The Agora

Statisticians at the Labor Department said they expect to revise down U.S. payroll employment by about 145,000 for the March 2003 reference month -- effectively showing even greater weakness in the sluggish labor market than previously thought.

The downward adjustment surprised Wall Street, which had been rife with speculation this week that Labor would adjust the figures up, bringing payrolls more in line with another survey which has shown a recent improvement in the job market.

"The expectation was that this revision would be positive, that we would be looking at a number in excess of 300,000," said Anthony Chan, chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors.

There has been argument in the past months over which survey of the jobs market is more accurate: the Establishment Survey, or the Household Survey.

Generally speaking, boosters of the President's economic plan tout the Household numbers, claiming that they are more accurate, and that they show a strengthening job market. Others, including the Dept. of Labor, said that the numbers, when looked at closely, showed continuing weakness.

This won't settle the argument, but it is important point: the weakness found by the Establishment Survey has been confirmed.
4:28:57 PM    comment []trackback []

Given that I have the day off today, and nothing serious to do, I should churn out some sort of kick-ass blog post.

Instead, I think I'll just mock The Wall Street Journal's Op-Ed page, because today it's chock full 'o stupid stuff.

First off, is the spinning of the Kay report. And it's a very piss-poor spin job.

"We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."

As we read David Kay's report last week on the weapons search in Iraq, the paragraph above is the real news. It concludes, even in this interim report, that Saddam Hussein was systematically attempting to evade inspections in blatant violation of United Nations Resolution 1441.

We bring this up because five days after his presentation to Congress we haven't seen it reported anywhere else. Instead the headlines have been that Mr. Kay hasn't found any WMD weapons "stockpiles." But the Stockpile Standard wasn't anyone's measure in agreeing to 1441, which was supposed to be Saddam's last chance to comply with U.N. demands. And what Mr. Kay has already found is more than enough proof that Saddam was attempting to deceive the world one more time about his dangerous intentions.

We know that the Iraq War will cost, by the end of this fiscal year, more than $150 billion. All of which will be added to the deficit. Frankly, $150 billion seems to be a very high price to pay to enforce one UN resolution.

It is an especially high price when one considers that it is possible that Saddam could have been removed from power will a great deal of international support and financing if the administration has systematically build a case on his removal around the undisputed facts of the nature of his rule.

Instead, the Bush administration rushed ahead, placing visions of mushroom clouds over Manhattan in the heads of the American public.

As this editorial points out, undue haste wasn't even called for, as attested by President Bush's own words:

In fact, the Bush Administration never subscribed to the "imminence" test when making its case for deposing Saddam. Mr. Bush flatly rejected it in this year's State of the Union address as too risky. The argument was that Saddam was continuing to hide the WMD capabilities he was known to possess in the 1990s and had used against Iran and his own Kurdish population -- with the clear intention of resuming these programs once the political heat was off. The Kay report proves this is precisely what Saddam intended.

$150 billion dollars and 300 American lives spent because "Saddam was attempting to deceive the world one more time about his dangerous intentions", and that he "remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons. These officials assert that Saddam would have resumed nuclear weapons development at some future point." and that the Iraqis were developing "UAVs, that could possibly be used to disperse WMD agents."

So let's get this straight, David Kay spent 300 million on a report that makes liberal use of the words and phrases like "possibly", "resumed at some future point" and "can be used", and he wants $600 million more to continue the search? I say give it to him, but first make the administration swear on a stack of Bibles that Kay's final report will be issued before the November election.

Also on the Op-Ed page today is Dinesh D'Sousza continuing his habit of being head-smackingly stupid in public(ironically, in an editorial with the title "Not so 'Bright' "). He uses Daniel Dennett's recent appearance in the New York Times to attack atheists.

Mr. Dennett, like many atheists, is confident that atheists are simply brighter -- more rational -- than religious believers. Their assumption is: We nonbelievers employ critical reason while the theists rely on blind faith. But Mr. Dennett and his fellow "brights," for all their credentials and learning, have been duped by a fallacy. This may be called the Fallacy of the Enlightenment, and it was first pointed out by the philosopher Immanuel Kant.

The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know, and that limit is reality itself. In this view, widely held by atheists, agnostics and other self-styled rationalists, human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.

In his "Critique of Pure Reason," Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. The only way that we apprehend reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that our five-mode instrument for apprehending reality is sufficient for capturing all of reality? What makes us think that there is no reality that goes beyond, one that simply cannot be apprehended by our five senses?

Wow, you would have to wake up pretty early in the morning to fit more stupidity into your day than D'Souza fits into that paragraph.

"The only way that we apprehend reality is through our five senses." Really?well, it is absolutely true that our five senses are inadequate for comprehending reality. Which is why we use radio telescopes, X-ray machines and gravitometers. Just how did Penzias and Wilson discover the background radiation that lent support to the idea of Big Bang? Did they hear it? Which one of your five senses detects radio signals? What about the concept of Magnetic Resonance Imaging? Or is an MRI scan just some technician with really, really keen eyesight? Has D'Souza ever met someone who has seen a quark, a black hole, or a planet around another star? Has he ever had a dental X-ray?

And, lastly, the Journal's editorial page proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that, yes, it is all about the Clintons, even when it's about a right-wing hero allegedly illegally trafficking in narcotics:

[I]t's worth detailing what Mr. Limbaugh has not done. He has not expressed outrage at leaks about a criminal investigation. He hasn't sent his wife out to accuse critics of manufacturing the thing out of whole cloth. He hasn't attacked the housekeeper who sold her story to the National Enquirer. And so on.

12:20:28 PM    comment []trackback []

A guy is coming this afternoon to put in a new floor in the bathroom, so my big task today is to simply wait wait for him, and double check that my didn't leave any filmy unmentionables hanging the back of the bathroom door.

I've already drank two cups of coffee, done a small bit of laundry, and read a chapter in Peter Green's great The Greco-Persian Wars

My minor tasks today are, in no particular order: drink some more coffee; mock The Wall Street Journal's editorial page; listen to some Bruce Cockburn; watch the Kurosawa under appreciated classic Ran; roll out a new feature for the weblog.

And not once all day will I think about anybody's riparian rights,.

Ah, Monday!

(Of course, Tuesday will suck)
10:19:52 AM    comment []trackback []