It figures after War and Peace-size Presty the DJ entries the past few days, today’s is relatively short.
The number one album today in 1974, a few months after the death of its singer, was “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim”:
The number one single today in 1974 introduced the world to the word “pompatus”:
Today in 1982, Bob Geldof was arrested after a disturbance aboard a 727 that had been grounded for five hours:
The number one album today in 1964 was “Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash,” the first country album to reach the top of the album chart:
The number one single today in 1964, whatever the words were:
I haven’t seen the new “Star Trek” film, which is accused of being a remake of the second “Star Trek” film, “The Wrath of Khan.”
Dayton Ward disagrees with that assessment, but goes with it anyway:
Strictly as an exercise in goofy fun, I posited the idea that rather than taking bits or pieces from previous series or films to fill out the storyline for a new movie, that we should compile a list of episodes which all but beg for a wholesale remake. Fans for years have speculated what extravagant do-overs of the most memorable episodes from the original series in particular might look like on the big screen. So, I figured, “What the heck?” Why not engage in a little fanboy wish-listing? …
Presented here in alphabetical order, the results of our little online experiment:
“Balance of Terror,” suggested by Joseph Berenato on my Facebook page – Virtually nothing is known about the Romulans in the “alternate reality” created by the Abrams Star Trek films. Just as the original episode introduced us to the enigmatic alien race, so too could a reworked and expanded version of the story. With room to breathe a bit, there would be more time for character interplay, including the fleshing out of back story for the Romulans and their culture. The scope of the film also could be opened up, with scenes set away from the Enterprise and the Romulan ship, such as at one of the destroyed outposts or a new planet-based location. Would Kirk and the Romulan Commander battle each other face to face, or would the ship-based aspects of the original tale still rule the day? …
“The City on the Edge of Forever,” suggested by Joseph Berenato on my Facebook page – Widely regarded as one of Star Trek’s finest hours—if not the finest hour—what would it take to update and expand this story to feature film length and scope? To be honest, I don’t have the first clue, and maybe it should never be attempted, but if a decision is ever made to revisit this classic tale, then there really is only one person suited to the task: the episode’s original writer, the incomparable Harlan Ellison. Perhaps the answer lies not with the televised episode, but within Ellison’s original screenplay, the development of which is worth a book all its own…so much so that Ellison himself already wrote it! Somewhere within the different versions of the story may well lay the seeds for a new take on Captain Kirk’s ultimate tragic romance. …
“The Doomsday Machine” – Are you kidding? One of the most iconic episodes from any of the Star Trek series is just screaming for a big-budget revamping. This is an absolute no-brainer for me. Just think of what an expanded storyline could do to give us more background on Commodore Matt Decker and his crew, before and during their fateful encounter with the mammoth alien machine. We could even get some insight into the beings who built the thing (just so long as they don’t turn out to be evolved hamsters, or something). And of course it’s just the kind of story that lends itself to the eye-popping space scenes that drive summer blockbusters. Besides, who doesn’t want to see Karl Urban’s Doctor McCoy give Crazy Matt the business? The great Norman Spinrad’s still around, so I say let him have first crack at updating and enhancing his original tale. …
“Errand of Mercy” – If Star Trek Into Darkness showed us anything, it’s that a Federation confrontation with the Klingons is likely, if not inevitable. Somebody’s already drooling at the prospect of the massive, all-out Star Wars-style battle sequences which are sure to litter a tale like this. With that in mind, let’s be sure to have a nice balance of action in space and some of that great character work Star Trek can do when it’s firing on all cylinders. Give Chris Pine’s Captain Kirk a worthy adversary in the form of Commander Kor, who can be a thorn in his side for many years to come. This also is the kind of story which could be fleshed out so as to include plenty of good material for the rest of the cast while Kirk and Spock are dealing with Kor. As for the Organians? Well, Star Trek never really followed up on what the original episode established, so it’s pretty much a blank page so far as what these omnipotent super beings might do, given the chance. …
“In A Mirror, Darkly” (Star Trek: Enterprise) – In truth, I figure any movie featuring the Mirror Universe also would take cues from original Star Trek episodes “Mirror Mirror” and “The Tholian Web.” If the filmmakers wanted to use this conceit as a means of showcasing the “old school” U.S.S. Defiant and the original series aesthetic in order to represent the original timeline, I’d be game. Maybe part of an expanded story using elements from the various episodes could be used to show how Mirror Spock deals with his Captain Kirk. I wonder what Zachary Quinto would look like in a beard? Or, maybe they tweak the idea enough so that Leonard Nimoy could be Mirror Spock. Also, is Trek fandom ready for “Empress Nyota?” I think we could handle it. …
“Mudd’s Women”/”I, Mudd” or “The Trouble With Tribbles,” suggested by Melissa Nickerson and John Ordover on my Facebook page – During the discussion we had about this topic over on Facebook, friend and former Pocket Books Star Trek fiction editor John Ordover made the point that after the fairly intense storylines which have dominated the last few films, it might well be time to lighten things up a bit. Just as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was a definite change of pace following the first three movies, so too could a fresh take on a lovable rogue adversary like Harry Mudd or Cyrano Jones. Tackling a more whimsical tale would depend in large part on the actor chosen for the pivotal role of the scoundrel du jour. For my money, I can see Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly) as Mudd, but what about Jones? Hmmm?
This, first, is an outstanding list, combining my two favorite episodes (“Balance of Terror” and “The Doomsday Machine”), the most award-winning episode (“City on the Edge of Forever”), and two other favorites (“Mirror, Mirror” and “The Trouble with Tribbles”). The Harcourt Fenton Mudd episodes are amusing, but “I, Mudd” was over-the-top campy, though the use of the Liar’s Paradox is great.
Each of the original episodes was longer than an hour-long series today, because the networks jam in more commercials. Many episodes required substantial pre-filming script editing. Science fiction writer Harlan Ellison wrote “City,” which required enormous rewrites because creator Gene Roddenberry objected to Ellison’s characterization of some of the Enterprise’s crew. “Tribbles” author David Gerrold typed his script on a 12-pica IBM Selectric typewriter (remember those?), and when, as the studios did in those days, Desilu distributed the first draft of the script as retyped using a 10-pitch typewriter, it was 90 pages long. At one minute per page, Gerrold said, that could have been the first 90-minute episode of “Star Trek.”
The problem, however, is how to add material without padding to stretch a one-hour TV episode into a two-hour movie. This might be easiest in the case of “Balance of Terror,” because it was based on a movie, “The Enemy Below.” A movie could delve into the backstory of Romulans and Vulcans being related, along with the particular anti-Romulan animus of the navigator in the original. (That, however, is a character not in the current version of “Star Trek” — Chekov arrived in the second season.)
“The Enemy Below” was about a U.S. destroyer and a German submarine, each pursuing the other in the North Atlantic. The German sub had a war-weary captain and his friend the executive officer, plus other characters including a more-Nazi-than-thou officer. There is one scene while the sub is in silent running where the captain looks at his exec to have him look at super-Nazi, who is of course reading Mein Kampf. The exec looks back at the captain and shrugs. The scene could not have been done better.
“The Enemy Below” shows that while the Germans were the enemy, not all Germans were that different from the Allies. (Which is different from claiming that the Axis and the Allies were equally bad.) “Balance of Terror” is similar in showing a Romulan captain who does his job well and carries out his orders without necessarily agreeing with them.
As for “The Doomsday Machine,” there’s a sequel option there too if any more “Star Trek: The Next Generation” movies are made. One of the better TNG novels, Vendetta, posits that the doomsday machine was created by a race at war with … the Borg. Some of the action in the original occurs off-screen — the machine eating a planet onto which Commodore Decker’s crew was beamed down after the machine damaged Decker’s ship — and obviously could be included to devastating effect. (Imagine watching the planet you’re standing on destroyed — watching your own death.)
The scene where Kirk orders Spock to relieve Decker (Kirk’s superior officer) of command is not only one of the greatest moments in the history of the series (all five series and all the movies), it is quintessential Kirk and a demonstration of why Kirk was the superior captain to all the rest. Kirk would do anything for his ship, including blatantly violate not just Starfleet regulations, but protocol of any military in the history of mankind.
“Tribbles” would be an interesting choice, because there’s more there than casual viewers might think. Gerrold wrote that James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, who had to clean up the tribbles from the Enterprise, pointed out that the tribble crisis could have cost Captain Kirk his command thanks to a series of events beyond Kirk’s control combined with Kirk’s antagonism toward the Federation bureaucrat in charge of the quadrotriticale project. The episode had the Enterprise protecting a shipment of wheat — sorry, quadrotriticale — on a space station for a planet experiencing a famine, when along comes Cyrano Jones and his tribbles, followed closely by the Klingons. What happens if the tribbles eat all the grain? (Apparently tribbles are not gluten-intolerant. And as viewers know, if you feed a tribble, you get a bunch of hungry little tribbles.) What happens if the Klingons attack the space station? What if the Organians give Sherman’s Planet to the Klingons? Any of those scenarios would probably be a career-killer for Kirk.
The problem with any of these, of course, is the inevitable comparisons between J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” and the original. It’s impossible to imagine, for instance, better music than the original “Doomsday Machine” soundtrack …
… which was also used for “Journey to Babel,” “Mirror, Mirror,” “Obsession,” “The Immunity Syndrome” and other episodes.
There’s also the larger issue of why not just a series, but an episode is being remade. Of course, the long and dreary list of TV-sh0ws-turned-inferior-movies — “Wild Wild West,” anyone? — shows that ship sailed a long time ago, and is a subject that would take up far more space than this blog.
It was a bummer, though not particularly surprising, that Wisconsin lost the Capital One Bowl in Orlando to South Carolina.
In fact, the Badgers were really only the fifth best team in the Big Ten, or 12, or 14 next season. That’s not as measured in football; that’s measured in finances, as the Wall Street Journal shows:
The only real surprise to me is that Iowa brings in that much more football revenue than Wisconsin with a smaller stadium. The other Big Ten universities ranked higher than Wisconsin all have larger stadiums, as does Penn State.
The number one British single today in 1957 was the same single as the previous week, though performed by a different act:
The number one British single today in 1958:
The number one album for the fifth consecutive week today in 1976 was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits”:
This Christmas season included some sad news in our family. From the Morrison County (Minn.) Record:
Evangeline Vangie Gwost, age 99, of Little Falls, passed away Thursday, Dec. 19, 2013, at St. Ottos Care Center in Little Falls. …
Evangeline Vangie Merchlewicz was born Aug. 2, 1914, in Little Falls, the daughter of Joseph and Frances (Sniezek) Merchlewicz. She grew up in Little Falls and graduated from Little Falls High School, Class of 1932. Following her schooling, she worked for the Farm Security Administration in Little Falls and across northwestern Minnesota. During World War II, she was a court reporter at Camp Ripley. She was engaged to George Gwost before he went to serve during the War in the Pacific. Upon his return, the couple was married April 10, 1945, at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. During their honeymoon, they went to the Busch Gardens in St. Louis. It was there they got their initial inspiration to start a rose garden which grew to 500 bushes in their retirement. Vangie worked as a professional secretary for many companies in Little Falls and retired from Morrison County Social Services. Her retirement was short lived and she began working at the Morrison County Record as a proofreader. She was soon asked to begin a cooking column, Whats Cookin In The County, which she began in 1981 and continued until her second retirement in 1996. Vangies commitment to her church was life-long. She began playing the organ in the third grade and played until 2002. She and George were life-long members of the Senior Choir. She also played at St. Ottos for 10 years. Vangie was instrumental in the launch of the basement remodeling committee which she co-chaired with her husband, George. They published a cookbook, which she co-edited with Geri Wotzka, to fund the basement renovation. Vangie enjoyed working, cooking, flower gardening, was famous for her kolaches, dancing, music and with George, hosted many parties in their backyard log cabin. …
Vangie was preceded in death by her parents; husband, George (May 6, 2008); infant daughter, Mary Suzanne; brothers, Vincent, Dominic, John, Jerome Merchlewicz and sisters, Celia Rue, Helen Trebiatowski, Sr. Vincent (Lucille) DePaul, Esther Prestegard and Leona Janousek.
Vangie was my great-aunt, and, as far as I know, the first columnist in the family. The brothers and sisters were my great-uncles and great-aunts (five of whom, I believe, I met), and Esther was my grandmother, who died before I was born. I found out about her cooking column on one of our Little Falls trips, so I mentioned that to the cooking columnist at the newspaper I worked at in college, so Vangie got to be a guest columnist in Monona, and perhaps our cooking columnist was a guest columnist in Little Falls.
Vangie was the last of her family to pass on to the great Polish family reunion in the sky. Celia lived in a big white house in Minneapolis within view of a SuperAmerica gas station sign, which fascinated the four-year-old who visited one summer. On a previous trip, the story goes, my father took my brother and me for a walk, and for some reason I decided to take a slightly different path, into a pond, to where the only thing floating was my hat. I don’t remember that, but I do remember this sequence of events on the aforementioned 1969 trip:
Aunt Helen, who lived in Little Falls, owned a Buick convertible that apparently had included as a previous passenger one Hubert H. Humphrey, which is why she kept it. Her late husband was the police chief in Little Falls, and my father would visit their son during the summer. I think Herman died before I was born, although I heard enough times the story of one of his officers who found a stray cat and put it in his squad car. Said officer found out that transporting cats in cars is a bad idea for the driver and, in his case, his squad, which overturned during said transport attempt. I’m told that Herman couldn’t usually get the whole story out because he’d start laughing and then start crying from laughing.
It is said you should write about what you know. Vangie knew cooking, at epic quantities. She once admitted she stayed up all night to cook for said reunions. Every Labor Day weekend for many years she and George would host enormous family reunions at their house outside Little Falls. Uncles John and Jerry (the owner of the second English springer spaniel I ever saw, the first being our own) would sit at a table and drink beer and brandy. Some number of their four children and 10 grandchildren, plus other nieces and nephews would be there — all cousins of mine to the extent I could remember who belonged to whom. Food was eaten, adult beverages were drunk, and music was played and sung. (Including by me when cousin Mary Ann gave me her trumpet to play.)
The reunions were so large by the late 1970s that the family rented out Lindbergh State Park. One year, the Morrison County Sheriff’s Department threw us out of said Lindbergh State Park. How do you fix that? You get one of the family to marry a sheriff’s deputy. He’s now the sheriff of Morrison County.
Someone once said that Merchlewicz family reunions, weddings and funerals were all the same event. I can’t speak to the latter, but that seemed to apply to the first two. George and Vangie sang at Mary Ann’s wedding (which was not at Lindbergh State Park). I forgot the reason, but that wedding included this joke: A duck walks into a pharmacy and asks the pharmacist for a tube of Chapstick. (If this was a Wisconsin joke, it would be Carmex, of course.) The pharmacist gave the duck his Chapstick, and then the duck said, “Put it on my bill.” In keeping with that joke, when the priest presented the new couple to the congregation, a bunch of the family was wearing duck bills on their noses.
(The worst thing I can say about this family came from this wedding: A bunch of us went out that weekend to a Little Falls bar. They were drinking Grain Belt beer on tap. Appallingly bad beer.)
This is the sort of thing you see less of these days, for two reasons. Vangie was one of 10 children. Vangie and George had five children, one of whom died at birth, and the other of whom gave Vangie and George a total of 10 grandchildren. Those children live from Minnesota to Washington. Smaller and more spread out families make big family events more difficult.
That doesn’t mean that family traditions can’t continue to future generations. Every Christmas, we get from my aunt two pans of kolaches, which are Polish pastry with a drop of fruit inside. You can guess where my aunt got the recipe. I just finished ours yesterday.
National Review’s Jim Geraghty writes about Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who reports:
“I spend more time with voters than anybody else,” Luntz says. “I do more focus groups than anybody else. I do more dial sessions than anybody else. I don’t know [squat] about anything, with the exception of what the American people think.”
It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. “They want to impose their opinions rather than express them,” is the way he describes what he saw. “And they’re picking up their leads from here in Washington.” Haven’t political disagreements always been contentious, I ask? “Not like this,” he says. “Not like this.”
Luntz knew that he, a maker of political messages and attacks and advertisements, had helped create this negativity, and it haunted him. But it was Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived, had absorbed the president’s message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution. …
The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone. “We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that’s why they voted for him,” he says. “And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great.”
To which Geraghty replies:
Imagine if the most bland and milquetoast president had been in office since January 20, 2009. Instead of electing uber-celebrity munificent Sun-King Barack Obama, we elected President Boring Center-Left Conventional Wisdom — the genetic hybrid of David Gergen, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, and Cokie Roberts.
America would still have endured the Wall Street crash of late 2008 and the Great Recession. This recession (still ongoing, in the minds and experiences of millions of Americans) was driven by many factors but largely from the bursting of the housing bubble and the mortgage securities and asset-backed derivatives that came out of that. We can argue that better policies would have generated a more significant recovery from 2009 to 2012, but indisputably, America’s economy fell far and fast, and climbing back up to, say, 2007 levels of employment and average household-retirement savings was destined to be a long, slow, tough slog. All those folks employed in the housing bubble — the home builders, the construction guys, the realtors, the house-flippers, all that real-estate-advertising revenue, etc. — had to find some other work. And with the exception of the energy sector, there hasn’t been much of a boom in the U.S. economy in the past five years.
At the same time, we spent most of 2001 to 2009 absorbing millions of illegal immigrants, and the unskilled labor was flooding the market for the few unskilled labor jobs out there. The multi-decade decline of American manufacturing hasn’t abated much, schools and universities continued to pump out new American workers who are only partially prepared for the reality of the modern job market, and new technology continues to wreak havoc in established industries (ask Newsweek). Competition from cheaper labor overseas continues unabated. The era of spending your career at one company is gone. The era of traditional defined-contribution pension plans is gone. The era of a college degree automatically providing a ticket to a white-collar job and middle-class lifestyle is gone.
Economic anxiety is baked in the cake in American life right now. It’s not that surprising that a lot of our fellow countrymen are receptive to a message seeking scapegoats. In other words, even under President Cokie Gergen Friedman Brooks, Luntz would be seeing a similar cranky, resentful, demanding mood in the electorate. This president may be particularly skilled at opportunistically exploiting that anxiety to further his agenda — in fact, it may be the only thing he’s really good at — but it’s not like he invented it, nor like he’s the only one to ever practice it (remember Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a ‘vulture capitalist’?), nor like he’ll be the last to try it.
If Luntz is right that a large chunk of the American electorate has turned angry, entitled, resentful, and spiteful — and I’ll bet a lot of us have suspected this in the past year or five — then it is indeed ominous for the next few elections, and suggests American life will get worse before it gets better.
But there’s also an upside to this, at least for us. Because it means large numbers of our fellow countrymen are embracing a philosophy and attitude that is destined to fail them and leave them miserable. Anybody who sits and waits for the government to improve his life is going to get stuck in endless circles of disappointment, anger, self-destructive rage, and despair.
We would be foolish if we told ourselves that being conservative means we’ve gotlife all figured out. We all have our flaws, our foibles, our sins, and our moments of not practicing what we preach. But if you’re conservative, you’ll probably manage to avoid certain mistakes and pitfalls on this journey called life.
If you’re conservative, you’ve probably learned that there’s no substitute for hard work. Even great talent can only get you so far, particularly if you don’t apply yourself. Yes, luck is a factor, but we also acknowledge that old saying, “the harder I work, the luckier I get.”
If you’re conservative, you probably at least try to embrace individual responsibility — meaning you realize the quality of your life is primarily up to you — and there’s no point in blaming mommy or daddy, no point in blaming the boss, no point in blaming society at large, no point in complaining that life isn’t fair. It isn’t. We can’t control a lot of things. The only thing we can control is how we react to things.
If you’re conservative, you hopefully don’t spend much time worrying about or grumbling about somebody else who’s doing well for themselves. You want to figure out how to join them! Or at least “do well” enough for yourself and your family, and maybe have a little something left over to help out somebody who really needs it.
If you’re conservative, you may or may not believe in a higher power, but you probably believe in right and wrong and you’re wary of people who talk about the world as a murky blur of grey and endorse a moral relativism. You know doing the wrong thing catches up with you sooner or later. You know the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and life’s bad guys are always insisting that the ends justify the means.
If you’re conservative, you believe there’s evil in the world, and we’re not likely to successfully sweet-talk with it, negotiate with it, ignore it, or reason with it. Confronting it, on terms most beneficial to us, or containing it seem to be the best options. …
Both liberals and conservatives were appalled by the administration’s management and handling of Obamacare rollout, but only the liberals were surprised. (Well, maybe we were surprised at just how epic the failure was.) We don’t expect government to do a lot of things right. We don’t count on it to immanentize the eschaton — to build God’s Kingdom, or utopia, on earth. But year in and year out, the Left always convinces itself anew that government can do it — even after it completely botches a website and fails to tell the president before the unveiling.
The number one single today in 1955 was banned by ABC Radio stations because it was allegedly in bad taste:
The number one album today in 1961 wasn’t a music album — Bob Newhart’s “The Button Down Mind Strikes Back!”
The number one album today in 1965 was “Beatles ’65”:
Frank Zappa once said that “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”
That certainly describes Rolling Stone magazine when it wanders off music into areas where it completely lacks what the lawyers call “standing.”
Instead of wasting your time reading Jesse Myerson‘s рубец, read Seth Davis‘ demolition of Myerson’s навоз:
Over the weekend, Jesse Myerson, a twenty-something former Occupy organizer, finally stumbled upon a foolproof recipe for success for today’s struggling Millennials. The recipe? Communism, naturally.
Myerson, whose Twitter bio includes the hashtag #FULLCOMMUNISM (for when fractional communism just can’t murder people quickly enough), listed five economic reforms that he thinks every Millennial should demand: Guaranteed jobs, guaranteed income, no more private real estate, no more private assets at all, and a public bank in every state (a great place to store all those financial assets you no longer own). If that sounds eerily similar to a Yoko Ono-infused brainstorming session by John Lennon, it’s because it is eerily similar to a Yoko Ono-infused brainstorming session by John Lennon. …
Look, lots of people think everybody else’s stuff should be their stuff. Unfortunately for Myerson, most of those people drink juice out of a box and think Cookie Monster and Dora the Explorer are real people. There’s a time and a place to brag that you’ve finally figured out how to make communism work, and it’s your college dorm room at 3:00 a.m. If you publish a serious call for the reconstruction of several core pillars of communism barely two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (this is the point at which Myerson would almost certainly interject that the USSR wasn’t practicing real communism, maaan), you’re pretty much begging to be mocked.
But what makes Myerson’s article so precious is that either he’s too dumb to know what the Soviet Union stood for (or too lazy to have done a quick Google search prior to clicking “Publish”), or he thinks his readers are too dumb to discern that he’s actually pushing for a return to Soviet-style communism. In his defense, he published his Marxist mash note at Rolling Stone — a site run by a seemingly drug-addled 23-year-old nepot — so maybe he has a point about the collective IQ of his readers. …
As Andrew McCoy noted shortly after Myerson’s piece was published, Myerson’s ideas aren’t just similar to Soviet ideas. They are Soviet ideas, which should come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Soviet Union. According to McCoy’s research, each of Myerson’s five reforms was contained in the USSR’s Constitution. Guaranteed jobs are in Article 40. Social insurance for everybody is in Article 43. Abolition of private real estate is in Article 6. Complete abolition of all other private property is in Articles 4 and 5. And government-owned banks — the only banks allowed in the Soviet Union — were a natural byproduct of a system that says only the government can own things. …
If Myerson wants to see what a government-engineered “climate collapse” (whatever that means) looks like, he need only study the Great Chinese Famine, a three-year period of absolute desolation caused directly by Mao’s communist regime. Between 1958 and 1962 alone, upwards of 45 million Chinese died as a result of the Mao-engineered famine, while another 30 million failed to be born because of the communist-caused carnage. As a percentage of the country’s total population, those 45 million Chinese deaths would be roughly equivalent to the entire populations of New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia being wiped out between now and 2018, all thanks to government fiat. I’m pretty sure my capitalist air-conditioning and SUV haven’t murdered 45 million people since 2009, but your mileage may vary.
For all his faults, though, Myerson really is the perfect 21st century chickenhawk communist. Oh, you live in Manhattan, make close to six figures, and went to a middling NY liberal arts college where the cost of a single credit hour exceeds the GDP per capita of a whole host of African countries? Tell me more about how you’re down with The Struggle™. Nothing says certified prole like black-and-white candids, three-piece suits, and finely manicured beards, amirite?
Between this sort of nonsense and its fawning Boston Bomber coverage, Rolling Stone is clearly trying to cement itself as Slate for the dumb set (but I repeat myself) with a traffic model that all but begs people to mock its stupidity. No longer wanting to be confined to writing terrible music reviews, Rolling Stone is basically becoming the print equivalent of clips of the grape-stomping local TV reporter, minus the shame and embarrassment.
If you believe Democrats (and, you know, I could stop writing right there), the economy is recovering.
But if the economy is recovering, why is Congress passing an extension of unemployment benefits?
Ask U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wisconsin), who congratulated herself in a news release:
A new report released by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee shows that the long-term unemployment rate is twice what it was when Congress last allowed federal unemployment insurance to expire after the recessions of 1990-91 and 2001. Approximately 1.3 million workers, including 23,700 Wisconsinites, lost all unemployment benefits when Congress failed to act before the end of December.
Maybe Baldwin should have a conversation with her president about our great economy. Baldwin also fired shots at Gov. Scott Walker, ignoring the fact that Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is lower than the nation’s, and has been lower than the nation’s throughout Walker’s term as governor.
The obvious explanation of that previous paragraph is that it’s an election year. The other answer is that, well, the economy isn’t recovering in ways non-economists can see, reports John Lott:
It has been over four-and-a-half years since the economic “recovery” began, yet a new CNN poll indicates that almost seven out of every ten Americans considers the economy to be in poor shape.
Democrats want to claim that the economy is improving at the same time that they will be pushing Monday for a continued extension of unemployment benefits. Democrats also refuse to acknowledge that up to two years of unemployment insurance benefits actually creates unemployment.
Indeed, people are so worried about the job market that they are clinging to their current jobs at remarkably high rates.
Quit rates that usually rise after recessions, particularly after long recessions when they have stayed with jobs they might not care for, are still lower over the last three months than they were during the recession.
But how can that possibly be?
The official unemployment rate keeps falling. We are told that the job market is improving. Are Americans just not realizing that things are getting better? Or do they perceive of something that the unemployment numbers are not picking up?
The answer is the latter.
The unemployment numbers do not accurately reflect the state of the labor market
. The reason is that the unemployment rate only considers those who are actively looking for work, failing to include the ones who have become so discouraged that they no longer look for a job.
Even the broader U6 measure of unemployment only includes these discouraged workers in its count for just one year. With the traditional measure of unemployment that keeps being reported on the news, these discouraged individuals are counted as officially having left the labor force.
Imagine if workers had not dropped out and that the labor force participation had remained the same as it was when Obama became president 60 months ago. …
As we can see, the official unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in October 2009 and slowly fell to 7 percent today. But if we add the drop-outs to the unemployed, the current rate would still be 11 percent, virtually unchanged since it hit 11.1 percent in October 2009.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 