LOOK FOR CANCER, AND FIND IT. All this new skepticism about testing and early detection may be right, but I’m a bit suspicious that the entire medical establishment did an about-face on the subject the instant ObamaCare passed.
Archive for 2014
April 8, 2014
MISBEHAVIOR AT THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION: SEC Is A Due Process Nightmare: Searches Emails Without A Warrant, Refuses To Share Exculpatory Evidence.
THEY’VE BEEN MOVING ON LIE-LIE TERRITORY LIKE PUTIN’S BEEN MOVING ON CRIMEA: On Equal Pay, the White House Moves from Noble-Lie Territory Toward Lie-Lie Territory.
UPDATE: ‘Come on! Really?’ Even CNN’s not buying Jay Carney’s weak spin of WH pay gap .
MORE TROUBLES FOR SILICON VALLEY: Tech Firms May Find No-Poaching Pacts Costly. “A high-stakes negotiation is taking place in Silicon Valley among some of the biggest names in the industry — Apple and Google among them — over accusations that they were involved in a collusion to prevent their employees from being hired at rival companies. The employees filed a class-action suit, contending that the illegal hiring practices cost employees $9 billion in lost wages. Now the companies are locked in mediation sessions, hoping to settle the case in the next several weeks.” I’m surprised the Antitrust Division hasn’t gotten involved. Well, no I’m not.
HMM: NASA photo captures strange bright light coming out of Mars.
People who have been reading InstaPundit know what’s going on. Wake up, sheeple!
HEH: White House Says Wage Gender Gap Stats Are Misleading…When Applied to the White House. “It’s good that Carney acknowledges this as far as the White House is concerned, because the Obama administration and many others are quick to gloss over nuance like this when talking about the wage gap in general. We frequently hear that American women make only 77 cents for every dollar men make, but this is based on data that fails to account for women’s work histories and life choices. It aggregates the earnings of women in all positions and compares this average against the earnings of all men.”
YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO GET MEASLES AS AN ADULT: Second measles case confirmed at UC Berkeley.
RICHARD EPSTEIN ON MCCUTCHEON: Weak property rights, not large campaign contributions, are undermining our political order.
IN THE MAIL: From F. H. Buckley, The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America.
Also, today only at Amazon: 40% Off Saucony Kinvara 4 Running Shoes.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Survey: U.S. sees sharpest health insurance premium increases in years.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 334.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ON SILICON VALLEY’S TRUST PROBLEM: Silicon Valley Scares Americans.
THE ATLANTIC: The Culture of Shut Up: Too many debates about important issues degenerate into manufactured and misplaced outrage—and it’s chilling free speech. Ya think?
We have unlocked the gates and we are removing the gatekeepers. We aren’t beholden to the views of the three green elders in the village. (See, I tied it back.) But what happens next—how we face the downside of so much connectedness—will determine whether or not this revolution empowers us, or once again empowers those gatekeepers. And I don’t want that to happen, because those gatekeepers suck. They’re arrogant and easily swayed by big, nice-sounding dangerous ideas; they’re ambitious and careerist and forgetful and unimaginative and shortsighted; they’re subject to groupthink, beholden to corporate interests, and enamored of fame and power.
I don’t want those voices to drown out the diverse and compelling voices that now have a better chance of making it in front of us than ever before—even as we still have a ways to go. And what I think we have to do, then, to protect this new wonderful thing of ‘a good idea can come from anyone anywhere’—is we need to stop telling each other to shut up. We need to get comfortable with the reality that no one is going to shut up. You aren’t going to shut up. I’m not going to shut up. The idiots aren’t going to shut up.
We need to learn to live with the noise and tolerate the noise even when the noise is stupid, even when the noise is offensive, even when the noise is at times dangerous. Because no matter how noble the intent, it’s a demand for conformity that encourages people on all sides of a debate to police each other instead of argue and convince each other. And, ultimately, the cycle of attack and apology, of disagreement and boycott, will leave us with fewer and fewer people talking more and more about less and less.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s basically the plan.
I MADE TWITCHY AGAIN, WHICH IS ALWAYS NICE: Instapundit wonders if ‘National Equal Pay Day’ applies to the White House too.
AT AMAZON, Laptop Computers Under $500.
MICHELLE FIELDS INTERVIEWS ROGER SIMON: Silence of the Liberals: Obama’s Failures Are Making Liberals Very Nervous.
JAMES TARANTO: ‘Shut Up’ Is No Argument: The illiberal left lacks confidence in its ideas.
“The debate over repealing this law is over,” President Obama declared last Tuesday in reference to ObamaCare. April Fool! By the end of the week some of Obama’s most loyal media supporters were proving him wrong–by repeating his arguments.
“Is there any accountability in American politics for being completely wrong?” demanded the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne in his Thursday column. “Is there any cost to those who say things that turn out not to be true and then, when their fabrications or false predictions are exposed, calmly move on to concocting new claims as if they had never made the old ones?”
It won’t surprise you to learn that Dionne did not demand accountability from Obama and the other politicians who sold ObamaCare on the fraudulent promise “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Rather, he asserted that the administration’s claim of having “hit its original goal . . . of signing up more than 7 million people through its insurance exchanges” was a definitive refutation of any notion that ObamaCare is “doomed.”
What about insurance cancellations, narrow networks, high deductibles, blown deadlines, work disincentives, adverse selection and the law’s continuing political unpopularity? Dionne dispenses with all these problems in one sentence: “To be sure, the law could still face other problems, blah, blah, blah.”
The next day it was former Enron adviser Paul Krugman’s turn.
He’s well practiced at telling people to shut up.
Related: Joel Kotkin: The spread of ‘debate is over’ syndrome: On climate and other issues, many in academia, media, government insist their viewpoint is unassailable and won’t tolerate dissent. They’re insecure about their ability to persuade, but more confident of their ability to coerce.
SPEAKING OF DEMEANING TO WOMEN: White House: The ’77 cents’ wage gap figure isn’t accurate, but they’ll use it anyway.
A White House adviser had to walk back the oft-repeated myth that women make 77 cents on the dollar that men make after being questioned about the figure during a conference call Monday. . . . Except, as soon as Stevenson was actually questioned about the statistic by McClatchy reporter Lindsay Wise, the White House adviser crumbled, admitting her earlier comments were inaccurate.
“If I said 77 cents was equal pay for equal work, then I completely misspoke,” Stevenson said. “So let me just apologize and say that I certainly wouldn’t have meant to say that.”
Well, not if she knew she was going to be called on it. Good for Lindsay Wise for doing something that doesn’t happen often enough in the White House — asking a tough question.
ED DRISCOLL interviews Dave Barry about his new book. Er, Barry’s not Driscoll’s. Though I think Ed has a book or two in him.
FUNNY, I DIDN’T KNOW BREITBART WAS PART OF THE GOP: Dems blast Breitbart over Pelosi image. Two points: (1) Did doing this kind of stuff to Palin or Bush hurt the Dems? As Obama reminds us, he won. (2) I saw a lot of pearl-clutching on Twitter on the ground that this image “demeans a woman.” And I agree that portraying Miley Cyrus as Nancy Pelosi is demeaning to Miley Cyrus. Breitbart California should apologize to Miley at once.