Friday, March 18, 2011

Tokyo power company has been faking nuclear safety reports for years

Bloomberg: The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan's atomic power industry.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

President Hamlet

VDH: conscience does make cowards of us all.

The problem with prescriptions for OTC products

WSJ: Patients are demanding doctors' orders for over-the-counter products because of a provision in the health-care overhaul that slipped past nearly everyone's radar. It says people who want a tax break to buy such items with what's known as flexible-spending accounts need to get a prescription first.

...
The IRS eventually decided the cards could be used—as long as the pharmacist labels and processes the over-the-counter item exactly like a prescription.

That had another unintended effect. Thousands of over-the-counter products now must pass behind the pharmacist's counter when the customer pays with the special debit card.

Big Brother in school

Daily Caller: Education Department officials are threatening school principals with lawsuits if they fail to monitor and curb students’ lunchtime chat and evening Facebook time for expressing ideas and words that are deemed by Washington special-interest groups to be harassment of some students.

The leading advocate for the expanded rules is Kevin Jennings, who heads the Education Department’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Jennings founded the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network advocacy group, and raised at least $100,000 for the Obama campaign in 2008.

Obama’s Social Security Hoax

Krauthammer has a nice explanation of the fictional Social Security "trust fund".

OPEC joins Pimco in cutting US dollars

Bloomberg: Oil-exporting countries are cutting holdings of U.S. government debt as energy prices rise, helping depress the dollar, the worst-performing major currency of the past six months.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Run, Democrats, run

Dr. Milton Wolf:  You’d run too if you had to defend the failures of big government.

"The free market is the most powerful engine of human prosperity in the history of mankind and today’s Democrats stand desperately in its way to appease those who are enriched by big government at the expense of everyone else. It’s not by coincidence that the most prosperous and powerful nation the world has ever known grew out of the cradle of democracy. Freedom, after all, is the core of the free market. It’s the freedom for you to control your own resources and with them, your destiny. It’s the understanding of a simple concept that you can spend your own dollars more effectively than the government can spend them for you."

Water injected into troubled nuclear power plant to avert disaster

Japanese authorities scrambled Sunday to avert a nuclear disaster, injecting seawater into overheating reactors and relieving the pressure inside at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture that was hit and shut down by Friday's devastating earthquake.

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

Video: Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

The White House's Green-Jobs Fantasies

John Stossel: Anyone who understands basic economics already knows that President Obama's $2.3 billion green-jobs initiative was snake oil. Now, thanks to Kenneth P. Green, we have statistics as well as theory to prove it.