Defining Liberals Part Deux

The next cartoon in the series, the first one being yesterday.









Regards  —  Cliff

Collapse of Rome

James Burke and connects has this ten minute segment.  Perhaps the Tea Party types will be taking note.

Regards  —  Cliff

Cooling Off

Here is a note from the Manager on the heat wave:

The City of Lowell will open a " COOL DOWN CENTER" today at The Senior Center at 276 Broadway Street in Lowell 1:00pm to 10:00pm.  Air conditioning and cold bottled water will be available in the Great Hall.  In addition City Pool hours will be extended by 1 hour on Tuesday and Wednesday.  See [LINK].

It is a step.

A lot of things didn't help with the heat, such as the power failure down town about 2:30 PM.  Martha and I were at the Worthen for lunch, along with two friends from Texas.  Trying to show them a little local color.  The lady behind the bar had just turned on the overhead fan system for a demo and the power died.  We were then going to go to the library to look at the big painting, but they had also lost power.

The city opening facilities to help folks cool off was a good move, to which I say "thank you".

Later in the day I wondered if there were heat injuries down at the corner of Nesmith and Merrimack.  About 6:45 tonight, returning from the western part of town, via VFW Highway, I came across the bridge and was shunted off to the East.  It looked like three pieces of fire equipment and three ambulances and several police cars, blocking the road in all directions.  I saw no sign of fire, which is why I thought heat related injuries.  We will see what The Sun has in the AM.

UPDATE:  It was a fire.  Here is the report on the fire during last evening's rush hour.

hree firefighters were taken to a local hospital with what appeared to be heat exhaustion after a 2-alarm fire possibly started by careless disposal of cigarettes struck a building at Nesmith and East Merrimack streets yesterday.

Crews were called to 356 East Merrimack St., about 6 p.m., for a report of a fire outside a second-floor porch in the rear of a large yellow home that contains seven apartments.

Isn't this the house that had a fire a while ago, across from the Saints Memorial parking lot?  I seem to remember it being draped with plastic sheeting for a while before it was repaired.

And, The Sun reports that the power failure was due to a truck driving in the Connector and snagging a power line.  Maybe the heat made the power line sag.

Regards  —  Cliff

Defining Liberals

And here is Cartoonist Chris Muir's view on the situation.  This is Tuesday's comic.  For orientation, the redhead (Sam) is more of a libertarian and the brunette (Jan) is more of a liberal.  The baby belongs to the brunette (Jan).  Jan has twins.  Both ladies were laid off when the firm they were working for shuttered its doors, some time ago.  Their husbands, Zed and Damon, respectively, worked there also.










My view is that liberals are people like Maggie Thatcher and John Major.

Regards  —  Cliff

Embedding Links

I am sitting here at my kitchen table, talking to a friend from Naples, Italy (our time there), and her friend from Texas.  I am showing them how to put up a picture on the blog.  Pretty easy actually.♥

Regards  —  Cliff

♥  The picture came from, I believe, Neal Crossland

Death by Stoning

From CNN:

Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani, a mother of two, is waiting to die in Iran by a method of execution described by her lawyer as "barbaric"—stoning.

She will be buried up to her chest, deeper than a man would be, and the stones that will be hurled at her will be large enough to cause pain but not so large as to kill her immediately, according to an Amnesty International report that cited the Iranian penal code.

The 42-year-old woman from the northern city of Tabriz was convicted of adultery in 2006, and her execution is imminent, said prominent human rights lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei.

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

I would think there are limits to multicultural accommodation.

There is a reason the US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

Regards  —  Cliff

Economically, what works?

My middle brother, Lance, figuring that three newspapers in the house on Sunday (Sun, Globe, NYT), plus all those blogs, is not enough.  So, he sends me a link to a Dr Paul Krugman column in The San Jose Mercury News.

Mr Krugman, appearing to talk about officials and experts in the US, condemns them for their concern about long term federal debt.  But he cites a European official and then goes off to talk about Ireland.

As sort of a memory exercise, does anyone remember when President George W Bush (and especially his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld) used to ignore Old Europe and everyone would get all upset about it?  Try hard.  You've got it!  So what is Mr Krugman recommending the current Administration do?  Ignore the advice and actions of Old Europe.  Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose (the more things change the more they stay the same).♠ 

We are talking theology here.  On the one hand you have those who say that FDR's big failure during the Great Depression was lack of sufficient deficit spending.  On the other hand, you have those who say that deficit spending does not work.

Frankly, it is like walking into the Astro Final and having there be one question only.  "How big an asteroid is needed to destroy the earth.  Give three examples."

What we know is that the Great Depression ended for the United States during World War II and that by 1944 we were experiencing manpower shortages.  The war actually started in the mid-1930s but we were not engaged much until about 1939, when we became an arms merchant.  We joined the war December of 1941.  Unemployment as a percent of the civilian labor force was as follows:

1940	1941	1942	1943	1944	1945
14.6%	9.9%	4.7%	1.9%	1.2%	1.9%

It would seem that even with war production going strong and the draft and women being recruited into the work force, 1942, our first year of the war, we still have a nominal "full employment" but not the numbers a layman might expect.  And competition was tight for workers, thus the beginnings of employee health benefits on a big scale.

There is this view, by Robert Higgs:

ABSTRACT: Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.

I am saying it is not all that clear that we know what happened or what should have happened.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Or, as Kad Barma would say, there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans.