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Well, that’s Chicago for you….

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Humana actuary Nick Mueller today confirmed the Kentucky Department of Insurance has approved ObamaCare health premiums very close to the eighty percent increase he requested in June.

Internal Department of Insurance documents received today from Lori Brown at the Department contain final, approved premium information for Humana, Anthem and Kentucky Health Cooperative, the only three companies who applied to participate in the Kentucky Health Benefit Exchange. Anthem and the Kentucky Health Cooperative got exactly what rates they applied for, while Humana received a cut of less than one percent from their initial proposed increase.

An 80% increase? I guess that’s why they call it the ‘Affordable Care’ Act.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws, or who knows what would have happened?

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Identity politics made manifest. This is the way Democrats think.

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People who aren’t looking for a job aren’t counted in the headline unemployment figure, and as the AP notes, right now the percentage of people who either have a job or want one—the labor force participation rate—is at 63.2 percent, the lowest its been since 1978.

How’s that Hope and Change working out for you?

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If you’re an illegal immigrant worried about being caught, help is only a mouse click away. An article from the radical website DreamActivist.org will give you a quick lesson on how to lie about your status. It’s all part of the aggressive pro-illegal immigration ‘Dreamer movement’ that is leading the fight for “comprehensive” immigration reform, with a boost from President Barack Obama and many in Congress.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Never has an American government been so dedicated to subverting the law.

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A man is reportedly in a coma and may be brain dead after authorities say a suspect who declared he was going to punch the first white person he saw knocked him to the ground Wednesday.

Authorities say John Babbitt, 62, who is white, was punched by 31-year-old Lashawn Marten in New York City’s Union Square.

If the races were reversed, of course, this would have HATE CRIME all over the front page of newspapers across the country.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except white people, of course.)

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School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

…

When schools were taken over by the state and made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends, the basic structure and methods of schooling remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform have failed because, though they have tinkered some with the structure, they haven’t altered the basic blueprint. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real, felt desire to know, is well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. It’s no wonder that many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators either left school early (like Thomas Edison), or said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it (like Albert Einstein).

Elliott Abrams lays out the proof that Obama is an incompetent amateur.

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The Affordable Care Act includes four significant, permanent, implicit unemployment assistance programs, plus various implicit subsidies for underemployment. Every sector of the economy, and about half of nonelderly adults, is directly affected by at least one of those provisions. This paper calculates the ACA’s impact on the average reward to working among nonelderly household heads and spouses. The law increases marginal tax rates by an average of five percentage points (of employee compensation), on top of the marginal tax rates that were already present before the it went into effect. The ACA’s addition to labor tax wedges is roughly equivalent to doubling both employer and employee payroll tax rates for half of the population.

Increase taxes will make things more affordable! Of course! Why couldn’t we see that?

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More here.

His novel with Cyril Kornbluth, Gladiator-at-Law, was the fundamental impetus for me becoming a science-fiction fan (and going to law school – well, one out of two ain’t bad).

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Jack Miniard, the school district’s director of school and community nutrition, was on hand to explain that the federal government now governs both food choices and portion sizes in most American school districts including Harlan County.

Under the National School Lunch Program, participating schools must provide lunches — including free or reduced price lunches — with minimum amounts of fresh fruits, fresh vegetables and whole grains. Also, in what presumably falls outside the hunger-free aspect of the act, there’s a calorie cap: 850 for high school lunches, 700 for middle schools and a mere 650 calories for kids in elementary school.

Students can only have one serving of meat or other protein. However, rich kids can buy a second portion each day on their own dime.

Guys, get a clue: You want a free lunch, you take what they give you. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and when the Feds pay for your lunch, they get to say what you eat. If you don’t like it, you can always provide your own kid’s lunch, which you ought to be doing anyway.

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The economic way of thinking tells you that incentives matter and that therefore when something seems odd, you should look at where the incentives lie. Often the incentives for stupid and wasteful behavior are outdated government regulations that no one can be bothered to change. So it is with the seat belt demonstration, at least under American law (other jurisdictions undoubtedly have similar regulations).

Fear of being sued, and the horrible consequences of losing a lawsuit as opposed to the relatively minor inconvenience of pissing off customers or looking ridiculous. Case in point: ‘zero tolerance’ policies in schools and other places.

Want to know why you can’t buy a new 5-gallon flush toilet any more? Because the government requires manufacturers to offer 1.6 gallon tanks for sale, and it’s not worth the money making more than one size of tank. So too bad, disgruntled comsumer, your tax dollars at work are to blame, not the profit-maximizing manufacturer.

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I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except white people, of course.)

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Because, you know, doctors tend to have that whole Hippocratic-oath ‘First do no harm’ thing going, and it makes them very tedious.

(No word yet on whether coat hangers come under Obama’s new tax on ‘medical devices’.)

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Former Illinois Republican Party Chairman Pat Brady has signed on with the American Civil Liberties Union to lobby House Republicans to pass a same-sex marriage bill in the land of Lincoln.

When people are offered a choice between a real Democrat and a fake Democrat, they go with the real Democrat every time.

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A new proposal from the Department of Energy proposes an unexpected target for President Obama’s climate plan: refrigerators. By targeting industrial walk-in freezers and restaurant fridges, the department explains, gradual increases in efficiency standards could have enormous effects on energy use, both saving money and reducing carbon emissions. President Obama’s climate plan had drawn criticism from environmentalists as toothless and ineffective, but these latest proposals would raise the stakes, cutting emissions by an estimated 350 million metric tons of carbon over the next 50 years.

The proposed standards would also effect smaller units, like the open-air dairy fridges found in modern supermarkets. Because of the large size of the units and their overall energy usage, the cumulative effect is expected to be equivalent to taking 109 million cars off the road for a year. More importantly, these regulations come direct from the Department of Energy, and don’t require congressional approval to take effect. They’re still just proposals, and would need to be adopted by the president, but given his previously announced climate plan, it seems likely the measures will meet with his approval.

This is the cornerstone of the enviro-nazi agenda: Everything touches the environment, therefore everything is subject to environmental regulations, therefore there is no limit to government regulation. None. There is no sphere into which the government — state, Federal, international — cannot stick its nose, its fingers, and its dick. Not one. That is why it’s vitally important to shut these people down, because the longer they’re allowed to play this game, the harder it becomes to draw the line.

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We’ve confirmed a report today that Android VP Hugo Barra is leaving Google for “Apple of China” Xiaomi.

The report was timed to coincide with another story about the dissolution of Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s marriage to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki. It also revealed that a person whom Hugo Barra had been in a previous relationship with was now dating Brin.

Barra’s departure was said to be “unrelated” to the above.

California. Need I say more?

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It’s not complicated at all. They can charge that because there is no competition, and no price pressure — the people receiving the service aren’t the people paying for it, and there is no political future for anybody advocating that people pay for their own health care when politicians roll over as soon as anybody whines ‘But what about the poor!’ Health care providers charge whatever they can get for every jot and tittle because the government and the insurance companies hammer them six ways from Sunday on everything they do.

NPR indulges in some wishful thinking.

Colorado’s politics have become positively Californian lately. There are new restrictions on guns. Pot is legal. The legislative agenda featured an expansion of alternative-energy use requirements for rural consumers. Gay couples can now enter into civil unions.

Notice how ‘Colorado’ has suddenly become ‘the rest of the West’. Gotta love that Blue State math. (I bet he went to government schools….)

Lots of Californians have moved to Denver and its environs, bringing a progressive strain of politics with them and angering more conservative parts of the state — so much so that 10 northeastern counties are planning symbolic but serious votes on secession this fall.

Conservatives have discovered that living on the far side of the Rockies is no longer far enough to get away from the influence of West Coast liberals.

“California migration, to a degree, has altered Colorado politics,” says Mike Krause, vice president of the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Denver. “I see California license plates in my neighborhood and on my commute all the time.”

So California isn’t so much a place as it is a breeding ground for ideological disease that can be transmitted to more rational areas of the country. (The same thing is happening in New Hampshire, which is being infected from Massachusetts and Vermont.)

* The Kennedy Assassination and subsequent coverup destroyed any trust the American people had in its government.

* The Beatles destroyed the indigenous American rock music culture.

* Vatican II effectively destroyed the Roman Catholic Church for going on fifty years now.

* Betty Friedan kick-starts modern feminist corrosion of American culture.

* Bobby Kennedy closed Alcatraz.

* Coca-Cola introduced Tab and started the fetish of paying good money for things that taste bad.

* The Ngo Dinh Diem assassination and coup in Saigon made the Vietnam war (and campus radicalism) inevitable.

* Harvey Ball invented the smiley face.

* PITA Andrew Sullivan was born.

It’s all been downhill since then.

The New York Times indulges in some handwaving, hoping to point the finger of blame in some direction other than where it belongs, at their masters in D.C.

In the four years since the Great Recession officially ended, the productivity of American workers — those lucky enough to have jobs — has risen smartly. But the United States still has two million fewer jobs than before the downturn, the unemployment rate is stuck at levels not seen since the early 1990s and the proportion of adults who are working is four percentage points off its peak in 2000.

And who was responsible for the Great Recession? Why, the federal government, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and legislation sponsored by Democrat Congresscritters like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, the sort of people who get endorsed for re-election like clockwork by … The New York Times. Funny how that works.

Are we in danger of losing the “race against the machine,” as the M.I.T. scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in a recent book? Are we becoming enslaved to our “robot overlords,” as the journalist Kevin Drum warned in Mother Jones? Do “smart machines” threaten us with “long-term misery,” as the economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and Laurence J. Kotlikoff prophesied earlier this year? Have we reached “the end of labor,” as Noah Smith laments in The Atlantic?

Is it the fault of government schools, who cripple the minds of our children so that they aren’t able to do anything other than things robots can do better? Is it the fault of Federal, state, and local government regulations that make it all but impossible for someone to afford to create and grow a small business? Notice which questions the Voices of the Crust ask, and which they do now.

Of course, anxiety, and even hysteria, about the adverse effects of technological change on employment have a venerable history. In the early 19th century a group of English textile artisans calling themselves the Luddites staged a machine-trashing rebellion. Their brashness earned them a place (rarely positive) in the lexicon, but they had legitimate reasons for concern.

And the fact that their ideological heirs, the Unions, support the Crust and its Voices (like the New York Times) is purely a coincidence. Nothing to see here, move along, move along….

At one end are so-called abstract tasks that require problem-solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity. These tasks are characteristic of professional, managerial, technical and creative occupations, like law, medicine, science, engineering, advertising and design. People in these jobs typically have high levels of education and analytical capability, and they benefit from computers that facilitate the transmission, organization and processing of information.

These are the sorts of people who good schools produce. We don’t have a lot of such schools, although we used to.

On the other end are so-called manual tasks, which require situational adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interaction. Preparing a meal, driving a truck through city traffic or cleaning a hotel room present mind-bogglingly complex challenges for computers. But they are straightforward for humans, requiring primarily innate abilities like dexterity, sightedness and language recognition, as well as modest training. These workers can’t be replaced by robots, but their skills are not scarce, so they usually make low wages.

These are the people that government schools are turning out in impressive numbers, even though we’re spending more tax money on education than ever before.

Dr Jeffrey Singer turns over a rock.

So we canceled the surgery and started the scheduling process all over again, this time classifying my patient as a “self-pay” (or uninsured) patient. I quoted him a reasonable upfront cash price, as did the anesthesiologist. We contacted a different hospital and they quoted him a reasonable upfront cash price for the outpatient surgical/nursing services. He underwent his operation the very next day, with a total bill of just a little over $3,000, including doctor and hospital fees. He ended up saving $17,000 by not using insurance

This process taught us a few things. First, most people these days don’t have health “insurance.” They have prepaid health plans. They pay premiums to take advantage of a pre-negotiated fee schedule arranged for and administered by a third party. My patient, on the other hand, had insurance.

Second, even with the markdown for upfront “cash-pay” patients, none of the providers was losing money on my patient. Otherwise they wouldn’t have agreed to the prices. With the third-party payer taken out of the picture, we got a better idea of the market prices for the services. It is the third-party payment system that interferes with true price competition, so “market clearing prices” can’t develop.

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All over America, government officials enjoy privileges that ordinary citizens don’t. Sometimes it involves bearing arms, with special rules favoring police, politicians and even retired government employees. Sometimes it involves freedom from traffic and parking tickets, like the special non-traceable license plates enjoyed by tens of thousands of California state employees or similar immunities for Colorado legislators. Often it involves immunity from legal challenges, like the “qualified” immunity to lawsuits enjoyed by most government officials, or the even-better “absolute immunity” enjoyed by judges and prosecutors. (Both immunities — including, suspiciously, the one for judges — are creations of judicial action, not legislation).

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Kinda late to the party, arent’ you, Professor West?

Guess it doesn’t take much more than black skin and a loud mouth to get tenure at Harvard any more. Pity. Used to be a pretty good school.

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We seem to be approaching a consensus…. And of course these were the very people who supported Obamacare, and voted for the Magic Negro who pushed it.

When the wallet comes out, you find out what people truly believe, because that’s what they’re willing to pay for — and the Left demonstrates that it’s full of hot air.

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Los Angeles recently elected a new head, so former high-living mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is taking a common step for former politicians. He is joining the staff of an elite university. It will be fascinating to discover what he plans to teach Harvard’s young scholars.

The Crust take care of their own.

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There are two deep-blue regions that are critical to the Obama administration: the Northeast and the coastal region between San Jose and Seattle that truly deserves the moniker of the Left Coast. They dominate the Democratic donor list, and provide the administration with most of its appointees and much of its ideological moorings.

Yet this common ground conceals a shift in the balance of power between these two blue strongholds. The power of the high-tech heavy Left Coast is waxing while the old Boston-to-Washington corridor is waning. Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post simply confirms this movement of the political tectonic plates.

Popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, the 1% are chiefly Democrats. They know, as most do not, that money follows power, and that if they want to keep their money they’re going to have to follow power as well.

‘Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.’

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Rosie’s mother, Mary (names changed to protect the child’s identity), is single and severely disabled. She and her daughter live on a fixed income disability payment of $628/month. The garden vegetables growing just outside her backdoor lovingly tended by Rosie provide a fresh and healthy addition to their diet that they could not otherwise easily afford.

Rosie started the garden in May 2013, but now the property management company has ordered the garden be removed this week!

The reason?

Gardening apparently goes against the rules set by the USDA’s Rural Development Agency which forbids residents to have structures of any kind within landscaped areas. It seems to me that the practice of growing vegetables by the most needy in our society would take precedence over landscaping, wouldn’t you agree?

Apparently not.

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You cannot be faulted for thinking the bureaucracy in this country is comprised chiefly of fools, mad-men, and criminals.

The Wall Street Journal story offers an example of our-government-in-action, which tends to confirm the above assessment.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau performed a genuine public service this week by alerting taxpayers to the tidal wave of student loan defaults coming their way. Too bad the intention was also to alert student borrowers to ways they can avoid repaying those loans.

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Two men were shot in Chicago on August 11 on one of the city’s newly created “Safe Passage” routes intended to keep school children safe.The “Safe Passage” routes along which the men were attacked had recently been heralded by Mayor Rahm Emanuel as a fix for children who had to travel along new routes to schools.

Well, hey, they didn’t shoot any kids, did they? So it’s working, isn’t it? Sheesh, all some people do is complain….

Good thing Chicago has those strict gun control laws or it would be a bloodbath up there … oh, wait….

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Obamacare raises the top Medicare payroll tax rate from 2.9% to 3.8%.

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The German government is engaged in increasingly heated negotiations with energy companies in an effort to stop them closing carbon-emitting power plants which have been rendered unprofitable by the national renewables policies.

Funny how that works. You’d think they’d learn. But no, they never do.

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Used-book stores are disappearing in our day at an even greater rate than regular book stores. Until ten years ago or so, there used to be a good number of them in every city and even in some smaller towns, catering to a clientele of book lovers who paid them a visit in search of some rare or out-of-print book, or merely to pass the time poking around. Even in their heyday, how their owners made a living was always a puzzle to me, since typically their infrequent customers bought nothing, or very little, and when they did, their purchase didn’t amount to more than a few dollars. Years ago, in a store in New York that specialized in Alchemy, Eastern Religions, Theosophy, Mysticism, Magic, and Witchcraft, I remember coming across a book called How to Become Invisible that I realized would make a perfect birthday present for a friend who was on the run from a collection agency trying to repossess his car. It cost fifteen cents, which struck me as a pretty steep price considering the quality of the contents.

What made these stores, stocked with unwanted libraries of dead people, attractive to someone like me is that they were more indiscriminate and chaotic than public libraries and thus made browsing more of an adventure. Among the crowded shelves, one’s interest was aroused by the title or the appearance of a book. Then came the suspense of opening it, checking out the table of contents, and if it proved interesting, thumbing the pages, reading a bit here and there and looking for underlined passages and notes in the margins.

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You may ask: Why should a company need a license to ‘transmit money’, in Florida or anywhere else.

You might consider asking your Congressman about that.

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For a generation, most Americans, whatever their politics, have largely admired Silicon Valley as an exemplar of enlightened free-market capitalism. Yet, increasingly, the one-time folk heroes are beginning to appear more like a digital version of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” In terms of threats to freedom and privacy, we now may have more to fear from techies in Palo Alto than the infinitely less-competent retro-Reds in North Korea.

Hey, most of these people voted for Obama. This is just chickens coming home to roost.

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In theory, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop may be able to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes.

In reality, the layover the project will take in Sacramento could delay that trip for decades.

The Hyperloop, the so-called “fifth way” of transportation unveiled by famed entrepreneur Musk on Monday, is an exciting idea, one that is filled with possibilities. Using air-cushioned aluminum tubes, he hopes to create a pod system for just $10 billion. The pods, powered by solar energy, would travel at upwards of 700 mph and make the trip in 30 minutes. On paper, Musk at least says it is workable from a scientific perspective.

But physics may be the least of Musk’s problems. His home state is a bigger issue.

California is widely considered to be a brutal regulatory environment. A survey of business leaders polled by Chief Executive magazine ranked California the worst place to do business. Why? For all the reasons that bode poorly for the Hyperloop. The state received half a star out of five for regulatory environment.

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While polls consistently show that Americans overwhelmingly favor the tech industry’s #1 legislative goal, comprehensive immigration reform, I wondered if I could also get them to agree to a horribly xenophobic plan that was the opposite of the proposed bill: deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants. We conducted a CrunchGov poll with Google Surveys to find out and the results, you’ll find, are surprising.

Not to those of us who understand that what people say on polls is typically what they feel they ‘ought’ to say, rather than how they really feel.

The truth is that most people wish illegal immigrants to be removed.

In our poll, a majority of all Americans (53%) and a whopping 74% of Republicans want to kick out every undocumented immigrant.

An entirely reasonable position, except to those who feel that laws they disagree with are somehow to be freely ignored.

Bear in mind, no one, not even the most anti-immigrant members of Congress, are proposing any remotely close to this idea.

Perhaps that’s why the popularity of Congress is at an all-time low. Just maybe.

At most, Congressmen disagree over whether current undocumented immigrants should be permitted to become citizens, not whether they can stay in the country.

And that’s what’s wrong with Congress — their debates are always about to which extent they will do the wrong thing, not whether anybody is interested in doing the right thing.

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Checking Facebook made people feel worse about both issues, and the more they browsed, the worse they felt, the University of Michigan research said.

Hah! That’s what you get for being social, you communists.

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A court clerk who helped exonerate a man wrongly imprisoned for rape was fired in June, and now she’s speaking out about the ordeal. Robert Nelson was convicted of rape in 1984. After two previous motions for DNA tests that could clear his name were rejected, 70-year-old clerk Sharon Snyder decided to step in and better his odds. She provided Nelson’s sister with a successful DNA motion from another case, giving Nelson a better idea of how to properly seek the tests. His third request was granted, and ultimately Nelson was cleared of a 1984 rape conviction; he’d been serving time for the crime since 2006.

But for her good deed, Snyder was fired from her position nine months before she was due to retire. Jackson County Circuit Judge David Byrn said Snyder had gone too far in assisting Nelson, violating a number of court rules in the process. Specifically, by providing Nelson’s sister with a motion that could help her brother’s case, Snyder was found to violate Canon Seven, which the judge said “warns against the risk of offering an opinion or suggested course of action.” Thankfully Snyder’s pension remained intact despite the forced exit, and in an interview on MSNBC, she says she’d do it all over again. “I think that the law should be changed, that judges should be taken out of the mix on deciding these DNA motions, and they should automatically be granted.”

No good deed goes unpunished.

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Assuming, of course, that that’s what you want to do.

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There’s been another round of Drudge-linked articles about how record numbers of Americans are giving up U.S. citizenship out of frustration over new tax laws requiring financial cavity-searches on the estimated 6 million U.S. expatriates.

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According to a report from Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, nearly 1/3 of the immigrants making asylum claims last year who were released on bond or their own recognizance never even bothered to appear in immigration court.

Hey, they’re not that stupid.

Good thing that the border is secure … oh, wait….

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Jesse Jackson, Jr., the former Congressman and son of Jesse Jackson, is scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday for misspending $750,000 in campaign funds. Jackson’s wife Sandi is also scheduled for sentencing at the same time for her failure to report as much as $600,000 in income to the IRS.

Two down, two to go.

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Meet the new coyotes: immigration attorneys and government rule-writers.

According to the clear guidelines published on the Internet and updated by the Obama administration in mid-June, there’s an easier way to cross to gain entrance to the United States: simply step right up to a border crossing and tell the officials that you have a “crediblee fear” of persecution or torture. Use that exact phrasing and you may be able to enter the USA while you await a hearing before an immigration judge…a process that could take years.

As Breitbart News reported yesterday in a story that swept through the Internet, that’s exactly what’s been happening recently with a flood of new asylum requests that seem designed to overwhelm the system.

Because it’s too much to expect them to honestly enforce a law that they disagree with,  all that oath-of-office stuff to the contrary notwithstanding.

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This copy of the Eighth Grade Exam for Bullitt County Schools in 1912 was donated to the museum. We thought you might like to see what the test looked like a hundred years ago. Obviously it tested some things that were more relevant at that time than now, and it should not be used to compare student knowledge then and now.

Because that would just highlight how much our elementary education system SUCKS compared to what it was 100 years ago, despite the fact that we have computers and all sorts of wonderful toys and are spending more per pupil than we ever have.

Steve Sailer lays out the economics of amnesty.

Even more than they love taxing and spending, politicians adore a giveaway that doesn’t show up in the budget. Stumped by how to get minorities to earn more money, for instance, George W. Bush announced at his 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership his plan for letting minorities borrow more money: Reduce requirements for down payments and documentation on mortgages. What could go wrong?

Even better from the modern Senator’s standpoint is frittering away the scarcity value of your citizenship on various ethnic and business lobbies. In part, that’s easy to do because the notion that American citizenship has a cash value is not a concept that comes readily to the minds of idealistic Americans.

It sure does to foreigners, however. Randall Burns calculated in 2005 from Indian-arranged marriage ads that an H-1B visa adds $50,000-$70,000 to dowries. The gold standard of citizenship is worth even more. Similarly, Chinese birth tourism websites are extremely informative about all the advantages that accrue from glomming onto birthright citizenship.