The Ledes

Thursday, September 19, 2024

New York Times: “A body believed to be of the suspect in a Kentucky highway shooting that left five people seriously injured this month was found on Wednesday, the authorities said, ending a manhunt that stretched into a second week and set the local community on edge. The Kentucky State Police commissioner, Phillip Burnett Jr., said in a Wednesday night news conference that at approximately 3:30 p.m., two troopers and two civilians found an unidentified body in the brush behind the highway exit where the shooting occurred.... The police have identified the suspect of the shooting as Joseph A. Couch, 32. They said that on Sept. 7, Mr. Couch perched on a cliff overlooking Interstate 75 about eight miles north of London, Ky., and opened fire. One of the wounded was shot in the face, and another was shot in the chest. A dozen vehicles were riddled with gunfire.”

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The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

     ~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI." 

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

Washington Post: The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which houses the world's largest collection of Shakespeare material, has undergone a major renovation. "The change to the building is pervasive, both subtle and transformational."

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Monday
Sep272010

"Structural Unemployment" Is an Excuse for Inaction

Paul Krugman: the claim that current high levels of U.S. unemployment is "structural" is a fake excuse for not pursuing real solutions.* In this column, Krugman offers no solutions (though he does elsewhere), so ...

... The Constant Weader proposes a solution! --

The problem, then, is that demand is low. Americans aren't buying widgets & washing machines because they can't afford them, or think they can't afford them.

There are a couple of ways to increase demand.

Plan A is the George Bush way: tell everybody to go shopping. The trouble is, too many people took his advice (true, they were shopping till they dropped way before Bush suggested it). Americans ran up huge debts, often ballooning under the weight of absurd interest rates. Especially when the recession hit, they (1) either found themselves out of work or underemployed & really could not afford to pay off their debts, or (2) they still had jobs but realized they had better start paying off their usurious debts rather than buying a new car on credit. People who are fortunate enough to be in Category 2 are doing the right thing for their families by beginning to live within their means, even if they are constricting the economy.

So, let's go to Plan B. I call it redistributing the wealth. (And you may label me a socialist if you like.) If we want more money in circulation, let's tax the you-know-what out of the super-rich. That's the best way the government can increase demand: put the tax dollars of the rich to work employing the not-rich (that would be 97% of us).

High taxes for the rich aren't a "punishment" as Republicans &, last week, Ben Stein, complained. They're a privilege & an honor -- a badge of recognition that a taxpayer has done mighty well for himself. Congratulations are in order. Send the payers of high taxes fancy certificates. Send super-high payers engraved plaques. Let's spring for fancy silver loving cups for billionaires like Bill Gates & Warren Buffett. They deserve it for the great contributions they'll be making to the American economy.

Or, there's Plan C, advocated by Herbert Hoover & the Fed guy from Minnesota -- Kocherlakota. Plan C, of course, will bring on a full-blown 1930s-style depression, wherein we become officially a third-rate country, a hopeless debtor nation, unable to sustain our own people or to keep up with more robust economies.

The correct answer is "B."


If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.
-- Winston Churchill

* On the One Hand. Krugman presents evidence there are no major labor shortages anywhere in the U.S., & there are no "major industries that are trying to expand but are having trouble hiring, [no] major classes of workers who find their skills in great demand, [and no] major parts of the country with low unemployment even as the rest of the nation suffers." ...

... On the Other Hand. Rana Foroohar of Newsweek says just the opposite. She says that "three fields — construction, manufacturing (particularly in the automotive sector), and finance — have been hit much harder than others." She says the housing crisis has also cost the labor force flexibility: "...with so many homeowners underwater on their mortgages, their ability to relocate has diminished."

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