Category: Uncategorized

Madison police reported this afternoon that Audrey Seiler admitted to staging her own abduction. “We do not believe there is a suspect at large, period,” said Acting Police Chief Noble Wray about the sketch of the man who Seiler reported had kidnapped her at knifepoint. Seiler, a 20-year-old University of Wisconsin students from Rockford, Minn., told police that the man who abducted her used tape, gum, cold medicine, a rope and a knife “against her,” Wray said. Police found those items in the area Seiler said she had been held captive, but found earlier videotape of Seiler going into a local store and buying the items, Wray said.

And yet when I wrote a column about the FBI-compiled statistics of how many women are forced to admit their own rape accusations are false, it outraged feminists, some of whom parroted the official Sisterhood line that women never lie about such things. Um, okay, whatever. Of course, there are real male predators out there, which is why I recommend that women carry firearms. Then again, I won’t be terribly shocked if the case against Kobe Bryant begins to fall apart soon either.

The boy who cried wolf should have been a girl.

Via Drudge: The Observer has learned that the deal for former Vice President Al Gore and his business partner Joel Hyatt to acquire digital-cable channel Newsworld International (NWI) has hit a major obstacle and may have fallen through in the 11th hour of negotiations.

I’m guessing that this major investor took one look at the dinosaur-killing debacle that is Alice’s show and decided that a humorless Democratic political operative is the very last sort of person who should be trusted to run an entertainment entity.

From the Washington Times: Preschoolers are leading the growth in use of antidepressants by U.S. children, even though many questions persist about the safety and effectiveness of using these drugs on minors. A study published in the journal Psychiatric Services found that children 5 years old and younger are the fastest-growing segment of the nonadult population using antidepressants today…. Tom Delate, director of research for Express Scripts and lead author of the study, declined to provide specific numbers of children taking antidepressants in various age groups. But one table in his report suggests that nearly 30,000 children 18 and under were taking antidepressants in 1998; and that the total was 45,000 in 2002. Prevalence of use is far greater among older children. The study found that in 2002, nearly 6.4 percent of U.S. girls ages 15 to 18 years — or 640 per 10,000 — were taking antidepressants. Among boys that age, 4.2 percent — or 420 per 10,000 — were on such drugs, the study showed.

But at least they’re not smoking pot! Here’s what I’d like to know. What percentage of these children drugged into complacent zombiedom by their parents are homeschooled? Or perhaps I should say, what percentage of these chemically adjusted children are attending, or will be attending, public schools? And am I supposed to believe that parents who drug their children into socially acceptable passivity love their children just as much as normal parents too?

Virgin Atlantic Airways was forced to ditch plans to offer hip, fun urinals in the men’s rooms of its lounge at New York’s JFK Airport after feminists complained that the designs were offensive to women, reports the New York Daily News. The airline wanted to put bright-red urinals shaped like women’s lips into the restrooms, but the National Organization for Women had a hissy fit.

“I don’t know many men who think it’s cool to pee in a woman’s mouth, even a porcelain one,” NOW President Kim Gandy wrote on the group’s Web site.

I have no way of knowing, of course, but I’m guessing the Kimster doesn’t spend a lot of time in the internet Newsgroups. Back before the net went GUI, I had a friend once who had a collection of Japanese schoolgirls in uniforms that must have represented a statistically significant percentage of the population of Japanese high school girls. He filled up a twenty-meg hard drive with them! Sure, I was appropriately appalled, but I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with his dedication to his hobby.

And I felt bad, too. Here’d I’d actually been living in Japan for six months and I didn’t bring back one picture of a girl in uniform for the guy.

Nate asks: Do you have the figures on total debt vs. the GDP?

As of today, the national debt is $7,122,841,728,666.17. Of course, this doesn’t include the 50 State debts, or the various county, city and local debts. The national GDP is $10.5 trillion, so the debt-to-GDP ratio is 67.83 percent. That’s about twice what I’ve seen officially reported elsewhere, but then, many of those numbers are as many as three years old, when the debt was only 80 percent of what it is now. As of March, it’s also growing at an annual rate of 7.3 percent of GDP, so would hit Italianate levels of 100 percent in 2011.

By the way, based on a notion I put forward my discussion last week with Strange and AA, this would suggest that the USA is markedly more socialist than we’d been thinking then and that such socialism is growing ever more quickly. Thank goodness it won’t slow down our economic growth at all!

UPDATE: DR writes: Here’s some more numbers for you:Total US household equity: $45,000,000,000.000 Total unfunded US government liability: $44,000,000,000,000 Source: Fannie Mae and, I think GAO. Do you suppose it’s just a coincidence?

I suppose they figure that their lenders figure they can always grab the equity. After all, as Nate pointed out, they technically own it all anyhow. That $300k you laid out for a mortgage only makes you a higher class of renter. Can anyone confirm these numbers?

This is a disgusting story about how local governments are seizing homes over tax bills as small as $572. That’s a good business. Seize the home for nothing over an unpaid tax bill, then sell it for a gain of more than 10x at auction. Maybe I should get into that business… although I suppose if I did it, we would call it theft or loan-sharking.

But it’s worth it, of course. Because they need most of the money to run the cursed public schools. Did I hear public schools again? Is there an echo in here?

A great article by Neal Boortz today on the UN’s attempt to take over the Internet. He even points out the same thing that I have been attempting to stress for years – Article 29, Section 3 – which proves that the UN is a totalitarian organization with no respect whatsoever for human rights.



The United Nations is no friend of freedom .. and its eyes are on your Internet. If operational control of this fantastic source of information is ever transferred to the United Nations you can rest assured that Article 29, Section 3 will be used to destroy what we enjoy so much today.

US exit UN. Now. Before it’s too late, or there will be another war to preserve an entirely different Union.

A quartet of Minnesota men with a radio show of their own, the Fraters Libertas, pronounce Alice’s show “an unqualified disaster: As an example, take the Strom Thurmond impression Franken did about 30 minutes ago. After taking about 5 minutes to outline the premise with his side kick (Cacklin’ Katherine Lanpher), it consisted of these words, in a gravel voiced, LOUD, angry, southern drawl:

“I screwed colored girls! I screwed Puerto Rican girls! I screwed them all! The pecker don’t know no color!”

And he said it over and over and over again. I actually had a shudder of embarrassment run down my spine and I considered crawling under the car seat to somehow distance myself from what was coming out of my speakers. The bit didn’t contain even a rumor of humor, just a guy shouting hateful nonsense in an attempt to be irreverent and edgy. Even Cacklin’ Katherine could only manage a few bursts of uncomfortable, embarrassed courtesy laughter. Which is more than she wanted to give, I’m sure. Can you imagine her reaction to someone saying those words on her old MPR program? Or imagine her and Franken’s reaction if Rush Limbaugh had said those words (even under the guise of it being satire)?

I think we need a new Toxic Pool, only this one measuring the lifespan of Alice’s show. I’m just not sure if we should do it in days or weeks. I expected a disaster, but not one of dinosaur-eradicating proportions. “The pecker don’t know no color!” That should serve nicely for Alice’s epitaph. I was going to ignore the show, honestly I was, but holy cats! This is like trying to ignore a semi colliding head-on with bus one lane over.

UPDATE: Even worse, that was planned and prescripted. According to Saint Paul of the Fraters, that hysterical little bit was in the works two weeks ago: [Franken] and his team of writers have been compiling files on a range of topics that is utterly Frankenesque. The Bush tax policy will be ”a huge story for us,” says Ben Wikler, Franken’s producer. Then, too, Franken unleashes a hilarious, X-rated Strom Thurmond impersonation that has been playing in his head and that he desperately wants to make work….

I’m not sure dinosaur-eradicating will suffice. Alice, you might want to stop listening to the voices in your head. They aren’t funny.

PM writes: Vox, if I remember correctly, Chuck D. mentioned that “rhetoric” as referring to the idea that Americans have a sense of superiority (which is confused with patriotism) and that they travel all over the world with complete disregard for anybody they meet. This wasn’t mentioned in a collective sense. He then immediately discussed how he goes all over the world with his music and finds that the people he meets are just as much people as Americans.

No, in that context, I quite agree with you. And had I understood that was the context, which was not clear from the Atlanta newspaper account, I would not have written that post in that manner. I’m quite pleased to know that the Rhyme Animal is not an ein Welt, ein Reich globalist. As you may recall, I was so disturbed by the notion that I was forced to turn to quoting Les Miserables to express the depth of my shock, horror and dismay.

It just goes to show that it’s a mistake to comment on things known secondhand, which is why I’ve just been recalculating my own debt-to-GDP numbers for next week’s column. It turns out Mogambo was off by half a percent, but then, he always says he’s bad with a calculator. Unbelievably, he turns out to be too optimistic for a change! I guess I’ll go back to ignoring Alice’s show; I’m certainly not going to bother listening to it.

However, I think it would be difficult to deny that the mindset I described is rather common among the globalist set, which equates both charity and loving one’s neighbor with extortion, fraud and judicial force. I still stand by my statements, although I am happy to retract them where Chuck D, and apparently PM are concerned. My apologies. As far as the points about arguing like a libertarian goes, I’ll confess to being guilty of going off half-cocked in openly stated ignorance, but I don’t see that any of the rest of it applies to me.

I have not traveled as extensively as the Time-Bomb Ticking, but I speak more languages than he does and have probably immersed myself more thoroughly in at least two more cultures than he has. Because of this, I would disagree slightly with the notion that people are just people everywhere you go. They are all human beings, all children of God, to be sure, but I can state with some authority that different cultures do, indeed, cause noticeable and significant differences in the way individuals raised in them think, act and behave.

If you talk to the average stockbroker, or even regular office guy with a 401k, they’ll tell you how stocks always go up over time; just look at the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Forget the effects of inflation, what they also neglect to factor into their stunningly ignorant equation is that the Dow is not the Dow of yore. It’s barely even the Dow of yesterday.

The century-old Dow Jones Industrial Average was reshuffled yesterday in a way that reflects the strains from the recent recession, globalization and information-technology revolution on American businesses. Three venerable but declining companies — AT&T Corp., International Paper and Eastman Kodak — were replaced by three recent winners in today’s globe-spanning competition: insurance giant American International Group Inc.; the largest local U.S. phone company, Verizon Communications; and the world’s biggest drug company, Pfizer Inc.

Why? Well, according to the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal: “Evolutionary trends in the economy and the stock market — in particular, the rise of financial and health care stocks and “the diminishing relative weight of basic materials stocks” But apparently no one told the traders that they were supposed to explain it in terms that make the average guy’s eyes glaze over: “They’re putting in much larger companies that have had better results over the last couple of years,” said Owen Fitzpatrick, a portfolio manager at Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management.” Yeah, I thought that might have something to do with it.

The 1999 makeover also heralded the ascendance of “new economy” technology bellwethers such as SBC, Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., over the “old economy” icons they replaced: Sears, Roebuck & Co., Union Carbide Corp., Chevron Corp. and Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. Home Depot Inc., a hardware chain store whose meteoric rise has mirrored record growth in home sales and the remodeling industry, also was added to the Dow at that time.

So, if you get rid of the worst-performing ten percent of the index and replace them with fast-growing new companies every five years, you can keep things moving onward and upward forever. It’s almost the opposite of the management of the Consumer Price Index, which excludes, through hedonics interpretation, “substitution” or simple exclusion, all the prices that are going up. Are you noticing a pattern here?

Mutating metrics. Interesting times.