One in Four

Lapdancers have a college degree.

I'm not sure what that says - either lap dancers are surprisingly well educated or a college degree isn't worth as much as one would think.

The Most Interesting Man in the World

It is the best ad campaign since the Budweiser "Wassssappppp." A list of the many quotes. My personal favorites:

“He is the life of parties he has never attended”

"If he were to mail a letter without postage, it would still get there."

"Alien abductors have asked him, to probe them."

And perhaps the most succinct summation of the worldly POV:

"He lives vicariously through himself."

He is the anti-metrosexual, the anti-facebooking, internet dating, whiny entitled pussy inside every contemporary American male. Yes, he is reactionary, absurd, and a fantastical male fantasy. Nevertheless very funny and preferable to the alternative:

The Return of Hayek

On the battlefield of economists.

(He) has tirelessly reminded me that ideas, not politics, are what matter and what I should focus on. Ideas are what we are fighting for, no matter what’s happening in Washington, no matter what the America people think at any given moment.

I find this oddly reassuring.

It's All Relative

On the financial clueless-ness of 20 somethings.

Not Really An Argument

On how the contemporary left has come to hold most Americans in contempt and how ideology - as opposed to argument - dominates their thinking.

Question

Clueless was 15 years ago. Is it just me or has Paul Rudd simply not aged in 15 years. He looks the same at 41 than he did at 26.

Wish I Was There

Martin Scorsese attends imovie workshop at Apple Store.

"I haven't been this enamored of a title screen since my mother took me to see Duel In The Sun when I was 6," said Scorsese, standing up to address the iMovie demonstrator and the audience. "So just to clarify, all I have to do is go to the title menu, type a word, and that will be superimposed over the screen? That's just an extraordinary feature. Look at that, you can make words scroll like credits at the end of a movie. Wait until I tell Brian De Palma about this."

What would I do without the Onion. Feel sad, that's what.

Could Prove To Be Interesting

ACLU is bringing a case to court about the US Government's ability to kill terrorists anywhere we want.

Much more so than the torture issue, this gets at a core question of American political philosophy. How comfortable are we - as a country - giving our military or spy services the power to clandestinely kill people anywhere and everywhere? Obviously, in this age of terrorism, where Al Queda openly makes the entire world a battleground, there are reasons for allowing such a law. But if anything ought to give you the heebie-jeebies, it is state-sanctioned murder without trial or burden of proof or any boundaries or checks and balances.

One needn't be soft on terror or a stupid moon-bat liberal to be concerned with this much unchecked government power.

The Sign of Decline

Interns paying thousands to work for free.

White Self Pity

Hitchens criticizes the Glenn Beck rally of being about white self pity and the fear of whites becoming the minority in America.

I don't worry too much about this issue, although I suppose it may be murky waters ahead if our ruling class continues act like spoiled teenagers.

The Washington Post quoted Linda Adams, a Beck supporter from Colorado, who said, "We want our country to get back to its original roots," adding that "her ancestors were on the Mayflower and fought in the American Revolution."

Yeah, mine too. The others were illegal immigrants. Ironic, I suppose.

Another Good VDH Column

On what is behind the mosque.

How the left sees it: 1) Rauf is a sincere ecumenicalist, who simply wants to turn the “tragedy” of 9/11 into a teachable moment of interfaith bridge-building: the mosque, in other words, will be a beacon of America’s tolerance;

How most of America sees it: 4) Rauf is a wily, cynical divisive figure who knows darn well that, on his Islamic flank, radical Islamists will use his mosque for triumphalist propaganda value, while, on his liberal flank, the clueless multicultural left will see it as a way of contextualizing America’s role in the world — as all the while he emphasizes a supposed litany of America’s overseas transgressions; if the mosque is built, it surely by intent will be a much discussed, perennially controversial center aimed at offering context to often polarizing Islamic ideas about everything from Iran, Hamas, and bin Laden, to Sharia and the role of religion and state — a project as praised by the left in the U.S. as it is employed as a banner logo on radical Islamist Internet sites in the Middle East.

What a lot of this boils down to - many on the left seem to think America needs to grapple and be "taught" about racism, islamophobia, etc. You see the same attitude in the immigration debate. I disagree. I don't think America has a fundamental problem with race or xenophobia anymore. I simply don't see it. For the left, this is the issue that can never be resolved - no amount of affirmative action, no amount of free borders, no amount of mosques built on ground zero, no amount of anything that can be expressed as "tolerance" will ever be enough or ever be asked to be measure up against other values. Take illegal immigration, for example. The left basically takes the position that an act that is by-definition ILLEGAL is preferable to enforcement that may-be-construed as somehow racial.

But That Makes Way Too Much Sense

There is a simple solution to the housing crisis: lower prices.

Congress is currently discussing creative new ways to prop up this market. It should be plain as day at this juncture that the government cannot fix the housing market with their incessant fidgeting. The market needs to correct further before reaching a sustainable bottom. Lower prices will act as an automatic stabilizer by generating significant demand. At this point, more government intervention merely kicks the can down the road by pulling demand from the future. We can continue to deny the simple economics at work here, but at some point the market will prevail and prices will settle at a level that the market can absorb. In my opinion, the sooner this happens the sooner we can get on with the recovery process. Unfortunately, politicians have elections to win so they will continue to use their law degrees to attempt to change the laws of economics. It won’t work.

The debate over whether to prop up the housing market through banks or through keeping homeowners in their homes is ridiculous. Why do "homeowners" or "mortgage holders" get to carry any special privilege than other debtors? It makes zero sense. This romantic notion of the American dream and home ownership has been manipulated into a suckers game where greedy lenders, dishonest brokers, and foolish consumers collude to push up the prices on homes and leave normal people overpaying and then on the hook for bail outs. I just hope the market corrects in the next 5-7 years, right when I'm getting ready to buy.

No Shit

Do ya really need a survey to to prove Facebook feeds narcissism?

Narcissism is defined in the survey, by a researcher at York University in Toronto, Canada, as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and an exaggerated sense of self-importance."

For the average narcissist, Facebook "offers a gateway for hundreds of shallow relationships and emotionally detached communication."

Ahhh...the new millenium.

Woops

Lawyer suspended for billing more than 24 hours a day.

One of the greatest pleasures of NOT being a lawyer is not tracking how much time I spend on each task during the day. What a bore.

Debt

Mullen: Debt is top national security threat.

There's basically no good way to spin the debt crisis.

I Think That's Right

"Violent crime should be treated more harshly, everything else less so."

The German Model

A good David Brooks piece on how Germany and America reacted to the economic crisis differently.

In the short run, it looks like the German's got it more right. Then again, I'm dealing with a German production company right now on an option payment and it's the most tedious and stupid set of procedures I've ever encountered. If I was an author, I wouldn't sell my IP rights to a German film company.

Islamophobic

Mark Steryn breaks it down.

On the other hand, "Islamophobia" is not phony or even psychological but very literal - if you're a Dutch member of parliament or British novelist or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death or a French schoolgirl in certain suburbs getting jeered at as an infidel whore, your Islamophobia is highly justified. But Islam's appropriation of the gay lobby's framing of the debate is very artful. It's the most explicit example of how Islam uses politically correct self-indulgent victimology as a cover. You'll recall that most Western media outlets declined to publish those Danish cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed. Thus, even as they were piously warning of a rise in bogus "Islamophobia" - i.e., entirely justified concerns over Islamic terrorism and related issues - they were themselves suffering from genuine Islamophobia - i.e., a very real fear that, if they published those cartoons, an angry mob would storm their offices. It was a fine example of how the progressive mind's invented psychoses leave it without any words to describe real dangers.

There's definitely a creepy relationship between the mindset of so called "progressives" and "Islamicists." These two ought to be mortal enemies, yet rarely do they stand in one another's way and oftentimes seem to have a sort of dysfunction respect for one another. Just a case of the weaklings finding strength from one another - a bit like Kenny Powers and Stevie's relationship.

Ken Mehlman Is Gay

Ann Althouse says: I thought everyone knew he was gay.

I say: who is Ken Mehlman?

A Strange Feeling I Just Had

For some reason, I just felt a small longing for hanging out in San Francisco. This is rare -- much as I love SF -- I don't often long to be there. But just now, I had a small moment, wishing I had plans in the city tonight.