A Primer on the Cultural Elite

A very interesting article on how the cultural elite are currently in charge of America.

It is a sloppy term that might include the academic class in the university that educates our children in college. The upper echelons that run government departments constitute part of this cultural elite. So does an entertainment cadre that oversees television and Hollywood. Corporate managers are elites as well.

There is no racial, regional, religious, or tribal commonality. One shared allegiance perhaps is to higher education that certifies the cultural elite by diplomas of all sorts from a �good school,� as well as a respectable salary and a nice home with appurtenances. The good life of the elite is defined by both the absence of worry about necessities, and a certain status that accrues from properly recognized advanced education and sensitivity.

I think them being divorced from actual labor and running a business is part of why we can't get the unemployment under 10%. They think that all people need is more grant money or more contacts on a foundation and jobs should be flowing like crazy. They haven't had to run a business in order to make money so the business can continue. That is why they have such an aversion to profit since they have never had to make it or their company goes out of business. I mean no one is going to close Cal Berkley even if it lost money for 20 years strait.

What is so odd to me is that they can be okay with Leo DiCaprio making $20 million a picture but can't stand when a CEO makes $1 million or more a year. They both do a job that the vast majority of Americans cannot do. Only a handful of people could open a $60 million movie or run multi-billion dollar company. So they are both paid what they are worth. However, the left hates the CEO for whatever reason and treats DiCaprio with reverence and awe.

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More Evidence of the Stimulus Bill Failure: How we paid $500,000 to generate each job

Now this would be really funny if it wasn't such an indictment of government wasting money.

The purpose of the trip is to highlight the �success� of the President�s $862 billion economic stimulus package which the White House claimed yesterday has already �saved or created� 3 million jobs. Specifically, this factory is being subsidized by $151 million of stimulus funds from an even larger $2 billion honey pot of stimulus money set aside for electric car battery investments. This one plant is expected to employ 300 workers. That works out to more than $500,000 per job created. $500,000 per job. This plant, in a nutshell, explains why the President�s stimulus plan has been an objective failure.

The government is the master in taking billions of dollars and figuratively flushing them down the toilet. They might have been better off if they didn't just give the money to people so that they could pay the bills or start businesses or something.

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BP Caps the Well on the 85th Day

Well at least the White House can take their boot off their necks for a little while. Maybe they can put their boot on the neck of unemployment next.

A tightly fitted cap was successfully keeping oil from gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for the first time in three months, BP said Thursday. The victory � long awaited by weary residents along the coast � is the most significant milestone yet in BP's effort to control one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

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"White Flight" From MySpace?

At least this article seems to think so.

Subsequent statistical analyses of the characteristics of users of online social networks by researchers, marketers and bloggers, she notes in her latest work, backed up her claims that white and asian teens who belonged to higher socieconomic strata (and who aspired to college, with which Facebook at the time was associated) were attracted to Facebook, while latino, black and working-class teens tended to opt for MySpace.

This seems like an interesting parallel to draw:

Boyd argues that MySpace's inability to deal with spammers added to the feeling of urban blight that overtook the site, leaving derelict profiles "covered in spam, a form of digital graffiti... As MySpace failed to address these issues, spammers took over like street gangs."

Subsequent media coverage of the "death of MySpace" was a direct result of this flight, says Boyd. For example, she cites a 2009 New York Times article that was entitled "Do You Know Anyone Still on MySpace?" despite the fact that at the time Facebook and MySpace has roughly equal numbers of users.

The problem too was that the corporations and the celebrities jumped onto Facebook almost en mass. In other words the so-called cool kids with the flashy cars and the big bank accounts were on Facebook. I guess MySpace was the inner city public high school with its gang problems, its giant crappy advertisements, and graffiti everywhere. I remember that most of the MySpace sites you went to had floating crap everywhere and just looked thrown together and haphazard.

While Facebook was college with its privacy, its white suburban sameness, and its games with cute little avatars. In fact Facebook started as a place for college students to meet and only opened to the public in the last few years. In other words it was a place to graduate to after MySpace.

So if you take the college analogy a little further most inner city kids and poor whites don't (or can't due to circumstances) aspire to college so they may not have made the jump from MySpace High to the University of Facebook. What incentive is there to go to a place populated with white and Asian college kids when you aren't a white or Asian college kid?

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Two New Diet Drugs Move Toward Possible Approval: lorcaserin and Contrave

Well tomorrow is an important day in diet pill land as the FDA advisory panel is looking over a drug from Vivus called Qnexa on Thursday. There are also a couple of other promising pills on the horizon as well.

Arena Pharmaceuticals' lorcaserin is one of three drugs that are boosting hope for a new generation of more effective weight-loss medicines. One gets a Food and Drug Administration review on Thursday and the others, later this year.

In the study, lorcaserin (lore-KASS-ah-rin) caused more people to lose at least 5 percent of their body weight over one year, more than twice the rate achieved by those on dummy pills.

There is also this drug in the works as well:

Contrave, made by Orexigen Therapeutics Inc., combines bupropion and naltrexone. The first is used to help people quit smoking and deal with depression. The second is used to decrease cravings for alcohol and illegal drugs.

As long as they don't blow out your heart like Fen-Phen did in the 90s. That second one sounds petty interesting because it is a smoking cessation drug mixed with a drug to decrease cravings. That should work well for those compulsive eaters out there.

In any case it is good to see some companies taking a chance on diet drugs. That Fen-Phen scare and the resulting lawsuits pretty much soured the whole deal for years. The idea that you just pop a pill and you lose weight sounds like it should have been invented decades ago.

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Stimulus "Saved" Millions More Jobs: Pricetag of Each Job $239,444

This sounds so good right?:

Updating its estimate of the impact the controversial new law has had, the White House now projects that the vast spending act has created or saved between 2.5 million and 3.6 million jobs.

That's up from the estimate of 2.2 million to 2.8 million jobs that was released in the first quarter of the year from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The new estimate says the act is on track, if it hasn't already reached, the promise that the stimulus act would save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010.

Well, if you actually break that number down. They spent $862 billion to "save" 3.6 million jobs. That means that each job cost $239,444 to save. If each of those jobs paid the median yearly wage of $32,140 that means that $207,304 extra was needed to generate each job. I know that most of that amount was funneled off for Democrat pet projects and shovel ready BS but you get the point.

The funny part is the White House is crowing about the stimulus like it was anything but a dismal failure. The unemployment rate was still 10% when it was promised to be 8%. Also the total jobs lost during the recession was 7.9 million. So even with the stimulus we are still 4.3 million jobs short of a full recovery. The more you look at it the more you can say that they took $862 billion and just set it on fire.

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Pelosi Blasts Gibbs for Speaking the Truth

Wow the infighting has begun and we still have quite a few months until November.

Asked Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" if the Democratic majority in the House was in jeopardy, Gibbs responded: "I think there is no doubt there are a lot of seats that will be up, a lot of contested seats. I think people are going to have a choice to make in the fall, but I think there's no doubt there are enough seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control."

What was wrong with saying the truth? Does Pelosi feel that even speaking about the GOP taking over the House will make it happen? Is she that scared of the possibility that she doesn't even want anyone to talk about it? I mean Gibbs is actually being a pragmatist here. In any case this rift shows how contentious this election is going to be even among fellow Democrats.

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IPhone 4G Death Group Problem Solved: Duct Tape?

Now this seems like something that should have gotten ironed out in the testing or prototyping phase but what can you do?

The main culprit appears to be a gap in the band separating the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS segment of the antenna from the section for cellular GSM and 3G reception. Experts believe that if you touch the gap and "bridge" the two antenna segments, you may lose reception and even drop calls.

So here is what you do to get around that problem:

That said, Gikas notes that there is an "affordable" fix for iPhone 4 owners other than Apple's $30 Bumper cases: duct tape, or "another thick, nonconductive material." "It may not be pretty," Gikas says (now there's an understatement), "but it works."

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Department of the Interior Attempts to Kill 1000s of Gulf Jobs

Well, I guess they won't rest until every oilfield worker in Louisiana is out of work.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar unveiled the new six-month moratorium, worded differently from an earlier drilling ban after a U.S. appeals court struck down the original moratorium last week.

"I am basing my decision on evidence that grows every day of the industry's inability in the deepwater to contain a catastrophic blowout, respond to an oil spill and to operate safely," Salazar said.

The new ban will extend until November 30 and affects the same drill rigs as before, although it is based on types of drilling technologies rather than on water depths as the old one was.

The oil companies won't simply stack up their rigs until November 30. They will move them to Brazil or the North Sea or somewhere else where they won't be losing millions per day. So Obama pretty much ceded those jobs that were once held by American oil field workers to someone living in Brazil or Sweden.

Those are year long leases they will be signing so you can kiss that American job goodbye. So we have the spectacle of having the coast fisheries decimated by oil and the oil field workers also out of a job at the same time. I wonder if they would be doing this if Louisiana was a blue state?

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Poll Against Obama on Immigration Lawsuit

I wonder if he ever gets tired of having just 30% of people support him on just about anything he does?

Half of Americans reject President Barack Obama's lawsuit against Arizona's controversial immigration law, with only a third supporting the move, according to a Gallup poll released Friday.

I can just hear him now:

"I don't do the things that a popular *pauses looks at teleprompter* i do what I think * pauses looks at other teleprompter* is right! *pauses looks at both teleprompters*

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LeBron Criticized for Train-Wreck of a Move to Maimi

Now this is pretty harsh words directed toward LeBron.

As the worst idea in the history of marketing unfolded, James looked trapped somewhere between despondence and defiance. His bumbling buddy Maverick Carter had walked him into the public execution of his legacy, his image, and there was a part of James that clearly wished he could turn back through the doors and hide. Only, it was too late. No going back now. James goes to the Miami Heat, Cleveland goes into a basketball Hades and LeBron�s legacy becomes that of a callous carpetbagger.

Yeah I have to agree that this was not a smart marketing move at all. I mean you have the Cavs owners ripping the crap out of him a few minutes after the announcement and you do have an actual train-wreck on your hands.

He should have just said that he didn't want to play in Cleveland any longer and saved the humiliation of the town trying to hold on to him. He could have just said he wanted to try his luck with his good friend Wade down in Miami weeks ago and saved us all this run-up and stupidity. Then the speculation would be on bringing Bosh to Miami to make the team into a contender.

What Miami gets now is 3 All-Star players and that is pretty much it. They have to "fill in the role-players" most of which will be at minimum salary. That means they probably won't win any titles for years until they can get the right mix of defense and long range shooting to compliment the All-Stars.

So in other words LeBron left a title contender that he gave up on in the Playoffs to join a team that is basically 3 guys and a bunch of nobodies. I guess it just boils down to that the allure of the Miami nightlife and all those hot Latinas was just better than a bunch of frozen winters in a town that once had its river catch fire.

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Our Long National Nightmare is Over: LaBron is Going to Miami

This crap was drawn out so much that it became a joke after a while.

LeBron James has made his decision. He's going to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh with the Miami Heat.

James made his long-awaited announcement in a hastily arranged ESPN special Thursday night in Greenwich, Conn., and James wasted no time in making a prediction: "We're going to be a real good team."

I stopped watching SportsCenter for a while just to avoid all the annoying speculation. I was also tired of the army of talking heads that were sure where LaBron was going because they heard from someone close to his Camp that LaBron was wearing Bermuda shorts and thus was going to Miami. I guess on the upside NBA was finally relevant again for like 5 minutes.

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The New Head of Medicare and Medicaid Sounds Like a Communist

I don't throw the communist word around too much but this statement could have come right out of Marx or Lenin's writings.

�In America, the best predictor of cost is supply; the more we make, the more we use�hospi�tal beds, consultancy services, procedures, diagnostic tests,� Dr. Berwick wrote. �� Here, you choose a harder path. You plan the supply; you aim a bit low; you prefer slightly too lit�tle of a technology or a service to too much; then you search for care bottlenecks and try to relieve them.�

If you control the means of production and "plan the supply" you can control the people through an artificial shortage. That sounds like something that Stalin or Mao tried and their people died by the millions. I assume that "enlightened individuals" like this Dr. Berwick will be the ones who will be doing this "central planning."

I wonder how many hospital beds and procedures will go to the Party Members in Good Standing (ie Hollywood and Government elite) and not to everyone else? I think you just saw a little red under the white doctors smock of Dr. Berwick.

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UAE Wants Us to Bomb Iran

Hmm, maybe we can do some join Saudi attack on Iran's nuclear facilities so it doesn't look like the Crusader vs. the Muslims. In any case the so-called Arab Street might want Iran taken out of the game when it comes to the bomb.

Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba: �I think it�s a cost-benefit analysis. I think despite the large amount of trade we do with Iran, which is close to $12 billion� there will be consequences, there will be a backlash and there will be problems with people protesting and rioting and very unhappy that there is an outside force attacking a Muslim country; that is going to happen no matter what. If you are asking me, �Am I willing to live with that versus living with a nuclear Iran?� my answer is still the same: �We cannot live with a nuclear Iran.� I am willing to absorb what takes place at the expense of the security of the U.A.E.�

I agree that a nuclear arms race in the Middle East will be the last thing that the UAE would need.

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Doom Seems Overrated

I have to agree with the thesis of this article.

I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in telling the good news? They do not exist. By contrast, the behemoths of bad news, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year and doom is their best fund-raiser. Where is the news media's interest in checking out how pessimists' predictions panned out before? There is none. By my count, Lester Brown has now predicted a turning point in the rise of agricultural yields six times since 1974, and been wrong each time. Paul Ehrlich has been predicting mass starvation and mass cancer for 40 years. He still predicts that `the world is coming to a turning point'.

The doom industry takes in billions a year and employs 1000s of people so things are always at a turning point headed downward. They can't say that things have been solved or they would all be out of business. So Global Warming will kill millions of people even if they have to cook the books because it challenges the existence of an entire industry. When their livelihoods are threatened as well as their decades of accomplishments then a little lying and exaggeration is a small price to pay.

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