Paul M. Jones

The administration is essentially arguing that IPAB will cut costs only by reducing provider incomes, not by curtailing in any way the consumption of Medicare beneficiaries.  This is possible, I suppose, but it is not supported by either economic theory, or historical evidence.  (And indeed, the early discussons of health care reform, as well as my interactions with the administration's very smart economists, make me suspect that they, too, believe that IPAB will curtail service provision . . . but also believe, correctly, that saying so would be political suicide.) 

The "fact checkers" have thus somehow annointed the least likely outcome as a "fact" about the future.  

This is, as others pointed out during the welfare kerfuffle, the great problem with fact checkers.  They have no particular policy domain knowledge, so when the administration tells them that well, the law explicitly forbids IPAB from rationing treatments, they are in no position to understand that this doesn't really make any sense.  

There's nothing wrong with opining based on the information you have; the problem is with calling the results a "fact".  The even bigger problem is that other journalists then treat it as such, transforming a shallow understanding without roots in history or theory, into a known thing, no different from stating the color of the sky or the height of Mount Rushmore.  Then, of course, they're free to declare that anyone who disagrees is lying.  

via Facts, Damned "Facts", and Fact Checkers - The Daily Beast.

Shows like Sesame Street are multi-million dollar enterprises capable of thriving in the private market. According to the 990 tax form all nonprofits are required to file, Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell received $956,513 -- nearly a million dollars -- in compensation in 2008. And, from 2003 to 2006, "Sesame Street" made more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales. 

If you break that down, it works out to over $50 million a year "Sesame Street" is taking in from all that merchandising.

Yep, that one-percenter Big Bird makes about four times what Mitt Romney does annually and yet Barack Obama still wants you and I to still carry his freight.

via Big Bird Richer Than Mitt Romney.

And for what? A few votes:

The Obama administration has sought to quell the fear of mass defense layoffs in presidential battlegrounds like Virginia, where letters sent in early November warning about the possibility of job losses could discourage thousands of defense workers from backing the incumbent.

The government's guarantee to foot the bill for legal problems, as long as contractors heed OMB's advice to refrain from warning about lob losses, is unusual.

"I don't know of any situation where the government has done this in the past," said William Gould, a labor professor at Stanford Law School.  

via Just Say No To Layoff Notices - The Daily Beast.

Then they'll pay attention. Right?

Free speech is a gift given to us in 1948 by U.N. officials? Who knew?

The only appropriate response of free-born peoples to such a statement is: **** off, ******. Free speech is not in the gift of minor Swedish timeserving hack bureaucrats, either to grant or withdraw.

Where is the “respect”, by the way, in “Behead the enemies of Islam”? Under the not so subtle evolution of “free speech” advanced by the likes of Obama and Eliasson, you’ll be shackled by “respect” and “the need to avoid provocations” but kindergartners will still be able to parade around the local park demanding “Behead all those who insult the Prophet.”

In the end, the one-way multiculturalism of craven squishes like Eliasson will destroy our world. Nuts to him and to the U.N.

via Behead All Those Who Insult Free Speech - By Mark Steyn - The Corner - National Review Online.

Heisenberg’s principle can be crudely generalized (it’s the best I can do) as follows: An observer can change the nature of a thing or an event merely through the act of observation. Observation all by itself can become an intervention. Heisenberg was describing how reality works at the level of quantum mechanics, where a wave becomes a particle and vice versa depending on how it’s being measured. But it applies, too, at the level of political journalism, where reality is even stranger. There, facts can become interpretations, interpretations can become facts, and events of no significance can achieve an earthshaking importance simply by virtue of being pawed over by a large number of journalists.

A typical journalist, if he’s any good, insists at least theoretically on the iron divide between observer and participant. At its best the press corps sees itself as a squadron of Red Cross workers, wandering among the combatants in a battle zone and ensuring their own safety with a claim of strict neutrality. The Heisenberg Principle of Journalism puts the lie to all that. You see it at work whenever a news anchor announces that “this story just refuses to go away” or a headline writer insists that “questions continue to be raised” about the conduct of one hapless public figure or another.

The story refuses to go away, of course, because the anchor and his colleagues won’t let it; and the questions that continue to be raised are being raised by the headline writer and his editors. Reporters create more news than anybody, just by pretending they’re watching it unfold.

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » OBSERVATION CAN BE AN INTERVENTION: Andrew Ferguson’s “Press Man” back page column at Commentary is ….

"What if Congress passes an unjust law, the President signs it, and the Supreme Court upholds it?"

"What if the government conscripts you to fight in an unjust war, and you die a horrible death?"

"What if a poor person drinks and gambles away his welfare check?"

"What if the government denies you permission to legally work?"

"What if the President decides your ethnicity is a national security risk and puts you in a concentration camp, and the Supreme Court declares his action constitutional?"

"What if a person lives an extremely unhealthy lifestyle, so by the time they're retired, they're in constant pain no matter how generous their Medicare coverage is?"

"What happens if a President lies to start a war, and voters don't particularly care?"

Once you start the what-if game, it's hard to stop.  Name any political system.  I can generate endless hypotheticals to aggravate its supporters.  The right lesson to draw: Every political perspective eventually has to say "Tough luck" when confronted with well-crafted what-ifs.  There's nothing uniquely hard-hearted or cruel about libertarianism.  Defenders of democracy, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, the American Constitution, and social democracy all eventually sigh, "Life's not fair," or "Well, what do you want me to do about it?"

via Tough Luck, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

This explains so much:

A new brain study suggests an opium-like chemical may drive the urge to gorge on chocolate candy and similar fatty and sweet treats.

Researchers discovered this when they gave rats an artificial boost with a drug that went straight to a brain region called the neostriatum: it caused the animals to eat twice the amount of M&Ms they would otherwise have eaten.

The team also found that when the rats began to eat the chocolate-coated candies, there was a surge in enkephalin, a natural opium-like substance that is produced in the same region of the brain.

via Chocolate Gorging Linked To Opium Chemical In Brain.

In what appears to be a slap in the face for gender equality, the report found the divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.

“What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment,” said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled “Equality in the Home”.

The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising, the researcher said.

“One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,” he said.

The figures clearly show that “the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” he went on.

It's science! You can't argue with science. Via Couples who share the housework are more likely to divorce, study finds - Telegraph.

According to a national poll last week, 79% of Americans think that all Americans should pay income tax, regardless of their incomes. That includes 85% of Republicans and 83% of independents. Even Democrats agree, by an overwhelming majority: 71%. Politicians should take note: these are huge margins.

These Americans understand instinctively what a recent report from the Tax Foundation said: "Aside from the revenue impact of not having 58 million Americans pay income taxes, economists worry about the social and political effects of having so many people disconnected from the cost of government -- a phenomenon known as fiscal illusion. The concern is that when people perceive the cost of government to be cheaper than it really is, they will demand ever more government benefits because they either don't feel the cost directly or believe that others will be paying those costs. Indeed,when one takes into account those who do not file, about half of all households pay no federal income tax, making the situation particularly worrisome in a majority-rule democracy."

Emphasis mine. Of course, if we move to the Fair Tax then it's easier to see the cost of government every single day. Via Column: With liberty and taxes for all.

A jury is responsible for reaching a verdict the case, but it is also responsible for reaching a verdict on the law itself. As a juror, you have a responsibility to veto laws you find unjust.

Technically, Alvin was guilty of breaking the laws in question, even though the laws are totally ridiculous and unjust.  Luckily this jury was informed about the process of jury nullification, and their legal right to rule in favor of the accused for breaking unjust laws.

According to Iloilo Jones, director of the Fully Informed Jury Association “Minnesota has long had highly visible FIJA Activists volunteering their time and efforts to educate every potential juror in Minnesota about the right of the people to veto bad laws through the use of the Juror Veto, or, as it is commonly called, Jury Nullification. As laws become more and more invasive, punitive, and draconian, prison populations become more and more peopled by harmless, productive people, who have harmed no other person. Jurors can stop the enforcement of bad laws. Jurors have stopped bad laws since freedom of religion was defended by jurors, and by later jurors who refused to enforce slavery. We, the owners of all government, retain the peaceful, lawful right to refuse to enforce bad laws made by some judge or politician. Courageous jurors have always stood firm--for the human rights of their families and neighbors--by refusing to sanction bad laws. The right of the People to drink the milk of their choice, and to feed their children healthy foods, is a human right.”

This news comes just weeks after a jury in New Hampshire dropped felony marijuana cultivation charges against a Rastafarian man because they believed that punishing him for the offense would be unjust. Hopefully what we are seeing is a trend, and as more people become informed about jury nullification there will be less nonviolent people put in cages for breaking unjust laws.

via Raw Milk Co-Op Farmer Acquitted Through Jury Nullification » Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance || Good Vibes Promotions.