Ice cream is the new brownie

Janet, you're doing a heck of a job:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Obama administration claim that "the system worked" after a failed aircraft bombing wasn't quite as jolting as President George W. Bush's "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" when New Orleans was sinking under deadly Hurricane Katrina. But both raised disturbing questions about presidential response in a time of crisis.

Actually, it's worse. It is at least conceivable that, given the clusterduck that plagued the state and local efforts*, Brownie did as good a job as he could in a very difficult situation. I'm not saying he did, I'm saying it's possible. Of course, one could also write it off as a boss trying to make an employee feel better.

The Napolitano claim that "the system worked" is of an entirely different nature; it's simply political ass-covering in the face of political embarrassment. There is no conceivable way to argue that The System worked in a case where the bomb simply failed to go off, unless the system includes clandestine agents whose responsibility is to sabotage Al Queda explosives. She came back with, "once the incident occurred, the system worked," which I guess is an assertion that after somebody failed to blow up a plane, he was successfully taken into custody. That's hard to argue against. But finally, after howls of raucous laughter cracked the very ice on the globally-warmed Potomac, Interplanet Janet settled on, "our system did not work in this instance." Makes me wonder what other instance she was talking about before.

I don't blame Obama for the security breach. We live in a dangerous world and if people are dead-set on killing other people, it is unlikely that any system can be designed that will prevent that perfectly**. I do blame him, however, for what his administration says about such efforts. Perhaps if he told people that life is dangerous, he would lose a few votes. If he can't tell that truth, the best thing to say is nothing at all.

* You might recall that it was the Louisiana state government that purposely kept rescue workers out of New Orleans in an attempt to keep people from remaining in the sodden city.

** Though passing out a role of duct tape to each passenger might be a good start.

Gotta be a bottom here somewhere

Drop some money and see if you can hear it:

The Obama administration pledged Thursday to provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, an eleventh-hour move that allows the government to exceed the current $400 billion cap on emergency aid without seeking permission from a bailout-weary Congress.

Well that's a relief. Congress is not in the mood to pass any more bailouts, what with a trillion or so dollar health package to work on. So the Obama administration will instead dedicate "unlimited financial assistance" to the two mortgage giants it nationalized under El Presidente Pasado*. However, the critical element of the story is not in the lead, but buried in the fine print:

By promising to keep the companies solvent, the government can maintain its sweeping power over the housing market.

They've done such a grand job with housing, I can't wait to see how they handle grandma's broken hip.

UPDATE: That well must be pretty deep:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - GMAC Financial Services is expected to get about $3.5 billion in additional U.S. government aid to help the troubled lender absorb mortgage losses, a financial industry source familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

But what I found really enlightening was this:

GMAC's auto finance operations were profitable in the third quarter, earning about $164 million after taxes, while the mortgage business lost nearly $600 million.

It's going to take a lot of quarters earning $164 million to make up the $16 billion Uncle Sam will have given GMAC so far. I bet General Motors Assurance Corp is real glad they didn't stick with those dangers car loans...

* You remember, that one who urged other countries not to abandon free-market capitalism even as he was nationalizing every failed pseudo-capitalist financial corporation in sight.

FWIW, I'm on vacation for the next week, so posting will be sporadic* at best. Merry Christmas and may God bless each of you this new year.

* Maybe I'll do like the networks and just show reruns?

Always late to the party

The State of Kansas, that is:

DODGE CITY, Kan. — Hundreds of people turned up Tuesday for the opening of a casino in Dodge City, launching a new franchise for Kansas and reviving memories of the once-raucous cowtown that inspired television's "Gunsmoke."

I've lived in Kansas for 25 years, and it seems to me that whole time the state has been huffing and puffing (and failing) to catch up with its neighbors in the gambling arena*. It was the "temporary" lottery in the 80s, then it was dog tracks, then it was slot machines at the dog tracks, then it was Indian Casinos (though I suspect that that state could do nothing about those) and now it's regular, non-Indian, state-run casinos.

There has been a theme in common in each of these cases:

• Every one of them was done in large part because state government wanted the revenues that were being enjoyed by other state governments.
• None of them has ever brought in as much revenue as expected.
  

In fact, in the case of dog tracks in which you could bet on horse races from other states but which quickly needed slot machines to compete with still other states, they went bankrupt anyway and now bring in nothing**. The problem is not so much that Kansas seems to give in to the temptation of promoting gambling for tax money, but that it always does so when the wave has crested and the worm has turned, when the payoff is so poor that it's hardly worth the effort. Kansas is a barfly who plays coy until the handsome, rich guys have gone home.

UPDATE: But at least the stupid ones are still there:

Butler National expects the casino to generate nearly $44 million in net gambling revenues during its first year. The state's share would be almost $10 million.

"I feel like I ain't just throwing my money away," said William Alcorn, a 48-year-old painter from Greensburg, who was playing a slot machine. "It goes to a good cause."

State lotteries and casinos have been called a tax on people who are bad at math, and I suppose I have no problem with people voluntarily paying taxes; it seems a lot kinder and gentler than "give us some money or we'll take your house and sell it" property taxes. I just hope that stupidity works like so many other things: the more you tax it, the less of it you get.

* Let me say straight up that I have no problem with gambling. I do have a problem with gambling being illegal except where the government has a financial interest in people losing at gambling.

** I drive by an abandoned one every day on the way to work. More than once the owner has received a development grant - though I know not from where - and workers will swarm the place for a month or two. Then they all go away and I still don't hear any barking.

Call it recycling

This is the global warming before the global cooling before the global warming that became Climate Change. But it was after the Global Cooling.

Kill the polar bears

It's the only scientific thing to do:

PARIS (AFP) – Man's best friend could be one of the environment's worst enemies*, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle...

Combine the land required to generate its food and a "medium" sized dog has an annual footprint of 0.84 hectares (2.07 acres) -- around twice the 0.41 hectares required by a 4x4 driving 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) a year, including energy to build the car.

So if I did carbon math like Al Gore I could forgo a dog and buy 2 SUVs instead? That's carbon neutrality, baby.

But you know who the real polluters are? Polar bears. The average dog (according to the scientists) is an Environmental Menace™ because he eats 360 pounds of meat a year. The average polar bear eats about 5500 pounds of meat per year**, for a carbon footprint on the order of 15 hectares. 30 acres. 30 SUV-lives. That's a carbon footprint like an Environmental Saviour™ private jet ride to Copenhagen every single month.

According to Polar Bears International, there are 20,000 to 25,000 of these environmental Gozers loose in Canada, Greenland, all over the northern part of the earth. They eat anything, everything they can get their mouth on. Whales. Reindeer. Waterfowl. Vegetation. It doesn't matter. And their population is growing, up 500% in the past half century alone. At that rate of growth, within a few centuries the polar bear hordes, by their hungry millions, will devour all other life on the planet.

There is only one environmentally-sound, scientific solution to such a menace as the polar bears present. We've got to save the planet.

Kill 'em all.

* ignoring the fact that dogs, like people, are part of the environment.

** Seaworld says, "A ringed seal weighing 55 kg (121 lb.) could provide up to eight days of energy for a polar bear." 121/8*365.25 = 5524 lb./yr.

Yo, Taylor

I'm really happy for you, and I'mma let you finish.

But Dragon Age: Origins is the greatest RPG of all time.

Of all time.

UPDATE: And the Packers just lost on a (literally) last-second touchdown, giving the Vikings the NFC North title*. It was a good weekend.

UPDATE the SECOND: I thought T-Jack wore #7?

* thanks, guys. Pity it wasn't to the Cardinals, though.

A mathematical challenge

Shanghai Daily discovers the problem:

IT is getting harder for governments to buy United States Treasuries because the US's shrinking current-account gap is reducing supply of dollars overseas, a Chinese central bank official said yesterday...

"The US current account deficit is falling as residents' savings increase, so its trade turnover is falling, which means the US is supplying fewer dollars to the rest of the world," [Zhu Min] added. "The world does not have so much money to buy more US Treasuries."

This is exactly the problem I mentioned last May: Obama wants to issue two thousand billion in new debt a year, yet no one has that kind of money lying around to buy it. Nor do they earn that much. Nor will they ever. It will simply have to be printed from nothing.

The 'Trade Gap' chart above shows part of the problem. A couple years ago, when we had a trade gap of $700b with the rest of the world and a $350b government deficit, it was at least reasonable to expect that it could be covered. We were at least providing foreign nations with enough money to do so.

However, Zhu Min has enough class to not mention the real problem in print. Yes, increased savings has improved the trade deficit considerably*. But the real problem is this:

2007 Money supplied to world via trade deficit: ~$700b
2007 Money needed to fund US budget deficit: ~$350b
Ratio: 2:1 (of every $2 sent overseas, $1 needed back)

2009 Money supplied to world via trade deficit: ~$500b
2009 Money needed to fund US budget deficit: ~$2,000b
Ratio: 1:4 (for every $1 sent overseas, $4 needed back)

"The world does not have so much money to buy US Treasuries." That means it's up to the Man of the Year to do it.

Banana Republic, here we come.

* As has a weak dollar, but not with China specifically as their currency is tied with ours.

Gunning for another

The Obama administration opens offensive operations in a fourth nation:

On orders from President Barack Obama, the U.S. military launched cruise missiles early Thursday against two suspected al-Qaeda sites in Yemen, administration officials told ABC News...

President Obama placed a call after the strikes to "congratulate" the President of Yemen, Ali Abdallah Salih, on his efforts against al Qaeda, according to White House officials.

The Yemen attacks by the U.S. military represent a major escalation of the Obama administration's campaign to secure a second Nobel Peace Prize.

I wonder, however, how Mr. Obama would react if, say, Israel or Mexico or Spain decided that someone in the US was planning an attack on their soil and consequently lobbed a bunch of bombs onto American soil to kill them*. But that's different, right?

I'm not sure what "congratulate" is supposed to mean in a case like this. Perhaps the Yemeni government asked us to launch a few missiles, you know, if we had a few extras lying around. Or perhaps Obama said, "Accept my congratulations or I will bring democracy to Yemen."

Either way, the foresight of the Nobel committee is confirmed once again.

* and anyone in their immediate vicinity.

As far as I know

CNN has no idea what makes a bad movie:

So that got us thinking about the worst tech movies ever made. Not science fiction movies, with their planet-killing asteroids, journeys to the Earth's center, and homicidal dinosaurs, but movies about the digital world. Movies with technology that, even by Hollywood standards, is ridiculous. ... Bad movies, bad tech -- here's our list:

I issue that world class "As far as I know" disclaimer because seven of the nine movies have something in common:

Antitrust (2001) - Never saw it
Feardotcom (2002) - Never saw it
Hackers (1995) - Never saw it
Johnny Mnemonic (1995) - Never saw it
The Lawnmower Man (1992) - Never saw it
The Net (1995) - Never saw it
Swordfish (2001) - Never saw it

So obviously, I can have no opinion about them nor whether they belong on a list of the worst tech movies of all time. But I have to disagree on the two that I have seen:

I'm glad they feel guilty about putting Weird Science on the list. I can cut them some slack because they spend much of the explanation explaining why it shouldn't be there. It just shouldn't.

But I just can't let ID4 go:

An alien race invades Earth and methodically begins destroying the planet. The end seems imminent until Jeff Goldblum writes a computer virus that damages the alien ships and saves the day.

So, let's get this straight: An alien species whose technology seems centuries ahead of humankind, with ships whose shields render nuclear missiles ineffective, are vulnerable to a computer virus?

ID4 is no more a "technology movie" than is Star Wars. It's a modern re-telling of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, you know, that late 19th-Century story about the unconquerable invaders from another planet who were defeated by viruses? Complain that it's a poor re-telling* or a really stupid twist to sub a computer virus for a bio virus**, I can live with that.

But let's not assume that aliens won't have their own Microsoft. If the aliens have technology, there is certain to be a corporation on their planet that can't help but render it vulnerable to cable repairmen the galaxy over.

UPDATE: Heh. It's goes something like this:

WASHINGTON -- Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Technological advancement in its current iteration is the great equalizer. Bring on the aliens.

* It's not. This is.

** I figure they wanted to steal Wells' story and this was a way not to have to pay his estate anything. Not that they would have anyway.

Broke Treasury is broke

Luckily, they get to make their own rules:

The latest calculation of the National Debt as posted by the Treasury Department has - at least numerically - exceeded the statutory Debt Limit approved by Congress last February as part of the Recovery Act stimulus bill...

A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some "extraordinary accounting tools" it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling.

Is anyone really surprised that the Treasury has "tools" that allow it to issue more debt than it is allowed to issue? No?

How about surprise at born-again fiscal conservative Republicans who complain, "the liberals that are running this Congress have been on a wild spending spree for the last three* years..." No?

How about surprise that people seem to be seriously questioning whether Congress will keep raising the ceiling** rather than just enjoying the political theater for what it is? No?

Geez. Tough crowd...

* If by "three" he means "ten," then I'm right there with him.

** though not raising it would be the equivalent of a balanced budget amendment starting RIGHT FREAKING NOW, if Congress can't even hold spending within 10% of last year's numbers, there's no way they're going to chop this year's spending in half with one fell swoop. What individual members will do, when the vote gets close enough, is extract even more spending in exchange for their vote.

My wife knows me too well

So anyway, I told the lovely and gracious Rogue that I was planning to take the week between Christmas and New Years off. Not go anywhere, just hang around the house, work in the yard, read a few books.

She bought me Dragon Age Origins so I'll stay out of her face that week.

UPDATE: Yes, it rocks.

If by 'historian' we mean 'internet atheist'

then we're all on the same page:

Obviously, the above is not an exact chart, but it does represent how some historians view the Christian Dark Ages*. (My guess would be that the collapse of the stable Roman Empire had at least as much effect as the domination of Christian religious dogma that stifled the pursuit of any heretical knowledge.)

Now I'll give Luke** all kinds of leeway in that the Christian Dark Ages is not really his point in this post; rather it's a theoretical Muslim Dark Ages based on demographics. He is also honest enough to posit that the complete destruction of the government and culture and an invasion of swirling hordes of unlettered Barbarians might have something to do with a drop off in learning; Luke is neither wholly bigoted nor wholly foolish. No, my beef here is the assumption - or rather blatant untruth - that he slips in above as a base for his later argument, that the chart somehow represents how some historians view the Christian Dark Ages.

It might come as something of a shock to internet atheists to learn that real, actual historians never use the phrase Christian Dark Ages***. In fact, they don't even really use the term Dark Ages. To buttress the point, I could show all manner of historians not using it, but it's probably easier to go to that treasury of general knowledge, Encyclopedia Britannica****:

"[Dark Ages] is now rarely used by historians because of the value judgment it implies. Though sometimes taken to derive its meaning from the fact that little was then known about the period, the term’s more usual and pejorative sense is of a period of intellectual darkness and barbarity..."

Which pejorative sense is, of course, exactly what internet atheists mean when they use it, and why they anachronously attach "Christian" to it. Even so, that whole, flat, no-learning millennium on Luke's chart, that still exists, right?

That period has also been called the "Middle Ages," which title seems to lack the derogatory power of Dark Ages and on the surface sounds a bit more fair. But our encyclopedia again lets us in on a little secret:

The term [Middle Ages] and its conventional meaning were introduced by Italian humanists with invidious intent ... the notion of a thousand-year period of darkness and ignorance separating them from the ancient Greek and Roman world served to highlight the humanists’ own work and ideals... the humanists invented the Middle Ages in order to distinguish themselves from it.

The Middle Ages nonetheless provided the foundation for the transformations of the humanists’ own Renaissance.

Imagine that! Italian intellectuals created the idea of a thousand years of darkness - with "invidious intent" - to illustrate how advanced and smart they considered themselves. Just look at the ignorance they saved us from! It's the same manner and for the same reason that internet atheists posit one.

The fact is that, if one were going to draw a chart that measured actual learning or advancement, there would be very little rise in Rome - the Romans were not creators, not scientists, and not inventors, but engineers and soldiers - and certainly none in late Rome. The "rise" in Greece might have topped out in 300bc or even a bit earlier. There certainly would have been a drop after 476, but it would immediately begin upward again, slowly at first, then accelerating into the Renaissance and still accelerating today. And there would be room for India, China, Persia, Meso-America, all those places unaffected by the non-existent Christian Dark Ages.

But the irony is that internet atheists, who generally consider themselves the most intelligent, informed, and enlightened people on the planet, rely so often for their arguments on data that is not only demonstrably incorrect and out of step with modern scholarship, but literally centuries out of date. It's almost like recommending Paine's Age of Reason as a serious religious resource.

* Some of you have seen this chart before (I dealt with its shortcomings about 2 and a half years ago) but since Luke's post is from this year, I figured it might be time for a bit of a refresher.

** Yes, it's the same Luke who is involved in a (so far) 7-round debate with Vox.

*** That's not exactly true. A search of JSTOR turns up 3 usages of the phrase in a century of journals. By contrast, a search for "Medieval" brings up a mere 82,300 references.

**** Not because it's 'better' but because it is more general. Britannica generally defines modern professional usages of terms that are assumed in more scholarly works. But the point is that it defines current usage, not the usage of past centuries, which we shall see is the case with 'Dark Ages' as an historical paradigm.

Tommy

The New Legions

It's far more civilized so far:

Pennsylvania's school districts will see their retirement costs increase by more than 70 percent next year as the first symptoms of the state's public pension crisis begin to be felt...

That means taxpayers will have to spend $1.1 billion next school year for teachers' pensions, or almost $500 million more than this year.

State and local education officials said the worst part is that next year's increase is just a fraction of an anticipated leap to record public contributions by 2012, when the state and local tab is projected to exceed $4 billion.

A lot of people are fond of making comparisons between the USA and the late Roman Empire; we're going to fall just like them and all that. I think that generally such comparisons are forced and illustrate the writer's psychology more than anything about either Rome or the USA.

But if we are following the Roman model, then I would have to say that we are Rome in the generation following the Third Punic War rather than Rome in the third century. The background is that at the end of the Third Punic War, when Rome utterly defeated and destroyed its long-time enemy Carthage, Rome stood for a while as a republic with no worthy opponents. The result was not immediate expansion (the greatest expansions would come in the next century) but a turning inward of politics that destroyed the republic and resulted in the Sulla/Marius civil war, leading to the Caesar/Pompey civil war, leading to the Imperium.

But what is different this time is the nature of the army looting the Republic. In Marius' day, it was legionaries seeking pensions who ultimately changed the focus of Rome - no longer would issues affecting all be hashed out in the legislature, but rather all politics would devolve to a simple theme: the man who held power was the man who could best command soldiers, and that man was the man who provided them the most booty and the best retirement.

Today, it is not the soldiers who haul off the booty of the republic in retirement, but public employees*. USA today announced this week that fully a fifth of federal employees are now making six-figure salaries**, and hardly a day goes by where one does not see an article explaining that this or that public employee group is going to need $x billion tax dollars in the pension fund over the next few years, an incredible increase over prior years.

And it does not help that government has been the one area of the economy which has been posting increasing employment numbers - more and more employees who will be demanding more and more pensions based on higher and higher salaries. The amount squeezed from taxpayers on behalf of those who are no longer working is going to have to increase massively unless governments get their budgets under control. There is little evidence so far that they - at least beyond the local level - are able to do so voluntarily.

If one considers the government a business, it is easy to see just what kind of business it is: one that is owned not by shareholders or by customers - the customers of government are captive - but by its employees. And a business operated on behalf of its employees is one where there are few incentives to control costs or make a profit; all incentives are geared toward looting customers and company on behalf of the workers***.

If we are Rome, then the good news is that we have a long, explosively expansive period before we fall. The bad news is that relatively few Romans enjoyed that period very much.

* Of whom I am one, technically.

** Which includes a jump from a single transportation department employee making $170k 2 years ago to almost two thousand today.

*** Which is why GM - to pick an example - will be destroyed utterly in short order.

It's such a puzzle

What I can't figure out is how this:

October was the second monthly year-over-year increase for retailers this year and the best performance since April 2008, according to Retail Metrics. The fall momentum has given retailers, beleaguered by a year of sharp sales declines and steep discounting, more confidence heading into the critical holiday shopping season.

Jives with this:

Texas sales tax collections plunged in October over the same month in 2008, the state comptroller said.

Fort Worth’s collections were off 17.3 percent, Arlington’s 4.7 percent, Hurst’s 11.8 percent and Southlake’s 13.9 percent. Sales tax receipts are a major source of income for municipal budgets, and cities have already cut deeply.

Compared to government figures, the 150-year-old John Brown family cipher is a piece of cake...

c-c-c-combo breaker

It's not often that I brag about my failures in advance, but I thought I would run a little something up the pole here and see if anyone salutes. It looks like a good part of this weekend will be spent trying to decipher the John Brown family's encryption. Probably unsuccessfully.

When John, Jr*., wrote to his wife Wealthy, if he had something he did not believe it safe to write out for whatever reason, he would encode it like this:

12 03
8 02
24 18
25 01
25 22

I have already identified a number of patterns, such as the fact that the pairing 00 08 appears often (and always apart from other groups), that the first column runs from 00 to 25, but the second 01 to 26**, that the periods at least appear to be used as periods, that spaces only appear in column 1, and that the reading is columnar rather than linear. Tonight after everyone is in bed I shall grab a glass of wine and a pencil and really go after it.

However, if any of you pattern recognition geeks would care to take a look and throw some ideas my way, I would be appreciative. I would not really care about the code, except that the correspondence in which it appears is written during a period (Jan., 1862) in which it is vitally important for me to know what Brown was truly thinking about a number of things.

* and perhaps others, I just have not seen it elsewhere.

** Which spread leads me to believe we are dealing with letter-by-letter encryption(perhaps on a matrix), which is breakable, rather than a page/book scheme, which is hopeless.

UPDATE: SUCCESS! And failure. I worked on it until I fell asleep last night, then again this morning.

It's not a matrix, but a straight-line letter substitution.

I started off by graphing the occurrence of each number by column, but that really didn't seem to get me anywhere and as I discovered a matrix would not provide enough letters needed per word, I quickly discarded the idea that the column itself was important*.

I also noticed that where there were spaces, they always occurred in the left column and that the periods were consistently closer to the lower group than the upper. That lent credence to the idea that the periods were punctuation and one spelled the words bottom up.

Then I made the provisional assumption that they were spelled like this:

FE
DC
BA

Which would give words with odd numbers of letters a blank in the upper left position.

Then I concluded that the reason 00 08 always appeared in isolation was that it represented "I" - the zeroes being inserted to mask the common occurrence of 08 by itself.

Then I graphed the occurrences of each number on the middle page and compared the result to a chart from wikipedia of the overall occurrences of letters as they appear in everyday writing.

Then I located a number of recurring number groups with three and four letters - these were obviously important and/or common words that could be used for testing or process-of-elimination.

Then I isolated all the 2-letter groups and compared them to common 2-letter words (e.g. am, an, as, at) to isolate potential vowels.

Then marking a few that looked like vowels, and isolating the most common consonants, I wrote out the alphabet and put prospective numbers under them.

It took about 5 numbers before a pattern emerged and it proved to be correct: start with A as 24 and reduce by 2 (B=22, C=20) until you get to 2, then start the next letter (N) at 1 and go up by 2. Y=25, and it doesn't matter what Z is, as there were none.

My common words quickly proved to be "love" "that" and "you," and the only thing that threw me off was the word "Weppy" in quotation marks, which turned out to be Brown's pet name for his wife. I made the mistake of trying that first instead of last.

Decrypting the whole thing from there was simple if tedious.

So that's the success**. The failure is that it turned out to be a mush letter which did not give me what I was hoping to find. In fact, I felt a little guilty reading the guy's mail.

* I also realized that since this was going to his wife and not a Confederate agent, the scheme did not have to be overly complicated.

** ignoring numerous rabbit trails that I thought might be shortcuts, like Caesar offsets and finding 8-letter words like "Jennison" and "Missouri," which would obviously give me lots of letters quickly.

Pretty soon they'll want Nixon back

A poll no liberal could love:

Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama's declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited.

Two items of note concerning this very amusing, sadistic* poll. The first is that I'm actually one of the 50% rather than the 44% and do not look back on the term of el presidente pasado with anything remotely resembling nostalgia. Besides, the differences between the Bush and Obama approaches to the problems created by government are so slight that the only redeeming side effect is that we now have an opposition party, the Republicans, rather than two parties competing at auction**.

But the second thing is I think the most enlightening. I don't know anyone - and don't hear of anyone other than in the press - who is giving Obama "space" because of the mess he "inherited." He did not inherit a mess, he asked for it. Obama complaining about Bush is like a replacement quarterback blaming his performance on the fact that his team was trailing when he came off the bench. It's immature and unbecoming for Obama and the Dems to constantly place blame on Bush when they have had a full year of their own in the executive branch and three in charge of the legislative to turn things around.

Of course, the fact that the Democrats are following the Bush playbook almost to the letter - even to the extent of now extending TARP and widening the war on Afghanistan - means that blaming Bush for the continuing mess is not as dishonest at it would first appear. The dishonesty comes in trying to distance themselves from him.

* Toward Obamabots, anyway. I mean, who can imagine a more cruel question - at least when combined with the present answer.

** For the benefit of giraffe, this wholly unrelated footnote appears in the correct order.

(Hat tip: Mish)

We have to eat our way out of this obesity epidemic

If it kills us:

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama called for a major new burst of federal spending Tuesday, perhaps $150 billion or more, aiming to jolt the wobbly economy into a stronger recovery and reduce painfully persistent double-digit unemployment...

Obama said the U.S. has had to "spend our way out of this recession" with so many people out of work but insisted he was still mindful of a need to confront soaring deficits.

"Still mindful" of the need to confront deficits is the equivalent of the guy who orders four big macs thinking about the recumbent bike he got for Christmas that lies neglected in the basement. Obama has no more intention of controlling deficits than The Man in Grey has of ordering a salad**.

With Obama's priorities from health care to an expanded war in Afghanistan to cap-and-trade all demanding ever more dollars* which are now being openly created via Helicopter Ben's printing press, the current dollar rally cannot be considered anything but a temporary market aberration, the equivalent of a Wall Street jumper hitting a flag pole or clothes line on the way down. It may reverse the descent for a moment, but it does not change the fact that there's about to be a hell of a mess on the sidewalk.

"Just words," Obama once said. This is what he meant.

* As if the demographics of Medicare and SocSec weren't enough to bust us, which they are.

** Alone, anyway.

The good news is

It works:

(CNN) -- An Ohio inmate, convicted of killing and dismembering a 22-year-old woman in 1991, was executed Tuesday using a new, untested one-drug method of lethal injection, state officials said.

Consider that test a success.

Now if we can figure out a way to make the whole process take less than 18 years, that will be like a success overdose.

A Day Which Shall Live in Infamy II

"...Hopkins is stopped for a loss, bringing up fourth and five for Fort Scott, who will run the clock down now, leading 26-24, late in the fourth. Punting unit comes on and lines up at their own 46. Blinn has one man back at the 20. The clock is still running, 36 seconds left, 35, Blinn has no time outs and is going to need every second if they want to drive this field for a field goal. Here's the punt and it's a knuckleball into the wind. Blinn fields it at the 17, the runner reverses his field to the twenty, there's the wedge, he's at the thirty and cuts back again, 40, 50, 45 there are no flags on the field, 40, 30, he's going to score!"

NJCAA National Championship: Blinn 31, Fort Scott 26.

Great season, one minute too long.

After yesterday I'm ready to burn all my footballs

The Friday Payroll Green Shoot

Bob K. Mando asked:

actually, i wonder how much the unemployment numbers went "down" because of people falling off of the unemployment rolls due to excessive time receiving benefits?

The short answer is, "all of it." The above chart shows not the unemployment rate (massaged as that is) but the percentage change of reported non-farm payroll jobs from the number reported at the beginning of the recession. Today we see, 24 months after it started, that there are about 5% fewer jobs reported.

Which is enlightening in that at 24 months from the average post 1950 recession, all the jobs are usually back and we go on from there. The "jobless recovery" of 2001 took 48 months to recover all the jobs, even though the total lost was never more than 2%, and that nadir was hit 30 months after recession started.

So here we are with 66% of that time expired, yet with two and half times as many jobs lost as a percentage of the whole*. We may be reaching the bottom or not. But as we are still losing jobs every month**, it is not unreasonable to expect that we may be a decade or more away from 2007-style employment numbers.

* And with absolutely unprecedented monetary stimulus to boot.

** And the Birth/Death adjustment in January is going to be a whopper. Expect close to a cool million jobs to disappear in a puff of statistical revision.

(hat tip: Casey Research)

Here comes the job fairy

just in time for Christmas the holidays:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- President Obama called on business leaders Thursday to help the administration kickstart hiring as policymakers contend with rising unemployment that's weighing down the economy...

Ideas for spurring job creation abound. They range from giving businesses tax credits for hiring workers to pumping millions into state and local economies. One of the top priorities is extending unemployment benefits.

That last item is actually the only one that you can be absolutely certain will occur, because the most tried and true way to create jobs is to pay people for not working. But it's still incredible that this government, while at the same time trying to saddle companies with enormous new taxes in health care and carbon emissions, believes tax credits are going to be useful.

There is a far easier way to go about creating jobs, and one that costs almost nothing and takes no time at all:

US employers cut far fewer jobs than expected last month in the best showing for the labor market since the recession began, boosting the U.S. dollar and global stock prices on hopes for a strong economic recovery...

The labor market improvement was broad based and 159,000 fewer jobs were lost in September and October than previously thought, according to the Labor Department data.

"These numbers are almost too good to be true," said Tom Sowanick, chief investment officer at the OmniVest Group in Princeton, New Jersey.

Yup, almost.

The very definition of "A Day Which Shall Live in Infamy"

Yeah, we're playing those guys again.

(rerun tip: PiffordT)

Nobody move

Or the Black Swan gets it:

Nassim Taleb, the author of "The Black Swan", said he would retreat from public life if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gains a second term at the helm of the central bank...

"I need to withdraw as immediately as possible into the Platonic tranquility of my library, work on my next book, find solace in science and philosophy, and mull the next step," he wrote, adding that "I will only (briefly) emerge from my hiatus when the publishers force me to do so upon the publication of the paperback edition of The Black Swan."

I wonder if he'll turn out like the half of Hollywood that threatened* to leave America and never eat apple pie again if El Presidente Pasado was re-elected in 2004. He was, and yet they are still all over CNN's web site.

But even if the Senate does the unthinkable** what's the point of going away? Taleb wrote a book discussing how banks and financial companies are susceptible to failures from factors not accounted for by their financial models*** - called "black swans" - and that's a good part of what happened, and I might add, is happening again.

Now the guy second-most responsible for the current iteration of trouble, and wholly responsible for the next one, is about to get another four years to implement a federally funded black swan breeding program.

Is Taleb truly holding his own public presence hostage in a bid to force the Senate to do the right thing and send Bennie back to the clown college from whence he arose? Or is he really just afraid of how much writing he's going to have to do?

* promised.

** perhaps it should be the "unthinking." This is the Senate after all.

*** Which are surely better than global-warming models, having been written by non-government programmers.

They picked it up cheap in bankruptcy

The stimulus is working

This is how we do math in the big leagues:

WASHINGTON -- The $787 billion fiscal stimulus program approved in February is working pretty much as expected, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. U.S. employment is about 600,000 to 1.6 million higher, and real gross domestic product is about 1.2% to 3.2% higher than they would have been without the stimulus, CBO said. That estimate is nearly identical to the CBO's assessment in March. The CBO based its estimates on long-standing relationships between additional spending and economic growth, rather than relying on incomplete and inaccurate reports from companies awarded federal contracts. Much of the direct government spending in the stimulus bill is yet to come.

This paragraph is so epic that I had to quote it in full, because this is a green shoot extraordinaire.

Now there are two facts here that are at issue. The first is that the stimulus is working "pretty much as expected*." The second is that GDP and employment are both measurably higher than they would have been without us all being stimulated.

But here's the kicker. These two facts, which are sure to turn up in a million CNBC stories about how we are spending ourselves rich** according to the CBO, are not based on "incomplete and inaccurate reports from companies awarded federal contracts," in other words, they did not ask the people who spent the money what they spent it on.

Nope, the facts in question are based on "estimates [of] long-standing relationships between additional spending and economic growth."

That's why there were no surprises: they based their conclusions on the very assumptions that went into the bill in the first place. In short, they simply assumed the result, then reported that as success.

You know, there are a few global warming positions slated to open up in the next couple weeks. Looks to me like some CBO guys are angling for a career change.

* And that's good news, because very few people like surprises when they are being stimulated.

** Not to mention the forthcoming "Not a Stimulus" stimulus package version 3.0.