Akkam’s Razor

Blogger, veteran, and author Colby Buzzell writes the following:

Since the Army was kind enough to send me an invitation to go back to Operation Iraqi Freedom, I decided to R.S.V.P. to it by writing a little Op-Ed piece about it for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The article is here.  Buzzell says the following:

On way out of my building two weeks ago, I checked my mailbox and found a letter from the Department of the Army with “Important Document” printed in all caps on the middle. I immediately felt sick, so I went back to my room, locked the door, grabbed a beer from the fridge and stared out my window for a while. People outside were all wearing sunglasses and walking about enjoying the sun. I took a picture.

• Pew Research Center: The Daily Show: Journalism, Satire or Just Laughs?
  Stewart has always insisted that his show isn’t journalism and given its comedic core, its blurring of truth and fiction, and its ignoring of many major events, that is true in a traditional sense.
  (tags: jonstewart dailyshow television new journalism satire)
• Prediction: Broadcast TV Will Get Hosed In Upfront - Silicon Alley Insider
  [Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen] thinks the overall market for prime time broadcast TV will be down anywhere from 2% ($8.79 billion) to 14% ($7.73 billion) from the $8.9 billion spent last year.
  (tags: tv broadcasting revenue upfronts advertising commercials)

You can’t tell me that St. BBQ, the maverick of campaign finance reform, doesn’t know explicitly how to game the rules that he helped author.

You can’t tell me that Bernake’s academic focus of research on the Great Depression wasn’t a factor in his selection as leader of the Fed.

You can’t tell me that the decision to stop reporting M3 is not at all reflective of the need to inflate us out of our current financial dilemma.

You can’t tell me that no one could have foretold the current economic crisis while the debate regarding bankruptcy reform was going on in Congress in 2005.

• Congress looks at steel pennies, nickels - May. 7, 2008
  (tags: contrary indicator numbers station signal)
• Innovative Aircraft Seats | Cozy Suite
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• Phase Two - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog
  Most current polling nonetheless shows a close race. The poli-sci guys say never mind: polls are all over the place when the GE is 5 or 6 months out, but converge to fundamentals as election day draws near.
  (tags: paulkrugman polisci politics economics)

• The Raw Story | White House admits pre-war e-mails not archived
  “The harm is that we’ve lost a huge piece of history,” says Anne Weisman, a lawyer for CREW. Weisman estimated the total number of missing White House e-mails at “10 million-plus.”
  (tags: emails georgebush whitehouse iraq war preparation backup archive)
• The 75 Skills Every Man Should Master
  (tags: skills men social howto business diy Esquire)
• The Gospel of Consumption | Orion magazine
  Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.
  (tags: consumerism economics history politics consumption society culture)

My oh my! Which one of the many things might they be looking for?

Destruction of evidence? Peripheral information related to violations of the Hatch Act? Or possibly related to the December 7th “date of infamy” for the eight fired US Attorneys? Or something related to intolerant US Attorney Rachel Paulrose? Jeb Bush associates and Katrina pumps in New Orleans? Or possibly Bloch’s own ethical lapses? Or Bloch’s investigation into Karl Rove’s politicization of everything?

The mind reels at the possibilities!

• Topp 100-Comic Book Runs
  (tags: comics lists comicbooks writing art literature entertainment)
• Arianna Huffington: What John McCain Told Me, and What it Says About How Far He’s Fallen - Politics on The Huffington Post
  “I didn’t vote for George Bush” the man confessed. “I didn’t either,” his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband).
  (tags: politics mccain 2008 conservative election HuffPo lies opinion)

Krugman says:

[The] gas tax holiday is not, in my view, a good idea. But the furor over what is, when all is said and done, a small and temporary policy proposal is entirely disproportionate. What’s going on?

[…]

[E]conomists talk much more about trade than they do about health care policy, because they think they know something about it in a way the laity don’t.

The gas tax holiday is in this category. Economists really do know something about tax incidence that the laity don’t. So when a presidential candidate says something that conflicts with economistic wisdom, it becomes THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE EVER. Except, you know, it isn’t.

• 16 Ways to Keep A Razor- Sharp Focus at Work | Zen Habits
  (tags: focus productivity work business)
• All of Inflation’s Little Parts - The New York Times
  Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gathers 84,000 prices in about 200 categories — like gasoline, bananas, dresses and garbage collection — to form the Consumer Price Index, one measure of inflation.
  (tags: economics visualization money Inflation nyt infographics US)
• Who Will Tell the People? - New York Times
  Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people.
  (tags: news economics obama politics)

I told you so - the economists are too elite.  The only supporter for her gas tax holiday plan (also pitched by Republican John McCain) she could find - Steve Elmendorf - is an Oil Co. lobbyist.

• Manage Your Human Sigma
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• How To Write a Literature Review
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• The Return of the Paranoid Style
  We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead.
  (tags: movies film politics media paranoia culture war)
• List of eponymous laws - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Adages named after people.
  (tags: quotes laws philosophy adages wikipedia humor list)
• map_of_humanity.jpg (JPEG Image, 2587×1728 pixels)
  (tags: Maps philosophy visualization culture art politics sociology)

Tanta at Calculated Risk posts the following as a response to a story in the Washington Post regarding a ‘condo flipper’ upset that his owners association’s board won’t allow them to rent their properties (with the logic that if not being allowed to rent, they will be forced into foreclosure and eventually a short-sale, dragging the value down for the other units):