Category: Uncategorized

The New York Times lobbies for Ben Bernanke’s second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors:

Fellow economists, however, are heaping praise on Mr. Bernanke for his bold actions and steady hand in pulling the economy out of its worst crisis since the 1930s. Tossing out the Fed’s standard playbook, Mr. Bernanke orchestrated a long list of colossal rescue programs: Wall Street bailouts, shotgun weddings, emergency loan programs, vast amounts of newly printed money and the lowest interest rates in American history….

Amid the chaos, Fed and Treasury officials made numerous mistakes. Their original idea for the $700 billion to buy up bad mortgage assets held by banks has yet to get off the ground. But economists say Mr. Bernanke’s most important accomplishment was to create staggering amounts of money out of thin air.

That’s certainly new. And bold! I mean, who would have ever come up with the idea of using a central bank to create vast sums of money out of nothing? And who can doubt that this will permanently solve the problems originally caused by creating large sums of money out of nothing? Bernanke’s helicopter money approach isn’t going to work; extend and pretend is only a delaying measure that makes the major statistics look better for a little while until reality again intrudes.

The map is not the territory.

EP sends a link informing us of Starcraft and negative sexual stereotypes:

I fear that Starcraft, along with nearly all modern computer games, alongside it’s addictively entertaining gameplay, and beautiful plotline, reinforces negative gender stereotypes by quantifying the women as sexual objects, and simultaneously as unknowable beasts.

First, if you’re looking to the game developers of the world for political correctness, you’re looking in the wrong place. I never much liked Tomb Raider as a game, but perhaps you’ll appreciate it more if you understand that the developers genuinely believed they were engaging in revolutionary gender outreach by making the protagonist a woman with large breasts, short shorts, and a gun. Second, I think it’s safe to say that women are nothing but unknown sexual objects to a sizable majority of the men employed in the games industry.

And right about now I’m bitterly regretting my decision to turn down the first Starcraft novelization. We will never know how much potential humor we have lost. When I think of all the misinterpretations of what I had intended for the Zerg….

This may help explain why the best wingman is a pretty girl:

A new study provides evidence for what many have long suspected: that single women are much keener on pursuing a man who’s already taken than a singleton…. The most striking result was in the responses of single women. Offered a single man, 59 per cent were interested in pursuing a relationship. But when he was attached, 90 per cent said they were up for the chase.

I’ve long been aware that many women appear to pay absolutely no attention to the fact that a man deemed of interest is taken. Even being informed of the man’s marital status doesn’t seem to slow them down a bit, no doubt in part due to past experience of men who didn’t allow their marital status to get in the way of anything. But there is at least one extremely effective means of dealing with it. Women rapidly lose all interest in a man who is married to a woman they recognize as being out of their league. Smartphones with pictures are very helpful in this regard.

Hierarchy takes a different form in women than it does in men, but women are definitely hierarchical creatures too. It is really amusing the way a picture of a beautiful wife will often cause women to visibly reassess a man, in some cases inspiring them to literally step back and frown as they try to figure out how a man they rate at a certain level is with a woman they rank a few levels higher. The reason this is effective is because if there’s one thing more powerful than a woman’s attraction to a taken man, it’s her desire to avoid the humiliation of rejection.

I’d be interested to see a follow-up study with the women who expressed interest in the taken man being divided into three groups. One group would be shown a picture of a less-attractive woman, the second group would see a picture of a woman of about the same level of attractiveness as the woman in the study, and the third would be shown a picture of a much hotter woman. My hypothesis is that the third group would be far less interested in attempting a pursuit than the other two groups. In general, Angelinas steal from Jennifers, Jennifers don’t steal from Angelinas.

If you’ve managed to scare Nat Hentoff with your policies, you can’t possibly claim that your opponents are all right-wingers motivated by race:

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration…. Emanuel writes about rationing health care for older Americans that “allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination.” (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing — which is fundamental to Obamacare goals — “the complete lives system.” You see, at 65 or older, you’ve had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks.

It’s always interesting to see how people use language to maneuver around the plain meaning of a term. Saying that a form of age-related discrimination is not “invidious discrimination” is an open admission that it is discrimination, you just happen to think that it’s justifiable. Clearly, that’s where the anti-civil rights forces went wrong… they should have argued that race-based discrimination wasn’t “invidious discrimination” and was therefore perfectly acceptable.

Many of America’s liberals have not only transformed into full-blown liberal fascists, they have reached a point of literal insanity from the Constitutional perspective. They’re now quite openly arguing that private individuals cannot legally discriminate while the federal government legally can. This is the exact opposite of the Constitutional position; one wonders just what they believe the Right of Free Association to be.

We received the sad news this morning that economist, author, and philanthropist Rose Friedman died yesterday at the age of 97. The beloved wife of Nobel Prize– and Presidential Medal of Freedom–winning economist Milton Friedman was, in the words of President George W. Bush, the only person ever to have won an argument against her husband.

Thus passes the second half of the economic power-couple of the 20th century. Without Milton and Rose Friedman, there would have been no Ronald Reagan and no rebirth of interest in human freedom in America, however brief it may have been. Her insight into political ideology was arguably even greater than her husband’s, and I suspect she played an important role in his transformation from Neo-Keynesianism to the Keynesian heresy known as monetarism.

May they rest in peace as they lived, together.

Mark Rosen reports Favre is unretiring. Again.

A high-level source with the Minnesota Vikings tells WCCO-TV’s Mark Rosen that quarterback Brett Favre is expected to sign with the team Tuesday.

I don’t even have an opinion at this point… fortunately, we Vikings fans have had a lifetime’s experience in being stoic. But, as my brother reminds me, Favre #1 and Sage #2 is without question better than Sage #1 and the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment #2.

KM appears to be somewhat irked about having fallen for the AGW/CC scam:

Global warming is a truckload of bull!!! I listened to the rhetoric for much too long before consulting my physics books. Carbon dioxide comprises 0.3% of the world’s atmosphere. The world has been warming and cooling for hundreds of thousands of years. No matter what you do to such a small percentage of our atmosphere, the measurable effect will be negligible. Our planet’s temperature is controlled by the sun, when solar radiation increases, more water vapor results in cloud formation, thus cooling the earth. The opposite is also true. When political opportunists grab a small effect and magnify it to major proportions in direct contradiction to what is really happening, it smacks of deception and opportunism – see Al Gore’s Nobel Prize,and the many political aspirants who have profited and had their disingenuous asses elected to powerful political positions “to save the planet”. The Cap and Trade legislation is an example of the exploitation of a mis-interpretation of scientific fact!

Yes, I do think we may be rapidly approaching the previously discussed tipping point for the AGW/CC charade . As with aggregate economic statistics, the experts can only dazzle the public with their pseudo-scientific BS for so long before even the most inobservant individual begins noticing that regardless of how many times the media trumpets the “scientific consensus” for an economic recovery and an overheated planet, he’s got no job, no money, and it’s bloody cold outside.

Setting aside the hidden birth certificate, how old is Obama anyhow?

A new wrinkle in the dispute over his birth – and whether he is eligible to be president under the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that the president be a “natural born” citizen – appeared today when Obama’s official MySpace page declared his age is 52, thus placing his birth year at 1957 instead of 1961 as has been claimed…. a check of the Internet archive “Wayback Machine” finds that on April 10, 2007, Obama had his age listed as 45 on MySpace, which would be correct if, in fact, he had been born in August 1961 as has been trumpeted.

I would normally assume that this is just simple incompetence on the part of an Obama staffer, which would appear to be a safe and logical assumption in light of the administration’s performance thus far. But, considering the increasingly bizarre aspects of his parental history in the timeline that WND has constructed based on the available documentation, it’s probably not safe to assume anything at this point.

The Magic Negro misleads about as well as he speaks extemporaneously:

Obama1: I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here…. I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.

Obama2: “I just lost my grandmother last year. I know what it’s like to watch somebody you love who’s aging deteriorate, and have to struggle with that,” Mr. Obama said. “So the notion that somehow I ran for public office, or members of Congress are in this so they can go around pulling the plug on grandma? I mean, when you start making arguments like that, that’s simply dishonest.”

No, he doesn’t want Congress to pull the plug on Grandma, he merely wants an independent Death Panel of doctors, scientists, ethicists providing “guidance” on the best way to pull the plug on Grandma. Two TOTALLY different things… who does he think will fall for this, besides the media? And what does the nationalized health care system he’s been pushing of late have to do with why he ran for office anyhow? It’s just a clumsy non-sequitur intended to mislead but unlikely to succeed in doing so.

What I find interesting about Obama isn’t his lame attempts to insult the intelligence of those observing him, because I’ve never seen any indication that he’s all that bright himself. What’s interesting is the way in which he appears to be transforming into one of the most openly obnoxious president we’ve known. Even Clinton, for all his many well-known flaws, had a great deal of personal charm to balance them. Whether it is throwing friends and family under the bus, calling the police “stupid” or calling his critics “dishonest”, Obama is increasingly displaying that he’s more than a bit of a jerk.

And while we’re on the subject, it’s nice to see the billboard campaign growing.

UPDATE: The antiwar candidate for the Democratic nomination is having his administration spend $1.5 billion to increase the size of the US military four percent due to escalating violence in Afghanistan. This is precisely what I meant by “counterpush”. And don’t be surprised when it suddenly becomes necessary to invade Pakistan, most likely around the time the Dow hits new lows.