Jerry Pournelle really doesn’t like the new health care plan.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an editorial worth your attention. There is no better term for the ObamaCare Bill than Despotism. It’s all very well for Congressmen and Senators to look out for their states, but this bill is a pure transfer payment from Republicans to Democrats. There is built into the bill a 40% tax on the most comprehensive — and thus most expensive — health care plans: But it does not apply to everyone. Longshoremen, for instance, are exempt — and of course their unions have negotiated some of the most comprehensive healthcare short of what Congress gets. Other lines of work, nearly all heavily unionized, are exempt from the 40% tax (which will pretty well eliminate these plans for those who aren’t exempt from the tax). Also, 17 States will be exempt; for the rest it’s just too bad. There is no attempt at an explanation for these arbitrary transfers from those taxed to those not taxed. There is no logical reason why some are taxed and some are not. It’s simply a set of earmarks, rewards to those supporting the “plan” and punishment for those who don’t.

Read it.

Buy ’em books, send ’em to school….

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A few weeks back, Reason.tv discussed Canadians coming to the U.S. for operations that would take forever to get in the Great White North.

Reason contributing editor and San Francisco Chronicle journo Carolyn Lochhead has a fascinating piece on American medical tourists who go elsewhere for much cheaper and equally good care….

Read it.

Chinese police were held in a hour-long stand-off with a suspected suicide bomber only to find the man was armed with sausages.

Well, at least we know he wasn’t a Muslim. That’s something.

Always thought that ‘suicide bombers’ were a bunch of wieners, anyway….

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One fully-loaded B52 would raise the average IQ in Britain beyond all imagining.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

David Pogue reveals why everybody hates the phone company.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about two particularly nasty Verizon Wireless practices. First, Verizon doubled the early-cancellation fee for smartphones, the price you pay for canceling before your two-year contract is up (it’s now $350).

Second, I passed along a note from a Verizon whistleblower who identified a really outrageous Verizon profit center: if you accidentally hit one of the arrow keys on your Verizon cellphone (which come premapped to various Verizon Internet functions), you’re charged $2 instantaneously, even if you cancel instantly. (Verizon confirms that on many models, you can’t remap those buttons to other functions even if you’re tech-savvy enough to try.)

Apparently there is no cell phone provider in the U.S. that doesn’t suck.

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What is it about being elected to public office that makes people stupid? New England was, at one time, a bastion of individual liberty and self-reliance; it is rapidly turning into Little Europe.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants the city to require similar labels.

Quelle surprise.

Boland uses a cell phone, but keeps it away from her head by using the speaker. The AP story also says she leaves the phone turned off unless she’s expecting a call.

And, of course, nothing will do but that EVERYBODY IN THE STATE ought to be FORCED BY LAW to do it her way — sort of an inverse Burger King.

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Facebook is being cited in almost one in five of online divorce petitions, lawyers have claimed.

Yet another reason to stay away from Facebook and its ilk.

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Cocaine’s a hell of a drug, and even more so when laced with another drug that’s commonly used to deworm opossums. Federal agents have found that 69 percent of cocaine shipments seized entering the United States contain levamisole, a veterinary drug linked to serious weakening of the immune system in humans. Here’s the real funny part: no one knows why.

Go, Darwin. Cull that gene pool.

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Surely there’s a movie in that somewhere.

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I think this counts as a virtual Darwin Award. Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Your government at work. Aren’t you proud?

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What’s the use of being a supermodel if you don’t get special treatment? I mean, duh.

Darwin says: Drop the Communist Manifesto and step away from the gene pool. Now.

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So and so is calling for you, please hold and I’ll get him.

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A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them? It’s not obvious that you would.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that messing with a guy who has facial tattoos is a really bad idea.

As tattoos go mainstream, criminals have to adapt. These days, even art on your neck, collarbone, and wrists is barely enough to signal your commitment to subcultures that are totally legal.

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According to Russian newpaper Kommersant, as relayed via the RIA Novosti news wire, Illarionov says that the HadCRUT dataset doesn’t include the records from many of Russia’s meteorological stations. He adds that the missing records, if they had been included by the British climate scientists, would have significantly reduced the amount of warming shown for Russia by the HadCRUT database.

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

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This is news?

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Whenever you get to feeling that you live in a bad neighborhood….

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Dozens of Iraqi security force members were involved in attacks that killed up to 112 people in Baghdad last week, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Wednesday.

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

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Were it not for my native indolence, I’d do the same.

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But does Obama care? Sorry, he’s too busy with the government takeover of the health care industry.

Priorities? Sure, he’s got priorities. They just aren’t YOUR priorities.

A good example of why the dinosaur media in general, and Newsweek in particular, suck.

A new GAO report shows how George W. Bush’s Justice Department abandoned advocacy for minority groups.

As if ‘advocacy for minority groups’ were the definition of ‘civil rights’.

Ellis Cose obviously considers himself a black columnist (rather than a columnist who happens to be black), and it shows.

George W. Bush was never particularly taken with the civil-rights crowd. Not that he was exactly hostile to the notion of protecting society’s most vulnerable groups. But he and his minions assumed that the time for coddling minorities had passed. So after sizing up the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice—the most powerful advocate for civil rights within the federal government—Bush’s operatives endeavored “to rip the heart out of [it],” in the words of Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP.

Never was a President of the NAALCP so appropriately named. God forbid that anyone should ‘assume that the time for coddling minorities had passed’.

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Note that this trick isn’t possible without a government that is willing to be stupid with YOUR money. (What am I saying? That’s ALL of them.)

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No sucres will be printed or coined, but the virtual currency will be used to manage debts between the nine nations in a move to reduce reliance on the US dollar.

Cuba already signed an agreement on Saturday to pay for a shipment of Venezuelan rice in sucres, according to Rogelio Sierra, the island’s deputy foreign minister. He declined to say what the shipment was worth.

That agreement was made as it emerged that cash-strapped Cuba has fallen behind on its debt to nations and multinational corporations amid the global recession.

Judging from this, I think it ought to be pronounced ‘sucker’, but that’s just me.

I am somewhat astonished that there are only nine ‘left-wing’ governments in South America.

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Britain’s financiers and entrepreneurs are leaving the country at the rate of 10 a week to avoid rising taxes, it has emerged.

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

And they won’t want to come to America once the Obama Nation takes hold. Maybe Belize.

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So what great lesson did the military and the President take from the experience of the massacre at Fort Hood? Why, the most obvious one, of course: we need more Muslims in the military….

Incredible. Look at these pictures. Our people, deliberately murdered by a Muslim doing his bit for jihad. A Muslim who was an officer in the United States Army, who had taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States. And the response is ‘Please, sir, can we have another?’

Your tax dollars at work. The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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Marching morons in Copehagen: They’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

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They should only count their blessings.

Tell Norway they can have all of Obama in exchange for $50 and a third-round draft pick.

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I still remember those 50-cent Ace Tarzan paperbacks Frank did the covers for. Those were the days.

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And about time, too. She ought to have taken a frying pan to his head. Several times.

People like Governor Sandford give weasels a bad name.

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Because the previous threats have worked so very well.

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Police detain 200 activists at their Copenhagen accommodation and seize items they claim could be used for acts of civil disobedience.

Hey, all you leftists who hate America and think it ought to be more like Europe: Be careful what you wish for.

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The looters dump the producers.

Kelly, who has also served as GC at Fannie Mae, Sears, and MCI/Worldcom, is one of the more experienced and well-respected in-house lawyers in the country — and was serving as vice chairman at AIG, a rarity for a GC. If she leaves AIG soon, writes the NYT, “her departure would come at a time when the company needs experienced counsel to complete its restructuring, shepherd it through myriad legal proceedings, and prepare prospectuses for the anticipated initial public offerings of its subsidiaries.”

Joining Kelly in her decision to leave are four other senior officials of the company, who have had their compensation reduced earlier this year by the Treasury Department’s special master for compensation, Kenneth Feinberg.

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

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But sometimes a story emerges that requires outright condemnation.  On this occasion, the condemnation goes to the British Government.  The government – our government, supposedly representing you and me in its interaction with people abroad – wants to label goods as coming from the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, so as to help consumers boycott them.

The rot spreads.

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And, apparently, made a good case.

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Let’s lock the animal-rights environmentalists and the alternative-energy environmentalists in a room with switchblades and see who walks out.

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A comparison of the actual temperature record at one of the ‘climategate’ collection points compared to what the Global Warming people are claiming it is. Hint: Not even close.

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

The answer is, these graphs all use the raw GHCN data. But the IPCC uses the “adjusted” data. GHCN adjusts the data to remove what it calls “inhomogeneities”. So on a whim I thought I’d take a look at the first station on the list, Darwin Airport, so I could see what an inhomogeneity might look like when it was at home. And I could find out how large the GHCN adjustment for Darwin inhomogeneities was.

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

Read it.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Didn’t know they did that sort of thing in Ireland … Thank God granny’s dead….

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A hint from God to stay away from Nepal.

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A hint from God to stay home.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A couple who claim social services “kidnapped” their baby daughter for adoption are due to flee Britain today to prevent their unborn child being taken into care.

The couple allege that police and council staff forced their way into their home and snatched the girl despite no allegation made against them ever having been proven.

The father, a lorry driver, told the Daily Telegraph: “We are absolutely terrified that social services will do exactly the same thing with our baby boy as they did with our daughter.

“They have already requested that we attend meetings for a pre-birth risk assessment but we are not taking any chances, so we’re leaving immediately.

A rational concern, it would appear.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here … wherever busybodies can find power and wealth working for the government — i.e., anywhere.

Civil Liberties Group Loses $20 Million Donor

A longtime anonymous donor to the American Civil Liberties Union has withdrawn his annual gift of more than $20 million, punching a 25 percent hole in its annual operating budget and forcing cutbacks in operations.

A.C.L.U. board members, who insisted on anonymity because the loss of the gift was reported in an executive session of their meeting, identified the donor as David Gelbaum, who made a fortune as a hedge fund manager and is now better known as a major investor in clean technology.

So the guy gave them over $100 million on the sole condition that he remain anonymous, and as soon as he stops giving, they out him? That rather illustrates the moral qualities of the ACLU board members, doesn’t it? Hope it gives him a warm fuzzy.

Check it out.

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Dr Dave Reay, senior lecturer in carbon management at Edinburgh University, has calculated that filter coffee is responsible for 50 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than its cheaper counterpart.

Don’t expect that to sit well with the Crust.

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Those French, they’re so hospitable.

Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister said: “This is another gesture of contempt from France to Britain. The only result of this will be to encourage more potential illegal immigrants to try to break our laws.

Oh, ya think?