Monday, March 20, 2017

Refusing Service is Good for Me But Not for Thee

Guy wearing Trump hat sues bar for refusing to serve him



Bartenders at a West Village hot spot served up discrimination — with a liberal twist — refusing to serve a customer because he was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, according to a lawsuit.

Greg Piatek, 30, an accountant from Philadelphia, claims he was snubbed and eventually 86’d by workers at The Happiest Hour on West 10th Street over his conservative fashion statement, popularized by Donald Trump on the campaign trail, he told The Post.

“Anyone who supports Trump — or believes what you believe — is not welcome here! And you need to leave right now because we won’t serve you!” Piatek claims he was told as he was shown the door by a manager.

Can anyone guess how many liberals that were only too glad to punish Christian couples for following their beliefs will run to defend this bar's 1st Amendment rights.

The over/under is 92 percent.

Friday, March 17, 2017

Will Perceptions Help Trump to a Second Term?

Perceptions are that Trump's policies are working

Perceptions matter. People make decisions, even life-altering decisions, based on what they perceive as likely to happen. To the extent that public policy affects such decisions, the perception of likely policy change can affect behavior even before the change happens — even if it ends up never happening.

Something like that seems to be happening in America — and around the world — in the two months since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president. People are making decisions based on perceptions of how he might change the country's direction.

Take the economy. The numbers in the jobs report for February, Trump's first full month in office, showing an increase of 235,000 jobs, are not wildly out of line with some monthly reports in recent years.
In contrast to the years of the Obama stimulus program, when the bulk of new jobs came in the public sector, it appears that the increase here is in the private sector. Moody's Analytics says there were 298,000 new private sector jobs in February, far more than the 189,000 it expected.
Construction jobs were up 58,000, private educational services jobs up 29,000, manufacturing jobs up 28,000. This suggests that lots of employers, small as well as large, are taking the plunge and creating new jobs.

Can I prove that they're doing so because of perceptions that regulations and taxes will be decreased by the Trump administration? No, and I'm not sure any economist's statistical model could either. But that sure looks like what's happening.

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Manmade Global Warming? Maybe Not So Much


Arctic ice loss driven by natural swings, not just mankind: study


Natural swings in the Arctic climate have caused up to half the precipitous losses of sea ice around the North Pole in recent decades, with the rest driven by man-made global warming, scientists said on Monday. 
The study indicates that an ice-free Arctic Ocean, often feared to be just years away, in one of the starkest signs of man-made global warming, could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler mode.
Natural variations in the Arctic climate "may be responsible for about 30–50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979," the U.S.-based team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

See what happens when scientist can do honest science?