SUICIDE VESTS IN MORE TASTEFUL COLORS? Taliban Leader: ‘Train Mujahideen How to Behave Well with People’

NBC NEWS: Zika Money Is Running Out Across Federal Agencies.

Democrats in Congress are blocking funding in order to make sure Planned Parenthood gets its share of the booty, although NBC News didn’t phrase quite that way.

THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: Medicaid’s “Improper Payments” Needlessly Costing Taxpayers Billions.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the improper payment rate for Medicaid in 2016 will likely hit 11.5%, meaning more than one in ten dollars taxpayers spend on the program are spent wrongfully.

Improper payments have nearly doubled since 2013, undoubtedly driven by Obamacare’s massive expansion of Medicaid to able-bodied, childless, working-age adults that to date has been accepted by 31 states. The federal government’s total growth improper payments – which now top $136 billion – was driven almost entirely by Medicaid.

I’m so old, I remember when President Obama promised his signature law would practically pay for itself by eliminating “hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud.”

That has to be worth at least a Pinocchio or two.

UH-HUH: Barack Obama is officially now a parasite (it’s an honor).

FASTER, PLEASE: New Electrical Stimulation Therapy Shows Promise Improving Hand Function In Stroke Patients.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: The spark with South Korea is gone as China makes clear the North comes first.

The degree of warmth between Ms. Park and Mr. Xi was unexpected, given that South Korea is a staunch American ally and China is North Korea’s socialist bedfellow. But they had a mutual interest in cozying up.

Mr. Xi sought to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington. He also wanted to further poison Ms. Park on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who early in his tenure had enraged the two countries by visiting the Yasukuni war shrine, where Japanese war criminals are honored.

For her part, Ms. Park invested heavily in the relationship in hopes that it would encourage Beijing to do more to restrain Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.

She’s still waiting for the payoff. Judging by North Korea’s latest nuclear test, its fifth, it may never come.

The mistake Park made was forgetting that for dictatorial regimes, international commercial interests, no matter how lucrative, will inevitably take second place to domestic political exigencies, no matter how transitory.

ADVERSE SELCTION: A Scary Obamacare Mystery.

Megan McArdle explains — yet again — a simple concept to her readers at Bloomberg:

Because outside of the near-poor, uptake of Obamacare policies is not as high as we’d like. As health insurance consultant Bob Laszewski has written, “Historically, insurers want to see a 75-percent participation rate.” In other words, they want to see three-fourths of the eligible people sign up.

That’s because insurers can predict their costs when a representative cross-section of people buys their plans. But when too few sign up, the insurer has to ask, “Who’s declining to buy insurance?” and the most likely answer is, “Healthy people who don’t expect to use it much.” The remaining pool, then, will be sicker. The lower the participation rate, the more likely it is that you’ve got a small group of people who are going to make expensive claims.

This is a phenomenon known as “adverse selection.” And it tends to get worse as premiums rise to reflect the cost of covering this sicker pool, because more people start dropping the ever-costlier insurance, and usually the folks who drop out are the healthiest ones.

Obamacare’s individual mandate was supposed to prevent this death spiral by levying a tax penalty on those who refused to sign up. But the fine appears to be too small to get young folks to buy in.

Despite the headline, there’s no mystery here. Many of us, McArdle included, explained ObamaCare’s perverse incentives and adverse selection problems ad nauseum even before it was passed into law.

If its supporters still don’t understand why ObamaCare is failing, it’s their own damn fault.

JOURNOLISM:

I see the polls have the Washington Post in full panic mode. pic.twitter.com/kKBB53NtKK

— neontaster (@neontaster) September 9, 2016

KURT SCHLICHTER: 2016 Is the Year of the Hack.

Read the whole thing.

YOU DON’T SAY: ‘Broadway Supports Black Lives Matter’ Event Cancelled for Antisemitism.

I’m pleasantly surprised they at least had the decency to cancel.

FRANCOIS HOLLANDE: French Republic must make room for Islam.

In a speech on terrorism and democracy in Paris he defended the country’s Muslim minority following a vitriolic debate on the banning of the Islamic burkini swimsuit.

“Nothing in the idea of secularism opposes the practice of Islam in France, provided it respects the law,” Hollande said.

Secularism was not a “state religion” to be used against other religions, he said, denouncing the “stigmatisation of Muslims.”

The problem isn’t that France hasn’t made room for Islam. There’s been room for it in France’s “sensitive urban zones,” where Muslims have lived unassimilated for generations. And France has made more room for Islam in the form of tens of thousands of migrants from North Africa and the Levant. That hasn’t been going very well, either, as France’s Muslim guests have created new cultural and criminal tensions with native Secular/Catholic/Jewish French citizens.

The real problem then is the still-open question of whether there’s room for the French in Islam.

THIS IS PRETTY MUCH THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Google’s DeepMind claims major milestone in making machines talk like humans.

The researchers note that today’s best TTS systems, generally considered to be powered by Google, are built on “speech fragments” recorded from a single speaker. Those fragments are then reconstructed to create utterances.

While this approach, known as concatenative TTS, has produced natural-sounding speech, it is generally limited to a single voice unless a new database is provided.

Another technique called parametric TTS, which relies on voice codec synthesizers, may be more flexible, but this hasn’t achieved as natural-sounding speech.

WaveNet differs by being trained on raw audio waveform from multiple speakers and then using the network to model these signals to generate synthetic utterances. Each sample it creates is fed back into the network to generate another sample.

“As well as yielding more natural-sounding speech, using raw waveforms means that WaveNet can model any kind of audio, including music,” DeepMind researchers note in a blogpost.

Just don’t give it control of the pod bay doors.

IF ONLY THIS WERE TRUE EVERYWHERE: Texas Politics is So Boring in 2016, Folks Are Already Talking 2018.

UNFORCED ERROR: Trump attacks U.S. foreign policy, political press corps on state-owned Russian television network.

Asked during the RT America interview what has surprised him most about the political process, Trump unloaded on the American press.

“Well, I think the dishonesty of the media. The media has been unbelievably dishonest,” Trump responded. “I mean they’ll take a statement that you make which is perfect and they’ll cut it up and chop it up and shorten it or lengthen it or do something with it.”

“And all of a sudden it doesn’t look as good as it did when you actually said it. But there’s tremendous dishonesty with the media. Not all of it, obviously, but tremendous dishonesty,” he said.

Of course the American press deserved Trump’s scathing criticism, but understand that Russia Today is a Russian propaganda outfit, and that Trump’s appearance will be used by the Kremlin to further the Kremlin’s interests.

SOMEWHERE IN NORTH DAKOTA, ANOTHER FRACKING RIG COMES BACK TO LIFE… Oil heading for first rise in 3 weeks on OPEC hopes, U.S. stocks.

TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Hillary’s friends profit from the death tax she avoids.

It’s almost as though the death tax was just a scheme for fancy lawyers and accountants to help the well-connected protect their assets while preening about their moral superiority.

THAT’S DEFINITELY A BUG, NOT A FEATURE: Florida man’s vehicle catches fire after charging Galaxy Note 7 explodes.

Samsung recalled the new phones last week, so if you have one you really want to get it replaced under the recall.

THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK: Mark Zuckerberg was accused of ‘abusing’ his power after Facebook censored this iconic Vietnam war photo.

At issue is an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken in 1972 by photographer Nick Ut, depicting children fleeing in terror from a South Vietnamese napalm strike in the midst of the brutal Vietnam war. Its central subject, the 9-year-old Kim Phuc, is naked.

It is, as Hansen points out, “by far the most iconic documentary photography from the Vietnam war’ — and one of the most famous photos of all time.

But when a Norwegian author, Tom Egeland, wrote a Facebook post about “seven photographs that changed the history of warfare” which included the photo, the photo was deleted, and he was subsequently suspended from the social network.

Then, when Aftenposten shared a news story to Facebook that used the photo, an email from Facebook demanded that the newspaper removed the post — before the social network went ahead and deleted it itself, before the newspaper could respond.

A Facebook spokesman said, “while we recognize that this photo is iconic, it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others.”

Algorithms make for poor curators, worse editors, and dangerous censors.

SCENES FROM ERDOGAN’S TURKEY: Turkey suspends over 11,000 teachers for suspected terror links.

At least 11,285 schoolteachers across the country were suspended over suspected links to a separatist terrorist organization, Anadolu reported Thursday, citing Turkey’s Education Ministry.

That number could reach 14,000 during an investigation conducted in coordination with governors’ offices across the country, Anadolu reported.

Although the ministry did not specify the group, the term “separatist terrorist organization” usually refers to the Kurdistan worker’s party, or PKK.

Later, a senior Turkish official confirmed to CNN that the “separatist organization” is PKK.

It isn’t Kurdish schoolteachers Ankara should be worried about, but Kurdish schoolchildren. Turks are no longer breeding at even replacement levels, with a fertility rate of just 1.5. Kurds make up an estimated 18-25% of the country, but are producing children three times faster than the Turks are. Spengler wrote a while back that Turkey’s demographics mean that Erdogan is “inherently incapable of rationality,” and so you have to wonder if his War on Kurdish Teachers is a new part of Ankara’s longstanding effort to deny Kurdish identity.

IF YOU MISSED THE FIRST WEEK, THERE’S STILL PLENTY OF TIME TO CATCH UP: Raise a Glass — Bourbon Heritage Month Is Upon Us!

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW : Molson Coors Created an Amazon Dash Button for Beer.

The U.S. may lead the world in beer innovation, but the U.K. might have an edge when it comes to beer buying. Molson Coors brand Carling just unveiled a beer-ordering button for British fans, similar to Amazon Dash, that automatically orders a case of the blonde lager. Like Amazon Dash buttons, which can automatically order the foods that would accompany Carling (namely Doritos and Red Bull), or help clean up after you clean out a case a Carling, this beer button connects to your phone and helps you place an order.

It does fall a step short of Amazon’s one-click purchasing, however, as the beer button only places the Carling in an online shopping cart for one of the five retailers available. You’re also, very unfortunately, limited to Carling. You’ve maybe heard of Carling Black Label, a Canadian classic — depending who you ask. But this is the Canadian brewery’s U.K. offering, a four percent ABV adjunct (rice or corn) lager that’s received a score of 64 out of 100 on BeerAdvocate.com. That’s good enough for a “Poor” rating. The review scale on RateBeer.com is less generous, giving Carling a 1 out of 100. And no, that’s not the top score.

Oh.

The headline was much better than the story.

I’M NOT SURE HONESTY IS A MISTAKE: Johnson Admits ‘Aleppo’ Remark was a Mistake, Espouses Honesty.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: U of Iowa looking to create social justice bachelor’s degree.

TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND ALL THAT STUFF: ‘Justice League’ Cast Unites to Save World from Dakota Access Pipeline.

HEALTH: Early Antibiotics Exposure Ups Risk Of Allergies Later In Life.

The researchers selected 22 studies involving 394,517 patients to study eczema risk and 22 studies involving 256,609 participants to study hay fever risk. Twelve of those studies (64,638 patients) had observational data on both conditions.

On analysis, it was found that when children are exposed to antibiotics in early life, the risk of eczema heightened, with a 15 to 41 percent increase. Early life antibiotic consumption also resulted in an increased risk of hay fever by 14 percent to 56 percent. The risk of eczema and hay fever were found to be higher when the children were given two or more courses of antibiotics for the conditions.

Though the reason behind the findings is unclear, the researchers suggest that the antibiotics could be altering the immune system of young children by disrupting the microorganisms in the gut.

The human gut is a mini-biosphere inhabited by microorganisms which impact the health of the rest of the body — and we still don’t have enough understanding of how it all works.