Ira Stoll: IRS Sets Sights on Frequent Flyer Miles - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "...when the government is spending so much more than it takes in, the pressure rises for Washington to dream up new items to tax, or to raise taxes on."
The FBI Prospers by Feeding Fears - Reason.com: "...he resembles just about every bureaucrat in the history of government. He thinks that his agency is vitally important and growing more so every day. If there had been a Federal Bureau of Stagecoaches when passenger trains and cars came along, it would still be in business and finding ways to justify its preservation and expansion...
Comey is upholding the tradition that once the government identifies an evil, the evil never goes away—it only gets bigger and tougher, requiring ever-increasing efforts to combat it. The Department of Energy was created during the "energy crisis" of the 1970s. The crisis didn't last, but the department did. The same pattern holds here. In the decade after 9/11, the number of terrorist episodes in this country averaged 17 a year, compared to 41 a year in the 1990s. Nor is al-Qaida gaining ground. Since 9/11, reports the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, it has carried out no attacks in the U.S. But progress is never taken as progress. It's always interpreted as the calm before the storm."
Wim Hof World Record Breaker Trains Others On His Mental Method: "In 2007 at the Feinstein Institute on Long Island, Kenneth Kamler, a world-renowned expedition doctor who has worked on Everest, observed an experiment in which Hof was connected to heart and blood monitors and immersed in ice. At first the experiment hit a major snag. The standard hospital devices that track respiration declared him dead after he’d been in the ice only two minutes. The machine got confused because he didn’t take a breath for more than two minutes and his resting heart rate was a mere 35 beats per minute. He wasn’t dead, though, and Kamler had to disconnect the device to continue. Hof stayed in the ice for 72 minutes. The results were astounding. Hof’s core temperature initially declined a few degrees but then rose again. It was the first scientific validation of Hof’s method. It was becoming clear that Hof could consciously affect his autonomic nervous system to increase his core temperature. “Exactly how you explain it depends on the kind of philosophy you want to believe in,” says Kamler, who references similar feats called tummo performed by Tibetan monks. Ultimately, he says, it boils down to how Hof uses his brain. “The brain uses a lot of energy on higher functions that are not essential to survival. By focusing his mind he can channel that energy to generate body heat,” he speculates...
Peter Pickkers is just about the last scientist who would be swayed by outlandish claims. An expert on sepsis and infection at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, he specializes in studies that look at responses of the immune system in humans. In 2010 Hof contacted Pickkers, saying he could suppress or ramp up his immune system at will. The feat is, by definition, almost impossible. But Pickkers, who had watched Hof’s career rise on TV, was curious. Pickkers devised a test in which he administered endotoxin, a component of E. coli bacteria the body thinks is dangerous but is actually inert. A previous trial Pickkers pioneered proved that 99 percent of healthy people who come in contact with endotoxin react as though they have the flu before the body realizes it has been duped and goes back to normal. While Hof meditated, Pickkers injected him with the endotoxin. The results were unheard of. “Wim had done things that, if you had asked me prior to the experiment, I would not have thought possible,” Pickkers told me. Whereas almost every other person dosed with endotoxin experienced severe side effects, Hof had nothing more than a minor headache. Blood tests showed he had much higher levels of cortisol—a hormone usually released only during times of extreme stress, sort of like adrenaline—than had been previously recorded. Also, blood drawn while he was meditating remained resistant to endotoxin for six days after it had left his body."
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