It was worse than the seasonalized numbers indicate.

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Note: This column went up at PJ Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Monday.

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It’s hard to decide which aspect of the horrid April employment report the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday is the most troubling: the understated unemployment rate, the awful raw number of jobs added, their suspect seasonal conversion, or the sickening attempt at positive spin by the Obama administration’s labor secretary.

As to the genuineness of the official seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, the jig is basically up. It’s clear that many Americans, even among the relatively disengaged, have long since figured out that the official figure, which dipped to 8.1% in April, doesn’t include an extraordinary and unprecedented number of those who have given up looking for work. At 63.6%, the labor force participation rate is back to where it was in the early 1980s. Qualitatively, and despite a few years during which baby boomers have begun to collect Social Security, today’s rate is worse, because the frequency of stay-at-home parenting was far higher three decades ago. Zero Hedge has calculated that a participation rate equal to its post-1980 average would have generated an unemployment rate of 11.4%. Even establishment media reports from the likes of the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press, acknowledged that April’s rate drop occurred “only because more Americans gave up looking for work.”

It’s hard to understate how deeply disappointing April raw numbers of jobs added were, and how lucky the administration was (at least I hope it’s luck) that the seasonal conversions to 115,000 and 130,000 jobs added overall and in the private sector, respectively, came in as high as they did.

In early February, I wrote: ”[T]he acid test for Team Obama’s claim that the economy is finally legitimately recovering will come during the next five months (February through June).”

They’re flunking:

Despite a clearly larger pool of people who want to work or could be looking for work, through three of the first five months of the acid test period, this year’s economy has added fewer raw jobs than the 2004-2006 average for those same months. It has also added fewer than last year. The trend this year is even worse: February was okay, March trailed where it needed to be, and April stunk to high heaven. Sadly, it all makes sense. Last year’s peak in gas prices came in early May, about a month later than what (we hope) was this year’s early-April high point. In 2011, job creation in May and June fell off badly compared to what was needed. May and June 2012 seem to be on track for a repeat — or worse, as gas prices will almost certainly be higher than what motorists paid last year.

Most Americans don’t appreciate how truly bad the situation is because April’s seasonal adjustments worked in the administration’s favor. Somehow, even though the economy really added 283,000 and 233,000 fewer jobs in April 2012 than it did in April 2011, and 2010, respectively, April’s seasonally adjusted result was only 136,000 lower than 2011 and 124,000 lower than 2010. I’m not saying that the calculations were cooked (seasonal adjustments in March made things look a bit worse than the really were that month), but it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to expect that the 896,000 jobs actually added in April would have generated a zero or even negative result after seasonal conversion. I’ve been saying for years that relying solely on seasonally adjusted numbers during a time of abnormal economic volatility is foolish, and that the press’s almost universal failure to even look at the raw numbers in such times is derelict.

Unfortunately, those who believe that the BLS is no longer walled off from political influence gained three forms of support for their argument this month.

First, the bureau’s “Birth/Death” adjustment, which incorporated 206,000 jobs into April’s raw number, seems abnormally high and without strong basis. The adjustment in April 2011 was 172,000. We’re really supposed to believe that thousands more Americans are starting up enterprises than were doing so a year ago, and that they generated 20% more jobs than such people did a year ago (net of bankruptcies and other business terminations)? Subtracting Birth/Death from April in both years means that the raw number of job additions the bureau found through its normal survey methods dropped by over 30%.

Second, the employment report’s verbiage seemed like an attempt to water down the bad news in a vain attempt to minimize the damage. Unlike the vast majority of previous months when the news was better, the authors failed to mention the particularly weak number of seasonally adjusted 130,000 private-sector jobs added (130,000). It made sure to remind us that there were “gains averaging 252,000 per month for December to February” (like we care now?). It also decided to trumpet the seasonally adjusted 62,000 jobs added in “professional and business services,” even though the raw gains in that broad category were less than in each of the previous two Aprils, and despite the fact that this April’s number included 21,000 positions added at temporary help services. (Temps, a segment which is barely 2% of the private workforce, have made up over 740,000, or almost 28%, of the 2.66 million jobs added to private-sector payrolls since the recession officially ended in June 2009.)

Finally, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’s related press release was an arrogant exercise in see-no-evil partisanship, as seen in these excerpts (my comments are in italics):

“I would characterize our growth as durable and steady. For 26 straight months, we have added private sector jobs. The national unemployment rate has fallen a full point in the last eight months. Layoffs are continuing to come down and are now back to 2006 levels. (Mass layoffs may be down, but unemployment claims, the better indicator of overall layoffs, were lower during every week in 2006 than during any week so far this year.)

“In April, our largest gains — 62,000 new jobs — were in good-paying business and professional services careers, meaning more architects, engineers, computer programmers and consultants are finding jobs. (Uh, over one-third of them were temps, and most temps aren’t particularly well paid.)

… “We’re on the right path, and we know our recovery would be even stronger if Congress hadn’t blocked almost every single proposed investment in the American Jobs Act. (Because AJA will work just as well as the stimulus did — oh, wait a minute…)

… “Going forward, we have a choice to make. We can either make investments in things like education, transportation and new sources of energy … Or we give more tax breaks to wealthy Americans who don’t need them and didn’t ask for them. (Team Obama’s current solution is hundreds of billions of dollars in tax increases scheduled to kick in on January 1, 2013.)

This is delusional. All the lipstick in the world can’t disguise how ugly this pig is — and in case you’re wondering, I really am referring to the jobs report.

The only reasonable response to April’s employment report and the Labor Secretary’s reaction is “OMG.” As in, “Obama Must Go.”

Impressive — and fun:

Can your drummer do this?

From Houston (video at link):

Friday, April 20, 2012

A Houston hospital is the last place you’d expect to find love. But, it actually happened to two young people were waiting for heart transplants at the same time.

Linda Thibodeaux and Jordan Merecka like watching alligator shows, and they like to cook.

Linda said, “I do things my way and he does things his way, but somehow we seem work together.”

And they both have … new hearts.

Jordan said, “She got her transplant May 11 and I got Syncardia May 22.”

Their romance began when in a hospital. They were waiting for heart transplants at the same time. When a heart became available last May, it matched Linda. To keep Jordan alive, Texas Children’s surgeons gave him the new artificial heart.

It made national news. Jordan’s face was on a JumboTron in Times Square. But it was hard. At 18, living on a mechanical heart, still waiting for a heart transplant.

Linda Thibodeaux understood. This was her second heart transplant.

“Our physical therapists and our nurses thought we should meet,” Jordan explained,

Jordan came to visit, dragging the 400 pound console that ran the artificial heart.

He sad, “They brought Linda out of her room and her mask and everything and I was on big blue in the hallway. And I’m not going to lie — it was kind of an awkward meeting at first.”

“I don’t think we really knew what to think yet,” Linda said.

But they had so much in common.

“I’d never met anyone my age who was going through pretty much the same exact thing,” Linda said.

“It was really nice to have someone to talk to who understood what I was going through,” said Jordan.

Linda added, “Its a connection you can’t really have with anyone else.”

Linda was the hospital for the five months Jordan was on the artificial heart.

He said, “There was hope I could live a normal life like she was doing.”

He was near death in October, when they found a donor heart.

Linda said, “I felt like myself getting a whole new heart again, but it was him and it was a beautiful moment.”

As Jordan and Linda recovered, their friendship grew into a romance.

“Seems like we’ve come so far and both doing amazing,” Linda said. “It’s wonderful.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

From Johannesburg, South Africa:

11 April 2012 09.57 EDT

Man locked in his own car boot sends text message to girlfriend, who uses Twitter to spread word and track down vehicle

It has fuelled political revolutions and offered the likes of Stephen Fry, Wayne Rooney and Lady Gaga a direct line to their fans.

Twitter might not, however, be the first thing on the mind of a man hijacked and locked in the boot of his car. Yet it was a chorus of tweets that quite possibly saved his life.

The victim was driving through Johannesburg, South Africa, at around 9pm last Saturday when two armed men stopped and seized his Golf 3, South Africa’s Star newspaper reported.

The carjackers forced the man into the boot and drove away with him trapped inside – an act that has too often ended horrifically in a country blighted by violent crime.

However, the victim used his mobile phone to send a desperate text message to his girlfriend. She turned to Twitter for help, posting at 9.11pm: “Be on the look for DSS041GP. my boyfriend has just been hijacked and is in the boot please RT [retweet].”
(more…)

Ouch:

The truth about what their elders have done to Millennials and younger people hurts, but Whittle’s final message, after encouraging them to learn and liberate themselves, is crucial: While doing all of that, “Hang in there.”

Cool gesture (HT Daryn Kagan):

Toymaker Mattel announced last week it will create bald Barbie dolls for girls affected by hair loss, and distribute the popular toys to children’s hospitals and charities in early 2013

The move grows from from an online petition to create a bald Barbie because “losing hair is a hard thing to deal with, especially for little girls.”

Jane Bingham, of Sewell, N.J., started the Beautiful and Bald Barbie Facebook page on Dec. 20 after she lost her hair last year to chemotherapy after treatment for follicular non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a blood cancer, which upset her 9-year-old daughter.

Her goal was 1,000 “likes” in a month. They reached that in five days, and, at last count, stood at more than 150,000 “likes.”

“I love that both companies are making these dolls,” said Bingham, 42. “It shows kids from a young age that you’re not dependent on who you are by your hair.”

Mattel has a “policy of not forwarding unsolicited product ideas to our design teams,” the company has said. It didn’t create the doll in direct response to the Facebook group, “but they helped us realize how important this was for us to do,” said spokesperson Alan Hilowitz.

Bingham and Rebecca Sypin, the Facebook group’s cofounder, say the company told them privately in February it would make a bald friend for Barbie.

Toymaker MGA Entertainment also told the women about its plans to create bald dolls, proceeds of which will go to charity. Its bald Bratz and Moxie Girlz dolls hit toystore shelves this summer.

Barbie’s bald friend, whose name hasn’t been released, will not be sold in stores.

Rather the company will donate the dolls to children’s hospitals in Canada and the United States and a few charities “to get the dolls directly into the hands of children who can most benefit from the unique play experience,” said a statement from Mattel. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Via CNN (HT Daryn Kagan):

February 18, 2012

A Kenyan chief in a town far from the bustling capital foiled a predawn robbery recently using Twitter, highlighting the far-reaching effects of social media in areas that don’t have access to the Internet.

Chief Francis Kariuki said he got a call in the dead of the night that thieves had broken into a neighbor’s house.

He turned to Twitter, which allows users to send messages in 140 characters or less, to reach his community instantly.

“Thieves in Kelven’s living room, let’s help him out please,” he tweeted in Swahili, the local language.

Local residents, who subscribe to his tweets through a free text messaging service, jumped into action. They surrounded the house, sending the thugs fleeing into the night.

He later sent a message thanking the community in his town of Lanet Umoja for coming out. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

From the company’s Heritage and History page, as it appeared before Evins’ passing:

Traveling the highways of America, you drive through the places where many folks in this country still live: the small towns. One of them, just off the stretch of I-40 that runs between Nashville and Knoxville in Tennessee, is a place called Lebanon.

Now, unless you’re a hunter and collector of antiques, you probably haven’t heard of Lebanon. But that’s okay because folks in Lebanon like it just the way it is: comfortable, friendly, and a great place to come home to. No wonder Dan Evins thought it was just the place to start a business that, as it turns out, would someday become anything but small!
(more…)

From TheDaily.com:

Before airport shops began selling miniature versions of every site in the world — extraordinary or otherwise — encased in plastic and sprinkled with glittering dust, snowglobes were the singular souvenir of a singular event, the 1889 Paris World’s Fair.

The World’s Fair dome was not the first object to put something precious under glass. Treasured family objects — figurines, clocks, medals, heirlooms — had long sat on shelves in display cases. Ivory, wood and bone dioramas had been preserved under glass across Europe for decades. France had manufactured glass paperweights — that least useful of supposedly useful objects — for nearly a century. Even in America, little domes appeared in the 1870s (these now sit in a museum in Neenah, Wis.). Glass, though it was easy enough to make by the late 19th century, still carried a veneer of luxury. To put something under glass indicated an object’s worth.

The fair had its share of wonders, but many patrons were particularly taken with the exhibits of decorated glass, particularly the paperweights of hollow balls filled with water and white specks in an imitation of a snowstorm.

Among the fair’s globes was one made by an aspiring merchant: In his version, as on the fairgrounds themselves, the new Eiffel Tower darkly pierced a pale sky. The domed version, of course, could sit in an outstretched palm, fit to carry home. The souvenir’s success came less from its beauty than from its tie to a moment of global significance: the building of the tower, the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the dawn of a new century. Unlike family heirlooms or ivory dioramas, the snowglobe wasn’t intrinsically valuable — it only announced itself as such, and so it was.

After the Paris fair, snowglobes proliferated across Europe and America, with several inventors claiming the object as their own. Around the turn of the century, Erwin Perzy, a Viennese medical instrument maker, was trying to make a brighter operating room bulb by filling a globe with water and white grit and shining light through it. It didn’t work, except to remind Perzy of snow. At the request of a souvenir-maker friend, he put the Basilica of the Birth of the Virgin Mary below a glass globe, which, when shaken, resembled a snowstorm. Perzy patented the “Glass Globe with Snow Effect” in 1900, launched a business and, by 1908, won an award from the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef I. His company still churns out domes today.

By the 1920s, German firms were exporting snowglobes to the U.S. and Canada. In 1927, a Pittsburgh man, Joseph Garaja, filed a patent for a snowglobe of “artistic attractiveness and novel ornamentation.” A popular mail-order catalog advertised the item in 1929; within a year, Japanese firms copied Garaja’s design, taking the globes fully, er, global.

After that, snowglobes were everywhere. They were called snowshakers, waterdomes, snowstorms, water balls and blizzard-weights. They were round or square or oval, tall or short, and sat on bases of wood, stone, metal, marble, ceramic or glazed pottery. Inside were figurines of wood, stone or wax, and snow made of china pieces, minerals, sand, sawdust, ground rice, even chips of animal bone. Manufacturers ferociously guarded their recipes for snow, later adding chemicals to keep the water from freezing and to make the snow float rather than just fall.

In the middle of the 20th century, mass production helped the snowglobe industry thrive even more. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

RIP, or I guess we could say, “C” you in the afterlife — from the Associated Press in San Francisco:

Oct 13, 2:58 PM EDT

Dennis Ritchie, a pioneer in computer programming, has died at age 70, according to his longtime employer.

Ritchie created the popular C programming language and helped create the Unix operating software. He died a month after his birthday, according to his biography on a webpage of Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs. Ritchie joined Bell Labs in the late 1960s.

The company confirmed his death to The Associated Press but would not disclose the cause of death or when Ritchie died. A spokeswoman said the company was trying to contact his family.

Ritchie is best known for his contributions to computer programming and software. The C programming language, which Ritchie developed in the early 1970′s, is still popular. It has gone through a number of upgrades, and it is commonly used for website development and other computer tasks. The Unix operating software also surged in popularity. It and its offshoots, including the open-source Linux, are widely used today, in corporate servers and even cellphones.

Ritchie’s biography on the Bell Labs site says that he was born on Sept. 9, 1941 in Bronxville, N.Y., and studied physics and math at Harvard University.

“My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat,” Ritchie wrote. “My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones.”

Jeong Kim, president of Bell Labs, wrote in a blog post Thursday that Ritchie was “truly an inspiration to all of us, not just for his many accomplishments, but because of who he was as a friend, an inventor, and a humble and gracious man.”

The referenced blog post is here.

Recounting a 1,500-mile, 30-hour trip.

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Note: This column went up in slightly edited form at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Tuesday.

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Just before Easter, I brought a vehicle to my son down in Florida. The whole enterprise, including the return, took all of 30 hours. During that time I experienced many of the marvels of a country and its system that for all of their current challenges remain the most impressive on earth.

The drive was about 750 miles, and began in Mason, Ohio. Over 600 of those miles were on interstate highways. Several decades ago, a Wall Street Journal editorial angered public transportation zealots by asserting in essence that autos, trucks, and the highways and roads that support them represent the single greatest mass transit system ever devised. Though there’s always room for improvement, I don’t see how anyone can reasonably disagree. The drive itself took only 12 hours, point to point — no nodes, no tolls, and virtually no hassles.

Given that it’s springtime, there were of course a few construction delays, particularly in the hilly section between Cincinnati and Louisville. Otherwise, traffic moved nicely and safely at or slightly above the posted speed limit, which was usually 70 (Governor John Kasich in Ohio, where only the Ohio Turnpike has this limit, please note).

It’s been over a decade since I’ve driven the stretch of I-65 between Louisville and Nashville. I barely recognized much of it. Most of the “country” stretch between Louisville and Nashville was three lanes wide in each direction. Before that, the Metro Louisville portion of the trip revealed a robustly growing area. Indeed, according to the 2010 census, Jefferson County’s population increased by almost 7% during the past decade, while the majority of urban counties in Ohio, most notably Cuyahoga and Hamilton, suffered significant declines. Nashville’s highway improvements since I was last there have been simply stunning, but they needed to be; Davidson County has grown by 10%.

I stayed at a well-appointed hotel south of Nashville whose brand was synonymous with the word “dive” not that long ago. Since the directions seemed to conflict with the hotel’s address, I had to call it from the road on my wireless phone to clear things up. An effort which would usually have been quite expensive or would have required a separate stop to use a pay phone just 15 years ago cost me nothing. Does anyone think that the old AT&T monopoly would ever have evolved to this point without the competition from entrepreneurial upstarts in the long-distance and wireless businesses, or that it would have thought up the type of “friends and family” plans that gave me about an hour of free talk time during the trip?

The hotel stay itself was also free, courtesy of reward points. Does anyone think that a government-run hotel chain would ever come up with the idea of frequent-stay incentives on its own? Or that a government-run or government-controlled Internet would ever have moved wireless access at hotels from a fee-based rarity a dozen years ago to a routinely expected free commodity today? Oh yeah, breakfast was also free, and I otherwise spent less than $8 on food during the entire trip down. Additionally, even with prices higher than they should be, it also only took about $120 in gas to complete the outbound journey.

The next day’s drive was predominantly through Alabama, a state I haven’t visited in decades. Memo to East and West Coast elites: Your stereotypes about the economically backward South would not survive drives though Metro Birmingham or Metro Montgomery. (Update: Some of the areas through which I drove were subsequently hit hard by devastating tornadoes. Go here for a list of donation links and ideas.)

Even the trip’s one downer was easily handled (it’s an almost ironclad rule that yours truly cannot travel without the occurrence of at least one Murphy’s Law event). Fifteen miles from the end, an oncoming truck on a two-lane highway threw off a stone which created a silver dollar-sized crack in the bottom left of the front windshield. Insurance will cover it, with no deductible.

I had a few hours to visit with my son, who is in his first year of serving his country. Though I would never minimize the day-to-day challenges and stresses of military service, I can report that the “barracks” at Eglin Air Force Base looked more like the outside of a Comfort Inn, up to and including keycard access. We went out to a nice restaurant in town, and ate well while researching the ins and out of insuring cracked windshields on my son’s Droid and exchanging texts with his mother.

My son doesn’t know the area very well yet, so after dinner he set the GPS on his Droid to direct us to the Fort Walton Beach Airport. Despite heavy construction activity in the area, the unit’s spoken directions were virtually perfect.

While waiting for my flight back to Ohio to board, I remembered that I didn’t have it tied to my frequent flyer account. In less than five minutes, I found the airline’s toll-free number on my computer using the airport’s free Internet access, called the airline, and got the miles credited to my account, even without knowing the account number. In between the two legs of the trip, I was able to let the folks picking me up know that I would arrive as scheduled, while also finding time to fix a typo (imagine that) at my home blog.

Most of the wonders just described have come about because of the efforts of private companies operating in a capitalist, free-market system. Though most don’t seem to recognize it, we’re in more than a little danger of giving it all away. We must not let it happen.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Thursday (link won’t work until then) when the blackout expires.

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Left on the cutting-room floor: The column recounts a 1,500-mile trip I took just before Easter to deliver a vehicle to my son and the taken-for-granted marvels employed and encountered on the trip.

I was hoping to weave in a phone call into Rush Limbaugh that I heard during the last couple of hours of the drive. But it’s probably better that I didn’t, because it would have messed with the column’s upbeat tone.

While I was benefitting from outstanding roads built by private companies engaged by the government, using communications tools that were the stuff of science fiction not that long ago, driving an outstanding four year-old SUV that was getting about 25 miles a gallon, going through sections of the South for the first time in 30 years which had so obviously improved in meantime, taking advantage of incentive programs no government would ever have devised, and spending a relative pittance to accomplish all of this, Rush’s caller from Kalamazoo, Michigan was telling him that capitalism is just another form of “slavery.” Really, he used that word.

The guy’s case was in essence that once entrepreneurs achieve a certain level of success and lifestyle, they become intent to maintaining it, and if they have to do it on the backs of their employees by paying and treating them like dirt, they will, turning the employees into de facto “slaves” of an oppressive regime.

Rush’s reasonable question after hearing this was (paraphrasing): “Where did you learn this garbage?” Because, of course, it is total garbage.

Sadly, the answer is more than likely the following: “an educational system whose teachers all too often have NO concept, let alone appreciation, for how wealth is created, or how free-market capitalism has done more to improve the human condition for virtually all of its participants than any other system ever devised.”

From the employees’ standpoint, the most obvious response is that they need to vote with their feet and find another job in instances where this happens. The caller and lefty readers should note that an entrepreneur and company exercising such poor judgment is more likely to hang onto his or her employees in these circumstances when the economy, like the private-sector-hostile Pelosi-Obama-Reid economy, is in historically lousy shape.

Thanks to competition for employees as well as customers, companies which consistently treat their employees like dirt often end up paying the ultimate price by putting themselves out of business, e.g., Circuit City (last item at link). When oppressive governments which economically enslave their people treat them like dirt (read: the old Soviet Union, today’s Cuba), there is no alternative, and things just get “progressively” worse. Cubans “live” on $20 a month plus whatever they can buy with a government-issued ration card. Yet Castro and his thugs still get treated with kid gloves or are even praised by people in the educational establishment.

It takes a special brand of ignorance to use the marvels around you on a daily basis while arguing that the system which produced them leads to “slavery.” But our schools are apparently producing all too many people who “think” this way.