06.14.11
The President has left the building (continued)
Obama said he would even use the “bully pulpit” to spread the word that nerdy is cool and that students should work toward degrees in the hard sciences.
“I want the pocket protector to be the new sex appeal,” said Obama, who held the meeting at a company, Cree Inc., that builds high-efficiency LED lights.
The other approach is to emphasize how much worse the recession could have been.
The President will be nearing eighty by the time the new “nerds” are reaching their peak in the hard science, assuming a certain number will even get there.
As for “nerdy being cool,” it has always depended on what kind of nerd you are. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates became cool (as for the latter, it depended on who you asked) when they rich. In the US, nerds only get a cool dispensation if they have bags of money.
In well over four decades (with the assumption you can’t be much of nerd in the low single digits) “nerdy” has never worked for me.
Here’s the rock bottom line: If you’re nerdy and you don’t have a fat wallet, you’re slightly less than wholeheartedly shunned. Always.
Anyway, it’s just more of the President putting up a smokescreen for 2012.
He may be around for another term even if the economy is still tanked because of what’s obvious — almost all the Republican candidates are unelectable by dint of being crazy, loathsome or both.
From a Politico piece:
Newt Gingrich faults big government for the lamentable absence of manned stations on the moon. Rick Santorum wants to “a system of discipline??? to “punish??? gay soldiers, which suggests that his problem with pornographic Google results is not likely to abate. Tim Pawlenty views Iraq as “one of the shiniest examples of success in the Middle East.???
However, those Democrats not running for President don’t have Obama’s luxury. They can all still get their necks rung in favor of local extremists by constituents.
At Pine View Farm, readers are pointed to an article in the Asia Times which indicates that current US economic activity is 40 percent transfer payments. It calls this a “zombi economy,” one where the banks sit on their cash, not dead and not alive, making money slowly on their toxic assets.
“Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned on Tuesday that a failure to lift the government’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling risks a potentially disastrous loss of confidence in America’s creditworthiness,” reads the lede of a Reuters piece today.
Deep inside there’s a niggling desire, getting stronger, that maybe it would be better if the GOP pulled the pillars down on top of themselves and Washington. In the resulting turmoil and economic crash, the government might fall.
Then there would be a big enough excuse to get on with things.