RAND SIMBERG: The Final Launch: Is The Era Of Big Government Space Over?
Check out his Six False Lessons Of The Space Shuttle, too.
Archive for 2011
July 8, 2011
HOPE AND CHANGE: A reader emails: “I just got the renewal on our work’s health insurance. It is up 24%. Thank you, Mr. President.”
IT’S NOT JUST ANARCHISTS: A New Democracy Movement Blooms In Greece. “Amid all the economic misery, unemployment, slashed payrolls, and indecision about the future, they are holding ongoing discussions in the main square where anyone — just like in ancient Greece — is allowed to voice opinions without repercussions. They have established an ancient Greek agora, where Socrates, Plato, and their contemporaries created the world’s first democracy. They hold daily seminars and discussions in search of a way forward. Instead of joining the anarchists, these protesters are conducting intelligent, serious discussions.”
OBVIOUSLY, YOU SHOULD HAVE MADE BIGGER POLITICAL DONATIONS: Goldman Sachs Got A $15 Billion Loan And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.
NEVER TRIED THIS BARBECUE SAUCE. Any good?
UPDATE: Readers say yes! Jeff Grey emails: “This stuff is good! Costco carries it in my area, and i use it a lot on salmon.”
John Williams writes: “I’ve used two of Fischer/Weiser sauces before and they were excellent–I’ve used the mango/ginger/habanero sauce on chicken and actually poured the roasted raspberry chipotle sauce over cream cheese and served with water crackers for a great appetizer. Definitely high quality stuff and these are great prices.”
And Denise Dillow emails: “The chipotle raspberry one is great with all sorts of things. Pour it on a block of cream cheese and spread on crackers. yum. Great with pork too.”
Guess I’ll order some, then!
WELL, THAT’S NO FUN FOR ANYBODY: The spread of effectively untreatable gonorrhea? “The potential emergence of gonococcal cephalosporin resistance is of particular concern because the U.S. gonorrhea control strategy relies upon effective antibiotic therapy. Previously, the emergence and spread of gonococcal antibiotic resistance in the United States was addressed by changing the recommended antibiotics for treatment. No other well-studied and effective antibiotic treatment options or combinations currently are available. The emergence of gonococcal cephalosporin resistance would substantially limit available treatment options.”
A public-health reader adds: “It is going to take much greater cooperation from our patients for us to come up even against this, let alone kill it off. Right now it is early enough. 3-5 years from now? I don’t know.”
Well, the public health community should be focusing on this, instead of wasting its time on promoting gun control and other faddish efforts that undermine the public trust needed to fight infectious disease as well as waste time and energy on unproductive topics.
UPDATE: Reader Robert Gleason writes: “The test of ‘unproductive topics’ is how much money they attract or what political narrative they support. I don’t think untreatable gonorrhea attracts that much money. Gun control: yes. National health care: yes. Untreatable gonorrhea: no.”
Given the predilections of our political class, you’d think this would be a higher priority for them.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Harmon Ward writes:
This post brought back memories. I asked my father, the doctor, about “the good old days.” He put down his coffee and cigarette, looked up from the newspaper and said, “Before penicillin there were no Good Old Days”. He also predicted that someday an untreatable stain of gonorrhea would arise. We used to have a lot of deep discussions about the laws and infection control. In the age before penicillin many STDs were untreatable. When someone was diagnosed the doctor asked them for a list of people they had been sleeping with so they could be informed that they had to be tested. The infected were informed that they had to stop spreading the disease. As un-politically correct as this may sound, the program greatly reduced the rate of infection. The politicians would flip over such a program today, but how do you stop a disease that has no cure? There are few options besides avoiding infection in the first place.
Thanks for focusing on some of the serious stuff. God knows most of our politicians aren’t.
Before penicillin, there were no good old days. True enough. As for the politicians, well . . . .
KEITH HENNESSEY: Redefining “Balance” in a budgetary context.
DAVE KOPEL: EZELL AND DOCTRINAL RULES FOR THE SECOND AMENDMENT: “The Seventh Circuit’s decision in Ezell v. Chicago is a tremendously important case for Second Amendment doctrine. The key rules from Ezell: use originalism from both 1791 and 1868 to determine if an activity is within the scope of the Second Amendment right. If it is, apply First Amendment doctrine, and make the standard of review more stringent when the activity is closer to the core of the right, and when the government is prohibiting rather than regulating. Generally speaking, when looking for guidance, look to Eugene Volokh.” Always a wise approach.
MARKDOWNS ON sports and fitness gear.
MY REVENUE-ENHANCEMENT IDEAS get headlined in Politico. But they were too early to pick up on the plan for eliminating Hollywood’s tax loopholes.
UPDATE: Reader Roger Sutton writes, “How about a windfall-profits tax for trial lawyers?” The possibilities for mischief are endless if the GOP will just think outside of the Grover Norquist box. . . .
75% OF WOMEN wouldn’t marry an unemployed man. Which, as unemployment continues to climb, is a bigger and bigger deal.
STEPHEN GREEN: THE BISTROMATH ECONOMY. “The numbers, they are awful.”
A NEW YORK MAGAZINE PHOTO ESSAY: President Obama Receiving Sycophantic Laughter.
MAYBE THIS IS WHY COPS DON’T LIKE PEOPLE TAKING PHOTOS: “Not only does this Seattle police car appear to be parked more than 12 inches from the curb, its officers carelessly left this AR-15 rifle sitting on the trunk of the car while they ate donuts or drank gourmet coffee or whatever it is Seattle cops do . . . Police officials now say they are ‘very embarrassed’ over the incident, adding that they are not sure if the gun was loaded, which means it probably was.”
And people need to read Morgan Manning’s piece on photographers’ rights.
UPDATE: Reader Phil Dean writes:
Since you linked this incident and connected it with Morgan Manning’s piece, I think it’s only fair to point out that the photographer here was not charged, harrassed, or anything like it. In fact, the SPD expressed GRATITUDE to the person, who flagged down other officers and brought it to their attention.
Lots of creepy gratuitous cop-hate in the comments at Pixiq, though, including a guy who expressed outrage that a female officer placed her car behind him with the lights going while he was changing his tire on the side of the road.
Good point.
WE’VE SEEN A LOT OF THESE REVISIONS: “Contributing to the weak tenor of the report, the department said the economy created 44,000 fewer jobs in April and May than previously thought.” Unexpectedly!
RAND SIMBERG IN POPULAR MECHANICS: Six False Lessons Of The Space Shuttle.
TAXING CLOSING TAX LOOPHOLES CUTTING TAX EXPENDITURES ON HOLLYWOOD: Dave Hardy emails:
Check out the Domestic Production Activities Deduction (§199), created by the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. It classifies moviemaking as a production activity, and gives a tax credit for it (I think 9% or half of salaries paid, whichever is less). (Might PajamasTV qualify, I dunno). Hollywood thus gets a special tax credit of its own, on the theory (which Hollywood types would reject if applied to anyone else) that reducing taxes increases employment.
Plus lots of States give tax credits for the same. I know Arizona does. And often they’re transferable, so that if Disney films in AZ but doesn’t pay taxes here, it can sell the tax credit to someone who does.
Seems like Tea Party folks should push the elimination of these kinds of tax breaks for rich people, at both the federal and state levels. You know, consistent with the President’s rhetoric . . . .
OF COURSE IT DOES: New Hampshire Judge Caught On Video Ordering False Arrest: Incident sparks court order banning cameras in courtroom. Blame the messenger, not the abuse of power.
I just reread The Godfather, which I had previously read back in college. It’s easier for me to understand Don Corleone’s contempt for constituted authority now than it was then.
FROM THE BAD IDEA FILE: Installing Spyware On Apple Store Computers As An “Art Project.”
Yeah, who do they think they are, public school administrators?
IT’S AS IF THE EPA IS MAKING A SPECIAL EFFORT TO HURT TEXAS or something. “Three blue states and two swing states get left off, while Texas gets added even though the EPA’s own model shows little evidence that emissions from Texas impact other states at all. Nah, there’s no politics here.” Well, it’s embarrassing for Obama when Rick Perry’s Texas is creating the jobs that the blue states aren’t. Must undercut potential rivals as early as possible.
SOME CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRESS in Georgia.
UPDATE: Reader John Steakley writes: “Please let the record reflect that the aforementioned victory is almost entirely attributable to Georgia Carry and their brave friends in the Legislature.”
HOW TO GET A JOB that doesn’t exist. “Maybe you don’t know exactly what job you want. Maybe you are not fully cognizant of all your skills, because you have employed some, but not others, and what you can do, really do, remains to be seen. This means that if you are looking for one job doing one certain thing, you are seeking your goal too narrowly. . . . These days, in this job market, you cannot be a square peg trying to fit yourself into a hole that may be a circle or a square. You need to be a peg made of Play-Doh. . . . Let the other people be lemmings. You are a unicorn. Lemming rules apply to lemmings. Unicorn rules apply to unicorns.”
SO DRIVING HOME FROM THE GYM JUST NOW, I heard Rush Limbaugh saying that if the GOP caves on the debt-ceiling fight we’ll see a Tea Party-backed third-party candidate for President, and the RNC will “implode” for lack of contributions. I think that’s right, but I don’t think that will happen.
For one thing, the big scare-story about what happens if there’s no deal may not be true. The worry — as Megan McArdle noted in our interview yesterday — was that if you hit the debt ceiling and Social Security checks quit going out, then angry senior citizens storm Washington and put the Democrats back in charge. But, at least if Felix Salmon is to be believed, Treasury will send out checks anyway because it can’t stop. “It’s far from clear that it’s even possible to stop making the 3 million payments that Treasury makes automatically every day. Doing so involves a massive computer-reprogramming effort which I’m sure could not be implemented overnight — and for political reasons nobody is going to get started on such an effort until after all hope is lost for a deal in Congress.”
If that’s true, then the Democrats aren’t holding very many cards, and there’s no reason for the GOP to fold under the threat. Which isn’t to say that they won’t fold anyway, of course. As Teddy Roosevelt once said about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., I could carve a better backbone out of a banana. . . .