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A parrot called Griffin has humiliated students at Harvard University, as well as local children, by beating them in a memory test. Harvard researchers compared human memory skills with those of the African grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) – an animal separated from humans by more than 300 million years of evolution. They compared how 21 Harvard undergraduates and 21 six-to-eight-year-old children performed against the 22-year-old bird Griffin in several rounds of a classic shell game. The game required mentally tracking the locations of fluffy pom-poms hidden under cups that swapped places a number of times. Griffin's accuracy was comparable to,...

On Friday, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un offered to shut down the nuclear test site, telling South Korea’s president Moon he’ll scrap the nuclear site by mid-May....

Members of the Princeton Student Climate Initiative have drafted a New Jersey Carbon Fee and Dividend Policy, a 94-page white paper outlining a fee-based strategy for reducing carbon emissions and air pollution while minimizing environmental impact. “What a carbon fee and dividend does is it places a fee on fossil fuels based on their carbon content,” said Jonathan Lu ’18, the founder and research director of PSCI. The carbon fee provides an incentive for companies and individuals to reduce emissions. Another key aspect of the policy is that tax revenue will be recycled back to low- to moderate-income households and...

When the Democrats were railing against the tax cut package which was passed before Christmas, one of their major rallying cries was to say that Trump and the Republicans were “punishing blue states” by capping SALT deductions (the amount of state and local taxes you pay which may then be deducted from your federal taxes) at $10K per year. Hardest “hit” were New York and California, with their respective governors vowing to #RESIST Trump and find a way to spare their people. While this would obviously be a silly idea in progressive circles, one response might have been to...

outhern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities Left-wing nonprofit pays lucrative six-figure salaries to top management BY: Joe Schoffstall August 31, 2017 5:00 am The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a liberal, Alabama-based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable organization that has gained prominence on the left for its "hate group" designations, pushes millions of dollars to offshore entities as part of its business dealings, records show. Additionally, the nonprofit pays lucrative six-figure salaries to its top directors and key employees while spending little on legal services despite its stated intent of "fighting hate and bigotry" using litigation, education,...

The Conservative talker quit his show during the middle of his program 7/31. “The Jason Lewis Show” is syndicated by Genesis Communications. Lewis spent a decade at KSTP-AM in the Twin Cities before leaving the station in 2003 for a job at WBT in Charlotte. He returned to the Twin Cities in 2006 for a job at KTLK. Lewis’ show was syndicated in 2009. His flagship was Clear Channel’s KTLK. “He told me two months ago he intended to retire Aug. 1,” Mike Crusham, president and market manager of CCME Minneapolis/St. Paul told The St. Paul Pioneer Press. “He decided...

One of the most hackneyed lines in the apparently endless and sterile partisan tug-of-war in Washington is this sanctimonious claptrap about Obamacare being “the law of the land” and that it therefore must not be obstructed. Anyone resorting to such pious invocations of the law in the United States should be subject to a potential penalty (applied only in the most extreme cases) of the extraction of the tongue with red-hot tongs.

Obamacare is a gigantic shell game. Americans were promised that the Affordable Care Act would lower health costs by $2,500 a year for the average family, provide coverage for tens of millions more Americans, and do all of this while reducing the federal budget deficit. It would be accomplished through 2,800 pages of legislation, tens of thousands of pages of regulatory directives and an interlocking network of new federal mandates. Many Americans were skeptical that this unprecedented effort at government re-engineering could succeed. Their skepticism is justified. Still, the Obama administration continues to try to convince us that all is...

Avik Roy, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has done an actual cost comparison "Here’s the bottom line," he writes, "most people with average incomes will pay more under Obamacare for individually purchased insurance than they did before." Here's where the shell game comes in: the administration says that the actual numbers of the insurance aren't important and what really matters is how much people will pay after the subsidies. But subsidies aren't free. They are paid for through higher taxes or greater deficit spending. And these taxes are a dead weight on the economy that impede economic growth.

CNN's Brooke Baldwin had some stunningly ignorant analysis on Thursday about the opposition to ObamaCare in Congress. "Congress passes a law, in this case ObamaCare, and then some of its members turn around and essentially try to sabotage it. Again, I repeat, it's a law. Certainly not the way the Founding Fathers maybe drew this thing up," she argued. First of all, not a single Republican voted for ObamaCare in 2010, and many current Republicans opposing the law's funding were elected several months after ObamaCare passed, so no Republican voted for ObamaCare and now is trying to "sabotage" it. Secondly,...

Employers will not face a penalty if they fail to inform their workers by October 1 about changes under President Barack Obama's healthcare law, the administration said, in what will likely come as a relief to many small businesses. The federal government is requiring businesses to notify employees about the new health insurance marketplaces created by the law that are set to start enrolling millions of Americans beginning October 1. Employers are also required to inform employees that they may be able to get lower-cost insurance on the exchanges, but if they buy insurance on the exchange, they may lose...

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Republican state lawmakers stood in united but futile opposition Thursday to the practice of approving empty bills that contain no real legislation but will be amended later to include budget legislation. Democrats, who control both houses, each approved several so-called "shell" bills—the Senate 40 of them, and the Assembly 38. The bills contain no actual budget details but will be amended later to include specific language needed to enact the budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Passing the bills now makes it quicker and easier to approve a state spending plan before the constitutional deadline in...

The president’s pretend compromise today does nothing to fix the religious-liberty problems he has created for millions of Americans who do not share his view that contraception and abortion are good things. First, the idea that religious employers will not be paying for contraception, sterilization, and abortion drugs under this system is simply false. The coverage only comes through an insurance policy, and the religious employer is being forced by the government to buy that policy. For most religious believers, stapling the coverage on as a rider isn’t any better than including it on page 2 of the policy. At...

Cat actually plays the shell game. Worth watching. Video was on one of the TV channels this morning. Video is at http://www.break.com/index/cat-learns-to-play-the-shell-game-2065317.

President Barack Obama has put raising the Medicare eligibility age on the table in the budget and debt talks with GOP congressional leaders, a Democratic official familiar with the talks confirmed Monday. Obama said he would only agree to the change if it was part of a major deal on spending, and it demonstrated his commitment to taking on "sacred cows," the official said. The increase in the eligibility age could be more palatable, the official said, because the new health law would expand access to insurance coverage for older Americans not yet eligible for Medicare

The entire U.S. financial system has become a gigantic shell game. While it is still in motion, a shell game can be mesmerizing to watch. But when it ends the consequences can be painful. So exactly what is a shell game? According to Wikipedia, a shell game "is portrayed as a gambling game, but in reality, when a wager for money is made, it is a confidence trick used to perpetrate fraud." Sadly, that is exactly what is happening on the global stage today. The Federal Reserve is like a con artist that is desperately trying to stay one...

Michael Walsh is in-studio today and we’ll be discussing his New York Post article out this morning. He’s also promoting the release of one of his earlier novels available for your Kindle and Kindle apps. Walsh is pointing out the the spending shell game. The country teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, operating without a budget for the current fiscal year while Congress debates relatively minuscule spending cuts and President Obama fills in his March Madness brackets, lectures the nation on school bullying and prepares for a trip to Rio.

WASHINGTON – About 13.4 million taxpayers may be getting unexpected tax bills because they were awarded too much money under President Barack Obama's Making Work Pay tax credit, a government audit said Thursday. The tax credit, which expires Jan. 1, was designed to increase take-home pay by about $8 a week through new tax withholding tables. The credit was capped at $400 for individuals and $800 for married couples filing jointly. However, the credit put millions of taxpayers at risk for not having enough taxes withheld from their paychecks, resulting in a tax bill when they file their returns, said...

In his primetime health care address before a Joint Session of Congress, President Barack Obama promised the American people: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period.” But it is hard work adding $1 trillion in government spending while claiming with a straight face that you are not adding to the deficit. Enter White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who has just the solution: just strip out $247 billion of the spending in the bill, pass it separately, and voila … your job just got one-fourth...

With the President and Congress’s plan to pass comprehensive health care reform reaching increasingly high levels of unpopularity, and reconciliation becoming an impediment, the leadership of the Senate is rumored to be preparing a new secret plan to railroad the bill through the Senate in record time by using a seldom used parliamentary procedure.Their plan is to proceed to a House passed non-health care bill to provide a shell of legislation to give Obamacare a ride to the House then to the President’s desk.  Sound confusing? We lay out the steps below, but essentially the Senate would pass health care...