kenlacrosse

The New York Times has an interesting article on treating “gun violence” as a disease.  It describes the work of Gary Slutkin who “came to the view that gun violence in poor neighborhoods did indeed resemble the epidemics he had treated in Africa”.

In 2000, he founded CeaseFire (now known as Cure Violence), a Chicago-based organization that treated violence in one such local cluster — in West Garfield, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city — as a public health problem rather than a criminal justice issue. Shootings dropped dramatically. …

The center’s director, Amy Ellenbogen, had decided several years earlier to begin focusing on gun violence in the African-American community. … The first step in combating an epidemic is to find the disease carriers. … A second group of staff members are called “violence interrupters.”

Slutkin’s treatment apparently rests on the idea that shootings are an African-American cultural problem and by finding “disease carriers” and treating them, crime could be reduced. Slutkin’s heart must be pure, or else his whole program would be condemned by the NYT as an exercise in racial profiling and forced re-education.

Rebranding works wonders. Shakespeare was mistaken to say, “what’s in a name?”  A name is everything.  Andrew Sullivan has recently imagined president Obama as Ronald Reagan. It’s not hard to see why. Reagan was a winner and Obama is … well Reagan.  Everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln would be a liberal democrat today. Might as well say it.

Try changing “R” to “D” and the approach of “curing” the African-American population of gun violence by mind control is instantly legitimized. It isn’t fascism when the Left does it. Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood wanted to eugenicize mental defectives and genetic inferiors in order to achieve racial betterment.

As part of her efforts to promote birth control, Sanger found common cause with proponents of eugenics, believing that they both sought to “assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.” Sanger was a proponent of negative eugenics, which aims to improve human hereditary traits through social intervention by reducing reproduction by those considered unfit. Sanger’s eugenic policies included an exclusionary immigration policy, free access to birth control methods and full family planning autonomy for the able-minded, and compulsory segregation or sterilization for the profoundly retarded. In her book The Pivot of Civilization, she advocated coercion to prevent the “undeniably feeble-minded” from procreating.

Although Sanger supported negative eugenics, she asserted that eugenics alone was not sufficient, and that birth control was essential to achieve her goals.

In contrast with eugenicist William Robinson, who advocated euthanasia for the unfit,[note 9] Sanger wrote, “we [do not] believe that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding.” Similarly, Sanger denounced the aggressive and lethal Nazi eugenics program.

In addition, Sanger believed the responsibility for birth control should remain in the hands of able-minded individual parents rather than the state, and that self-determining motherhood was the only unshakable foundation for racial betterment.

Sanger also supported restrictive immigration policies. In “A Plan for Peace”, a 1932 essay, she proposed a congressional department to address population problems. She also recommended that immigration exclude those “whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race,” and that sterilization and segregation be applied to those with incurable, hereditary disabilities.

But at least her heart was pure.  The content of a political proposal doesn’t depend on its content; it relies on who proposes it. Conservative bad, progressive good. It’s simple: me Tarzan, you Jane.

The difference between “Climate Change” and raping Gaia is that it’s only an affront to Mother Nature when its for the Keystone Pipeline. The Left can change climate to any degree and still be in the good. Matthew Watson of the Guardian writes “why we’d be mad to rule out climate engineering”. He adds, “if climate change continues then all options to lessen its impact, including geoengineering, must be considered as a last resort”.

We know that supertyphoon Haiyan wasn’t caused by UN initiatives on climate change because they never do anything bad.  Balmy breezes caressing the tropical nights are the work of the Left. When death and destruction ensue it is certain to be the conservatives fault.

Just recently members of the Communist New People’s Army attacked a burial party on the island of Leyte. It must be good. They were only trying to make sure the dead were really dead and not US imperialist zombies in disguise.  That’s why Jose Maria Sison, the man who commands the New People’s Army, is a protected person in Europe. Just like Sanger, his heart is pure.

Recently the WSJ informs us that Obama has decided to oppose Obamacare. The “White House to Allow Insurers to Continue Canceled Health Plans”.  But weren’t conservatives criticized for the very same view on the grounds that Obamacare is the “law of the land” and they were Confederate Rebels to oppose it, not to mention slaveholders? But it’s only the “law of the land” when Obama agrees with it.  When he changes his mind he can set it aside by Executive Order.

Obama now admits that Obamacare is unworkable, in the felicitous phrase of Peter Suderman. The real issue is why he was deceived. The president told a press conference that he was angrier than anyone at being uninformed.

OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Had I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.

That convoluted admission will not change the fact that Obama is the smartest president in history. Megan Daum of the LA Times explains why a stammer is never just a stammer:

Apparently, a lot of people consider President Obama to be bumblingly inarticulate. “The guy can’t talk his way out of a paper bag!” a reader wrote to me recently. “Sarah Palin is a brilliant speaker. It’s the president whose sentences are undiagrammable,” said another in response to a column I wrote about Palin. It’s not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives, who hold this view. A Google search of “does Obama have a speech impediment” turns up several pages of discussion among the president’s supporters and critics alike.Admittedly, the president is given to a lot of pauses, “uhs” and sputtering starts to his sentences. As polished as he often is before large crowds (where the adjective “soaring” is often applied to his speeches), his impromptu speaking frequently calls to mind a doctoral candidate delivering a wobbly dissertation defense.

But consider this: It’s not that Obama can’t speak clearly. It’s that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can’t keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you’re a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president’s stammer doesn’t bother you.

It takes a real genius to think of that. Me, I would have just thought he had a stammer or talking through his hat. But since conservatives are by and large inclined to leave you alone, nobody cares about what I  think; why should you when I’ll leave you alone? I won’t send the New People’s Army to shoot up your funeral. This indifference is characterized as “uncaringness”. However the Left is relentlessly interventionary. Not only about the political, but the personal. They have an opinion on everything and know exactly what you need.

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Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

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RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “Obama is waist deep in quicksand. The first rule of quicksand is not to struggle; to swim your way out. But Obama won’t. Can’t. The deeper he gets the harder he thrashes. No shame. No self control. And therefore this may end in the manner of the Beast From Hollow Mountain.”

Plus this: “Meanwhile the conservatives, who cannot at present account for more than half the voters, are in a strategic waiting game. At best they can consolidate the half into the nether millstone against which events may grind. The single greatest task for conservatives is to fix their own leadership problems. In so doing they must avoid the single greatest mistake Obama has made, which is to rely on fantasy. The facts, however unpalatable. The truth, no matter how bitter.”

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: UnitedHealth drops thousands of doctors from insurance plans.

DORIS LESSING HAS DIED. Let me again call attention to this column of hers on political correctness and communism, and this piece on why feminism should stop attacking men, which was linked back in the very earliest days of InstaPundit.

Also, this scathing piece on Robert Mugabe. “Mugabe is now widely execrated, and rightly, but blame for him began late. Nothing is more astonishing than the silence about him for so many years among liberals and well-wishers—the politically correct. What crimes have been committed in the name of political correctness. A man may get away with murder, if he is black. Mugabe did, for many years.”

EUROPE: Young and Educated in Europe, but Desperate for Jobs. Plus, what passes for entrepreneurialism: “To gain experience, she was making plans to form a cooperative to study social issues like gender equality and sell reports to public institutions.”

Plus, an idiot who thinks the problem is “massive population growth.” Actually, in Europe it’s the lack thereof that’s contributing to the stagnation.

(Steven Hayward)

With all the fun watching Obamacare collapse, we’ve hardly had time to take note of the climate change circus tent collapsing around its tentpoles at the latest UN climate summit taking place over in Poland right now.

First, Japan has essentially said “Goodbye to all that” in announcing that it is repudiating its Kyoto Protocol target of a 6 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels (a target that would require about a 25 percent reduction from current emission levels).  Instead, Japan announced that its new emissions policy will allow for a 3.1 percent increase in GHG emissions from 1990 levels by the year 2020.  Reuters quotes China’s climate “negotiator” (heh) as saying “I have no way of describing my dismay” about the revised target.  China is secretly delighted, since it relieves the pressure on them to submit to the economy-ruining agenda of the UN.

Japan is having to revise its target upward because of its rash decision to phase out nuclear power in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster.  You would think environmentalists would be pleased at this.  But over 95 percent of Japan’s replacement energy is coming from hydrocarbons (coal, oil, and gas).  Oops.  As Reuters puts it, “Japan’s decision added to gloom at the Warsaw talks, where no major countries have announced more ambitious goals to cut emissions, despite warnings from scientists about the risks of more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising sea levels.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. and other developed nations including the EU have rejected a proposal from developing nations that future emissions targets be based on historic emissions going back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which would tilt policy in highly predictable (and anti-U.S.-EU) ways.  Here’s a bit from the Bloomberg account of the conference:

The U.S. and European Union blocked a proposal supported by 130 nations including Brazil and China that would use [CO2 emission] levels dating back to the industrial revolution to help set limits on emissions in the future. . . The proposal goes to the heart of one of the most divisive concepts in the talks — the notion of equity. Developing countries say that because industrialized nations have been emitting greenhouse gases for 200 years, they must bear the most responsibility to rein in the pollution blamed for global warming. Richer countries see a focus on the past as a tool by poorer nations to avoid making bigger efforts to curtail their own emissions.

Of course, whenever you hear the term “equity” at one of these UN gatherings, it is code for the U.S. and Europe to hand over their wealth.  The UN is aiming for a new comprehensive climate treaty by 2015.  Doesn’t look good, unless Iran steps into the picture somehow, thus assuring a U.S. cave in.

By the way, kudos to Australia, which sent a low-level diplomat to this round of the climate talks rather than their senior environment or energy minister, as they have always done in the past.  We should start following their lead.

FRAUD: To pass health plan, Obama and Dems kept mum about its downsides.

The journalist Jonathan Cohn, an ardent supporter of Obamacare, recently wrote in The New Republic that problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act should be “an opportunity to have a serious conversation about the law’s tradeoffs — the one that should have happened a while ago.”

Cohn is right that there was no serious conversation about those tradeoffs back when Congress was considering the law’s passage in 2009 and 2010. But why was that? It was because President Obama and his Democratic allies could not speak seriously — and honestly — about those tradeoffs and still pass their bill.

So instead, Obama assured Americans they could keep health care policies they liked. And it wasn’t just Obama. “One of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in August 2009. “If you like what you have, you can keep it,” said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October of the same year.

Many, many Democrats promised the same thing. They had to. If they had declared openly that millions of Americans would lose their current coverage and face higher premiums and deductibles — if Obama and Democratic leaders had said that, they would not have been able to maintain party unity in support of the bill, and the Affordable Care Act would never have passed Congress.

It would not have mattered that Republicans opposed the bill unanimously. A frank public discussion of Obamacare would have divided Democratic support, with the result being no new law at all.

But now, as the reality of Obamacare begins to present itself in the lives of millions of Americans, the president and his party can no longer avoid an honest look at the law they passed. And one part of that honesty will be examining what they said when they passed Obamacare. There will likely be a lot of accountability in coming months.

Despite their best efforts to avoid it.

ABOVE THE LAW: Justice Clarence Thomas Speaks, And Oh, What A Speech. “I quit my job impetuously, packed up a U-Haul, and moved to Washington. One thing led to another and I wound up on the Court. It was totally Forrest Gump.” Plus this:

Judge Sykes: Stare decisis doesn’t hold much weight with you?

Justice Thomas: Oh it does. But not enough to keep me from going to the Constitution.

Indeed.

“Using statistics,” my teacher used to say, “is like driving a car down a road with the windshield blacked out, guided only by your rear-view mirror.” The notion of the future as a probability is at the heart of the Washington Post‘s survey of natural disasters. Typhoon Haiyan was not unique. It was individually unpredictable, but it was statistically just what one would have expected: “33 of the 35 deadliest tropical cyclones on record have occurred in southern or southeastern Asia – due to a confluence of meteorology, geography, population density, poverty and government.”

The deadliest tropical cyclone in recorded history is largely considered to be the Bhola Cyclone that struck Bangladesh on November 12, 1970, claiming between 300,000 and 500,000 lives. Six of the top ten deadliest tropical cyclones have occurred in Bangladesh, and the vast majority of the top 35 have occurred in the countries that lie along the Bay of Bengal.

The older readers might still remember the Bangladesh typhoon because the following year it spawned the Concert for Bangladesh, at which George Harrison performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The other catastrophes you may have forgotten.

 

1.	Great Bhola Cyclone, Bangladesh	1970 (Nov 12)	Bay of Bengal	300,000 – 500,000
2.	Hooghly River Cyclone, India and Bangladesh	1737	Bay of Bengal	300,000
3.	Haiphong Typhoon, Vietnam	1881	West Pacific	300,000
4.	Coringa, India	1839	Bay of Bengal	300,000
5.	Backerganj Cyclone, Bangladesh	1584	Bay of Bengal	200,000
6.	Great Backerganj Cyclone, Bangladesh	1876	Bay of Bengal	200,000
7.	Chittagong, Bangladesh	1897	Bay of Bengal	175,000
8.	Super Typhoon Nina, China	1975 (Aug 5)	West Pacific	171,000
9.	Cyclone 02B, Bangladesh	1991 (May 5)	Bay of Bengal	138,866
10.	Cyclone Nargis, Myanmar	2008 (May 3)	Bay of Bengal	138,366

Wikipedia has a list of record-breaking typhoon statistics.  It may surprise some to learn that the biggest recorded storm surge in history was 1899′s Cyclone Mahina in Bathurst Bay, Queensland Australia, killing 400 people — a lot considering the sparse population of the area. “A storm surge, variously reported as either 13 meters or 48 feet high, swept across Princess Charlotte Bay then inland for about 5 kilometers, destroying anything that was left of the Bathurst Bay pearling fleet along with the settlement. Eyewitness Constable J. M. Kenny reported that a 48 ft (14.6 m) storm surge swept over their camp at Barrow Point atop a 40 ft (12 m) high ridge and reached 3 miles (5 km) inland, the largest storm surge ever recorded.”

The problem with statistics is there’s always an outlier.

The dates of the disasters are particularly revealing because some happened long before any “carbon economy” was in evidence or the term even invented. Recent calls to combat “climate change” assume that bureaucrats know how the weather works.  Considering how much of our received wisdom is contrary to the evidence in the rear-view mirror, we might conclude that we are still without a reliable predictive model; and without such a model, what tinkering we embark upon may make things worse, rather than better. You only operate on a patient when you can see and not before.

How do people prepare for an unknown future?

The classic response of a decision-maker facing irreducible uncertainty has been to form a reserve. Reserves also go by the name of “savings” or “stockpiles” or design margins. They are intentional surpluses prepared against an unpredictable future. We all know, or used to know, the Biblical advice on risk management. “Pharaoh had a dream: He was standing by the Nile, when out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile and stood beside those on the riverbank. And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows. Then Pharaoh woke up.”

(Steven Hayward)

I’ve written before here about the documentary film Pandora’s Promise, in which prominent environmentalists have changed their mind about nuclear power.  Then a couple weeks ago several prominent climate alarmists, headed by the egregious James Hansen, put out an article advocating a return to nuclear power.  Naturally this has upset the retrograde/reactionary environmentalists who are stuck in 1979 and can’t get over Three Mile Island.

Last Thursday CNN decided to broadcast Pandora’s Promise, and pair it with an episode of Crossfire about the topic between the fossilized Ralph Nader and my stylish pal Michael Shellenberger.  Michael had called me in advance of the debate, saying he was a bit nervous about debating Nader, but I expressed confidence that he’d wipe the floor.  If you have 10 minutes or so to spare, here are two of the Crossfire segments:

Obama's easing of the non-citizen Medicaid enrollment process opens up Medicaid to being overwhelmed by fraud. This problem is compounded by the Navigator/Assister program being on the "honor system," and the scores of troubling Navigators/Assisters appearing on Healthcare.gov. (Also today, James O'Keefe reveals the inevitable results of this situation with an undercover sting operation.)

WAIT, I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Pregnant moms who drink wine may be healthier in other ways: study.

(Steven Hayward)

Cartoonist nonpareil Michael Ramirez is beating Obama like a drum right now.  Of course, Obama is proving an easier artistic target than Jimmy Carter, and Obama doesn’t even have a beer-swilling brother (that we know of).  Anyway, herewith a recent gallery:

THIS IS NEWS: Investor’s Business Daily: Intelligence Warnings On Benghazi Were Loud And Clear.

A trio of intelligence reports sounded the warning — but were ignored by senior administration officials during the 2012 presidential campaign.

One report, compiled for the Irregular Warfare Support Program of the Pentagon’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, predicted al-Qaida would take aggressive actions, including “selective terrorism, threats, intimidation and assassination.”

Well, that turned out to be true. Someone should ask Hillary about it.

THESE OBAMACARE ADS TELL YOU THAT they think you’re really, really stupid and gullible. And really, after electing Obama twice, it’s easy to see why they might.

ONLY TRAINED LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS CAN BE TRUSTED WITH FIREARMS:

Uniforms take cased rifle out of CT scanner and place it on counter that runs along left side of room. Proceed to unlock case, while TSA takes literally dozens of photos, and open case up. Rifle is now sitting in case, pointed at doorway and tensabarrier beyond which 8-10 hunters, a woman who bought her nephew a toy gun as a present and had to check it, and myself, are waiting.

Uniformed DPD then picks up rifle and sweeps it back and forth across the entire crowd while “inspecting” the trigger, safety and bolt. Finger on trigger.

Crowd scatters, I nearly dive for cover. Woman with toy gun just looks confused wondering why everyone is shoving to get out of the way.

Police, TSA and Detective are all completely oblivious. Not a clue what they just did.

I make smart ass comment out loud “leave it to the police to wave a loaded rifle at you”.

Pathetic. The terrorists have won.

(Steven Hayward)

It was inevitable that the climateers and their handwringing handmaidens of the media would pronounce Typhoon Halyan is proof of climate change.  So hand over your car keys and turn your thermostat down!  It is tedious and boring to have to deal with this, but, like hauling the trash to the curb every week, somebody has to do it.

For example, here’s one general assessment of the issue:

Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin… In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low.

Which oil-and-coal-backed skeptic said this?  Oops: this is from the latest UN IPCC climate science report released six weeks ago (chapter 2 on Oceans if you’re a glutton).

My current campus colleague Roger Pielke Jr. (we see each other every Monday at department faculty meetings these days) calls out the egregious Jeffrey Sachs for distorting the scientific consensus, based on this tweet from the Twit:

 

Of course, Roger has one big thing on his side.  This stuff called data:

Speaking of “turning your thermostat down,” over in Britain right now there is a resurgence in employment for . . . chimney sweeps.  No, it’s not a Mary Poppins revival: it’s what happens when energy costs are driven up and people resort to cheaper energy, like wood-burning fireplaces.  Sure to do wonders for London’s air quality.

 

COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM ALWAYS ENDS THIS WAY, AS THE COVERT LOOTING BECOMES OVERT: Venezuela’s Economic War With Itself.

The detained reporter was looking into upcoming municipal elections and the chronic shortages of basic goods that have plagued Venezuela. And the “military occupation” of an electronics retailer comes ahead of those elections, in which Maduro’s party is not expected to do well.

The roots of both of these issues go back to Chavismo, the left-wing ideology of former president Hugo Chavez, who used Venezuela’s oil revenues to support huge social spending. Unfortunately, Venezuela’s heavy, sulfurous crude requires a lot of continual investment to keep it coming out of the ground, and much of that investment has been diverted. Since Chavez took office, Venezuela has been pumping less and less of the stuff. . . .

As oil prices fell, the government inevitably ran into political trouble, which it has tried to manage with ill-considered economic interventions such as price controls. Shortages of basic household goods are common, and currency restrictions have sent the price of airline tickets soaring as Venezuelans resort to vacations as a way to get a hold of scarce foreign currency.

These restrictions tend to fall apart, creating the need for even more extreme measures.

Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. But hey, when Chavez died his family was somehow worth billions. Because he cared for the poor, you know.

Greg Sargent:

This Friday, House Republicans are expected to vote on a proposal — championed by GOP Rep. Fred Upton — that would allow insurance companies the option of continuing all existing health plans for a year, in response to the loss of plans that has taken place despite Obama’s vow otherwise. The White House points out that this will undermine the law. [Emphasis added]

Notice please that we’ve gone from three years of promises that “if you like the plan you have you can keep it,” to “letting you keep your plan will undermine the law.” What a difference a couple of weeks and a few million cancelation notices make.

In a related item, Matt Yglesias (quelle surprise!) is the latest to hop aboard the Eat Your Spinach bandwagon:

Rather than (foolishly) try to ensure that nobody could ever lose their insurance, the actual Affordable Care Act accelerated the demise of a certain class of plan. Politically, that’s now an embarrassment for the White House. Substantively, it’s a huge achievement.

I guess at least the lying liars who lie have quit lying about lying — and just in time, too, as the awful truth becomes undeniable:

Margaret Davis of West L.A. voted for President Obama and appreciates the ideas behind the Affordable Care Act. She agrees that everyone should have access to healthcare and no one should be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

But here’s the problem:

She knows firsthand, as the new law of the land rolls clumsily into being, that it’s not working out to everyone’s advantage.

“I’m a 55-year-old woman in excellent health and have a catastrophic health plan,” she wrote recently to Obama and California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. “I am completely happy with my plan. I received notice that the plan is being canceled and that to stay with a “comparable” plan my premiums would increase 88%, or $200 extra per month. To add insult to injury, the plan is INFERIOR to my existing plan.”

That means it’s working, Margaret. Just ask Yglesias.

Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal has a few questions about ObamaCare. Since I doubt he’ll get the answers he seeks from the White House, I have agreed to play the part of Professor Ditherton Wiggleroom to the best of my ability.

Got it? Then here we go:

Why implement the mandate in a way that forces many people to buy insurance at inflated prices (a bad deal) in order to subsidize others? Isn’t a universal principle of good governance that subsidies should be funded openly and honestly with tax dollars rather than disguised taxes on disfavored individuals?

No. Had we been honest about the subsidies, we never would have been able to pass this historic legislation. Also, this way there are many more opportunities to punish our enemies, which is in my administration the very definition of good governance.

At your 2010 health-care summit, you dismissed what you called “house insurance”—cheap, high-deductible policies that protect people from serious illness or injury but otherwise leave them to fund routine medical care out of pocket. How do you reconcile this with your oft-stated promise that people can keep their existing insurance?

I don’t reconcile it. I lied in order to get the legislation passed. I had thought that was clear by now.

More important, how do you reconcile it with the fact that virtually all progress on cost control in the past 20 years has come from cost-sharing to make users more sensitive to the price and value of the care they consume? Are we just going to throw this progress away?

“Progress” is defined as subsidizing my supporters and punishing my enemies, which this landmark legislation allows me to do in ways you haven’t even noticed yet.

Your ObamaCare program is supposed to be financed with the mandate-cum-tax on the young plus Medicare cuts, but the mandate is weak and Congress won’t deliver the Medicare cuts. Haven’t you created another unfunded government program destined to be starved for money in the future as the reality of our fiscal situation begins to bite?

Absolutely I have, yes.

You tout the Affordable Care Act as a triumph over special interests, but the stock prices of the insurance industry have enjoyed a huge run-up. Isn’t this because your program, boiled down, just throws more tax dollars at an unreformed health-care system that every analyst, including you, says spends resources inefficiently?

By giving the insurance industry a captive audience paying higher prices for fewer services, we were able to bring insurers on board to help pass this historical legislation.

You cite RomneyCare as a model, but RomneyCare was enacted by a GOP governor and Democratic legislature with overwhelming public support. Wouldn’t there be greater buy-in now from the public if your plan actually had been bipartisan, not to mention greater buy-in from the opposition party, aka Republicans, who are certain to become a governing party at some point in the future and responsible for carrying ObamaCare forward?

I won. And the ACA is the settled law of the land.

Your Affordable Care Act is a nice break with precedent in one way—it reserves its visible subsidies for the poor. Shouldn’t we apply this excellent principle to Medicare and the giant tax benefit for employer-provided insurance? Isn’t our problem that too many middle-class Americans are programmed to treat health care as a free lunch?

WELL NOW, DOESN’T THIS JUST SAY IT ALL: Obamacare girl not a citizen, hasn’t signed up and….wasn’t paid.

I WONDER IF THIS WAS AFTER ONE OF THOSE CHUMMY OFF-THE-RECORD SESSIONS WITH OBAMA? The New York Times endorsed a secretive trade agreement that the public can’t read. “The Obama administration is secretly negotiating a treaty that could have significant effects on domestic law. Officially, it’s a “free trade” treaty among Pacific rim countries, but a section of the draft agreement leaked in 2011 suggested that it will require signers, including the United States, to make significant changes to copyright law and enforcement measures. Strangely, the administration seems to be encouraging the public to have a debate on the treaty before they know what’s in it.”

You have to ratify it to find out what’s in it. Among other things, however, it could restrict the availability of generic medicines. Another payoff to Big Pharma?

ABANDON IN PLACE: In Afghanistan, interpreters who helped U.S. in war denied visas; U.S. says they face no threat.

THE RISE OF THE OBAMACARE SCAMS.

Here’s the most unintended, and inevitable, result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: the new opportunities it’s created for scammers. As a regular consumer of cable news, I’ve seen hundreds of ads that strenuously imply that the crap medical discount plan they’re selling is part of the new health-care law. But since the law took effect, the fraudsters seem to have stepped up. At least one enterprising fellow set up a website designed to fool people into thinking that it was the official government exchange (the government took it down). People are also repeatedly calling around and offering to “help” people enroll for $100, after which the victims are not only out $100, but also their Social Security numbers and other vital information.

This is not in any way the Barack Obama administration’s fault; it’s just the inevitable result of a big, new government program. But it’s worth emphasizing, on this lovely Friday, that you should use HealthCare.gov to find your state exchange. If HealthCare.gov isn’t working, then you should wait until it does, not Google around for “help” that may be anything but. And remind your friends and neighbors to do the same, particularly the elderly ones. The elderly are the most vulnerable to scams at any time, but that’s going to be particularly true with something like this, which requires them to use technology they may find intimidating.

Too bad no one could have foreseen this and done something to avoid it.

Fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the medical and scientific evidence may support the possibility of the "single shooter, three bullet theory" of the event. Yet new insights into the old medical data simultaneously suggest there may have been multiple shooters, according to a new article.

IT’S NOT GOING SO WELL FOR THEM: White House tries to explain Obama’s claim that all Americans can keep health plans.

Here’s the explanation: They couldn’t have passed the bill — which barely passed — without lying. So, they lied. And it worked until after the election.

WE KEEP HEARING THAT MEN ARE PIGS, BUT NOW SCIENCE HAS DEMONSTRATED THAT WOMEN ARE PIGS, TOO:

After monitoring how the gazes of 29 women and 36 men from a large Midwestern university reacted to images of the same group of female models with various body shapes, scientists concluded that participants focused more on the female’s chests and figure when asked to evaluate their appearance than they did on the women’s facial features.

Unsurprisingly, women with narrow waists, full breasts and larger hips – the classic hourglass figure – were rated more favorably than their less voluptuous counterparts, even when men were asked to assess a woman’s personality (rather than attractiveness) based on her appearance in the photos.

But perhaps what’s most interesting is that women also tended to objectify other females in the same way that men did. They, too, spent more time focusing on figure than face.

Hmm. Men are wired to size up women as sex partners. Women are wired to size up women as competitors for men.

In 2009, Nextbigfuture covered the curious case of Brooke Greenberg. At the time she was chronologically 16 years old but physically she was a toddler.

Brooke, who passed away last Thursday at the age of 20, had the body and cognitive function of a 1-year-old. She didn't grow after the age of 5 — and basically, she stopped aging entirely.

Brooke Greenberg, was a 20-year-old who never developed beyond the toddler stage, may provide clues to help scientists unlock the secrets of longevity and fight age-related disorders, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and heart disease.

There has been genetic sequencing of Brooke's DNA and other studies related to aging.



Read more »

(Paul Mirengoff)

Listening to, and live-blogging, Kathleen Sebelius’ testimony this morning, I somehow didn’t hear what may become the money moment of the entire affair. Pressed by Rep. Gardner as to why she has not, and will not, enroll in the ObamaCare exchanges (as Gardner has tried to do), Sebelius muttered “don’t do this to me.” (see video below)

The unwillingness of top government officials and members to subject themselves to that which they have imposed on ordinary Americans is a major sore spot in the Obamacare debate. In this context, Sebelius’ utterance can be viewed as an anthem.

In addition — and this comes as no surprise — Sebelius’ claim, given under oath, in response to Rep. Gardner that she is prohibited by law from using the exchanges because she has affordable health care coverage from her employer turns out to be false. Sebelius said, “if I have affordable coverage eligible in my workplace, I am not eligible for the marketplace.” But, in fact, as Andrew Johnson and Patrick Brennan show, such employees are eligible, though not for a subsidy.

Here is Sebelius’ “don’t do this to me” moment.

In a few days it will be time to recall the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. But as Haaretz points out, the 40th anniversary of a far more monumental event — at least for Israel — came and went last month without being much remarked. More than 40 years ago in October Israel came within an ace of being destroyed by a brilliantly planned Syrian armored attack across the Golan heights.

A friend of mine, then a child, told me about the terror in his town as terrible rumors circulated that the Syrian tanks would be there by nightfall. And by rights they should have been. Yet what should have happened didn’t. What occurred instead was something that occurs only in fiction but which on this occasion happened in fact. A little over 150 Centurion tanks (referred to as Shot by the IDF) and 4 batteries of M-109s had stopped more than ten times their number before they could reach the Jordan or the Sea of Galilee, as slated by the Syrian high command to occur within 36 hours of the jump off.

The Yom Kippur war in the Golan was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and the Alamo rolled into one. In the days prior to the Yom Kippur War, the IDF committed every strategic mistake possible. They discounted the fighting power of the Egyptian and Syrian Army. They misinterpreted the deployment of virtually the entire Syrian army even as it uncoiled itself before the very eyes of its lightly defended observation post on Mount Hermon. They crucially underestimated the power of new Soviet AAA systems accompanying Arab forces. They did not understand how the tank infantry equation had been changed by the new wire-guided antitank missiles.

And they nearly paid for it with the life of Israel.

The Syrians and Egyptians, by contrast, proved what military historians often teach: that defeat instructs more than victory. Smarting from the humiliation of the Six Day War the Arabs purged their armies of many incompetents and, swallowing their pride, let the Russians plan the attack.  The result was a multi-echelon assault plan in the best STAVKA tradition unleashing almost 1,500 tanks and more than 1,000 artillery pieces on Israeli positions on the Golan.

According to the plan the Syrians would pin down the Israeli forces in the center and worm their way around the northern and southern flanks behind a classic Soviet storm of fire. They would open the assault with a heliborne assault by 500 Syrian airborne troops against the 40 men on Mount Hermon, blinding the IDF. Then under cover of a barrage, they would send division after division of tanks, never reckoning the cost, across an anti-tank ditch and crush the hated Jew.

It almost worked.

What in hindsight provided the margin against the Syrian plan were actions by the local IDF commanders, who exercising their discretion, reinforced the Golan to the extent possible without mobilization.  In other words, they played a hunch in disregard of official policy.

“On Rosh Hashana eve, the Israeli 7th Brigade was ordered to move one battalion to the Golan Heights to strengthen the Barak Armored Brigade, under the command of Yitzhak Ben Shoham. The brigade commander Avigdor Ben-Gal concluded that something would happen on Yom Kippur. He ordered his artillery troops to survey the area and prepare targets and firing tables. He held a meeting with his battalion commanders to go over the main points of the operational plans that were previously implemented in the Israeli Northern Command. Without notifying his superiors, he took them on a tour of the front line. By 12:00 on Yom Kippur, 6 October, the brigade was concentrated in the Nafakh area.”

It was one of those inspired guesses that change the course of history. In this case it probably saved the life of Israel itself.

Nevertheless when the storm broke things went to pieces in a hurry. The Syrian artillery smothered any radio signal their funkers could find. The IDF commanders would no sooner stop and issue orders than shells would rain down on their heads. The Israeli air force, which had been counted on to stem any tide until armor could be brought up from depots, was blasted from the skies by SAMs, losing more than 50% of the aircraft they sortied over the Golan in the first hours.

And the Syrians were brave. IDF gunners watched, with a mixture of admiration and horror, as the Syrian tankers endured hit after hit as they attempted to place bridges across the anti-tank ditch. Finally sheer numbers prevailed and the Syrians swarmed across.

Then night fell; covering the battlefield with a darkness which the Syrians — equipped by the latest Soviet night vision systems — could pierce and the Israelis could not. Now across the ditch and on the escarpment a terrible duel ensued between groups of tanks, with the Syrians heavily outnumbering their foes.

What happened next has been explained in terms of superiority of training, the advantage of interior lines and sheer luck.

Israeli units improvised. Like some living organism shattered units reconstituted themselves under neighboring commands. Officers commandeered whatever came up the road and improvised groups to stem the Syrian advance.

Training helped too. IDF tankers literally fired 3 times faster than their Syrian counterparts due to their proficient drill. The M109s somehow illuminated the battlefield in order to give the Centurions fitful glimpses of the Soviet-supplied armor crawling like beetles over the slope in which to target and hit them. The IDF fought with the desperation of men defending their families. Tanks moved back to alternate positions sometimes with only one round left and resupplied themselves by caches hidden earlier by truckers who ceaselessly labored up and down the roads. By a hundred expedients the Centurion tanks of the IDF inflicted casualties at rates of up to 25 to 1.

Yet it might not have been enough had fortune and America not taken a hand. The Syrian ground commander, Omar Abrash, a graduate of the US staff college, was killed while leading from the front just when Syrian victory seemed certain. The other commanders were less inclined to press forward. In particular the Syrian armored spearhead fatally paused their attack on the evening of October 7, not willing to believe there was nothing in front of them.

That halt provided time for the IDF to get two divisions into the fight. That halt allowed time for US aerial resupply to provide ECM packages that gave the Israeli Air Force back the skies.

By Oct 8, the IDF had stabilized the line. Oct 11 saw the start of the IDF counterattack. On Oct 13 the IDF had reached the outskirts of Damascus. The game was over; the army of Damascus destroyed. The Syrian Army had nearly won; gotten almost everything right and only one thing wrong.  Yet that mistake had cost them everything.

For the IDF victory was purchased at great price. It marked the end of confidence and the beginning of a terrible awareness of their dependence on American resupply. The Yom Kippur War cost Israel the equivalent of a single year’s GDP. Nearly 800 IDF men died on the Golan alone, a huge number in so small a country. The Barak Brigade, the original defenders of the escarpment, were no more.

But the Syrian tanks, as my friend recalled, never came to their village that night nor on any other.

Haaretz argued that for 40 years the epic battle on the Golan has been forgotten history. Though a few books have been written on it,  no blockbuster Hollywood movies have been made about it; nor has it entered into legend as have Midway or June 6, 1944. What remains of that struggle today is the Golan itself, deceptively bucolic under the Mediterranean sky. The battlefield is now remembered as the Valley of Tears, after the countless Syrians who died on its slopes. The survivors, once young men, are now in their 60s and 70s.

For memory there is the relic of a single knocked-out Centurion tank standing guard still. You can see it in the upper left hand side of the photo below.

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