FRANK J. FLEMING ON HOW Mike Bloomberg is just protecting us from having too many choices.
Archive for 2012
June 4, 2012
SOMEBODY TELL MIKE BLOOMBERG: Gary Taubes: Salt, We Misjudged You. “With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death. Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a ‘safe upper limit’ is likely to do more harm than good. . . . Proponents of the eat-less-salt campaign tend to deal with this contradictory evidence by implying that anyone raising it is a shill for the food industry and doesn’t care about saving lives.” Of course they do.
That’s what dermatologists did to Vitamin D proponents until they were overtaken by the truth. But these “public health” crusades never generate any negative consequences for their proponents, even when it turns out that millions may have been harmed by lousy, politically-driven advice.
THE HILL: Weak May jobs report spurs GOP concerns over new Fed stimulus. “The disappointing May jobs report has set off a fresh round of speculation – and concern among Republicans – about whether the Federal Reserve will move to boost the economy. Friday’s employment report, which found the economy added just 69,000 jobs – less than half of expectations – suggested an already tenuous economic recovery may have lost steam.”
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THIS DOESN’T SEEM TO WORK: Trying the 3 AM Phone Call Ad on Mitt Romney.
I notice they have the sheets with the word “NIG” on them, though. When Hillary did it, that was evidence of racism. Who knew that feminists were such unreconstructed racists?
UPDATE: From the comments: “So what moron calls a campaign office at 3 am and expects someone to be there? Besides, if you want questions answered about the Paycheck Fairness Act, why don’t you ask the Democrat members of Congress why they pay their female staffers 27% less than their male staffers?”
YOU CAN OBSERVE A LOT JUST BY LOOKING: Cyber search engine Shodan exposes industrial control systems to new risks. “It began as a hobby for a teenage computer programmer named John Matherly, who wondered how much he could learn about devices linked to the Internet. After tinkering with code for nearly a decade, Matherly eventually developed a way to map and capture the specifications of everything from desktop computers to network printers to Web servers. He called his fledgling search engine Shodan, and in late 2009 he began asking friends to try it out. He had no inkling it was about to alter the balance of security in cyberspace. . . . Matherly and other Shodan users quickly realized they were revealing an astonishing fact: Uncounted numbers of industrial control computers, the systems that automate such things as water plants and power grids, were linked in, and in some cases they were wide open to exploitation by even moderately talented hackers.”
AXELROD AND HOLDER IN SHOVING MATCH? It’s hard for me to imagine that Holder would go to such lengths to resist “politicizing” the Justice Department. . . .
MICHAEL BARONE: America looks like Texas, not like California.
My prediction is that we won’t ever again see the heavy Latin immigration we saw between 1983 and 2007, which averaged 300,000 legal immigrants and perhaps as many illegals annually.
Mexican and other Latin birth rates fell more than two decades ago. And Mexico, the source of 60 percent of Latin immigrants, is now a majority-middle-class country.
Asian immigration may continue, primarily from China and India, especially if we have the good sense to change our laws to let in more high-skilled immigrants.
But the next big immigration source, I think, will be sub-Saharan Africa. We may end up with prominent politicians who actually were born in Kenya.
Continued domestic outmigration from high-tax states? Certainly from California, where Gov. Jerry Brown wants to raise taxes even higher. With foreign immigration down, California is likely to grow more slowly than the nation, for the first time in history, and could even start losing population. . . .But Texas has been doing very well. If you draw a triangle whose points are Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, enclosing Austin, you’ve just drawn a map of the economic and jobs engine of North America.
Texas prospers not just because of oil and gas, but thanks to a diversified and sophisticated economy. It has attracted large numbers of both immigrants and domestic migrants for a quarter-century. One in 12 Americans lives there.
America is getting to look a lot more like Texas, and that’s one trend that I hope continues.
Indeed.
SALENA ZITO: CLASS WARFARE’S LOSING RECORD. “Appeals to economic populism – pitting people against so-called ‘interests’ – are as old as the Democratic Party; Andrew Jackson successfully used them in the presidential election of 1828. Jacksonian Democrats never opposed capitalism, however, and most certainly did not support a stronger central government.”
LAWFARE BY THE GOVERNMENT: Central Basin Municipal Water District Suing for Libel. Eugene Volokh comments: “I just hope that the defendants quickly move to have this legally unfounded lawsuit dismissed (using an anti-SLAPP motion, for which the defendants can recover their attorney fees), before the district uses the baseless lawsuit to subpoena the defendants’ identities.”
They should go for sanctions, too.
SPACE: Its First Mission Done, SpaceX Looks to More Private Flights.
With the success of what amounted to a trial run for the spacecraft — there were only a few minor problems during the mission, which began when the Dragon was launched atop a SpaceX rocket from Florida on May 22 — the company is now poised to begin regular supply missions, with much bigger payloads, to the space station later this year. Since the space shuttle program ended last year, the station has been resupplied by Russian and European spacecraft.
So far, SpaceX has been the most successful participant in the government’s long-term plan to shift the business of spaceflight to private enterprise, with NASA acting only as managers. The agency’s $1.6 billion contract with the company for 12 supply flights still awaits final approval, but Alan J. Lindenmoyer, NASA’s manager for commercial spaceflight, said at the news conference that he expected the approval to come quickly.
“We became your customer today,” Mr. Lindenmoyer said.
Mr. Musk said that the first regular cargo mission could come by late summer. SpaceX also hopes to win a NASA competition to ferry astronauts to the space station, using a larger rocket. And Mr. Musk talks often of an even grander goal: sending humans to Mars.
The completion of the Dragon flight, Mr. Musk said, “really shows that commercial spaceflight can be successful.”
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Obama may face record re-election jobless rate. “No president since the Great Depression has won re-election with a jobless rate higher than 7.4%, and the latest Labor Department report says the current rate has now ticked up to 8.2% It’s hard to see that number falling 0.8 percentage points or more by the time the Nov. 6 election between Obama and Mitt Romney rolls around.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Limits of German Patience. “Germans seem to admit that they were playing poker with amateurs, that they knowingly took the players for a ride, and that they now find themselves with all the chips and no one anymore with the wherewithal to keep on playing. And yet they don’t think they can start over and divvy up the chips, not just because to do so would be to forfeit their winnings, but also because they suspect that the game would repeat itself identically every five or six years. They are right, which explains why the euro in its present manifestation is doomed, and why the Germans are exasperated for doing everything rightly that is now condemned as doing everything wrongly.”
BRAD WATSON not such a fan of Sandy Levinson’s constitutional thinking.
REALLY, “STUNNINGLY AWFUL” and “Newsweek/Daily Beast column “is pretty redundant. But maybe worth repeating this time. . . .