Paul M. Jones

Americans in the bottom 10 percentile are incredibly well off by global standards, as a general rule.  And I'm not even going to dignify the lefticle wank of "income gap" with a response, except to note it's pretty much Godwin's Law for economics. If you bring it up, you've admitted you have no argument.

via Speaker to Morons » You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

Bias matters not because liberals deliberately slant their stories, but because they are much more likely to interrogate the facts that contradict their ideological beliefs, than the ones that support them.  When they come across an uncomfortable fact, they'll go out of their way to figure out why it isn't really true.  When they come across a fact that confirms what they believe, they'll be more likely to accept it at face value.

I'm not claiming that liberals do this more than conservatives (I think that being human, they're equally prone to this phenomenon)--only that in the media, liberal bias is mostly what matters, because the media is overwhelmingly somewhere to the left of the American center.  Even if you have a conservative reporter prone to insufficient interrogation of convenient facts, those same facts are going to set off alarm bells with his editors, who are quite likely to question the whole story.

This is why I think liberal media bias is worrisome--not because it's a vast conspiracy, but because it creates a giant store of pseudofacts that "everyone knows", like all those ludicrous statistics about abortion and domestic violence that used to appear everywhere.  And new pseudofacts are being created, or resurrected, all the time.  Longtime readers of the blog have endured my jeremiads against Republicans who say that cutting tax rates raises revenue.  A few weeks ago I was flabbergasted to find out that a very smart left-of-center blogger I admire seemed to think it was common knowledge that there's really no evidence that tax cuts provide stimulus . . . a belief that I then find out seems to be common among some of the left commentariat.  This is not at all what any mainstream economist I'm aware of believes (the debate is over the relative size of secondary and tertiary effects of various kinds of stimulus, not whether tax cuts are stimulative at all.)  But somehow this belief had become common . . . presumably because in the milieu where it was transmitted, no one was disposed to question something that fit so neatly with what they already believed.  Add in a few hundred repeitions from people you like, and voila, "Everyone knows . . . "

...

But we don't investigate things that everyone knows--reporters do not start off each new story by checking if gravity is still in operation. The more things that everyone knows, the more unnoticed holes there will be in stories. And there is no one without blind spots--the best you can achieve is getting together a bunch of conscientious people who all have different blind spots.

via How Bias Works - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

via Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet | Danger Room | Wired.com.

A very scary chart. Essentially, there are not enough job openings to employ the unemployed. Welcome to "Depression." Via The 99% - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.

Warren is ... a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize -- i.e., conscript -- whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government -- including such public goods as roads, schools and police -- is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.

Emphasis mine. Via Elizabeth Warren and liberalism, twisting the ‘social contract’ - The Washington Post.

Bad news on HPV:  it now seems to be the leading cause of throat cancer in men. Worse news: it may be spread by kissing.

via HPV: It's Not Just For Ladies Anymore - Megan McArdle - Life - The Atlantic.

In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four -- for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas -- costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 -- and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)

In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9.

By the way, note the phrase "despite extensive government subsidies." It's almost as if the government doesn't know what's best for you. Via Is Junk Food Really Cheaper? - NYTimes.com.

... everything Bloomberg wrote about Koch Industries could just as easily have been written about G.E. G.E.’s foreign subsidiaries have done business in Iran, and G.E., like Koch, has publicly noted that its subsidiaries’ dealings with Iran were legal. Likewise, employees of one or more G.E. companies paid bribes to obtain business in Iraq, and just last year, G.E. paid a $23.4 million fine as a result. And G.E. has had environmental problems, like–to name just a few–contaminating the Hudson and Housatonic Rivers with PCBs, along with the Coosa River Basin, and releasing dimethyl sulfate, chlorine, 1, 1, 1, -trichloroethane, ammonia, and toluene from its silicone manufacturing plant in Waterford, New York. G.E. has had product liability problems, including claims of wrongful death that were, tragically, justified. And, while Bloomberg makes a laughable price-fixing claim against Koch, G.E. was in fact a party to one of the most famous price-fixing conspiracies of all time.

So, is Bloomberg’s story titled “The Secret Sins of General Electric”? Or, in the online version, “General Electric Flouts Law With Secret Iran Sales?” Of course not. G.E. is generally identified with the Democratic Party. Does anyone seriously doubt that Bloomberg wanted to do a hit piece on Koch Industries solely because that company’s owners are prominent conservatives? Of course not.

The Bloomberg piece is "battlespace preparation." Read the whole response at Bloomberg Whiffs, Part 1 | Power Line.

A few hours ago, the maniac simians at the Senate finally did it and fired the first round in the great US-China currency war, after they took aim at one of China's core economic policies, voting to move forward with a bill designed to press Beijing to let its currency rise in value in the hope of creating U.S. jobs.

As Reuters reports, "Senators voted 79-19 to open a week of Senate debate on the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2011, which would allow the U.S. government to slap countervailing duties on products from countries found to be subsidizing their exports by undervaluing their currencies. Monday's strong green light for debate on the bill bolsters prospects it will clear the Democrat-run Senate later this week, but prospects for action in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives are murky. If the bill did clear both chambers, it would present President Barack Obama with a tough decision on whether to sign the popular legislation into law and risk a trade war with Beijing, or veto it to pursue a more diplomatic approach."

The response has been quick and severe: "China's foreign ministry said it "adamantly opposes" a bill pushed by the U.S. Senate that will allow the United States to impose duties on countries that undervalue their currencies."

And just because China is now certain that the US will continue with its provocative posture, most recently demonstrated by the vocal response in the latest US-Taiwan military escalation, we would not be surprised at all to find China Daily report that China has accidentally sold a few billions in US government bonds... just because.

Reformatted, and emphasis mine. Via China Fires Back At US Senate Which May Have Just Started The Sino-US Currency Wars | ZeroHedge.

Enlist in the military, then. They'll give you something to do: I’m 22 and I Have No Idea What to Do « Penelope Trunk Mailbag.