News

Unemployment rate is 10.5%, counting those who have stopped job-hunting

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From Reuters.

Economists, analyzing government data, estimate about 4 million fewer people are in the labor force than in December 2007, primarily due to a lack of jobs rather than the normal aging of America’s population. The size of the shift underscores the severity of the jobs crisis.

If all those so-called discouraged jobseekers had remained in the labor force, August’s jobless rate of 8.1 percent would have been 10.5 percent.

[…]The labor force participation rate, or the proportion of working-age Americans who have a job or are looking for one has fallen by an unprecedented 2.5 percentage points since December 2007, slumping to a 31-year low of 63.5 percent.

“We never had a drop like that before in other recessions. The economy is worse off than people realize when people just look at the unemployment rate,” said Keith Hall, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.

[…]The economy lost 8.7 million jobs in the 2007-09 recession and has so far recouped a little more than half of them.

[…]Americans of all ages are leaving the workforce, but the problem is most acute in the 20-24 age group, where the participation rate has plunged by 4.4 percentage points since December 2007.

[…]”Because of delays to their career, the skills set accumulation that normally happens in the first or third job is not happening,” said Paul Conway, president of Generation Opportunity in Washington, a non-profit, non-partisan organization that works with 18- to 29-year-olds on economic issues.

Last month, the proportion of 20- to 24-year-olds in the labor force was its lowest since 1972. Other age categories are faring little better. The 25-54 age group has seen a decline of 1.8 percentage points since December 2007.

Meanwhile, from the radically left-wing Newsweek, of all places. (H/T Defeating Obama)

Excerpt:

[T]he total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak. Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed.

Can anyone look at numbers like this and explain to me why anyone – especially young people – would vote for this man?

News

NYC Department of Education to hand out Plan B to high school students

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From the New York Post. (H/T Strange Herring)

Excerpt:

The Department of Education is giving morning-after pills and other birth-control drugs to students at 13 high schools, The Post has learned.

School nurse offices stocked with the contraceptives can dispense “Plan B” emergency contraception and other oral or injectable birth control to girls without telling their parents — unless parents opt out after getting a school informational letter about the new program.

CATCH — Connecting Adolescents To Comprehensive Health — is part of a citywide attack against the epidemic of teen pregnancy, which spurs many girls — most of them poor — to drop out of school.

While Big Apple high schools have long supplied free condoms to sexually active teens, this is the first time city schools have dispensed hormonal birth control and Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy if taken up to 72 hours after unprotected sex.

[…]Parents at the 14 schools were sent letters informing them about CATCH. Parents may bar their kids from getting pregnancy tests or contraceptives if they sign and return an opt-out statement.

If they do not, schools can confidentially give the contraception without permission.

Does handing children contraceptives make them less likely to get pregnant?

Here’s the article from Life Site News.

Excerpt:

Abortion advocates often promote contraception by claiming that as contraception use increases, the number of “unwanted” pregnancies and therefore abortions will decrease. But a new study out of Spain has found the exact opposite, suggesting that contraception actually increases abortion rates.

The authors, who published their findings in the January 2011 issue of the journal Contraception, conducted surveys of about 2,000 Spanish women aged 15 to 49 every two years from 1997 to 2007.  They found that over this period the number of women using contraceptives increased from 49.1% to 79.9%.

Yet they noted that in the same time frame the country’s abortion rate more than doubled from 5.52 per 1,000 women to 11.49.

Does this Plan B cause an abortion?

Consider this story from Life Site News about the morning after pill.

Excerpt:

A poll has shown that as many as one fifth of all young women in the UK have used the morning after pill (MAP) in the past year after “unprotected sex.”

A Co-Operative Pharmacy survey of 3000 people found that 20 percent of women aged 18 to 35 took the “emergency contraceptive” pill last year. The same group said they had typically used the drug, which only acts as a genuine contraceptive in some cases, when they had had sex after using drugs and/or alcohol.

The poll further found that up to 250,000 women had used the drug two or more times during the year. One in fifty 18-21 year-olds said they used the MAP as their normal form of contraception. One sixth of the women surveyed said they had contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

While a National Health Service spokesman warned that the MAP fails to protect women from sexually transmitted diseases, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) has long warned that the medical community is simply not telling women what MAP really is, or what it does.

The morning after pill, a large dose of the same hormones used in contraceptive pills, can either prevent ovulation or prevent the implantation of an existing embryo in the uterine lining.

“Very few women will know precisely when they ovulate,” SPUC said, “so, if they take the morning-after pill, they will not know whether it has prevented conception or caused an abortion.”

This is what happens when you are forced to fund public schools. They don’t get paid more for pleasing you and they don’t get paid less for not pleasing you. They get paid regardless of performance. They get paid by lobbying politicians and influencing elections. They go to work every day and their main goal is getting more money by influencing elections. They don’t get paid more to teach your children better. What they would really like to do is turn your children into little leftists who will vote them higher salaries and better benefits. That’s what they really do all day.

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Must-see videos on education policy

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Videos

Stephen C. Meyer: does the Big Bang cosmology support God or atheism?

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Here’s the 66-minute video featuring Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, who holds the Ph.D in philosophy of science from Cambridge University, and other degrees in the hard sciences. (H/T UK Apologetics)

The lecture starts really, really slowly. You can just fast-forward to the 12 minute mark, or you might die of boredom.

Topics:

  • Up until the the last 100 years or so, everyone agreed that the universe was eternal
  • This is at odds with the traditional Christian view that God created the universe
  • Materialism, the view that matter is all there is, requires eternally existing matter
  • Discovery #1: Hubble discovers that the universe is expanding (redshift observation)
  • The expanding universe was resisted by proponents of the eternal universe, like Einstein
  • Some naturalists even proposed speculative static models like the steady-state model
  • However, not of the speculative models fit with observations and experimental results
  • Discovery #2: Penzias and Wilson discover the cosmic microwave background radiation
  • Measurements of this background radiation confirmed a prediction of the Big Bang theory
  • The steady-state theory was falsified of by the discovery of this background radiation
  • The oscillating model was proposed to prevent the need for an absolute beginning
  • But the oscillating model is not eternal, it loses energy on each “bounce”
  • A paper by Alan Guth and Marc Sher from 1982 proved that our universe will not bounce
  • In addition, experiments reveal that the universe will expand forever, and not contract
  • The beginning of the universe is more at home in a theistic worldview than an atheistic one
  • The beginning of the universe fits in well with the Bible, e.g. – Genesis 1, Titus 1, etc.

In case you are wondering about what the evidence is for the Big Bang, here are 3 of the evidences that are most commonly offered:

Three main observational results over the past century led astronomers to become certain that the universe began with the big bang. First, they found out that the universe is expanding—meaning that the separations between galaxies are becoming larger and larger. This led them to deduce that everything used to be extremely close together before some kind of explosion. Second, the big bang perfectly explains the abundance of helium and other nuclei like deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) in the universe. A hot, dense, and expanding environment at the beginning could produce these nuclei in the abundance we observe today. Third, astronomers could actually observe the cosmic background radiation—the afterglow of the explosion—from every direction in the universe. This last evidence so conclusively confirmed the theory of the universe’s beginning that Stephen Hawking said, “It is the discovery of the century, if not of all time.”

This is a good article to send to atheists who are not comfortable with what the progress of science has revealed about the beginning of the universe, and of time itself. If you look in agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow’s book “God and the Astronomers” (2nd edition), you’ll find 6 evidences.

By the way, Dr. Meyer also does a great job of explaining the problem of proteins, DNA and the origin of life in this lecture. And you can hear him defend his views in this debate podcast with Keith Fox and in this debate podcast with Peter Atkins. He does a great job in these debates.