Mayday! Mayday!

Karusi, Burundi, May 1 2013

And a Happy International Labor Day from New York City, where our Second-International Center-Deviationist mayor Bill de Blasio is putting a wrap on negotiations (which had been stalled for FIVE YEARS under the Bloomberg administration) with the United Federation of Teachers, which will restore some of that retroactive 8% raise to put them on par with bus and subway workers, spread out over the nine years of the new contract;

The officials said the teachers’ union had agreed to significant savings on health coverage that would not be made with cuts in programs or offerings and would not require an increase in premiums paid by city workers.

They're to use fewer emergency room visits and more health clinics, apparently, which is a good thing (my family uses one of those and we like the way the network is really a network), and more "prescriptions by mail", meaning email? If this really saves the city billion dollars (for all municipal workers, not just teachers), wow.

Also, more and more research demonstrates that a raise in minimum wage has no net effect on unemployment (the job losses it causes are canceled out pretty exactly by the new jobs it creates, except everybody's at a higher standard of living). It's getting to be like climate change, denial is no longer quite respectable, in addition to being wrong.

Chicago, May 1 1886, from InfosDroits.

But how do you *really* feel about capital punishment?

Linoleum print by Daniel Hodgkinson.

Looks like Mr. LessThanPerfect deleted the tweet, but luckily I made a screen shot:

Maureen sorrow than anger

Shorter Maureen Dowd, "Is Barry Whiffing?" New York Times, April 30 2012:

So remember when we were in like eighth grade and you were cool and I like wrote "Mrs. Barry Obama" in my economics notebook with all those little hearts and I would have totally done you I mean all the way and I'm not even fucking kidding? And now you're in math club? I'm like don't even try to speak to me you herb.

Image via Graphics18.

The audacity of Pope

Image by FBarok via Ken's Birdhaus.

Buckleyist theologian Ramesh Ponnuru at Ten Miles Square:

“Inequality is the root of social evil,” Pope Francis wrote in a Twitter post yesterday, with words that thrilled the left worldwide more than anything he had said since denouncing “trickle-down theories” of economics. We could read the definite article in his latest statement as indicating that the pope believes all social evil has inequality at its root. The price of that reading, though, would be to render the statement absurd. (In an apostolic exhortation, Francis had called inequality the root of “social ills,” which also suggests that reading is mistaken.)

I don't know about the thrill among the worldwide left there, since I haven't heard about it in my own circle and Ponnuru doesn't offer any links, but I did think it was curious how he seems to think you could appeal to the tweet's English grammar as a window onto the Pope's thinking in what presumably started off in some other language, like maybe Italian.*

Sure enough, there's an original Italian tweet, and it seems pretty clarifying:

Beyond humility

Shorter David Brooks, "Saving the System", New York Times, April 29, 2012:

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I do this grand strategy thing at Yale with a bunch of guys that you probably never heard of because it's, shall we say, kind of exclusive. Not Humility Studies, if you know what I mean. We were just emailing each other the other day about the state of the world, too, and how difficult it is for America to make all the other countries do what we want any more, and how stupid and petty-minded voters are, and I mentioned this article I saw in Foreign Affairs, and I can tell you we are very concerned.

Image from OceanWisher.

Studies in Grand Strategy is a full-year postgraduate class led by Professors John Lewis Gaddis, Charles Hill, and Paul Kennedy running from January to December,

Not drowning but waiving

My Heart is a Ticking Time Bomb by txgirlinaz at DeviantArt.

Over at the National Review, Andrew McCarthy chides Sarah Palin for making "jokes" equating waterboarding with baptism as not wrong but impolitic,

since they manage to provoke devout Christians and authentic Muslim moderates as much as they do jihadists

but finds it important to remind everybody that he doesn't believe the waterboarding performed by the CIA amounted to torture, because if you're being responsible you'll stick to legal definitions, as in the US Criminal Code, according to which torture only takes place in the event of "severe mental pain or suffering", that is,

Grimm tidings

Via GoodOleWoody.

Michael Grimm, known to the Times as

a former F.B.I. agent and Marine who capitalized on his straight-arrow image to win a seat in Congress, 

or to Howie at Down With Tyranny as

Sacramentary

If Sarah Palin were in charge, I hear, our enemies

would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.

Just a few random thoughts on the combination of torture with the Sacraments:

Baptism

Ice baptism at Epiphany, apparently a problem.

So

Not fooling anybody, but his piano teacher would be proud.

If you spend a certain amount of time listening to or overhearing NPR, as I have done in the mornings for years, you may not learn as much as you would from wider reading, but you do get a constant monitor on ongoing language change among the inhabitants of that Village and its friends, not only the catchphrases with a political significance but less obvious things, as when for instance people started using the semantically empty "going forward" at every opportunity.

So I've been noticing a really odd discourse pattern for the last several months, which—oops, there it is! When an interview subject begins the answer to a question with "so", in a [jump]

Navel-gazing mush

I swear I'll stop writing Piketty posts soon, or at least try to pause to read Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century myself, somehow, but it's going to be really hard if these conservatives don't give it a rest. There are just so many of them, just sufficiently stupider than me as to be not worth the attention of any actual economists (though Krugman couldn't resist a brief shout-out to Brooks this morning), and it gives you such a rush to realize you really do in a simple and straightforward sense know more about economics than Ross Douthat or Megan McArdle or—what's this? James Poulos?

Do any of you all recall James Poulos, an Edroso candidate for the title of worst writer working in the English language, whom I had the opportunity to cast as the logorrhoeic slave Lucky in an imaginary production of Waiting for Godot? Yeah, that James Poulos.

He's still around, it seems, still a colossally bad writer, and getting gigs with the Daily Beast, so you don't have to feel sorry for him, and apparently he too has been driven to write a [jump]

Quasi like a fox

Images via Goodreads.

Like Megan McArdle, David Brooks is so excited by the appearance of Thomas Piketty's Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century that he needs to respond to it right away, and he bursts into his own Shorter:

The book is very good and interesting, but it has pretty obvious weaknesses. Though economists are really not good at predicting the future, Piketty makes a series of educated guesses about the next century.

Well, that's a pretty obvious weakness, anyway. I mean, some of those predictions may well fail to come true, depending on what they are. So it turns out that there's no need to read it, which is a good thing, since it probably has a lot of math in it.

But that doesn't mean we can't propose a three-point program. Since economists may not be good at predicting the future, but non-economists are great at coming up with prescriptions for how to cope with what they can't imagine:

No racism here

Next time somebody's telling you about the racist Democrats of 50 years ago and how it's Republicans who passed the Civil Rights Act, just close your eyes and remember what the 1964 presidential campaign was actually like.

Via Erik Loomis at LGM.

You probably thought it was Nixon that invented the Southern strategy in the 1968 campaign, and so did I, but I was forgetting. Barry Goldwater totally rejected racism, as we all know, and merely rejected the Civil Rights Act on these absolutely abstract grounds, nothing to do with black folks here, oh no not at all, but you know racism didn't reject him; it knew something about him he didn't (apparently, if you know what I mean) know himself.

Via Pari_Passu.

Megan whoopee

Photo by David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons.

Hahahaha Megan McArdle:

I apologize in advance, because I am going to talk about a book that I have not yet read. To be clear, I intend to read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” It is sitting on my (virtual) bedside with a big stack of other (digital) books that I intend to read. But it’s far down in the queue, and I’m afraid that I can’t wait to weigh in — not on the book itself, but on its topic. 

But the topic might not be what you think it is, you know. You might want to at least read a couple of reviews all the way through, huh?

Real Leaders

Shorter David Brooks, "The Leadership Emotions", April 22 2014:

Barack lacks all conviction, while Joe Biden
Is full of passionate intensity.

O Captain! My Captain!.

We start off today complaining about how the politicals manage policy nowadays, something with which you and I might wish to concur with a hearty "Damn right, curse that Karl Rove!" or "Ol' Michael Deaver certainly has a lot to answer for!"

But it turns out that Brooks's problem isn't exactly that: it's more that dominance by the politicals has led to a presidency that's not amateurish enough:

Binges of Madison County

Pillars of the Community, Madison County, 1939, via Shorpy. Always a false front.

Ohai, Heritage, whassup?

.@unitedliberty: One of the saddest #Obamacare horror stories yet http://t.co/zRgsWajaTU
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) April 21, 2014

Wow, it's been a while! Glad to see you're still on your game and all. And tell us all about Madison County, Alabama, and its tragically dispossessed widows?

Madison County Commissioner Roger Jones said no one realized just how much the new federal health care law would change things, especially for the spouses of some of his former employees.

“What I’m trying to do is get this coverage back to them,” said Jones. “A lot of these people are on fixed incomes. Some of them are living on Social Security and very little else, and health insurance is very important to them.”

Confirmation Bias Watch

Some more Piketty fallout: Paul Krugman again bows to empirical evidence and acknowledges changing his mind:

we're rapidly moving towards a state where inherited wealth dominates. I didn't know that. I really was-- I should've known it. I should've thought about it, but I didn't. And so then here comes this book with-- I mean, it's beautiful-- absolutely analytically beautiful, if that makes any sense at all....  You suddenly say, "Oh, this is not-- the world is not the way I saw it."

(h/t Marie2 at Booman Tribune)

Meanwhile Yuval Levin is on record as having (in 2011) blamed current inequality in the United States largely on Great Society social spending in the 1960s and '70s:

Flush with revenue and stirred by the promise of technocratic mastery, our government took on immense entitlement commitments and major social reforms in that era, and these have certainly had some of their intended consequences. But they have also struck at the roots (economic and especially moral) of our ability to sustain our strength. The collapse of the family among the poor — powerfully propelled by the ethic of social democracy and by a horrendously designed welfare system that was not improved until the mid-1990s — has vastly worsened social and economic inequality in America, and the capacity of generations to rise out of poverty.

I'd say that's yet another chance for Levin to show that conservatives can be just as open-minded and ready to bend their opinions to fit the facts as liberals are. How about it, Dr. L? Anything about the Piketty-Saez data make you want to rethink your premises there?

Marx is risen?

Drawing by Martin Rowson.

In the wildest of today's Conservative Easter effusions, Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, opines that

IN the season of resurrection, it’s fitting that he’s with us once again — bearded, prophetic, moralistic, promising to exalt the humble and cast down the mighty from their thrones.

Yes, that’s right: Karl Marx is back from the dead.

I'd like to say I scooped Douthat on this one, but truth is it's not really news except the bodily resurrection part, and I totally missed the lede anyway, which is about the French economist Thomas Piketty, whose newly translated Capital in the Twenty-First Century is causing [jump]

A Libertarian Easter

How conservatives really think about the Lord.

From the monumental OMFG Raptor Jesus by Benpadiah.

Via Chris Allen. Good post, too.

Drawing by A.F. Branco for The Liberty Alliance. This one apparently not meant ironically.

For a more serious approach, don't miss Tengrain and Vixen Blogging Against Theocracy.

Annals of derp: HHIMM to Intellectual Beauty

Heritage tonight:

Yikes! This is how #Obamacare is treating young people: pic.twitter.com/4ZiWBRd3E7
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) April 11, 2014

Where do you suppose they got this data? First note when they got it, in the little note just under Alaska: six months ago, when it's pretty hard to imagine how they could have put together a such a magisterial picture of such data as there was at the time, when [jump]

Because if anybody expected the Spanish Inquisition, it'd spoil the surprise!

And speaking of CIA, their torture psychologist James Mitchell has called up The Guardian to complain about the vicious way he is (apparently) characterized in the Senate select committee report as a, um, torture psychologist: