Author: VD

I’m not saying she’s a gold digger, but she’s not staying with no gentleman of contracting circumstances:

Having married her wealthy husband with his considerable salary uppermost in her mind, the Toxic Wife simply does not do “for richer, for poorer”. Little Dorrit, she ain’t. Indeed, lawyers and financial advisers have reported a 50 per cent increase in the number of divorce inquiries since the financial markets collapsed in September….

According to Susie Ambrose, a marital psychotherapist and CEO of Seventy-Thirty, an upmarket introduction company that takes its name from the work versus free time balance, there has been an unprecedented demand from married women recently. ”We are being targeted by women on the fence between leaving their husbands who are on the brink of losing their wealth, and wanting to meet someone extremely rich straight away,” she says.

I’m sure it must be very hard for a proud and previously successful man to realize that his marriage is a sham and he’s been taken for a complete tool. But really, it’s not as if the warning signs are seldom there. If a woman is so psychopathic as to go ballistic over her husband not being willing to fund her every whim or give in to her every demand, he’d do well to sign Vampirella up for one of those upmarket introduction companies himself and shed the cashsucker at the earliest opportunity.

Of course, not everyone can be as happily philosophical about their previous mistakes as one acquaintance of mine in the game industry. When in the course of conversation, someone brought up the failure of his first marriage, he smiled happily and pronounced the divorce settlement to be the best $200,000 he’d ever spent in his life. Life is always better without Toxic people around.

And the hard, cold reality is that the Attractive Girls Union always plays hardball.

Paranoia doesn’t mean someone isn’t really out to get Santa:

FGCU administration has banned all holiday decorations from common spaces on campus and canceled a popular greeting card design contest, which is being replaced by an ugly sweater competition. In Griffin Hall, the university’s giving tree for needy preschoolers has been transformed into a “giving garden.”

The point isn’t that Christmas is in danger of being eradicated. The point is that those who celebrate Christmas know that those who insist on replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” will ban Christmas if they are ever given the opportunity.

You know, there’s probably an animated Christmas special to be found in this somewhere….

The Chairman responsible for the tax code is a tax evader:

First there is the Washington Post’s revelation that Rangel inappropriately claimed a tax break on his D.C. townhouse by claiming it was his primary residence. The five-year charade only netted the congressman from Harlem about $1,500, which is relatively small potatoes. But it nicely dovetails with two other Rangel escapades of late: That he failed to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income from his luxury beach villa in the Caribbean because he—ahem—didn’t know it was income; and that he scored several rent-stabilized apartments in New York, each of which he must claim as his primary residence. Taken all together, it looks like the top tax-writer in Congress is a tax cheat.

So, what are the odds this guy will get more than a decade in jail?

There can be no question:

The man charged with providing the President-Elect with information about the US media regulator spends his spare time fighting monsters and completing quests on the fictional planet of Azeroth…. He has invested so many hours in the game that his “Tauren Shaman” character has reached Level 70, one of the higher ranks.

For the Alliance!

It would be very interesting to see if Obama and the Democrats are truly dumb enough to call the Roman Catholic bishops on their threat to shut down one-third of the hospitals in the country:

The bishops are not bluffing when they say they’d turn out the lights rather than comply. Nor is Auxiliary Bishop Robert Hermann of St. Louis exaggerating, I don’t think, in vowing that “any one of us would consider it a privilege to die tomorrow—to die tomorrow—to bring about the end of abortion.”

Whatever your view on the legality and morality of abortion, there is another important question to be considered here: Could we even begin to reform our already overburdened health care system without these Catholic institutions? I don’t see how.

I don’t see what’s the problem here. Surely Richard Dawkins and those millions of caring, selfless atheists will gladly step into the gap.

Here’s a science skeptic’s prediction that I notice those who have enjoyed hammering me for my errant expectation of President Rodham haven’t seen fit to mention. In March, I put my intellect up against the foremost professional housing experts and their science:

According to the “scientific” forecast, housing prices were to stabilize in late 2007 and hold firm in 2008. Here’s the November 2007 forecast for 2008: “Existing-home prices are expected to decline 1.7 percent to a median of $218,200 for all of this year and hold essentially even in 2008 at $218,300. Wow, what precision! To a tenth of a percent! The February report comes out this week… let’s just say that instead of $218k, I’m expecting a decline that would project to $175k or less by the end of the year. But what do I know, I’m not an “expert” paying close attention to the “science” of the housing market, after all.

So, you’ll understand if this story caught my eye yesterday. Nov 24, 2008: WASHINGTON (AP) – With nationwide sales of existing homes falling more than expected last month and the median sales price plunging to $183,000, the U.S. housing market keeps getting worse. With more bad news likely on the way, industry groups pressed President-elect Barack Obama to help stem the damage.

I can’t help but notice that 183 is a lot closer to 175 than 218. And I’m reasonably confident that home prices won’t be increasing in November and December.

It’s bad enough when Keynesians run amok in government. But it’s worse when they seemingly can’t even figure out how to correctly apply their own economic model:

Britain’s highest earners face paying a new 45 per cent top rate of income tax, which is to be announced by the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, in the pre-Budget Report. Those earning more than £150,000 a year will fall into the new band, which the Government plans to use to claw back money to pay for an unprecedented £120 billion borrowing bill.

The Keynesian model calls for spending increases and tax CUTS to stimulate the economy out of contraction. Darling, supposedly an avowed Keynesian, is doing exactly what Paul Krugman faults FDR for doing during the Great Depression. But that’s merely how it appears on the surface. The reality, of course, is that this is little more than an easily evaded political measure meant to counteract the reduction in VAT and disguise the fact that UK budget deficits are going to soar.

UPDATE – Not that it’s significantly less crazy on the other side of the Atlantic: “The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.”

We would be better off being governed by a group of individuals randomly selected from the phone book than by the collection of graduate degree holders currently in office:

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday. Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone insist that they are more intelligent on the basis of their university degree. A college degree – especially from an elite school – increasingly becoming stronger evidence of ignorance than intelligence and often represents a combination of the two. The fact that one might possess a superior intellectual capacity in no way dictates that it has actually been used in any way, much less to obtain accurate information.

So, I estimated the bottom for what appears to be an incipient depression. Before you discover what it is in Monday’s column, go ahead, take your best shot, and offer your rationale for it. I want to see US GDP and year… alternatively, if you don’t see a contraction ahead, explain why not.

As has probably been apparent by my complete ignoring of it, I have zero interest in the so-called “Emergent Church”. I’ve yet to hear anything interesting or positive about it, and I’m not in the least bit surprised to hear that they’re little more than intellectually immature, emotional Episcopalians in the process of moving away from Christianity in favor of a New Age unitarianism:

One of the key leaders of today’s most cutting-edge church movement has opened an Internet discussion on the issue of same-sex marriage with the bold proclamation that he believes “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and queer” individuals can and should live out their sexuality in – and blessed by – the Christian church. “I now believe that GLBTQ can live lives in accord with biblical Christianity (as least as much as any of us can!),” writes author and church leader Tony Jones, “and that their monogamy can and should be sanctioned and blessed by church and state.”

Based on that picture, I don’t find it at all hard to believe that Mr. Jones will be announcing his own incipient homogamy in the near future. And based on his blog, the guy appears to have the reasoning capacity of a chipmunk. Look, Florence Nightingale, the only way one can reasonably connect an AIDS death with the church is if one’s friend was getting overfriendly with a gay priest. Seriously, what is wrong with these cretins?

“I want to do that!”

“Don’t do that.”

“But I want to… you can’t stop me!”

“Dude, just don’t. You’ll be sorry.”

“Waaah! Look what’s happened to me! It’s all your fault!”

“WTF? I told you not to, you moron.”

“You made me do it with your hostility and oppression and disapproval!”

“What part of ‘don’t do that’ did you not understand?”