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Human growth hormone is a specialty drug, a category of pharmaceuticals that includes medications for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia and HIV. As the name would suggest, specialty drugs aren’t cheap. There are no generic alternatives.

As such, insurance companies treat specialty drugs differently. Instead of having a flat co-payment, consumers pay co-insurance, which is a percentage of the price the insurer has negotiated with the drug’s manufacturer. Our co-insurance is 30 percent.

So specialty drugs have always been expensive, and co-insurance is not new. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act turned a cost problem into a bona fide cost crisis – pricing middle-class families out of an already heavily regulated market, sometimes forcing people to seek alternatives in Canada or Mexico, and leaving many patients to suffer.

Obamacare’s critics – many on the left as well as the right – weren’t wrong when they complained that the law would be a gift to insurance companies. Although the law capped out-of-pocket medical expenses, specialty drugs were exempt. But that only perverted an already distorted marketplace, encouraging insurers to raise consumer costs while narrowing their choices.

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In a move reminiscent of ancient history, Saudi Arabia is building a 600-mile-long “Great Wall”—a combined fence and ditch—to separate itself from the Islamic State to the north in Iraq.

The irony here is that those Muslims that Saudi Arabia is trying to keep out are the very same Muslims most nurtured and influenced by a Saudi — or “Wahhabi,” or “Salafi” — worldview.

Put differently, Saudi Arabia is again appreciating how jihad is a volatile instrument of war that can easily backfire on those who support it. “Holy war” is hardly limited to fighting and subjugating “infidels” — whether the West in general, Israel in particular, or the millions of non-Muslim minorities under Islam — but also justifies fighting “apostates,” that is, Muslims accused of not being Islamic enough.

Steve Sailer looks at the sordid underbelly of the Crustian Narrative.

As I’ve been pointing out for a couple of years, we constantly read news stories out of Silicon Valley about male chauvinist brogrammers oppressing women whose only dream in life since they were little girls has been to code. And yet, upon inspection of the details, another word often comes to mind: adventuress.

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Keep in mind that Ms. Pao broke it off after Mr. Nazre failed to divorce Mrs. Nazre. You might think that Ms. Pao’s predation upon Mrs. Nazre’s marriage might be an issue, but that’s missing the point, which is that John Doerr is a deep-pocketed rich white man and therefore must pay. Woman v. woman conflicts, while fascinating to other women, don’t fit well within the dominant feminist legal and media frameworks, so they are of no serious interest.

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Kramer is one of 113 people in the world, and the only former chef, to be certified as a Master Bladesmith. To earn this title (which is conferred by the American Bladesmith Society, of Texarkana, Texas), Kramer underwent five years of practice and study, culminating in the manufacture, through hand-forging, of six knives. Five had to be of gallery-quality designs; the fifth was a roughly finished, fifteen-inch Bowie knife, which Kramer had to employ to accomplish four tasks, in this order: Cut through a one-inch thick piece of manila rope in a single swipe; chop through a two-by-four, twice; place the blade on one’s forearm and, with the belly of the blade that has done all this chopping, shave; and finally, lock the knife in a vice and bend it ninety degrees without having it crack. The combination of these challenges tests steel’s central but conflicting capabilities: its flexibility and its hardness. If tested thusly, my boning knife, despite being hand-made, would have snapped like a toothpick. – See more at: http://craftsmanship.net/the-kitchen-bladesmith/#sthash.e1F8V1fV.dpuf

A fascinating look at knives and the people who make them.

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1) Congress is not out of touch with folks back home
Congress is only a part-time job in Washington, DC. An hour after the last vote, almost everyone is on the airplane home. Congress votes fewer than 100 days a year, spending the rest of the time back home where we pander to their constituents’ short-term interests, not the long-term good of the nation. Anyone who is closer to your district than you are will replace you. Incumbents stick to their districts like Velcro.

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“You’re never without an alibi.”

That’s the tagline of the new smartphone app Alibi, whose splash page is filled with a jerky, lo-fi video of a protest, putting the visitor in the midst of a whirl of yelling policemen, chanting participants, and omnipresent journalists snapping photos. It consciously evokes a kind of paranoia from the outset. Where am I, what kind of an alibi do I need, and how is this technology going to help me get one?

Founded by Jeff Myers and Ryan Salla, the app passively records audio, video, and location data on Android smartphones (it’s not yet available on iOS, and seems unlikely to be in the future given Apple’s store policies of not letting politically controversial tools into their system), and saves the previous hour of information on-demand, so a user always has proof of where they were and who they were with—just in case it becomes necessary. Given the recent killings of Michael Brown and many others in ambiguous violent contexts, Alibi is being pitched as a kind of preventative measure. “If there’s an instance of police brutality and someone has this on, that would be the best scenario,” Myers says.

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Essential oils often evoke thoughts of scented candles and day spas, but their benefits beyond relaxation are less well-known. Essential oils are ultimately just plant extracts—and those are used in countless cleaning and personal-care products, and are the main ingredient in some pest-control products and some over-the-counter medications, like Vick’s VapoRub and some lice sprays. They’re used in the food industry because of their preservative potency against food-borne pathogens—thanks to their antimicrobial, antibacterial, and antifungal properties. Various oils have also been shown to effectively treat a wide range of common health issues such as nausea and migraines, and a rapidly growing body of research is finding that they are powerful enough to kill human cancer cells of the breast, colon, mouth, skin, and more.

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Well, not really. But it is interesting.

Scientists have discovered a human “biological clock” based on certain changes to genes, called DNA methylation. These are important for the expression and deactivation of genes, and therefore our development. By studying DNA methylation markers, the researchers found a way to predict lifespan. When people had a biological age greater than their actual age (you could be 50, but have the DNA of a typical 75-year-old), they could see they were more likely to die sooner than a person whose biological and real ages were similar.

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Al-Shabab, the Somalian terrorist group loosely affiliated with al Qaeda, carried out an attack on a shopping mall in Kenya in 2013. Al-Shabab has now released a video that urges its followers in North America and the United Kingdom to execute similar terrorist attacks, including a specific call for an attack on the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.

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The mall bans guns, so that rules out the most obvious precaution that shoppers could take.

And so are complicit in their own destruction. I won’t go so far as to say that they deserve it, but Own Damned Fault about covers it.

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The nice thing is that they are free.

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As if this were a brand new idea that originated in Silicon Valley. But the Crust are realizing that the current system of government schools is failing, as all such similar government-run systems are failing, and they have to dress an idea in hipster clothes in order to make it more palatable.

A couple of weeks ago, I wandered into the hills north of the UC Berkeley campus and showed up at the door of a shambling Tudor that was filled with lumber and construction equipment. Samantha Matalone Cook, a work-at-home mom in flowing black pants and a nose ring, showed me around. Cook and her family had moved into the house in April and were in the middle of an ambitious renovation. “Sorry,” Cook said, “I didn’t tell you we were in a construction zone.” A construction zone, it turns out, that doubles as a classroom.

Case in point: Mention of the nose ring — to signal that this isn’t just some Baptist mom doing her barefoot-and-pregnant-in-the-kitchen thing, but rather One Of Us.

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(That’s when they’re not indoctrinating kids for a world that cannot ever exist.)

We “learn,” and after this we “do.” We go to school and then we go to work.

This approach does not map very well to personal and professional success in America today. Learning and doing have become inseparable in the face of conditions that invite us to discover.

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As human populations disperse, the separation leads to changes both in genes and in language. So if we look at human DNA and languages over time, we should find that they differ along similar geographic lines.

It’s an intuitive theory, but difficult to prove. That is, until researchers decided to match large collections of geographic, linguistic, and genetic data on hundreds of human populations worldwide.

A new study (PDF), published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, quantifies the complicated relationship between these three factors. Researchers compared the geographic presence of two things in human populations across the world: alleles (trait-defining stretches of DNA) and phonemes (the distinct units of sound that make up spoken language).

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, goes slumming.

A couple of years ago on this site I wondered “Why Isn’t Racism Cool?” Why, I asked, has the state ideology of the West not generated its antithesis, as historical trends are supposed to do? The Kultursmog of white ethnomasochism and xenophilia, of “diversity” and “hate,” of open borders and “no such thing as race,” is at least as stifling—and, in its underlying premises, at least as questionable—as the gray-flannel Organization Man conformism of the 1950s. So where, I asked, are our beatniks and hippies?

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If you break into admission statistics to elite colleges and universities you discover a pattern of “disparate impact” (as the civil rights term of art goes) against Asians. It appears Asians are being actively discriminated against just as Jews were for decades.

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

The interstates were successful because they provided transportation that is faster, cheaper (because it saves fuel), more convenient, and safer than before.

For the past two decades or so, however, much of our transportation spending has focused on infrastructure that is slower, more expensive, less convenient, and often more dangerous than before. Too many cities have given up on trying to relieve congestion. Instead, they have allowed it to grow while they spend transportation dollars (nearly all paid by auto users) on other forms of travel such as rail transit.

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A very simple test can determine whether any particular transportation project will be faster, cheaper, more convenient, and/or safer than before: Will the users themselves pay for it? Users will pay for real improvements in transportation; they won’t pay for slower, more expensive, less convenient, and more dangerous transportation.

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Looking at cities by density of design, Dallas has both New York and Chicago beat.

That’s right, the Big D. If you look past the nation’s tallest and most spectacular designs and focus on the sheer concentration of great design, you’ll find that there is no place that packs in better design than the city’s Arts District. While this standard doesn’t quite rise to the rigor of objectivity, it is juried. Dallas, it turns out, is host to the densest design district in the country.

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Six different Pritzker Prize-winning architects have designed signature buildings in the Arts District, all within an area that’s smaller than a square mile. All of the designers have won other prestigious awards, including Japan’s Praemium Imperiale, the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, and the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Gold Medal. Dallas’ superior six includes one architect who’s been knighted by France, one who’s been knighted by England, and one who’s been named a senator for life in Italy.

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We talked about how we both felt plagued by this weird new thing, and then it hit me. “We’ve become–had to become–professional multitaskers, and it’s almost as if we’ve retrained our brains,” I said. “Now we can’t focus for any length of time on one thing even when that’s our choice.”

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People often make pronouncements that have profound economic implications without knowing it. They care about ends and are content to leave the means to others. That’s irresponsible, the intellectual equivalent, as I’ve said before, to drunk driving.

Health insurance, whatever it is, does not grow wild and abundant in nature or fall from the sky like manna. It constitutes a command over goods and services—that is, over the products of human effort in conjunction with scarce resources. When government provides health insurance through subsidies or Medicare or Medicaid, it presides over the disposal of the fruits of other people’s labor. Government personnel decide who gets what, even though they had no hand in producing the resources they “redistribute.”

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As we all know, “Violent Extremism” is a euphemism for “Islamic Terrorism”. However, “violent” is pejorative and inherently discriminatory, and “extremism” implies a value judgment that says “moderate” ideologies are in some way preferable and superior to “extremist” ones.

Therefore I propose that we replace the outmoded phrase “Violent Extremism” with “Kinetic Activism”, which remains value-neutral while still addressing the dangerous tendencies of certain ideological radicals who interpret core documents in ways that negatively impact their fellow humans of all races, creeds, colors, and sexual orientations.

This past week President Barack Hussein Obama (pbuh) convened a summit in Washington D.C. to address the pressing issue of kinetic activism. The second day of the summit opened with an Islamic prayer in Arabic. No other religious invocations were offered — neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Buddhist, nor Wiccan, nor Ásatruar. Only Muslim.

That makes sense, of course, since Mohammed was the final prophet of the only true religion, whose ministry made all previous avatars irrelevant. So let’s not quibble about the fact that a conclave of responsible theophostics chose to offer a prayer to Allah only, and nothing else. Those esteemed mantics have a legitimate claim to being the best of all people, beloved of Allah. They deserve their righteous privilege.

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The time has come to rethink wilderness.

This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet—indeed, a passion—of the environmental movement, especially in the United States. For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness. Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet. As Henry David Thoreau once famously declared, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” (1)

But is it? The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.

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(Phys.org)—Human speech is not typically thought to adapt to the environment, and a standard assumption in linguistics is that sound systems are in fact immune to ecological effects. Recently, however, scientists at University of Miami and several Max Planck Institutes in Germany and The Netherlands have, in a single study, predicted that complex tone patterns should not evolve in arid climates by reviewing laryngology data on the negative effects of aridity on vocal cord movement, and – by analyzing climatic and phonological data on over 3,700 languages – found support for their prediction.

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Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.¹ Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers.² Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war against the Kurds.³ The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre.⁴ And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.

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Before understanding how we steal from nature, it’s important to know why we would want to. Under some circumstances, evolution through natural selection can lead to optimal solutions to particular engineering problems faced by organisms. What this means is that, given a well-defined problem under a stable set of constraints, a series of minor adjustments acted upon by selective pressure can, over the course of millions of generations, produce something very close to the best possible solution. There is simply no way, given the materials at hand and the constraints of biology and physics, to produce a significantly better performing apparatus for the task. This is what we term “optimality.”

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These animations are outstanding.

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If the Soviet Union had possessed this comprehensive an indoctrination system, it would still be with us today.

Steve Sailer connects the dots:

I think that’s key to understanding what’s going on. Start with the premise that couples who spend $40k per year in tuition per child aren’t doing that to have their child lose his privileges, they are doing that to augment their scion’s privileges. Indoctrinating your child in the dominant rhetoric of the era he will live in not only makes him less likely to make a career-damaging slip up, it makes him more cunning at how to attack and destroy his white rivals whenever they make rhetorical slip-ups as he claws his way to the top. You don’t need to be fair to the people you meet on the way up if you’re never coming back down.

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Mark Steyn says what I’ve been saying for a while now….

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current “leader of the free world” is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?

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Hundreds of people attended the funeral of Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, the man who attacked a cafe and a synagogue in Copenhagen. Estimates put the crowd attending who attended his funeral at from 600-700 — this, in Denmark. Many were masked and flashed the ISIS salute. “Up to half of the attendees, who were all men, had masked their faces with jackets or scarves. More directed their index fingers toward the sky, while others beat their chests with a clenched fist.”

It is hard to square the sight of that funeral, with its open defiance, symbolisms and militancy, with the media narrative — a line which the president has sought to advance – that people like the Denmark shooter are crazy. That they are “Lone Wolves”; disturbed individuals and  marginalized persons who belong to no larger community of belief.

They cannot bring themselves to admit that Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein was in his own way a sincere adherent of a cause because they would have to admit the cause. Instead the public is encouraged to denigrate him and those like him as lunatics. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Denmark shooter fought against overwhelming odds and tied up a European capital city for hours.

Pain Relief Wand.

Snirt Stopper.

Time Locking Kitchen Container.

Pop & Pour Beer Mug.

Windshield Snow Tarp.

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Using photographs of the real sword to gauge the dimensions of the hilt, Anderssen modelled the shape into basic polygons before working on carving out the fine details of the intricate design. Then he sent the finished model to i.materialise to be printed in bronze. When the finished print arrived, he cleaned up the details and had the pieces gilded and fitted with wooden inserts for stability before being attached to the blade.

“The whole project has been very interesting both as a learning experience and also to be able to use processes I already knew, but with more complexity,” Anderssen said. “In contrast to the digital work on screens, this is something you can pick up, look at and use. This is something I find very rewarding.”

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Scientists, supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, say they have discovered a new compound that produces proteins within the cell that look like normal antibodies, but have Y-shaped heads that act as blockers to the virus that causes AIDS.

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To this day, to be treated as a farmer in America doesn’t necessarily require you to grow any crops. According to the Government Accountability Office, between 2007 and 2011 Uncle Sam paid some $3m in subsidies to 2,300 farms where no crop of any sort was grown. Between 2008 and 2012, $10.6m was paid to farmers who had been dead for over a year. Such payments explain why Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, is promoting a rule to attempt to crack down on payments to non-farming folk. But with crop prices now falling, taxpayers are braced to be fleeced again.

American farm subsidies are egregiously expensive, harvesting $20 billion a year from taxpayers’ pockets. Most of the money goes to big, rich farmers producing staple commodities such as corn and soyabeans in states such as Iowa.

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No mess to clean up. No wonder they call it ‘clean’ energy.

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Since its creation in 2001, the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has raised close to $2 billion from a vast global network that includes corporate titans, political donors, foreign governments and other wealthy interests, according to a Washington Post review of public records and newly released contribution data.

Sure, foreigners are all in with the Clintons’ efforts to do whatever it is that the Clinton Foundation does.

Tyler Cowen makes some lemonade.

The next time you are waiting in line, take consolation in the fact that otherwise you might not have heard of the opportunity in the first place. If we see a line at a club, restaurant or movie, we figure something interesting is going on there, and so lines have become a driver of publicity.

Income inequality also may be encouraging sellers to use lines to better segment the market. The rich line-jump by buying Museum of Modern Art memberships, to see special exhibits before they open, while others line up. Restaurateurs give regular customers prime tables, especially if they are good tippers and order expensive wines, while others can’t get a reservation after 5:30 or before 11 p.m. This may seem unfair, but it extracts higher prices from those able to pay the most for New York’s cultural institutions and restaurants. In fact, the inconvenience of the line helps sell the more expensive line-jumping package to those who don’t have the time or the patience to wait.

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Andy McCarthy points out that, even as the White House throws “a public hissy fit” over the upcoming speech to Congress by Benjamin Netanyahu, it chooses to be “chummy” with Salam al-Marayati, the Muslim activist best known for saying, right after the 9/11 attacks, that we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.

You have to hand it Obama, he knows who his friends are. It’s America’s friends that he hasn’t a clue about, and that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt.

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The spot on Svanevej in Copenhagen where police shot Omar el-Hussein to death last Sunday morning has become a place of pilgrimage for “Danish” Muslims. “Youths” from the surrounding area have vowed to return to the spot every Friday and pray for their departed comrade.

Omar el-Hussein was the guy who shot up a cultural center and synagogue in Copenhagen, in case you haven’t been following the news.

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Hey, he’s a Democrat — that’s what they do. ‘Vote for us and get free stuff!’

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Here’s something else that ISIS’s rise in Libya won’t improve: the prospects of the Democratic party’s heir apparent. Hillary Clinton’s claim to be a serious, credentialed candidate largely rests on her tenure as Secretary of State; at the top of her list of accomplishments in that office are the Libya campaign (which she lobbied a reluctant President Obama to undertake) and the reforms in Burma. Now Libya is very visibly sliding from bad to worse—and Burma doesn’t look good either.

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Do-it-yourself 3-D printing is good for more than a hobby: it can also allow ordinary Americans to get medical supplies and devices at low prices. The New York Times reports on the increasing popularity of 3-D printed prosthetic limbs for children. With one in every 1,000 children born with missing fingers (post-birth accidents only augment those numbers), there’s a big demand for prosthetics, but traditional ways of getting one are expensive….

Perhaps the answer to high health care prices caused by government interference in the health markets is for people to do it themselves.

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The young culture-enrichers in Copenhagen who removed flowers from where Omar el-Hussein was shot and killed last Sunday are unhappy with the way they are treated in Denmark. They feel “discriminated against”

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As the only person to have won the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of sheer hope rather than actual achievement, President Barack Obama might have been expected to do everything within his power to vindicate this unprecedented show of international trust. Instead he has presided over a clueless foreign policy that has not only exacerbated ongoing regional conflicts but has made the world a far more dangerous place. And nowhere has this failure been more glaringly manifested than in his much ballyhooed “new beginning” between the United States and Muslims around the world.

John Hinderaker at Powerline points out some inconvenient truth.

There is no serious debate about the fact that Obama’s recent amnesty/work permit decrees were illegal, but the Democrats just don’t care. Hence the current outrage, after a federal judge made the obvious decision. Have we ever had such a lawless administration? Not in my lifetime, certainly.

The Ramirez cartoon is especially apropos.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

So, white grown-ups are a minority in the San Francisco public schools, but their remaining presence is still looked upon as the most obvious explanation for the problems of black students. Even when whites are an actual minority, they remain the Legacy Majority. Sure, white employees of the San Francisco public schools probably voted for Obama 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, but they remain permanently tainted by their race.

The Other McCain understands the dialectic.

Muslims want to kill or enslave us all. This is the “true nature” of Islam. It’s in the Koran. That’s their “grievance.” Period.

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Maybe because nobody cares about it other than Voices of the Crust like Slate? That’s just a guess, you understand.

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The disputed fate of the 21 Coptic Christians abducted in Sirte, Libya is now clear and visible for all to see on video: while holding them down, Islamic State members shove their fingers in the Christians’ eyes, crane their heads back, and slice away at their throats with knives—all in the name of Allah and Islam, all as the slaughtered call out on the “Lord Jesus Christ.”

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion with which no co-existence is possible.

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Scientists looking for deep sea organisms on a research cruise last month got a surprise when, instead of deep sea life, they pulled up metal balls the size of softballs. The German researchers stumbled inadvertently onto the discovery of the largest deposit of manganese nodules known to exist in the Atlantic ocean.

Forbes dishes the dirt.

Democrats are supposedly the party of the poor and oppressed, mightily concerned about the distribution of income and the concentration of wealth – right? And Republicans are the party of business and the affluent, more concerned about expanding income, including that of the rich and wealthy, right? If these characterizations are correct, you would expect the political leaders for the Democrats to come from humble educational backgrounds befitting their allegedly populists beliefs.  You would expect Republican leaders to be graduates of our nation’s academically gated communities, the highly selective rich private schools where even today most students come from affluent backgrounds.

In reality, this is all wrong – badly so. Republican political leaders come from far more humble educational backgrounds than their Democratic counterparts. And, for all their talk about income equality, the Democratic leadership has historically protected and expanded educational inequality through its actions, widening the gap between the rich and poor colleges, those considered distinguished and those considered ordinary.