Looks like Paul Ryan is going to deliver a much-needed speech tomorrow.
[Update a few minutes later]
“That’s not class warfare. It’s math.”
Forget math. This guy can’t even do basic arithmetic. And apparently neither can anyone on his staff. Can we see his grades, now?
[Update a few minutes later]
A follow-up for those attempting to defend the president’s math.
…for Gerard Van der Leun.
Liberals, especially, should be almost desperate to shrink government to a size that’s sustainable in the long run. Here’s a graph–one of many documenting the public’s declining faith in government efficacy, in this case that of the federal government. It shows that in 1986 Americans estimated that the government wasted 38 cents of every dollar it raises. Now they estimate it wastes 51 cents. It’s not hard to read the inevitable death of even Clinton-style liberalism in the rising slope of that chart, and others like it. Surely at least part of the voter’s disdain for government comes from their (accurate) perception that it’s bloated and keeps bloating, with new agencies and inefficiencies simply layered in on top of the old ones. Meanwhile, the private sector has used computer technology to streamline itself, eliminating layers rather than adding.
Democrats, as the party of government, need to turn that perception around by. Obama, by dedicating his stimulus to preserving bureaucracy as we know it, has by and large missed this opportunity. (Clinton would not have missed it.)
Public sector employment is also pretty much the worst sector to stimulate if you care about government deficits, since the unnecessary jobs saved will linger after the recession ends, protected by powerful public worker unions, where they will add to government’s long term costs. If we stimulate the construction industry, the tire industry or any other private sector industry, there’s not that same budgetary downside. If all those jobs linger after the recession ends, so much the better.
Even direct government employment in new WPA-style jobs would be better in this respect, I think, than simply paying to preserve existing government jobs. It’s easier to wind a WPA down, when recession ends, than it is to shrink the entrenched education bureaucracy.
One of the few things that Franklin Roosevelt got right was that government employees should not be allowed to unionize. It has been a disaster for the nation.
…and you destroy civilization.
It’s sad that these spoiled children have put themselves so deep into debt for educations that are worthless, both in the marketplace and in understanding how the world works. They rage against the wrong machine.
[Update a couple minutes later]
They’re also not materially poor. But they do suffer from a poverty that is worse in many ways:
These young people also suffer from a vast intellectual and moral poverty. One of the things that shines through when we interview the people taking to the streets is that so many are woefully ignorant, and that they wallow in a sea of relativism that allows for no morality other than that gained by intense navel gazing. They are the antithesis of the original American revolutionaries, whose leaders were men of exceptional erudition and thoughtfulness, and whose followers knew at the very least their Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. Revolutionaries of old were shaped by philosophy, known science, literature, practical life experience, and a deep sense of morality and justice. Today’s little park piddlers are shaped by an aching sense of unfairness, a terrible fear of human-kind (that would be the AGW shtick), and a morality shaped by Oprah and whichever fabulously rich Hollywood Leftist happens to grab the microphone on any given day.
These self-styled 99%-ers are not poor, not by any known standard, either today or in the history of the world. They are intellectually and emotionally bereft, but otherwise awash in material benefits.
Fortunately, they’re not, as they delude themselves, the 99%. If they were, the Republic would be lost.
A review, by Lileks:
It’s ridiculous to think about “Transformers 3” for more than six seconds, since it concerns “living mechanical creatures” who evolved into bipeds capable of rearranging their structure to resemble cars and trucks, even though these things do not exist on their planet. They were known as Autobots, even though those things do not exist on their planet. Then they got into a war with the Decepticons, beings who display absolutely no skill at nomenclature. If you are in the business of deception, so much so that it permeates your entire culture, it does you no service to announce the fact in your name. “Are you telling me the truth, Mr. Decepticon?” “Oh, absolutely.”
But if this bothers you, consider that you are watching a movie that has a robot from another planet who speaks in a Scottish accent. There are no words to describe the complete & utter . . . AUUUUUGHHHHH that produces in your critical brain. You can buy everything else, if you want; you can even make up some story about how they can really shape-shift into anything, not just cars, and “Autobots” is what it sounds like in our language, and really they call themselves something else, but when a character from the other side of the galaxy WHO IS A ROBOT talks in the accent of a particular part of a small island in the Northern Hemisphere, you know you’re dealing with large groups of people who don’t give a crap. The entire franchise is predicated on the unwillingness of anyone to ever utter the phrase “but that makes absolutely no sense” during any part of the creative process. Oh, I know why he speaks with a Scottish accent: he’s an engineer, and Scotty had such an accent. Ergo. Of course ergo. But it’s still wrong.
So it’s all stupid. It’s a stupid cartoon for little boys. This is fine if your inner little-boy can be coaxed out to enjoy the carnage, and your adult brain can enjoy the disjointed flow (action! broad comedy! heartwarming stuff! offkilter guy yelling a lot! action! drama!) and skip all the Trials of Shia nonsense that fill up the first hour.The only reason it has any resonance to someone who meets the technical definition of adulthood is because A) Optimus Prime sounds really wise and noble and moving, and damn, you just like the big guy, and B) it’s interesting to watch all that stuff coming at you. The CGI on this thing is just amazing. The battle in Chicago, which consumes the final seven hours of the movie, is a thing to behold.
Unfortunately, it too infested with humans. The script is designed to make you loathe every moment wasted with the human actors. GET BACK TO THE ROBOTS! No one acts like people act. No one says things people would say in these situations. Everyone is an archetype devoid of embellishment. The only way to watch the movie is to hit the NEXT CHAPTER button and unless there is a robot in the FIRST SECOND OF THE CHAPTER, hit next, because they had their chance to give you robots and they missed it. Repeat until movie is over.
I think I’ll pass. But go read the whole Bleat — there are bonus pics of classical composers, and thoughts on the elusive and mysterious nature of memories.
Some thoughts on what might motivate ET to attack us.
Doug Mohney weighs in (though he misspells Keith Cowing’s name — a common error). The SLS is fiscally insane.
Nice work, if you can get it:
Though it would be easy for cynics to assume otherwise, this was a serious study based on a series of scientific measurements and not on the opinions of Mallucci.
‘We used computer measuring tools to examine the dimensions and proportions of each pair of breasts, identifying four features common to all of them,’ he explains.
The features analysed were the dimensions of the upper and lower pole, medical terms that describe the areas above and below the nipple; plus the angle at which the nipple points and the slope of the upper pole.
‘The study revealed that in all cases the nipple ‘‘meridian’’ – the horizontal line drawn at the level of the nipple – lay at a point where, on average, the proportion of the breast above it represented 45 per cent of overall volume of the breast and below it 55 per cent.
‘In the majority of cases the upper pole was either straight or concave, and the nipple was pointing skywards at an average angle of 20 degrees. In all cases the breasts demonstrated a tight convex lower pole – a neat but voluminous curve.
The science is settled.