21ST CENTURY COMMERCE: Pirates Wait For Cost Cutting To Start.

Right now the pirates are stymied by an energetic international effort to make it very difficult for pirates to succeed. There is an international anti-piracy patrol off Somalia, which has over two dozen warships and more than a dozen maritime patrol aircraft monitoring the vast sea areas the pirates were once able to “disappear” into. No more. The large (well insured) commercial ships that the pirates long feasted off are now well prepared to detect, evade or defend themselves from a pirate boarding attempt. Many of the more valuable ships now carry a half dozen or so armed security personnel, most of them former military and ready and able to shoot to kill.

The insurance companies point out that until the rule of law returns to all of Somalia (and pirate-friendly ports and anchorages disappear) the pirates will still be a threat. It’s costing seafaring nations, who supply the ships and aircraft for the anti-piracy patrol, over $7 billion a year to maintain these defenses. A lot of that cost is borne by the shipping companies in the form of additional security expenses for their ships and ultimately by shippers in the form of higher transportation feed. As more time passes with no pirate successes there will be a temptation to cut back on the security efforts. That’s what the pirates are waiting for and the insurance companies know from experience that this is how the world works.

The old-time solution, usually described as “burning out a nest of pirates,” was less defensively oriented, and somewhat longer-lasting.

YOU CAN’T HUG A KID WITH . . . Nearby Galaxy Cluster Has Giant Plasma Arms.

GLAD TO BE OF HELP: Reader Jon Marr writes:

I like to support Instapundit where I can by purchasing from Amazon through your links. If I would likely buy something anyways, why not toss a few coins in the case?

But your tip about the Furinno Laptop Table turned out to be a real find. For a variety of health reasons, including diabetic neuropathy in my legs and a bad back, I spend many days working in bed on my laptop, and this table is fantastic! It’s endlessly adjustable, provides an extremely stable platform, and best of all, get’s the laptop up off my legs which has resulted in a lot less pain and lets me adjust my legs frequently for comfort while working.

Thank you for this tip, and all you do.

Like I said, glad to be of help. The Insta-Wife has used it as a standing desk, but the booklet that came with it suggests that it’s a great reclining laptop desk, too. Glad it worked out. And thanks for the support!

TERRORIST GUNMEN STORM MALL IN KENYA: At least 30 thought dead.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: You Can Take Orgasm Classes Online.

MAYBE I’LL WAIT A BIT TO UPGRADE: iOS 7 Bug Lets Anyone Bypass iPhone’s Lockscreen To Hijack Photos, Email, Or Twitter.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 135.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Health-Care Costs Are Driven By Technology, Not Presidents. Well, presidents can drive them up. But read on:

Those of you who do not spend many happy waking hours parsing health statistics may be unaware that the rate of increase in health-care spending has slowed in recent years. The administration and not a few people in the press are fond of claiming this as a victory for President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. The program is so fantastic on cost control, the argument goes, that providers have naturally started to control costs in preparation for the actual implementation. Authors Amitabh Chandra, Jonathan Holmes and Jonathan Skinner dismiss this explanation. Most of the cost controls haven’t kicked in yet, while one cost-increasing factor (the expansion of private insurance coverage to children under 26) has already taken effect. More importantly, as they note, “the downturn in health-care cost growth began in 2006, back when Barack Obama was still a relatively unknown senator from Illinois.” . . .

Which leaves us with technological change, and that’s what much of the discussion centered on. Cost growth, the argument goes, is largely driven by innovation. Not necessarily good innovation — quite a bit of time was spent denigrating Proton Beam facilities (used for cancer treatment) that cost in the tens of millions of dollars and don’t seem to do patients much good, yet whose total number is set to double between 2010 and 2014. And this is where I started to get nervous. Most participants agreed that if you want to control costs, you need to stop third-party payers from paying for new technologies — particularly Medicare, which is not very discriminating, and which makes it hard for private insurers to deny a treatment that the U.S. government has thereby endorsed. Several people argued rather hopefully that the government could do this — and maybe even would do this, with moves, in Medicare and Obamacare, toward bundled payments and “Accountable Care Organizations.” But no one offered any reason to believe that the government, or the ACOs, would only shut down bad innovation.

Five years ago, when the national health-care debate began in earnest, I worried that national health care would slow innovation. The U.S. is not an efficient user of health care, I argued, but our lavish reimbursements fund innovation. Much of that innovation is bad, which is true of basically any technological frontier; it takes a lot of users, and a lot of iterations, to figure out what works and what doesn’t. But some of it is good — life enhancing, or even extending. If the U.S. shut down that engine, some people might be helped now, but a lot of people in the future might suffer or die from things we could have cured, if we hadn’t shut down the innovation machine.

I still worry about that, personally. While I think we’re on the cusp of the technological cost-lowering revolution that Andy Kessler has been projecting for a while, I still worry that ObamaCare will kill innovation at precisely the time when it was ready to take off.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Little Lies The Media Tell About ObamaCare.

FARE FORWARD is a “Christian Journal of Ideas” published by a group of recent Dartmouth grads.

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Also, coupons galore in Household Supplies.

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SCOTT JOHNSON: Benghazi Scandal Management. “If the media were not a Democratic protection racket, of course, this would all be big news. But they are and it’s not.”

JOURNALISM: Rollie Chance, misidentified as Navy Yard shooter, demands media accountability.

Chance, 50, thought the call was a joke. He told the caller, “I guarantee you 100 percent Rollie Chance didn’t do it,” and hung up.

Moments later, FBI agents arrived at his home. Soon after, reporters began piling up at the curb. And on Twitter, reporters for both NBC and CBS named Chance as the now-deceased killer. CBS also identified Chance on national radio. ABC, which called Chance, did not report any connection.

The two network news outlets quickly retracted their tweets and CBS corrected its radio report. But Chance is wondering how he will ever erase the accusatory Internet trail that led to his door and is trying to work through days of anxiety for his family, including his 9-year-old daughter, whom he held out of school for a day.

“Verify before you vilify,” Chance implored in an interview Friday with his lawyer Mark Cummings. He joined a list of innocent people wrongly connected to high-profile crimes, to include the brother of the Newtown school shooter, two Boston men wrongly linked to the Boston Marathon bombings, and security guard Richard Jewell at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing.

Enormous damages would ensure greater circumspection.

JAMES TARANTO: Rich Man, Poor Woman? The truth about poverty stats: It’s complicated.

The answer to this mystery can be found in the Social Security Actuarial Life Table, which charts, by sex and at every age from 0 to 119, the probability of dying in the next year, the average remaining life expectancy, and the number (out of 100,000) who are still alive at that age. The table gives us three pertinent facts about Americans under 18:

• Boys have a higher infant-mortality rate than girls. Out of 100,000 live-born boys, 699 die before age 1. For girls the figure is 573. That means the infant-mortality rate for boys is approximately 20% higher than for girls.

• Out of 100,000 boys, 1,140 die before age 18. For girls the figure is 867. (These figures include infant deaths.) That means the total mortality rate for minors is 24% higher among boys than among girls.

• Boys are likelier to die than girls at every age except 10 and 11. Those are the ages at which persons of either sex are least likely to die, and the sex differences at those ages are minuscule.

Mortality among infants, children and teens is correlated with poverty for a variety of reasons, including greater exposure to abuse, neglect and crime and poorer quality of nutrition and health care. Boys are at greater risk than girls because they tend to be less robust physically and, as they get older, likelier to get involved in crime and other dangerous behavior. So if there are slightly more impoverished girls than boys, it is likely because poor girls have a better chance of surviving to adulthood than their brothers do.

A similar explanation applies to the elderly. . . . Old age is a shipwreck, de Gaulle observed. Like the Titanic, it is one that women are likelier to survive–and that is why old women have a higher poverty rate than old men.

Sorry, doesn’t fit the preferred victimization-narrative.

YEAH, BUT THE COST HAS DOUBLED FROM THE ORIGINAL PROJECTIONS SO IT EVENS OUT: “The latest predictions from the Obama administration have the Affordable Cart Act insuring only half the number initially expected.”

BUT IF THE GOVERNMENT SHUTS DOWN, IT’LL BE BECAUSE OF REPUBLICAN INTRANSIGENCE: Obama calls Boehner, says he won’t negotiate on debt ceiling. Maybe Vladimir Putin can offer Obama a face-saving way to climb down.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: FBI Instructed to Break Rules Banning Interactions With Terrorist Co-Conspirator CAIR.

Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) pulled out a Sharpie marker and wrote in big block letters at the bottom of a letter: ”THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. THE FBI MUST COMPLY WITH THE LAW.”

The letter was addressed to FBI Director James Comey. . . .

Wolf was referring to the FBI’s violation of the ban on cooperation with the unindicted co-conspirator terrorist organization CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), according to a just-released DOJ Inspector General report. CAIR was determined to be related to the web of terrorist financing during the Holy Land Foundation trials in Dallas, a trial which resulted in guilty verdicts. Afterwards, the FBI issued a blanket policy: no cooperation in the field with CAIR.

But the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs issued instructions to ignore the policy.

Why are DOJ press flunkies in Washington, D.C. issuing directives to FBI field offices about how to deal with CAIR? The answer to this question lies at the heart of the scandal, demonstrating that the politicized lawlessness of the Eric Holder Justice Department now is affecting the FBI.

From the DOJ Inspector General’s report:

Instead, a different headquarters entity, the Office of Public Affairs (OPA), provided policy interpretation and advice to FBI field offices on potential interactions with local CAIR chapters, without consulting [NAME REDACTED].

I suspect the redacted name is a national security component that would have objected to the interaction.

Read the whole thing.

CHANGE: Post-Benghazi Defense Posture: Lives Now Get Same Protection Priority as Intelligence. “Officials says changes made in a matter of months, including weekly sit-downs to talk terror, would have changed Benghazi response.”

BECAUSE OF THE NARRATIVE: Why Has The Media Stopped Talking About The Navy Yard Shooter? “Had the story been about a white Tea Party member as everyone in the liberal media was hoping, we’d still be bombarded with coverage of the story. Black guy? Liberal? Mentally ill? The story no longer served any purpose for the left’s agenda so it was dropped.”

Related: Another Mass Killing, Another Nutcase with Plenty of Warning Signs.

SMALL AND INSECURE: You mad, bro? @BarackObama throws snicker-worthy tantrum over defund Obamacare vote.

Related: Apparently some White House staffers have a new nickname for the president: “Obam-me,” because it’s all about him and his big thoughts.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Didn’t People Smile In Old Portraits?

WOULD THIS WORK IN THE U.S.? A Thai Push-Up Bra commercial.

A VITAL GROOMING ACCESSORY: Goateesaver – The Goatee Shaving Template.

STILL WAITING FOR THAT FEELING OF POST-DIVORCE EMPOWERMENT TO KICK IN.