A Media Bistro announcement in my inbox informs me that,
Gawker.com video editor Richard Blakeley postponed the [monthly Media Meshing] party to next week to accommodate holiday hangovers, but he exclusively told The Press List that December’s Meshing will be the last. Blakeley says he’s doing away with the popular event because the economic crisis has left many media people unemployed and, “it seems kind of rude to be getting trashed when people are without jobs.”
I was never going to attend one of these parties, so I’ve got no self-interest at stake here but Blakeley’s reasoning strikes me as silly. Almost as silly as some of the comments on Megan McArdle’s Happy Thanksgiving post chiding her for being so public about the joys in her life when some are less than joyful.
Approximately 94 percent of Americans who wish to be employed are employed. Even in the best of times, some Americans are miserable. And, even if Barack Obama permanently ends that unhappy condition by deft use of his magic pony, one presumes someone, somewhere will be in something less than a state of absolute bliss.
At what point is it permissible to act as if you’re happy?
Further, if one can afford to throw large parties at public venues and would otherwise do so but for the unseemliness of it all, it’s worth noting that canceling said party will contribute to the very economic downturn causing said fear.
So, if it’s “rude” to “be getting trashed when people are without jobs,” what label do we apply to putting more people out of work by failing to get trashed?
Photo by Flickr user yewenyi under Creative Commons license.
The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.
The long-planned shift in the Defense Department’s role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.
There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military’s role in domestic law enforcement.
But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response — a nearly sevenfold increase in five years — “would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable,” Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the realization that civilian authorities may be overwhelmed in a catastrophe prompted “a fundamental change in military culture,” he said.
In Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs shows that the main reason lies in government’s responses to national “crises” (real or imagined), including economic upheavals (e.g., the Great Depression) and especially war (e.g., World Wars I and II, Cold War, etc.). The result is ever increasing government power which endures long after each crisis has passed, impinging on both civil and economic liberties and fostering extensive corporate welfare and pork. As government power grows, writes Higgs, it achieves a form of autonomy, making it ever more difficult to decrease its size and scope, and to resist its further efforts to increase its reach, so long as the citizenry remain uninformed of its true effects.
In resposne to the war on terror we have a new federal department that has a cabinent level appointee, considerably more spending, and now watring down if not the outright removal of a 130 year old law limiting the use of U.S. military on U.S. soil. How long before mission creep has the military aiding in drug enforcement, crowd control and other such endeavors without the need for declaring a state of emergency?
Jim Geraghty notes, as many of us did, that the lectern and microphone placement at today’s press conference made Barack Obama’s national security team look quite short. The notable exception was National Security Advisor designee Jim Jones, who at 6′5” towered over the proceedings.
My guess is that the rest of them won’t be asked to join in any of Obama’s pickup basketball games. Jones played varsity at Georgetown, so he’s in either way.
Jonah Goldberg argues that conservatives should have embraced “The Wire” more than we did.
This is a Democratic city, run almost uniformly by liberals. While many of the problems most prominently on display can certainly be traced back to racism, racism itself is not a central issue in The Wire (nor is racism an inherently or historically conservative phenomena). These drug gangs and the poor souls in their orbit, are not trapped by racism so much as by a dysfunctional culture. That’s certainly the lesson of much of season four. The stoop kids do okay. The Corner Boys are destined for a life of misery. For every main character who is a murderer or dope dealer (but I repeat myself), there’s a representative of the black middle class who rejects the criminal culture of the street. For every Marlo, there’s a Bunk. Race relations between the actual characters are remarkably healthy, and nearly every mention of race as a salient issue is in the context of the political nonsense inherent to Baltimore, or rather urban, Democratic politics. To the extent many liberals try to explain all of the problems of poor blacks on racism, the show was a powerful rebuttal.
Some liberals (including some of the show’s creators) might look at the manifest failures of the schools in The Wire as evidence that we don’t “invest” enough in urban education, which is itself a symptom of racism. Okay, fine. But as a conservative, I don’t look at the schools in the Wire and say, “gosh, if only they had more money.”
Alex Massie, sensibly I believe, wonders, “have we really reached the stage where even TV programmes have to be apportioned between conservatives and liberals so that watching television becomes a dreary act by which one demonstrates ones political allegiance?” Nonetheless, he wades in fearlessly:
In any case, if you have to investigate The Wire’s politics, it seems to me that you might be tempted to conclude that it endorses a libertarian view of local politics, rather than conservative or liberal perspective. No wonder it’s such a trendy show to like… The evidence is there: manifest failure of a crippling and immoral war on drugs? Check. Manifest failure of a school system resistant to reform and implicitly ripe, therefore, for real school choice? Check. Desperate consequences of the criminalisation of prostitution? For sure. Ghastly consequences of local government and planning regulations held hostage by rent-seeking?
Which just goes to show that programs with a heavy dose of social drama can be read in ways that conform to one’s own preexisting ideological bent. In any event, we should refrain from drawing too many political lessons from fictional television shows, however “realistic” they seem.
Howard Mortman presents “Top Ten Funniest Political Quotes Of 2008.”
My favorites: “We should be able to deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies” and “I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House.”
Gabe Rivera’s Memorandum, a favorite of bloggers almost from its inception, has gotten some love fromThe Guardian.
If you want to know what’s happening in the world, then Memorandum will tell you – at least in a couple of areas. It’s an automated news clipping service, known in the trade as a “news aggregator”. It provides headlines and short texts updated every few minutes, with links to the original sites, much like Google News.
Memeorandum is based on the idea of “memes” or ideas that spread across the web (along with a pun on memorandum). Someone publishes an interesting story, other people find it, discuss it, and link to it. That’s how the web works. Small stories come and go quickly, while big ones generate lots of comment and dominate the page for hours.
The developer, Gabe Rivera, says it’s all done in software. He provides a list of publications as “seeds,” but the software still finds stories on sites he’s never heard of. It’s just a question of following links, and then trying to assess the contents. The algorithms are, obviously, secret.
Google also follows links and assesses content, but Memeorandum is embarrassingly better than Google News. Google reckons that the more coverage a story gets, the more important it is. Unfortunately, broad coverage takes a long time to develop, so Google News can run hours or even a day behind Memeorandum. This is fine for casual consumers, but if you’re a news junkie – or a journalist – it’s hopeless.
I’ve been using Memeorandum almost since its beginning in September 2005 and, indeed, found this story there. I still use Google News and Yahoo News for finding specific stories, especially European news, but Memeorandum has long been my first stop to see what stories people are buzzing about.
The folks in charge of determining whether we’re in recession or not have now declared that we’ve been in one for a whole year, despite not meeting the technical definition.
The US economy has been in recession since December 2007, a panel of economists charged with the official designation of business cycles said Monday. The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research said it made the determination during a conference call on Friday.
Although a recession is generally defined as two consecutive quarters of declining activity, the panel has its own criteria for determining a downturn. “A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income and other indicators,” the panel said. “A recession begins when the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends when the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion.” The committee said it “identified December 2007 as the peak month, after determining that the subsequent decline in economic activity was large enough to qualify as a recession.”
According to government data, the US economy contracted at a 0.2 percent pace in the fourth quarter of 2007 but grew 0.8 percent in the first quarter and 2.8 percent in the second quarter of 2008. It then contracted 0.5 percent in the third quarter, based on a provisional estimate.
Now, it’s been the consensus of economists for some time that the economy is in a recession and things are pretty bad whether we call it “recession,” “depression,” or just “crappy.” But you’d think that a quantitatively oriented group like NBER could come up with a quantifiable measure for recession, preferably one that could be read at the time the data are released, instead of deciding it arbitrarily via phone chit-chat a year after the fact.
Or is that asking too much?
UPDATE: Kevin Drum reminds us that he predicted way back in February that, “When NBER eventually gets around to dating the 2008 recession, when will they decide it started? My money is on December 2007. And when will they date the end? I’d guess March 2009.”
Here’s hoping he’s as right on the second as the first.
Update (Steve Verdon): The NBER Dating Committee does not see its job as dating the start and end of a recession in a timely fashion as its job. Instead its job is to accurately date the start/end of a recession. As for the “generally accepted” definition of a recession that definition is only popular with journalists and not the NBER and has not been for at least 3 recessions now (i.e this goes back to the early 1990s). Seriously, if you are a journalist and you write on financial matters it would behoove you to get your act together and read about how the NBER dates recessions.
A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators. A recession begins when the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends when the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion.
Because a recession is a broad contraction of the economy, not confined to one sector, the committee emphasizes economy-wide measures of economic activity. The committee believes that domestic production and employment are the primary conceptual measures of economic activity.
The committee views the payroll employment measure, which is based on a large survey of employers, as the most reliable comprehensive estimate of employment. This series reached a peak in December 2007 and has declined every month since then.
The committee believes that the two most reliable comprehensive estimates of aggregate domestic production are normally the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Product and the quarterly estimate of real Gross Domestic Income, both produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In concept, the two should be the same, because sales of products generate income for producers and workers equal to the value of the sales. However, because the measurement on the product and income sides proceeds somewhat independently, the two actual measures differ by a statistical discrepancy. The product-side estimates fell slightly in 2007Q4, rose slightly in 2008Q1, rose again in 2008Q2, and fell slightly in 2008Q3. The income-side estimates reached their peak in 2007Q3, fell slightly in 2007Q4 and 2008Q1, rose slightly in 2008Q2 to a level below its peak in 2007Q3, and fell again in 2008Q3. Thus, the currently available estimates of quarterly aggregate real domestic production do not speak clearly about the date of a peak in activity.
Other series considered by the committee—including real personal income less transfer payments, real manufacturing and wholesale-retail trade sales, industrial production, and employment estimates based on the household survey—all reached peaks between November 2007 and June 2008.
The committee determined that the decline in economic activity in 2008 met the standard for a recession, as set forth in the second paragraph of this document. All evidence other than the ambiguous movements of the quarterly product-side measure of domestic production confirmed that conclusion. Many of these indicators, including monthly data on the largest component of GDP, consumption, have declined sharply in recent months.
In short if we were to go with the “generally accepted” definition we’d still NOT be in a recession, yet everyone has considred the economy to be in recession for the past several months if not longer. In fact, the 2001 recession wouldn’t have fit that definition either.
Here is some additional information provided by the NBER on how it dates recessions,
Q: The financial press often states the definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. How does that relate to the NBER’s recession dating procedure?
A: Most of the recessions identified by our procedures do consist of two or more quarters of declining real GDP, but not all of them. As an example, the last recession, in 2001, did not include two consecutive quarters of decline. As of the date of the committee’s meeting, the economy had not yet experienced two consecutive quarters of decline.
Q: Why doesn’t the committee accept the two-quarter definition?
A: The committee’s procedure for identifying turning points differs from the two-quarter rule in a number of ways. First, we do not identify economic activity solely with real GDP, but use a range of indicators. Second, we place considerable emphasis on monthly indicators in arriving at a monthly chronology. Third, we consider the depth of the decline in economic activity. Recall that our definition includes the phrase, “a significant decline in activity.” Fourth, in examining the behavior of domestic production, we consider not only the conventional product-side GDP estimates, but also the conceptually equivalent income-side GDI estimates. The differences between these two sets of estimates were particularly evident in 2007 and 2008.
So is it surprising we are now “officially” in a recession? No. I noted a few weeks ago that payroll unemployment has declined every month in 2008 so far. Employment/unemployment tend to be lagging indicators. Thus, the recession probably started prior to 2008. I also linked to a post by James Hamilton about research that looked at the income side of economic activity (Gross Domestic Income) this should, by definition be equal to GDP, but rarely is. This difference is considered a “statistical discrepency”, however in looking at the GDI side we have had the “two quarters of economic decline” but not on the GDP side.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the U.S. has a pretty messed up judicial system. We allow no-knock SWAT raids on non-violent offenders in the name of protecting evidence. The implication being that the evidence is more important the lives of the non-violent offenders and even the police officers. We also have spent countless resources combating the War on Drugs…a war about what people decide to put in their bodies. Yes, drugs can destroy one’s life…just as alcohol can. Yet we decided long ago the War on Alcohol was stupid so we stopped it. Not so with drugs.
Now we have a story like this. These sex offender laws are becoming not only overly harsh and broad, but also counter productive. If you can’t live within 2,000 feet of a school (a bit over 1/3rd of a mile) of a school, park, church, day care, or any other facility likely to have children present then you are pretty much exiled. This encourages sex offenders to just disappear and not stay on any registry at all. Seriously, in Florida sex offenders are ordered by the legal system to live under a bridge.
The Florida Department of Corrections says there are fewer and fewer places in Miami-Dade County where sex offenders can live because the county has some of the strongest restrictions against this kind of criminal in the country.
Florida’s solution: house the convicted felons under a bridge that forms one part of the causeway.
The Julia Tuttle Causeway, which links Miami to Miami Beach, offers no running water, no electricity and little protection from nasty weather. It’s not an ideal solution, Department of Corrections Officials told CNN, but at least the state knows where the sex offenders are.
Yes, they know where they are for now…when they finally get sick of that life and decide to leg it out of state, and try to start over? Will the new neighbors know anything about the sex offender in their midst? Will the state know? Will the authorities know? No, no, and no.
And now these laws have been extended so that even a 16 year old boy or girl who has sex with another boy or girl that is sufficiently younger can wind up on the list for life even if the sex is consensual. Here is one example, Wendy Whitaker has been listed as a sex offender for 12 year and is danger of losing her house because of a decade old blowjob. When she had just turned 17 she performed oral sex on a classmate who was 3 weeks shy of his 16th birthday.
Another case: a 15 year old girl was arrested on child pornography charges for taking nude pictures of…herself. This girl could be forced to register as a sex offender for a very long time possibly the rest of her life.
None of the people in these three cases are a likely to present a danger to children or even adults. Making them register as sex offenders and destroying their lives is simply stupid. And even for actual sex offenders releasing them then passing laws that make it impossible to live anywhere in society is just mind boggling stupid. If they are still such a danger to society, then lock them the Hell up. Don’t release convicted criminals who are so highly likely to re-offend back into society and set up a monitoring system that is so harsh it actually encourages them to avoid registering as a sex offender.
