Berman Post

"Razer Switchblade" Gaming Netbook Changes Its Keyboard For Every Game
WikiLeaks Show Iraq War Justified
Lesbians Make More Money Than Straight Women
'True' Unemployment Rate at 11.7%
Starchild - "We Need a Libertarian Che Guevara"
ObamaCare And The Individual Mandate
Latin America Needs Free Trade & Drug Legalization

"Razer Switchblade" Gaming Netbook Changes Its Keyboard For Every Game

Posted: 10 Jan 2011 03:43 PM PST

It is a great concept, to be able to customize every key on your keyboard.

Video embedded below.

WikiLeaks Show Iraq War Justified

Posted: 10 Jan 2011 01:59 PM PST

By 'justified', I am referring specifically to the Weapons of Mass Destruction issue. The war was justifiable on many other grounds which is not relevant to this post. Just to avoid certain comments I will mention one; shooting at our airplanes. The information here should not be new to anyone who has had a serious interest in this and has not relied exclusively on the Main Stream Media for their info.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=40978 (bold mine)

"While the media have been quick to run with WikiLeaks' U.S. State Department cable releases to undermine Washington's efforts to effect stability in unstable parts of the world, it is slow, if not silent, in giving credit where credit is due. Although other credible sources confirmed it before WikiLeaks did, in receiving similar disinterested responses from the media, it should be clear now that President Bush's concerns about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program were well-founded.
...
The 2003 Iraq invasion by U.S. forces also launched a massive effort to find WMDs. By late 2003, as determined in a review by a Wired Magazine editor of WikiLeaks documents on the issue, the Administration was losing faith WMDs would be found. But, as Wired reports, the WikiLeaks documents clearly show "for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction. . . . Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam's toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents."
...
Of note too is a January 2004 revelation by Syrian journalist defector Nizar Nayuf. He reported there were three locations in Syria where Iraqi WMDs had been transported prior to the 2003 invasion and were being stored. He also revealed some of these sites were being built with North Korean cooperation. This explained why three years later Israel attacked a nuclear facility being built in Syria by Pyongyang — and Syria's subsequent failure to criticize Israel for fear of drawing further international attention to what Damascus had been doing."

Do not think that this will change to many of the minds of the 'Bush lied, people died' folks. They will tell you that Bush planted those documents and orchestrated the leak as part of his plan.

Lesbians Make More Money Than Straight Women

Posted: 10 Jan 2011 11:48 AM PST

It would seem to me to make for a more catchy button slogan, though less politically correct, than the gender divide. As with that, my feeling is it has less to do with any sort of discrimination than it does with cumulative personal choices.

http://bigthink.com/ideas/25492 (via)

"The wage premium paid to lesbian workers is a bit of a mystery. Sure, lesbian women are better-educated on average, are more likely to be white, live predominantly in cities, have fewer children, and are significantly more likely to be a professional. But even when you control for these differences, the wage premium is still on the order of 6%.

It is fascinating when the data starts looking like the majority is being discriminated against. Is it wage discrimination, though, or is there an economic argument for why lesbians are getting paid more?

Well, a possible explanation has to do with the division of labor in a heterosexual union.
...
This theory is cleverly tested in a paper which calculates the wage premium paid to lesbians in two distinct groups—those who were once in a heterosexual marriage and those have never been married.* The assumption made is reasonable; lesbian women who were once married to men (about 44% of the lesbians in the sample) presumably have in the past had the expectation that they would have a marriage partner with a higher income. The never-married women might also have had this expectation, but it is much more likely that, on average, women in that group expected to be in a relationship with another woman with a comparable income.

Does the evidence support the theory that the wage premium can be explained by greater investment in more market-oriented skills by lesbian women? Well the premium does not disappear completely for the subset of previously married women but is reduced by about 17%, providing some support for the idea. At 5.2% though, the once-married lesbian premium is still high enough that I don't think we can consider the case closed."

Side note; you may want to think about wearing glasses.

'True' Unemployment Rate at 11.7%

Posted: 10 Jan 2011 09:32 AM PST

The unemployment rate stands officially at 9.4%. That is a fall of .4% from the previous month, but there is a reason I termed it a "fake fall". When most people think of the unemployment rate they intuit that to mean percentage of people not working who want to. That is technically not correct. People may want to work but after fruitlessly searching have just given up and will start again after they feel the economy improves. These discouraged workers are eventually removed from consideration for the numbers.

To try and add these people back in and get a 'true' unemployment rate, Tyler Durden makes calculations using labor force participation rates. He found a discrepancy of 3.91 million people, people that may be in that category of having given up. There are other possible reasons for that number including an increasingly aged population and an increasing trend toward people living off the state. Still, given the number of jobs created vs the employment rate fluctuation, it seems safe to say a solid majority resulted from people giving up.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/labor-force-participation-rate-drops-fresh-25-year-low-adjusted-unemployment-rate-117 (via)

"While today's unemployment number came at a low 9.4%, well below expectations, the one and only reason for this is that the labor force in America has plunged to a fresh 25 year low. Assuming a reversion to the mean in the long-term average participation rate back to 66%, means that the civilian labor force, which in December came at 153,690, a drop of 260,000 from November, is in reality 157.6 million, a delta of 3.91 million currently unaccounted for. Maybe someone can ask Bernanke during his imminent presentation before Congress what happened to the unemployed population, which would have been 18.4 million if this labor force delta was incorporated, resulting in an unemployment rate of 11.7%."

Click over to the source to see the Labor Force Participation Rate graph.