They didn't back down, they lost the vote, 3-2.

Enjoy your $60,000,000,000 in new taxes.

No snowflake believes that it is responsible for the avalanche.

Vaccines have a non-zero risk. Not vaccinating one child has very little risk to that one child. The risk of not vaccinating is mostly in the aggregate, rather than the individual. I suspect that some fraction of the people not getting vaccines for their children are hoping to be free riders, trading one tiny risk for another.

I don't know how common it is, my point is just that not wanting your kids vaccinated isn't necessarily the same as thinking the earth is flat. On a related note, not wanting to meddle in other people's decisions about their children makes you "not-a-statist", not anti-vaccine or anti-science.

In the end, I think the real problem is that we have unions running our schools for the benefit of the union members, rather than for the children. Plus, math hasn't been cool for decades, not since the end of Apollo. If kids don't want to learn math, and if the schools aren't pushing it hard, you end up with an innumerate population.

If you can't do math, then Nullius in verba is just a bumper sticker, not a reminder. Certainly not an order.

Next, we have all manner of quackery on parade. Psychiatrists and psychologists with opposing, but equally untestable, views in criminal trials. Fat, cholesterol, salt and other nonsense warnings from the USDA while they create a diabetes epidemic. Economists pushing more debt to cure our strangulating debt problems.

Those that practice scientistry do not have a good track record when they try to pass off their non-scientific ideas as scientific ones, and the people have noticed. They may not be able to do science, but they can tell when the other guy can't either, or just hasn't.

Which isn't a dig against their work ethic. We know that the climate model circle jerk crew runs nonstop, validating their models against other models instead of against nature. And the Ministry of Truth is tirelessly adjusting the historic data to fit today's fashions. And I hear that Mann is again defending his secret program that turns arbitrary data into hockeysticks.

(For those that are wondering, Briggs has a climate model that you can run on a pocket calculator, and it has more predictive skill than any of the autoregressive abominations being passed off as "science" these days. And the plots of corrections to the temperature record, made by people with the good sense to download and keep old copies for comparison to new editions, are hilarious.)

If you want to see people that can't listen to reason and accept evidence, head over to realclimate and ask why the past keeps getting colder every year. Or why people that have received billions (with a B) in government money are trying to refute a paper by flinging poo over one of the authors getting around a million in private funding.

By context, would you perhaps be talking about all of the quotes and video clips of the bill's authors, consultants and supporters in congress saying the exact opposite?

I'm tired of all this bad news about Obamacare. Could we maybe just all agree not to talk about it any more until there is some good news to report?

Mexico is now keeping track of vaccinations for every illegal that crosses the border into the US? The ones from Honduras? The ones from Yemen?

My hat is off to you sir. You managed to troll me. For a while there, I was seriously thinking that you were honestly failing to understand the difference that I have now clearly described three times.

You still don't get the distinction, do you? You are still turning adjacency into participation, and confirming that he was adjacent into confirming that he was participating.

Do you have anything that contradicts the version of the story where he gave a speech to a group that was unaffiliated with (but also had some overlap with) the EURO convention? I'm looking for a quote, or something written by him or his staff that unambiguously states it, not just an article where the author (like you) misrepresents his statement.

I once "appeared" at a comic book convention. I gave an informal talk in a hospitality room in the same facility, the same day. I was actually there for the bitcoin conference next door (the non-floor spaces were shared between the two portions of the facility), but by your logic, I just "copped" to being part of the comic book industry.

My first thought is that this is based on information.

** Crackpot speculation alert **

c seems to be a limitation on the speed of information more than anything else. When a random photon comes in, the information arrives at the same time as the photon. If the photon has been selected in some way that allows you to make predictions, the information would arrive slightly early. To prevent this, the photons need to slow down so that the early information doesn't arrive before it should.

I don't think it does.

The Lorentz equations use the constant c, which happens to be the same as the maximum speed of light in a vacuum. Tricking some light into going slower doesn't change the constant, and it isn't a big deal to go faster than some particular light (see Cherenkov Radiation), but it would be a big deal to go faster than c.

Perhaps your google skills are better than mine. I keep finding articles like these:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

The quotes in those articles support the scenario above. Am I missing something?

If you give a speech to a group of people, and find out later that a portion of the audience were also members of an unpopular group, then acknowledging that you gave the speech, and accepting that you should have looked into the group a little closer, is not the same thing as admitting to being on center stage in a white hood yourself.

Do you get that distinction?

I haven't been following this in detail, and I personally don't give a shit if this guy was a card carrying Klansman or just some dude that didn't bother vetting a group that wanted to hear his speech on a topic that he was passionate about. What I do care about is people making unsubstantiated claims, and so far I haven't been able to find anything else.

So, if you have something more, please let me know, and I'll shut up. Otherwise, perhaps you should ask yourself why you are so willing to make this leap of faith.

It will display the temperature preferred by the woman, but control the air handler based on the man's preference. Because the man wrote the software for the thermostat.

At least that's how mine works.

Were you out sick from school when the immune system was taught?

Nothing (NOTHING) has a 100% infection rate on exposure, largely because your immune system fights off most of the crap that you are exposed to, often without you even noticing. Having a well functioning immune system will indeed improve your odds when you are exposed.

Vaccines work by boosting your immune system. They aren't a magic shield that turns away pathogens before they land on you; they help your immune system respond faster and stronger by teaching it, in advance, how to deal with a pathogen it hasn't seen previously. And they aren't 100% effective either. If they were, no one would give a shit if other people were vaccinated or not. If that last part isn't obvious to you, think about it for a minute or two.

So, in summary, vaccines are one thing, out of many, that help your immune system and reduce your chances of infection. If you assign liability, or worse, criminality, to not boosting your immune system in one way, why not the others too? Or why not to people that do things intentionally that reduce their immunity? (Keep in mind that there exists in the west a protected class of people, membership depending on choosing behavior that has astonishingly powerful negative effects on the immune system.)

For those with weak reading comprehension:

1. EURO organizes a conference.
2. Knight, acting for EURO, books a hotel's conference facilities.
3. The facilities include a hospitality room, generally like a lounge.
4. Knight uses the hospitality room for other purposes, before the EURO conference starts.
5. One of those other things is a meeting for a neighborhood association.
6. Scalise spoke at that meeting, in the hospitality room.

Now make sure your tinfoil hat is on good and tight because the next step is a doozy:

7. Lamar White, Jr. asks three or four people if they've ever heard of the association in question, and they haven't.
8. Lamar White, Jr. assumes that any time a group of 3 or more people gather they must obtain government permission and get recorded on the state registry of corporations and DBAs, so he queries that database and finds nothing.
9. Lamar White, Jr. thus concludes that the whole thing was made up to hide Scalise's involvement.

Note also that step 6 involves "speaking at an event HOSTED by", but not "speaking TO a conference of".

http://dailyanarchist.com/2012...

http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroo...

He was charged for selling agricultural fireworks (to scare away pests) on ebay. Turns out that the manufacturer was making them too powerful and/or not following regulations that limit their sale to farmers, ranchers, and growers.

He was also the only person prosecuted over the incident, despite the same fireworks being sold all over, including Cabelas. (Ken Shearer is mentioned in the CPSC press release, but his case is unrelated.)

It must be rough for those that rejected Stallman as "too extreme", catching up to where he was in the 80s.