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Archive for 2010
May 7, 2010
VIDEO: “I never thought I’d be on national TV for wearing an American flag shirt.” “What seems to elude people in this incident is that everyone has the right to express themselves on every day of the year in the US, and that ‘some people may be offended’ is no just cause for censorship.”
PETER SUDERMAN: Job Creation And The CBO.
BACTERIA: IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? “Bugs” will give us free power while cleaning our sewage.
THE CAR WORLD’S version of Crocs.
BOB OWENS: The Appalling Media Double Standard on Reporting Political Violence. “When it comes to leftist violence, the media sees no evil, hears no evil, and especially speaks no evil.”
SHOCKING NEWS FROM BRITAIN: Women blame BlackBerrys and iPhones for poor sex life. “Modern gadgets such as the Blackberry and iPhone are ruining women’s sex lives because their husbands are too distracted in the bedroom.” On the other hand, there’s this: “Two in three women (65 per cent) say their partners do not make enough effort in the bedroom, however, one in three women never initiate sex and always let their partner make the first move.”
WELL, THEY’VE GOT YOU OUTNUMBERED EVEN ON A CELLULAR BASIS: You Are Your Bacteria. “By cataloging the variability in different individual’s microbial communities, as well as how those communities change in response to certain drugs or other environmental factors, scientists hope to harness the malleability of our microbes for medical uses.”
HMM: Broader U-6 Unemployment Rate Increases to 17.1% in April. “The U.S. jobless rate was rose to 9.9% in April, the first increase in three months, but the government’s broader measure of unemployment ticked up for the third month in a row, rising 0.2 percentage point to 17.1%.” So how does this jibe with the claim that the rise to 9.9% is good news because it shows that discouraged workers are re-entering the labor market?
HMM: Bank Risk Soars to Record, Default Swaps Overtake Lehman Crisis. “The cost of insuring against losses on European bank bonds soared to a record, surpassing levels triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., as the sovereign debt crisis deepened.”
IN THE MAIL: From Sebastian Junger, WAR.
UH OH: Faculty Pensions On The Chopping Block. The good news for me is that I never had one of those overgenerous defined-benefit plans, just a defined-contribution 403(b). The bad news for me is that I never had one of those overgenerous defined-benefit plans, just a defined-contribution 403(b).
JAPAN ACTIVATES the Monju Fast-Breeder Reactor. If we’d started building these in the 1970s, the world’s energy probems would be largely solved, and carbon emissions would be much lower. But environmentalists blocked them. Thanks for nothin’, guys.
SLAPPING A PARENTAL-WARNING LABEL on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence? Good grief.
BEST AND WORST: Hotel WiFi Rankings.
RON BAILEY: Mr. President Please Think of Spain — The Iberian Solar Power Bust. “Germany and France have also been pulling back on their ridiculously expensive solar subsidies. Of course, some American states and cities are just now enacting the same failed subsidies that Europe is quickly jettisoning.”
THE MINIVAN, 1958 Edition.
THE GREEK CRISIS as a demographic wake-up call.
ALARMISM: “A dire government report on cancer risks from chemicals and other hazards in the environment has drawn criticism from the American Cancer Society, which says government experts are overstating their case.”
JOBLESS RATE RISES TO 9.9%. UNEXPECTEDLY! But the spin is positive:
Employers added 290,000 jobs in April, the Labor Department said on Friday. It revised figures for February and March to show 121,000 more jobs were added than previously thought. The unemployment rate, however, rose to 9.9 percent as the size of the labor force increased. . . . Analysts polled by Reuters had expected nonfarm payrolls to rise 200,000 last month and the jobless rate to remain unchanged at 9.7 percent.
All the economic news is good, it’s just that unemployment is up. . . . .
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
MICKEY KAUS IS OUTPERFORMING EXPECTATIONS. His own!
I had hoped that the L.A. Times, in the course of inevitably endorsing Barbara Boxer, might say a few nice words about me. It didn’t occur to me that they’d actually stay neutral in the race.
Feel the Mickey-mentum building!
PETER WEISS: Most Trusted Name? CNN Runs Outrageous Health Care Tale. “CNN reports a man couldn’t find a better quote for his surgery than a price ten times higher than the going rate. This is bad enough to put all CNN health reporting in question.”
I CAN SPEAK HIGHLY FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, of American Airlines’ nonstop flight service between Knoxville and Miami. This week’s trips down, and back, were on-time, smooth, and comfortable. Would that I had this kind of service everywhere.
THE GODS OF BRUSSELS ARE FAILING: Walter Russell Mead: It’s A Crisis of Faith Not A Crisis of Stocks. “We like to assume that history is getting calmer, more settled, safer and more predictable. It ain’t. history is going to remain radically risky, radically unknowable, and scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote.”