Saturday, January 2, 2016

SAR #16002


Proportion your enthusiasm to the evidence.
Another Victory In The War On Darwin's Rejects: A doofus who was too mentally incompetent even to find the local Walmart (the FBI agent provocateur drove him there and told him what to buy) has been arrested for planning to have a hamburger an ISIS attack in Rochester. In an unwarranted panic attack, the New Year's fireworks in Rochester were canceled.
Quoted: "It's always comforting when a scientist uses the words "absolutely terrifying."
Because Freedom: If someone back in 1995 had told you that in order to fly home for Christmas you and your kids would have to line up like sheep in a slaughter chute to be groped intimately by strangers and have to carry a passport in order to enjoy the indignity, you'd have been incredulous. But there you were last week, meekly lining up to be humiliated. But you didn't need a passport nor a note from Big Brother. Starting in January a lot of you will need passports while the note from Big Brother will come soon if we do not refuse - just leave the passport at home. If we do it en mass, by the tens of thousands, how much revenue loss do you think it would take for the airlines to change Homeland Security's mind? Communism fell and the Berlin Wall came down when the people simply stopped obeying the secret police. Remember - hundreds of millions patted down, not one terrorist nabbed. And quite a few weapons missed, too.
New Beginnings: From the 1990's to 2012, America's overlords (the 400 wealthiest taxpayers) saw their tax rate fall from 26.4% to a measly 16.7%. It has now edged back to 22.9%. Hold the kleenex.
Heart To Heart: Examinations of preserved pre-modern people's bodies indicate that the modern scourge of heart disease and atherosclerosis is not modern after all. Rather, irrespective of the diet or culture, our ancestors - all of whom ate less fat than we do and no high fructose corn syrup and who certainly got a lot more exercise than I do - "suffered striking levels of heart disease and atherosclerosis. ... The amount of atherosclerosis in ancient times isn’t much different from what you see in modern times. If you account for age, it looks like we’re in the same ballpark.” But just in case, eat lean and get off the couch.
Noted: 2015 was the first pre-election year since the Great Depression that the stock market ended down for the year.
It's Your Fault: Why haven't you been out spending all the money that $2 gasoline is saving you? According to conventional wisdom (ie mainstream economic guessers) the problem is that you are saving more. No, really, they say things like that. Actually, if you had anything at all to save, that would be 'more'. Actual spending data suggests people are spending pretty much what people spend - a bit more than they earn. Thus the explanation for the persistent weak GDP growth in the US must be found elsewhere. Maybe it's the trade deficit, which increased 23.3% Y/Y. That's enough to drop a percentage point off 2015's GDP, which was pretty puny to begin with. But supporters of the TPP ignore the trade deficit and its impact on growth and jobs, and blame the consumer for not spending enough. Because trade is good. Trade is good. Repeat after me: Trade is good. Don't look at the jobs. Don't look at wages. Trade is good.
Porn O'Graph: Fair's fairer.
The Parting Shot: 

3 comments:

McMike said...

re heart to heart. Or perhaps, the fact is that modern medical science still hasn't much of a clue what actually, really, goes on inside our bodies, let alone why, not to mention deciding what's "good" or "bad". I mean, beyond sewing up wounds and setting broken bones, at which we are pretty consistently proficient. Until we over-apply antibiotics anyway.

Perhaps we are still just blind men with an elephant. Pushing and prodding, little more than medieval blood-letters, taking copious notes, and ooh-ing and ah-ing when we seem to trigger a desired response.

McMike said...

re: please drive me to Walmart so i can wage Jihad. I just read a piece on the DEA's war on terror, equally focused on the Feds' preferred method of playing all parts in the drama, except fall guy: i.e. recruiting, supplying, prodding, entrapping, and then prosecuting compliant morons, mentally ill ex-cons, and sundry losers. To the point that apparently the ONLY thing these agencies do anymore is drive around looking for windows to break so they can pump their window repair business.

This is not new. A large part of the FBI's anti-domestic-dissent operation involves using honey traps and insistent sociopaths with fat bankrolls to try and trick/cajole hapless naive twenty-somethings into conspiring to commit a crime - said crime wholly hatched, proposed, and plotted by the agency's paid (on a commission basis) provocateur. Oftentimes participation in the criminal conspiracy amounts essentially to agreeing to listen to the crazy a-hole's plan, but only if he promises afterwards to shut up. A bit of indulgence that costs the targets twenty-years-to-life in solitary.

It's almost like Bradbury's firemen going around looking for fires to start. One wonders if we removed the sociopathic agencies' various schemes, snitches, and schemers, would there be any crime left to be worried about?

kwark said...

RE "Heart to Heart": The big improvement over yesteryear is that today someone can profit by killing you slowly with stuff like statins! Now THAT'S innovation for you!