The idea of using increased cigarette taxes to fund an expanded insurance entitlement for poor children has been thrown around. What a web of mixed up incentives! If too many people quit smoking, kids won't get healthcare, so we need to smoke more? It's for the children!

This is a completely messed up story. This Polish guy was moving to Canada to live with his mother. So he gets off the plane at the Vancouver airport, goes through customs, and then somehow gets stuck in the arrivals lobby for 10 hours. It's not clear why, whether he was lost and confused, or if various airport personnel wouldn't let him out for some reason. At any rate, his mother was in a nearby part of the airport, maybe 200 feet away, but unable to communicate with her son, and she got no help from airport people. So after a while, she went home, with assurances from the airport that her son would be located. So there's a surveillance video that shows the airport police finding the guy, confronting him, and then tasering him 24 seconds after they first approached this man. And he died. For no reason.

The mother called the airport about half an hour after they killed her son, and they told he he had been found and was safe. I would like to find whoever told her that and taser him to death. Can you believe this? I thought it was a joke at first. People bash US airport security, but they haven't killed anyone yet, so far as I know.

Edit: Turns out the guy had gotten somewhat violent, throwing chairs and stuff, because he was stuck for 10 hours and no one would help him.

This is a riot. A journalist in Iraq wrote a story on his blog about an encounter with an American soldier at a gate of some sort. The journalist comes off as an incredibly self-absorbed asshole who is contemptuous of the lowly soldier, yet the journalist seems to think he was slick and clever and to be admired for his actions. Then about 190 comments that all blasted him for being a complete jerk later, he took down first the post, then the website. Thankfully someone saved it and posted the original story and the comments on the link above.

Here's a nifty little roundup of news with an interesting defense of George Bush, as one of the most truthful Presidents ever, a statement you will never see in the New York Times. But the guy has a point, Bush has always told the truth, at least as he sees it. And the particular case the author is referring to involves a speech about Cuba. Bush basically backs up the claims made by many Cuban dissidents that when the communist regime there finally falls and the real story of what happened behind the "Castro Curtain" comes out, current defenders will feel the same way they felt about Stalin; duped.

With the sheer number of horrid stories that have come out from Cuba over the years, it's hard to believe Castro has any defenders, but your typical left winger, especially of the celebrity sort, has been enamored with the guy for decades. One wonders if they will admit they were wrong when the truth does come out? Even if they do, that won't stop the same folks from worshiping the next totalitarian dictator who touts a worker's paradise. Somehow they never mention the deaths, imprisonments, and other restrictions on freedom.

I don't think I have to show much proof of the statement "The American public education system is failing." Test after test shows our students falling behind those of many other industrialized nations, so I will go ahead under the assumption that that statement is correct. Why then are so many people willing to give the government even more control over their lives with various universal health care schemes? Gee, they did such a great job with public schools, let's give them our bodies, too. Come on, you liberals out there, get real. It ain't gonna work. And frankly, even if it did work, I'd still prefer a system where I control things for myself instead of some bureaucrat who makes decisions based on the statistics his advisors show him.

The more I think about social security, the less sense it makes. Just think about it from a logical standpoint. The reasoning for it is that old people can't work to support themselves, and haven't saved up enough money to get by, so young people will pay for them. But those young people get old eventually, and then they can't work, and they have even less income saved up since they had to give a lot of it away to the previous generation of old people. How does this make any sense?

I understand that when they first came up with this plan, there were like 16 people working for every retired person. Sure, that works, just like an illegal Ponzi scheme works. Until the last generation pays out and gets nothing back. Anyone under the age of 35 or so who thinks they are going to get a dime of social security benefits under the current system when they retire is nuts. Or completely ignorant of the facts.

Here's a nice article on the S-CHIP bill and entitlements. The main point is that the real "war on children" is being fought by those who favor more entitlements like S-Chip. We have a society that seems to think it should be educated for free for a couple of decades, then work for 25-35 years, then live off the state again for another 30 years or so till we die, and that's unsustainable. Our current children will spend their adult lives working to pay for old people. A quarter of our GDP will go to old people. It's a giant Ponzi scheme, and our kids will pay for it, even more than my generation will.

I've actually talked to people my age about social security and I get some really strange viewpoints. I remember one person believed in social security and was ready to fight for it, but at the same time did not anticipate being able to draw on it for himself. Why would you support a system that you think is failing? What sense does that make?

Bush's personal savings accounts probably wouldn't have saved SS, but presumably they would have taught at least a few people to be responsible for their own futures instead of depending on the state.

Here's a link to a John Stossel report on Global Warming. The basics are that the debate is not closed, that human-caused global warming is not necessarily true (though there is no doubt, according to Stossel, that the Earth is warming), and that much of Al Gore's movie is demonstratively untrue. One point was Gore's graphs that show a correlation between temperature rises and carbon in the atmosphere. Stossel superimposed the graphs and noticed that the warming part came first, not the rising carbon part. He also mentions several other reasons why the Earth may be warming that are both scientifically valid, and are not the fault of humans.

His most important point was that even if it's all true, is it such a reason to panic? The planet's climates change, always have, always will. And while such change may destroy some animals, it also allows others to thrive. Anyway, this is just another point of view, since you pretty much only ever get one side of the story in the press.

Here's a short and nifty little article on Jews and Nobel Prizes. Basically Jews win a lot of them, and American Jews even more so. And the author goes on to discuss the real story of the brain drain in Europe- they keep driving out their Jews through Holocausts and pogroms and general anti-Semitism.

Regarding Jews and intelligence, I read a nifty article theorizing that the above average intelligence recorded in Jewish people stems completely from Ashkenazi Jews, and that it was basically a Darwinian process by which only the smartest Jews were able to survive and thrive in the anti-Semetic European countries, whereas the Sephardic Jews (the simple difference being that the Ashkenazi's fled foreign invaders in Israel east and around the Mediterranean, while the Sephardics fled west to northern Africa and up to Spain, though it's really a lot more complicated than that.

Two really big scandals from the online poker world have come to light in the last few days. First off, TheVoid, winner of the recent 2007 WCOOP Main Event on Pokerstars, the largest online poker tournament ever held in terms of prize pool, was disqualified, and Pokerstars is moving everyone up one spot on the list and redistributing the prize pool accordingly. Turns out the guy was multi-accounting. He had several different accounts, presumably on different computers, playing the same tourney, and rode of those horses all the way to first place. Pokerstars showed a lot of integrity in the way they handled the entire affair.

Contrast that with the other scandal, which is almost too ridiculous to believe. A well known and successful online player (X) had played a high stakes sit and go, which is a one table tournament, on Absolute Poker. He thought one of the players (Y) was making a lot of very suspicious plays, almost as if he knew the other players hole cards.

So X examined Y's history on one of the sites that tracks those sort of things, and noticed a lot of statistical improbabilities in Y's play and win-rate. X posted about this on an online poker forum, and Absolute claimed they investigated and found no problems. X requested a hand history of the tournament from Absolute Poker, and they sent him an Excel spreadsheet, which he found to be mostly gibberish. He handed it off to his friend Z. Z is well known in the online poker community for founding one of the original player tracking sites, as well as some other interesting poker related projects, but he is not much of a poker player himself. I think I read he's a law student at Emory.

Anyway, Z had the technical knowhow to know what the spreadsheet contained. Not just the hand history, but hole cards, IP addresses, and even the IPs of observers. He found first that Y folded the first two hands until another account, #363, logged on to watch the table. Then Y started playing like he knew the other holecards. Then through a series of IP pings, crosschecking email addresses, and other nifty computer detective stuff that is beyond my knowledge, Z tracked down Y to an IP shared by an email address owned by one of the CEO's of Absolute Poker.

The conclusion? The CEO was using a "pitboss" type of account so he could see the holecards, while actually playing with a different account. That's just messed up.

Needless to say, very few people who read online poker forums will ever play at Absolute again, nor their sister-site, Ultimate Bet. I wonder what Phil Helmuth, Ultimate Bet's most well known logobearer, will do?

As many of you may know, WWI was sparked off by the killing of Archduke Ferdinand by a Serbian student named Princip. This one murder led to not just WWI, but WWII, and even many problems the world faces today. Granted, there are several single events that could have changed history, but in this particular case, I have a question to pose. Princip's main deal was that he wanted Serbian independence from the Hapsburg Empire. If he could have seen the future, and known what that one shot would lead to, all the death, and Serbia is still not exactly stable and happy, would he still do it? Would he be even more fanatical for his cause, or less?

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 4068218

It's that time of year again. I love this tourney, always some good table talk.

Smiley and I were bored tonight and wanted something different for dinner. I suggested we make homemade burritos, and he responded, "Deep fried homemade burritos!" And thus another adventure began.

yhe excitement was palpable. We had invented something new and wonderful, and the anticipation of the first bite was unbearable. First we got some black beans boiling, then put some cheap steaks on the grill and got some rice cooking. Filled a pot with vegetable oil, sliced up the now cooked steak and put cubes of it on a bed of rice on top of a tortilla. The beans, unfortunately, were not soft enough yet, so we did without. Next time I'll have to start them soaking hours earlier. Anyway, Smiley rolled up his burrito, put it on a slotted spoon, and lowered it into the oil. Then his phone rang, and for some reason he answered. It was a representative from Google calling him about an interview. He said he was a little busy deep frying a burrito and could they talk the next day. She said that sounded dangerous, and they made plans to connect later, but seemed to share Smiley's excitement about the new food item we were creating.

Finally our burritos were done. And they were wonderful, though extremely messy and requiring a large amount of refinement for the next attempt, but overall definitely a success. Deep fried burritos will be made again in this household.

The capstone of the affair came an hour later when Smiley received an email from the Google rep which read, "Aren't deep friend burritos called chimichongas?"