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Allergies have become a widespread in developed countries: hay fever, eczema, hives and asthma are all increasingly prevalent. The reason? Excessive cleanliness is to blame according to Dr. Guy Delespesse, a professor at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Medicine.

So go out there and get dirty.

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Briefly, a VAT resembles a sales tax passed in the end onto the consumer at the register. But the government collects most of the money during the stages of a product’s manufacture. Since manufacturers are writing the checks, it’s an extremely efficient, virtually fraud-free way to collect money.

But it’s never gotten much support in the U.S. for two reasons. First, it’s a regressive tax: Low-earning families pay a bigger portion of their incomes than the wealthy. And second, the VAT — first introduced by a French civil servant in 1954 — has fueled the rapid growth of government in France, Germany, and even Japan. In fact, no other country spends the kind of money we’re planning to spend without a VAT. The numbers tell the story.

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Guess the standards are what they are at the Niagara County Community College.

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They used their disguises to fool officials for more than a week despite more than 300 members of the local constabulary searching for them.

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Children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Williams syndrome (WS) are overly friendly because they do not fear strangers. Now, a study shows that these children also do not develop negative attitudes about other ethnic groups, even though they show patterns of gender stereotyping found in other children. “This is the first evidence that different forms of stereotypes are biologically dissociable,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who led the study published today in Current Biology¹.

So racists are normal, and non-racists have a brain disorder. I wonder whether this new fact will get as much publicity as it would where things the other way? Somehow I doubt it.

UPDATE: And, as you might expect, Steve Sailer has a lot of fun with this.

Read it.

A UK-based milkman and former football manager has questioned whether Google Street View played a role in a series of attempted burglaries on his home – one successful – after Google’s virtual window onto the world’s very real streets exposed a photo of his wide open garage.

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What a great way to prolong the recession and make it worse. Thanks, Barry.

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I had a night like that in college. Fortunately nobody in my entryway spoke Klingon.

Emach is my kinda guy.

This is a classic example of two douchebags who want to use some hairbrained notion of charity as a premise to get other people to fund a 3 month vacation to scratch their own selfish itches.  Who wants to bet me that at least one of these idiots will write a book about his life-changing experience while on the road wasting your money?

Steve Sailer yawns.

A recurrent theme in David Remnick’s biography of Obama, The Bridge, is The Boredom of Barack: He was bored as president of the Harvard Law Review, bored as a civil rights lawyer, bored as a law school lecturer, bored as a state senator, and bored as a U.S. Senator. The one thing that really interests him is writing about himself. (Well, that and power and praise.)

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Recent health care reform legislation doesn’t take any meaningful steps towards reducing or controlling costs. In fact, it explicitly forbids states from trying to curtail the costs of malpractice litigation in any way that would reduce lawyers’ fees.

Anytime we tell anyone anything, any kind of advice, doctors must consider the risk of a lawsuit. Everything we say and do is supposed to be documented, too– to defend ourselves. Every wonder why the doc spends so much time scribbling in the chart, instead of talking to you? It’s not because we like writing. It’s because every single day we’re reminded that the chart is our only defense.

The Economist tells it like it is.

The most serious problem facing taxpayers is complexity, says Nina Olson, who is the national taxpayer advocate—the head of a watchdog service created by Congress in 1996 and ignored ever since.

Politicians use the tax code to encourage things they like, such as driving hybrid cars, and to discourage things they don’t like, such as work.

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A common gout drug, colchicine, has been around for so long that pre-dated the FDA and until last year, it had never been approved by the agency. As part of a push by the FDA to bring such drugs under its umbrella, a company called URL Pharma commissioned studies to show that colchicine was safe and effective, and last summer the FDA approved the company’s version and gave URL three years of marketing exclusivity for the drug.

Here come the unintended consequences. While the FDA says it hoped there wouldn’t be a significant run-up in the price of colchicine — sold as Colcrys by URL — the retail cost has soared to more than $5 a bill from the previous pennies a tablet. URL Pharma also sued five makers of manufacturers of colchicine, saying they have been illegally marketing their colchicine products since Colcrys’s approval. One of those makers has settled the matter and stopped production. The other four companies are fighting the lawsuit.

This is what always happens when the government gets involved in anything — costs go up, availability goes down, people start suing each other, and nobody wins. Except the government, of course.

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Hint: No, he prolonged it. As Obama is doing now.

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Jeez, I’m only doing five of these. I am SUCH a slacker….

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“We’re making molecular plywood — a flat piece of building material that you can build nanoscale structures with,” said chemist Ronald Zuckermann of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, coauthor of a study April 11 in Nature Materials. “This study will open people’s eyes and make them talk about proteins and plastics in the same sentence.”

Read  it.

If you have government-controlled medicine, as the Democrats want to institute here, then every health care decision becomes political. Is that really what you want?

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A new look at the human Y chromosome has overturned longstanding ideas about its evolutionary history. Far from being in a state of decay, the Y chromosome is the fastest-changing part of the human genome and is constantly renewing itself.

We’re agile, baby.

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We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state – doctors can only make a sufferer’s last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking … a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. Steve Boggan witnesses these ‘strange and wonderful’ rebirths.

Perhaps ‘reset’ would be the accurate phrase.

Freeberg boils it down.

What they all think of as some kind of Utopia — on my planet, and Ike’s planet, we call that “jail.” That is what we need. A special jail. Part of the reason 2010 is shaping up to look like a promising election year, after all, is this growing feeling that there are indeed two cultural halves of our country, and the wrong half is being driven underground. And this seems to me to be why everyone is so pissy right now, liberals & conservatives. The folks in charge don’t like to deal with reality too much; they’d rather be in jail, although they don’t realize it.

So let’s go the other way. We should have one single Supermax prison for the entire country, and put all these people into it — the stoners, the gang-bangers, the feminists who are upset that Michelle Obama is being made to look like a proper, effective and content housewife. The peaceniks, the enviro-weenies, the socialists who don’t want to be called out as socialists. They don’t like freedom anyway, so they’d probably be happier that way.

So they don’t want a real jail, of course. What they want, is a place where they can surrender all of their freedoms without being reminded that is what they’re doing. Maybe all the walls should be painted pink instead of gray.

Read it.

Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is a fact.

Darwin Award candidate.

Good idea – get rid of the stupid ones before they reproduce. Natural Selection at its finest.

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When reading science fiction, I can’t really believe in an alien species unless they are at least as strange as the Japanese.

Kelly McCullough is one of my Recommended Writers (see there on the right?), for good reason.

I am a pretty gold dragon. I hatched today. Girl was waiting. Told her my name was Henth. Then I ated her.

Met a knight today. He tried to poke me with sharp stick. I didn’t let him. I did not ated him. How do you shuck a knight?

Not sure about ateding mimes. Too much gas later—silent but deadly. On the other claw, it’s one box they’ll never get out of.

Found princess and have set her out front as knight-bait. No more mime-indigestion. Thinking of collecting shields. Sparkly.

Read it.

You never know when you might need a good sling.

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Another SWPL toy. Let’s see whether it lasts.

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O brave new world, that has such creatures in’t.

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A theoretical examination of what Jerry Pournelle calls the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

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If you don’t have to buy it, you don’t have to go through The Store.

My wife discovered this trick early on with her Kindle. Most of the books she has now are ones she got free from Project Gutenberg rather than bought from Amazon.

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Mr Amor’s torment began when he noticed immigration officers outside Withington Community Hospital, Manchester, and joked that his colleague had “better hide”.

Although his remark caused no offence to his “victim”, it was overheard by someone else who lodged an official complaint with his superiors. As a result he was suspended pending an investigation.

This sort of thing is why I have a category entitled ‘Dystopia Watch’.

However, a friend said: “Roy made a joke along the lines that his friend had better hide in case the officers found him. It was nothing more than a good-humoured joke but apparently someone overheard it and made an official complaint because they thought it was racist.

“Roy was devastated when he was suspended and was worried he might lose his job.

“His colleague has known both Roy and Ann for years and is a family friend. He went to Roy’s funeral and is as shattered by what happened as is everyone else. He has told Ann that he didn’t make the complaint.”

This is what happens when people with no sense of humor or proportion have their hands on the levers of power. I hope they find out who this asshole is and beat him to death.

Read it.

Very thorough and cold-blooded, but overall positive.

The best way I can describe picking up, holding and using the iPad is it feels like it was built for you. Whenever someone on Star Trek TNG walked around with a tablet, it was always natural and they always seemed able to do whatever it was they needed to do on it. That’s the iPad. As an added bonus, you don’t have to wear a terrible jumpsuit to use it.

So, yes you can run old iPhone apps, but no you wont want to. What you will want however are shiny new iPad apps that run at full res. Unfortunately these all seem to start at $9.99. I don’t even want to know how much I’ve spent on apps in the past few days, and most of them aren’t even that good. They each just fulfill some specific need that the iPad doesn’t otherwise do on its own. This is the strength of the platform, but the pricing just feels wrong.

An Entertaining Fable.

Now that’s comedy.

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Nick Verron started breathing independently after his mother Sue said a final goodbye to him. She also gave permission for the drugs keeping him alive to be stopped.

Mr Verron, 26, opened his eyes and within weeks he was able to sit up and talk again. He is now recovering from the injuries he suffered when he was stabbed in the head with a screwdriver in an unprovoked attack in Bournemouth, Dorset, on July 4 last year.

Tim Cavanaugh connects the dots.

…is that all your supporters will just start imagining what’s in it. And then you (or actually, innocent bystanders in the private sector) will have to talk them down from the ledge.

I’d like to join in the funmaking, but how can this be a surprise? The first rule of freeloading is that you have nothing to gain by being shy. Of course people are making the phone call. Who can say for sure that if you called an insurance company right now and said “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says you have to sell me insurance now,” you wouldn’t get somewhere?

There’s a new benefit on the table. Anybody who isn’t grabbing for it already is unworthy to be a citizen of Schnorrerstan.

Read it.

What these folks are ranting against, or at least gnashing their teeth over, is progress – or, more precisely, progress that goes down a path they don’t approve of. They want progress to, as Bray admits, follow their own ideological bent, and when it takes a turn they don’t like they start grumbling like granddads, yearning for the days of their idealized Apple IIs, when men were men and computers were computers.

If Ned Ludd had been a blogger, he would have written a post similar to Doctorow’s about those newfangled locked-down mechanical looms that distance the weaver from the machine’s workings, requiring the weaver to follow the programs devised by the looms’ manufacturer. The design of the mechanical loom, Ned would have told us, exhibits a palpable contempt for the user. It takes the generativity out of weaving.

Read it. Thanks to Peggy for the link.

The Rev. Julie Blake Fisher, an Episcopal priest in Kent, Ohio, created “Episcopal Priest Barbie High Church Edition” for a friend, the Rev. Dena Cleaver-Bartholomew, when she got her first pulpit assignment in Manlius, N.Y.

One of the most tedious aspects of the unravelling of the Episcopal Church in the United States is its descent into a SWPL dress-up game for people who want to look like Catholics but don’t want to have to follow all those silly rules.

Read it.

They’re right, the rich don’t pay their fair share — they pay much, much more.

First of all, half of Americans don’t even pay income taxes, but it gets worse. If we look at total federal taxes, 20% of Americans pay 70% of taxes, as shown below. 40% of Americans pay 85% of federal taxes.

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Actually, the headline ought to read ‘Audit Finds EnergyStar Program Total Bullshit’.

Does a “gasoline-powered alarm clock” qualify for the EnergyStar  label, the government stamp of approval for an energy-saving product?

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Want a preview of ObamaCare in action? Check out the Massachusetts insurance market—which earlier this week entered a state of “market chaos” after Governor Deval Patrick denied a host of health insurance rate increases.

The technical scientific name for those who refuse to profit from the experience of others is ‘stupid’.

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Another good reason not to fly.

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Born of war and now in its 70th year, its brilliant design has propelled it into a new century with an undiminished reputation. It is an engineering landmark, the epitome of functional simplicity, and yet nobody is entirely sure who designed it or gave it its name.

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Never touch the stuff, myself.

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Turkey’s treatment of its Kurdish citizens is shameful. In fact, they’re not content to leave the conflict at the border: here’s an old post of ours about their carryings on in Oslo. A Turk in Norway is not a Norwegian. Just ask him: he’s a Turk, first and last. Norway is simply a kafir hole he’s currently occupying.

They’re killling off the remaining Christians or running them out of the country.

As for the Alevites mentioned in the letter to Erdogan, here’s some information about this Shi’ite, left-wing subset of Islam. They are another persecuted minority in Sunni Turkey. This is just one more proof that were the worldwide Caliphate somehow to arrive tomorrow, Islam would quickly turn to a factionalized killing machine. A religion founded on death and violence is never going to live in peace, even with itself. Or maybe especially within its own borders. The ugliest, most repressive forms of this theocracy are on the rise. Average secular Muslims don’t stand a chance against this malign belief system in love with death.

The Yezidis are a fascinating, very old culture. But like other groups relentlessly attacked by Islam, they are in danger of eventual extinction. Just like the Alevites, the Turkish Kurds, the ever-shrinking Christians remnant in Turkey, they are an endangered species. So many small sects are gone past recall. The Turks are doing their share to continue this tradition.

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And the reason why is a complete giveaway:

“Everybody, you’re going to be surprised: I finally found a tax I don’t like, and it’s this VAT tax!” Skinner exclaimed. “Here’s why – it doesn’t produce any behavioral changes – it’s hidden as Gerri Willis said. What you want in a tax is a tax that changes behavior.”

And that’s why ‘progressive’ notions of taxation are entirely illegitimate. The only legitimate justification for a tax is to raise revenue to pay for the necessary operations of government. Anything else is theft, pure and simple. The ideal tax is like making people swim in water: Yes, it’s a burden, but it affects everyone equally, and doesn’t distort economic activity.

But distortion of economic activity is precisely what ‘progressives’ want: They manipulate economic conditions in order to impose a political agenda in an attempt to make their imposition self-enforcing. ‘We can’t make you do it, but we can sure make you wish you had.’

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She is said to have been furious when she learnt of Woods’ other affairs, according to the National Enquirer magazine.

“I felt used and violated, like I meant nothing to him but a night of casual sex,” she said. “I wanted to dig a hole, crawl in and die.”

One searches in vain for any hint that she has apologized to Tiger’s wife. Evidently, it’s All About Her. Sounds like a night of casual sex is about all she’s worth.

What  a great idea.

Gotta love Australians.

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A police force has been criticised for making a public appeal to find a lost search dog 19 hours before issuing a similar request for the missing man the animal had been hunting.

Hey, it’s all about priorities.

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