We're Really Fucked
mikethemadbiologist | August 2, 2011Actually, it will probably be several decades. While details of the budget ceiling negotations haven't been released, the initial reports sound pretty awful, with $2.4 trillion of cuts over ten years with $1 trillion in discretionary cuts (that's stuff like NIH and NSF, by the way). It's pretty clear, at this point, that Obama wants massive cuts to happen, in part because he doesn't really understand how the deficits arose:
While I am reporting this, I should note that the President made news regarding his understanding of the origins of the deficit and our slow growth recently when he…
mikethemadbiologist | July 15, 2011One of the most frustrating things about Obama's playing the role of The Great Conciliator is his belief that we should 'look forward, not back', that there should be no accountability for those who have failed or committed fraud. Leaving aside notions of justice (which these days is best for one's sanity), this idiotic belief allows the incompetent and the malfeasant to continue their harmful activities. Case in point: the financial rating agencies. These are the bozos who went along with Wall Street's alchemy wherein shitty loans were magically turned into AAA securities (the highest…
mikethemadbiologist | July 12, 2011With last week's release of the latest month's unemployment data, it's worth remembering that the official figures would be far worse were it not for our policy of mass incarceration (aka the War on Drugs). Why? Because people in jail (mostly men) are 'disappeared' from unemployment and employment statistics. And we imprison a lot of people. Most of the numbers I'm finding put the prison population at 2.3 million. In terms of incarceration rates, since 1980 (before the War on People Who Use Drugs), we have had an effective tripling of the prison population. So that's roughly 1.5 million…
mikethemadbiologist | June 27, 2011Consider this a post wherein I engage in some speculation, and hope that I'm very, very wrong. You see, the 'German' E. coli O104:H4 outbreak ('HUSEC041') has taken a confusing turn:
The strain of E. coli blamed for 46 deaths in Germany appears to have resurfaced in France, the French Ministry of Health said.
The new outbreak has sickened eight people, who went to two hospitals in Bordeaux, authorities said.
Officials interviewed seven of them, all of whom reported having attended an open house at a children's recreation center. Six of them reported having eaten sprouts during the visit, "…
mikethemadbiologist | May 10, 2011...you know things are getting weird. David Warsh writes:
I belong to a luncheon club whose smartest member is a longtime investment manager whom I have observed for many years, He walked out of the room after a global tour d'horizon talk the other day and said on the sidewalk in front of the building, "The only things that can possibly address inequality of a magnitude that will soon be judged to be unacceptable in this country are much higher levels of taxation on the well-to-do and a negative income tax for the poor." I hadn't heard it put so simply or succinctly before, but in the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 15, 2011A study showing that many people who receive assistance from government programs don't believe they have done so has been making the rounds once again (you heard it here first! Months ago!). My favorite idiocy is how 43% of Pell Grant recipients--federal aid for college--don't realize it's a government program (one does wonder how that 43% successfully graduated from grade school). I argued that this delusion was willful:
This seems a case of willful ignorance by definition. Government aid is for lazy slackers, for 'welfare queens', and, in some people's minds, for those people. Decent,…
mikethemadbiologist | February 6, 2011At D-squared Digest, some ruminations about Egypt lead to the bestest political science theory EVAH! (italics original; boldface mine):
...so that brings me to a useful piece of advice for any readers who are aspiring dictators, one that the Communists knew, Suharto knew, but that some modern day tyrants seem to have forgotten. There is always a level of civil unrest that outstrips the capability of even the most loyal and largest regular armed forces to deal with. In all likelihood, as a medium sized emerging market, you will have a capital city with a population of about five or six million…
mikethemadbiologist | January 27, 2011Over at Open Left, jeffbinnc pithily summarizes all of the metrics of which educational 'reformers' are fond:
Then, to illustrate just how the focus on more and better tests is going to be raised to the levels of panacea, the CAP rolled out a new report last week that based just about everything on the notion that test scores are the be-all and the end-all of education attainment in our country.
As I noted in a Quick Hit here on Open Left, CAP's analysis of school performance "relied on the results of 2008 state reading and math assessments in fourth grade, eighth grade, and high school"…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2011I would ask if movement conservatives have any decency or shame, but that has an obvious question. By way of Jamison Foer, we find that Erick Erickson, CNN contributor and rightwing conservative, has definitely discovered what ails this nation:
Through it all though, well meaning people on both sides of the ideological and partisan divide are not talking about the one thing that should be talked about -- a saving faith in Jesus Christ....
The topic of faith in Christ makes people cringe. But whether you believe it or not, here is the reality: beyond us is a world we cannot see with our eyes…
mikethemadbiologist | January 5, 2011...and there's another important date right around then. First, the crazy:
Exley is part of a movement of Christians loosely organized by radio broadcasts and websites, independent of churches and convinced by their reading of the Bible that the end of the world will begin May 21, 2011...
"A lot of people might think, 'The end's coming, let's go party,'" said Exley, a veteran of two deployments in Iraq. "But we're commanded by God to warn people. I wish I could just be like everybody else, but it's so much better to know that when the end comes, you'll be safe."
In August, Exley left her…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2010I've written before about the municipal and state level fiscal crises that are occurring across the U.S. (and, yes, this was not only predictable, it was predicted). Well, now we have a new crisis: no more BABs. BABs is short for Build America Bonds program, and there are two types of BABs:
1) BABs that give the recipient (i.e., the bond purchaser) a federal tax credit--this subsidizes the purchase of the bond, making it cheaper.
2) BABs that give the issuer (the state or local government) a subsidy of 35% of the interest. This lowers the amount the state or local government has to pay…
mikethemadbiologist | November 23, 2010A while ago, I finished reading Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell. While there are far too many inane comparisons between the Late Roman Empire and the U.S., this summary of Goldsworthy's thesis seems appropriate (italics mine):
That is not to say that the latter emperors were more selfish, but simply that they could never be as secure. Many may have had the best of intentions to rule well, but the government of the empire became first and foremost about keeping the emperor in power - and at lower levels, about the individual advantage of bureaucrats and officers.
The Late Roman Empire was…
mikethemadbiologist | November 18, 2010Because it's the sucker's play.
So Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky--a real Democrat, not a Very Serious fiscal 'conservative'--has released her own deficit plan. It's a perfectly good plan: the numbers add up (no magic asterisks, such as 'we will lower Medicare expenses [somehow]'), and as policy, even if one weren't concerned about deficit reduction, it's pretty good.
But, as I've argued before, going along with this deficit reduction mania is a rigged game.
Look, if this whole deficit reduction horseshit doesn't just blow away with the next televised national disaster or missing…
mikethemadbiologist | November 9, 2010If you haven't heard, there's a new antibiotic resistance gene, NDM-1, which stands for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1. This gene has been found in Gram-negative Enterobacteriaceae (E. coli and Klebsiella), and confers resistance to every penicillin derivative. Like the KPC genes, this gene is found on miniature chromosomes that also carry other resistance genes, making this organism resistant to just about everything we can throw at it.
By way of Maryn McKenna, we find this nice ATCC chart which shows just how bad one of these bacteria can be:
All those "R"s mean that drug doesn't…
mikethemadbiologist | October 8, 2010Just how desperate to find a story--and a controversy--do you have to be to believe this is real:
Anchors at the Fox News national morning news show "Fox and Friends" reported Tuesday that the city of Los Angeles had ordered 10,000 jetpacks for its police and fire departments. The price tag: a whopping $100,000 per unit.
Yes, jet packs. Thousands of them. Maybe that should have set off warning bells. Well, actually it did, but this being Fox News, well... (italics mine):
For those doing the math at home, the cash-strapped city of Los Angeles, which is regularly sending its police…
mikethemadbiologist | September 23, 2010But, then again, I'm one of those pessimistic liberals, so what do I know? By the way, when the CEO of Wal-Mart is more sensitive to the needs of the unemployed than our political betters, you know we're screwed:
"The paycheck cycle we've talked about before remains extreme. It is our responsibility to figure out how to sell in that environment, adjusting pack sizes, large pack at sizes the beginning of the month, small pack sizes at the end of the month. And to figure out how to deal with what is an ever-increasing amount of transactions being paid for with government assistance.
"And you…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2010Having parasitized private industry, our economic betters are now turning their sights on the public sector:
The most popular deals in the works are metered municipal street and garage parking spaces. One of the first was in Chicago where the city received $1.16 billion in 2008 to allow a consortium led by Morgan Stanley to run more than 36,000 metered parking spaces for 75 years. The city continues to set the rules and rates for the meters and collects parking fines. But the investors keep the revenues, which this year will more than triple the $20 million the city was collecting, according…
mikethemadbiologist | August 9, 2010I don't know whether to laugh or cry over this recent speech by Fed Reserve Chairman Bernanke:
A report last week showed that the American economy, recovering from the worst recession since the 1930s, slowed to a 2.4 percent annual rate in the second quarter, less than forecast, as a scarcity of jobs eroded consumer spending.
The economy "is now expanding at a moderate pace," Mr. Bernanke said at the Southern Legislative Conference, a group of lawmakers from 15 states. "To be sure, notable restraints on the recovery persist," including housing, commercial real estate and the labor market, he…
mikethemadbiologist | April 4, 2010...get drunk and hit you. Digby thinks that's the meaning of this poll by Gallup:
A new USA Today/Gallup poll out this morning shows that more Americans blame the Democrats more than any other group when it comes to the inciting the violence and vandalism that have spread across the country in the week since health care reform became law. Fifty percent said passing the bill was a "bad thing," while 47% said it was a good thing.*
When asked about the violence, 49% of the 1,009 adults surveyed over the weekend said the "Democratic tactics" are a "major reason" for the violent incidents. Forty-…
mikethemadbiologist | February 16, 2010In the political bloggysphere, there's been some discussion about former Congressman and Two Million Dollar Man Billy Tauzin losing his job as the top lobbyist for Big Pharma. I follow this stuff a lot more than most--my observation that much of what our great congressional solons do is geared towards their retirements, to me, seems so obvious that I'm surprised it received some minor circulation. But Tauzin's degeneracy is stunning (italics mine):
So in 2003 Mr. Tauzin, then chairman of the powerful energy and commerce committee, made a deal. Though still on a modest Congressional salary,…