Patterico's Pontifications

3/8/2013

Friday Night Music

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 9:44 pm



“Sin City” by Gram Parsons, covered by Uncle Tupelo.

“Moonshiner,” traditional, performed by Uncle Tupelo.

“I’d like to introduce someone who’s just joined our group.” Gram Parsons singing “Hickory Wind” with the Byrds live in 1968 at the Piper Club. YouTube is a wondrous thing.

Now let’s change things up in a big way, with Jamie Woolford’s “A Framed Life in Charming Light” from his new record:

Phony Unemployment Numbers for a Phony Recovery

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:51 am



Supposedly “unemployment” is down today, which is an utter joke. Only a President and media that calls spending increases “cuts” would pay attention to this number we call “unemployment.” This quote from CNN Money explains why:

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate dipped to 7.7%, as 12 million workers were counted as unemployed. The drop was partly because more people said they got jobs, but also because 130,000 people dropped out of the labor force.

This is the same kind of genius logic that causes people like Paul Krugman to declare that World War II got us out of the Great Depression. Take your best, most able-bodied workers, and ship them all overseas — millions of them — and voila! they are no longer unemployed! (Problem is, the same phony GDP numbers they cite to show a “recovery” during the war also show a deep depression during the incredibly prosperous year of 1946.) When you can play with your denominators at will, it doesn’t matter so much what your numerators are, does it?

The number that matters is this: what percentage of the population is working? James Pethokoukis has the chart, along with some incisive analysis, and it’s not pretty:

I have said for a while now: we are going to get a phony “recovery” before the big crash. Today’s numbers help prop up the Phony Recovery Narrative. If you want to get suckered by it, that’s your business.

North Korea Threatens Nuclear Attack on United States

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:30 am



Way back in law school, I wanted Bill Clinton to bomb North Korea if necessary to stop them from getting the bomb. He didn’t, they did, and now we get this:

North Korea amplified its threatening rhetoric as the U.N. Security Council approved new sweeping sanctions, vowing to launch a first-strike nuclear attack against the United States and threatening to engulf Washington in a “sea of fire.”

An unidentified spokesman for Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry said the North will exercise its right for “a preemptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors” because Washington is pushing to start a nuclear war against the North.

At a mass rally in Pyongyang on Thursday, Army Gen. Kang Pyo Yong told the crowd that North Korea is ready to fire long-range nuclear-armed missiles at Washington.

Hey, I know what we should do: allow yet another country run by madmen (Iran) to get the bomb too.


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