Beyond Stupid

From PRI

"... you got these huge 40,000lb fuel trucks rollin' down the road - those are very very enticing targets to our enemies. At least a thousand Americans have been killed moving fuel. In essence what we're doing is we're air conditioning the desert over there. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places - DoD will spend about $20 billion annually to air condition tents and temporary structures in Iraq and Afghanistan."

If you combine all the money the govt s putting into Solar/Nuclear/"Clean Coal"/Carbon Sequestration/Renewables etc - you wouldnt get $10b
Obama's big loud edumacation plan is Race to the Top - that's a paltry $1.35b by comparison. Hell - we only spent $18.7b on NASA.

The current "market value" of the NFL is $30.6b... So it would be cheaper to BUY THE NFC and give it to the soldiers who are stuck in the tents than it would be to air condition them (not to mention the whole 'now you dont have to drive that fuel truck over any IEDs this week). How do you think the soldiers would react to the whole 'hey, you dont get any air conditioning, but you own the Detroit Lions'....

...

ok, yeah, maybe they'd rather have air conditioning.

Being Unreasonable

2 moar years...

The Week in Review

So the week started off with a series that should be up for awards from the Washington Post on the disaster our National Intelligence organization has become since 9/11. Most of this stuff probably comes as no surprise to those on any side of the political spectrum - it has all the hallmarks of a classic washington horror story. Well intentioned move by government to make things better becomes moneypit, loses efficiency, and becomes a behemoth that's so big it cant be reined in.

I worry about what happens to the country when, as a result of programs like these, that the money spigot in congress will be unable to turn itself off (whether from fear of lost jobs in one's congressional district, or from the positive reinforcement of major campaign contributions from firms getting paid to sift through my phone records). At what point is 'keeping america afraid' such a big part of the economy that it cant be changed - or are we already there.

Does government get out of control when it spends without a backstop? of course it does... pretty much every time... but so do private sector companies awash in cash without any responsibility to productivity (90s internet VC play anyone?). This is generally the argument against giving people money for unemployment - that those people's marginal propensity to spend might be very high, but they're not doing anything productive themselves while they spend - so it's not a good use of money in the economy. Of course, this isnt the argument used by the MSM talking heads - rather it's 'they wont get work when they're getting paid to sit at home'. Of course, that doesn't square with the data at all - but that never stopped the idiots from spewing their opinions as facts...

The first big distraction this week was Jessi Slaughter trolling Good Morning America. An 11 yr old girl played the 'i've been bullied by 4chan card' on her youtube channel, became a meme, was yucking it up with 4chan a couple hours after... but has played the drama card for all it's worth.

Speaking of which, the other major trolling distraction this week was the utterly manufactured Sherrod story - take a girl, take a quote out of context, spew hatred, get girl fired, spew hatred for firing, ask each other questions about why questions weren't asked sooner... about as effective a smokescreen as I've seen the media kick up in a long time...

Why the smoke? Because the president passed 'sweeping' legislation to reform wall street - that didnt reform much of anything. Regardless, the right didnt want to talk about the 'victory' and this latest Bush administration didnt want to own up to how useless it all was, or talk about some of the other nightmares...

Like former BP executives sitting on the board of the company that makes Coreexit....

or the increased jobless claims for the week...

or the way the financial reform bill shut the asset backed security market down...



or that the climate bill is dead... and we get nothing but an exploding john kerry in return

in the end - being reminded of how screwed up the entire system is - whether by how goldman starved millions playing games with commodity prices or seeing racists and bigots be upset because calling them bigots is discriminatory... or how the oligarchs through Obama through Geithner have gamed treasury to screw the public out of a colossal amount of money.

Seriously... why do i even try.

How do you begin to fix this place.

learning something new

this...

a hundred times this...

not for the discussion of warren... but for the 'this is what treasury is doing' - it's succinct, easy to read and understand, and damnably accurate.

If the US were playing this game in a vacuum - maybe they could pull it off in a half dozen years or so... but china is slowly acquiring real assets the world over - and europe is right at the verge of a massive crash... these policies, in the context of that backdrop, are a truly terrible idea.

They should have nationalized the damned banks

sigh...

you've probably seen it....

but it's monday, and we all need a unicorn chaser to start the week

The R'lyehians have spoken

fault

you hear a lot of people who've been saying 'it takes a lot of time to change things' when they defend the current administrations policies - but time and again the administration has had courts give them an opportunity to deviate from the path W put the nation upon, and failed to do so.

This oil spill, it turns out, is yet another one.

Given the nature and the details of this article - i think it's simply another case of 'business as usual' - perhaps with the sense that if something did go wrong the administration would be able to claim cover for their actions by the proximity to the prior administration. I think Rahm has a sense of realpolitik in how he's trying to handle the left, the economic collapse, global environmental issues, and the political landscape - and i think every decision they make is tempered by the question 'what does it get me?' - as opposed to 'what's the right thing to do'.

That's not what the progressives thought they were voting for. In fact, it was the sense of that same behavior in Clinton that turned us off to her in the primaries and drove us into the arms of Obama. I dont think Clinton would have been any better - so I dont regret that... but the sad truth is that the democratic party, through it's deeds rather than it's words, stands in lock step with the previous administration on a vast majority of issues.

To describe the degree of my sense of disappointment is difficult.

oh derek wildstar... what have they done...

if you think this looks bad it could have been much much worse

lol

The general rule is that, to keep apace with the population, the US economy must grow at 150,000 jobs per month to be 'even' in terms of employment. Any month it fails that bar is a month that more Americans are out of work than the previous.

W had a truly abysmal record on that front - but it sure doesnt seem things are any better these days...

In June - the economy actually shed jobs - with a big minus 125,000.

In the face of numbers like that, you'd think we'd be talking about increased unemployment benefits or new stimulus packages... but no.

"Reacting to the figures US President Barack Obama said the economy was heading in the right direction, but not fast enough."

If it goes faster in this direction no one will have a job.

Then again, Krugman is finally starting to sound more like me - so maybe someone somewhere will start listening.

Mastering the Art

The Japanese have tried... but generally failed with this. They end up with girl bands that are a bit too quirky (or downright wtf) and the boys trend more to glam-rock or jazz...
South Korea and K-Pop on the other hand has really adopted the western manufactured sound well... and it seems it adapts to china pretty well... (seriously guys - if we've exported american culture this deep into the bowels of the chinese psyche can't we begin to look at whether the question of borders and nationalism is even relevant at this point?)

warning, not for the faint of heart...