American Recovery Watch Goes On High Alert

Media 11 Comments

After seven years * of punishing positive US economic data with negative headlines, signs that some in mainstream media are mending the error of their ways – “Rosy Headlines And Few Read the Data”

Take the chipper headline about durables Durable-Goods Orders in U.S. Increase More Than Forecast on Autos, Defense. The article appropriately points out that the decline is not even bottoming (i.e. private business investment is sure to keep slowing).
[…]
Let’s just hunt for green shoots in a different place. How about the weekly unemployment report? Nice headline there Initial U.S. Jobless Claims Fall in Signal Biggest Rounds of Firings Over. So what does that mean?

What it means is that they finally got what they wanted!

Dead Aid

Vast Right Wing Conspiracy 23 Comments

A National Post interview with Dambisa Moyo;

No country on Earth has ever achieved long-term growth and reduced poverty in a meaningful way by relying on aid. It’s just never happened. So we’re pushing a strategy that has no evidence of working anywhere on Earth. And we have years of evidence that the aid strategy doesn’t work.

Well, it depends on how one measures success. Welfare has never worked to raise individuals out of poverty either, but that’s not what the modern system has evolved to do. Outside of academia, there is no more reliable a voting bloc for the left than the dysfunctional, dependent neighborhood. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 46 Comments

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Now that we’re starting our second year of SDA LNR officially hosting Reader Tips, I’m going to try changing the format of SDA LNR slightly, in that rather than have a seven-day cycling “topic” schedule, for now we are going to experiment for a while with (a) a few days in a row on the same topic, and (b) random jumps to different topics. In part this is because variety is the spice of life, and in part it’s because our wholesale resources here in the studio have become better aligned to this new approach, whereas a year ago they were better aligned to the cyclical schedule. Needless to say, DJ EBD’s Wednesday night SDA LNR show is independent of this DJ Vitruvius plan for the other days of the week.

 
 

Anyway, building on last night’s show and rule [a] supra, tonight, for your delectation, and in honour of SDA LNR listener Hello Birdy‘s appreciation of Jewish humour in last night’s comments, here are two shows by C. Israel Lutsky, who performed as the Yiddisha Philosopher from 1931 to the mid-’60s. Lutsky took to the air daily with letters from listeners seeking advice. He replied with spoonfuls of folk wisdom and dollops of abuse. Firstly, from station WEBR, Miami, Florida, we have his essay, in English, On Jewish Humor, and secondly, from his classic series of A Letter To the Yiddisha Philosopher “advice columns”, on station WEBD in New York, this one in Yiddish with English subtitles, The Boy Should Be Told. That last one is really the best (the antecedents are to provide context), so if you only have time to listen to Israel once, listen to that last one.

Update: A number of listeners are reporting that they are unable to tune in to the streaming audio formats used in tonight’s broadcast. I do apologize, and I’m a little sad too, because this means I won’t be able to use the Yiddish Radio Project, with its excellent Yid-O-Matic Yiddish to English translator, in future shows. Oh well, for those of you with radios that have been able to receive tonight’s transmissions, you may want to explore the other fine offerings that are available at the Yiddish Radio Project outside of the scope of SDA LNR.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Because Archbishop Prendergast Would Lop The Head Off His Sister If Given The Chance

Religion Of Submission 42 Comments

Please note:
An Islamic thug screaming “death to Jews” in the streets of Sweden is an “activist”.
An Islamic thug who “restores” his family’s honour by unloading a .44 Magnum into his sister and her boyfriend is an “Ottawa Man”.
Thus concludes your Media Terminology Update for today.
Previous – “Because Sean Hannity Would Herd Jews Into Railcars If Given The Chance”
h/t Maz2

Y2Kyoto: Safe In The Arms Of Enron

What He Said 36 Comments

Enron’s Other Secret;

The climate-change industry — the scientists, lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and, most importantly, the multinationals that work behind the scenes to cash in on the riches at stake — has emerged as the world’s largest industry. Virtually every resident in the developed world feels the bite of this industry, often unknowingly, through the hidden surcharges on their food bills, their gas and electricity rates, their gasoline purchases, their automobiles, their garbage collection, their insurance, their computers purchases, their hotels, their purchases of just about every good and service, in fact, and finally, their taxes to governments at all levels.
These extractions do not happen by accident. Every penny that leaves the hands of consumers does so by design, the final step in elaborate and often brilliant orchestrations of public policy, all the more brilliant because the public, for the most part, does not know who is profiteering on climate change, or who is aiding and abetting the profiteers.
Some of the climate-change profiteers are relatively unknown corporations; others are household names with only their behind-the-scenes role in the climate-change industry unknown. Over the next few weeks, in an extended newspaper series, you will become familiar with some of the profiteers, and with their machinations. This series begins with Enron, a pioneer in the climate-change industry.

The first in a series by Lawrence Solomon.
h/t Ed S.

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 53 Comments
 
 

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Saturday night distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, here are excerpts from the inimitable Mr. Jackie Mason‘s Lecture & II from the occasion of his being awarded a fellowship in the Oxford Union Society in 1992.

By the way, ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s a year now, already, since SDA Late Nite Radio first officially hosted Reader Tips, in what was soon to become a regular affair. Who would have thought? On the other hand, tonight’s SDA LNR cheese selection is Colston Bassett Stilton, surely one of the finest cheeses ever.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

CWB vs The Open Market

Gopher News 29 Comments


Rolf Penner;

You could have sold all of your crop on the worst day for the worst price in the open market and still done as good a job as the wheat board. Better actually because you would have had all of your money already last fall, with the board you’ll get it sometime after next Christmas.

Speaking of which…

Prior to the last federal election, some of us wanted to demonstrate to get the federal government to support the Risk Management Program. But the Grain and Oilseeds Safety net committee asked us to stand down because they were paying a lot of money to the Daisy Group, a lobby outfit run by hard core Liberal Warren Kinsella. So far, the Daisies got us nothing, which is understandable. Who in their right mind hires a Liberal strategist to lobby a Conservative government? Now the Daisies tell us if farmers don’t do their job lobbying nothing will happen.

Because Experience Only Counts When You’re Vice President

The One 53 Comments

Who could have seen this coming?

For the first time since another Democrat occupied the White House, investors from Beijing to Zurich are challenging a president’s attempts to revive the economy with record deficit spending. Fifteen years after forcing Bill Clinton to abandon his own stimulus plans, the so-called bond vigilantes are punishing Barack Obama for quadrupling the budget shortfall to $1.85 trillion. By driving up yields on U.S. debt, they are also threatening to derail Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s efforts to cut borrowing costs for businesses and consumers.
The 1.5-percentage-point rise in 10-year Treasury yields this year pushed interest rates on 30-year fixed mortgages to above 5 percent for the first time since before Bernanke announced on March 18 that the central bank would start printing money to buy financial assets. Treasuries have lost 5.1 percent in their worst annual start since Merrill Lynch & Co. began its Treasury Master Index in 1977.
“The bond-market vigilantes are up in arms over the outlook for the federal deficit,” said Edward Yardeni, who coined the term in 1984 to describe investors who protest monetary or fiscal policies they consider inflationary by selling bonds. He now heads Yardeni Research Inc. in Great Neck, New York. “Ten trillion dollars over the next 10 years is just an indication that Washington is really out of control and that there is no fiscal discipline whatsoever.”

Captain Ed;

Right now, the United States has responded to a lack of demand for its Treasuries through a questionable and disturbing method: we’re buying our own debt. That allows the yields to remain low, but buying our own debt is somewhat akin to creating your own credit card. Eventually, you have to acknowledge that the money you create on the books never really existed, unless the United States plans to simply print money to pay off all the bonds. That would create a level of inflation not seen in the West since the Weimar Republic, and will effectively force the rest of the world to avoid U.S. currency and investments as unsound. It would, for the first time in decades, put the United States on the financial sideline.

Meanwhile, over at the Toronto On-Another-Planet, the headline item under “News|World” is titled “Was Bush on a mission from God?”

Take Me, Obama

The One 38 Comments

From the Associated Press’ John Rogers (who is a man);

He was tall and stunningly good looking, a guy who could appear pensive and serious one moment and then, with smoke from an unfiltered cigarette swirling around his face, morph into the hippest looking dude this side of James Dean.

h/t OttRob

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