Dennis the Peasant

Matty, Little Matty...

If the boy keeps this up he's gonna be headlining for The Atlantic in no time:

This Foreign Policy article on Steig Larsson and the decline of the Swedish utopia concludes with what seems to me to be a whopper of a factual error:

If you look at the statistics, Sweden is not a particularly violent country, nor a particularly lenient one to criminals. It is in about the middle of the European averages for both figures. There were 230 homicides in Sweden in 2009, compared with 143 in Washington, D.C., which has a population a bit more than half Sweden’s size. But compare these figures to what they were in the years when Sweden looked like a utopia. In 1990, there were 120 homicides in Sweden, and 472 in Washington. There is a convergence here that doesn’t flatter Sweden.

In fact, there are 9.3 million people in Sweden and only 600,000 in Sweden. In other words, Sweden has about fifteen times the population of Washington DC and less than half the murders. Stockholm is a bit larger than DC, and its murder rate of 3 per 100,000 in 2009 is way lower than DC’s murder rate of 24 per 100,000. And indeed you can see that the relatively low level of violent crime in Sweden is a necessary backdrop for the plot of Larsson’s books. In The Girl Who Played With Fire a triple-murder in Stockholm becomes a major news story that dominates nationwide media attention for several days.

No, Matty, according to your facts, Sweden has about fifteen times the population of Sweden.

Which is a neat trick if you can pull it off.

Remember: Proofreading is the enemy.

Update: Last time I checked, 143 is not "less than half" of 230. Let's double check. 230 divided by 2  is - uh, carry the 7 - 115. Nope... 143 is not less than 115. At least it isn't for us non-Ivy League types.

About That Nobel Prize In Economics...

I've spent a fair amount of time over the past few days marvelling at the mixture of silliness and stupidity eminating from Little Matty's fill-in bloggers. However, it's always important to remember that no matter how silly, or how stupid, those knobs are, there is really only one Little Matty:

Thinking Outside The Currency Peg Box

You can’t talk China and the economy without talking about the exchange rate issue. And thinking about it has got me pondering some questions. For example, insofar as the Chinese want to insist on pegging their currency why do they have to do it in this way? My understanding is that the peg doesn’t just operate automatically. It needs to be defended with a combination of capital controls and active measures. Specifically, the Chinese government spends a ton of money every year buying up U.S. financial assets. But couldn’t they just buy something else? They could order planes from Boeing and sink them into the ocean—that would accomplish everything the Chinese want to accomplish, but also create jobs.

Of course they’d look a bit silly in the eyes of the world if they did that. But what if they held a lottery and gave the winning families all expenses paid vacations to the United States? People would enjoy that, it seems to me. And wouldn’t it work just as well in terms of maintaining the competitiveness of Chinese exports?

I can only assume he's pondering a new career as a comedy writer, although the vast majority of his commenters seem to have missed the humor.

Note: Remember, John Podesta pays him for this sort of stuff.

A Useful Measure Of Her Worthlessness...

Not that femnist featherhead Amanda Marcotte could give a lick, but there's some splendid news today for the young women of this nation:

The American Academy of Pediatrics has rescinded a controversial policy statement raising the idea that doctors in some communities should be able to substitute demands for female genital cutting with a harmless clitoral "pricking" procedure.

"We retracted the policy because it is important that the world health community understands the AAP is totally opposed to all forms of female genital cutting, both here in the U.S. and anywhere else in the world," said AAP President Judith S. Palfrey.

The contentious policy statement, issued in April, had condemned the practice of female genital cutting overall. But a small portion of statement suggesting the pricking procedure riled U.S. advocacy groups and survivors of female genital cutting.

Thank God. Hopefully AAP got its ass handed to it over this bit of faux "cultural sensitivity", and hopefully it hurt enough to preclude further forays into moral relativism.

Meanwhile, Little Mandy, who didn't have any trouble with AAP's position as long as the FGM wasn't real serious, furrows her brow over more weighty issues.

Moron. 

An Aside: It was fascinating to see just how little interest this issue generated amongst femnist bloggers since the AAP released its original policy statement. That lack of interest simply reinforces the impression that for the most part, today's femnists are whiny, self-obsessed, grievance-mongering featherheads.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Sometimes the jokes just write themselves:

President Obama called Iraq his predecessor's war of choice. Now it is his war to exit -- and quickly.

The challenge for Obama, whose opposition to the Iraq invasion helped propel him to the presidency, is sticking to his timeline for a U.S. military withdrawal despite a jump in violence and continued wrangling among Iraqi politicians over who will lead the country.

The sensitive departure is being managed by Vice President Biden, who says the U.S. military will reduce troop levels to 50,000 this summer, even if no new Iraqi government takes shape.

Unfortunately, this seems uncomfortably close to being very dark comedy...

Let's All Panic...

Straight from the Department of "Gee, you never coulda seen that coming!" Department:

The M3 figures - which include broad range of bank accounts and are tracked by British and European monetarists for warning signals about the direction of the US economy a year or so in advance - began shrinking last summer. The pace has since quickened.

The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting to an annual rate of contraction of 9.6pc. The assets of insitutional money market funds fell at a 37pc rate, the sharpest drop ever.

And why would this be happening? Well, let's go to the Department of The Obvious Department:

"It’s frightening," said Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. "The plunge in M3 has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the US is not recovering properly," he said.

A couple of things to note here.

• First, this isn't "frightening". At least it isn't to me. That's because M3's contraction can be explained. And if you understand the linkage between effect and cause, you could have very easily predicted something like this.
• Second, the cause isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you buy into the idea that much our current crisis is a result of reckless behavior by the financial industry, then a dose of caution and some retrenchment is exactly what is called for.

And of course the Obama Administration wouldn't be the Obama Administration if it didn't react with its usual bizarre mixture of panic, incomprehension and recklessness:

The US authorities have an entirely different explanation for the failure of stimulus measures to gain full traction. They are opting instead for yet further doses of Keynesian spending, despite warnings from the IMF that the gross public debt of the US will reach 97pc of GDP next year and 110pc by 2015.

Larry Summers, President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, has asked Congress to "grit its teeth" and approve a fresh fiscal boost of $200bn to keep growth on track. "We are nearly 8m jobs short of normal employment. For millions of Americans the economic emergency grinds on," he said.

David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said the White House appears to have reversed course just weeks after Mr Obama vowed to rein in a budget deficit of $1.5 trillion (9.4pc of GDP) this year and set up a commission to target cuts. "You truly cannot make this stuff up. The US governnment is freaked out about the prospect of a double-dip," he said.

You could make it up, but I doubt you'd have found any believers.

So the story line for Barack Obama is this: You come to office in the midst of a severe recession and spend your first 16 months attacking large sections of the business community, comtemplating or passing legislation that increases the burdens on business, and specifically the burdens of hiring new employees, pressure the financial industry to adopt risk-adverse lending practices, and then you're shocked that spending $800 billion on pork designed to benefit Congressional re-elections and unions doesn't bring about nirvana.

Yeah, you never coulda seen it coming...

This Week's Little Matty Sentence...

He's half-way 'round the world annoying the Chinese, but still has time to murder the English language:

Today I did a couple more meetings in Shanghai before my group was ushered onto a train to the smaller city of Yiwu where I’ve just now gotten checked into my hotel room.

They're a clever lot, those Chinese. Building hotels inside their trains, and whatnot.

The fact that he's "doing" meetings is a nice touch. Very yuppy. Very '80s.

In the remainder of his travelogue (over multiple posts), Matty informs us that China is...

• big,
• has lots of new buildings and stuff, 
• and is full to the brim with Chinese.
• Lots of Chinese.

Paul Theroux he ain't.

Hey, Where's The Outrage?

While all the little lefty bed-wetting types ponder the lack of public outrage about Big Oil polluting the planet and whatnot, the rather short, somewhat fat, and very definitely ugly Dennis wonders where the lefty outrage is over Blackface Bush's war in Afghanistan:

Members of Congress with any inclination to balk at President Obama's massive emergency war-funding request have found their case strengthened by two recent reports that question many of the administration's key premises and assumptions.

The reports from the Congressional Research Service and Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction raise concerns ranging from the existential to the procedural.

Any bets on what we'll hear out the usual suspects?

Today's "Gee, I'll Just Make Some Stuff Up" Moment...

Little Matty knows how to pick 'em.

Sunday we were treated to the musings of a college sophomore on the subject of discrimination against short, fat, ugly people (also known as Dennis-ism). Now we get a young man named Jamelle Bouie, who is a blogger/free-lance writer attempting to break into journalism (i.e., probably unemployed) explaining race, marriage and economic mobility:

C.H. at Democracy in America flags a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts on the effect of marriage on economic mobility for children:

Messrs DeLeire and Lopoo find that marriage has a positive effect on economic mobility for children of all races. Among those who are born in the bottom third of the income distribution, 50% of those born to married parents climbed to the middle or top third as adults. Only 26% of those whose parents divorce moved up. Somewhat surprisingly, a greater share of those born to single mothers moved up, 42%, but the size of this sample is relatively small.

Nevertheless, marriage explains only part of the gap in mobility rates between white and black children. Fifty-six percent of all black children in the middle class fall to the bottom third as adults, compared with 30% of white children. But when parents are continuously married, this 26-point gap shrinks to 12 points. For many other measures, though, family structure only slightly reduced the racial gap in mobility rates. “On the whole, family structure is not the culprit,” explains Mr DeLeire.

I don’t have any firm numbers here, but my hunch tells me that part of the achievement gap among children is attributable to the housing segregation. Middle-class blacks face significant housing discrimination, and on average, are far more segregated than any other racial or ethnic group of comparable means. Large numbers of middle-class blacks are clustered in disproportionately poor neighborhoods, which tend suffer from poor schools and other social services. What’s more, middle-class blacks have fewer educational opportunities than their white counterparts and they lack access to the “achievement networks” that characterize white middle class life.

Huh.

For a guy who doesn't "have any firm numbers" (and it's not like his link provides much in the way of concrete evidence, either), Jamelle has managed to come up with a pretty comprehensive damnation of Whitey, don't you think? Note that when I say "Whitey", that's me talking. Understand, too, that I'm assuming Jamelle doesn't mean all white people are nasty segregationists. That would be racism. As I have no way of looking into Jamelle Bouie's heart, I'm going to assume he isn't racist. So, what I'm willing to bet is that the sort of white people he is talking about are white people like you and me...

And not like Little Matty and the sensitive progressives who read blogs at Think Progress.

I don't have any firm numbers to back that up, so call it a hunch.

Like Krugman Said...

Further evidence of the essential rightness of Paul Krugman's thesis that Corporate America both fears and loathes Barack Obama:

In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.

The records also indicate that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits, most of which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Not to worry, though:

“It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies,” Mr. Obama said. “That cannot and will not happen anymore.”

“We’re also closing the loophole that has allowed some oil companies to bypass some critical environmental reviews,” he added in reference to the environmental waivers.

Uh huh.

Only When His Lips Move...

About the only joy in reading Paul Krugman is to watch him stumble over the truth, pick himself up, and then march on as if nothing actually happened. In this case, he's trying to sell an increasingly uneasy progressive/liberal base that Barack Obama really is one of them:

So here’s how it is: They’re as mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this anymore. Am I talking about the Tea Partiers? No, I’m talking about the corporations.

Uh huh.

Call me jaded, but based on what I've seen to date, I'd say the outrage of Corporate America seems a tad - how shall I say this - muted. In fact, over the past 16 months the most outrage I've seen has come from the pharmaceutical industry. And correct me if I'm wrong here, that outrage wasn't a result of Barack Obama's unceasing attempts to destroy free enterprise and the capitalist system, it was because Barack Obama welshed on a $150 million deal to use the federal government to protect the PhRMA Boys from free enterprise and the capitalist system. 

I could go on, but suffice it to say Krugman has noticed the obvious and is manfully attempting to disguise it: Barack Obama is a corporatist. And not just any corporatist, a corporatist's corporatist. Obama's sold the left a bill of goods, and liberals with the conscience (and intellectual dishonesty) of a Paul Krugman are now going into Full Pretend Mode to avoid facing facts. Given that, the irony of this is probably lost on Paul:

So where does that leave the president and his party? Mr. Obama wanted to transcend partisanship. Instead, however, he finds himself very much in the position Franklin Roosevelt described in a famous 1936 speech, struggling with “the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.”

Uh huh.

Just keep movin' those lips, Paul. Everything will work out alright.