Monday, January 27, 2014

DON SURBER'S Daily Scoreboard. Bookmark it.
THE 'IRISH DEMOCRACY' IS WORKING: ObamaCare is unraveling because young people won’t sign up.
DON’T BLAME THE MAPS: Republicans don't appear to owe their current congressional majority to gerrymandering.
FROM MY EMAIL: Falling Obama. If he gets stuck between the 'O' logos, click and drag him to get him falling again.

My only complaint was that he never seems to hit bottom, but my brother immediately corrected me....
Thumbs up. I like to fling him high to the left (by the seat of his pants) so he gets a long uninterrupted fall before hitting something.

The reason he never hits bottom is that there is no limit as to how low he can go.
Heh.
STATE OF THE UNION: An Empty Suit Prepares To Deliver an Empty Speech.
WARY OF ANOTHER BEAGLE MOMENT, the European Space Agency managing expectations for Rosetta’s ride-along lander Philae.
NEW YORK TIMES: free speech is only for those who agree with us.
TO USE A SOCIAL SCIENCE TERM: Your data is obviously fucked up.

Just another liberal twit wanting Americans to move to cities where it's easier to provide the government 'services' that will keep them poor.

Enjoy the fisking, and be sure to check out the comment about Loving county, Texas.
I LOOK DOWN on young women with husbands and kids and I'm not sorry.

Anonymous posts a scathing - and well deserved - response.
PREPARE FOR SEVERAL YEARS OF BAD LUCK: Birds attack peace doves freed from Pope's window.

Be sure to note the Leftist 'hate mail'.
MISUNDERSTANDING OBESITY: What cats can - and can't - tell you. I have three, and they exactly verify Martin's observation. Two, Shadow and Daisy, are normal; the third, Diamond is, well, fat. Yet all eat exactly the same meals.

Read the comments for a plethora of studies, opinions, and discussion, but the gist, to me, is this. One, the laws of thermodynamics hold: if you ingest fewer calories than you expend, you'll lose weight. The trick, of course, is in the expenditure side, which is complex and highly individualized. And two, for most people to lose weight, just eat a bit less and/or exercise a bit more.

I never had a weight problem until I started commuting 30 miles to work every day. I ate a bit more (breakfast in the car) and exercised a bit less (2-3 hours sitting in the car every day) and wound up gaining ... about 5 pounds a year. Now that I've quit commuting, I'm losing weight (albeit much more slowly than I put it on).
DO AS WE SAY, not as we do.
WHY THE NSA’S SPYING on offline computers is less scary than mass surveillance.

Two thoughts: One, I'm not convinced that the NSA's 'mass surveillance' is particularly scary, for the simple reason that while it's hard to find a needle in a haystack, it's much harder being filled even faster than you can comb through it for needles. Like ObamaCare, the NSA's email collection programs will soon collapse of their own weight.

My second thought is that the wireless surveillance tools in the NSA's toolkit are also available commercially. Imagine their use by, say, Project Veritas.
IRISH DEMOCRACY: thuggery only works when people are afraid of the thugs.
IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK LIKE ... gangland thuggery.
BREAKOUT: Freedom to Choose Better Learning. The times, they are a changin'.
JONAH GOLDBERG: The Constitution is powerless against Satan. Some thoughts about the (non-government) institutions of a civil society.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS -- DARKLY. The Washington Post's Richard Cohen looks at Hillary 2016 ... and despairs.
MAJOR GARRETT: Why are fewer people looking for jobs?

I believe there are some useful nuggets in the analysis, but also a lot of hooey. Two items that jumped out for me:
1) Youth are staying in school (and accumulating debt) because there's no place to go except their parents' basement (i.e., pajama boy).

2) Baby boomers aren't retiring because they want to; they're retiring because they've been forced out (i.e., me). Those who have stayed in, or or re-entered, have either been very lucky, or have taken lesser jobs for which they're substantially over-qualified.
The Labor Department data may be good, but the analysis fails the 'look out the window from your Ivory Tower' test.