Rubio Blasts Obama: Left-Wing Strong Man

H/T Drudge, at National Review:

Earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio made an auspicious debut.

Unlike so many first turns in the upper chamber, Rubio’s stirring remarks, which celebrated American exceptionalism, caught fire. The Florida Republican’s words were cited by Senate colleagues and championed by conservatives. To no one’s surprise, the push to put Rubio on the 2012 ticket only increased, even though the charismatic freshman continues to swat away the chatter.

Look for the Rubio buzz to continue. In an interview with National Review Online, he says that he will take to the Senate floor for his second speech this week — and this time he will have President Obama in his crosshairs.

Rubio tells us that he will respond to Obama’s recent press conference, where the president reveled in class-warfare bluster. “Quite frankly, I am both disappointed for our country and shocked at some of the rhetoric,” he says. “It was rhetoric, I thought, that was more appropriate for some left-wing strong man than for the president of the United States.”

“Talking about corporate jets and oil companies,” Rubio says, missed the point. “Everybody here agrees that our tax code is broken,” he says, and he is open to discussing tax reform. “But don’t go around telling people that the reason you are not doing well is because some rich guy is in a corporate jet or some oil company is making too much money.”

Watching Obama brandish such talking points made Rubio wince. “Three years into his presidency, he is a failed president,” he says. “He just has not done a good job. Life in America today, by every measure, is worse than it was when he took over.”…

…(read the last sentence here, it is worth it)….

ReasonTV Talks About Fracking

From video description:

Hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking” – is a fast-growing source of natural gas used to create electricity, heat homes, and more. It involves forcing water, sand, and chemicals into super-deep wells and then recovering the gas released during the process.

Fracking is also highly controversial, with viral video hits such as “The Fracking Song” and the 2010 documentary Gasland contending that the process leads to polluted drinking water, home explosions, and worse.

Fracking has been around for more than 60 years and over 100,000 gas wells are dug per year, most of them in sparsely populated areas in the western U.S. With the discovery of the Marcellus Shale in the eastern part of the country, fracking is increasingly common in populated parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, leading to heightened tensions between drillers and environmentalists. Indeed, the attorney general of New York has called for a moratorium on the practice in the Empire State.

Is fracking safe? And what are the potential benefits that will be forfeited if the practice is ended? Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with science correspondent Ronald Bailey to learn the truth about fracking. Bailey reports that the cases of contaminated water supplies were the result of poorly designed wells that had nothing to do with fracking itself. As important, he notes that the gas generated by fracking would not only massively increase American energy supply, it would do so with a relatively clean and cheap fuel.

Shot by Jim Epstein and Josh Swain; Edited by Swain.

Pervious Concrete (Amazing Stuff!)

Pervious concrete, a type of concrete without sand, can drain hundreds of inches of rain per hour, allowing water to filter into groundwater stores below, rather than run off into storm drains.

Paved surfaces are so ubiquitous in urban areas today that most of us give little thought to the impact they have on water quality and the health of the environment. But here’s the sobering reality: As more available land area in the country gets paved over, a larger amount of rainwater ends up falling on impervious surfaces such as parking lots, driveways, sidewalks, and streets rather than soaking into the soil. This creates an imbalance in the natural ecosystem and leads to a host of problems including erosion, flash floods, water table depletion, and pollution of rivers, lakes, and coastal waters as rainwater rushing across pavement surfaces picks up everything from oil and grease spills to deicing salts and chemical fertilizers.

A simple solution to avoiding these problems is to stop installing the impervious surfaces that block natural water infiltration into the soil. But few of us are ready to give up our paved roads, driveways, and parking lots. Rather than building them with conventional concrete or asphalt, more and more communities, municipalities, and businesses are switching to pervious concrete or porous pavement, a material that offers the inherent durability and low life-cycle costs of a typical concrete pavement while retaining stormwater runoff and replenishing local watershed systems.

Instead of preventing infiltration of water into the soil, pervious pavement assists the process by capturing rainwater in a network of voids and allowing it to percolate into the underlying soil. In many cases, pervious concrete roadways and parking lots can double as water retention structures, reducing or eliminating the need for traditional stormwater management systems such as retention ponds and sewer tie-ins.

Self-Contradictory [e.g., incoherent] Sayings

You can’t know anything for sure. Are you sure of that? • You should never judge.  Is that your judgment? • There is no certainty. Are you certain of that? • All things are relative. Then that statement is relative, so it is not true, thus all things are not relative. If a statement is relative then it is not binding, so all things cannot be relative. • You can’t know anything. Do you know that? • No one can know anything about God. Do you know that about God? To assert that God is unknowable, is to say a lot about God. • What is true for you is not true for me. Well, what is true for me is that you are wrong. • Logic is just sophistry and isn’t always true. That’s self-refuting because the claimant used logic to attempt to disprove logic. To declare that the law of non-contradiction isn’t true, is to prove that law is true. It has to be true for the assertion to be made.  • There are no laws of logic. The attempt to refute the laws of logic requires the employment of the laws of logic. These Laws of Reason are invariant and universal truths. The laws of logic are nonmaterial, invariant, transcendent, atemporal, universal, and necessary. They require God because He is nonmaterial, immutable, transcendent, atemporal, universal in knowledge, and necessary. • The only true knowledge of reality is discovered through the positive sciences. That statement is not true because it is not found in the positive sciences. • We can’t be married to any idea. Are you married to that idea? • Philosophy can add nothing to science. Is that your philosophy for your science? • How to Believe in Nothing and Set Yourself Free (a title of a book). Is that what you believe? • Language is not useful for a definition. Is that your definition in which you employ language? • I can’t believe in anything that I can’t see or feel. Can you see or feel the point of that statement? • There are no wrong needs. I need that to be wrong. • All knowledge begins with experience. Did you experience that? • God is indescribable. Is that your description of God? • All speculations of the reality of absolutes are an illusion. Is that statement an absolute? If it is, it is an illusion, thus it is false. • Everything is just an illusion. Then that statement is an illusion, so it is false, thus all things are not illusions. If people really believed this, they wouldn’t look both ways when crossing the street, but they do, proving they can’t consistently hold this view. They must depend on the Christian worldview. • “Pundits all make over $50,000.00, so they can’t understand anything” (Chris Matthews, wealthy pundit).  Chris, do you understand that? • “All knowledge is confined to the realm of experience” (Immanuel Kant). Have you experienced all knowledge? • The whole notion of truth must be scrapped and replaced by the ongoing process of refutation. Then that statement is not true. • Every assertion is false. Then that assertion is false. • No truth is immutable. Then that statement is mutable, so it is not true. • Truth can never be rationally attained but remains an elusive myth and an erroneous pre-commitment. Then that is an elusive myth and is not true. • True knowledge is only that knowledge that can be empirically verified. Can you empirically verify that statement? • “That intelligence, when froze in dogmatic social philosophy generates a vicious cycle of blind oscillation” (John Dewey). Is that statement frozen in dogmatic philosophy? If yes, its blind oscillation, therefore it is false. • Truth is not a boxy, dogmatic thing with hard corners attached by dogmatists. Are you dogmatic about that? • Truth does not consist of words, propositions or assertions that can be communicated by language. Are those words or assertions communicated by language? • Here, we have no rules. Is that your rule? • Lies, lies, everywhere you turn are lies. Is that a lie? • Apart from mathematics, we can know nothing for sure. Is that proposition a mathematical equation? No. Then you are providing in what you say, the very basis to reject what you say. • Commit to the flames any propositions or assertions that do not contain mathematics or facts obtained from observable experiments. Did you test that statement with experiments or does that statement contain mathematics? No. Then commit it to the flames on the basis of its own statement. • We can know nothing about reality. Do you know that about reality? • “The line of demarcation between knowledge and mere opinion is determined by one criterion: falsebility by empirical evidence, by observed phenomena” (Popper). Did you observe that? If not, then that is just mere opinion. • The only thing that is predictable is unpredictability. Do you think that prediction is unpredictable? • Only things that are blue are true. Is that statement blue? • I doubt everything. If you tried to doubt everything, you would be clipping off the rope you’re holding onto, because the notion of doubting, itself, presupposes certainty. • There are no good reasons for holding to the belief in objective knowledge. Is that objective knowledge? • We cannot achieve certainty because it is based on postulates. Are you certain about that postulate? • Nobody’s right. Are you right about that? • Every attempt to fashion an absolute philosophy of truth and right is a delusion. Is that true and right? • All I believe in are the laws of logic. Is that statement one of the laws of logic? • All English sentences consist of four words. This sentence comments on all English sentences, including itself. It fails to meet its own demands, hence it is false. • Seen on display in a store: “I Love You Only” Valentine cards: Now available in multipacks.

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