If only we could feel it.
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Two For Two
Looks like I was spot on again yesterday, this time over Rick Perry's firefighting funding.
Follow Up
My piece yesterday was pretty timely, it appears. People are starting to get really fed up.
Color Me Surprised
Normally, I don't really get into sports stories, but this was a bit surprising. The New York Yankees and Baltimore Orioles baseball teams played a game last night that was interrupted with a four hour rain delay, ending a little after 2AM.
In the grand scheme of baseball, this is unusual but not unheard of. In 1986, the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves battled until nearly 5AM, no rain delay...and then the stadium had a Fourth of July fireworks display, which annoyed the neighbors.
What's curious to me is, today the Yankees and Orioles have a scheduled game at 1:05 this afternoon.
I'm shocked the players union hasn't been up in arms about this, considering that day games on Thursday are an outgrowth of a union insistence in the last collective bargaining agreement that any games on Thursday where either team has to travel X miles to their weekend series must start before 4PM, in order to provide appropriate rest to the players and give them at least 24 hours between games.
Shoes For Industry!
It looks like homeland security will stop making you take off your shoes at the airport.
This was one of the more ludicrous security measures taken in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and to be honest, there were few things I dreaded more about flying than unshoeing in an airport on a cold snowy winter morning.
Maybe the meals. Maybe.
Dire Straits
Think you had it rough during the recent spate of bad weather?
At least you won't have to live on an oil rig.
School's In. Lie Carefully
Welp, I think this pretty much is the swan song for News International, or at least Jim Murdoch.
Buh-bye! Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Meh. It's A Start
$300 billion for jobs, is what Obama seeks from Congress.
Or about one-fourth of what Congress has gladly handed over since the beginning of hostilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.
You know, when we could afford frivolities like wars of choice.
Diacritical Marx
I'm often struck by how the hyperbolic loons of the right wing of this nation operate. There's a deep dissonance to much of what passes for "thinking" over there, to the point I want to quote Inigo Montoya endlessly: "You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means."
In this case, the word is science.
For instance, the sciences of global climate change & evolution are suspect "theories" (blithely ignoring the textbook definition of theory, by the way) mentioned in snarling, mocking tones. Despite the fact that there is more proof, for the theory of evolution and more evidence for the theory of climate change than there is for the theory of electricity, these folks still manage to believe if they turn on a switch, the lights will go on.
But neither evolution nor climate change is "settled science" in their view.
Ahhhh, but meanwhile, in economics, lowering taxes and freeing the markets creates jobs and growth. That's science.
Even though every shred of evidence contradicts these theorems and consign them to the junk heap of pseudo-fact, these know-nothings will swear up and down that lowering taxes is good for you and me and getting rid of regulations makes us stronger.
So wholly provable science is wrong, and wholly disproven science is truth.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm...what do you suppose the outcome of this base ignorance is?
Yet some of our top university professors, winners of Nobel prizes, and central bankers who are the subjects of adoring books, still preach the hyper-efficiency of self-correcting markets. They demonize the actions of policy makers who try to intervene to help offset demand contractions (as in the Recovery Act), impose regulatory structure on key markets (financial regulatory reform), strengthen social insurance (health care reform), invest in public goods (infrastructure spending), or pursue industrial policies to better position our national economy (President Obama's clean energy agenda).
The intellectual actions of these extreme free marketeers do not take place in a vacuum. They interact with a political structure comprised of lobbies and pseudo think-tanks to promote policies that, while wrapped in the cloak of promoting free markets, ultimately serve to redistribute growth to the top of the wealth scale. "Efficient market hypotheses" and "rational expectations"--the idea that absent government interference, market participants will make optimally efficient decisions--leads directly to supply-side tax cuts, deregulation of financial markets, the formation of financial bubbles, the acceptance of income stagnation, and disinvestment in public goods. And these measures, in turn, have delivered levels of income and wealth inequality not seen since the late 1920s, along with policy handcuffs that today have us arguing about how to reduce, rather than strengthen, regulations.
Shorter Jared Bernstein: "Braaaaaaaaaaaaaanes bad but good food."
Economics has been called "the dismal science" for good reason. It's bad science and usually gets the answer wrong (I'm aware of Carlyle's original meaning.) Economics, because it is so intertwined in the human experience, cannot make accurate predictions on its own. For example, it presupposes conditions that simply do not exist: rationality, perfect knowledge, perfect elasticity, free markets (or not.)
You can't theoretically test economics the way you can, say, physics or global environmental science. You can make limited predictions that might demonstrate some useful bits of information, but the application of that information becomes unwieldly, inaccurate, and ultimately self-defeating.
In many ways, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies first and foremost to the science of economics. Observing the phenomenon immediately voids the theoretical constructs involved.
This is not to suggest the economics has no value. For example, it's very good at helping us get a general understanding of how the world works from a commercial point of view. If you pull back the lens to a wide focus, you see a general application of principles, and they work pretty well: demand for a product does drive the price of the product up until supply catches up. Run a surplus of production and you have to lower prices to sell off the inventory.
Even socialism has value, as one of the few economic theories that tries to incorporate the human factor (it fails on other merits, to-wit the quality of that human factor. At least capitalism acknowledges greed as a motivator.) To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities, that makes a lot of sense. On a limited scale, it works rather nicely, too.
But I digress.
The simple fact is, economics has become so divorced from the real world mechanics its supposed to describe, as Bernstein points out, that we cannot rely on it to be accurate. For example, it's not unusual for a stock market to go into decline when the economy is bad. It is unusual for the market to go into decline when companies are reporting record profits and projecting decent growth into the future.
That's a disconnect. There's something manipulating either the market or the economy, or both. Bernstein points out the intransigence of the "marketeers" which explains a lot. Even gravity will be suspended if you flap your arms fast enough. The trouble is, eventually, gravity sucks.
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
More Moore, More
During the 2008 election run-up, Michael Moore was avidly pro-Obama.
I mention that because I am considered by many to be even more liberal than Moore (I don't own a gun, for example) and supported Hillary Clinton, a fact I get reminded of from time to time.
On Labor Day (in what has to be a beautiful piece of programming), one of the movie channels played Capitalism: A Love Story, which got me thinking: How does Moore feel about Obama now?
“I don’t understand why he’s chosen the path he’s chosen, why he did not come in fighting for the working people of this country,” Moore tells Newsweek. “He could have been a great president. He could have pulled us back from the abyss.” Instead, “he came in more as Neville Chamberlain, wanting to appease Republicans.” Moore hasn’t even decided whether he’ll vote for Obama again in 2012; he likes Jon Huntsman on the Republican side, saying “it’s crazy time over there” and Huntsman is the only “sane candidate.” “If the Republicans were smart, they would nominate [him].”
Wow. Maybe it is surprising.
Torn By A Huntsman's Pack
Essentially, next February is either the end of John Huntsman or the flickering ember of an insurgency campaign.
He's hanging his hopes on the reasonable and rational folks in New Hampshire.
His best strategy for the primary is to forge a coalition of people who are terrified by the prospects of losing the general election with the nomination of either Rick Perry or Mickey Mouse, I mean, Bachmann and the anti-Mitt sentiment that runs strong in states that border Massachussetts, where Romney performed most of his "wolf in liberal clothing" antics.
He could conceivably place a strong second and become a factor at the convention. If he wins outright, it would make the race very interesting. See, I think he's the GOP best hope against Obama, after Mitt. Beating Mitt would send a loud message to the rest of the party at such an early date.
He has his work cut out for him to be sure. A strong second place automatically positions him at the top of the Veep short list as someone who can win moderate votes, crucial in the general election (remember how Palin effectively moved McCain to the right when he needed to move to the center.)
But....I doubt he has the sand to do it.
Fab Jive, Freddie
Freddie Mercury would have turned 65 yesterday. If you haven't seen the Google Doodle commemorating this, hurry.
Ripe For A Gaffe
As sad as it is to say in a race for Senate, I fully expect the Wisconsin race to replace retiring Democratic Senator Herb Kohl to come down to whether the Republicans can keep their mouths shut about Tammy Baldwin's sexual orientation. One nasty gaffe, and a close race will explode.
M-I-C...See You Real Soon! K-E-Y...Why?
Because it was a crappy idea from the get-go and obviously, Ed Rollins couldn't get a raise.
Between His Rock And A Hot Place
While I'm reluctant to gloat much, because people's lives and homes are on the line, the schadenfreude is a little sweet. Here's to the photo op of Rick Perry, hat in hand, heading up the White House driveway.
A New Hope?
If Obama's finally ready to hold the GOP feet to the fires, something he has shown great reluctance to do in the past, then maybe we can start moving forward here.
The Lost Decade
I'm going to make a concerted effort to get my 9/11 rants out of the way early this week. The tragedy still has too much emotion tied up in it for me to want to dwell until the last minute, when my maudlin streak will rear its ugly head.
You know what has me most upset heading into this ten year memorial?
What could have been.
I've written often over the past seven years...has it really only been seven years?...of my frustration of a nation on the precipice of a new century, a budget surplus and the hope of a brand new age of progress. Yes, we were in the middle of a recession, but it was a relatively mild one, a shake out of the fat in the dot-com boom. We've come back strong from those kinds of recessions before.
And yes, we had a moron for President, but morons generally don't do that much damage to a nation in four (or worst case, eight) years. There's inter- and intraparty squabbling, and factions form, and politicians jockey for positions. Bush certainly looked like he'd be a one-term President, lost in the office, popularity dangling in the 40s in not even his first full year in office (and that's without the albatross Obama entered office with.)
We'd have a debt of closer to $10 trillion now, instead of $14 trillion. There would have been no wars to speak of (as far as we can tell. Bush foreign policy was more focused on Russia and China.) The tax cuts probably would have passed, at least the first round, but there's no guarantee rounds two and three, the really economically devastating ones, would have been anything but a non-starter. Remember the attempt to privatize Social Security.
But 9/11 happened. It's hard to say what else we might have saved. To be sure, however, there are plenty of things we would not have.
We wouldn't have Alan Greenspan artificially surpressing interest rates, and Bush encouraging already debt-laden middle Americans from loading up on even more debt in an effort to be patriotic.
One reason I believe the stimulus package of $780 billion should have been primarily for mortgage holders is that it would be akin to a veteran's benefit: after all, we shopped and mortgaged to the hilt because our President asked us to, insisting we were an "ownership society."
We wouldn't have been bullied and cowed into submission by a government that believed to dissent is to commit treason, even if we could see the emperor had no clothes. There'd be no PATRIOT Act. Torture would be a thing for television programs, and at the end of the day, there'd be no using the protagonist as an argument to legtimize what we all know to be illegal, immoral, and sinful behavior.
We wouldn't have the logical end of thirty years of raping the American worker, stripping him and her of union representation against goliaths and behemoths that can stomp a mudhole in our own government. After all, the stimulus package had zero accountability, precisely because that was the term bankstahs dictated to Congress and President Bush. We wouldn't have jobs just folded up in the dead of night and exported, not to Mexico or Central America (which might make sense, if you're fighting an immigration battle,) but to India and Asia and China.
All because this quarter's profit was pennies less than last quarter's and woebetide the company that doesn't pay attention to the software that can pick up that nuance and short the stock and make it crash!
We wouldn't have Glenn Beck, the modern-day Father Coughlin hate-mongerer, railing about them. Sarah Palin would be sitting on someone's lap, taking dictation. Michele Bachmann would be trying to cure her husband of teh gay.
We'd be a better nation. A more secure nation, not just physically but psychically. We wouldn't see bogeymen behind every beard and under every turban. A mosque at Ground Zero wouldn't even catch the blink of an eye in the national attention span. We wouldn't have endless terror scares coinciding with the re-election of a President who was terrified of his own shadow.
You know what has me most hopeful heading into this ten year memorial?
What still may come to pass.
See, there was some good to come out of 9/11 and while I would not thank Al Qaeda from bringing it out in the mix, we ought to acknowledge the wake-up call we got.
I think the foremost good to have come out of the past decade is this: the politics of fear, so amplified and echoed, has been shown to be a hollow barrel after all. Eight years into the Bush administration and no succuessful terror attack was even attempted in the US. One could claim that was the outgrowth of the policies of Bush the Younger, but the American people saw through this and disagree, firmly.
Else, John McCain would be President now. Simply put, the US was shown to be a terrified little child, led by terrifying children. We were The Lord of the Flies writ large.
It is this focus of the people now that has me most hopeful for our future, for as much as I rail against the tyranny of the idiocracy, I see a slow (painfully slow) evolution in the American mindset.
9/11 woke the people up to the hubris of American society, of American culture, of American hegemony. Our belief that oceans protected us from harm was stripped away not by an ICBM, but by a Boeing 757 (or 767).
We were woken by the quintessential American transportation: the transcontinental flight that anyone of us could have been on that morning.
If we could be attacked so savagely with such ease and familiarity, my thinking goes, then the very fabric of our society, the glue that holds this culture together, has to come under question. How could it not? It's not unlike finding your son or daughter smoking out of the nickle bag you hid in the back of your fetish porn collection. Clearly, you're going to wonder how things got that out of control.
We questioned the need for war, even as we stood up as the patriots we were demanded to be and supported the troops. We saw the horrors that war did to our economy, masked as it was for the eight years of Bush by being placed off-budget, like how jobs were not being created, yet enormous wealth was trickling upwards. It had to bother us on some level that companies were snapping each other up like potato chips, yet each of us saw no raises or bonuses for ten years. Meanwhile, our taxes would go up, while those on the rich kept slipping lower.
And when the neutron bomb that was the mortgage crisis exploded, the anger that had been bubbling up since 9/11 finally was directed to the proper parties: the businessmen and cronies who had taken from us our God-given destiny of freedom and happiness. Remember how the American people flooded Congress when the first stimulus package failed in a late-night vote?
We elected Barack Obama, arguably the least-likely President since Harry Truman. He spoke of hope and change, and we responded to this. That's not a coincidence, even if in application neither has truly come to pass in a recognizable form (I won't debate the merits of Obama here expect to say that, on the whole, he's done a really good job, all things considered. It's this last condition that concerns me.)
In short, we've begun to reject the old schools of thought: the free markets will provide (they structurally cannot), lower taxes create an economy (they don't), Republicans are strong on defense (who got Osma bin Laden again, while the other guy fiddled?).
Indeed, even the old shibboleths, like the first rule of Socialism is you can't talk about Socialism, have gone out the window, slowly.
Yes, there is a significant percentage of yahoos and asshats and failed PoliSci assprofs who profess the end of socialism and progressivism, but they are winnowing out. We hear them only because they have megaphones, and the American people are rolling up their windows.
Fret not, my friends, my readers. This is a time for hope. This is a time for optimism.
This is a time for America.
Friday, September 02, 2011
Nobody Asked Me, But...
1) Apologies for my absence yesterday. I was under medical treatment for tennis elbow. I got it playing softball after an earlier bout of it from bike riding. I think God's trying to tell me to take up tennis.
2) The Zadroga Bill for injuries and illnesses suffered by Ground Zero first responders passed by Congress...after much arm-twisting by Obama and even Jon Stewart... made an exception for coverage for cancers until a scientific study was completed. I'm not sure if this is sufficient, but...
3) It was a maganimous gesture made by President Obama, rescheduling perhaps his single most important address to Congress of his administration so they could hold the tee ball game that is a GOP debate. The NFL should reschedule the Thursday night season opener one hour later. It's in the midwest, which is one hour behind DC anyway, and IT'S JUST A FUCKING FOOTBALL GAME!
4) But keep in mind "No presidential request for a joint session had ever been turned down."
5) Jonathan Allen needs an enema to clear his sinuses.
6) A pain in the ass is dead.
7) It's about fucking time. By the way, believe it or not, this suggestion comes from a Bush administration official, Glenn Hubbard:
Hubbard is proposing with colleagues Christopher Mayer and Alan Boyce a national refinancing of mortgage debt for the estimated 37 million federally guaranteed loans Americans have with government mortgage issuers like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The issuers would send borrowers an application to refinance at current low mortgage rates; the borrowers would have to be current or become so for at least three months; no down payment would be required; and the government would guarantee the new loans just as it chose in 2008 to guarantee the existing ones, meaning taxpayers would not be taking on any new risk.A national refinancing effort could slow the number of foreclosures by making mortgage payments more manageable for borrowers who can stay in their homes if they get a few thousand dollars a year in interest savings. It might also stimulate consumer spending — Hubbard estimates $50 billion to $70 billion worth — as homeowners wouldn't feel quite so pinched. "A national refinancing would be like a large, permanent tax cut which would have a very big effect on the economy," says Hubbard, who has briefed the Obama Administration since he introduced the idea.
8) Please. Get involved.
9) Maybe Mother Nature is trying to tell us something.
10) Finally...this story appears to be serious.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Public Service Announcement
Over the next few weeks, you'll read from idiots on Facebook and Twitter who really ought to vet stories first, about the Doomsday Comet scheduled to wreak havoc on October 16.
Pop Quiz
1) Your seven year old son is crying uncontrollable on a tour boat.
2) Your teenage son gets into a fistfight with another teen. Your twice the size of either kid, so you try to referee the fight. Do you c) beat the crap out of your kid for losing?
Grain Of Salt
Granted, this is Al Jazeera and so should be viewed with an eye towards bias. Still, the underlying report is fascinating.
It's Both Embarassing And Funny
For those of you unblessed to live outside New York City, you do not get the opportunity to hear our esteemed alcalde Mike Bloomberg mangle Spanish.
To his credit, he's 69 and trying to learn the language. To his discredit, he's 69 and doesn't know he really sucks at it.
I mean, REALLY sucks. He knows he's not good, and I suppose he gets credit from the Hispanic community for trying, but...
It was there, on Saturday morning, that @ElBloombito was born. Hurricane Irene was bearing down on New York City, and Ms. Figueroa-Levin was chuckling about Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s heavy American accent and prolific mispronunciations when he delivered warnings in Spanish about the storm during a news conference the previous night.
So she took to Twitter, and began to type.
“Hola Newo Yorko! El stormo grande is mucho dangeroso!” she wrote. And then the Twitter messages began to flow — from the living room computer, from a laptop in her bedroom and from the iPhone she carries everywhere, having mastered the skill of typing on it with one hand while holding her daughter in her other arm.
“Fill los bathtub con agua por preparando el no agua,” read one post. “Los floodwaters!” exclaimed another.
Sadly, she's not exaggerating by half (only a little). He really does sound like Archie Bunker.
Thinning The Herd
Idiots. Some of these stories are tragic, to be sure, but most smack of foolhardiness at best and foolishness at worst.
Great Healthcare System We Got Here
Babies in Poland have a better chance of surviving than babies in the US.
In 1960, the US ranked 16th, and that low due to the extreme poverty minorities lived in, pre-welfare, pre-Great Society.
In 2009, after Republicans (and Democrats) raped the welfare system, we ranked 29th.
Now, we rank 40th.
Soon, we'll be at the bottom.
I Had A Dream
This morning in the elevator up to my office, I wondered, "If politicians like Ron and Rand Paul, Rick Perry and Mickey Mouse...I mean, Bachmann are anti-disaster relief, why not bill them for the past disaster relief their constituents have received?"
We can take it out of the Federal aid they receive for things like highways, post offices, welfare, homeland security and military bases and contracts.
Think of it: we'd reduce the deficit, something else they harangue about ad nauseum, while allowing them to stand up for the principles they espouse.
If I was Obama, I'd have the GAO run the numbers and send the bill.
A Leap Forward
The trouble with hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels is the energy needed to cull hydrogen usually exceeds the energy drawn out of it, which means that use of conventional energy sources like fossil fuels would actually increase in a hydrogen-energy scheme.
If only there was a way to harness a free energy source...
Now scientists from the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville have found an inexpensive semiconductor material that can split water solely using sunlight as its energy source. Their findings were published in the journal Physical Review B.
Energy independence is just a few years away.
There, um, is one other problem: As anyone who's watched the video of the Hindenburg disaster knows, hydrogen is not only flammable, not only inflammable, it's combustible and highly reactive.
Storage becomes an issue. Now, for most cars, say, not so much. A hole in a gas tank, for example, would be less of a problem than you might imagine because hydrogen is lighter than air and the explosion would rise nearly straight up. An explosion in a gas tank is a different story, but that's an engineering question.
It's the storage, like those large tanks at refineries, that becomes the real issue. Oil won't burn unless it's exposed to air (technically, it's the petroleum vapors that burn). Hydrogen does not have this feature, so it needs to be bonded to something, but that something has to be easily disposed of or the hydrogen easily extracted from, as needed for use.
Also, hydrogen is the slut of the atomic world: it can bond with practically anything. It's almost as bad as carbon. It makes separating it really hard.
But...once more...scientitians come to the rescue this week:
Not to worry, because researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have come up with a way to safely store hydrogen in a harmless chemical material. Their research was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
So fuel cells are on their way.
Oh Great! Now They're Blackmailing us With Jobs?
MEMO
To: AT&T
From: Actor212
Bring them back now, don't use people's lives as leverage.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Oath, Shmoath
These two couldn't tell the truth if they had electrical wires attached to their gonads.
Irene Is Mostly Behind Us
While not meaning to diminish the pain she's created, particularly in places not used to hurricanes and tropical storms, it's been six years since Katrina devastated an entire city.
The Day The Earth Stood Still
So what if ET shows up here, all peaceful and beneficent, and then decides we don't deserve their friendship?
Queen Of Denial
It always intrigues me to read how deeply in denial people who make controversial decisions can be:
In an exclusive live interview on TODAY Tuesday, former Vice President Dick Cheney disputed the notion that the invasion of Iraq has weakened America’s standing in the global community.
“I don’t think that it damaged our reputation around the world,’’ he told Matt Lauer. “I just don’t believe that. I think the critics at home want to argue that. In fact, I think it was sound policy that dealt with a very serious problem and eliminated Saddam Hussein from the kind of problem he presented before.
Lemme see...we unilaterally invaded a sovereign nation under false pretenses, then changed those false pretenses to yet another set of false pretenses, then changed THOSE pretenses to a justification that wouldn't have passed the smell test with Neville Chamberlain, then rounded up suspects among an innocent people and tortured them, and all we managed to accomplish was to eliminate a pathetically inept dictator of a fourth rate military power who had already been contained by our massive air superiority in conjunction with our allies under the auspices of a recognized international peacekeeping body, all while inflaming a region that already had reason to hate us.
So, um, what WOULD weaken our standard in the international community, Dick?
Why We Are In For More Trouble Before We Get Less
It's because of asshats like this:
[John] Taylor is the chairman and CEO of FX Concepts, a hedge fund that specializes in currency speculation. It's the largest hedge fund of its kind worldwide, which is why Taylor is held partly responsible for the crash of the euro. Critics accuse Taylor and others like him of having exacerbated the government crisis in Greece and accelerated the collapse in Ireland.People like Taylor are "like a pack of wolves" that seeks to tear entire countries to pieces, said Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg. For that reason, they should be fought "without mercy," French President Nicolas Sarkozy raged. Andrew Cuomo, the former attorney general and current governor of New York, once likened short-sellers to "looters after a hurricane."
The German tabloid newspaper Bild sharply criticized Taylor on its website, writing: "This man is betting against the euro." If that is what he is doing, he is certainly successful. While Greece is threatened with bankruptcy, Taylor is listed among the world's 25 highest-paid hedge fund managers.
Markets serve a purpose. They do whittle the fat out of inefficiencies. If a firm spends more than it should, for example, the markets respond by bidding the price of the stock down, based on the theory that lower earnings means lower value in the future. This is not a bad thing. It's in many ways a healthy measure of company's health.
Even currency speculation, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, necessarily. There's nothing wrong with profiting off a country's inability to rein in a fiscal problem. They are, after all, supposed to be run by knowledgable people.
Where it gets ugly, both on the private and public side of the equation, is when the speculators can control the game.
Ideally, markets are supposed to operate in a vacuum: everyone has equal and perfect knowledge of the future. This is why the SEC exists, along with any number of industry-standard self-regulators. They're supposed to keep the game honest, because everyone is supposed to have a fair roll of the dice.
In practice, as we've seen, things don't work that way. Investment bankers become politicians and more and more often, politicians become investment bankers. This means not only is information imperfect, it's gamed and massaged to benefit those in the know over those out of the loop.
Speculators are the worst. Not only will they game the information, they'll interpret every single development like it's a Talmudic passage.
Think of the birthers and the Obama flap, and now add trillions of dollars to the mix, and you'll see how dangerous this game can be.
But hey, the rules are the rules, and these idiots think they're playing by them!
"The big problem is that in some cases these politicians are looking for the easy way out and want to blame somebody else and say speculators are taking Europe apart, taking the euro down and ruining the prosperity of our country," he says, characterizing such charges against hedge fund managers as "nonsense." "My capital isn't the capital of the Rothschilds," he says, insisting that he is working with the "capital of the people," and that his goal is to protect and increase this capital. Taylor points out that no one from any of the German pension funds that invest their money with him has ever called him on the phone to tell him not to bet against the euro.
Don't blame him because politicians have to scramble to fix the problem! After all, it's only people's lives, fortunes and sacred honor involved!
Sexual Transmissions
Today was a pretty big day for STDs.
3) Wisconsin hospital may have infected thousands of patients (I know! Wisconsin, right?)
Not a good week to have sex. Or a blood transfusion. Or work in the porn industry. Or go to a hospital. Or...
Monday, August 29, 2011
Ever Wonder What It Would Have Been Like To Be The Last Person Out?
Final survivor of the Trade Center attacks reflects on the past decade.
How Fast Does Rain Fall?
I can't be arsed. Can my physicist/enthusiast friends double check his math? 55 mph sounds a little high to me.
What Did You Think Was Going To Happen, Shithead?
You think labor unions were about to welcome you?
These aren't helpless housewives living with an abusive husband.
Dumbest. Republican. Of The Week.
Bonus stoopidity: He wants to abolish the National Hurricane Center, too.
This Is Your Lord, Jesus....
...this is your Lord Jesus on steroids. Any questions?
(Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do...)
False Start On False Starts
Little notice in the blizzard of storm news (HA!) was the disqualification of sprinter Usain Bolt in the 100m dash at the world championships this weekend.
He false started twice. The second time is controversial as it appears on some replays that the neighboring runner may have been responsible for the false start.
But I digress...
Immediately, calls went out to review the rule (that has been long-standing in track and field) to disqualify runners after a single false start. It used to be after two false starts by the same athlete, but runners would often deliberately false start to psyche out their competitors, and to sneak a peek at start tactics. In 2003, the IAAF ruled the first false start by anyone would serve as a warning to everyone, but that didn't stop the head games, so now it's one and done.
Which makes sense. You know the rules, you live with them. Bolt anticipated the gun in order to get an edge on the field. He lost his gamble.
The End Of Ron Paul's Aspirations
Even as hurricane Irene was roaring up the East Coast, Ron Paul was asking why the federal government has any role in disaster management and relief.
Drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, Congressman.
Thoughts On Irene
Michelle Bachmann's right, in one regard: Hurricane Irene is a wake up call, but for reasons other than the ones she cites.
We pretty much got lucky (and I don't mean to minimize the impact on anyone who suffered a loss this weekend.) The storm did not gather strength off the DelMarVa as was originally projected, and even heading into North Carolina, dry air started to infiltrate the storm, which while it didn't weaken the winds, helped keep the rainfall totals in check a little. Basically, the back end of the storm was lopped off.
But the storm also should have lost strength faster than it did over cold water, and that's something scientists and meterologists will have to study closely.
My personal, uninformed opinion is that this storm was too big for its own good. Had there been a smaller, tighted windfield that could have kept the rotation intact longer once it reached Cat 4, it would have wreaked significant destruction all along the seaboard as more than a Cat 1 hurricane.
And there's the other mystery of this hurricane. It lost strength over water faster than when it was half on, half off the coastline. Usually, the friction from land will compensate for the intensifying out at sea, both tearing the storm apart while weakening it. As with the fact that it didn't maintain strength as a high Cat storm, I suspect the enormity of the windfield picking up energy off the ocean had much to do with it.
Too, Irene lingered off the southern coast, but once it passed the Outer Banks, it seemed to put on jets and rocket up the coast, which probably saved a lot of homes in Jersey and Long Island. Had it lingered longer, who knows what the flooding would have been like?
To our nation's credit, the events of 9-11 and particularly Katrina forced us to take a long, close look at disaster preparedness, and the plans implemented this weekend were a tribute to the effectiveness of those plans. It certainly helped that governors and mayors all in the storm's path spoke with one voice about the intensity and danger of this storm.
As much as I hate to acknowledge this, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, the state with the longest coastline affected by the storm, deserves singling out as an effective (if bullying) voice to the people in harm's way. His words moved a million people inland, and no one seemed to really mind.
Unlike New York where Bloomberg's cadging was seen as unnecessary and chiding. People have short memories, forgetting that the city did practically nothing ahead of the Christmas blizzard and was taken to serious task for that.
We dodged a bullet. This time.
The Right Move
President Obama seems to have made the right pick to head the Council of Economic Advisers.
Dr. Alan Krueger is an economics professor who specializes in labor issues, in particular why the boomlet of the mid-2000s produced almost no jobs (a million net jobs were created in the two Bush administrations. President Obama created that many by the end of his first year in office.)
The people have needed a voice on the inside ever since the economic royalists of the Bush administration were rousted out the door. It's years late, but it's a hopeful sign.
Oh, Micky! You're So Fine, You Blow My Mind!
Micky Mouse, errrrr, Bachmann, cheerleading death and destruction
Equal Rights For The Ugly
I got mine, you get your own, Jack.
At least now we know how some neocons got their college degrees...affirmative action from other ugly folks.
Zev Chafets Needs An Enema
By Carl
Shorter...no, verbatim Chafets: "We're all Cheneyites now."
President Obama has largely adopted the Cheney playbook on combating terrorism, from keeping Gitmo open to trying suspected enemies of the state in military tribunals. Obama’s drone war, which has quadrupled the number of attacks in the past two years, reflects Cheney’s whatever-it-takes approach. The leftist wrath once trained on Bush’s veep is aimed at the Democratic incumbent these days. Even the Bush-Cheney pro-democracy doctrine, born as a substitute rationale for the Iraq War after the failure to find WMD, is bearing fruit, toppling dictators from Cairo to Tripoli. The dirty little secret of the last few years is that the man George Bush called “Big Time” won. We’re all Cheneyites now.
Um, no. President Obama has not been the most diametrically opposed to the Cheney/Bush policies of the past decade, it's true and that has frustrated his liberal base.
But if you recall, Zev, he tried to close Gitmo and in no uncertain terms was told off by, well, asshats like you and Rush Limbaugh and Weaker Boener that to do so would be tantamount to treason. Obama ended Cheney's war of choice in Iraq, for all intents and purposes. And Obama's Homeland Security department continues to thwart legitimate plots against the United States-- not the phonied up plots of the Sears Tower bombings-- by using old fashioned detective work.
And look, you win when the goal you set out to achieve-- finding WMDs-- is accomplished. If you move the goalposts to what you've actually accomplished, that's called a "compromise," not a victory.
Chafets continues to bloviate about how events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria justify the Cheney Doctrine of pre-emptive intervention, but they don't. The Arab summer would have happened under any circumstance, largely because it was internal strife, specifically shortages of food and jobs, that caused the uprisings.
Unless you want to make the case that the wars so bankrupted America that we were unable to prop up the shitty little dictators that the Republicans have been supporting for decades. That case I might give you but I'm not sure that, given the domestic economic fallout, it's a case you want to make.
The telling event in the book, the event Chafets ought to pay more attention to as he ponders the future of barbaric conservatism, especially in light of his deep support for all things Israeli, is the scene in 2007 in his book where Cheney insists on bombing Syria's nuclear reactor:
“After I finished,” he writes, “the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”
A room full of blood-thirsty, pro-Israel necons unanimously voted him down. There's the Bush administration in a nutshell: too little, too late, and too stupd.
(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)
Zev Chafets Needs An Enema
Shorter...no, verbatim Chafets: "We're all Cheneyites now."
President Obama has largely adopted the Cheney playbook on combating terrorism, from keeping Gitmo open to trying suspected enemies of the state in military tribunals. Obama’s drone war, which has quadrupled the number of attacks in the past two years, reflects Cheney’s whatever-it-takes approach. The leftist wrath once trained on Bush’s veep is aimed at the Democratic incumbent these days. Even the Bush-Cheney pro-democracy doctrine, born as a substitute rationale for the Iraq War after the failure to find WMD, is bearing fruit, toppling dictators from Cairo to Tripoli. The dirty little secret of the last few years is that the man George Bush called “Big Time” won. We’re all Cheneyites now.
Um, no. President Obama has not been the most diametrically opposed to the Cheney/Bush policies of the past decade, it's true and that has frustrated his liberal base.
But if you recall, Zev, he tried to close Gitmo and in no uncertain terms was told off by, well, asshats like you and Rush Limbaugh and Weaker Boener that to do so would be tantamount to treason. Obama ended Cheney's war of choice in Iraq, for all intents and purposes. And Obama's Homeland Security department continues to thwart legitimate plots against the United States-- not the phonied up plots of the Sears Tower bombings-- by using old fashioned detective work.
And look, you win when the goals you set out to achieve-- finding WMDs-- is accomplished. If you move the goalposts to what you've actually accomplished, that's called a "compromise," not a victory.
Chafets continues to bloviate about how events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria justify the Cheney Doctrine of pre-emptive intervention, but they don't. The Arab summer would have happened under any circumstance, largely because it was internal strife, specifically shortages of food and jobs, that caused the uprisings.
Unless you want to make the case that the wars so bankrupted America that we were unable to prop up the shitty little dictators that the Republicans have been supporting for decades. That case I might give you but I'm not sure that, given the domestic economic fallout, it's a case you want to make.
The telling event in the book, the event Chafets ought to pay more attention to as he ponders the future of barbaric conservatism, especially in light of his deep support for all things Israeli, is the scene in 2007 in his book where Cheney insists on bombing Syria's nuclear reactor:
“After I finished,” he writes, “the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”
A room full of blood-thirsty, pro-Israel necons unanimously voted him down. There's the Bush administration in a nutshell: too little, too late, and too stupd.
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