Read it.

A cancer patient whose health insurance was canceled due to Obamacare says he will “pay the $95 fine and let nature take its course” rather than “be a burden on my family” with new monthly premiums that are over $1,300 higher under Obamacare.

No doubt this is the fault of those mean-spirited Republicans.

Welcome to the Obamanation. How’s that Hope & Change thing workin’ out for ya?

Read it.

BLUF: No, Arafat wasn’t murdered with polonium.

The claim Arafat was poisoned with polonium ignores a very important detail, as Brian Thomas writes: if Arafat had ingested polonium in 2004, there simply wouldn’t be any trace of it in his remains by now. That’s science not speculation.

Swiss scientists say Arafat had symptoms commonly linked to radiation poisoning, including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and liver and kidney failure — but not two other classic symptoms, hair loss and a weaker immune system.

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On Friday, the Labor Department reported that 720,000 Americans left the labor force. This exodus pushed the labor force participation rate down to 62.8%, the lowest level since 1978. One out of three adults is neither working nor actively looking for work.

Some observers attribute the sharp drop to the shutdown and the furloughed federal workers. Even if that were the case, and it is unclear why these workers would be counted as not in the labor force, the number of Americans exiting is still significant. The total number of adults not in the labor force in October rose 932,000 to almost 92 million.

Welcome to the Obamanation. How’s that Hope & Change thing workin’ out for ya?

Read it.

John Kerry has openly sided with the Palestinians on key final agreement points:  That Israel controlling any land beyond the 1949 Armistice line is “illegitimate” and land that eventually will be part of a Palestinian state, and that there must be not a single Israeli soldier left anywhere on the West Bank.

This means the historic Jewish Quarter of Old Jerusalem and the Western Wall become part of a Palestinian state, the illegal Jordanian occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem becomes memorialized, Israel reverts to the “Auschwitz borders,” Judea and Samaria become Judenfrei, and defensible positions including in the Jordan Valley are lost.

Read it. And watch the video.

I doubt even Bill Clinton, the undisputed heavyweight champion spinmeister, could spin his way out of the wreck of Obamacare.  But the lesser lights like Pebbles Pelosi, Watermouth-Schultz, Carney-Barker, etc really ought to give it up this cloddish effort.  This two-minute highlight reel captures the full farce….

For those who don’t catch the reference in the title, an explanation is here.

Gavin MacInnes delineates some inconvenient truth.

Some rich brats at Salon were recently bitching about the “GOP-shredded safety net” they claim has forced moms into the workplace. In a typical example of bourgeois naiveté, they assume it’s the libertarian lack of government that’s keeping us poor and tearing apart families.

This is false for at least three reasons. One, the government can’t create wealth. It can only make people poorer. Two, the poorest we have are single moms, and it’s the left that glorifies that lifestyle, not the right. And three, the poor aren’t even that poor.

Read it.

I caught Ender’s Game last night and was quite surprised: The film subtly advocates for values of liberal governance. The plot centers around a gender-integrated, multicultural global military of wise children in a world with strict population control. The takeaway “lesson” is that militarism and genocide are bad, mmmkay? And yet the usual subjects—many who probably wouldn’t bother seeing the film anyway—are boycotting. Why?

Author Orson Scott Card, who by the way won’t be receiving a dime from the film’s profits, isn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about gay marriage. What else could provoke such outrage in 2013 America?

Read it.

The Manhattan Institute just published an analysis of the Obamacare individual policy insurance rates which demonstrates that the average cost will rise by 41% next year.

The results are very similar to the 2009 PriceWaterhouseCoopers analysis that predicted insurance rates would rise by 47%. The biggest hikes will hit the young people, whose rates will jump by an average of 98% for men and 58% for women. Insurance rates will also increase for everyone who is healthy and for all males.

Obamacare’s taxpayer-funded subsidies will primarily benefit those approaching retirement, despite substantially higher average net worth for that demographic compared to the young. But the real winners under Obamacare are huge insurance companies and HMOs whose stock prices have gone up twice as fast as the market, since Obamacare kills competition and creates monopolistic profits. National insurance companies are exempt from federal anti-trust supervision under Obamacare; whereas manufacturing, transportation and service companies are protected from “unfair” competition in the markets.

All hail the Magic Negro, who gave us less for more!

Read it.

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

 The Working Group said its findings were likely to underestimate the total farm subsidies that went to the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list because many of them also received crop insurance subsidies. Federal law prohibits the disclosure of the names of individuals who get crop insurance subsidies, the group said.

How convenient … for them.

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Though Democrats have railed against the influence of money in politics after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, liberals have accounted for 70% of the so-called “dark money” that has been spent this year.

According to Open Secrets, “liberal dark money in 2013 makes up 70 percent of all the dark money spent so far. At this point in 2011, liberal money accounted for less than 6 percent of the dark money spent, and in 2009, the total was a little higher, at 6.5 percent.”

Open Secrets describes “dark money organizations” as “501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their donors.” Democrats have tried unsuccessfully to pass the DISCLOSE Act, which would “require unions, nonprofits and corporate interest groups that spend $10,000 or more during an election cycle to disclose donors who give $10,000 or more.”

I guess some animals are more equal than others.

Don Boudreaux explains the Aggregation Fallacy.

Collectives are not sentient human beings.  It is folly to suppose that just because each member of the collective has some voice in determining the actions of the collective, that the collective thereby is some sort of scaled-up human-like decision-maker.  It is not, and it cannot be.

The Other McCain waxes philosophical.

We live in a world of Special Snowflakes™ who believe they can do no wrong, and that whatever problems they experience in life must therefore be someone else’s fault. Strangely enough, one of these perpetual victims is a Professional Journalist who, when her skill at her craft was criticized, decided to file a lawsuit.

Read it.

This is the calculation that the Crust don’t think you’re smart enough to make.

Unfortunately for them, we have the technology — and the Little People aren’t as stupid as they think.

Read it.

The roots of this culture go back to the Frankfurt School but really got momentum from college professors indoctrinated by manifestos such as Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

By “them” I never mean educated alpha males prepared to give rational arguments. I mean the churlish left’s frustrated beta males, bored girls, and bullied gays hell-bent on revenge.

Authors such as Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg take the high road and rarely even read such rants. “I’d never give them the pleasure,” Goldberg once told me. Breitbart used to call it “punching down.” However, when you diligently assemble a controversial argument with “some degree of vigor,” ignoring a critique takes some willpower. One thing you’ll notice about these ridiculous rants is that they all look the same.

Not only entertaining, but true.

Read it.

Maglev doesn’t solve any problems that high-speed rail doesn’t solve. It’s a little faster, but still not as fast as flying. It’s friction-free, but still requires a huge amount of energy to magnetically levitate a train. Most importantly, it doesn’t go where people want to go when they want to go there, which is why the Shanghai maglev has such poor ridership, filling an average of just 20 percent of its seats.

Some people wonder why the United States isn’t building a maglev line similar to the one planned for Japan. After all, says Slate staff writer Will Oremus, we spend more than $112 billion each year on highways. Yes, but unlike a 320-mile maglev, our 4 million miles of highways, roads, and streets go just about anyone someone could want to go.

And that’s why trains are stupid in the modern age. They’re good at taking a lot of people from point A to point B, but if you aren’t at point A, or if you don’t particularly want to go to point B, they don’t do you any good. Trains are primarily popular with people who live near the center of dense cities and can’t imagine anyone wanting to go anywhere except the center of another dense city, which is why they are loved by politicians and journalists. Ordinary people who need to get from their home to their job, neither of which is near (or likely to be near) a train station? Not so much.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

One reason for colleges’ quirky essay questions is to discriminate against Asians, who are viewed as often not contributing much to classroom discussion beyond “Will this be on the test?”

A college admission issue I’ve never seen investigated quantitatively is quantity and quality of class participation. How important is class participation and how do you predict it?

Read it.

 When the US Air Force launched the F-22 program over two decades ago, it sought to deploy around 750 of these multirole fighters, to replace over 600 F-15 variants and 60 F-117A stealth fighters. At that time the F-22’s stealth capabilities and performance were specified to defeat a projected future Soviet air defence threat. Two decades later that exact threat capability has materialised – exactly as then predicted by USAF technological strategists – but on the global stage, rather than the territories of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

The common catchcry of F-22 critics that the aircraft is “designed to defeat an non-existent Soviet threat” is little more than a convenient deception: these threat capabilities do now exist but are being exported globally, making it very likely that the US will have to soon confront them in combat, as compared to the defunct scenario of fighting WW3 against the Soviets.

Food stamps buy votes, advanced fighter jets don’t, although the latter are an essential function of government and the former are not.

This is what happens when you let politicians run your government.

Read it.

Unaddressed is the question of why anybody would want to make a city move.

However, given the failure of many static cities, perhaps this type of city makes sense as a solution to some of our social and economic development problems.

Uh, like, how? I don’t see that Detroit would be anything other than a disaster if you could move it somewhere else — unless perhaps you left the current population behind, which is not being suggested. The problems of failing cities are problems caused by the people, not their location.

Read it.

It was an argument he says he made to Thomas Friedman as The New York Times columnist was writing his 2005 book, The World is Flat, a work that came to define the almost end-of-history optimism that accompanied the entry of China and India into the global labour markets, a transition aided by the internet revolution. “Fine, go to those Bangalore Infosys centres, but just for the hell of it go three miles aside and go look at the guy living with no toilet, no running water,” Gates says now. “The world is not flat and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.”

And that tells you everything you need to know about Bill Gates — and Thomas Friedman.

Unfortunately, his viewpoint is still technocratic: “Hey, there’s this problem! We’re smart guys, we fix problems! Let’s go!” Such people spend all their time fixing the symptoms and not addressing the disease, which is the social structures and attitudes that allow such problems to arise and persist in the first place.

Read it.

 You Millenials voted for Obama by a margin of 28 percent, which will make it a lot easier for me to accept the benefits you will be paying for. We warned you that liberalism was a scam designed to take the fruits of your labor and transfer it to us, the older, established generation. Oh, and also to the couch-dwelling, Democrat-voting losers who live off of food stamps and order junk from QVC with their Obamaphones.

You didn’t listen to us. Maybe you’ll listen to pain.

The guys at Powerline have some fun.

* I Walk the Lie
* Coward of the Country
* I Used To Be a Coal Miner’s Daughter, But Daddy’s Unemployed
* Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Democrats
* Thank Allah I’m a Commie Boy
* Benghazi’s Never On My Mind
* Jarrett Take the Wheel (That’s IowaHawk)
* He Stopped Having Health Coverage Today
* I’m a Rhinestone Golfer
* I Love This Par
* Here’s Seventeen Trillion Dollars, Call Someone Who Cares
* MSM: Are You Going to Kiss Up To Me, Or Not?
* Don’t Take Your Guns To Town (Or Anywhere Else)
* Man, I Throw Like A Woman
* I Wanna Talk About Me (Actual song name, no change needed)
* Scammed By Your Plan (Heh.)
* Patches (to the Web Site) (You have to be of a certain age to appreciate this one)
* God Damn the USA
* I Never Promised That In the Rose Garden
* Take This Constitution and Shove It
* All My Taxes Are In Excess
* You Picked a Fine Time To Leave Me, Blue Cross/Blue Shield

The Other McCain looks at Regressives.

There is a phenomenon on the Left — especially among academics and other “intellectual” types, including feminists — where they become so used to living within cocoons of like-minded sympathizers that they don’t realize how weird their ideas seem to normal people. And so, when somebody outside the cocoon takes notice and quotes their deranged gibberish, these people claim victimhood: “Those right-wing [sexists, homophobes, racists, Koch-funded Rethuglicans, whatever] are [harassing, libeling, slut-shaming, whatever] me!“

You can ask Jeanette Runyon how she has actually been reported to the police for the alleged crime of quoting some of the “Free Kate” weirdos who want to legalize sex with 14-year-olds.

Read it.

The chickens are coming home to roost for supporters of Barack Obama in classic fashion: one San Francisco couple that donated to Organizing for America and worked the phone banks to ensure Barack Obama’s reelection has found that they are far worse off because of ObamaCare than they were before

Poor iddle babies….

The couple was paying $550 a month for their health coverage, but recently they were informed by Kaiser that their plan would be canceled by the end of 2013 because the plan couldn’t meet the standards of ObamaCare.

Hammack said, “From all of the sob stories I’ve heard and read, ours is the most extreme.” Health care reporter Charles Ornstein of ProPublica took a look at the couple’s coverage and found their plan was a good one; any new plan would be more expensive with less benefits, and the couple didn’t qualify for federal subsidies because their income was more than quadruple the federal poverty level.

Welcome to the Obamanation. You broke it, you bought it.

Read it.

Oh, ya think?

The Obama administration indicated last week it will propose exempting certain self-insured, self-administered insurance plans from two of the healthcare law’s three-year reinsurance fees.

The policies that would escape the fees include the multi-employer or “Taft Hartley” plans that are commonly held by union members.

Look for … the Union label….

So to speak.

Several week ago, Jessica Dever-Jakusz resigned her position as a police officer in Tempe, Arizona. A memo from the police chief confirming her resignation led to a public records request, which revealed that Dever-Jakusz had told an alleged drug dealer she was having sex with that she and two other females buying “Molly” (MDMA, mostly, kinda) from him were undercover cops investigating him. Cops found out what happened when the target of the investigation showed up at a police station to tell them.

Nick Gillespie throws up his hands.

Steven Hayward points out some inconvenient truth.

Today in my Constitutional Law class I’ll be taking up the famous case of McCulloch v. Maryland, the bank case from 1819 in which Chief Justice John Marshall observed that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” which immediately set my mind to thinking about . . . Obamacare.  Obamacare’s medical device tax—a tax not on profits remember, but on revenues—is doing its destructive work already.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that “Funding Dries Up for Medical Startups,” noting that “Investment in the medical-device and equipment industry is on pace to fall to $2.14 billion this year, down more than 40% from 2007 and the sharpest drop among the top five industry recipients of venture funding.”  It seems we have to relearn every few years (such as the luxury boat tax of 1990, swiftly repealed when it killed the boat-building industry) the basic lesson that Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan taught us: tax something and you get less of it.  Especially when you tax it like Obamacare, where the tax significantly reduces the after-tax return to investors.

It is a popular theory that failure is the deliberate design of Obamacare, the better to force us into a single-payer system.  True enough that Obama voiced this sympathy some years ago.  But I tend in these matters to go with Uhlmann’s Razor, the bureaucratic-age variant of Occam’s famous blade, provided to us by professor Michael Uhlmann of Claremont Graduate University: “When stupidity is a sufficient explanation, there’s no need to have recourse to any other.”  Remember that it was Congress—Nancy Pelosi’s Congress—that wrote most of the (Un)Affordable Care Act.

Read it.

Now, let’s watch Greenpeace and similar eco-Nazis try to shut them down.

Read it.

How to be a ‘progressive’ in one easy lesson.

Read it.

As the search for a missing autistic child continues in New York City, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is proposing a tracking initiative that could help to prevent similar stories from happening across the country. Schumer has requested that the Department of Justice begin funding voluntary programs that would give tracking devices to schools and caretakers who ask for them. The tracking devices might be worn around the wrist or ankle or looped between shoelaces, and would allow local law enforcement to locate children with autism who have run away.

Chuck Shumer’s purpose in life is finding ever more ways to spend other people’s money.

SF author Mike Flynn channels Aquinas, delightfully so.

 Question I. Whether Christianity promoted the rise of science

Guy Somerset is delightfully dyspeptic today.

One cannot be perpetually ill-informed or uninformed on every issue of any substance for the better part of a decade without having people conclude that Barack Obama is either a colorful cut-out made to dance and shuffle for the American people down the stairs of Air Force One, or he is an idiot.

Either way, the effect is the same. We’re fucked.

Incidentally, the Barry Stutter (by which he stumbles, repeats, and pauses over the first syllable of words) is a very old linguistic technique of quasi-hypnotists. Its purpose is to commence a phrase, use quick repetition without completion, hesitate long enough for the listener to anticipate what is to come and thereafter continue, creating positive reinforcement in the audience. Onlookers hear what they were prepared to hear moments prior yet believe they thought it first. When Barack says what he conditioned them to expect, they feel intelligent. Since he is confirming what they “already thought,” Obama is “brilliant.” Politicians and newsreaders use this trick to exhaustion.

We saw this same trick in the Bush/Kerry election, where Bush was touted as ‘stupid’ and Kerry as ‘brilliant’ even though Bush got better grades at Yale and had a Harvard MBA, something that Kerry could only dream of.

Read it.

A new poll by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling shows Republican Greg Abbott leading Democrat Wendy Davis by 15 points in the 2014 Texas gubernatorial race.

As predicted: Prettiest. Roadkill. Ever.

Read it.

Though the famed Egyptian pharaoh King Tutankhamun died more than 3,300 years ago, the mystery surrounding his death and mummification continues to haunt scientists.

Slow news day.

Read it.

With the help of computerized eye trackers, new research finds that at least 50 percent of people can see the movement of their own hand even in the absence of all light.

Read it.

Of course he does. He’s a Democrat.

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The District’s ShotSpotter has detected 39,000 outdoor gunshot incidents in the past eight years. Sensors cover about a third of the city and are concentrated where gun crime is highest. It allows police to respond immediately to the exact location where shots are fired and provides a dramatic picture of the danger faced in many neighborhoods.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws. Otherwise it might wind up looking like Texas….

Read it.

Hey, they got some serious women in Tennessee.

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HMS Ocelot, an Oberon class diesel-electric submarine, was launched from Chatham Dockyard in 1962. After spending nearly 30 years in commission with the Royal Navy, she paid off in 1991 to make way for the short-lived Upholder class.

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No problem. We’ll just go back to making everything with hand tools. Win-win!

Cancel that pesky Industrial Revolution! Let’s go back to the days of Karl Marx, where labor was supreme!

Or maybe not.

Read it.

In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moment, the Navy has given a man bearing the name of the famed, fictional captain of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise real command of the USS Zumwalt, an advanced, $3 billion dollar, 610-foot destroyer equipped with advanced missiles and stealth technology.

His full name is James A. Kirk, but his nickname is “T,” a reference to Star Trek’s James T. Kirk, the character first played on television and the big screen by William Shatner, said Lt. Cmdr. Chris Servello, a Navy spokesman.

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Federal “Regulatory Impact Analyses” and regulatory bureaus generally, whether federal or state, aren’t particularly adept at capturing the value of lost liberty and choice.

While these costs don’t get attention or acknowledgment, they are genuine in the eyes of those impacted.

This brief series will describe a few of these hidden costs of big government, starting with simply the loss of liberty in our nanny-state, whose officials want to “nudge” us into behaviors they deem good for us.

Read it.

Well, some do, anyway — hopefully not the same ones that are shilling ‘climate change’ for the U.N…..

I am not making this up.

Think about that next time you get the notion that democracy is a rational form of government.

Read it.

Great idea. Let citizens carry their personal firearms in airports, and you’ll HAVE armed guards at every checkpoint — and save the taxpayers a lot of money.

But I guess that isn’t what they meant.

(Every notice that every time a government employee suggests a solution to a problem, it always involves hiring more government employees?)

Read it.

So now she’s a Protestant. Hey, it’s a step in the right direction — perhaps someday she’ll make the move and become a Christian.

We can only hope

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Another stupid idea mandated by government that everybody agrees is bad but nobody seems able to fix.

Lot of that going around these days.

Read it.

Apparently the future of humanity rests in the laps of HIV-positive Muslims. Who knew?

Read it.

In response to state laws and federal incentives, cities and metropolitan areas across the country are engaged in “sustainability planning” aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In many if not most cases, this planning seeks to reshape urban areas to reduce the amount of driving people do. In general, this means increasing urban population densities and in particular replacing low-density neighborhoods in transit corridors with dense, mixed-use developments. Such planning tramples on property rights and personal preferences. To increase urban area densities, planners use containment policies such as urban-growth boundaries or greenbelts.

Owners of land outside these boundaries are restricted from developing their land. Inside the boundaries, housing prices rise, making homeownership in general, and single-family homes in particular, unaffordable to large numbers of people.

Not that the Crust gives a damn. It’s all about the Narrative.

An economist ‘with a focus on pension issues’ has an idea.

The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks. Being out of sync with European time changes was projected to cost the airline industry $147 million a year in travel disruptions. But I propose we not only end Daylight Saving, but also take it one step further.

…

Now the world has evolved further – we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8am instead of 9am, restaurants were packed at 6pm instead of 7pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early. And for what purpose? If everyone functions an hour earlier anyway, in part to coordinate with other parts of the country, the different time zones lose meaning and are reduced to an arbitrary inconvenience. Research based on time use surveys found Americans’ schedules are determined by television more than daylight. That suggests in effect, Americans already live on two time zones.