Half Moon

Don Asks...

"Can you recommend a good porter?" The one porter that left a fine memory in my mind is Left Hand's Black Jack Porter. If you can find it on tap, you will not be disappointed.


I also gave him an unsolicited recommendation for a great lager, Peroni:

But only if you can get it on tap. It goes skunky quickly in the (green) bottle.

The End of the World as We Know It.

I read James H. Kunstler's book The Long Emergency over the Thanksgvng holiday and am still in shock. This book maybe the only xmas gift I buy for you this year. He delves into the economic jackpot of the petroeconomy, it's ability to help us enjoy an unsustainable lifestyle outside of what earth's parameters allow and what happens when the oil runs out. The truth hurts. This article is a brief introduction to the idea:

If you really want to understand the U.S. public’s penchant for wishful thinking, consider this: We invested most of our late twentieth-century wealth in a living arrangement with no future. American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period. This dilemma now entails a powerful psychology of previous investment, which is prompting us to defend our misinvestments desperately, or, at least, preventing us from letting go of our assumptions about their future value. Compounding the disaster is the unfortunate fact that the manic construction of ever more futureless suburbs (a.k.a. the “housing bubble") has insidiously replaced manufacturing as the basis of our economy.

Visit his blog at ClusterFuckNation.

You've been warned. Act and plan appropriately. I'm off to buy more guns and ammo.

Submitted Without Comment:

Didn't Eat Yourself to Death on Thanksgiving?

Here's another chance.

Day Late, Dollar Short

Of course if they were three banks going to D.C. with hands open they would have gone back to Detroit with briefcases loaded with cash.

The Myth of the $70/Hour Autoworker

Complete, traditional media bullshit.

But then what's the source of that $70 hourly figure? It didn't come out of thin air. Analysts came up with it by including the cost of all employer-provided benefits--namely, health insurance and pensions--and then dividing by the number of workers. The result, they found, was that benefits for Big Three cost about $42 per hour, per employee. Add that to the wages--again, $28 per hour--and you get the $70 figure. Voila.

Except ... notice something weird about this calculation? It's not as if each active worker is getting health benefits and pensions worth $42 per hour. That would come to nearly twice his or her wages. (Talk about gold-plated coverage!) Instead, each active worker is getting benefits equal only to a fraction of that--probably around $10 per hour, according to estimates from the International Motor Vehicle Program. The number only gets to $70 an hour if you include the cost of benefits for retirees--in other words, the cost of benefits for other people. One of the few people to grasp this was Portfolio.com's Felix Salmon. As he noted yesterday, the claim that workers are getting $70 an hour in compensation is just "not true."

UPDATE: Just came across this post wondering if the Republicans are trying to union-bust and Katrinaize Detroit:

But I can't help thinking that in their hearts a lot of them are looking at the possibility of tens of thousands of people in Michigan losing their jobs and then their homes and seeing the opportunity to do to Detroit what Katrina allowed them to try to do to New Orleans, empty the city of Democrats.

Over/Under?

Whatcha think the over/under is for W. either drinking hisself into rehab or coffin? I got two years, if he stays in the States. One year if he's off to Paraguay.

You Don't Mess With the Rahmbo

On the "O"

An interview with the designer of the Obama logo.

Kill Your Television.

And get happy.

This Is a Great Fishing Story

Dog found swimming a mile off shore.

More on Right Wing Radio and Tactics

Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com has some interesting insight on the Right's tactics, talk-radio and their failures after a pretty funny interview with a Republican operative. It dovetails nicely with one of my earlier links.

Too Funny Not to Pass Along

Thanks to Angie:

Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect
Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over
the past eight years through his controversial use of
complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's
appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the
president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr.
Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually
every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in
his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks,
since after the last eight years many Americans may find his
odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the
University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it
"alienating" to have a president who speaks
English as if it were his first language.

"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and
verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he
keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an
elitist."

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using
complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find
itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject
predicate -- we get it, stop showing off."

The president-elect's stubborn insistence on using
complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one
of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

"Talking with complete sentences there and also too
talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the
Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I
think needing to do that isn't tapping into what
Americans are needing also," she said.

Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears
in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his
award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com.

I Consider This Good News

Sorry Dingell, move over for Waxman.

The Detroit (nee Big) 3 are losing clout by the day. There is some serious change on the horizon.