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“Easy for him to say.”

That’s the view of many of America’s millionaires on Warren Buffett’s demand that the rich pay higher taxes. It’s one thing for an 80-year-old philanthropist-investor worth $39 billion to pay a higher tax rate. It’s quite another for a small businessperson just starting out who’s worth a few million.

“There is more of a difference between my financial position as a multi-millionaire and Buffett’s than there is between mine and a guy that makes minimum wage,” one reader told CNNMoney. “Why am I grouped with him and why does he feel he can speak for me?” According to data from Spectrem Group, just 24% of those making $1 million or more a year said that the most equitable tax is a “graduated tax in which those who make more money, pay more.” Nearly half of them supported a flat tax.

Looks like rich people aren’t totally clueless after all.

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The East and West Wings of the White House are guilty of more cheesy stage-managing than the Emmy, Oscar, and Tony Awards shows combined.

Last week, the glamour queen wore more than $40,000 worth of diamonds while partying with hubby at several high-priced fundraisers in New York. Her bling made international headlines and photos.

To counter the negative diva buzz as most Americans face hard economic times, Mrs Obama somehow managed to turn up at an Alexandria Va. Target (with her “shopping assistant” in tow).

And somehow, coincidence of coincidences, an Associated Press photographer just happened to be there to snap her.

Snortalicious headline: “Michelle Obama shops incognito at Target (Photo).”

Movin’ on up (movin’ on up) … to the East Wing (movin’ on up) … they’ve finally got a piece of the pie.

And it’s a pretty big pie.

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This may not seem like it matters, but it does. We haven’t had a pro-life first lady in the post-Roe era. Every first lady since Lady Bird Johnson, Republican or Democrat, has been openly pro-choice. The last person the leader of the free world talks to before they go to bed matters.

Yes, that includes both Mrs. Bushes. Considering the number of black babies that have been murdered by Planned Parenthood in the last forty years, you would think that Michelle-ma-belle would be sensitive to this issue. But life in the Crust trumps skin color … except when it fits the Narrative.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder. This prevents job creation in two ways: Employers have less money to pay new employees because they’re supporting more and more unemployed people through the unemployment tax, and employers are more reluctant to hire new employees because it costs real money to get rid of them once they’re on board. These are also major reasons behind chronic high unemployment in Europe (coupled with the disincentive to go back to work when being paid not to work is always an alternative).

Last year, employers paid 27.8% more in state jobless taxes, said Doug Holmes, president, UWC Strategic Services on Unemployment & Workers’ Compensation, a business trade association.

“Unemployment taxes, which were a relatively low bottom-line cost in 2008, are now becoming a significant cost,” Holmes said. “It discourages companies from electing to hire new employees.”

But wait! There’s more!

This is the first time during this economic downturn that states have had to pay interest on their federal borrowing, which currently totals nearly $38 billion. The 2009 stimulus act waived interest payments for two years, giving both cash-strapped states and their employers some breathing room.

The problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher so famously pointed out, is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

For Margery Keskin, an executive at four construction-related companies in upstate New York, the extra $2,000 her companies had to shell out means less money goes to bonuses or profit sharing for her roughly 40 employees. And she will have to think twice before she hires anyone.

“We try not to hire because we will be socked by a bigger tax bill for unemployment insurance,” said Keskin.

Thank you, Obamassiah, for all you’ve done for us.

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Cutting regulation would be a good idea too.  My example of this is raisin bread.  You know, bread with raisins, cinnamon and sugar in it.  In California evidently you have to have your bread as certified as having enough raisins in it to call it “raisin bread.”  Otherwise, we might die of disappointment or something.

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Stay away from hospitals. People die there.

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If schoolyard bullying is a federal issue, then everything must be, right? But in the eyes of the Obama administration, everything is a federal issue.

The Obama administration has taken a keen interest in what otherwise has to be the most local of issues. Last year, Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in which she threatened school districts that don’t do enough to prevent schoolyard bullying. The letter makes it clear that simply punishing bullies who harass others on account of their race, sex, national origin or disability is not enough. Schools must wipe out the culture of bullying.

No hair is too fine for statists not so insist on splitting it. After all, they know what’s best for us; did they not go to Harvard?

Try to imagine George Washington convening a conference on playground bullies. Just try. Or better yet Andrew Jackson. Or Teddy “Bully!” Roosevelt.

Read it.

In fact, if you think about how little time most adults have spent actively learning accurate information about science and scientists, it’s a little amazing that more people aren’t equally confused.

And, sadly, many of those confused people wind up in politics and The Media … with results as you see them.

We graduate high school knowing that Issac Newton discovered gravity, the general anatomical location of our stomachs relative to our hearts, and what happens when a car travelling 30 miles per hour crashes into a brick wall. At some point, probably in grade school, somebody told us about the scientific method, but not how that actually plays out in the real world. We learn the basics. We memorize some charts.

And then we live our lives in a world where science is much more complicated, and constantly changing.

Indeed, a world in which an ignorant public lives under a constant cloud of nameless fear generated by professional hand-wringers whose livelihoods depend on scaring the daylights out of people who’d just rather go about their lives in peace. But unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be on the program.

Steven Hayward speaks for all right-thinking people.

The trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor for involuntary manslaughter.  The new network TV season.  (Why is it that Hollywood always resembles the birds on the telephone line, who all take off in the same direction when the first crow squawks “Mad Men”?)  Doonesbury.  New York Times op-ed columns; all of them.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg….

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Never say that we don’t have useful stuff here.

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Supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Schlein and his research partner Günter C. Müller concocted an array of nectar poisons known as Attractive Toxic Sugar Baits that are easy to make, environmentally friendly and inexpensive.

In tests in Israel and in West Africa, the baits knocked down mosquito populations by 90 percent. Even better, they nearly eliminated older females, the most dangerous mosquitoes. (Only females bite humans, and only mosquitoes that have already picked up malaria, dengue or another disease from one human can inject it with their saliva into another human.)

Joel Kotkin lays it out.

My colleagues at Praxis Strategy Groupand I have looked over data for the period after the economy started to weaken in 2006. Using stats from EMSI, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we compared sectors by growth, and then by average salary.

Not surprisingly “recession-proof” fields such as health care and education expanded some 11% over the past five years. More inexplicably, given its role in detonating the Great Recession, the financial sector expanded some 10%.

Considering the number of government bailouts of firms ‘too big to fail’, it certainly doesn’t surprise me.

But the biggest growth by far has taken place in the mining, oil and natural gas industries, where jobs expanded by 60%, creating a total of 500,000 new jobs. While that number is not as large as those generated by health care or education, the quality of these jobs are far higher. The average job in conventional energy pays about $100,000 annually — about $20,000 more than finance or professional services pay. The wages are more than twice as high as those in either health or education.

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

Few corporate expenditures seem to receive as high a rate of return as donations to Democrat politicians.

I may have to establish a new Venture Socialism Watch category.

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All your Crayola questions answered.

Starting with a fresh box of twenty-four Crayola crayons I measured each with an i1 pro spectrophotometer to create a set of spectral power distributions (SPD) of the reflected light. You may not know this, but a spectrophotometer is good for much more than creating screen and printer profiles—for instance, I can tell you with some precision the color of my tongue (and my dog’s).

Well. There it is.

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

Any company with a national presence has to spend money on lobbying — nothing nefarious about that; it’s a simple matter of self-defense. As Microsoft found out back in the 1990s, if you don’t pay for lobbyists, you get screwed by the government on behalf of your business rivals, who do pay for lobbyists — hence the anti-trust litigation that never accomplished anything but wasted millions of taxpayer and company dollars. The lawyers got fat, though, which was apparently one of its objectives. Nobody in the tech sector ever forgets that lesson.

Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying that, when legislators can determine what gets bought and sold, the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators. Willie Brown, out in California, had this down to an art when he was Speaker of the California state legislature — he would introduce some bullshit regulatory legislation that would effectively destroy a company’s business, then drop it when they saw the light and contributed to his political war chest.

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My question is, if it’s invisible, how do they know?

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If the police had been Palestinian, and the girl Israeli, the Palestinian government would have rewarded the police.

There lies the difference between Israel and its enemies.

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In the 2008 presidential campaign, two projects in Alaska were ridiculed as examples of pork-barrel spending. Each sought more than $200 million from Washington to build a bridge to a sparsely populated area with light traffic. In the end, neither received earmarked federal funding.

But the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority, or KABATA — the group behind a bridge project that would link Anchorage to a peninsula nearby — is still wooing private investors and trying to pry loose a considerable amount of state financial backing. And more than $50 million it has spent on promotion has been federal money.

Although earmarks for the bridge were eliminated, some of the redirected federal money has still made its way to the bridge authority for research and promotion.

(Emphasis added)

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The Justice Department is forbidden by federal law from hiring employees based on political affiliation. Yet the resumes revealed the following ideological breakdown among the new hires:

Leftist lawyers: 113

Moderate, non-ideological, or conservative lawyers: 0.

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Couple of thousand demonstrators dead? Yeah, that sorta looks like ‘near violence’ to me.

Once-peaceful Syrian protesters are increasingly taking up arms to fight a six-month military crackdown, frustrated that President Bashar Assad remains in control while more than 2,700 demonstrators are dead, analysts and witnesses say.

Guess this Kumbaya-hippie-peace-love-dope process doesn’t work against a government that isn’t a Craven Western Government. Gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way.

The growing signs of armed resistance may accelerate the cycle of violence gripping the country by giving the government a pretext to use even greater firepower against its opponents.

Yeah, looks as if they really need a pretext to take it to the next level. Although it’s not clear what that ‘greater firepower’ might mean….

Authorities already have used tanks, snipers and mafialike gunmen known as “shabiha” who operate as hired guns for the regime.

What’s left? Nuclear weapons?

I can’t believe that people get paid for writing this stuff. I’m in the wrong line of work, obviously.

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Government officials rushed $535 million to Solyndra because the Obama administration was determined to make the company the centerpiece of its green agenda regardless of the law of supply and demand. Billions more have been wasted by politicians betting on favored companies and making Washington bigger, using the brute force of government to force liberal preferences into the economy. Mr. Obama calls them “investments,” but this is really venture socialism.

All part of the same mindset: You, Ordinary Citizen, are too stupid to spend your money in the best way possible, so we’ll leave you a pittance to live on — if you’re lucky; we’d prefer that you live on government handouts — and let our Harvard-educated Whiz Kids spend it for you.

That’s what ‘socialism’ boils down to … they prate about The People but they actually mean The Government, and The Government means Right Thinking Folks like themselves.

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Six years ago, Senate Finance Committee investigators mounted an inquiry into an exotic variety of nonprofit organization that they feared affluent families were using to warehouse wealth while simultaneously earning themselves lucrative tax breaks.

One nonprofit group singled out for scrutiny was a low-profile organization based in Tulsa. That group, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, later became the biggest investor in Solyndra, the solar company that collapsed last month after burning through a half-billion dollars in taxpayer money.

And this is why the ‘raise my taxes!’ meme is such bullshit. Beyond a certain level, being rich is not about having ready money but about having power, and power can be exercised through a tax-free foundation as readily (and sometimes more readily) than through a fat wallet — and the public relations benefits are far superior. ‘Do this or I won’t give you money’ uses after-tax dollars; ‘Do this or my foundation won’t give you money’ uses pre-tax dollars — and the power exercised is exactly the same.

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Every time you think he can’t get any stupider, he exceeds expectations.

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Once again, the Democratic Party’s true nature as the Party of the Rich reveals itself.

Mr. Himes, 45, once benefited from his Wall Street past. His 12-year career at Goldman played well with voters near his Greenwich home during his first campaign in 2008, and he brought in more than $500,000 in donations from the securities and investments industry, nearly $150,000 of which came from individuals at Goldman.

With a neat side part, a sharp jaw and the trim physique of a former Harvard lightweight crew captain, Mr. Himes, a Rhodes Scholar who once modeled for Ralph Lauren, still looks every bit the financial executive. In 2002, he left Goldman to take a job at Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing nonprofit, where he stayed until running for office in 2008.

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We’d be better off just picking random unemployed people and cutting them a check for $200k.

But, of course, that wouldn’t ‘create or save’ any government jobs, which is the real objective of this boondoggle.

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There’s no such thing as hospice for federal bureaucracies. No quiet corner where bureaus who have outlived their usefulness can go to bravely face the end. The undead need no such niceties; not when they can leap vampire-like upon the next great sector of American life and proceed to suck it dry in the name of “public interest,” “fair play,” or any other euphemistic glamour the Executive and Legislative branches can be lulled into…

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As far as atrocities go, it would appear that Turkey is never held responsible for any of them, and pays no consequences for its arrogant denials about those million Armenians. It will be the same for the Cypriots.

Funny how it feels free to lecture Israel while it kills Christians and persecutes the Kurdish population in Turkey. Not to mention Turkey’s Kurdish Christians.

And this is ‘secular’, ‘modern’, ‘moderate’ Turkey.

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Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.

Read it. And watch the video.

Police in Lancashire have told the owner of a Christian café to stop displaying Bible texts on a video screen, because it breaches public order laws.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Officers attended the Salt & Light Coffee House on Layton Road, Blackpool, on Monday 19 September, following a complaint about “insulting” and “homophobic” material.

He says the officers told him that displaying offensive or insulting words is a breach of Section 5 of the Public Order Act, and told him to stop displaying the Bible.

Guess they’ve never read the Koran. And why would they? It’s religious.

The Bible texts are displayed on a TV screen at the back of the café. Mr Murray uses a set of DVDs called the Watchword Bible.

The DVDs cycle through the whole of the New Testament verse by verse, with the words appearing on the screen. Mr Murray mutes the audio.

Yeah, that’s a ‘breach of public order’, all right. George Orwell, call your office.

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Yet more reasons not to use Facebook and Twitter.

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Good. I hate those damned things.

When Keith Wearne goes grocery shopping, checking out with a cashier is worth the few extra moments, rather than risking that a self-serve machine might go awry and delay him even more.

Most shoppers side with Wearne, studies show. And with that in mind, some grocery store chains nationwide are bagging the do-it-yourself option, once considered the wave of the future, in the name of customer service.

“It’s just more interactive,” Wearne said during a recent shopping trip at Manchester’s Big Y Foods. “You get someone who says hello; you get a person to talk to if there’s a problem.”

And you provide jobs for young people, partially disabled people, and those on the left side of the bell curve who, let’s face it, don’t have a lot of options.

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A group of American military officers and Afghan officials had just finished a five-hour meeting with their Pakistani hosts in a village schoolhouse settling a border dispute when they were ambushed — by the Pakistanis.

An American major was killed and three American officers were wounded, along with their Afghan interpreter, in what fresh accounts from the Afghan and American officers who were there reveal was a complex, calculated assault by a nominal ally. The Pakistanis opened fire on the Americans, who returned fire before escaping in a blood-soaked Black Hawk helicopter.

The attack, in Teri Mangal on May 14, 2007, was kept quiet by Washington, which for much of a decade has seemed to play down or ignore signals that Pakistan would pursue its own interests, or even sometimes behave as an enemy.

‘Sometimes’?

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Lock your doors….

Check it out.

This Is So Cool….

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… Pakistan’s spy agency — Inter-Services Intelligence — played a direct role in supporting insurgents who attacked the American Embassy in Kabul last week, killing 16 people. He also said that with ISI support, the Haqqani network of terrorists planned and conducted an earlier truck bombing on a NATO outpost that killed 5 people and wounded 77 coalition troops, and other recent attacks.

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

(I’m chiefly surprised that this is from the New York Times, noted butt-kisser of all things Muslim.)

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Sarah Dutton of CBS News crunched the numbers from the latest CBS/New York Times poll and found that of the last 6 presidents, only Jimmy Carter had worse CBS/NYT polling numbers at this point in his presidency. His approval is 7 points below his disapproval numbers — a minus 7 overall.

Only Jimmy Carter had a negative number at this point — minus 18.

Obama has the highest disapproval number — 50%. Even Carter’s disapproval was not that high, at 49%.

But hang in there, Barry; you’ve still got a year to go.

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The first full series of scans of the developing adolescent brain—a National Institutes of Health (NIH) project that studied over a hundred young people as they grew up during the 1990s—showed that our brains undergo a massive reorganization between our 12th and 25th years. The brain doesn’t actually grow very much during this period. It has already reached 90 percent of its full size by the time a person is six, and a thickening skull accounts for most head growth afterward. But as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade.

For starters, the brain’s axons—the long nerve fibers that neurons use to send signals to other neurons—become gradually more insulated with a fatty substance called myelin (the brain’s white matter), eventually boosting the axons’ transmission speed up to a hundred times. Meanwhile, dendrites, the branchlike extensions that neurons use to receive signals from nearby axons, grow twiggier, and the most heavily used synapses—the little chemical junctures across which axons and dendrites pass notes—grow richer and stronger. At the same time, synapses that see little use begin to wither. This synaptic pruning, as it is called, causes the brain’s cortex—the outer layer of gray matter where we do much of our conscious and complicated thinking—to become thinner but more efficient. Taken together, these changes make the entire brain a much faster and more sophisticated organ.

This process of maturation, once thought to be largely finished by elementary school, continues throughout adolescence. Imaging work done since the 1990s shows that these physical changes move in a slow wave from the brain’s rear to its front, from areas close to the brain stem that look after older and more behaviorally basic functions, such as vision, movement, and fundamental processing, to the evolutionarily newer and more complicated thinking areas up front. The corpus callosum, which connects the brain’s left and right hemispheres and carries traffic essential to many advanced brain functions, steadily thickens. Stronger links also develop between the hippocampus, a sort of memory directory, and frontal areas that set goals and weigh different agendas; as a result, we get better at integrating memory and experience into our decisions. At the same time, the frontal areas develop greater speed and richer connections, allowing us to generate and weigh far more variables and agendas than before.

When this development proceeds normally, we get better at balancing impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules, ethics, and even altruism, generating behavior that is more complex and, sometimes at least, more sensible. But at times, and especially at first, the brain does this work clumsily. It’s hard to get all those new cogs to mesh.

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A route planner with all main roads and cities of the Roman Empire, based on the Tabula Peutingeriana.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, takes some time to teach us a little economics.

In his essay that I addressed yesterday, Pat Buchanan writes:

You cannot have a rising standard of living when your highest-paid production jobs are being exported overseas.

I suspect that the above sentence strikes most readers as merely stating an obvious, indeed trivial, truth.  But it’s wrong.  And understanding why it’s wrong – why it’s wrong beyond its use of the familiar yet misleading notion that jobs are “exported” – is necessary to any informed discussion of trade.

Of course, what Buchanan means by writing “your highest-paid production jobs are being exported overseas” is that valuable tasks once done for domestic (say, American) consumers by fellow citizens are now done for domestic consumers by foreigners.  And Buchanan likely agrees that the reason for such a switch of who performs these tasks is that foreigners can now perform these tasks at lower costs than can Americans.

Let’s call the good that high-paid American producers once produced, but are now imported from low-paid foreigners, a “doohickey.”

Americans can now get the same quantity of doohickeys that they value by at least $X per unit – where $X is the price they paid for each doohickey when fellow Americans produced doohickeys – for a price of less than $X.  So Americans as consumers of doohickeys are clearly better off.

Also better off are those American producers who now sell more – or who fetch higher prices for their outputs – because at least some of the money American consumers now save when buying doohickeys is now spent on these other American-produced goods and services.

‘Jobs’ cannot be exported because ‘jobs’ are not things that can be physically moved — ‘jobs’ are temporary arrangements whereby money is exchanged for a service. The reason we purchase services is so that we will be left in a better state once the purchase is completed than before. When the ‘better state’ is the possession of a product, then whether we purchase the product itself or purchase the service that creates the product is a matter of relative price (all else being equal). When we buy a shirt from Sears rather than hire somebody to come to our house and make it for us, the reason is because we can get an adequate shirt at Sears for a lesser price that it would take to have somebody come to our house and make it for us — we are not ‘exporting the job of shirtmaking’ to Sears.

Read it.

When there aren’t any Jews or Americans handy, Muslims will quite cheerfully kill each other.

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A previously unknown painting by Francisco de Goya has been found hidden underneath one of his masterpieces, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has announced.

The unfinished work was discovered underneath Goya’s Portrait Of Don Ramon Satue, using a new X-ray technique.

It is thought to depict a French general, and may even portray Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother, Joseph.

John Stossel lays it out.

School spending has doubled over the past 30 years. Yet what do we get? More buildings and more assistant principals—but student learning? No improvement. If you graph the numbers, the spending line slopes steeply, while the lines for reading, math, and science scores are as flat as a dead man’s EKG.

Why no improvement? Because K-12 education is a government monopoly, and monopolies don’t improve.

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‘… With ponies! And unicorns!’

The 2001 attacks on the United States have intensified the debate that has existed since the dawn of Islam: How is the West to respond to the followers of Muhammad?

Kill them before they kill us. It’s really just that simple. Islam is not a religion, it’s a disease.

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Answer: When seven of the 12 highest-income counties in the country, and four of the top five, are in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

An excellent metric.

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A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that the declining use of cigarettes explains our obesity rates.

No good deed goes unpunished.

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The Russians know the stakes, and know what to do about it.

Aaron Renn does the numbers.

Let’s take a look at the top level data. While reviewing, keep in mind that the data for the US as a whole actually includes Texas. If you stripped the Texas data out of the US total, the comparisons would generally get even better for the Lone Star State.

I don’t thing it’s so much what Texas is doing right as it is that Texas is refraining from doing the wrong things that California and Michigan are so fond of.

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No one knows for sure exactly how much fraud exists in the Medicare system, but most experts agree that it costs billions of dollars each year. Between 2007 and early 2011, the federal government reports having won convictions against 990 individuals in fraud cases totaling $2.3 billion. In 2010, it recovered an additional $4 billion through collection of non-criminal penalties on health providers who improperly billed the government. But that’s just a fraction of the total problem.

According to a 2011 report from the Government Accountability Office, Medicare makes an estimated $48 billion in “improper payments” each year, an estimate that’s almost certainly lower than the actual amount since it doesn’t include bad payments within the prescription drug program. Some of that money, perhaps a lot of it, is fraud, but experts differ on exactly how much. On the very low end, the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association has estimated that about 3 percent of all U.S. health care spending is fraud. Assuming fraud is distributed equally across payment systems, that would mean Medicare’s share is roughly $15 billion a year. But almost all analysts believe fraud is much more common in Medicare than in it is in payments by private insurers. Toward the high end, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) once suggested the number could be as much as $80 billion a year. In March, the executive director of the National Health Care Fraud Association told members of Congress that total health care fraud losses likely range from $75 billion to $250 billion each year.

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Read it.

To use Google+ and Facebook, people yoke themselves to the providers by handing over their data in exchange for use of the services. It’s like a feudal system: the social-networking companies are sustained by the data flooding into them, and gain in power from the exchange. People upload their photos, their messages and other data from their personal life, but the service providers control how that information is presented to the world.

“The users contribute their own content to you for free. You sell it back to them with banner ads put on there. And on top of that, you spy on them to gather profiling data,” says Michiel de Jong, of the Unhosted project to decentralise user data.

THE SKY IS FALLING! Film at 11.