INSULT like Shakespeare: it's easy with this kit!

I BLAME the SUVs and the polluting factories back then: "Climate Shifts Sparked 17th-Century Conflicts"

ISRAEL, Palestine, and antisemitism.

GENERALISSIMO FRANCO IS STILL DEAD: "As Spain's jobs crisis deepens, more young Spaniards are leaving the country in search of greater opportunities in Germany."

It's back to the 60s all over again.

A FEW amazing display ads.

STEVE JOBS' best quotes.

QUOTE OF THE DAY, by Kevin Williamson (in a Steve Jobs tribute, but it doesn't matter; the sentence is atemporal):

Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values.

MOURN DIFFERENT: the 20 most creative tributes to Steve Jobs.

AMERICA'S most beautiful college campuses. Awesome.

PRETTY MUCH a no-brainer, ain't it?

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ACCORDING to the European intelligentsia, the U.S. is the land where the poor who can't afford health insurance die at the hospitals' doors because the are not admitted. This will come as a suprise:

ON Jan. 4, 2010, Raymond Fok was changing trains on his way to kidney dialysis treatment when he collapsed on the Canal Street subway platform. Emergency medical technicians examined him and took him by ambulance to the nearest hospital, New York Downtown, near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Workers in the emergency room recorded that Mr. Fok’s speech was slurred and that he was lurching from side to side when he walked.

“He was a very typical hemorrhagic stroke,” said Jeffrey Menkes, the hospital’s president. From the emergency room, the hospital admitted Mr. Fok to the intensive-care unit on the third floor, where workers tried to find out more about their patient — not just his medical history, but his insurance or Medicaid status, his address, his Social Security or taxpayer identification number, the location of family members.

Once his condition had stabilized, the hospital moved him to a regular room on the fifth floor, where staff members expected to treat him for 7 to 10 days before discharging him to a sub-acute-care center for rehabilitation, the usual regimen for stroke victims.

Nineteen months later, Mr. Fok, 58, greeted a reporter from his bed in Room 516, eager to have a visitor. In the previous year and a half, perhaps 100 or more patients had come and gone from the room’s other bed, but Mr. Fok had gone nowhere. “Yes, I remember you,” he said. “John, right?”
The price of his treatment: $1.4 million.

And who was paying for it?

“The government,” Mr. Fok guessed, though he was not sure. “The hospital is losing money.”

In a city with a large immigrant population, it is not rare for hospitals to have one or more patients who, for reasons unrelated to their medical condition, do not seem to leave. At Downtown, where a bed costs the hospital more than $2,000 a day, there are currently three long-term patients who no longer need acute care but cannot be discharged because they have nowhere to go. The hospital pays nearly all costs for these patients’ treatment. One man left recently after a stay of more than five years.

They are the forgotten people in the health care system — uninsured, usually undocumented, without resources and stuck in the system’s most expensive course of care. Some are abandoned by or estranged from relatives; some belong in rehabilitation centers, where care is much cheaper, but because of their immigration status they are not enrolled in Medicaid or Medicare, so the places will not take them. For hospitals, some of these patients, like Mr. Fok, come in as medical cases and then quickly become puzzles for detective work.

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THE MIT has developed an 'artificial leaf' that turns sunlight into storable fuel; there's video at the link.

A MOVING VIDEO of a 29-year-old girl, born deaf, as she hears for the first time in her life thanks to an implant. Those pharma and medical tech industries are evil, eh?

MANY OF YOU have probably seen this chart purportedly showing how bad Republican presidents are and how good Democrat presidents are -- particularly Obama -- at controlling the growth of public debt:

There's just one problem: it's as false a Michael Moore's slimming diet. I'll give word to the Washington Post:

The chart has some basic conceptual flaws. For instance, as the debt keeps getting higher, the possible percentage increases will keep getting smaller. Under the mixed-up logic of this chart, a person can go from 10 to 20, and that would be a 100 percent increase. If the next person goes from 20 to 30, that’s only a 50 percent increase, even though the numerical increase (10) is the same.

The chart also cherry-picks the data that portray Obama in the best light by claiming to show “public debt” but in actuality using the statistics for gross debt.

Gross debt includes intergovernmental transactions such as bonds held by Social Security and Medicare, but public debt is the more commonly used figure of national indebtedness, at least among economists.

If the chart actually used public debt rather than gross debt, it would have put Obama and George W. Bush virtually in the same league — 60 percent increase (as of September 2011) for Obama versus 70 percent for Bush — even though Bush served as president much longer.

But the biggest problem is that this is just dumb math. What really counts is not the raw debt numbers, but the size of the debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product. The GDP is the broadest measure of the national economy and directly indicates the nation’s ability to service its debts. In fact, the White House budget office historical tables portray much of the data as a percentage of GDP, because that is the best way to truly compare such numbers over time.

If the chart were recast to show how much the debt went up as a percentage of GDP, it would look pretty bad for Obama after not even three years in office. In fact, Obama does almost twice as poorly as Reagan — and four times worse than George W. Bush.

    Reagan: plus 14.9 percentage points
    GHW Bush: plus 7.1 percentage points
    Clinton: down 13.4 percentage points
    GW Bush: plus 5.6 percentage points
    Obama: plus 24.6 percentage points

WHAT A STRANGE WAY oil has to reach its end, eh?

U.S. oil production in areas including West Texas' Permian Basin, South Texas' Eagle Ford shale, and North Dakota's Bakken shale will record a rise of a little over 2 million barrels per day from 2010 to 2016, according to data compiled by Bentek Energy, a Colorado firm that tracks energy infrastructure and production projects.

Canadian crude production is expected to grow by 971,000 barrels per day during the same period, with much of the oil headed for the U.S.

Combined, the U.S. and Canadian oil output will top 11.5 million barrels per day, which is even more than their combined peak in 1972.
Goldman Sachs has estimated the U.S. could move from being the No. 3 oil producer behind Saudi Arabia and Russia to the No. 1 spot by 2017.

TEN MYTHS about Afghanistan.

IS CHAVEZ REALLY SICK, or is it a ruse?

To me it's a bit difficult to believe that he's making the whole thing up and has nothing; maybe it's another illness and not cancer, but in any case he's clearly exploiting it for propaganda.

GREAT COMMERCIAL

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GOD'S ENGINEER: P.J. O'Rourke on Gaudí, at The Atlantic.

THIS IS FUNNY:

BULLSEYE! " US-born cleric Anwar al Awlaki - said by the US to be a senior figure in al Qaeda - has been killed in Yemen, the country's defence ministry has said."

UPDATE. More at the Washington Post:

A Yemeni security source, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said Aulaqi was killed in an air strike, possibly by an unmanned American drone. The Obama administration in recent months have escalated the use of drones to target al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen and Somalia. U.S. officials could not be reached for comment.

If true, Aulaqi’s death would be considered a significant victory in the U.S. war against global terrorism. Believed to be 39 or 40-years old, the New Mexico-born cleric has been implicated in several attacks on U.S. soil, including the 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, Texas; an attempt later that year to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner; and an attempt in 2010 to send parcel bombs on cargo plans bound for the United States.
 
In April 2010, the Obama administration authorized his targeted killing. U.S. officials alleged that he is a top leader in al-Qaeda’s Yemen wing, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

BUSTING THE MYTH that the U.S. military is basically full of poor and black recruits:

In 2008, using data provided by the Defense Department, the Heritage Foundation found that only 11% of enlisted military recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth, or quintile, of American neighborhoods (as of the 2000 Census), while 25% came from the wealthiest quintile. Heritage reported that "these trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, in which 40% of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods, a number that has increased substantially over the past four years."

Indeed, the Heritage report showed that "low-income families are underrepresented in the military and high-income families are overrepresented. Individuals from the bottom household income quintile make up 20.0 percent of Americans who are age 18-24 years old but only 10.6 percent of the 2006 recruits and 10.7 percent of the 2007 recruits. Individuals in the top two quintiles make up 40.0 percent of the population, but 49.3 percent of the recruits in both years."

What about the charge that our Army is disproportionately black? This too is false, as is clear from data for fiscal 2010 available on the Army's website: Whereas blacks comprise 17% of Americans ages 18-39 with high school degrees, they represent only a slightly larger proportion of enlisted soldiers, at 21%.

Meanwhile, whites were significantly overrepresented among enlisted Army personnel in 2010. While 58% of Americans 18-39 years old are white, 64% of the Army's enlisted men and women are. Whites are underrepresented to a minor degree in only one category, in which blacks are overrepresented: Army officers. While 74% of 25-54 year-olds with bachelor's degrees are white, 72% of Army officers are white. While 8% of 25-54 year-olds with B.A.s are black, 13% of Army officers are.

Is it true that with a shaky economy, blacks have been driven to enlist in the Army in dramatically increased numbers? The 2010 numbers say otherwise. While 60% of 18-24 year-olds with a high school degree are white and 17% are black, 64% of new enlistees are white and 19% are black.

AL-QAEDA to Ahmadinejad: enough already with 9/11 conspiracy nonsense!

NOAM CHOMSKY says in this video that Obama is worse than Bush and Blair (unclear whether he means combined...)

THROWING good money after bad:

European officials are working on a grand plan to restore confidence in the single currency area that would involve a massive bank recapitalisation, giving the bail-out fund several trillion euros of firepower, and a possible Greek default.

'NO, HE CAN'T':

This week’s Economist/YouGov Poll is full of bad news for President Barack Obama. The frontrunners for the GOP nomination in the 2012 contest are pulling very close to him in head-to-head matchups, and his approval rating has been at or near the lowest levels of his Presidency for the last few weeks. And the worrisome economy keeps it there: this week just 36% approve of the way he is handing his job overall, the lowest rating ever in the two and a half years of his Presidency.

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES EXPLAINED: there's nothing paranormal about them.

SPAIN'S SOCIALISTS scuttle the ship: "Zapatero’s party is in a mess of its own making."

GOOGLE a mobile carrier? Regardless of whether the image is real or doctored, it sure would make a lot of sense.

UPDATE. More here.

AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: Spain's banking mess. Accompanied by a few charts that don't look pretty.