Platte River Networks employee Paul Combetta, the person who wiped Hillary Clinton’s private server and email archive with BleachBit, plead the Fifth Tuesday and refused to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee.
“On advise of counsel I respectfully decline to answer and assert my Fifth Amendment privilege,” Combetta said.
Platte River Networks is the company employed by Clinton to host her private email servers and email accounts during her time at the State Department.
According to the timing presented FBI report on the criminal investigation into the servers, Combetta wiped the server with BleachBit four weeks after the investigation started and two weeks after Congress requested all emails be preserved. Combetta has also been accused of wiping the server while under subpoena.
Combetta’s colleague, Bill Thornton, was also called to testify and plead the fifth.
You might remember that another Obama official, Lois Lerner, also pleaded the 5th, during an investigation of the Obama administration’s effort to punish conservative organizations using the IRS.
Details:
Lois Lerner, former director of IRS exempt organizations, invoked her Fifth Amendment rights again Wednesday before a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the IRS targeting American citizens for their political beliefs.
“On the advice of my counsel, I respectfully exercise my Fifth Amendment right and decline to answer that question,” Lerner said in response to a slew of questions by Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) regarding the IRS targeting of tea party and conservative groups.
You’ll recall that in Obama’s re-election year, the IRS persecuted conservative groups in order to help Obama win re-election. That’s what government workers do with the salaries that taxpayers pay them. The only solution, of course, is to shut down their departments and only allow the federal government to perform the duties laid out for them in the Constitution. But it looks like Americans prefer to get goodies from their neighbors more than they care about honesty and transparency in government.
The MIT physicist says that the fine-tuning is real, and is best explained by positing the existence of an infinite number of universes that are not fine-tuned – the so-called multiverse.
Excerpt:
While challenging the Platonic dream of theoretical physicists, the multiverse idea does explain one aspect of our universe that has unsettled some scientists for years: according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are required for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces and certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be “fine-tuned” to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this fine-tuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it. Actually, the word anthropic, from the Greek for “man,” is a misnomer: if these fundamental parameters were much different from what they are, it is not only human beings who would not exist. No life of any kind would exist.
If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”
Intelligent design, however, is an answer to fine-tuning that does not appeal to most scientists. The multiverse offers another explanation. If there are countless different universes with different properties—for example, some with nuclear forces much stronger than in our universe and some with nuclear forces much weaker—then some of those universes will allow the emergence of life and some will not. Some of those universes will be dead, lifeless hulks of matter and energy, and others will permit the emergence of cells, plants and animals, minds. From the huge range of possible universes predicted by the theories, the fraction of universes with life is undoubtedly small. But that doesn’t matter. We live in one of the universes that permits life because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.
I thought I was going to have to go outside this article to refute the multiverse, but Lightman is honest enough to refute it himself:
The… conjecture that there are many other worlds… [T]here is no way they can prove this conjecture. That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.
Sound familiar? Theologians are accustomed to taking some beliefs on faith. Scientists are not. All we can do is hope that the same theories that predict the multiverse also produce many other predictions that we can test here in our own universe. But the other universes themselves will almost certainly remain a conjecture.
The multiverse is not pure nonsense, it is theoretically possible. The problem is that the multiverse generator itself would require fine-tuning, so the multiverse doesn’t get rid of the problem. And, as Lightman indicates, we have no independent experimental evidence for the existence of the multiverse in any case. Atheists just have to take it on faith, and hope that their speculations will be proved right. Meanwhile, the fine-tuning is just as easily explained by postulating God, and we have independent evidence for God’s existence, like the the origin of biological information, the sudden appearance of animal body plans, the argument from consciousness, and so on. Even if the naturalists could explain the fine-tuning, they would still have a lot of explaining to do. Theism (intelligent causation) is the simplest explanation for all of the things we learn from the progress of science.
We need to be frank about atheists and their objections to the progress of science. Within the last 100 years, we have discovered that the physical universe came into being out of nothing 15 billion years ago, and we have discovered that this one universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life. I don’t think it’s like that the last 100 years of scientific progress on the origins question are going to be overturned so that science once again affirms what atheists believe about the universe. Things are going the wrong way for atheists – at least with respect to science.
See it in action
To see these arguments examined in a debate with a famous atheist, simply watch the debate between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens, and judge which debater is willing to form his beliefs on scientific progress, and which debater is forming his beliefs against the science we have today, and hoping that the good science we have today based on experiments will be overturned by speculative theories at some point in the future. When you watch that debate, it becomes very clear that Christian theists are interested in conforming their beliefs to science, and atheists are very interested in speculating against what science has shown in order to maintain their current pre-scientific view. That’s not what rational people ought to do when confronted with evidence.
You might think that there are a lot of poor people in America, given the way that Democrats are always talking about the need to take money away from job creating businesses and working families to hand out in welfare to the 47% who pay no income tax. The U.S. Census says that lots of people are poor in America. But is it really true?
Here’s an article from the Daily Signal to explain.
It says:
On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released its annual poverty report declaring that 43.1 million Americans lived in poverty in 2015.
We should be concerned about any American living in real material hardship, but much of what the Census reports about poverty is misleading.
Here are 15 facts about poverty in America that may surprise you. (All statistics are taken from U.S. government surveys.)
Poor households routinely report spending $2.40 for every $1 of income the Census says they have.
The average poor American lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair and has more living space than the average nonpoor person in France, Germany, or England.
Eighty-five percent of poor households have air conditioning.
Nearly three-fourths of poor households have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.
Nearly two-thirds of poor households have cable or satellite TV.
Half have a personal computer; 43 percent have internet access.
Two-thirds have at least one DVD player
More than half of poor families with children have a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.
One-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.
(The above data on electronic appliances owned by poor households come from a 2009 government survey so the ownership rates among the poor today are most likely higher.)
Activist groups spread alarming stories about widespread hunger in the nation, but in reality, most of the poor do not experience hunger or food shortages. The U.S. Department of Agriculture collects data on these topics in its household food security survey. For 2009, the survey showed:
Only 4 percent of poor parents reported that their children were hungry even once during the prior year because they could not afford food.
Some 18 percent of poor adults reported they were hungry even once in the prior year due to lack of money for food.
The following are facts about the housing conditions of the poor.
Poverty and homelessness are sometimes confused. Over the course of a year, only 4 percent of poor persons become homeless (usually a temporary condition).
Only 9.5 percent of the poor live in mobile homes or trailers; the rest live in apartments or houses.
Forty percent of the poor own their own homes, typically, a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths that is in good repair.
The left claims that one in 25 families with children live in “extreme poverty” on less than $2 per person per day. Government surveys of self-reported spending by families show the actual number is one in 4,469, not one in 25. The typical family allegedly in “extreme poverty” reports spending $25 for every $1 of income the left claims they have.
Why does the Census identify so many individuals as “poor” who do not appear to be poor in any normal sense of the term? The answer lies in the misleading way the Census measures “poverty.” The Census defines a family as poor if its income falls below a specified income threshold. (For example, the poverty threshold for a family of four in 2015 was $24,036.) But in counting “income,” the Census excludes nearly all welfare benefits.
In 2014, government spent over $1 trillion on means-tested welfare for poor and low income people. (This figure does not include Social Security or Medicare.) Welfare spending on cash, food, and housing was $342 billion.
I’ve talked before about how welfare programs incentivize young women to have fatherless children, and how fatherless children put a burden on society through crime and other unhealthy behaviors. What is really going on here is that there is not very much real poverty in the United States, but talking about poverty is just a way that Democrats trick the public into supporting more confiscation of wealth from job creators so that the Democrats can buy votes from people.
The right solution to poverty, of course, is to encourage young people to marry, to eliminate teacher unions, to enact vouchers for school choice, and to give financial incentives to people who want to start a business or hire people for their existing business. Democrats are opposed to all of these measures, because they rely on keeping people unmarried, unemployed and dependent on welfare in order to get votes. Government spending to alleviate poverty is just vote buying, especially when the welfare is not temporary and attached to a requirement to look for work.
WINTERY KNIGHT 