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| There is a cure for Sudden Jihad Syndrome |
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| 1819 Independence Day Celebration in Philadelphia |
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| Photo from a 2011 CBS news story entitled: "Do July 4th festivities make you Republican?" |
San Francisco is a weird magnet for poop. Travel around the city in the grimmest of Easter Egg hunts, and you'll find turds basking on sidewalks, chilling in flower gardens, gumming up subway escalators—hell, you'll even find them littering the roof of a three-story building with no roof access.
I assumed upon moving here this was the marking of irresponsible dog owners. I wish I could still believe that. But Jennifer Wong has torn the brown veil asunder with "(Human) Wasteland," a revolting map of all the anthropogenic excrement around San Francisco.
Wong's venture into crappy cartography began with her needing a hack-week project for her company, HotPads. So the San Francisco native scoured the web for "cool" data sets, and found that the Department of Public Works, for whatever reason, keeps records of sidewalk cleanings for reason of "human waste or urine."
"Honestly, the data inspired me," she emails.''
Americans are inveterate tinkerers — a trait commented on by observers from de Tocqueville to Winston Churchill.
That’s why it’s not surprising that the bureaucrats at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would want to keep tweaking Obamacare. Mind you, it’s not so much because they think they can perfect the law. Rather, they keep tweaking the law in order to keep the American people from brandishing pitchforks and coming to Washington to tar and feather them and ride them out of town on a rail.
Self-preservation can be a marvelous motivating factor.
The geniuses who brought us the dysfunctional website healthcare.gov are in a panic because just about every Obamacare policy is going up in price. So rather than having American citizens deal with such unpleasantness, our intrepid bureaucrats have hit upon a brilliant scheme: why not change the auto-renewal rules of Obamacare premiums by automatically shifting a consumer from a policy that went up in price over to a cheaper policy? Of course, the cheaper policy will have fewer benefits and a larger deductible. And some people may actually like the policy they have now.
But what does that matter to the jamokes at HHS? They know what’s best for you. Just ask them.
In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.Actually, the American voter wasn’t stupid about Obamacare. They never supported it, as public opinion polls showed. And twice, they put a licking on Democrats who voted Obamacare into law.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
“He says, ‘God man, you got more balls than brains don’t you?’ ” Sinke said. “So I said, ‘Well actually, sir, I was kind of hoping that one of those scum-of-the-earth radicals would show up and take me on because, to tell you the truth, I have always dreamed of being able to confront an evil-doer and run him through with this damn sword.’ So he kind of liked that, you know.”
