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Hey, it’s still a jungle out there.

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New York Times columnist David Brooks says that Republicans in America should look for inspiration to Conservatives in Britain, who back a 50% top tax rate at the national level. This is what passes for the right-of-center regular voice on the New York Times op-ed page.

I find it curious that the Crust doesn’t have Own Goal Specialists the way the ‘right’ has people like Brooks, Frum, and Friedersdorf. Perhaps that’s what being the Establishment is all about — don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

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Who names their kid ‘Falcon’? If I had parents like that, I’d be looking to escape, too.

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Perhaps they’ll find there the actual legislative text of the actual health care reform plan.

The Daily Telegraph has a little list.

The Other McCain indulges in some philosophizing.

Old money can corrupt, and new money can, too. Remember the IPO hot shots of the “dot-com” boom? Or recall those stories about lottery winners who wasted vast winnings and ended up broke again? What about those professional athletes — first-round draft picks and All-Pro stars — who reached their 40s without retaining a cent of their once-fabulous earnings?

God tests us every day. Some He tests with poverty, and some He tests with wealth. Some He tests with bad fortune, and some He tests with good fortune. Some He tests with pain, and some He tests with pleasure. But every hour of every day He is testing us; and how each of us responds to those tests shows what we are worth.

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Apparently, it’s something that the Other Guys do.

… it is ironic that Keith Olbermann, who, unlike Rush, is actually a hatemonger, is a network commentator on NFL games. Apparently no one thinks Olbermann is too “divisive” to be associated with the league.

Which raises this thought: has any liberal ever been labeled “divisive”? I can’t recall a single instance. President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are trying to dismantle our health care system, an effort to which most Americans object and about which many millions care deeply. So, why are they not divisive? If that isn’t divisive, what is?

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A VAT is by its nature hidden, because no one files a tax return.

The VAT is so slippery that academics here and abroad do not agree on who pays this seemingly magical tax. Some economists still deceive themselves with the old notion that a VAT is simply a tax on consumers. This misperception comes from the European VAT, which uses a system of credits to create the illusion of pushing the tax forward from one business to another and finally to consumers.

The one certainty about a VAT is its enormous revenue-producing potential. At a rate of 17% to 18%—about average for Europe—it could increase total federal taxes to 30% of GDP or more from 15% now, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In combination with higher federal spending, this could forever alter the balance between the public and private sectors.

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Alas, Rowley doesn’t appear to have taken out bear-inflicted damage insurance when she bought her iPhone, because her local Apple store allegedly refused to replace the damaged device for free, according to a report by website CIO.

For all your caped crusader needs.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) claims the latest version of the federal hate crime bill, which the House passed last week and the Senate is expected to approve any day now, includes  “protections for freedom of speech and association” that are “stronger” than the language in the version passed by the House last April. That’s the reverse of the truth. Last spring’s version said “evidence of expression or associations of the defendant may not be introduced as substantive evidence at trial, unless the evidence specifically relates to that offense.” The American Civil Liberties Union cited this safeguard in reversing its longstanding opposition to the bill. By contrast, the current version (PDF) says “nothing in this [bill] shall be construed to allow prosecution based solely upon an individual’s expression of racial, religious, political, or other beliefs or solely upon an individual’s membership in a group advocating or espousing such beliefs” (emphasis added). Since all the crimes covered by the bill are acts of violence that already are illegal under state law, this assurance amounts to nothing.

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Saudi Arabia is trying to enlist other oil-producing countries to support a provocative idea: if wealthy countries reduce their oil consumption to combat global warming, they should pay compensation to oil producers.

I am not making this up.

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And ‘vile’ is not too strong a word.

The fabulously wealthy SPLC exaggerates the scope of racism to frighten donors into opening their wallets. SPLC is nominally a public interest law firm, but it spends little on actual litigation. Instead, it uses politically skewed definitions of racism to indoctrinate children while smearing conservatives who question racial preference programs.

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Fossil boffins say that dense triple-canopy rainforests, home among other things to gigantic one-tonne boa constrictors, flourished millions of years ago in temperatures 3-5°C warmer than those seen today – as hot as some of the more dire global-warming projections.

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Cornish separatists have launched a campaign to scare students out of the county, along with second homers, surfers and celebrity chef Rick Stein.

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Meanwhile radio commentators begin with the premise that everyone has a fundamental right to have someone else pay for their health care costs, just as everyone has a fundamental right to have someone else pay for their children’s education. The result is a school system that is, perhaps, less than optimal. What the result of applying that principle to health care will be is not so obvious.

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We have the technology.

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The Wash Post reports on burgeoning efforts by the Obama administration to butt into even more aspects of everyday life and treat us all as if we have the brainpower of Joe Biden. “A handful of Obama appointees,” writes the Post, “are awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products, and most items found in kitchen pantries and medicine cabinets.”

Near the top of the list? The dread menace of Cheerios, the burp-inducing breakfast cereal that lies (lies!) about its crunchety goodness and heart-helping properties.

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Apparently the show’s writers would just insert a marker in the script that would be filled with technobabble later.

As you probably guessed, this is not how I write SF — in fact, it’s the antithesis of everything I enjoy in an SF novel.

Hard to blame him. And yet, being a socialist, he favors government doing the same thing on a grander scale. You’d think he could connect the dots.

Unfortunately, writers and other ‘artistic’ people, many of demonstrable talent and intelligence, just can’t seem to extrapolate from X is stupid when group Y does it to It’s still stupid when the government does it.

I guess Gary Gygax was right: Intelligence and Wisdom are separate rolls.

Steve Sailer takes a look at David Brooks. (He does this stuff so that you don’t have to.)

For example, here is a scan of David Brooks’ brain during his daily reading of iSteve. As you can see, the experience is stimulating both the Man-I-Wish-I-Could-Say-Interesting-Stuff-Like-That and the But-I-Can’t-Or-I’ll-Lose-My-Job-So-I’ll-Say-the-Opposite sectors of his brain.

I love watching a professional at work.

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Barack Obama’s seemingly inexplicable winning of the Nobel Peace Prize says less about him than about the current mentality of Europe’s leadership class. Lacking any strong, compelling voices of their own, the Europeans are now trying to hijack our president as their spokesman.

Take our President. Please.

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President Obama’s White House blog team reports that “President Obama’s aims (sic) to restore fairness to the tax system by providing the Making Work Pay tax cut to 95 percent of working families….”

Of course, there is a small problem here.  95% of working families don’t pay taxes.  One-third don’t pay any income taxes at all.  So how can we give them a tax cut?

Frankly, we can’t.  But we can give them money.

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And you think you have problems….

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The Mary Rose Trust unveiled the items to mark the launch of an appeal to raise the remaining £4 million needed to build a new £35 million museum at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, Hampshire, to house the ship’s remains and artefacts.

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But why? Congress doesn’t, judging by the spending they do. Voters don’t, judging by the people they elect.

You’re preaching to the trees, here, Larry.

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“We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world,” warns Ms. Ehrenreich. “Things are bad and getting worse, any fool can see that,” warns Mr. Derbyshire.

The outside world starts catching up.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Well, that’s a relief.

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Let us count the ways.

You don’t need to criticize liberals to end up on their “Hate You Forever And Ever” list. You really don’t need to do much of anything at all, because the anger is already churning acridly away before the liberal ever starts to know you, let alone see what you say and do. They are like walking clothes washing machines, always at the high point of the cycle, sloshing pure acid around in their innards instead of water.

The anger has nothing to do with critics or any other outside party. It is caused by the inherent contradiction of liberalism. To understand the anger, you have to understand the contradiction; in order to understand the contradiction, you have to understand Star Trek.

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The fools. Who do they think ran the damned slave trade from medieval times up until after World War II? And still does.

The irony of this situation is that the argument that politicized Islam inherently improves the position of racial minorities is entirely untenable from both a historical and a modern perspective. Though many Islamist websites make claims like “only … through Islam has this idea [‘of racial equality and of human brotherhood’] ever been realized in action,” reality tells a different story.

According to historian Bernard Lewis in his book Race and Slavery in the Middle East, slavery was an established practice in the lands of Islam from the time of Muhammad. The Islamic states later hosted an extensive slave trade network that rivaled that of the Europeans. A look at the modern world is even more telling: in the Arab Islamic states of Mauritania and Sudan, black slavery is still so pervasive that the word “black” in the local Arabic dialect has become synonymous with “slave.”

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Wendy Williams and her husband liked their health insurance plan.  The premium and annual deductibles made sense for them, and a more “gold-plated” plan was not worth the money.  Yet Massachusetts’ health care regulators disagreed, and forced the Williams to pay a $1,000 fine if they wished to keep their insurance plan — a plan they prefer to a comparable state-approved alternative.

Teachable moment: Stay out of Massachusetts.

It wasn’t always this way.  When the Massachusetts mandate was first adopted, their plan was just fine.  But then the rules changed.  The state no longer accepts their insurance plan, even though they are fully insured and are not imposing their health care costs on other taxpayers.

Well, that’s government for you.

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A Texas firm plans to use power generated by the Gulf of Mexico’s waves to make its salty water drinkable.

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Energy globocorp Royal Dutch Shell has announced plans to deploy a fleet of monster processing ships – the biggest ever constructed – to exploit so-called “stranded” gas fields, ones which can’t be harvested economically by conventional means.

We have the technology.

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My species, and welcome to it.

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It’s a pretty good list.

1. Aliens are basically humans with silly foreheads

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Casten’s original plan was to sell one-third of the recycled power to Cabot’s plant, and the rest to an industrial facility just down the road for around $45 per megawatt-hour–cheaper than the $55/MWh that electricity cost in the area, yet still high enough for the project to be profitable. But, in Louisiana, as in most of the United States, state law forbids anyone from stringing up private wires across a public street. Casten couldn’t market his power directly–he could only sell it to the local electric utility. And, because the utility, due to state rules, chiefly earned a profit from the power plants it built and ran itself, it refused to offer anything more than rock-bottom prices for Casten’s recycled power–prices too stingy for the project to work. After many months of bitter wrangling, Cabot gave up entirely. As a final insult, the utility later won approval from regulators to build a brand new fossil-fuel plant, a pricier way to generate electricity that would also add more carbon to the air.

The Louisiana utility wasn’t doing anything evil–it was just responding rationally to the rules laid down–but the end result was perverse. “It’s like we’re forcing citizens to pay extra to heat the planet,” Casten bristles. And similar roadblocks stand in the way of recycling across the country, with jaw-dropping consequences: One study for the EPA found that harnessing industrial waste energy had the potential to meet 19 percent of the country’s electricity needs–equal to 95 nuclear plants–while slashing fossil-fuel use in the power sector by one-quarter.

Megan McArdle cuts to the chase and does an autopsy on the healthcare debate.

Anything you could do to a putative new system, you could do to Medicare.  And the reason we haven’t is not that we just thought of comparative effectiveness research, healthcare IT, or strong-arming provider payments last week.  These ideas have all been kicking around for a long time, and in the case of the provider payments, have already been tried more than once.  Providers learn to game the new payment rules, and if they don’t, they get Congress to undo them.

It’s no good saying that well, we should try to be more like the Netherlands–you can’t build a system on the assumption that you will, suddenly and for no apparent reason, be able to import someone else’s political culture.

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This pathetic outcome is all that is left of a federal prosecution that threatened Martinez with up to 20 years in federal prison, portraying her as a taxpayer-bilking drug pusher. The case, launched three years ago by U.S. Attorney James A. McDevitt, stemmed from Martinez’s willingness to treat people with histories of illegal drug use for pain, a practice that is not only legal but ethically required. In 2007 a jury acquitted her of prescribing narcotics outside the scope of medicine, failed to reach verdicts on related charges of unlawfully distributing narcotics, and convicted her on eight felony counts of health care fraud. After the trial, Judge Van Sickle dismissed the distribution charges and ordered a new trial on the fraud charges. The Yakima Herald-Republic reports that a medical billing expert hired by Martinez’s lawyer “concluded that the convictions were based on misrepresentations by government auditors.” According to the lawyer, “it gutted the prosecution’s case,” which is why McDevitt agreed to a plea bargain instead of retrying Martinez. As for Martinez, she wanted to keep fighting, but she “had run out of money” and assets, having “lost her home in the process of defending herself against the charges.”

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Gosh, Microsoft wouldn’t lie to us … would they?

In any event, my “Launch Party” package is allegedly on its way. I’m hoping that there will be balloons. I can do some very interesting things with balloons. Some of them are even legal.

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But when you look at the current stimulus package — aka the Recovery Act — it’s a bit of a head scratcher, considering so little of it has been spent.

Let’s take a look at the big picture: According to information aggregated by recovery.gov, of the $499 billion in stimulus funds slated for spending —contracts, grants, loans and entitlements — only $251 billion has been made available. Of that amount, just $107 billion had been paid out as of September 30. That’s less than a quarter of the overall number.

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Psychologists in Canada have revealed new research suggesting that people who become eco-conscious “green consumers” are “more likely to steal and lie” than others.

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

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Today’s Wall Street Journal headlines that “New Math Boosts Health Plan.” Some new calculations claim that the Health Care Plan (whatever it is, since it’s hardly final) will reduce the deficit. Given that all the health care plans make some form of health care a free good for many new millions of people, the notion that it will save money is ludicrous, and it’s hard to understand how anyone would believe that for a moment. It’s going to cost money — every such plan always has. It’s going to cost a lot more than we project. Every such plan always has. This is the Bullwinkle the Moose principle: “This time for sure!”

And that about says it all.

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And why?

Since I care more about my country than my personal pride, here’s how I lost my insurance: I moved. That’s right, I moved from Washington, D.C., back to Massachusetts, a state with universal health care.

In D.C., I had a policy with a national company, an HMO, and surprisingly I was very happy with it. I had a fantastic primary care doctor at Georgetown University Hospital. As a self-employed writer, my premium was $225 a month, plus $10 for a dental discount.

In Massachusetts, the cost for a similar plan is around $550, give or take a few dollars. My risk factors haven’t changed. I didn’t stop writing and become a stunt double. I don’t smoke. I drink a little and every once in a while a little more than I should. I have a Newfoundland dog. I am only 41. There has been no change in the way I live my life except my zip code — to a state with universal health care.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Traditional children’s nursery rhymes such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star are becoming so unpopular with parents that they could die out, researched suggests.

It highlighted gaps in the knowledge of different age groups, for example three quarters of those over 55 knew all the words to Little Miss Muffet, compared to just over half of those parents under 24.

The figures also show a gender knowledge gap: only 52 per cent of men surveyed knew all the words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star compared to 83 per cent of women

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That reminds me that I need to revisit my set of The Office DVDs.

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Why India has an embassy to any Muslim-dominated state surprises me, since Muslims regard Hindus as polytheists, which (unlike the People of the Book) the Koran requires to be converted or killed, no exceptions, whenever and wherever found. Maybe they staff such embassies with some of the 161 million Indian Muslims; I don’t know.

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In the West of Europe and in the East, in North Africa and the Middle East, Classical civilization came to an end in the mid-seventh century; and the reason for its demise can be summed up in one word: Islam.

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How geeks look at coins.