Category: Uncategorized

The Washington Post redefines cool:

The mission of D4D (Downtown for Democracy) is to “bring the aesthetics into politics,” says Tran, and to bring some of that new aestheticized politics to the heartland. On each trip they go to a college campus, throw one huge “New York-style party” — meaning open bar, projectors and DJ — and register voters.

Their bags are packed; the iPods are ready. The last time they had a DJ along, and “I could have driven forever,” says Raza.

“This is my third trip and I haven’t met anyone I didn’t like. People are self-selecting. If you’re the kind of person who likes Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, you’re more likely to be there.”

Right, if you like no-talent frauds who have almost been completely forgotten even before they died and who are older than my parents, you’re the epitome of self-professed hipdom. The Baby Boom has to be the lamest generation of all time; they’ve been out of it for almost three decades now without even realizing it. Just wait for all the “Retirement is cool!” junk in another ten years… they’ll be the first generation in human history to die off before finishing adolescence.

I mean, wasn’t Bruce Springsteen past his prime TWO FREAKING DECADES ago?

What is less selfish, I wonder. To actively think about others’ desires but regularly refuse to share with them when asked, or to never think about others’ desires but readily share with them when asked? I don’t have an opinion on this except to admit that my personal bias is probably towards the latter, I was just curious what others thought on the issue.

It seems to me that to be unwilling to share/help/whatever is more of a conscious act than to simply not think about another individual, but perhaps that complete unconsciousness is actually more self-centered. Then again, a constant consciousness of other people and how they relate to one could be considered an extreme self-centeredness in its own right… and so it goes.

George Will scares the children:

When Bush left Austin 45 months ago, planning tax cuts, educational standards and faith-based initiatives, he had no inkling that foreign affairs would dominate his first term as much as they did Woodrow Wilson’s second. Wilson’s happier first term produced landmark achievements, such as the income tax and the Federal Reserve system. A second Bush term, involving tax as well as welfare reform, might be as creative domestically as was Wilson’s first term.

Please, please tell me that he’s not floating proposals. I think I’d prefer John Leo’s “present” internment debate. How creative? I mean, are we talking outright corporate feudalism here?

John Derbyshire writes on The Bell Curve and the cognitive elite:

While egalitarianism and the fear of racism fueled most of the Left’s hostility to TBC, I don’t think it is much of a stretch to assume that self-interest played a part, too. There is a psychological cost to be paid for belonging to an elite that has taken over the commanding heights of a society. That cost is guilt, and the “cognitive elites” who have taken over U.S. society in recent decades are addled with it. Looking down from their lofty heights at the struggling, cognitively non-gifted masses far below them, they cannot help but feel that they have won a sort of lottery. This morphs into guilt, followed by a desire to improve the lives of the non-elite masses via social engineering — sentimental kind-heartedness mixing with cold prudence to produce a heady brew. Imbibing that brew brings on left-orthodox opinions of a traditional kind; and the cognitive elites are, in fact, overwhelmingly left in their political orientation.

But how to improve those lives? Since being cognitively gifted does not necessarily mean you have any advanced powers of imagination (the correlation is, in my experience, actually negative), most of the elites can imagine nothing better than to improve the educational opportunities of the masses so they can all go to law school, just as the elites themselves did. Problem solved! If you now say: “But there are many people who are simply not bookish, aren’t very interested in being educated, and don’t want to go to law school,” you have jabbed a large pin in the elite’s bubble, and this makes them angry. Herrnstein and Murray dared to say this, and backed it up with numbers drawn from decades of research. This made the elites very angry indeed.

Perhaps it’s easier to be a libertarian if you care, but not that much. I couldn’t care less if people go to college or not, as I’ve never seen the point in trying to make physically mature quasi-adults learn if they don’t want to. It would be easier on everyone if we’d just require parents to fork over $500,000 or whatever the going rate is for an Ivy League diploma and the kid would get his ticket punched for jobs at investment banks, newspapers and law schools, saving him four years and allowing those who actually want an extended education to receive one.

I’m not a blue-collar guy by birth, education or inclination but I’ve never seen anything inherently wrong with a career in fixing cars or whatever. My uncle has an MBA and a small fleet of Jaguars; he may not be a blue-collar guy but he sure seems to wish he was, considering that he spends all his free time underneath leaky old British cars.

In my ideal world, there would be a test for an inclination to tell other people what to do. Those who test positive would be sent to Antarctica, where they could spend their lives trying to run each others’ lives, leaving the rest of us in peace for a change.

I was out and about all day, doing what some would consider real work for a change. It went well, which was good, even though Space Bunny and I overdid the margaritas the night before so my brain was operating in slow motion until about 2 PM.

Amazing, how all the tequila sinks to the bottom, and yet you can’t taste it….

MY BOY BILL [John Derbyshire]

Yep, just been reading the woman’s deposition in the Bill O’Reilly case. There is all sorts of fishy stuff here. Her lawyer, Benedict Morelli, is said to be a big Dem donor — but then, what trial lawyer isn’t? Result-wise, I suppose the whole thing rests on whether she has tapes. If she has, it’s bad for Bill. If she hasn’t, I think a fair assumption — given what a hate figure O’Reilly is to the foam-flecked Left–is that it’s all a shakedown.

The thing that strikes me most forcefully, though, is what a silly racket this whole “sexual harassment” business is. The deposition claims that: “Plaintiff sustained conscious pain and suffering, physical injury, great mental distress, shock, fright, and humiliation.” “Physical injury”? For goodness’ sake! Even if everything in this deposition were true, I can’t see why it would rise to the level of a tort. It would just — and I repeat, this is EVEN IF it were all true — be a guy behaving obnoxiously. When did women cease to be able to deal with that? The very few times I’ve been obnoxious to women, they gave as good as they got, and then some. But then, my pockets are barely an inch deep….

RE: DERB’S BILL [KJL]

Derb, I’m far from a fan of sex-harassment suits and I have no idea what the deal is with the O’Reilly suit, but (in general) when it is a boss, that fact does make it a tad more than a guy “behaving obnoxiously.” With power comes responsibility…

Posted at 09:55 AM

Only two days late… they’re right on top of this one, aren’t they!

From the Drudge Report:

Prior to September 29, 2004, Mackris never complained to anyone in authority at Fox about sexual harassment by O’Reilly, despite having received and being well aware of the clearly written harassment prevention policies and procedures of Fox and its ultimate parent, The News Corporation Limited (“News Corp”). Attached as Exhibit A is a copy of Fox’s harassment policy contained in its Employee Handbook, which Mackris received when hired. Attached as Exhibit B is a copy of the “Equal Employment Opportunity And Unlawful Harassment” section of News Corp’s “Standards of Business Conduct,” which Fox reissued to Mackris and its other employees on or about September 8, 2004.

On September 29, 2004, however, Defendant Morelli, Mackris’s attorney, sent a letter to several executives of Fox and News Corp which is attached as Exhibit C. Morelli stated in his letter that he represented a Fox employee who was allegedly being harassed by “one of Fox’s most prominent on-air personalities.” Although he did not identify O’Reilly or Mackris by name in the letter, Morelli wrote that he and the Fox employee were then prepared to sue Plaintiffs, and therefore a settlement discussion would be in Plaintiffs’ best interests because the lawsuit “would be extremely damaging to both Fox’s reputation and the reputation of the individual involved.”

Fox and News Corp representatives spoke with and met several times with Morelli and his associate, David S. Ratner. Mackris attended one of the meetings. At those meetings and during telephone conversations, Defendants demanded $60 million in hush money to keep quiet and never once lowered this outrageous, extortionate demand. At one of the meetings, Morelli allowed the Fox and News Corp representatives to read a draft of a harassment complaint (“the draft complaint”) that he threatened to file on Mackris’s behalf. The draft complaint contained several lengthy block quotes of statements that O’Reilly allegedly made to Mackris. The length of the quotes and the specific verbiage used made it appear that Mackris was taping O’Reilly during the conversations. Morelli, though, refused to permit the Fox and News Corp representatives to have a copy of the complete draft complaint, providing them only with an excerpt.

The whole thing really depends upon whether Mackris has the tapes of O’Reilly or not. If she does, then he’s through as the king of faux conservative media. He’ll survive, of course, just like Dick Morris and others have, but he’ll lose an awful lot of support from true believing conservatives, even some who are otherwise Three Monkey Republicans. The extortion bit is irrelevant as is the ludicrous demand for $60 million. This is primarily about destroying O’Reilly’s credibility by exposing him as the fraud that I, and many others, have always believed him to be.

One thing that strikes me as believable about this is the fact that Mackris is not particularly attractive. I’ve noticed that the women who get treated like this aren’t the delectable Heather Nauert types, they’re the plain to slightly attractive kind that men like Bill O’Reilly, Bill Clinton and others think, sometimes accurately, will appreciate the unexpected attention from a big shot.

Note too, the emphasis on non-intercourse sexual activity. This is very remniscent of the Clintonian pyloctomy. It can’t possibly be cheating if he’s not even touching the woman, right?

CN feels less alone now:

Much to my surprise, I was leafing through Sports Illustrated’s 50th Anniversary issue and in the sports trends timeline section, Intellivision Football was featured to represent sports in the video game era. I was the only kid I knew who had it back then. Everyone else was pretending those Space Invaders on a blinking green and yellow Atari screen were football players.

Obviously, the movers and shakers of tomorrow were Intellivision fans. I was hugely into NFL Football, although I couldn’t find anyone to play it with me since I owned my brother and few people had the patience to play the real-time 15-minute quarters. The Sports Guy is an Intellivision guy too, of course.

One of my great video game triumphs was matching up with my cousin Todd about nine years ago. He’d been talking and talking about how good he had been at NFL Football when he moved to town, but he didn’t realize we had at least one of everything at the Digital Ghetto. (And I mean everything, Bally, Vectrex, Sega Nomad, you name it. An Intellivision was downright mainstream and we had all the models). Anyhow, we played a quarter and I beat him something like 35-0. Like riding a bike….

However, Big Chilly owns the single most impressive video game moment I’ve ever seen. We had a massive Christmas party and hooked up game systems all over the house. Big Chilly practically missed the whole thing, however, as he’d been challenged to a game of 1942, which he’d never played before, on the Atari Jaguar. He blew through the entire game without losing a single plane, chuckled, and handed the controller to an awestruck Micron before heading upstairs.

Eric Muller notes that I’m not the only non-left, non-academic, non-ethnic critic of Me So Michelle’s race-based lockup advocacy:

This is getting tiresome. Another radical-left, civil-liberties-absolutist, ethnic-grievance-industry-supporting rag rips apart Michelle Malkin’s “In Defense of Internment.”

This time, it’s the Wall Street Journal.

The review is actually pretty soft on the Gestapette, from my perspective, but then I think I’ve adequately demonstrated how little the media knows about history in general and military history in particular.

I wonder how far over the line you can go before a journalist will notice? I mean, I expect that even the average ABCNNBCBS sort will blink if you relate something to the way Julius Caesar’s Xth legion battled Rommel in North Africa. But change Rommel to the Desert Fox, and it might just fly right over their heads.

66. During the course of O’REILLY’S telephone monologue on August 2, 2004, he suggested that Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS purchase a vibrator and name it…. It became apparent that Defendant was masturbating as he spoke. After he climaxed, Defendent O’REILLY said to Plaintiff: “I appreciate the fun phone call. You can have fun tonight. I’ll appreciate it. I mean it.”

I have no idea if Brave Sir Billy has been bad, very bad, or not, but the whole thing is beyond question really, really funny. The cheesy porn talk does sound like something Bad Sir Billy might say, as those who’ve had the misfortune to run across the purple prose of his fiction will note.

We’ll find out soon enough if the whole thing is just the fictional creation of Miss Mackris or not. And if it isn’t and The Factor is a superfreak, then I, for one, won’t shed a tear. Well, I might, but only because I’m laughing. If you live like a whore, don’t be surprised when you find yourself going down like a whore.