Saturday, May 2, 2009

9122/Weekender

"No members of society – none – deserve to be victims of a violent crime. because of their race, their religion, their ethnic background, their disability, their gender... or their sexual orientation,"

Edward Kennedy.


Roundup: Much to Wall Streets dismay, unemployed workers make poor consumers. The March decline in customer spending gave the lie to the deceptive "green shoot" spurt of the prior two months. Just weeds.

Death Knell: A Gallup Poll reports that 32% of Americans have been spending less recently and 27% intend to save more and spend less going forward. Retailers do not view this as "going forward."

Physics Smysics: Capitalism's apologists inhabit an imaginary world with no constraints to economic growth, which can and will improve the lives of all mankind, one salad shooter at a time, forever and ever. Don't need no Second Law of Thermodynamics 'round here.

Dusting: The danger of global warming melting the vast ice caps in the Antarctic and Greenland is probably overstated, for there is a good chance that the layer of soot being deposited on the ice from our ever expanding coal-fired power plants may cause them to melt long before the CO2 that wafted the soot and dust up the smokestacks gets a chance to do so.

Moving On: 43% of Georgia's Republicans feel the state would be better off if it seceded from the US. Elsewhere it is reported that 25% of Americans do not finish high school. But like Texas, the US would be well rid of Georgia - both states get more money from Washington than they pay in federal taxes. Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi seem to be good candidates, too.

Believe It or Don't: As unlikely as it seems, US manufacturing contracted again in April. Fifteenth consecutive month.

Yes, But. Chrysler is bankrupt, but that doesn't mean Chrysler is bankrupt. Not yet. Now we'll play a few rounds of 'surgical restructuring' that will magically allow Chrysler to produce cars and employ workers without cutting into the sales of other (GM) manufacturers and the livelihood of their (GM's) union employees, while letting suppliers slowly starve to death. Perhaps they should have practiced various ways of cutting up a pie first.

News, Good and Bad: Sales of Ford's fuel-efficient Fusion helped Ford grab a bigger piece of the auto sales pie, even as the pie got smaller. GM's sales fell 34% in the last month.

Relatives: An extensive examination of DNA markers of modern-day Native Americans showed that a particular non-biological variant occurred in all 41 of the populations studied, from Alaska to Chile. This strongly suggests that all existing Native American populations share a common ancestor.

Better and Better: Last week DHS saved the US from having a Frence plane with an leftist journalist passenger from flying over the ever-pure USA. Now DHS has included Mexican separatists, “black power” advocates, “racial Nordic mysticism” practitioners, black nationalists and anti-immigration extremists (unless they are elected officials) on the list of dangerous extremists.

Does This Dress Make Me Look Fat: Congress is warming up to pitch another bad idea into the mix: Cash for clunkers, wherein consumers with old, gas guzzlers get $1,500 to $5,000 government gifts to use toward the purchase of a new car. If they promise to convert the clunkers to electric propulsion, I'm for it.

Quoted: “The supposed omniscience and perfect efficacy of a free market stems from economic work done in the 1950s and 1960s, which with hindsight looks more like propaganda against communism than plausible science.” The capitalist ideology that undergirds economics in the United States has led the profession to be detached from reality, rendering it incapable of understanding many of the crises the world faces .

Porn O'Grah: Weakly Earning.

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