As other liberals have noted, sadly, "It could have been worse, maybe," is not exactly a slogan on par with "It's Morning in America."

Jonathan Alter tries his hand. You can't prove to a determined partisan liberal that Obama's a bad president.

How far we've come, from Alter and his ilk praising Obama as awesome, to now sputtering "you can't proooove he's awful."

I'm not going to quote it, because it's lame (though the comments shellacking him are fun). Just wanted to note Jonathan Alter is now reduced to sputtering "Prove to me Obama's a bad president."

More fun is this hapless sack of fail, who advises fellow liberals to stop expecting Obama to succeed and then maybe he will meet your expectations.

Stop Waiting for Superman

By TIMOTHY EGAN

Hope and audacity hung in the winter air those early months of the perilous presidency of Barack Obama, a time when street vendors were selling pictures of him as Superman, complete with an “S” across his chest.

I remember picking one up, thinking the collage might be worth something down the road. Of course it was never realistic, despite ObamaÂ’s gifts of oration and the power of his narrative, for him to be The One, or The Natural, let alone a superhero. We canÂ’t help it, though; every inauguration is like the start of a new baseball season, filled with hope for the rookie to hit 60 home runs.

...

Through the haze of this dystopia, Obama has no skip in his step, no lift in his voice. His poll numbers are the worst of his time in office. His enemies no longer call him Muslim, socialist or Kenyan. They donÂ’t have to: they point to 9.1 percent unemployment, and seek to ride the wave pushed by three-fourths of the country that feels the nation is going in the wrong direction.

The presidentÂ’s supporters expect him to emerge from a deserved vacation with a term-saving jobs plan, and maybe the old cape out of the closet. They should forget such delusions. The jobs proposal will go nowhere in a Congress that has made clear from the beginning it cares about only one thing: ensuring that Obama fails.

And the Superman hype — that came with the froth of the 2008 campaign, when his words seemed strong enough to break up a storm, and the idea of a black man becoming leader of a nation born with slavery was so potent.

...

Urban liberals, labor, blacks and Hispanics, environmentalists, the young – the core of Obama’s army in 2008 — are disappointed in the president...

But instead of waiting for an arm-flapping populist to emerge from the genteel summer redoubt on MarthaÂ’s Vineyard, the left should focus on the coming ground war, and try to fill Congress with new people who can at least tell fact from fiction.

Ah, we've given up on Obama. Time to turn to Congress.

Posted by: Ace at 08:11 PM | Comments (95)
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Good evening, Morons and Moronettes, and hello from the Moron Central Weather Desk. It looks like we may have some good news for once, but there is still danger for the Eastern Seaboard... here are the quick hits.

1) The expected strengthening of Irene did not happen this afternoon, and the storm currently has maximum sustained winds of 100 mph, making it a strong Category 2 storm. We had anticipated it strengthening to a Category 3 storm, so this is a good development. With that said...

2) The track seems to be firming up, having the center of circulation crossing the eastern point of North Carolina and hugging the coasts of Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey before entering New England somewhere fairly close to New York City, most likely as a Category 1 hurricane.

Details below the fold... more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:45 PM | Comments (65)
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Well it looks like CDR-M is caught up in this whole "Hurricane Irene" business or as the Krug-Man calls it, "Organic Jobs Creator."

Just a reminder to the East Coast Elite Morons that there is a storm is a'headin your way.

Details on the storm's path can be found here. If you are potentially in the path, then you should probably check this every hour or so. As TMI3rd pointed out this morning, these things can easily change direction.

Now for something unrelated to Hurricane Irene.

Let's see what I've got here...[rummaging through internet]....ahh here we go.

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:00 PM | Comments (774)
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I don't mean that ironically or sarcastically. I just got into a tiff with someone, and I did think: Look, this is what people are thinking. People are backing horses, and people aren't fond of the other horses.

There's not really any point saying "11th Commandment" when everyone's knocking each other's candidates anyhow.

So let's have it all out here. Get all the grievances and knocks out.

I don't know if this will create less bad blood or more bad blood. But it's on everyone's mind, so no sense pretending it's not.

Posted by: Ace at 03:36 PM | Comments (785)
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If you saw it, someone spoofed Paul Krugman as saying a really big juicy hurricane would get this economy going again.

Spoof, but Krugman really is a big believer in the Broken Windows Fallacy the idea that wanton destruction of property is actually stimulative and hence good for the economy, as people have to go out and buy replacements for all they've lost.

This animates (partly) the idea that WWII was what got us out of the Depression.

Liberals keep arguing that it is literally true that a vandal going up and down a street shattering windows is doing a public service, for that vandalism of $1000 worth of windows will result in the spurring of $1500 of new economic activity.

The reason this is a fallacy is that while it may be true that $1000 may have to be spent on replacement windows, and that spending may spur $500 in additional, secondary-effect spending (the glazier can now buy a horse), it only seems so if you ignore the other parties, the hidden men, in this parable.

What about the tailor, who would have sold a $200 suit if his client had not needed to divert that $200 to buying new windows? And so on. The glazier is doing gangbusters business, but the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker now find their clients cutting back.

All that's really happened here is exactly what it intuitively seemed like was happening -- property was being destroyed, and hence, people were poorer. The attempt to be clever and see something counterintuitive fails; those who sought to look clever instead look dumb.

I busted on Matt Yglesias' chops on Twitter -- he was really pushing this nonsense -- and asked him, "If losing property leads to greater wealth, can I have all your shit? Win win, baby."

Thusfar my invitation to accept all of his shit, forcing him to buy new shit, and thus making him wealthier (?), has gone unaccepted.

Anyway, this article accidentally explains why that is a fallacy.

Hurricane Irene sent East Coast shoppers into stores to stock up on essentials this week, instead of the clothes, notebooks and other supplies that retailers were counting on selling as children get ready to go back to school.

Chains such as Home Depot Inc (HD.N) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) were doing brisk business on Friday, selling water, flashlights, batteries and other goods in states standing in Irene's potential track from the Carolinas to Massachusetts.

"Most probably, the biggest demand right now is for generators, obviously," said Suzanne Roche, manager of a Sears (SHLD.O) store in Wilmington, North Carolina. "We have got customers calling nonstop."

...

Those who were not trying to squeeze in one last summer stay on the New Jersey shore or Long Island beaches may have been planning to go to shopping malls to buy clothes, shoes and other items for children who will soon head back to school. Now those plans will be on hold.

"Nobody is going to go to a mall to buy a pair of jeans," said Richard Hastings, consumer strategist at Global Hunter Securities.

Exactly, and that is why it is called Hurricane Irene, not Economic Miracle Irene.

Posted by: Ace at 02:50 PM | Comments (113)
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I had predicted he'd cut it short two days. I knew he'd cut it short to get that headline -- President Wonderful Sacrifices So Much For You Inbred Ingrates--but I forgot that he is extremely lazy and didn't mind making it obvious that that's what he was doing.

Know what I mean? If it's two days it doesn't look like he's barely cutting it short just to say "I cut it short." But he loves his me-time, so, screw it, he's heading home a few hours early.

So the Hardest Workin' Man In Political Show Business took merely nine days off.

"In the mind of the president, he felt it was prudent for him to be at the White House this evening," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. Obama had been scheduled to end his nine-day family vacation on Saturday morning.

In the mind of his PR adviser, you mean.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:27 PM | Comments (165)
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Sorry, it's about Perry being ahead with Tea Partiers. I'm just throwing this up because I got lost in the discussion in the last post and stopped putting up new posts. Sometimes the blog itself, the comments, become more interesting to me than actually working. Go figure.

Anyway, Allah's on about what I was tellin' y'alls months ago that Perry seemed like the sort of guy who could pull a good amount of support from the various corners of the conservative coalition, and hence no one would say "Oh my God, I can't support this guy." Which is important.

Perry is beating Romney in two key areas:

Perry, not surprisingly given his lead among Tea Party supporters, is the preferred candidate among Republicans who identify “government spending and power” as the set of issues most important to them. Perry is the top choice of 31% of these Republicans, with Romney (17%), Paul (13%), and Bachmann (12%) vying for second place.

But Perry also has a slight edge over Romney, 25% to 19%, among Republicans who say business and the economy is their top issue. Romney, a wealthy businessman, has argued his business credentials make him better suited to solve the economic problems facing the country than candidates who lack significant private-sector experience.

Obviously that's tough for Romney, if he's beaten in one and edged in the other.

Another poll shows the GOP finally satisfied with its field, which may reflect some people happy that Perry got in (like me), and also just a general exhaustion with the waiting game. Just a general "Oh what the hell, I'm tired of waiting for Chris Christie or Sarah Palin, I guess I'll look at the declared candidates" kind of reaction.

(Not to suggest that people wouldn't support either candidate, just that some people might figure they've held off looking at the declared candidates long enough.)

Meanwhile, an IBD reporter says a media friend told him:

"We plan to declare war on Rick Perry and do all in our power to crush him."

One thing that surprises me: I thought Perry would be an okay pick for the Establishment -- that they might not love him, but they'd like him.

I keep being told that is not the case:

And frankly, for a few in the GOP consultant class, they'll gladly see Perry lose in November just to ensure they are not shut out of a Republican White House. For all the talk of Perry being an establishment guy, the establishment hates his guts as much as the left does . .

Another guy just told me this last night. And I said, "Really?" And he said, "Really."

I suppose that sort of helps Perry, I guess, although it was actually my thought he would be borderline acceptable to the Establishment.

Posted by: Ace at 01:40 PM | Comments (325)
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I will address this in longer way, regarding Rick Perry's proposed Trans Texas Corridor.

I have recently learned -- according to some -- that apparently it is contrary to the idea of a limited state to build roads. Michelle Malkin recently linked an article stating that Perry did not adequately respect "property rights" because this proposed road-building endeavor, like all road-building endeavors since the foundation of the Republic, involved the use of eminent domain to condemn and seize property from citizens.

I am baffled about this. Eminent domain is clearly listed to be a power of the federal government in the fifth amendment (with the protective, property defending caveat that the owner must be given "just compensation" in exchange for the taking). States of course always had that power. (And, I just learned, prior to the 5th Amendment, compensation wasn't even offered, usually.)

But there seem to be some people now questioning whether powers of the state expressly listed in the Constitution are "unconstitutional."

I keep wondering, as far as some of these New Parts of the Constitution I didn't even realize existed, "Where the hell are you getting this from?"

I had thought that historically a radical libertarian would say the state's functions are limited to:

1, defending the borders from foreign invaders,

2, providing police to keep the peace and protect the citizenry, and

3, building and maintaining roads and ports,

but I now seem to see chatter that 3 turns out to be sort of unconstitutional. And people don't really say why; they just sort of assert it. It was unconstitutional for Rick Perry to suggest building an extensive highway system in ever-growing Texas.

Really?

Where are you getting this from? When did we decide that of the 3 undeniable functions of the state -- admitted even by the hardest of hard core libertarians -- we were, without voting on it or even much discussing, subtracting 1 to leave only 2 functions of the state?

Anyway, this is connected to Michelle Obama. Let me explain.

There is tendency among conservatives -- particularly now -- to cast virtually every single discussion of policy in terms of whether or not the state even has this power in the first place.

In many cases, I think this is a sanguinary development. Conservatives keep saying, "Why are we assuming, as an initial matter, the government needs to act at all, and instead proceeding directly to questions of in what manner shall it act?"

I actually agree with that. I think that is long overdue. We need to have that discussion. Every new law should begin at Step 0. Not Step 1. Step 0 -- an inquiry into a, does the government have this power? and b, even conceding it does have this power, is it urgent that it should exercise this power?

However, we seem to have ventured into an Undiscovered Country in which things I know for a fact are constitutional and have always been done by the state (or states) -- since the days when we were colonists; since the Articles of Confederation; since the Constitution; since the Golden Age of libertarian thought in the 1920s -- are now simply being claimed to be unconstitutional, without even an argument as to how this surprising conclusion came to be held.

I think arguments are getting very sloppy here. I think disputes that are accurately about proper policy keep morphing into arguments about general philosophical/theoretical arguments about the power of the state, and furthermore, we seem to be frequently steering into wildly ahistorical territory in asserting, without evidence, The state never had x power.

In the situation of Michelle Obama's eat-right nonsense, there are two strains of argument being made, and I become confused between them.

The first, advanced by, for example, Jewell, is that this is jackass policy which is counterproductive as kids will not eat badly-prepared, boiled and mushy carrots, so even if you think you're making them "eat healthy," guess what, you lose, the kids are actually just eating Combos instead.

That's a policy criticism. I get that.

The second argument, which always pops up, almost immediately, is some kind of argument that Michelle Obama, or the state itself, simply does not have any power to advance any policy whatsoever in this sphere. This argument has the advantage, as a tactical matter, of ignoring the pesky details of actual policy and simply declaring at the outset no policy choice is "right" for there is no power to effect any policy at all.

However, as tactically useful as that argument may be, it has the disadvantage of being... wrong.

Whether you agree, or disagree, with the current policy chosen by your school administrators -- and you probably disagree, and are right to disagree -- it is simply not true, and will not become true by simply claiming it enough times, that school policy was never before in our nation's history set by school boards and state lawmakers.

I keep finding that arguments that should be about policy questions keep morphing into these ahistorical claims -- often not explicitly stated, but you can read between the lines -- that the state doesn't have the power to make decisions in the schools it runs.

This is sloppy. If you're going to make that claim, make it explicitly, and be prepared to show your work as far as historical citation.

Instead the claim just keeps being made in a sort of stealthy way, with recourse to general expressions of annoyance like "Stay out of my life," or whatever, but the animating principle behind such sentiments is that the state has exceeded its power.

In some cases this is undeniably true, and it should be proclaimed, vigorously.

In some cases this is undeniably false, and it simply isn't true the state has exceeded its historical powers -- it is simply the case that it exercising those powers in a stupid, deleterious, arrogant manner.

To keep confusing one argument for the other results in confusion on the part of a respondent, as he doesn't know which of these two arguments is actually in play at any moment.

Why does this argument always make an appearance in every situation?

1, it's a sexier argument. Rather than talking about mundane details of workaday policy, we're talking about the State and its proper relation to the Citizen and the impact on Freedom so ensuing. An important argument, but like anything sexy... well, there's always time for The Sexy. Sexiness draws interest.

2, it permits everyone to discuss the issue in some way, even people who may not know any details about the issue at all, because they can always step back, take the view from 10,000 feet, take an argument about specific details and turn it into one of General Principles, and start offering an opinion within five minutes.

I get that. I do that too. When I don't have anything specific to say, I say something general. I'm not being condescending when I observe this is standard operating procedure for virtually all humans in some kind of discussion or debate.

However, it is often the case that the resort to General Principles is misplaced, as it simply is not true that General Principles supply an answer, regardless of details.

It is said we need to reevaluate, discuss, and consider the powers we grant the state. I agree. However, note that "evaluate," "discuss" and "consider" are parts of that sentence.

It's getting a little bizarre that every discussion quickly becomes an assertion (by some) that the state doesn't have this power, doesn't have that one, never had that one.

In some cases, that's right.

In the case of Michelle Obama, it is not correct to say First Ladies have traditionally kept out of citizens' business. This is false. First Lady Laura Bush's campaign was for literacy and reading more (especially directed at kids, of course), so it simply false to claim that Michelle Obama is acting outside the portfolio of duties for first ladies.

You may say that she is acting poorly, and making dumb errors, and the rest, but it is simply false to claim she's doing something novel and somehow destructive of liberty.

No one nagging at you is eroding your liberty. You might not like the nagging, but people have the right to nag. If you don't like nagging, tune it out. You don't have the right to freedom from nagging.

The rest of it with Michelle Obama is dumb laws and dumb policies implemented by the schools, and those should be criticized, but the stealth underlying assumption in many cases is that "school boards have no right" and guess what? They do. They always did. If you want them to act better, you take them over.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but it is beginning to drive me batty. It seems every single day I am learning that something else is "unconstitutional," very often without any explanation about this conclusion at all.

And the reason I'm pushing back on this is not because I'm a RINO, but if we are to have a discussion about the proper role of the state and the constitution's framework for its powers, we actually have to have an actual discussion, where assertions are challenged and questioned then, only if they pass muster, adopted as general caucus policy.

Perry's Trans Texas Corridor may have been dumb for reasons of policy (I have no idea) but it is simply wrong to keep this drumbeat up that The state is not permitted to build roads and condemn property for these purposes.

On some of these things I am becoming exasperated. People who claim to revere the Constitution really need to respect it enough to look things up before making claims about what it says.

Posted by: Ace at 11:42 AM | Comments (490)
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Can't wait for the consensus.

Health experts blame passive overeating for global pandemic, warning in the Lancet that governments must tackle obesity now.

What's passive overeating?

Swinburn’s paper comes up with a clear primary culprit: a powerful global food industry “which is producing more processed, affordable, and effectively-marketed food than ever before.”

...

He said an “increased supply of cheap, palatable, energy-dense foods,” coupled with better distribution and marketing, had led to “passive overconsumption.”

...

“They [the government] have to look to how other epidemics, like road injuries and tobacco, have been handled and almost always it has been through taxes and regulation.”

There are two parts to this: The diagnosis, and the suggested cure.

Unlike David Thompson (who posts this on his blog), I do think the writer is right about "passive overeating" being the driving force behind obesity.

Let me explain.

How food is prepared has a great impact on people's weight. steve_in_hb relayed to me an experiment on the impact of cooking on diet, shown in a documentary.

A scientist got a group of young people and basically told them to eat everything they could. The catch? The food was raw. It was all apples and potatoes and such.

The young people dropped weight at a very high rate. They could not eat enough to maintain weight, even though they had plentiful food.

Now, for the second phase, he introduced the caveman-era technology of cooking by fire and boiling water. With the exact same foods, the group regained most of their lost weight and stabilized.

There are two reasons for this. First of all, cooking makes food taste better and hence permits you to eat more of it. If you consider eating a raw potato -- it's not a pleasant affair. You're not dying for more raw potato. But now chop up those potatoes and grill them over a fire, add some salt, and now... well, it tastes good. You want more.

But less well understood is that the body actually exerts energy to break down unprocessed food, so the net energy capture from eating food is always [the food's energy potential] minus [the energy spent by the body to capture that potential].

Cooking is actually a form of predigestion, breaking down difficult-to-process structures in food to make it easier for the body to digest, as part of the work has already been subcontracted out to the grill.

Point is, among the less-appreciated revolutions in human diet and physique is the rise of cooking as a technology. We all know how important agriculture and husbandry were, but but fewer realize how critical the simple act of cooking impacted human development.

Flash forward and humanity is making huge strides in agriculture. We have bred stunted, tiny, almost-just-berries not-so-sweet proto-apples to be the voluptuous sugar-loaded true apples we know today. And the same for corn and all the rest of our agricultural staples which did not exist for our poor caveman ancestors.

But our biology is still basically that old caveman biology. We sense we are sated when our stomachs are filled, as we always have; but now, when our stomachs are filled, they are probably packed with 2500 calories, whereas our cavemen ancestors' bellies would be stuffed to the rafters with, I don't know, 600 calories of net energy.

Anyway, point is, this is all almost certainly true. We are overeating and getting fat because our food is so rich and filled with nutrients and delicious carbohydrates (and fat, and protein) that by the time we feel sated, as our cavemen were, we haven't eaten a caveman meal, but the energy equivalent of four full days of caveman foraging.

Okay, I think he's right. I think actually most nutritionists and scientists think he's right.

But his proposed cure for that is to... dramatically raise the taxes on food in order to discourage people from eating?

Really?

He couldn't just write a blog post like I did?

I have said this before, and I am not just flattering commenters when I say this: A long time ago I did in fact accept the basic assumptions that liberals assumptions, unconsciously.

Lately I am having a re-think of things I've never thought about. Like a liberal, I just assumed them without having realized I was assuming anything much at all.

I'm actually learning some things here. I am learning to question.

The most important thing I'm focusing on lately is the Government must trust its own citizens if citizens are to trust the government.

And that means assuming not that citizens are children in need of government bullying and nagging and instruction and allowances and curfews, but assuming they are adults who can actually manage their own g-damn affairs.

Now, is everyone actually of stable, forward-thinking, impulse-controlling adult mentality? No. But that's life. You cannot strip rights and privileges, and the simple respect shown when you just let someone figure things out for themselves, from 90% of the public in order to help the 10% of the public that could afford a little paternalism.

This is part of the problem with liberalism, too. When liberals do things like this, they are really seeking to control people, benevolently in their minds, in order to achieve the paternalistic end of, they think, saving them from themselves.

But they have this idea that paternalism is a dirty word. And maybe it is. But there is nothing to be gained by refusing to call things by their proper names. And because they don't want the low-functioning members of society who might actually benefit from a little paternalism to feel the stigma of having paternalism shown to them, they make their paternalism universal, so everyone is equally condescended to.

I think this is what annoys conservatives about something I consider sort of unobjectionable -- that Michelle Obama, like other first ladies, has a goo-goo feel-good Positive Social Messaging campaign, and in her case, it's childhood obesity. I think conservatives chafe at being instructed by her as if they were children.

I actually still think that is off-base, for several reasons. 1, her nagging is not coercive, it is merely suggesting, and 2, there really are a lot of people who could use a little instruction about obesity. Not to get all racial here, but childhood obesity is especially pronounced in the black community, and guess which community actually looks up to Michelle Obama the most? The black community, of course.

So I do understand the "Oh just leave me alone and worry about your own damn life" impulse, but I don't really understand how a non-coercive nagging about eating healthy is some kind of improper (bordering on unconstitutional) interference with people's freedoms.

But the point I'm actually getting at is that, for a liberal, it is an unmitigated sin to say The poor and dysfunctional need our instruction, and here it is, especially for them, it becomes instead a general nagging of the entire population, and most of the population kind of knows they shouldn't eat too many Zingers and Ho-Hos and McDonald's apple pies.

The Victorians were pretty paternalistic -- but they called it by its actual name and didn't try to sound as if they were attempting to improve everyone. Victorian London actually had a fair number of apartment buildings set up by paternalistic minded people -- the apartments were cheap and clean and better than most poor folks could afford, but there were paternalistic rules imposed for living there. About gainful employment, health habits, interactions with the opposite sex and all the rest of it. It was in fact paternalistic; but let's face it, if you're subsidizing someone as if he is a child and you are his father, that is what paternalism is. Isn't it?

We seem to have gone wrong on this point, where we (as citizens not on the government dole, but contributing to it) step in act as surrogate fathers for people in need of that kind of paternalistic support, but then we recoil for calling a thing by its name, or from making up a set of Rules of Good Conduct and Specified Tasks for Receipt of Allowance Money, as fathers tend to do. Instead, it's just the subsidy part of paternalism, without nannying that traditionally went along with it.

And so we get more people in need of it. It's all upside.

So here's what I think: I think people are passively overeating. I think there is a disconnect between our biological signals for satiation, which stopped evolving 40,000 years ago, and our current food technology, which has evolved like gangbusters and continues doing so.

And I think the cure for this is telling people so.

And then trusting them to work it out for themselves.

And if they don't, they get fat, and they have elevated health risks.

And so what?

And so damn what. Not everyone is going to live to be 100, and only in a true tyranny could the government force people into the habits likely to get them to 100+ years of age.

Some people want to live longer and some people want to be thinner and some people want to indulge an appetite.

Let's trust people to work this out, huh? And if someone really, really likes food, and has decided, more or less, to trade a few years of his life for the pleasures of overeating, let's respect that decision, too.

People have the right to be wrong. I do not want to live in a Calvinist, paternalistic, endlessly moralizing religious tyranny. I do not wish to live under the classic version of that that liberals so fear, but I equally do not wish to live in the leftwing version of such a Puritan hell, in which I have a priesthood of bureaucrats forcing me to live my life as the Church of Healthy Living as decided in its third papal encyclical on Happy Meals.

Oh: And I guess my theory -- that if you're getting a subsidy, you have to endure a little paternalism -- is part of the driving force between the ever-increasing paternalism of the state.

After all, we're all cross-subsidizing each other now. The government is picking each of our pockets of $1000 to give $800 to someone else for whatever purpose (and giving us in return our own $200-$800 subsidy from someone else; but note few of us even get back a decent fraction of what we've paid out).

And since the country is now so heavily cross-subsidized, I guess the state thinks it's only good and just that we have more paternalism to accompany that.

But that's wrong.

That is not an argument for more paternalism.

That is a very strong argument for less subsidization.

But Michelle Obama Isn't Just Suggesting: Jewell writes:

Her "Let's Move" or whatever [...] it's called has yanked everything even remotely enjoyable to eat out of the schools. Replacing french fries with carrot sticks only causes the kid to not eat. Most of the "healthy lunches" are ending up in the trash can because the kids won't eat them. Some schools are even considering banning bringing your own damn lunch!

Okay, I didn't know that. A couple of points, though:

1. There is no federal law about this (at least as far as I know, and I know I don't know much). If I'm wrong, please correct me. Michelle Obama's nagging, then, is being taken up by school administrators (who I assume worship her); it's those people who ultimately have the actual power to do this sort of thing.

2. Making food kids won't actually eat is of course stupid.

That said, I don't know about you, but when I went to school, the lunch was a bounty of carbohydrates. And kids love the very things they shouldn't love (and adults learn to moderate).

But I don't know what you do about that-- that's what kids want to eat, and that's what they will eat, whether you offer them carrots or not.

C.S. Lewis: A commenter quotes him. Unlike the Chesterton's Fence quote, of course I've read this one dozens of times. But it's always worth a re-read.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Posted by: Ace at 10:12 AM | Comments (378)
Post contains 2112 words, total size 13 kb.

I'd sure like an accounting of how they're computing these figures because they seem to perpetually show a bias in favor of higher GDP figures.

Q1 was already revised down from a so-so 3.1% down to a meager 1.3%. Wait a second, no it wasn't. It was already at a meager 1.3% and then revised down to a verge-of-recession 0.4%.

(By the way, these figures are annualized gross domestic product figures for the quarter. They represent, in theory, all productive activity in the US. They are annualized, which means when we offer a figure like "1.3%" we mean if the economy grew at this rate for the entire year rather than the three month, one-season snapshot we're actually looking at, it would be 1.3%. In other words, for the real growth (or contraction) that occurred in the quarter, divide by four. "Annualizing" the figure by multiplying by four is done for convenience, so we can compare a one-quarter rate to, say, the average yearly growth rate in the last 30 years (guessing, around 3.1%) and compare to that.)

The last quarter, Q2, was estimated to be 1.3%. It's now revised down to 1.0%, and that's even a bit lower than the downward revision "expected" by economic forecasters, down to 1.1%.

So we are actually officially on a recession watch.

The United States is on a recession watch after a massive sell-off in the stock market knocked down consumer and business sentiment. The plunge in share prices followed Standard & PoorÂ’s decision to strip the nation of its top notch AAA credit rating and a spreading sovereign debt crisis in Europe.

While sentiment has deteriorated, data such as industrial production, retail sales and employment suggest the economy could avoid an outright contraction.

Ed notes there's one glimmer of good news--

There was one warning note: the core personal consumption expenditure index rose at 2.2%, faster than anything since 2009Q4, according to Reuters. That may be enough to keep the Fed on the sidelines, which we will know later today when Ben Bernanke gives a speech today on the economy and the FedÂ’s direction.

Yeah I don't really know what that means. I know the speed at which wealth is created is slowing to a crawl and the trend seems not your friend. Reports from the last snapshot generally show the economy deterioriating still further. There are almost no positive indicators whatsoever. So if the last half year was at an average of 0.7% on an annualized basis... well, it doesn't take too much further deterioration to bring that under 0.0% and kick off the actual second acknowledged (technical definition) recession.

Funny thing about recessions: Once they begin, economists tell you you've actually been in one for a half a year or full year. That's because once a technical recession (two back-to-back quarters of negative growth) begins, they date the recession as beginning from the last peak of economic activity.

That's why when the Bush recession hit in 2008 (if I'm remembering it right), economists then said we'd been in recession since sometime in 2007 (which was the last peak, after which later GDP figures were all lower).

In this case, if we fall into recession, it will be dated as having begun in the first quarter of 2010. (Note: I think. I don't know the details of how they date the onset of a recession.) Well before those awful Republicans even won the midterms, nevermind actually sat as a Congress and began to do things.

Posted by: Ace at 08:29 AM | Comments (312)
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