FEELING THE HOPE AND CHANGE: Obama Booed During PSA at Michigan State Football Game; Jeers reportedly started in student section.
Archive for 2014
October 6, 2014
I WOULD, TOO, BUT ALAS MY EARNINGS WOULDN’T SUPPORT ONE: “I bought a private jet because I thought it would make me more efficient in my work.” Then again, neither did his, I guess.
However, if you do buy a private jet, I don’t want to hear one goddamned thing about my carbon footprint. Got it?
HMM: Spanish Nurse Tests Positive for Ebola After Treating Patient. “A nurse in Spain has tested positive for the Ebola virus after she treated a patient who has the disease. If the preliminary tests are confirmed, she will be the first person believed to have contracted Ebola outside Africa.”
Related: Nigeria contains Ebola – and US officials want to know more. “US teams are headed to Nigeria to learn about its success in using ‘contact tracing’ – a significant practical step that limited the spread of the virus.”
Also: Out Of Control: How The World’s Health Organizations Dropped The Ball On Ebola.
And: CDC Director: The US Is Not Going To Have An Ebola Outbreak.
UPDATE: ABC News: US Journalist Believes He Got Ebola While Cleaning Infected Car. “The American journalist with Ebola who arrived at a Nebraska hospital today believes that he may have gotten infected when he got splashed while spray-washing a vehicle where someone had died from the disease.”
Hope those Dallas pressure-washing guys are okay.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Scientists ready to test lab-grown penises on men. The next step, I suppose, is testing them on women.
25,000 MILES in a BMW diesel wagon.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Are Space Bubbles to Blame for a Deadly Afghan Battle? “The 2002 Battle of Takur Ghar in Afghanistan turned deadly for American soliders after radio communications failed. Twelve years later, we may have a bizarre explanation for the disaster.”
REVERSIBLE MALE CONTRACEPTIVE now in trials. Feminists will probably complain that this empowers men.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FIGHTING FOR LIBERTY, even when you fear you live in a dying republic.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Is Syphilis Making A Comeback? “Research suggests condom use is trending downward, which may be one reason for the syphilis spike. And this surge has caught many doctors with their diagnostic pants down: Because so few docs have seen the disease, they often misdiagnose the initial warning signs.”
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Forbes.com, Self-Censorship, and the Perils of Cheap Content. I think that what Forbes did was cowardly and wrong, and I have lost a lot of respect for them.
WELL, GOOD: Report: Massive Explosion At Iranian Nuclear Facility. “According to ISNA the blast was so powerful it shattered windows up to 12 kilometers away and the glare from the explosion lit up the night sky.”
If I recall correctly, it takes about 1.5 psi overpressure to break a window. To get 1.5 psi overpressure at 12 kilometers — roughly 8 miles — takes an awfully big explosion.
UPDATE: Apparently I was off by a factor of 10 — I think it was 1.5 to shatter a window into dangerous projectiles — but still, a big boom. Waiting for confirmation.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: CDC, You Had One Job!
IN THE MAIL: From Suri Rosen, Playing With Matches. Helen read this and loved it, and she doesn’t like many novels.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 50% Off Select Lexar Memory. USB sticks, SD cards, etc.
And, also today only: ER: The Complete Series, $143.99 (79% off). That was a good show.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 515.
LOS ANGELES’S MINIMUM WAGE EXPERIMENT:
Essentially, Los Angeles is mandating that every full-time worker within the city limits must make $26,500 a year. I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, this will obviously raise the incomes of some workers, but it could mean that a lot of workers see their hours cut back or have their jobs moved beyond the city limits, possibly so far that they can no longer do those jobs. If you’re concerned about long-term unemployment — and I am — then that is worrying.
On the other hand, I’m very interested to see the experiment run. Municipal minimum wages can be a good way to look at the impact of high-minimum-wage laws, because you have control groups next door. This is far from perfect, but it does offer useful observations. And Los Angeles is particularly interesting because its municipal area is so darn big; employers in the center can’t simply move a short distance to avoid the wage.
According to the Wall Street Journal, 37 percent of the city’s labor force will be affected by the law. Half a million members of the city’s labor force are manufacturing workers, whose employers cannot simply raise prices to pass on the cost, because they’re competing with products from lower-wage jurisdictions, including overseas. Now, some of them will be on piecework, or off the books. But some are not. How will their employers handle the new rules?
Local service businesses are simultaneously the most and least vulnerable. Starbucks can’t start selling you your daily latte from Columbus, Ohio; it’s more likely to try to raise prices. And if people are getting a raise, they’ll have some room to do so (though, of course, that claws back some of the benefit of raising the minimum wage). But in places like Scandinavia, where servers get paid a lot, in the context of generally high wages, what you seem to see is that people spend a lot less money on going out to eat. And if your customer base has a lot of manufacturing workers — or if your customers simply refuse to pay more for your products — you might have to close entirely, because you simply can’t operate at a profit.
I predict that it will do as much for general employment in L.A. as the L.A. condom-requirement ordinance did for the porn industry.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Diversity And Self-Knowledge At The New York Times. Well, to be fair, the Times editorial board is as diverse as an Obama campaign headquarters. But remember: All this talk of tolerance and diversity is basically just a way for one group of white people to pursue power over other groups of white people. It’s not about actually helping anyone.
Besides, everybody knows if you want real diversity, you got to a Tea Party rally. The chicks are hotter, too.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Would Free Contraceptives Reduce Teen Pregnancies and Abortions?
AT AMAZON, deals on Metal Detectors.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: CDC, You Had One Job!
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: IRS Bosses Rating Agents According To Audit Quotas Even Though That’s Illegal.
Plus: “A growing number of tax agency bosses are declining to verify whether IRS employees are using discrimination or intimidation in their dealings with taxpayers.”
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CLUE? Leading Democrat: Obama Is Disconnected from His Own Government. “They keep getting surprised by stuff. And the surprise is almost worse than anything else. It conveys the sense that the White House doesn’t know what its own government is doing. You can’t prevent all these problems from happening, but you can certainly get ahead of the curve on some of them.”
POLITICO: Liberal doves run as war hawks.
Democrat Kay Hagan didn’t mince words about the Iraq War during her 2008 Senate campaign against Republican Elizabeth Dole.
“We need to get out of Iraq in a responsible way,” Hagan declared in May of that year. “We need to elect leaders who don’t invade countries without planning and stay there without an end.”
Hagan is striking a different chord these days. Locked in a tough reelection battle, the first-term senator boasts that she’s more strongly supportive of airstrikes against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant militants than her Republican challenger, Thom Tillis, and says she’s been pressing the Obama administration to arm Syrian rebels since early last year.
“This is the time for us to come together, Democrats and Republicans, to confront the challenges that are facing our nation,” she said this month.
A host of Democratic Senate hopefuls who rode anti-war sentiment into office in the past decade are running for reelection now as hawks, staking out hard-line positions on the latest upheaval in the Middle East.
Whatever works. The election is less than a month away.