Archive for 2013
December 21, 2013
BUT FALLEN ANGELS IS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT? RIGHT? 2013 will go down in the record books as one of the 10 coldest years in the U.S. since 1895.
WHY IS HBO TRYING TO SICKEN AND KILL WOMEN? A Complete Breakdown Of Every Unprotected Sex Scene In “Girls.”
AL SHARPTON, RAHM EMANUEL HOLD TOWN HALL, TEA PARTY BREAKS OUT:
On Thursday, a town hall meeting hosted by Al Sharpton and the National Action Network to address gun violence exploded into a revolt against “Chicago Machine” politics, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and the aldermen in City Hall, with panel and audience members calling to vote out their elected officials.
One 82-year-old preacher even called for “Tea Party” style meetings in some of Chicago’s south side communities such as Altgeld Gardens and Trumbull Park.
This kind of a revolt from the taken-for-granted client population is the Democrats’ worst nightmare. I hope it spreads.
Indeed, there are an entire shelf of books talking about the hows and whys of Men dropping out, and as far as I’m concerned the best of the lot is “Men on Strike” by Dr. Helen Smith. In it, she identifies four specific areas where increasing numbers of Men are “going on strike” in terms of involvement in American life. It’s an easy, quick yet powerful read, one that I highly recommend, and will revisit in future posts for further discussion, because it is just that important.
It really is.
50 REASONS TO HAVE SEX, according to TV shows.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: UC Hastings Law Dean Admits Major Flaws In Legal Education.
Wu compares law schools to Detroit automakers that assumed that when gasoline prices came down, people would flock to American-made cars again. “They mistook the cycle for the long-term trend,” Wu points out. “I believe we’re living through profound structural change. It’s not a cycle.”
Well, it’s both. But the change will remain even when the cycle reverses.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 18 Excuses For Why You’re Not Getting Laid, In GIFs. Aimed mostly at women.
WOMEN AND THE FINAL SOLUTION: “500,000 women had front-row seats to the Final Solution, where they watched and benefitted from the rapidly declining ‘racially inferior’ masses. And yet their presence, and their atrocities, have been largely ignored for the last 70 years. Twenty years ago, Lower was researching in Zhytomyr, a city in western Ukraine, leafing through the normal stuff of archives, the fading ink and illegible handwriting on tattered paper, some of which had bootprints and charred edges. It was there, among the German records that had been inaccessible under the Iron Curtain, that Lower began to notice an abundance of women’s names among the empire-builders. . . . There is link between the shockingly cavalier testimony given by these women and our collective ignorance of their actions in the Nazi East: genocide is usually considered the business of men, and thus, when it came time to call Nazis to account for their crimes, prosecutors were less interested in these women than in their male colleagues and husbands. . . . Jewish survivors have consistently described German women in the Nazi East as violent tormenters, not innocent bystanders.”
THE FISCAL TIMES: 10 Insanely Overpaid Public Employees.
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Plus, Browse Top Holiday Deals. New ones appear hourly.
Also: Vehicle GPS under $150. And deals on Sports & Handheld GPS Units.
READER JEREMY PERRY WRITES: “Today is the last day to get your gifts with free prime shipping by Christmas eve. I used your Amazon link in the upper right hand corner for a last minute Kindle HD with accessories.”
Actually, they’ve extended it by a day. But time’s a wastin’. And thanks!
HOW ADVERTISERS use sex to sell products to women.
SPYING: Report: National Security Agency paid RSA $10 million to build secret “back doors” into its encryption products. “Most of the dozen current and former RSA employees interviewed said that the company erred in agreeing to such a contract, and many cited RSA’s corporate evolution away from pure cryptography products as one of the reasons it occurred. But several said that RSA also was misled by government officials, who portrayed the formula as a secure technological advance.”
SILICON VALLEY INVESTOR wants to break California into six states. That still won’t get us up to 57, though.
TEST DRIVE: 2014 Acura RLX Sport Hybrid [w/video].
THE GEOPOLITICS OF GEOENGINEERING. “Keith is steadfastly confident about the technical details. He says a program to cool the planet with sulfate aerosols—solar geoengineering—could probably begin by 2020, using a small fleet of planes flying regular aerosol-spraying missions at high altitudes. Since sunlight drives precipitation, could reducing it lead to droughts? Not if geoengineering was used sparingly, he concludes.”
Do we have a plan to offset global cooling?
WONDERBAG: a slow-cooker that works using retained heat. “Wonderbag is a simple but revolutionary portable slow cooker. It continues to cook food, which has been brought to a boil by conventional methods for up to 12 hours, without the additional use of fuel. No plugs. No Fuss.” That’s kind of cool. Might be handy for disaster prep cookery, too.
ALYSSON SHEPARD: Future Disaster-Response Humanoids Compete in DARPA Robot Olympics. “The competition aims to develop robots that could one day come to the aid of humans in disaster situations. Each of the eight tasks from climbing a ladder to turning a valve is designed to mimic realistic obstacles that robots would encounter in catastrophes.”
ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Almost Human: The Surreal, Cyborg Future of Telemarketing. “Americans are fielding millions of calls from bright, energetic telemarketers, but what they don’t know is that they’re talking to machines… Sort of.”
Of course, I was talking to robots a decade ago. Plus, some (sort of) related thoughts on robot rights.
TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 226.
NEW YORK TIMES: NEW HEALTH LAW FRUSTRATES MANY IN THE MIDDLE CLASS: “’That’s an insane amount of money,’ she said of their new premium. ‘How are you supposed to pay that?’”
Plus: “Experts consider health insurance unaffordable once it exceeds 10 percent of annual income. By that measure, a 50-year-old making $50,000 a year, or just above the qualifying limit for assistance, would find the cheapest available plan to be unaffordable in more than 170 counties around the country, ranging from Anchorage to Jackson, Miss.”
MEGAN MCARDLE: ObamaCare Initiates Self-Destruction Sequence.
Yesterday, we had a more official announcement from the administration: Anyone who has had their policies cancelled will be exempt from the individual mandate next year. The administration is also allowing those people to buy catastrophic plans, even if they’re over 30.
What to make of these two statements? On the one hand, the administration is trying to minimize the number of people who have been affected by cancellations, and on the other hand, it is unveiling a fix to the problem of cancellations. And these are not minor changes.
As Seth Chandler points out, Healthcare.gov doesn’t even let you see catastrophic plans if you’re more than 30 years old. Is now the time to be making technical changes to the website?
As Avik Roy points out, catastrophic plans aren’t that much cheaper than the so-called bronze plans. They’re also not eligible for subsidies. This is unlikely to be much help to folks who lost insurance; all it does is introduce some much-unneeded complexity to Healthcare.gov.
As Aaron Carroll points out, insurers calculated their premiums for this year on the expectation that the relatively healthy folks who were already buying insurance would be buying policies on the exchange. The insurers are not happy about this latest change, and Carroll predicts that they will ask the administration to push more money to them through the “risk corridors.” I think he’s right.
As Ezra Klein points out, this seriously undermines the political viability of the individual mandate: “But this puts the administration on some very difficult-to-defend ground. Normally, the individual mandate applies to anyone who can purchase qualifying insurance for less than 8 percent of their income. Either that threshold is right or it’s wrong. But it’s hard to argue that it’s right for the currently uninsured but wrong for people whose plans were canceled … Put more simply, Republicans will immediately begin calling for the uninsured to get this same exemption. What will the Obama administration say in response? Why are people whose plans were canceled more deserving of help than people who couldn’t afford a plan in the first place?”
Arnold Kling put it more pithily: “Obama Repeals Obamacare.”
I’d ask this: What do you do for an encore? Will the administration force these folks to buy insurance next year? Or will they keep allowing special exceptions rather than take the political heat for changing health insurance that people liked?
As I said before, by June they’ll be adopting Rand Paul’s healthcare plan and calling it a “modification” to ObamaCare.
Plus: “However incoherent these fixes may seem, they send two messages, loud and clear. The first is that although liberal pundits may think that the law is a done deal, impossible to repeal, the administration does not believe that.”
MARIAH CAREY’S MANAGER: She’s not sorry she performed for a dictator. “The president of the United States took pictures with this guy’s daughter and congratulated this man on his many years of being in office. If he can rub shoulders with these people then why is Mariah Carey being accused of doing something wrong?”