Odds & Ends: Updates to Unemployment, Rachel Maddow, Dog Turd Posts

Regarding the earlier post today on the very low labor participation rate: @laurww sends this chart by Geoff exposing the "recovery" as no recovery at all.

Labor participation -- working -- drops precipitously after the housing bubble crisis, and never recovers:

Easy answer to the question, Why doesn't this feel like a recovery? Because it's not.

Regarding yesterday's post on Rachel Maddow's newest false conspiracy, this one claiming the Koch Brothers are behind a law to impose drug-use tests on welfare recipients. Well, they're not. They donate to a group called the State Policy Network, as do many companies, and the SPN worked with a Florida outfit on this law. But then, one of the companies that contributes to the SPN is Comcast, Maddow's ultimate employer. So MSNBC is behind this drug-testing regime to the same extent the Koch Brothers are.

But there's new information there. Maddow wants to say the Koch Brothers are responsible for the law because they gave $40,000 to the SPN over a period of time. But the ACUL challenged that law in court -- and won.

Among the contributors to the ACLU is... the Koch Brothers. And you know how much they contributed to the ACLU, representing the other side in the drug-testing issue?

Via @theh2, try twenty million dollars, jack.

Charles and David Koch have donated some $20 million to the American Civil Liberties Union, which just won a court victory overturning a Florida law requiring the drug testing of welfare recipients.

So Maddow wants to claim the Koch Brothers are responsible for the law, due to donating $40,000 to SPN, but ignores the fact that they're even more responsible for undoing the law, by funding the ACLU to the tune of $20,000,000.

She is a nasty, dishonest Marxist true-believing hyper-ideological conspiracy theorist, and ought to be called such.

Remember the study that claimed dogs align themselves with the earth's magnetic fields when pooping? Further information on canines' sensitivity to magnetic fields -- snow-diving foxes may use them to home in on their prey.

Think about this ... an ordinary fox can stalk a mole, mouse, vole or shrew from a distance of 25 feet, which means its food is making a barely audible rustling sound, hiding almost two car lengths away. And yet our fox hurls itself into the air -- in an arc determined by the fox, the speed and trajectory of the scurrying mouse, any breezes, the thickness of the ground cover, the depth of the snow -- and somehow (how? how?), it can land straight on top of the mouse, pinning it with its forepaws or grabbing the mouse's head with its teeth.

Link and video below from @clayranck.

And, Open Thread.

posted by Ace at 06:42 PM

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