May 04, 2015
Ed Miliband
Source: Shutterstock
SOROS THE “HEDGE” HOG
George Soros, that reptilian puppeteer of the American left, habitually flaps his gums about how the rich need to pay more taxes. Yet over the past few years he’s been leapfrogging his assets from Ireland to the Cayman Islands in an effort to delay paying more taxes. A report in Bloomberg suggests that such tax-dodging practices will eventually slam the hedge-fund titan with an American tax bill of nearly $7 billion. If the wily Soros and his battalions of tax lawyers prove ultimately unable to escape this bill, we hope he’s forced to hand-deliver the $7 billion in burlap bags filled with pennies.
GERMAN MAGAZINE PRINTS COVER USING HIV-POSITIVE BLOOD
A German men’s magazine called the Vangardist recently made headlines with its May issue, whose primary focus is HIV and AIDS. Three thousand copies of the magazine’s print run were printed using ink that contained HIV-positive blood from three willing donors. While taking great pains to reassure potential consumers that the HIV-infected blood was pasteurized before being mixed into the ink and thus is incapable of transmitting the deadly virus, the publishers said their message was that it’s perfectly safe to reach out and touch people with HIV, even though, if you wanna get technical, none of those people has been pasteurized.
POLL: 1 IN 5 AMERICANS IDENTIFIES AS LIBERTARIAN
A new Reuters poll finds that 19% of Americans identify themselves as politically libertarian. The poll also yielded several surprising results. Among them is the fact that young adults aged 18 to 29 were nearly three times as likely to self-identify as libertarian than adults over age 60. And in a three-way contest between Republicans, Democrats, and independents, Republicans were the least likely to identify as libertarian.
THE SAVAGE INFERTILITY OF MILLENNIAL WOMEN
A study from the Urban Institute concludes that millennial women”i.e. those born in or after the early 1980s”comprise the least fecund generation of women in American history. In a mere five years from 2007 to 2012, their fertility rates dropped a full 15%. The birthrate for Hispanic millennials is now 1,158 per thousand. For blacks, it’s 1,046. For whites, it’s a paltry 866. Nan Astone, the study’s co-author, theorized that the rough economy was the main reason for the overall fertility drop. This fails to explain why whites”who are relatively better off economically than either blacks or Hispanics”display the lowest fertility rates.
