NOT VERY IMPRESSIVE: Only 106,000 Americans Signed Up For Obamacare in October: Less than two percent of the 7 million Americans officials expect to do so.
And these are the phony shopping-cart numbers, not the number of people who have actually bought policies.
Related: Romney Was Right: GOP Nominee’s Predictions Coming True.
SCUBA DIVING the tectonic boundary between the North American and Eurasian plates.
A ROUNDUP OF NOTICES for Virginia Postrel’s new book, The Power of Glamour: Longing And The Art of Visual Persuasion.
CHANGE: Panel Unveils Shake-up in Strategy to Cut Heart Risk.
The current strategy of reducing a person’s heart-attack risk by lowering cholesterol to specific targets is being jettisoned under new clinical guidelines unveiled Tuesday that mark the biggest shift in cardiovascular-disease prevention in nearly three decades.
The change could more than double the number of Americans who qualify for treatment with the cholesterol-cutting drugs known as statins. The guidelines recommend abandoning the familiar and easy-to-understand guidance to keep LDL, or bad cholesterol, below 100 or below 70 for people at high risk—a mainstay of current prevention policy. Instead, doctors are being urged to assess a patient’s risk more broadly and prescribe statins to those falling into one of four risk categories.
The aim is to more effectively direct statin treatment to patients with the most to gain, and move away from relatively arbitrary treatment targets that are less reliable in predicting risk of attack than is widely believed.
Hmm.
NATALIE SOLENT: “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”
LIFE AMONG the Meteorite Hunters.
READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Paul Taylor, The Big Picture: An Illustrated Guide to Modern American Trends.
JUST TO BE SAFE, I ALWAYS WEAR MY SKYLAB CRASH HELMET. Watch Out for Falling Space Junk and Asteroids.
Related thoughts on space junk.
HMM: Experts See Inconsistencies in DOJ’s Merger Deal With Airlines.
A spokeswoman for DOJ referred Law Blog to remarks made by U.S. antitrust chief Bill Baer on Tuesday. He said the concessions would produce a whole new market dynamic, offering the discount airlines lower barriers to entry, and “providing the incentive and ability for those carriers to invest in new capacity and positioning those carriers to provide significant new competition system-wide.”
University of Tennessee law professor Maurice Stucke said he finds it hard to square that with what the government said before. The government’s complaint, for instance, talked about how Southwest was already competing against the legacy airlines in various markets but still couldn’t prevent the anticompetitive effects of earlier mergers.
The complaint also quoted a senior US Airways executive explaining to her boss in 2011: “Our employees know full well that the real competition for us is [American], [Delta], and [United]. Yes we compete with Southwest and JetBlue, but the product is different and the customer base is also different.”
Said Mr. Stucke, ”If it were just purely a slot issue, the complaint would read differently.”
Personally, I find Maurice Stucke more credible.
FROM THE CASSINI SPACE PROBE, Saturn viewed in natural colors. With Earth in the background.
STEPHEN GREEN ANSWERS THE OBAMACARE QUESTIONS THE WHITE HOUSE WON’T.
WELL NOW, DOESN’T THIS JUST SAY IT ALL: Obamacare girl not a citizen, hasn’t signed up and….wasn’t paid.
VIDEO: Lileks vs. The Robots.
WAPO: Why President Obama’s sinking job approval numbers matter. A lot. “The similarities between Bush’s trend line and Obama’s should be a major concern for Democrats hoping to hold the Senate and retake the House next year. And, already there are signs of real worry among Democrats who will be running for re-election in areas that are less-than-friendly to the president.”
YA THINK? “Redskins:” A Manufactured Controversy. Here’s a hint: In today’s America, almost every race-and-gender “controversy” is manufactured.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 188.
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.
PETER INGEMI: Who Won The Sexual Revolution? ObamaCare Edition.
SO A WHILE BACK I NOTED HERE THAT CAMPUS GENDER EQUITY ENFORCERS DON’T DISPLAY MUCH GENDER EQUITY. It’s a serious diversity problem, and probably explains why they’re so anti-male.
Turns out that things are just as bad in the corporate world according to this item I just ran across:
In an experiment that involved sending out more than 2,500 resumes either with or without photos of the applicant, economics researchers Bradley Ruffle at Ben-Gurion University and Ze’ev Shtudiner at Ariel University Centre sought to answer the question of whether being good looking could help you find a job. The answer surprised them: Not if you’re a woman. Pretty women faced an uphill struggle to get a chance at a job.
The economists hadn’t reckoned on the fact that 93 percent of the HR staffers deciding whether to call in someone for an interview were female. It turns out that HR women (who also tend to be young and single and hence still in the dating market for men) are eager to meet with handsome men. But they’re jealous of beautiful women. So your business is losing out on talented people (and wasting time with untalented ones) based on their looks.
The simple fact of a hiring office that’s 93% female would seem to be prima facie evidence of a hostile work environment, even before this documented pattern of discrimination.
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IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Issa Fires Next Round in IRS Investigation.
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