Category Archives: News

News

Hillary Clinton e-mail administrator to plead the fifth

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

This is from The Hill.

Excerpt:

The man believed to have set up and maintained Hillary Clinton’s private email server will assert his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and refuse to answer questions as part of an open records lawsuit against the State Department.

Bryan Pagliano will decline to answer questions from Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group, during a deposition scheduled for Monday, his lawyers wrote in a court filing on Wednesday afternoon. 

The move forecloses the possibility that Pagliano would break his months of silence about the server issue, even as scrutiny has intensified on his role.

Pagliano’s lawyers told Judicial Watch more than a week ago that he would not be answering any questions, they claimed in their filing on Wednesday, and asked that it drop its subpoena. The organization refused.

In the filing, Pagliano’s lawyers tried to have a federal judge block Judicial Watch from recording his deposition, given his planned refusal to answer questions.

[…]“Given the constitutional implications, the absence of any proper purpose for video recording the deposition, and the considerable risk of abuse, the court should preclude Judicial Watch … from creating an audiovisual recording of Mr. Pagliano’s deposition,” they wrote.

Videotaped depositions “pose a serious danger to deponents invoking the Fifth Amendment,” the lawyers added, pointing to past court decisions warning that the video makes a good “soundbite.”

[…]The IT expert has previously refused to answer questions on Capitol Hill, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights before the House Select Committee on Benghazi and rejecting requests from leaders of the Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees to answer their questions.

Last month, the State Department said that it had lost the backup archive of Pagliano’s emails from his time at the department. However, it had been able to cobble together some emails through the accounts of other officials.

The sound bite of the IT administrator pleading the fifth would make a wonderful ad against Hillary. And don’t forget how Lois Lerner of the IRS also pleaded the fifth about the Obama administration’s persecution of conservative and Christian groups in an election year. These Democrats wouldn’t want to incriminate themselves and go to jail, would they? Better to plead the fifth and avoid being held accountable for what you did. It’s the Democrat way.

News

Report: Republican-governed states score highest on fiscal measures

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Ranking of states by overall fiscal solvency
Ranking of states by overall fiscal solvency

(Click here for larger map image)

A new report prepared by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University finds that Republican-governed states are the strongest according to five fiscal measures. Democrat-governed states lag far behind. (H/T William)

The report says:

The financial health of each state can be analyzed through the states’ own audited financial reports. By looking at states’ basic financial statistics on revenues, expenditures, cash, assets, lia­bilities, and debt, states may be ranked according to how easily they will be able to cover short-term and long-term bills, including pension obligations.

This ranking of the 50 states and Puerto Rico is based on their fiscal solvency in five separate cate­gories:

  • Cash solvency. Does a state have enough cash on hand to cover its short-term bills?
  • Budget solvency. Can a state cover its fiscal year spending with current revenues, or does it have a budget shortfall?
  • Long-run solvency. Can a state meet its long-term spending commitments? Will there be enough money to cushion it from economic shocks or other long-term fiscal risks?
  • Service-level solvency. How much “fiscal slack” does a state have to increase spending if citizens demand more services?
  • Trust fund solvency. How much debt does a state have? How large are its unfunded pen-sion and healthcare liabilities?

If you look at the map, you’ll notice that most the worst states are run by Democrats, while the best states are run by Republicans.

Investors Business Daily explains:

[W]hile Mercatus makes no mention of the states’ political leanings, every state in the top 10 except for Florida is solidly red, meaning those states voted for the Republican in each of the past four presidential elections (see table). And Florida has had a Republican governor since 1999, and the state House and Senate are both controlled by Republicans.

At the other end of the spectrum, except for Kentucky, the 10 worst states are all solidly blue. And all but two of the governors since 1947 have been Democrats.

Politicians, especially the “pragmatic” ones, are always talking about how they are just interested in what works. When it comes to keeping spending, debt and long-term liabilities under control, the place to look seems obvious.

The conservative approach of lower taxes and limited government is a winner, while big-spending liberalism invariably leads to financial ruin.

Kentucky, of course, is the home state of Mitch McConnell, and only just elected a Republican governor (Matt Bevin) who is a fiscal conservative. Every previous governor of Kentucky since 1971 was a Democrat, except for Ernie Fletcher.

The point here is that the real reason that some Democrat states look good is because they are borrowing money to stay afloat, an piling up debt. The same is true with our illustrious President Obama. He doubled the national debt from 10 to 20 trillion, and he has managed to deliver below average GDP growth and a 38-year-low labor force participation rate. He was the worst President in the history of the country (not just on fiscal issues, but on social issues and foreign policy, too). But, since he added 10 trillion to the debt, he looks OK. We would have had better fiscal performance in the last eight years if we had elected a honeydew melon as President.

News

Study: biological convergence found in human and squid eye genes

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

We have to start this post with the definition of convergence in biology.

In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.

It is the opposite of divergent evolution, where related species evolve different traits.

On a molecular level, this can happen due to random mutation unrelated to adaptive changes; see long branch attraction. In cultural evolution, convergent evolution is the development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environmental conditions by different peoples with different ancestral cultures. An example of convergent evolution is the similar nature of the flight/wings of insects, birds, pterosaurs, and bats.

All four serve the same function and are similar in structure, but each evolved independently.

With that being said, here is an article from Real Clear Science with me.

Eyes and wings are among the most stunning innovations evolution has created. Remarkably these features have evolved multiple times in different lineages of animals. For instance, the avian ancestors of birds and the mammalian ancestors of bats both evolved wings independently, in an example of convergent evolution. The same happened for the eyes of squid and humans. Exactly how such convergent evolution arises is not always clear.

In a new study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, researchers have found that, despite belonging to completely different lineages, humans and squid evolved through tweaks to the same gene.

Like all organs, the eye is the product of many genes working together. The majority of those genes provide information about how to make part of the eye. For example, one gene provides information to construct a light-sensitive pigment. Another gene provides information to make a lens.

Most of the genes involved in making the eye read like a parts list – this gene makes this, and that gene makes that. But some genes orchestrate the construction of the eye. Rather than providing instructions to make an eye part, these genes provide information about where and when parts need to be constructed and assembled. In keeping with their role in controlling the process of eye formation, these genes are called “master control genes”.

The most important of master control genes implicated in making eyes is called Pax6. The ancestral Pax6 gene probably orchestrated the formation of a very simple eye – merely a collection of light-sensing cells working together to inform a primitive organism of when it was out in the open versus in the dark, or in the shade.

Today the legacy of that early Pax6 gene lives on in an incredible diversity of organisms, from birds and bees, to shellfish and whales, from squid to you and me. This means the Pax6 gene predates the evolutionary diversification of these lineages – during the Cambrian period, some 500m years ago.

This is an example of convergence because the same gene is present in animals that DO NOT SHARE A RECENT COMMON ANCESTOR. In short, this is exactly identical to the case where a computer programmer reuses the same library of functions in two completely different programs. Software engineers re-use libraries all the time in different programs. It makes sense in an software engineering paradigm.

But this example of convergence makes no sense on naturalistic evolution – random mutation and selection does not create the same design in two animals with no common ancestry. It screams out design.

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