Purchase of the day.

From the April 28, 2013 Amazon Associates Report:

Neater Feeder Dog Bowl

By using the Althouse portal, you can buy things you want, pay nothing extra, and make a contribution to this blog. We notice. We appreciate it. And only if you sit up and bark will we know it's you.

The Althouse Amazon portal: kick proof, spill proof, and elevated.

"My father, who has barely any formal education, but is whip smart, told a story to me right after the market crashed."

"He said that when he was starting his business in the late 70s, his accountant told him that if he just invests X percentage of his monthly income in an IRA, he will be a millionaire by the time he retires. My dad said to him, 'Bullshit. There is no way that the powers-that-be will let a poor schlub like me become a millionaire.' He was right, and will work until the day he dies."

I'm cherry-picking from a big discussion because of the way it's written, not to endorse the viewpoint.

"Imagine, Mr. Speaker, a world without balloons."

Said Congressman Hank Johnson. "How can we make sure that the injustice of there being no helium for comedians to get that high-pitched voice that we all hold near and dear to our hearts."

He was, as the video at the link showed, mocking Republicans for wasting 2 days debating the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act (which passed the House on a nearly unanimous vote, 394-1). "Too often lately, this body has sat deflated — not for lack of hot air, mind you. But seriously, ladies and gentlemen, unlike a noble element, this House has failed to act on Americans’ real concerns."

Now, Hank Johnson is the Congressman who famously asked whether the island of Guam, if it gets over-populated, might "tip over and capsize":



On his Friday show, Rush Limbaugh played the old tip-over-and-capsize clip along with the new world-without-balloons clip. Rush derided Johnson for caring about helium as if he's some kind of nut:

Did you know that helium was endangered or threatened? What, is the Hunt family trying to make a run on helium like they did silver? Or maybe the Koch brothers? The Koch brothers are trying to corner helium. That's what it is, so that kids can't have birthday parties. That's what it is. The Koch brothers are doing it! The Koch brothers are trying to corner the helium market. And Hank here was saying that he supported the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act. He's from Georgia. 

Well, every single Republican in the House who voted, voted yes, and the vote was 391-1, so you might want to educate yourself about what this program is about. When I blogged a Washington Post item about it — "Congress finds it hard to let Federal Helium Program run out of gas" — I got called out by a number of commenters, notably Carl, who said:

The issue is not nearly as picayune as this asinine article suggests. In the first place, helium is essential stuff for a number of high-tech, scientific, and medical uses. I said essential, as in completely irreplaceable, at least with present or foreseeable technology.

Second, it is a weirdly irreplaceable resource. When your liquid He boils off, it makes its way to the top of the atmosphere and drifts off into interplanetary space, because the Earth's gravity is too weak to hold it. It's gone for good. You will never be able to recycle it, the way you might think of recycling iron from scrap heaps, or even reconstituting oil from the CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere after it gets burnt.

Third, the only conceivable source is the underground decay of uranium and thorium, which verrrry slowly produce helium over millions of years, particle by particle. There is no way to hurry the process up, and the supply is obviously finite and decreasing remorselessly every year.

Fourth, the economics are stupid, because the 1990s Federal law said to sell off the reserve as fast as possible, so the Federal government has been dumping He at far less than the cost to actually supply it for years and years. Not surprisingly, all these wrong economic signals have built up a whole economic structure built on them -- built on sand, so that once those signals reset to reality, you are going to have significant disruption.

That's the difficult issue. There may be broad agreement that economic reality should take over, and the signals reset, but how and when to do that is a matter of debate, as well it should be, and for the admittedly narrow segments of tech for which this is relevant, hardly trivial. It is by no means something Senators and Representatives shouldn't be wasting their time upon. The Post could do its readers a better favor by explaining why this happened, and the strangely unique nature of helium, than by phoning in a cheap mindless story about how government programs live forever ha ha ha.

But that's modern journalism. It has decayed to formula so absurdly that I wonder whether someone with an actual original thought or story line could survive. I suppose it is conservatism born of their shrinking bottom line. Reminds me of Hollywood, similar[ly] threatened by cable and the Internet, which can only make Spiderman 8 and Star Trek: The Fourth Reboot because is timidity won't allow for any bolder essay.

I am pushed back. What seems dumb may not be dumb. It may be dumb to accept the prompt that something is dumb.

And is Hank Johnson dumb? Surely, his world-without-balloons speech isn't dumb. He may be wrong to minimize the significance of the helium program, but Rush was deriding him for seeming to care about the program, which wasn't even what he was doing. Was Rush dumb to misunderstand the balloon quote and to present it along with the tip-over-and-capsize quote? Rush has his fun, but I don't think Rush knew much about the value of the helium program.

But if Rush has his fun, occasionally at Hank Johnson's expense, he (and we) ought to see that Hank Johnson also has his fun. Unquestionably, the world-without-balloons speech deploys sarcasm. It's time to ponder whether the tip-over-and-capsize question was deadpan humor.

This is a island that, at its widest level is, what, 12 miles from shore to shore, and at its smallest level, smallest location, it's 7 miles between one shore and the other.  My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and, uh, and capsize.

I say it was!

ADDED: Back in 2010, at the time of the "tip-over-and-capsize" remark, Neo-Neocon said it was "deadpan humor"... but she was doing a big old April Fool's joke.

"Obama did not tout himself as the civil rights candidate in either of his two presidential runs."

"But if gay marriage becomes commonplace throughout America by the end of his second term, something that seems entirely possible right now, that could become an important part of his legacy as president."

Writes Perry Bacon Jr., in a piece written a month ago, which I ran across as I was researching the demographics of support for gay marriage. It's often assumed that black people oppose gay marriage. There's a delusion that the GOP has an opportunity to appeal to black people by leveraging this opposition. How much would black people need to loathe gay marriage to abandon the Democratic Party over this issue?

By the way, those who don't like seeing Obama get credit for anything should hope that the Supreme Court — which has 2 pending cases on the subject — finds a constitutional right to marry a person of one's own sex, because if the issue is left to political decisionmaking, we will end up in the same place and same-sex marriage will be inscribed in Obama's legacy.

Resisting a robber who points a gun.

A trend in the Bronx.

“You get more resistance in high-crime areas than low-crime areas,” [said Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economist]. “People who would not resist have left the areas. Those who stay can’t afford to leave or to give up the little property that they have in their possession.”...

“We are not under siege by the vigilantes and the criminals that come out at night,” said Andy King, a city councilman whose district includes the area. “The pride, the respect factor” takes hold, he said. “It’s a violation, and some people are at a stage in our communities that they will stand up for certain beliefs.”

In the comments, someone from Cincinnati says:

I don't live in NYC and would never live in a city that prefers to allow armed criminals run free while disarming it's citizens. In the midwest city where I live, there were three recent attempted armed robberies. In all three instances, the robber got shot dead by the victim. No expensive trial or costly incarceration. Just dead criminals, each of whom was no stranger to the justice system....

"Are there more abortion doctors like Kermit Gosnell?"

"And do we want to know?"

"People think of scientists as monks in a monastery looking out for the truth."

"People have lost faith in the church, but they haven’t lost faith in science. My behavior shows that science is not holy."

Springtime!

Highlights from "Meet the Press."

Here are the things that jumped out as I watched "Meet the Press." this morning.

1. At the end of a discussion of the Boston bombing, David Gregory asks "[W]hat are you really focused on that you’d like the intelligence community and the FBI to answer?"

REP. PETER KING: I think it’s important to know are there other people involved in this threat? Are there others that are still out there?... Are there family members or people in-- in the community? That’s very important to find out. Also, what did cause them to radicalize? Was it done here? Was it done overseas? Was it done over the internet? What caused that to happen? How can we stop it in the future? Also ask why the FBI is not cooperating more with the law enforcement? Why they did not give vital evidence to the NYPD about another possible attack.

GREGORY: This is that you think a failure that needs to be learned from?

REP. KING: Absolutely. Absolute failure.

2. Chuck Todd, talking about Obama's routine at the Washington Correspondents Dinner:

At the Magnolia Café...

... you can talk about anything you want.

"A baseball game between two Chicago public high schools was canceled Saturday when some parents from a North Side school..."

"... refused to let their children travel to the South Side for the game, saying they were worried about the safety of their kids."

"This is probably one of the most embarrassing moments I’ve had,” said [William] Wittleder, who has coached high school baseball for 10 seasons and is in his second year as Payton’s head coach. “It’s very heartbreaking. This is totally against what I believe in.”

"Glenn Beck on the CNN 'Pit of Despair' and Why He Got Out of Cable TV."

Headline at Forbes, with the amusing correction:

An earlier version of this post quoted Beck saying the “Pit of Despair” was at Fox News. In fact, he was talking about his time at CNN when he made that remark. I’ve corrected both the article and the headline to reflect that.

Ha ha ha. Would that have been the headline if the mistake hadn't been made?

Before coming to Fox, Beck worked at CNN, where, he said, he had an office that looked out on an open-plan office area where producers and reporters had their desks. “I used to call it the Pit of Despair because there are all these people plunking out stories like, ‘I just want to hang myself, I just want to hang myself,’” he said.*

Among his frustrations at both networks, he said, was the rigid, formulaic thinking about how to produce a talk show. “Most of what we do on television was developed by Desi Arnaz” in the 1950s, he said. “There’s no reason we still do it that way, except that it works. It drives me out of my mind that they are still using what’s called the Desi shoot, three cameras on the floor.”

For Beck, who loves to amble around as he talks, it was an unwanted constraint. “I moved, and they couldn’t follow me,” he said. “I said to them, ‘Get me a sports director, please. Get someone with experience producing sports. Just tell them I’m carrying a ball. I think they can do it.’ But everybody in news was saying, ‘You’re supposed to stay here.’”

Even as Lucy wanted to get into show business, Glenn Beck wants to roam free.

Over-anti-hyper-correction?

Or: Over-assuming Obama must be right?

A dialogue about grammar (arising out of the discussion of "good-paying" and "well-paying" that began in a blog post called "Speaking of my stream of consciousness, blowjobs, and 'the Golden Age of Male Rage'").

ADDED: Obama said "good-paying" twice in the October 16, 2012 presidential debate:

Now, the most important thing we can do is to make sure that we are creating jobs in this country. But not just jobs, good paying jobs. Ones that can support a family....

So... on wind energy, when Governor Romney says "these are imaginary jobs." When you've got thousands of people right now in Iowa, right now in Colorado, who are working, creating wind power with good-paying manufacturing jobs...

There was a time when people felt shame accepting a handout.

We moved beyond that, normalizing the sense of entitlement. But what if you wanted to restore that shame... some of it anyway?

Iain Duncan Smith says he “would encourage” elderly people who can well afford to pay for their their own heating bills, bus passes and television licences to return the money to the state.

ADDED: Is shame something that can be re-instilled? It's common to generate shame about something we haven't previously felt shame about — like not recycling or thinking that gay sex is shameful. But when you've got something people used to feel ashamed of, and you've convinced them not to be ashamed anymore, I think it might be close to impossible to make them feel ashamed once again. I want to talk about the nature of shame. Is it subject to resurrection? Or, once dead, does it stay dead?

When the government can turn off your household appliances....

"The National Grid is demanding that all new appliances be fitted with sensors that could shut them down when the UK’s generators struggle to meet demand for electricity. Electric ovens, air-conditioning units and washing machines will also be affected  by the proposals, which are already backed by one of the European Union’s most influential energy bodies."

"The terrorism threat facing the United States may be vastly understated, as well as inaccurately characterized..."

"... because so many 'failed' terror plots are excluded from the nation’s terror attack databases, new terrorism research suggests."

“One finding from my research is that the terror threat within the US is higher than most Americans realize,” says Erik Dahl, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, whose research has identified 227 failed domestic and international terror plots of all kinds (Islamic jihadist, right-wing extremist and others) against the US dating back to 1987 – the vast majority excluded from national “attack” tallies.

In his post-9/11 analysis, Dr. Dahl found that of the 109 failed attacks, 76 were inspired by radical Islamist beliefs. But the fact that the rest of the terror flops – 30 percent – were not inspired by radical Islam “might surprise some people and shows the importance of the domestic extremist threat, including right-wing militias, anti-government groups,” Dahl says.

There's so much room for cooking the numbers here. When we're talking about things that didn't happen and how to characterize those things, we're talking about the stuff of propaganda. Did Professor Dahl go looking for right-wing plots to up the percentage on non-Islamic terrorism? And what's with the phrase "including right-wing militias, anti-government groups"? It makes me suspicious that when something seems right-wing, it's called right-wing, but when it seems left-wing, it's called anti-government.