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June 01, 2004

What the World Needs Now is Cowbell, Sweet Cowbell

Data show economy roaring at record levels:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. factories cranked up output in May and construction spending surged to a third straight record high in April, according to reports on Tuesday that showed the economy gathering speed.

A measure of factory employment jumped to the highest level in 31 years as the nation's factories marked a full year of recovery, raising hopes for a strong gain in manufacturing jobs in Friday's national payrolls report.

Taken together, the data supported the case for a Federal Reserve rate rise later this month.

However, a third report gave a more subdued view of the job market in May, as the number of planned layoffs rose for the second month in a row.

There's always somethin'.

The Institute for Supply Management said its index of national factory activity rose to 62.8 in May from 62.4 the prior month, beating expectations of a small decline to 62.0. The index was not far off its two-decade high of 63.6 reached in January.

"Manufacturing activity has gone from being the U.S. economy's laggard to one of the driving forces behind the current recovery," said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody's Investors Service.

"That big jump by the employment index for the month of May favors another reading on payroll employment which exceeds expectations," he added. The job component rose to 61.9 in May -- the highest since April 1973 -- from 57.8 the prior month.

Markets are awaiting Friday's May payrolls report, which is expected to show an increase of around 216,000 non-farm jobs and seal the case for an official rate rise at the Fed's late June meeting.

Cowbell. Made in the USA.

posted by Ace at 01:32 PM

Comments

Ok, yeah, great, people are getting jobs and soldiers and whatnot. Bring back the Lara Flynn Boyle picture. DO it. DO it.
Thank you.

Posted by: Matt on June 1, 2004 01:53 PM

I wonder how this growth in manufacturing is connected to the steel import tariffs that Bush put in place to allow the industry some breathing room to "reorganize and consolidate". Tariffs that were ruled illegal by the WTO and lifted "too soon to do any real good" according to "industry analysts". The thing that really boosts my confidence in the Bush re-election prospects time and time again ( Besides seeing John "Imperious and Unappealing" Kerry drop in the polls every time he gets a national audience) is that this guy knows where to expend political capital. He spends it wisely and judiciously. It's great to have a Republican President with an MBA from Harvard that stayed awake during the "cost-benefit analysis" lecture.

Posted by: Kerry Is Unelectable on June 1, 2004 02:04 PM

heh, the Blue Oyster Cult cowbell segment on SNL was the best ever, i even went to the trouble of finding a copy of it online.

*tuk* *tuk* *tuk* *tuk* *tuk*

Posted by: tom on June 1, 2004 02:21 PM

Cowbell's the kinda thing that there's just too little of........

Posted by: Senator PhilABuster on June 1, 2004 04:06 PM

So many people still think the economy is bad, it is incredibly frustrating.

And then there are the people who will cling to pessimism because it serves their agenda.

True anecdote, happened to me last week;
I was in my store helping a customer, and as always I have the radio set to local news talk station.
We hear a quick blurb about some little toddler girl who was abandoned by her father, he left the baby with some strangers. My customer (an older woman) and I both made the same noises of disgust and dismay. I said, 'Can you believe the things that people do??' and she said;

You won't believe what she said.

She said, "Well with the economy the way it is, people are struggling to take care of their children."

I stared at her as if her head had transformed into a wheel of cheese. I said, "The ECONOMY? You think the economy made this guy abandon his kid??"

Well I listened to her nonsense briefly and changed the subject. She was an ancient hippie trying to push stealth politics by me and I wasn't having it.

Can you believe that crap?? Still get mad, especially when I see that the networks are embargoing the good news.

Posted by: lauraw on June 1, 2004 05:18 PM

Y'know, if by some weird chance I'm ever an absolute dictator, (yeah right) I won't ask for much. Hell, I'll let ya do any damn thing ya want, long as ya don't trample on other people's rights.

I just want the privilege of kicking the shit out of aging pacifist hippies without repercussion. Is that too fucking much to ask?!

Posted by: Mr. Bowen on June 1, 2004 10:30 PM

It's Marx's theory that everything in society is founded on economics. Whatever is right or wrong in art, history, morality, politics, language, philosophy, science, or anything else, is the direct result of the economic system in place. With a view like that, all bad news must stem from some economic cause. There's no other explanation.

Posted by: Smack on June 2, 2004 12:22 AM

I don't know all the nitty gritty details of Marxism; are you saying that it doesn't allow for natural born scumbags? It just assumes the economy creates scumbag behavior?

Posted by: lauraw on June 2, 2004 10:15 AM

That's pretty much it, yes. But the economic system is also responsible for everything good. Economics is responsible for everything. His philosophy of history was that economic systems were evolving and would eventually bring mankind to a perfect state where there would be no crime, no hate, no greed, no evil of any kind. And there would be no government--it wouldn't be necessary when man was perfected.

Posted by: Smack on June 3, 2004 10:41 PM

See, that's what I love about Capitalism. Human foibles are built right into the equation. Its crudity is its strength. Humans are greedy? We have the system for that.

Evolve to a perfect state later when it suits you.

Posted by: lauraw on June 4, 2004 12:47 AM

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David French just posted:

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In more marketing for Project Hail Mary, scientists say they've found the biosigns indicating life growing on an alien planet. It's not proof, just signatures of chemicals that are produced by biological metabolism, and it could be nothing, but scientists think it's a strong sign that this planet is inhabited by something.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists announced the detection of dimethyl sulfide (along with a similar detection of dimethyl disulfide) in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called K2-18b. This is actually the second detection of dimethyl sulfide made on this planet, following a tentative detection in 2023.
Tons of chemicals are detected in the atmospheres of celestial objects every day. But dimethyl sulfide is different, because on Earth, it's only produced by living organisms.
"It is a shock to the system," Nikku Madhusudhan, first author on the paper, told the New York Times. "We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal."

He means they tried to prove the signal was caused by things other than dimethyl sulfide but they could not.

Artemis moon shot a go, scheduled for 6:24 Eastern time tonight
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Good rickroll

What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

Finish the job, Mr. President!
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Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Red Leather Suit and Sweatband Edition
And I was here to please
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Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

Sec. Army recognizes ODU Army ROTC cadets for their bravery and sacrifice in private ceremony
[Hat Tip: Diogenes] [CBD]