Supremes

Instapundit:  "The Supreme Court has refused to save us from ourselves."

Maybe -- but that's not the Supreme Court's job, is it?

My view is that the GOP has nobody top blame but themselves.  The problems of, for example, coverage for existing conditions and portability of benefits had to be solved, and that should have been done politically, not left to the courts.  Instead, it was all allowed to sit there like a time bomb waiting to go off.

Well, Boom.  I expect the response to be some DOA campaign for legislative repeal.  Good luck with that.

I don't see any reason to be optimistic going forward.  In democracies led by permanent career politicians who get re-elected by redistributing goodies to ever-growing numbers of free-riders, social policy is a wrench that only ratchets to the left.  Click, click, click -- grab all you can until it finally snaps.

Sorry grandkids, apres nous, le deluge.

Byron

diet

Atkins was right: High fat, low carbs.  Bacon, eggs, and well-marbled steak.  Works great, and it's a diet I can stay on.  We have an obesity epidemic partly because the Government has its food pyramid approximately upside down. 

The book is Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat, And What To Do About It, Knopf, 2011.

Byron

Worse than random numbers

Junk Science Week: Climate models fail reality test

Climate computer models are far too crude to be worth taking seriously, and they will remain that way a long way into the future. The confidence intervals around estimated values are so wide as to be perfectly useless for any practical purpose whatsoever.  Much money could be saved by throwing darts instead.  Blindfolded.

The idea of making important economic policy from the predictions if these models is an idea so perfectly ludicrous that it could only sound plausible to somebody as ignorant and politically-driven as Barack Obama.  The whole enterprise is a travesty of science of the worst kind. The Piltdown Man fraud was nothing compared with this.

Byron

What is he?

Is President Obama A Pathological Liar?

I'd classify Obama as a fabulist, and the elaborate fable he's constructed -- been allowed to construct -- is himself.  The Obama Fable has been the key to his rise, the liberal media have been his primary enablers, and the list of falsehoods below is no doubt the tip of a much larger ice berg of lies, embellishments, and exaggerations.

Major media should now be on this story like a pack of hungry wolves, as in the ravenous media dissection of Sarah Palin and GW Bush -- which even included counterfeit documents promoted by Dan Rather at CBS.  But, no.  Instead we will hear only crickets, as in the media blackout of the John Edwards love-child story which was left for the National Enquirer to cover.  

Elizabeth Warren is a minor league example of the same sort of fabulism, and the liberal media have carefully failed to cover that, also, demonstrating yet again what sort of pathetic, rancid joke they've turned into.  Traditionally, journalism claimed to operate as a truth-seeking enterprise on the principle that "If something/body looks too good to be true, it probably isn't."  But journalism has been largely replaced by shameless liberal advocacy, making it a conservative force in the worst sense of the term.  I see the liberal media and the labor unions as the two institutions in our society most assiduously committed to preserving and promoting the status quo.

Byron

Religion of Peace

This young man's crime was to convert to Christianity.

For that his head is sawed off in the name of Allah, and the video distributed.

This is from Tunisia, which NPR featured rather favorably this morning in Steve Inskeep's "Arab Spring" series.  In his report, Steve didn't mention anything like this as far as I can recall. Not sufficiently Spring-like, I guess.

Some things, once seen, can't be unseen, so you might want to skip this one.  Or not watch past the 2:20 mark.

Then again, this is Islam as practiced, after all, and not an aspect they seem much interested in hiding; so I suppose you might consider it a necessary test of your multi-cultural bona fides, your commitment to respecting the cultural practices of others.

Of course, on Islam's part political correctness means specifically NOT respecting non-Islamic cultural practices -- which is how this man came to be butchered on video.

Such a conundrum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sxGWlOQZyEs

Ya think?

An Economy Built to Stall: With a third slowdown in three years, maybe the problem is the policies.

Yes, but the root of the problem is a president who holds office only because of a stem-to-stern united effort by the liberal media to put him there. Obama traded on being our First Black President, but that was never the uniquely important thing about him. We are now discovering that the true breakthrough Obama represents is not his race, but that he is our first post-modern president.

Post-modernism sees our experience of reality as increasingly being a construction based on media images. In our era, "objective" reality is progressively overwhelmed and superseded by versions of reality portrayed in media images.  The more that media images come into close coordination and agreement, the more the portrayals and associated narratives found there are accepted as "true."  (How could ABC, NPR, CBS, NYT, WaPo, etc. etc. etc. all be wrong?)  Traditional categories of analysis -- such as judgments of true or false based on independent empirical evidence -- are replaced by "negotiations" to find consensus about the "truth" of images and the narratives associated with them.

In two (!) autobiographies, Barack Obama (and some helpers, like radical leftist Bill Ayers) presented a carefully constructed narrative as his "life story." The story was -- and was no doubt designed to be -- highly attractive to the liberal media, which quickly stamped it as a "true" account. The story, as a consensus media image, then became the man. Information that might challenge the image, and the constructed reality it now represented, was ignored or explained away.

For example, when the hateful spewings of Rev. Wright -- the pastor of Obama's church, who had married him and Michelle, and who had baptized their children -- became known, the media quickly accepted Obama's claim that he had sat in the pastor's pew for 20 years without ever hearing what Wright was saying.  In order to preserve the consensus image of the constructed Obama, the most plausible objective history -- that Obama heard it all and never objected -- had to be negotiated out of the media narrative. 

Obama's claim of ignorance about Wright's preaching was preposterous as objective truth, but it was "true" in terms of its consistency with Obama's consensus media image as The One who offered post-racial, post-class Hope and Change for a divided nation. And it was that construction which was finally salvaged as the "true" Obama. The negotiation was difficult, and the salvaging operation was a close call, but the media image of Obama was elected, and we had our first Post-Modern President.

Fortunately for the country, but unfortunately for the Obama presidency, business decision-makers and economic markets do not operate by the "truths" of post-modernist clap-trap. Objective facts are destroying Obama's media narrative, and I really don't see how those facts can be negotiated away, no matter how hard the media try to do that. At some point most will throw in the towel, and then Obama will be truly finished. Maureen Dowd's column in the NYT this morning is highly interesting in that light.

Byron

Econ 101

Energy Milestone: Gas Rig Share Falls Below 30%

What's depicted in the graph is an example of the way the behavior of individuals and firms is affected by prices in a market economy. Multiply this example by the hundreds of thousands of such adjustments occurring every hour of every day, and you can begin to get some sense of the vast complexity and exquisite adaptability of a capitalist economy -- the most productive generator of wealth and higher standards of living there's ever been, by far.

At the same time, you also begin to get a sense of the insurmountable problem with central planning: It can't begin to handle the sheer volume and variety of information that constantly flows through the price system -- with no guiding authority at all, just individual actors pursuing their own interests as efficiently as they know how and as their competitors force them to do.  By comparison, central planning is deaf, dumb, and blind. 

Byron