wikipedia article for the movie and the IMDb page give screenwriting credit to Ron Clements (born in Sioux City, Iowa), John Musker (from Chicago, Illinois), and Rob Edwards (origins unclear). The character of Tiana is acted by Anika Noni Rose, who "was born in Bloomfield, Connecticut to Claudia and John Rose, Jr., a corporate counsel for the city of Hartford". Thus it's not clear whether anyone associated with writing or acting that scene has native intuitions about the likely distribution of y'all in the speech of a young African-American woman from New Orleans.

So it's a reasonable guess that the sprinkling of y'alls in Tiana's speech is a bit of southern spice added by northern chefs. However, it's worth quoting Jan Tillery and Guy Bailey, "Yall in Oklahoma", American Speech 73(3) 1998;

In spite of the large body of writing on yall, we know very little about the form. For example, we know almost nothing about its social and spatial distribution (i.e., about precisely who uses the form and exactly where it is used) and very little about its origins or even its precise meaning. This paradox is largely a consequence of the peculiar research strategy that underlies a great deal of the literature on yall. Rather than basing their conclusions on surveys of usage or ethnographic studies or even attestations in literary dialect, most of those who have written on yall rely on what is best termed the personal testimony of true believers. Especially in response to skeptics who cite apparent singular uses of you-all or yall that they may have overheard by chance, true believers simply give their personal testimony that these forms never occur as singulars in the South. They often do so with zeal, as in Axley's assertion that, in a lifetime of observation, he had "never heard any person of any degree of education or station in life use the expression you all as a singular" (1927, 343). Even Atwood (1962), in an otherwise excellent dialect survey, relies on the strategy of personal testimony. Although he surveyed the use of yall as a plural in Texas and Oklahoma, Atwood did not investigate its possible occurrence as a singular; he merely asserted that the form could not be used as a singular, adding that "if anything is likely to lead to another Civil War, it is the Northerner's accusation that Southerners use you all to refer to only one person" (1962, 69). In fact, only one study (Richardson 1984) provides anything like systematic evidence on the possible use of yall as a singular (she argues that the form is used only as a plural and that apparent singular occurrences usually reflect Southerners' exaggeration of their dialect for social effect); few studies provide any data at all on the social and spatial distribution of the form, either singular or plural. A century of fervent scholarship on you-all and yall, then, has produced mostly fervor.

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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2009

RONALD R. BUTTERS

DATA CONCERNING PUTATIVE SINGULAR Y'ALL
American Speech Fall 2001 76(3): 335-336; doi:10.1215/00031283-76-3-335

http://americanspeech.dukejournals.org/content/76/3/335.citation