A sand sculpture picturing Republican presidential hopefuls (L-R) Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, former candidate Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul is set in front of the Myrtle Beach Convention Center ahead of a Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on January 16, 2012. South Carolina will hold its GOP primary on January 21. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.
On MLK Day, Joel Kotkin calls for a "hard focus on economic growth and opportunity" for minorities:
While African-Americans make up 12% of the nation’s population, they account for 21% of the nation’s unemployed. Unemployment for black men stands at a staggeringly high 19.1%, and the Economic Policy Institute estimates that overall black unemployment will remain well above 10% till at least 2014. The black middle class is also under siege. The gap in net worth of minority households compared with whites is greater today than in 2005. White households may have lost 16% of their net worth in recent years, but African-Americans have lost 53%, and Latinos 66%.
A reader writes:
Awesome Newsweek essay – it totally mirrors my own thoughts on how both the right and left perceive Obama. My parents are Fox-ers and my friends are incorrigible coastal lefties, and I find myself constantly making the same arguments — look at the facts.
I was particularly struck by this passage:
This kind of strategy takes time. And it means there are long stretches when Obama seems incapable of defending himself, or willing to let others to define him, or simply weak. I remember those stretches during the campaign against Hillary Clinton. I also remember whose strategy won out in the end.
This is something I always bring up with the coastal lefties. “Didn’t you watch the primary? How do you not get his style?” People are impatient and have short memories.
But I think there’s something else involved: a subtle, latent, subconscious racism. A certain element of right sees a black man, and they project all their nightmares on him (Muslim, socialist, hates white people, etc.). No matter what he actually says or does, whatever the facts are, they can’t get past it. At the same time, a certain element of the left projected their liberal fantasies on to him. They didn’t listen to what he said in the campaign (beyond the words hope and change that is), because all they saw was a black man, and since he’s black, he must be a raging liberal crusader, right?
My experience is that it’s a waste of time to argue with either faction, yet I keep doing it.
I wonder how race affects both right and left. But, like my reader, I will keep trying to make an argument. I did it in 2007, when Clinton was the prohibitive favorite. Readers know – and the piece acknowledges – that I have not agreed with this president on everything and have taken a few hard swipes, when deserved. But I’m staggered at the gap between what he has done and what left and right say he has done.
By the way, Fox News has Mark Levin on to trash my article but they are far too afraid to have me on to defend it. I’ve been on the blacklist for years. Like Ron Paul, too dangerous for Fox. You might notice that they have actually blurred out my name on the cover. Heh.
Copyranter cringes at this "sleazy tourism ad" from North Dakota (which reads: Drinks, dinner, decisions. Arrive a guest, leave a legend):
ND is the least visited state in the US, by the way. I'm sure this superb ad will change that. Related: the most bizarre tourism commercial ever (via Switzerland).
Maggie Koerth-Baker feels nothing but pity:
It's sleaze as designed by people who have no idea what sleaze is supposed to look like. They've just heard about it third-hand from someone who went to Vegas once.
Frum's studies the GOP electorate in the next primary state:
Despite the grim economic numbers, Newt Gingrich's first TV attack ad focused on Mitt Romney's record on abortion, not economics. Why? Perhaps for this reason: Those South Carolinians most affected by the state's economic distress do not vote in the Republican primary. The S.C. Republican primary is dominated by older voters, many of them retired, who have escaped the worst shock of the economic crisis.
Meanwhile, Andrew Sprung anticipates Mitt Romney's response to the Bain attacks:
Romney may come back with a strong counter-narrative about Bain. He has the money, and a credible assemblage of facts on his side. But while the film and ad images are still raw, he's been reinforcing them by expressing his apparently core belief that all accumulations of wealth are fully justified, and that modifying the rules by which the managing directors of Bain or Goldman extract ever-growing shares are not a fit subject for public discourse. While those expressed beliefs are not lies, they do not accord with most Americans' current perceptions. Perceptions that a person believes what is untrue and asserts what is untrue tend to be mutually reinforcing.
A reader has a more straightforward response to the question:
Pigs will eat anything, including human feces. In South American villages without sanitation removal and indoor plumbing, pigs are used to keep the area free of garbage and feces. Villagers sell the scavenger pork to cities rather than eat it themselves. Pigs also lack sweat glands and slop around in mud to keep cool. Thus pigs are considered unclean, similar to shellfish, which are also scavengers.
Another writes:
Jews don't eat pork for the same reason Muslims don't: trichinosis. Only they didn't know it was trichinosis. They thought it was a curse from God. Soliders got sick before battle from eating raw or undercooked pork (pigs and goats being a good food source for traveling armies because they were low maintenance and can/will eat anything). Sick soliders make bad warriors, hence the edict from on high to stop eating pork.
Another:
Hitchens' theory is nice, but I'm afraid it's probably incorrect. The correct answer, it turns out, is that Jews don't eat pork because pigs are not antelope.
Most contemporary scholars think that Mary Douglas cracked the purity codes of the ancient Israelis. Douglas was an anthropologist and specialized in understanding different cultures' understanding of purity. Her book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo is a classic on the subject. She theorized that every culture divides up the universe based on a unique logic. But no matter what categories you come up with there will always be entities that defy them, things that are left over and unaccounted for or that violate the boundaries of the nice neat categories we've set up. It's these things that we call "impure." She writes, for example, in the context of the purity laws in the book of Leviticus that, "swarming things are neither fish, flesh nor fowl. Eels and worms inhabit water, though not as fish; reptiles go on dry land, though not as quadrupeds; some insects fly, though not as birds. There is no order in them. … If penguins lived in the Near East I would expect them to be ruled unclean as wingless birds."
When it comes to livestock, the cow served as the governing norm for the ancient Israelis; it 1) chews the cut and 2) has cloven feet. All animals that are like the cow in those two respects are clean, but animals that chew the cud (or at least appear to) but don't have cloven feet, as well as animals like pigs who do have cloven feet but don't chew the cud are rendered unclean and therefore unfit to eat. Here is her conclusion on the matter in Purity and Danger:
Note that this failure to conform to the two necessary critiera for defining cattle is the only reason given in the Old Testament for avoiding the pig; nothing whatever is said about its dirty scavenging habits. As the pig does not yield milk, hide nor wool, there is no other reason for keeping it except for its flesh. And if the Israelites did not keep pig they would not be familiar with its habits. I suggest that originally the sole reason for its being counted as unclean is its failure as a wild boar to get into the antelope class, and that in this it is on the same footing as the camel and the hyrax, exactly as it is stated in the book.
Another:
Gordon Grice makes a strong argument in his book The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators that pigs may be routinely shunned as food by desert cultures because they are notoriously good at rooting corpses out of the loose and arid soil. (Sealing a body in a stone tomb/cave ala Lazarus had a practical purpose after all.) Thus eating the flesh of a pig, especially a wild boar, may indirectly result in cannibalism.
Another:
Reading this post reminded me of a scene from an HBO documentary I'd seen several years ago. The documentary was about serial killers and cannibals in particular. I do not remember the name of the documentary but the women that was interviewing a man that was jailed for murder and cannibalism in the USA asked him what eating human flesh tasted like. The reason this sticks in my memory is because of his response to her query. He looked her in the eye and thought for a moment, then said, "You would taste like the best ham you've ever had."
Creepy.
(Photo by Flickr user red hand records)
It's hard to say. Michael Mandel explains how American workers "often have little to do with the gains in productivity attributed to them":
[I]f Company A saves $250,000 simply by switching from a Japanese sprocket supplier to a much cheaper Chinese sprocket supplier, that change shows up as an increase in American productivity—just as if the company had saved $250,000 by making its warehouse operation in Chicago more efficient.
Why this matters:
Over the long run, gains in domestic productivity should translate into higher living standards and more jobs for U.S. workers. Economic theory—and common sense—tells you that companies will want to hire more of the types of workers who are contributing to higher profits. If the profits are coming from improved factory productivity in Dearborn, High Point, or Mountain View, then the company will want to hire more good production workers at those plants.
“Supply chain” productivity doesn’t work the same way. If companies reconfigure themselves to better scour the globe for the lowest-priced goods and services, then their essential personnel are multilingual business school graduates with the ability to parachute into Shanghai or Bangalore and negotiate the best deals with suppliers, logistics experts who can keep the goods flowing, marketers to sell the goods, and software engineers to program the computers that communicate with the suppliers. In other words, the bulk of the company’s own workers essentially perform a creative or coordinating function, rather than a manufacturing one. These workers might be in the U.S., or they might be spread around the world.
Mandel goes on to encourage the collection of better productivity data.
A cinematic tribute to tumbleweeds:
(Hat tip: LikeCool)
Yes, but walking is recommended:
You’d need something like snow shoes, except instead of a mesh you have a sole of some heat resistant material. You don’t want to use anything that will transfer heat, so maybe the best bet would be asbestos – probably at least 25 cm thick. You’d want the soles to be big so they can block some of the radiant heat from the lava and you’d need to wear a thermal suit as well. And you’d need to walk reeeeal slowly because falling down is not an option.
Earlier lava coverage here.
Basically, according to Bill Gifford's reporting:
Most people—including nearly everybody I surveyed while reporting this story—assume that Livestrong funnels large amounts of money into cancer research. Nope. The foundation gave out a total of $20 million in research grants between 1998 and 2005, the year it began phasing out its support of hard science. A note on the foundation’s website informs visitors that, as of 2010, it no longer even accepts research proposals. Nevertheless, the notion persists that Livestrong’s main purpose is to help pay for lab research into cancer cures.
(Photo by Flickr user Fuzzy Gerdes)
The Dish 