Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Link roundup

1. "Knife-wielding crabs? Here’s the troubling truth behind these viral videos."
It appears the knife's handle is jammed into the claw, and the crab either can't let got of it or is instinctively clamping down on the weapon.

...

The crab is "absolutely distressed,"
2. From Matt Taibbi's lengthy article about Trump:
He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act.

Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer. "The insurance companies," he says, "they'd rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of companies going all over the place bidding ...  It's so hard for me to make deals  ... because I can't get bids."

He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that's impossible because of the influence of the industry. "I'm the only one that's self-funding ...  Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers."

Trump isn't lying about any of this.
3. Pink fairy armadillo.