Somewhat better now, therefore:

Couple of things found thanks to Uncle:
"We don't care if the law is actually enforced, we just want it there to threaten people with."


Stupid in Tennessee.  For public safety and money.  Probably mostly the latter.


And it gets even interestinger in New York:
Sheriff Lorey volunteered his county to participate in the state's already stumbling permit recertification program. As a result, some Fulton County handgun owners will receive "invitations" to go online and renew their permits under the new system—a process that's supposed to occur ever five years.

"I'm asking everyone that gets those invitations to throw them in the garbage because that is where they belong," says Lorey in the video below. "They go in the garbage because, for 100 years or more, ever since the inception of pistol permits, nobody has ever been required to renew them."

But what's to be gained by volunteering the county and then urging people to toss the applications?

"Let's have everybody's permit expire the same day and let 'em see what they're going to do with it."


A AR lower that will fit both AR-15 and AR-10 uppers.


More on the terrorists in France and the weapons involved.  Including this surprises-nobody-here bit:
In 2010, police in Belgium stated: "Counter to what you may have heard, it's not easy to get hold of a Kalashnikov." To prove them wrong, a reporter for Belgian newspaper La Derniere Heure managed to do so in less than six hours.
Someone tell Howard Dean, maybe he'll start screaming again.


From the third-world shithole that is New Jersey.
And to anyone stupid enough to want to vote for Christie for President: stop breathing.


Those elongated skulls found in Peru?  Some DNA analysis has been done:
It had mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far. But a few fragments I was able to sequence from this sample indicate that if these mutations will hold we are dealing with a new human-like creature, very distant from Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
This should get interesting.

And in more "The science is NOT settled" news,
The ‘Petralona man’, or Archanthropus of Petralona, as it has since been called, was found to be 700,000 years old, making it the oldest human europeoid (presenting European traits) of that age ever discovered in Europe. Dr Poulianos’ research showed that the Petralona man evolved separately in Europe and was not an ancestor of a species that came out of Africa.


Dr. Spencer is unhappy with the current state of climate science.  And doesn't think much of most journalists, either.
What changed is the politics. And not just among the politicians. At AMS or AGU scientific conferences, political correctness and advocacy are now just as pervasive as as they have become in journalism school. Many (mostly older) scientists no longer participate and many have even resigned in protest.

Science as a methodology for getting closer to the truth has been all but abandoned. It is now just one more tool to achieve political ends.

Reports that 2014 was the “hottest” year on record feed the insatiable appetite the public has for definitive, alarming headlines. It doesn’t matter that even in the thermometer record, 2014 wasn’t the warmest within the margin of error. Who wants to bother with “margin of error”? Journalists went into journalism so they wouldn’t have to deal with such technical mumbo-jumbo. I said this six weeks ago, as did others, but no one cares unless a mainstream news source stumbles upon it and is objective enough to report it.