OK, that was a seriously impressive GDP report — 5 percent growth rate, and it’s all final demand rather than an inventory bounce. But what does it mean?
It does not necessarily mean that now is the time to tighten; that depends mainly on how far we still are from target employment and inflation, not on how fast we’re growing. ... It’s interesting to note that the bond market seems quite unimpressed, with only a slight uptick in long-term rates.
Time for gaijin to take a second look at Abe's Womenomics →
This interests me on two fronts. I hadn't realized there was any backlash against Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's efforts to undo some structural sexism. And as Noah Smith says:
So if Abenomics succeeds, the thinking goes, Abe might be able to push Japan in a xenophobic direction. But that doesn't explain the particular venom many gaijin writers have toward the Womenomics part of the program. I have a hypothesis to explain this: Abe stole their issue.
You see this all the time in politics. Democrats gave Bush little to no credit for the Medicare expansion. Republicans gave Clinton little to no credit for scaling back welfare. And so on. When a leader of the Enemy Party does something you've long been calling for, the instinctual response is to A) discount it as tokenism, and then B) deride the Enemy Leader for engaging in tokenism.
Reacting to the Sony Hack →
First we thought North Korea was behind the Sony cyberattacks. Then we thought it was a couple of hacker guys with an axe to grind. Now we think North Korea is behind it again, but the connection is still tenuous. There have been accusations of cyberterrorism, and even cyberwar. I've heard calls for us to strike back, with actual missiles and bombs. We're collectively pegging the hype meter, and the best thing we can do is calm down and take a deep breath...
The CIA Torture Program: A Case of Can’t Control or Won’t Control? →
A principal finding is that the CIA actively impeded oversight. It says that the committee was not fully briefed about the application of techniques and some information was restricted to the committee chairmen or vice chairmen. The White House also only had incomplete and inaccurate information. What the report fails to address in the forensic detail it applies to the techniques is just how the White House and Congress allowed the agency to impede oversight for so long?
Elected politicians may have been unfamiliar with “rectal rehydration or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity.” But Congress knew, early on, that the gloves were off. Members could read about it in the Washington Post. The mistreatment of detainees in Afghanistan, deaths in custody, and the use of rendition was on the front page in December 2002...
The Year Having Kids Became a Frivolous Luxury →
So what’s going on? When Carbone and Cahn wrote their 2010 book, Red Families v. Blue Families, they described the blue state model of parenting as the kind where people defer child rearing until “both partners reach maturity and financial independence.” Red families have a different model—they promote abstinence until marriage and are pro-life, and so people get married younger, and there are higher rates of teen pregnancy among red families. There used to be sympathy for young parents who were struggling to get by in the “red” model.
Blue families have long preached and practiced “responsible parenting,” which is that you shouldn’t have children you can’t afford. But the shift is that red families are now also on the “responsible parenting” bandwagon.
...
The problem here is that wages have stagnated, and Millennials—the people who are starting to have kids now—are having trouble finding jobs that enable them to support themselves, much less families, despite being the most educated generation ever...
Less than half of U.S. kids today live in a ‘traditional’ family →
Americans are delaying marriage, and more may be foregoing the institution altogether. At the same time, the share of children born outside of marriage now stands at 41%, up from just 5% in 1960.
Voter ID laws fix a fake problem by creating a real one →
Voter fraud has been studied extensively for decades, with no evidence of widespread fraud on the part of individuals. Voter ID laws are meant to stop that kind of fraud. Instead, they lead to fewer (predominantly poorer) people voting, undermining the democratic nature of elections.
Blue Lives Matter →
To challenge the police is to challenge the American people, and the problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that we are majoritarian pigs. When the police are brutalized by people, we are outraged because we are brutalized. By the same turn, when the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves. Power, decoupled from responsibility, is what we seek...
...To the extent that this weekend's murders obscure the legacy of Eric Garner, it will not be due to the failure of protests, nor even chance. The citizen who needs to look away generally finds a reason.
I wonder if there is some price attached to this looking away. When the elected mayor of my city arrived at the hospital, the police officers who presumably serve at the public's leisure turned away in a display that should chill the blood of any interested citizen. The police are not the only embodiment of democratic society. And one does not have to work hard to imagine a future when the agents of our will, the agents whom we created, are in fact our masters. On that day one can expect that the tactics intended for the ghettos will enjoy wider usage.