Archive for 2012
September 8, 2012
AT AMAZON, warehouse deals in Home Goods.
WASHINGTON POST: A President Sidelined: Inside story of Obama’s struggle to keep Congress from controlling outcome of debt ceiling crisis. Note the White House counterspin. Which is more believable?
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Electronics.
Also, today only: Wenzel Insta-Bed Queen Air Mattress with Built-in Pump, $79.99. Handy to have around. And I like the name. Insta-Bed!
“DIRTY JOBS'” MIKE ROWE SENDS MITT ROMNEY A LETTER ABOUT SKILLED LABOR. Romney reads it. Rowe: “Holy crap! He read it!”
UPDATE: Here’s the actual letter. Excerpt:
In each case, I shared my theory that most of these “problems” were in fact symptoms of something more fundamental – a change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor. That’s the essence of what I’ve heard from the hundreds of men and women I’ve worked with on Dirty Jobs. Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers…they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again – our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce. We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.
Today, we can see the consequences of this disconnect in any number of areas, but none is more obvious than the growing skills gap. Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed “alternative.” Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as “vocational consolation prizes,” and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to “create” over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. (I always thought there something ill-fated about the promise of three million “shovel ready jobs” made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.)
Read the whole thing.
JOHN HINDERAKER ASKS: Why Is This Election Even Close? “On paper, given Obama’s record, this election should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Why isn’t it? I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy.”
UPDATE: Prof. Bainbridge wonders if we’re living in Jerry Pournelle’s future.
MORE: Reader Eric Schubert writes:
Why isn’t Romney running away with the election? http://instapundit.com/150323/
The majority of voters, as of early September, are not ready to address the underlying problems of the economy.
For a more detailed discussion of the election and the real changes that the economy is facing, see the venerable Walter Russell Mead.
Here’s an excerpt from Mead:
As regular readers know, our view is that the US stands at an uncomfortable transition point between eras. We are between social models. The blue model of twentieth century mass production, mass consumption society based on stable corporate oligopoly, bloc voting and government regulation in a relatively closed national economy has foundered and it cannot, so far as we can see here, be restored. But we have at best only a very dim and incomplete sense of what could replace it.
This means that we are at a moment of maximum discomfort nationally, and we want our politicians and leaders to fix things — but that neither party really knows what to do. On the whole, the Democrats stand for restoring the blue model and Republicans oppose that and so far, so good. The choices between the parties seem to be growing more clear as the problems resulting from the decay of the blue model take a larger toll.
Yet neither party can offer the smooth path to a stable and affluent future that voters want. The Democrats know what they want but can’t deliver it because it is undeliverable. The Republicans know what they don’t want but are not able to describe the future they would like to see — much less show how they can manage the transition fairly and kindly because they don’t really know what the goal looks like.
Our problem is that the time isn’t ripe: the real work of our society right now isn’t about political competition. It is about re-imagining, reinventing and restructuring core institutions and professions. . . .
The legacy media are going to have a tough job shifting from noisy political pseudo-drama (much of which has more in common with professional wrestling than real politics) to the kind of substance based reporting that people actually need. Covering the revolutions in higher ed, medicine, state and municipal governance (including things like the pension crisis) is much more important than having talking heads gas about potential Veep picks or speculate about debate strategies and poll trends. But it’s hard for legacy organizations with their heavy fixed costs, pension overhangs and creaking business models to pull away from campaign infotainment and invest in real news.
Among the American institutions in need of reinvention is the serious press; the intellectual framework of the legacy media is as broken as its business model.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: A reader offers a more cynical take: “I think that there is a pragmatic need to maintain the appearance of closeness, or a lot of the travel/TV schedules would be rendered moot. The market correction, or ‘preference cascade’ will be a late-October affair.” Let’s hope.
MORE: Reader William Stroock writes: “I am getting sick of conservative pundits like the guys at Powerline getting pessimistic about the election. Obama got a bump, big deal. So did John McCain, Bob Dole, and Bush the Elder.”
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: How to Tell Your Parents You’re a Prostitute. My advice: First tell ’em you’re a member of Congress. Then they’ll be relieved to hear the truth.
FAST: DARPA’s Cheetah Bot Breaks Human, Robot Speed Records. “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Boston Dynamics have unleashed a legged robot that’s even faster than Olympic champion Usain Bolt. The Cheetah recently broke its own land speed record of 18 mph, running a 20-meter split at 28.3 mph, faster than the world record for a human set in 2009 when Usain Bolt reached a peak speed of 27.78 mph.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Precautions for tick-borne disease extend “beyond lyme.”
The majority of human-biting ticks in the North—members of the blacklegged tick species—cause Lyme disease, but these same ticks do not commonly bite humans south of mid-Virginia. Biologist Graham Hickling of the University of Tennessee, co-author of the paper, says many patients in Southeastern states, who become sick from a tick-bite, assume they have Lyme disease, but the odds of that being the case are low. “Ticks in the eastern U.S. collectively carry more than a dozen agents that can cause human disease,” says Hickling. “Here in Tennessee we regularly collect lone star ticks that test positive for Ehrlichia, [a tick-borne bacterial infection]. Lone stars are an aggressive species that account for most of the human bites that we see in this region. So ehrlichiosis has to be a big concern, yet most people have never heard of it.”
And I don’t want it.
JIM BENNETT EMAILS THAT TO THE FOLKS AT SLATE it’s “Trolling” to accurately report on what Democrats do. He adds: “Of course it only applies to righties reporting what lefties said. The other way around, it’s called ‘Pulitzer Prize material’.” Yes. The “trolls” did actual reporting rather than just reprinting press releases. Key bit:
The Examiner, Washington Times, and Center for American Freedom’s teams were only fractions of the size of the CNN or New York Times teams in Charlotte. But they wrote the convention’s distracting stories.
Well, yes. It’s usually “distracting” when you report what actually happened, rather than regurgitating the press releases and talking points.
UPDATE: Ace: “Why do these stories come from the conservative press? Because the ‘mainstream’ press, which is of course actually liberal, does not want to cover them. They refuse to report on them. The conservative press is thus left with scoops, which they develop.”
HOT DRUNK: Hot face gives away when you’ve drunk too much. “We all know the telltale signs of someone whose had a little too much to drink – slurred speech, swaying walk and a red flush in the face. But what you might not realise is that as the alcohol causes dilation of blood vessels in the surface of the skin, certain parts of your face warm up disproportionately. Now a team at the University of Patras in Greece has come up with two different ways of measuring these temperature changes to automatically detect when someone has been drinking.”
A FISH, A BARREL, A SMOKING GUN: Ann Althouse busts a hypocrite.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: My husband invited a homeless woman to live with us. Should I divorce him?
WEB INVENTOR: There’s No Internet “Off” Switch. ” The inventor of the world wide web has denied there is an ‘off-switch’ which could turn off the internet across the globe. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the web on Christmas Day 1990, said the only way the internet could ever be entirely shut down is if governments all over the world co-ordinated to make it a centralised system.”
So beware when they look like that’s what they’re doing.
CHANGE: People Lack Patience To Use Voicemail. “With the rise of texting, instant chat and transcription apps, more people are ditching the venerable tool that once revolutionized the telephone business, displaced armies of secretaries and allowed us to eat dinner more or less in peace. The behavioral shift is occurring in tandem with the irreversible fading of voice calls in general, prompting more wireless carriers to offer unlimited voice minutes.”
WELL, THAT EXPLAINS THE RECESSION: Report: Sex No Longer Sells.
HITTING THE EXPIRATION DATE KINDA FAST: 1 day after railing about vouchers, Obama admin to send 2 million poor seniors into … vouchers.
IN THE MAIL: From Daniel Greenfield, The Great Betrayal: Obama’s Wars and the War in Iraq.
HOW COME WE’RE NOT HEARING ABOUT GREEN PARTY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE JILL STEIN?
PETER INGEMI ASKS FOR A BOOK-PLUG:
Hi Glenn:
Tim Imholt is a scientist I met on a plane to CPAC 3 years ago and blogged as DaScienceGuy until changing over to his own name.
His first work of fiction Nuclear Assault, is now out on Amazon about a Iranian Nuclear strike on the US during a time of political turmoil
He will be on the show today (11:15) and if you could give his book a plug I’d really appreciate it.
Done!
I’M GOING OUT ON A LIMB AND SAYING THAT OBAMACARE WON’T HELP: U.S. Health Care Waste Larger Than Pentagon Budget. “It’s not exactly earth-shaking news that there’s a lot of waste in the U.S. health care system, but this item we came across still managed to stagger us: A report by the Institute of Medicine estimates that as much as $750 billion is wasted in the U.S. health care system each year. Three quarters of a trillion dollars. Every year. As the Wall Street Journal notes, that’s bigger than the Pentagon budget, amounting to roughly 5 percent of GDP. The report offers a familiar laundry list of problems. Unnecessary services are the leading driver of waste, but administrative expenses and inefficient care are not far behind.”
Under ObamaCare, though, “waste” will probably be redefined as “health care for our political enemies.” And there probably will be less of it.
WELL, IT IS GAWKER: Soft-Pedaling Child Rape. “There’s some interesting reporting in this Gawker piece on pedophilia. Unfortunately it’s undermined by a bizarre lack of sympathy for children who’ve been sexual assaulted This is not a minor problem. . . . It’s poor journalism, and an insensitive attempt at being edgy.”
AGING BABY BOOMERS AND “STRATEGIC DEFAULTS.” “Note the whopping 88% who admit they were ‘strategic defaulters’. Banks never expected that. . . . 97% said they would recommend walking away to family members if they were in the same situation.”
Just another step along the road to middle-class anarchy.