The difference between Obama and recent Republican presidents is that when the economy went south for the Republicans, the media began an endless drumbeat of doom. 

George Bush faced media reports and articles which constantly talked down the economy.  I can remember hand-wringing articles and op-eds breathlessly declaring that 2001-2003 represented the worst economy in memory.  When the economy did pick up, the recovery was always prefixed as a 'jobless' recovery. 

Now, we are actually IN the worst economy since the great depression, but the media behaves very differently.  The bad news is soft-pedaled, and every shred of good news is presented as 'green shoots' or signs that the economy is beginning a robust recovery.  And of course, there are plenty of media shills helping to cast blame for the poor economy everywhere except at Obama's feet. 

This is the biggest liability for Republicans going into this election - the mainstream media will act effectively as an arm of the Obama campaign.   Think of what that represents in terms of campaign contributions - how much would Romney have to pay for ad buys to counteract the hundreds of TV hours of free shilling Obama will receive?

I just returned from a business trip to France, and the one thing that struck me was how uncommon it was to find air conditioning.  I imagine this is due to the generally lower standard of living coupled with high energy prices/taxes.  Whatever the reason, even business offices were often non-air conditioned.  I spent a sweltering day covered in sweat in a room with a dozen people and a projector and no air conditioning.

I suspect that so many people die in France during a heat wave because there is little opportunity to escape the heat - especially for old people who aren't very mobile and who are stuck in oppressive, heat-soaked apartments with no easy respite.

I found France to be a place of many contradictions, and where the gap between the rich and poor was even more obvious than it was in the United States despite their large government - or probably because of it.

The U.S. already has a socialized health care system.  In fact, the U.S. government spends more money per capita on health care than does the Canadian government.  Between Medicare and Medicaid and other health care benefits, much of the health care system is already under direct govermnent control, and the parts that aren't are heavily distorted by the parts that are.

France's system controls costs by instituting fairly heavy co-pays for basic health care coverage.  In Canada, we have a significant private health care system operating alongside the public system.  For example dentistry and prescription drugs are private in Canada, as is some eye care and increasingly, common medical procedures.

If you look at France and Singapore, it seems to me that the best health care system would be one which is heavily means-tested and which provides only for catastrophic coverage. 

My ideal system would be a public catastrophic health care system where the deductible is set by income.  Put as much of the cost on the consumer as possible, while still protecting people from bankruptcy and hardship due to long or difficult illness.  Let private gap insurance do the rest.

The opening of Roger Ebert's review, panning Rob Reiner's execrable North:

I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.

I absolutely adore The Trinity Sessions.  The version of Sweet Jane on that disc is absolutely gorgeous.  If you haven't heard that CD, run and get it.  There was also an excellent special on TV, "Trinity Revisited" where the band went back to the Trinity church for the 20th anniversary of that recording and re-recorded the album with special guests like Ryan Adams and Natalie Merchant.  Absolutely beautiful.

And you're right about Margo Timmins.  She's gotten more beautiful with age.

Yeah, I'm aware of those papers, along with other ones calling various aspects of AGW into question.  However, there are also papers on the other side reinforcing some aspects of current global warming theory.  That's how science works. Eventually it converges on the best hypothesis.  That is, assuming it's allowed to work and one side of the debate isn't legislated or intimidated out of existence.

You can't take any one paper and declare upon publication that it's the last word in the debate and that the 'science is settled'.  If we do that, we're just as guilty as the other side.  

(cont'd)

That's not to say that they would be better off doing something more productive with their time - but that's true of people who watch TV five  hours per night, or who spend their time reading trashy romance novels, or who engage in any other form of recreation that isn't building knowledge or skills.    I don't see that pot smoking is any different.

Now, one problem for young people is that it can be easy to become amotivated and neglect your schoolwork and waste your youth being stoned instead of preparing for adulthood.  And that's a shame.  But then, the same can be said for television addiction, drinking, or hanging out at the mall or arcade.  It's not government's job to stop them - it's their parent's job.

Coming from the 'wrong side of the tracks', I spent a good chunk of my youth surrounded by alcoholics and pot smokers.  I never drank much, but when I was young I occasionally smoked pot. 

Young kids smoke pot to get 'baked', to laugh themselves silly and have a good time at parties.  Adults often smoke pot because they find it relaxing, and it tends to heighten their senses.  This makes everything from food to sex to enjoying classical music a little more intense and pleasurable.   

It's now 30 years since my 'youth'.  My father died of alcoholism.  One of my friends died from the effects of alcohol.  I have other friends who are now struggling with the health consequences of drinking and smoking cigarettes.  

The friends who limited their recreational intake to pot show NO physical side effects.  Some of them still smoke it daily.  They are nice people who work hard and pay their taxes, but who like to go home after work, have a smoke, and play their guitars or watch TV or enjoy conversations and a snack with friends.

They aren't hurting anyone, including themselves.  Any system which makes this behavior illegal is immoral.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  That applies just as much to papers discrediting AGW as it does to AGW papers themselves.

This paper strikes me as being speculative at best.  That's not necessarily a bad thing - a lot of great paradigm changes in scientific thought start that way.  But it's by no means ready to displace current AGW theory, and it won't be taken seriously until it is studied, replicated, and its conclusions confirmed through other secondary analyses.

It strikes me that this paper makes a lot of assumptions that may not be warranted.  Using open star clusters as a proxy for supernovae seems problematic to me - especially when trying to tie them to events on earth in specific time frames.  There's still a lot of uncertainty in the astronomical community as to the source of most cosmic rays, let alone that they were responsible for temperature changes millions of years ago.

This paper does show that the science isn't 'settled' as the AGW hysterics want everyone to believe.  There are many papers still being published which call into question various aspects of AGW theory.  But there are no slam dunks.

I don't think his apparent youth is a problem.  On the other hand, buying Instagram for $1 billion dollars after mulling it over a weekend would not make me feel particularly warm and fuzzy about his business skills.

I don't know... The guy was in college, and writing to impress a girl.  Pretentiousness goes with the territory.  I'd cut him a lot of slack on that.  I once wrote a poem in college that was so bad and pretentious I still whimper a bit when I think about it.

In these letters, Obama comes across as pretentious but also well read and pretty smart.  That's not the writing of someone who skated through college with bad marks on the affirmative action program.  I don't think there's anything damning here at all. 

There is perhaps one small red flag:  his reference to " bourgeois liberalism".   Depending on usage, this can mean anything from classical liberals (i.e. the Adam Smith kind), to Jewish bankers and merchants, to 'poseurs' who pretend to be leftist radicals  while ensconced firmly in the luxuries of the middle class.    In my experience, you rarely see that term used unless the writer is a postmodernist lefty or a young radical.

The left doesn't seem to understand that most labor laws have the effect of hurting the poor, minorities, the disenfranchised, and small businesses - all group they claim to support.

When it becomes very hard to fire someone, who are you going to hire?  The kid from the immigrant family with no job history?  Or the nice boy in the suit and tie who comes from a solid, upright family?  Which one represents a bigger risk to your company? 

In France, where it can be nearly impossible to fire someone, the unemployment rate for young people and especially young immigrants is outrageous.

Large corporations don't mind strict labor laws.  They have HR departments, and they hire so many people that they can afford to play the law of large numbers, knowing that in the end a few bad apples won't make a dent in their bottom line.  But a small businessman who makes a bad hiring choice can be destroyed by it if he can't let the person go.

Minimum wage laws which prevent wages from being reduced when productivity drops result instead in massive layoffs among people at the bottom end of the income ladder.

I watched the first episode as well, and had a visceral dislike for every person in it.  It made me wonder if the writers actually thought they were sympathetic characters, and that it was just one big culture clash.  Or perhaps they're starting out unlikeable and the show will actually become more about how they have to grow up and become responsible, reasonable people and it will become a cautionary tale.

But frankly, given Hollywood's track record with such material, I can't give them the benefit of the doubt and keep watching.  The people on the show are just too obnoxious, and too similar to some of the people I've had to deal with in my own life.  I'd rather have needles stuck in my eyes than spend any more time  with them.

I think the Austrians are essentially right that during periods of high growth, a fixed money supply causes the price of money to go up in the form of interest rates, which is a very important signal to the economy.  High interest rates cause money to move away from long-term and low value investments and towards short term and high value investments.  In short, the money goes where it is supposed to go under those conditions.

When the economy slows down, demand sags for short term investment (inventory building, factory expansion, etc).  This causes capital to be freed up for long-term investments. 

Problems arise when the fed tries to fix interest rates instead of maintaining stable money.  The interest rate signal is destroyed and you get malinvestment of capital,  making the economy less efficient.   But that's not necessarily an argument against monetary policy - it's an argument of a specific kind of monetary policy. 

The Fed should maintain a money supply that increases with GDP growth and population growth, and is tied to some basket of commodity prices such that a nice, low-but-positive inflation rate is maintained.   It's just very hard to do.

Even Hayek struggled with monetary policy.  Friedman was a monetarist.    The problem for Austrians is that the money supply can and does shrink and grow with the velocity of money, and therefore is at risk of accelerating downturns.  Friedman gave a very strong argument that the depression was made worse because of the overly tight monetary policy of the fed back in the day.

On the other hand, Monetarists have a problem in that it is very difficult to figure out how to manage the money supply while providing stability.  The best idea is to set up hard rules that tie the supply of money to certain indicators, but it's hard to know what those should be and what their values are. 

Monetarists have a further problem that once you put the kind of power the fed represents into the hands of individuals, it's very hard for them to resist the temptation to tinker.  Even Alan Greenspan, who was a fairly hardcore free-marketer before joining the Fed, came to believe that he was smart enough to use monetary policy to manipulate the economy rather than to just maintain stability.

This isn't a simple problem.

Remember that flying the scheduled airlines is by far the safest way to travel.As a long time pilot and a computer usability engineer, I've long thought that airbus's cockpit usability had serious issues. This isn't the first accident in which the fly-by-wire system in that plane was at least a partial cause. Hopefully cockpit design engineers will learn valuable lessons from this.