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Why yes, I am enjoying the president-elect’s appointments. I can only imagine how much fun his actual administration is going to be!

Barack Obama’s selection of Eric Holder as his attorney general is a very discouraging sign for anyone who hoped the new administration would de-escalate the war on drugs. As Dave Weigel noted earlier today, Holder pushed for stiffer marijuana penalties when he was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia

Holder is seriously hard core on drugs. He believes it’s important to eradicate “marijuana violence”. And he’s right. Because when someone’s pizza delivery is sleazed by a baked dude with the munchies, government has to act!

Attn: Gov. Palin. The 2012 youth vote is now in play.

UPDATE – The anti-war Left were the next to feel the sharp kiss of Obama’s treacherous blade:
Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned at signs that Barack Obama’s national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on other important foreign policy issues.

It’s just not looking very good for the Keynesians these days, is it:

Dow 7,997.28 -427.47 -5.07%

S&P futures vs fair value: -8.60. Nasdaq futures vs fair value: -15.00.

Nothing goes straight up or straight down. There WILL be a rally coming soon. It’s more likely to kick off in the next two weeks than this week, but there will be a rally. However, don’t be misled by the cheerleaders into thinking that this is anything but a short-term bottom.

Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests it will never be successful in reducing male demand for female prostitution:

A brothel reputed to be the largest in Europe has been overwhelmed with interest after offering free entry for life to customers who have its name tattooed on their arm. The manager of Pascha, which houses more than 120 prostitutes across its 12 stories, did not expect any takers when he put up posters advertising the tongue-in-cheek promotion. But more than 40 men have already come forward to have the name inked onto their arm in large blue letters, and the brothel’s tattoo artist is having to work extra shifts to keep up with demand.

As Spacebunny likes to say, men are always proud of the wrong things… at least, the wrong things from a female perspective. So, you can expect that an anti-prostitution policy designed around reducing men’s demand for sex isn’t very likely to be viable. Considering the way in which criminal laws and fatal infectious diseases haven’t eliminated homosexuality over the last millenium, it’s rather optimistic, shall we say, to argue that the occasional $1,500 fine is going to have any impact at all on men’s demand for sex with women. The fine is still cheaper than a weekend trip to Hawaii.

Although I am not a consumer of paid sexual services myself, I am an adamant advocate of legal prostitution. It is not only the free market’s way of undermining the feminist political fascism that is destroying the West, it also happens to nicely highlight the fundamental absurdity of most atheist concepts of morality. That undermining is why the feminist Left is utterly obsessed with attempting to stamp out “sex slavery”. As usual, the feminist position is logically incoherent; they attempt to argue that while paid sex between adults can and should be subject to government control, unpaid sex between children cannot and should not be.

Never forget that legality is not morality. The only thing that has ever prevented prostitution from becoming a part of mainstream Western culture is its Christian moral tradition, not the laws that sprang from that tradition. Secular culture, which has no broadly applicable moral tradition and rejects the application of Christian morality to sexual matters, has no rational basis for objecting to prostitution; one thing atheists who so admire European secularism seldom see fit to mention is the way in which brothels, call girls, and roadside hookers are a normal part of the Old World landscape.

Men will always pay for sex in one way or another. Many young women will always find it easier and more to their liking to earn a living through their sexual capital than by working in any of the more conventional labor markets. And the Iron Law of Supply and Demand will always trump the best legal efforts of politicians and societal reconstructionists.

Yet another data point in support of his mantra:

Flight controllers were revamping plans Wednesday for the remaining spacewalks planned during space shuttle Endeavour’s visit to the international space station, after a crucial tool bag floated out to space during a repair trip. The briefcase-sized tool bag drifted away from astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper on Tuesday as she cleaned and lubed a gummed-up joint on a wing of solar panels on the space station. She and fellow astronaut Stephen Bowen were midway through the first of four spacewalks planned for the mission. The tool bag was one of the largest items ever lost by a spacewalker….

“What it boils down to is all it takes is one small mistake for a tether not to be hooked up quite correctly or to slip off, and that’s what happened here,” said lead spacewalk officer John Ray. Stefanyshyn-Piper and Bowen finished the spacewalk in almost seven hours by sharing tools from Bowen’s bag. Ray noted that Stefanyshyn-Piper showed “real character and great discipline” by continuing on. She was the first woman to be assigned as lead spacewalker for a shuttle flight.

I can’t help but note that Miz Steffy-Pie is rather ahead of the game when compared with the usual female first. She didn’t actually manage to kill herself.

Jerry and I will be discussing it again at 4 PM Eastern. You are welcome to listen if you like.

Steve Sailer proves that George Bush’s fingers are all over the mortgage meltdown by quoting a 2004 White House press release:

As part of President Bush’s ongoing effort to help American families achieve the dream of homeownership, Federal Housing Commissioner John C. Weicher today announced that HUD is proposing to offer a “zero down payment” mortgage, the most significant initiative by the Federal Housing Administration in over a decade. This action would help remove the greatest barrier facing first-time homebuyers – the lack of funds for a down payment on a mortgage.

This doesn’t absolve Democrats like Barney Frank from their own culpability in creating the crisis, instead, it demonstrates the ongoing problem with America’s left-leaning bifactional ruling party. And the fact that there are a few reliable Republicans who still stand strongly for limited government doesn’t relieve the Republican leaders in the White House, House, and Senate of their responsibility for the party’s absolutely abysmal performance of the last eight years.

On a related note, George Will notices that the GOP hasn’t exactly been shy about “spreading the wealth”:

America can’t have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans — whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm — and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called “the private sector” has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be “spread around.”

How long will it be before the first call for a UN Navy begin?

Somali pirates struck again yesterday, seizing an Iranian cargo ship holding 30,000 tonnes of grain, as the world’s governments and navies pronounced themselves powerless against this new threat to global trade. Admiral Michael Mullen, the US military chief, pronounced himself stunned by the pirates’ reach after their capture of the supertanker Sirius Star and its $100 million (£70 million) cargo. Commanders from the US Fifth Fleet and from Nato warships in the area said that they would not intervene to retake the vessel. The Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, the owner of the ship, condemned the hijacking as an “outrageous act” that required international action.

Note that this is almost surely a false crisis. Numerous national navies have the capacity to deal quickly and easily with a single captured supertanker, however, under so-called “international law”, I don’t think they have the right to attack a vessel flying a foreign flag. The Saudis have only to offer payment to the French, the British, the Americans, or the Chinese, and the matter could be quickly resolved. One wonders, then, why they are not doing so, and are instead calling for the ever-nebulous “international action”.

In which Kay Hymowitz decides that Camille Paglia was correct all along:

Jillian Straus, author of Unhooked Generation, discovered that a lot of women had “personal scripts”—explicit ideas about how a guy should act, such as walking his date home or helping her on with her coat. Straus describes a 26-year-old journalist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as advertised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mistake: he fails to open the car door for her. Mistake Number Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks. “Her idea of a date is that the man plans the evening and takes the woman out,” Straus explains. But how was the hapless social worker supposed to know that? In fact, Doesn’t-Open-the-Car-Door Guy might well have been chewed out by a female colleague for reaching for the office door the previous week.

It should surprise no one that the combination of mixed messages and self-destructive incentive structures created by women is having a pernicious effect on the mating rituals of Western culture. I don’t think it has occurred to many young women that the not uncommon act of saying one thing and doing another not only has the potential to turn would-be Nice Guys into Sexual Predators as is described in the linked article, it not infrequently has the effect of teaching young men to ignore absolutely everything that comes out of a woman’s mouth.

What, after all, is the average guy to conclude when, after listening to a female acquaintance’s oft-heard lamentation that “all she wants is someone who is nice and will treat her well”, she promptly lifts her skirt for the first drunk, unemployed bad boy she runs across within hours of their first meeting. Not only is her behavior creating a negative disincentive for courtly pursuit and a positive incentive for ruthless predation, it’s also teaching him that there is no reason to place any value on her words.

This sort of thing isn’t likely to make an significant effect the first or second time, unless it’s the behavior of a girl to whom the guy is especially attracted, but after seeing the same scenario play out a few dozen times, why would any woman expect men to pay attention to her words? Even worse, once a man concludes that female words addressed to him are meaningless, he loses any justification to tell her the truth in return.

I have to admit, even as a hard-core gamer, I’m somewhat dismayed by the stunning lack of interest many young male gamers show in the opposite sex. Historical statistics indicate that most of them will eventually come around and successfully propagate the species, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that in the next ten years, more and more intelligent young men will turn away from conventional dating patterns in favor of prostitute services, pornography, and female-substitute devices. I suspect that two of the great technology investment opportunities of the future will be pseudo-relationship software services for women and robo-girl technologies for men.

In fact, the incipient economic catastrophe may well be the one thing that saves Western culture; a society focused on survival is one too busy for the modern cycle of sexual bitterness. The great power of woman has always been her ability to influence the behavior of man, and while the descent of the modern young man may not have been caused by the decisions of the modern young women, it is certainly exacerbated and encouraged by them.

UPDATE – Roissy aptly sums up the crucial issue:

A simple question many men ask themselves: If I play by the rules and make room for human cultivation, and the asshole down the street is getting laid like gangbusters, then what’s in it for me?

If Hymowitz answers “An ennobling of your spirit and dignity as a man”, she will lose the argument. As well she should.

Rachel Lucas explains it in her “Scenes from Chem Lab”:

[I]t was a thick solution. It drip-drip-dripped very slowly through the funnel. So guess what my genius lab partner and a few other brain surgeons in the class decided would be a good way to speed it up?

Why, move the funnel apparatus as high up on the clamp stand as possible, as far away from the beaker as possible! Because somehow, in some alternate universe with vastly different laws of physics than we know here on Earth, that would make the solution move through the funnel more quickly.

I am not making this up.

When Lab Partner started doing this, all spastically as is his way, I told him that all he was accomplishing was making the drips splash harder into the beaker and even out of the beaker entirely. Pretty much, he was just making a mess. He was steadfast, and kept telling me to just watch. “It goes faster!”

I asked him if the solution in the funnel knew where the beaker was and he stared at me like I was being obtuse. I asked again, how could the distance between the two possibly have any effect whatsoever on how fast the solution came out of the funnel because after all, it doesn’t know how far it has to fall, and it doesn’t care. He shushed me and told me to watch.

Pressing on, I asked him if there is some sort of magical force field between the funnel and the beaker, and if he was positing that the beaker was sending a message to the liquid in the funnel, hey I’m far away, you better get through that funnel quickly! I wondered out loud if he knew some special law of physics I’d never heard of. He shook his head and kept repeating, “just watch, just watch.”

It was painful. And the thing is, it wasn’t even only him. Several other groups at our counter were doing the same thing. I was struck speechless and had no choice but to stand there and search for an argument in my brain that did not involve calling anyone “retarded.”

It only went on for about a minute because as soon as TA saw what all these Mensa members were doing, with their funnels high in the air, making the drips splash all over the place, he came over to us and asked why, and some of them actually attempted to present their finely-honed Einsteinian theories about how much more quickly the process would go this way. TA and I and the rest of the class that weren’t acting like crackheads all stared blankly at them for a full 10 seconds. One girl across the room loudly said something like, “I hope none of y’all are science majors.”

Sadly, most of them are.

It’s not just special biology physics. They also believe very, very hard in evolution as well. And if you don’t, well, then you’re clearly just not intelligent and educated like them.

Thankfully, that is entirely true.

Can you even imagine how foreign leaders are going to enjoy the Lizard Queen?

Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

On a tangential note, it is utterly unsurprising to learn that McCain is willing to team up with Obama in order to “help to guide through Congress legislation that they both strongly favour.”