Go!

Posted by: andy at 03:29 AM | Comments (364)
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They lied.

What difference does it make?

That's an odd question-- if it made no difference to you, Hillary, why did you lie about it?

It's a very strange assertion to make that something doesn't matter if that same person spent hours and hours crafting a lie about that something.

As intelligence officials pieced together the puzzle of events unfolding in Libya, they concluded even before the assaults had ended that al Qaeda-linked terrorists were involved. Senior administration officials, however, sought to obscure the emerging picture and downplay the significance of attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

...

Within hours of the initial attack on the U.S. facility, the State Department Operations Center sent out two alerts. The first, at 4:05 p.m. (all times are Eastern Daylight Time), indicated that the compound was under attack; the second, at 6:08 p.m., indicated that Ansar al Sharia, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group operating in Libya, had claimed credit for the attack. According to the House report, these alerts were circulated widely inside the government, including at the highest levels. The fighting in Benghazi continued for another several hours, so top Obama administration officials were told even as the fighting was taking place that U.S. diplomats and intelligence operatives were likely being attacked by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. A cable sent the following day, September 12, by the CIA station chief in Libya, reported that eyewitnesses confirmed the participation of Islamic militants and made clear that U.S. facilities in Benghazi had come under terrorist attack. It was this fact, along with several others, that top Obama officials would work so hard to obscure.

Look, you've got to read the whole thing. Let me quote just one more bit, though:

After the internal distribution, CIA officials amended that draft to include more information about the jihadist threat in both Egypt and Libya. “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy,” the agency had added by late afternoon. And: “The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al Qaeda in Benghazi and Libya.” But elsewhere, CIA officials pulled back. The reference to “Islamic extremists” no longer specified “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda,” and the initial reference to “attacks” in Benghazi was changed to “demonstrations.”

The talking points were first distributed to officials in the interagency vetting process at 6:52 p.m. on Friday. Less than an hour later, at 7:39 p.m., an individual identified in the House report only as a “senior State Department official” responded to raise “serious concerns” about the draft. That official, whom The Weekly Standard has confirmed was State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to Agency warnings.”

In an attempt to address those concerns, CIA officials cut all references to Ansar al Sharia and made minor tweaks. But in a follow-up email at 9:24 p.m., Nuland wrote that the problem remained and that her superiors—she did not say which ones—were unhappy.

See page 2 of the article to watch how Version 1 of the talking points -- specific, informative, accurate, and noting "attacks" by Al Qaeda connected groups -- becomes Version 3, that speaks only of "demonstrations" and does not mention Al Qaeda.

I seem to remember this Victoria Nuland woman offering many lies to the camera in defense of her image-concerned boss, but as of yet I haven't found them. I will update if I do. For now, I just have this.

More: Here, Nuland lies to the press -- a FoxNews reporter -- claiming that Susan Rice's Sunday Talking Points accurately reflected the government's "initial assessment," despite the fact that Victoria Nuland personally had the "initial assessment" changed to suit her "superiors'" political worries.

Note, in addition, there is no mention of a YouTube video in the Talking Points-- that's something Susan Rice added. And yet Nuland affirms that's part of their 'initial assessment."

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Posted by: Ace at 12:54 PM | Comments (295)
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So do I, Brother. So do I.

Drug-fueled violence in Mexico is not entirely the fault of the Mexican people, he said. Instead, the United States shares the blame because much of the violence is centered around the AmericansÂ’ demand for illegal drugs and the fact that guns are smuggled into Mexico from the United States.

Posted by: Ace at 02:34 PM | Comments (166)
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Pull the other one.

Will Democrats (or even the three other GOP members of the “Gang”) go along with rewriting the bill’s carefully constructed framework of deception, in which the border security ‘triggers,” as amnesty lobbyist Frank Sharry admitted, “are based on developing plans and spending money, not on reaching [the target level of] effectiveness, which is really quite clever”? Will they modify the “path to citizenship,” the core of the bill, as Rubio also suggests? I suspect not.

Emphasis in original. The bill is constructed to deceive the public and thus to be passed into law without ever actually securing the real consent of the governed required by the Constitution.

Posted by: Ace at 03:14 PM | Comments (446)
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ItÂ’s becoming more and more obvious that AmericaÂ’s job engine is stuck, and thereÂ’s no real consensus on what's causing the problem. Some of it has to do with changing demographics, some with government regulation of (and interference with) the economy, some with bad fiscal and tax policy -- the usual suspects. However, it is also obvious that we are undergoing a major shift in the post-Industrial Age economic model.

A book called Race Against the Machine came out a couple of years ago that concisely stated what many economists, technologists, and futurists have been thinking for a while now: that machines are obviating the need for humans in many parts of our high-tech globalized economy. And the pace of this displacement is accelerating. IÂ’m not going to recapitulate that book here, but I recommend it -- I donÂ’t agree with everything the authors say, but overall I find the argument compelling.

If machines are displacing humans in the workplace, and thus causing higher unemployment than we are used to without necessarily causing a drop in GDP, what (if anything) can be done about it?

Before I dive into that question, I want you to consider the following simple graph:

This is what is known as a Gaussian distribution, or a “bell curve”. Many statistical phenomena in nature conform to this distribution, but the one I want to discuss is human cognitive ability (or “IQ”). It’s long been accepted as scientific fact that human cognition among large populations adheres to a Gaussian distribution. There are sharp disagreements about how to measure human cognition (or even whether it can be measured accurately), and even sharper disagreements as to the outcomes of experiments designed to measure cognitive ability, but decades of empirical study leave the basic fact intact: human cognitive ability falls into a Gaussian distribution just like other human properties like height, weight, and so forth.

But why does this matter to our discussion of the technology-driven change to the economy?
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Posted by: Monty at 07:53 AM | Comments (353)
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... of course, it wasn't one he intended to make.

Courtesy of Phillip Klein, who Ace also linked in today's earlier post on the Oregon Medicaid study, comes this excellent pummeling of Former Enron Adviser Paul Krugman (emphasis added):

In attempt to mock conservatives’ reaction to the landmark study finding that Medicaid coverage did not improve physical health outcomes, Paul Krugman snarks that “Fire Insurance is Worthless! After all, there’s no evidence that it prevents fires.” Actually, fire insurance would be a pretty good model for health insurance.

Bingo!

Bing-f'n-o!

As Klein notes, conservative health reform plans have, for years, sought to make health insurance more like a real insurance product and less like a healthcare prepayment plan. This is why we've favored tax-preferred health savings accounts (HSAs) coupled with high-deductible catastrophic health insurance plans.

As Klein states,

Free market health care policy analysts have long argued for a catastrophic approach to health insurance. If health insurance were like other types of insurance, it would protect beneficiaries against financial strain due to unexpected medical expenses, but it wouldnÂ’t cover routine costs. Monthly premiums would be much lower in this case and individuals could put money in health savings accounts to pay for qualified medical expenses.

If anything, the findings in the Oregon study make the case for such an approach much stronger. ...

Why yes. Yes they do.

But leftists like Krugman have long played a cutesy little game where they conflate comprehensive health insurance coverage with actual healthcare services as if the two things are the same.

They are not.

The dollar one-coverage "health insurance" product that the Krugmans of the world have been advocating for interferes with the market pricing mechanism for health care services. Since the consumer of healthcare doesn't bear the cost of providing it, this lack of transparent pricing drives costs ever higher without being bounded by anything even approaching a cost/benefit approach to the services being consumed.

Meanwhile, the market pricing mechanisms for elective healthcare services like cosmetic surgery and Lasik, where health insurance isn't involved and the consumer has a cost/benefit decision to make, work to produce the right quantity and quality of these services at appropriate prices.

Why, it's almost like they're being guided by an invisible hand or something. Almost.

So, to counteract the forces of Econ 101,

Unfortunately, President ObamaÂ’s national health care law takes the opposite approach. Starting next year, Americans will be mandated not just to obtain health insurance, but to obtain insurance thatÂ’s comprehensive enough to meet the specifications of the federal government.

Of course. Of. Course.

Posted by: andy at 12:30 PM | Comments (74)
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People are calling this gun an "assault rifle" but I'm not sure it is; I can't tell if any weapons are actually firing multi-shot. (And even if everyone is firing single-shot, maybe they've just selected that... I don't know if this is the civilian version or the military version.)

As I'm in doubt, let's just compromise and use the neutral language of ambiguity and call it an "Assault Murder-Gun."

More speeches here.

And, per a Washington Times writer, Ted Cruz blew the crowd away. Metaphorically, he meant.

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Posted by: Ace at 01:53 PM | Comments (246)
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Arrested for corrupting the morals of a blogger.

You know how most women who are arrested aren't very attractive? And even those who might be marginally attractive in real life tend to look sorta bad in their mugshots?

Via @jammiewf, Not these babydolls. Whoa nelly, not these babydolls. I wouldn't kick any of them out of bed for cutting off my penis and burying it in the garden where the racoons would get at it.

Now I already gave you the Big Win from the collection of pictures so it's all downhill at the link. But the Hoosegow Honies (as Iowahawk used to call them) at the link are pretty cute.

And speaking of Winsome Slammerbunnies, America's Sweetheart, Reese Witherspoon, went all Drunken Diva on a cop, in a funny and embarrassing tirade caught on police dash-cam video.

Serious issues brought out by the video:

1. She is feisty. That's not just an act. Very Tracy Flick.

2. Also very Tracy Flick: She has given some thought to what it means to be an American, and what the rights of an American are. But not much thought. Mostly she envisions the Constitution as guaranteeing her right to stand where she likes and run her yap.

3. She's sorta trying to defend her husband (if counterproductively), who's actually the driver here who was stopped by the cops. I suppose that makes it cuter. Or cute-ish.

4. But darnit, she wants to know if you know her name, and if you don't, boy howdy!, you are So about to find out, Mister.

5. Her husband completely sells her down the river at the end and tells the cop "I tried [to stop that], that was completely one-hundred percent not my fault." I think this part is going to be An Issue at home.

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Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (281)
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The big headline from the Oregon Medicaid study is that paying for people's health care saves them from spending their own money (duh!) and marginally increases some self-reported psychological indicators (that is, stuff like "how do you feel?" which can be affected simply by the knowledge that someone's paying your bills) but does nothing whatsoever to improve the health of people on Medicaid.

Leftists, seeking any kind of spin, are now lauding the Medicaid program as the greatest anti-depression program since the Mousketeers. But is that really why the country is paying $7.5 trillion dollars on a program? To make people feel slightly better emotionally, without any tangible physical improvement?

Meghan McArdle wrote a long piece that I was trying to think of a way to link most of the day yesterday -- it's long, it's a little wonky, but it's very good. I was trying to figure out a way to sell people on reading it.

Well, anyway, it's an article where you wind up feeling you know slightly more after having read it than you did before. It explains why this study is so important, and really should be treated as very significant new scientific information about policy and policy outcomes.

And yet it's simply being treated as fodder for spin. A great big pile of new scientific information has been added to the debate, but the hacks are simply ignoring it in favor of talking up their shopworn bromides and wishcasting.

The supposed Party of Science sure seems to prefer Faith & Dogma to actual Science. The piece is worth reading in full, but here are her conclusions.

First, she notes that the left, in order to claim that this study vindicates them, are compelled to claim they never really expected ObamaCare or Medicaid to achieve much of anything at all and so they're wonderfully surprised to learn these programs may marginally improve self-reported indica of psychological wellness.

There’s been a bit of revisionist history going on recently about what, exactly, its supporters were expecting from Obamacare–apparently we always knew it wasn’t going to “bend the cost curve”, or lower health insurance premiums, or necessarily even reduce the deficit, and now it appears that we also weren’t expecting it to produce large, measurable improvements in blood pressure, diabetes, or blood sugar control either. In fact, maybe what we were always expecting was a $1 trillion program to treat mild depression.

She then criticizes those who have made certain that they are fully up-to-date on their immunizations against significant new information.

Even if you think that Medicaid has larger effects than we're seeing here, I think you also have to acknowledge that many of the uninsured seem to be surprisingly good at accessing the health system, if not paying for it.

Because, of course, this study shows that there is no difference between those on Medicaid -- free health care -- and the uninsured pool. This means that the Republican Talking Point -- about which I confess I was skeptical myself-- that the uninsured do get health care, is substantially vindicated.

At least on the markers that the study looked for, the majority of them--even the majority of the diabetics, hypertensives, and hypercholsterolemics--are doing about as well as their counterparts in Medicaid. They maybe don't feel as good about it, but from the outside, they're not that much different.

This was pretty much the thesis that Richard Kronick offered, when his observational study (much to his surprise!) suggested that there was no adverse mortality risk to going without insurance. Maybe those without insurance, he said, were simply finding a way to get at least basic care. Maybe in a costly and financially risky way, but still getting it.

If that's true, though, here's the question we have to ask: is Medicaid, or Obamacare, the program that we would design to solve these problems? We might think that they'd better be solved with free mental health clinics, or cash.

I'm not sure that if you'd waved this study at the American public two years ago, they'd have said, "Yup, this makes me want to put 16 million new people into Medicaid, and enact a giant new regulatory apparatus to force everyone else in the country to buy insurance." But of course, we didn't have this study. Instead, we heard that 150,000 uninsured people had died between 2000 and 2006. [A factoid debunked in the rest of the article-- ace.] Or maybe more. With the implication that if we just passed this new law, we'd save a similar number of lives in the future.

Which is one reason why the reaction to this study from Obamacare's supporters has frankly been a bit disappointing. Not because I expected them to fall on their knees and say, "Oh my God, national health care was a terrible mistake!" Even if I thought that was the obviously correct actual response, well, I've met people before, and that's not how they act.

But at this point, the only two large-scale randomized control trials that we have done on the benefits of paying for peoples' health care have both come back showing surprisingly small effects. In 2011, when the first results came out of Oregon, that was not what Obamacare's supporters were predicting. They were predicting that the second phase of the Oregon study would show large, significant effects on basic health measures like blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol control. It didn't. There's really no other way to put it.

A good Bayesian--and aren't most of us are supposed to be good Bayesians these days?--should be updating in light of this new information....

I don't know what a Baynesian is but a quick click on Wikipedia gives me a quick-and-dirty half-assed definition that it's empiricism of a probabalistic sort, that is, empiricism of situations where the precise truth cannot be determined due to its complexity but where you can probabalistic determine which way the truth is leaning.

That was not, let us say, the tone of much of the commentary I read. The financial effects tended to be punched up at the top even though they are the least surprising or interesting result. Depression also ranked high. The health effects often, er, less so--unless it was to explain why actually, these are surprisingly great.

Let me offer a gloss here. I believe leftists understand that the public will not go for a simple transfer of cash from one man to another. The public does not agree, to offer a specific hypothetical, that it is moral to take $5000 from the rich man to give that $5000 to the poor man. (Actually, guestimating, perhaps $1500 goes to the poor man after the government and its bureaucrats take their skim. This is just a Wild Ass Guess but I'll continue using it.)

The left avoids activating this rejection of their schemes by not casting them as simple rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul schemes, but as schemes which go beyond simple cash transfers.

Government-provided health care, you see, is not just about defraying the costs of health care, which would be a Peter to Paul transfer, but about something more than that, about providing people "access" to an absolutely critical good without which they cannot survive, and improving their health.

The idea of a "multiplier" is probably implicit in such arguments as well: Sure, we're taking $5000 from the rich man and giving $1500 to the poor man, but that $1500 will have such an impact on his life that it's wrong to treat it as $1500; you'd have to factor in an impact multiplier of perhaps 10x to represent all the actual good that will flow from this "investment." So the $5000 taken from the rich man yields, perhaps, $15,000 in actual good received by the poor man.

Why, we're actually almost making money on this transaction! We just turned $5000 to $15,000 by government action! Whoo-hoo! As Uncle Choo-Choo, Joe "Big Caboose" Biden, might say, let's get rollin'!

But this study scotches all those arguments, dispositively. Free government-provided health care does not increase health; it merely defrays the cost of it. It really is just a straight-up Peter-to-Paul cash transfer, and while Paul does indeed feel good about that (and who doesn't like to steal, when you get right down to it?), it has no beneficial effects beyond the sheer pleasure of having what you never earned. (Money won is twice as sweet as money earned, said Paul Newman in the Color of Money.)

There is no "impact multiplier" attached to the transfer; taking $5000 from the rich man to give $1500 in benefits to the poor man simply results in the poor man having an extra $1500, the rich man being poorer by $5000, and the government richer by the $3500 Sovereign Vig.

The study, in sort, not only questions the efficacy of the program, but the morality of it, because if there is no Value Added to the taking of money from the rich man than the entire scheme is simply what it's always appeared to be: Straight-up theft.

Posted by: Ace at 10:09 AM | Comments (239)
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Very funny, from "attempted heterosexuality" to this sum-up:

“Well, I think it was the suggestion that he had attempted, in a way, to take the earth-shattering significance of the occasion — that we had here some pristine, gay trailblazer, and that Howie Kurtz had somehow attempted to muddy that picture, and so had taken away from this iconic gay moment that was so iconically gay in all its fabulous iconic gayness, that the president of the United States took time off from not doing anything about Syria, and not doing anything about Benghazi, and not doing anything about the Boston bombers, and not doing anything about anything else, to personally call this guy and congratulate him on his courage and heroism in becoming the first, if I understand it correctly, I think he’s the first American to proclaim himself openly gay,” Steyn added. “And that is a historic moment.”

Posted by: Ace at 09:23 AM | Comments (268)
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