UNEXPECTEDLY! Business Activity in U.S. Shrinks for First Time Since 2009. “Business activity in the U.S. unexpectedly contracted in September for the first time in three years, adding to signs manufacturing will contribute less to the economic recovery. The Institute for Supply Management-Chicago Inc. said today its business barometer fell 49.7 this month from 53 in August. A reading of 50 is the dividing line between expansion and contraction.”
Archive for 2012
September 28, 2012
RESPONDING TO SAMUEL L. JACKSON: Reason TV: Wake the F*ck Up! – A Rebuttal (NSFW!)
CHICAGO VALUES: If “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values,” as its mayor defiantly boasted in July, are these?
LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR DIET: . . . but only if you have a license as a dietician. This great video from the Stossel show discusses a lawsuit filed in NC by the Institute for Justice, challenging the State’s crackdown on a gentleman who runs a blog advocating a “Paleo”/caveman diet (meat and fruit/veggies; no processed carbs) for diabetics like himself. The State takes the odd position that, while one can write a book about diets (free speech), one cannot run a blog about diets, without a dietician’s license. Does this comport with the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause?
IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY, OR WHAT? Why, yes — there will be a Victoria’s Secret at Cowboys Stadium.
“HANNAH ARENDT HAD IT RIGHT,” Patrick Moynihan once told an interviewer. “She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
BARACKALYPSE NOW: Top Five Worst Obamacare Taxes Coming in 2013.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What the Heck is ‘Gangnam Style’?
It’s a lot more fun than Pyongyang style, that’s for sure.
MARK STEYN: In his weekly column, Steyn writes, “One of the reasons why Barack Obama is regarded as the greatest orator of our age is that he’s always banging on about some other age yet to come – e.g., the Future!”
The excitable lads around the globe torching American embassies with impunity seem to have figured this out, even if the striped-pants crowd at Turtle Bay are too polite to mention it. Obama is not the President of the Future. He is President right now, and one occasionally wishes the great visionary would take his eye off the far distant horizon where educated women and fire-breathing Imams frolic and gambol side by side around their Chevy Volts, to focus on the humdrum present where the rest of us have the misfortune to live.
In the America over which Barack Obama has the tedious chore of actually presiding, second-quarter GDP growth was revised down from 1.7 percent to 1.3 percent – or, for in layman’s terms, from “barely detectable” to “comatose.” Orders of durable goods fell by 13.2 percent – or, as Obama would say, the future must not belong to people who own household appliances. Growth of capital stock (which basically measures investment in new equipment and software – or, as Obama would put it, investment in “the future”) is at its lowest since records began. There are 261,000 fewer payroll jobs than when Obama took office – in a nation where (officially) 100,000 immigrants arrive every month. A few weeks ago, an analysis of government employment data by the nation’s oldest outplacement firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, discovered that, of the 4,319,000 new American jobs created since January 2010, 2,998,000 – or about 70 percent – went to people aged 55 or older. This is a remarkable statistic, even in a land of 31-year-old schoolgirls like Sandra Fluke. You’d almost begin to get the vague, unsettling feeling that the future does not belong to Americans aged 54 and younger.
But what’s Obama’s vision for the future? For a president who presents himself as a cutting edge, postmodern, don’t bother me with history kind of guy, he’s offering strictly Bing Crosby-era gray flannel squaresville one size fits all “Industrial Age Solutions to Information Age Challenges,” Michael Barone writes:
His favorite high-tech project is to build enormously expensive high-speed rail lines like the one Jerry Brown is pushing in California.
Meanwhile, Google is developing self-driving cars that will be able to move faster and more efficiently than current cars because their 21st century technology, like the 19th century technology of fixed rails, effectively prevents cars from colliding.
Nineteenth century fixed rails take you where the railroad, or its government subsidizer, wants you to go. Self-driving cars will take you where you want to go, with as many stops as you like along the way.
That’s in line with the way Millennials lead their lives. The iPod/Facebook generation fashions its own playlists and friends lists, rather than let central decisionmakers choose for them.
Obama’s policies, from Obamacare to high-speed rail, treat people as identical cogs in a very large machine, part of a mindless mass that would not be able to get along without government guidance.
Which makes his campaign’s kick-off “1984” Apple rip-off mash-up ad from early 2007 even more ironic:
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But then, even before the economic downtown in the fall of 2008, Democrats warned that if they recaptured the White House, in addition to Congress and the Senate, which they already controlled since 2007, they’d taking the nation full-throttle “Barack to the Future,” as then-Congressman Paul Kanjorski admitted in May of 2008:
“All we’re doing is going into the basket and saying, ‘Damn, what did they do in ’32, what did they do in ’34, what did they do in ’36,’ and we’re pulling them out, dusting them off, giving them a paint job, correcting the fenders a bit, and we’re using them,” Kanjorski said. “To get us through the horrendous problems we may have over the next several years, we’ve got to make these old programs work, and we’ve got to be as inventive as hell.”
Even a die-hard leftist like Paul Krugman admits the New Deal failed, which is why he’s reduced to espousing the economic “miracle” of World War II and calling for goofy alien invasion fantasies to rally the American people. And yet, the left’s cargo cult obsessions with the New Deal seems impossible to break — despite the fact their competing obsessions with early-’70s-style environmentalism make such Hoover Dam-sized projects near impossible to build. But even that won’t end further attempts to build a bridge back to 1933.
THE MEDIA’S TOP 10 POST-DEBATE STORY LINES: Tomorrow’s spin today!
A DISEASE LAB YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL PHOTOGRAPHING.
WHO COULD HAVE IMAGINED SUCH A THING? Shocker: Matt Damon’s Anti-Fracking Film Is Funded By Middle Eastern Oil Interests. It’s almost like it’s just a propaganda effort to keep us dependent on foreign oil or something.
What’s behind the poll dances? Zombie explores.
VIDEO: NBC CAUGHT DOCTORING AUDIO YET AGAIN?
WATCHDOGS SAY WATERS PUSHED ETHICS LIMITS: The California Democrat hired her grandson, paid him well as her chief of staff. So House Ethics Committee reproves the grandson?
WHEN SLAVE ANTS REBEL. “Their home has been invaded, their queen killed and they have been forced to rear the offspring of their enemy, but these ants are fighting back.”
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists. Okay, this story is a few months old, but still. . . .
JUST NBC THE SCHIZOPHRENIA: Note these dueling items at Newsbusters:
● “Economic growth grew at an incredibly sluggish 1.3 percent in the second quarter, revised down from 1.7 percent. According to business writer Jim Pethokoukis, this is ‘dangerously slow.’ However, NBC skipped the bad news for Barack Obama entirely. ABC allowed it a mere 21 seconds. CBS was the only network to allow the story a full report.”
● “Leno: ‘We Wasted Four Years Waiting For Obama To Do Something About The Economy.’”
Glenn already linked to Rand Simberg’s take on Leno goofing on Obama, which assumes that the general public is well aware of the basic underlying news story, even though the news department has completely ignored it.
I’m not sure how it will play out again this year, but I’ve seen this story before.
RELATED: Speaking of just NBCing the network’s schizophrenia, the corporatist network “debunks bacon shortage myth by citing … free-market economics,” Ed Morrissey notes at Hot Air.
Found on facebook
And in terms of electoral campaign, go you and do likewise metaphorically speaking. The individualists always fail to organize, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be effective. Look at the teaparty.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Nicholas Carr: The Crisis In Higher Education.
COMING SOON: Transient Electronics That Will Dissolve Inside Your Body. “Chips made of extremely thin silicon could go into your body to kill bacteria or deliver drugs and then dissolve harmlessly when they’re done. They could also open up new possibilities in espionage.”