Roman Polanski defenders don’t leave any middle ground

I’ve avoided discussing Roman Polanski’s recent arrest for skipping bail on his 1978 statutory rape charge, but I’ve been watching it from afar. And I really don’t believe some of the public comments some people have made about Polanski, and about his 13-year-old victim.

I’m stunned, frankly. And now we can add one more lunatic to the pile: Gore Vidal.

I like to poke fun at Hollywood and the entertainment industry. It’s easy, and it’s fun, because these ridiculous people bring it on themselves. Despite that, the media refuses to criticize any of them, because the media depends on access to these yahoos for much of its content. They are, quite literally, “off limits”.

But what we’ve seen lately really ought to make some of us sit up and pay more attention to the types of people who produce our television shows, our movies, our books and CDs, and our newspapers. Because if their recent comments defending Polanski’s disgusting crime reflect their true vision of right and wrong, then we need to confront some ugly truths about our star-centric culture.

The list of such people is long, and disturbing. I’m not going to bother digging up links to all of them here and glorify their ridiculous statements.

So the big picture here is that it’s easy to dismiss cultural influence as unimportant, but I think that’s a mistake. A really big mistake.

And if the fact that Gore Vidal is an amoral twit with nothing useful to tell us wasn’t clear before, then it is pretty damn clear now.

But he’s like 145 years old, so who cares? Here’s why it matters: his outlandish, insane comments in this Atlantic interview a couple of weeks ago didn’t cause any kind of public backlash in the media.

This tells us just about everything we need to know, about both the media and Hollywood in general. And what it tells us is not good.

I’ll break it down for them: it’s ok to come out in public and criticize creeps that drug and rape and sodomize 13 year old girls. Really.

Give it a shot sometime.

Like a Giant IQ Test … That Much of the World is Failing

Thomas Sowell, discussing Angelo Codevilla’s new book “The Character of Nations”:

While nations differ, particular kinds of behavior produce particular kinds of results in country after country. Moreover, American society in recent years has been imitating behavior patterns that have produced negative— and sometimes catastrophic— consequences in many other countries around the world.

Among these patterns have been a concentration of decision-making power in government officials, an undermining of the role of the family, a “non-judgmental” attitude toward behavior and a dissolution of the common bonds that hold a society together, leading to atomistic self-indulgences and group-identity politics that increasingly pits different segments of society against each other.

It would appear that stupid ideas have bad consequences. Who knew?

A little more awesome news for those of who think that those patterns are the wrong way to go:

Those among the intelligentsia who say that we should “learn from other countries” almost invariably mean that we should imitate what other countries have done. Angelo Codevilla argues that we should learn from other countries’ mistakes, especially when those same mistakes have repeatedly produced bad results in many countries and among many very different peoples, living under very different political systems.

Putting ever more economic decisions in the hands of those with political power is just one of those mistakes with a track record of painful repercussions in many countries around the world. These repercussions have included not only serious economic losses but, even more important, a loss of personal freedom and self-respect, as ever wider segments of the population become supplicants and sycophants of those with the power to dispense largess or to make one’s life miserable with legalistic or bureaucratic harassment.

Other than all that bad stuff, though? Puppies and rainbows for everyone!

That bolded text above, in a nutshell, explains why I don’t pay much attention to the “news” any more: it’s because the “news” actively pushes back from the other side on every one of those points in bold above by Mr. Sowell and Mr. Codevilla. It isn’t “news” at all, it’s activism. And it’s on the wrong side of history.

Deadspin Confuses It’s Readership with That of “The New Yorker”

This is just too rich.

A post at Deadspin laments the death of a literary sports magazine.

Not a sports ‘n boobs site. A literary sports magazine. As if there was a market for such a thing in the first place.

It even links to an essay in the magazine by David Foster Wallace, a writer of some intellectual repute who committed suicide a few months ago. I had never heard of him, for whatever that’s worth. I checked out of that intellectual literary world a long time ago. A little too prissy and impressed with itself.

And I do like Deadspin, most of the time. But let’s be honest: it is a cesspool of sports blogs. Snark on every post, sex whenever possible, taking the low road at every chance.

It’s not where you go when you want literary nourishment.

Yes, it is funny. “Married With Children” was funny too, in a very crude way. It also wasn’t high art, and it didn’t pretend it’s viewership wanted that, either.

And now that some hoity-toity New York sports magazine called “Play”—that few people outside that world ever heard of—goes under, this is supposed to cause Deadspin Nation to have a good cry, while they presumably enjoy a fine Bordeaux and a $24 cigar. In the study, surrounded by thousands of books, and wearing a smoking jacket. While waiting for Muffy and Biff to come back from prep school.

That is just about the funniest thing I’ve heard in weeks.

Quote of the Day

Ann Coulter:

Start with the fact that the average Gitmo detainee has gained 20 pounds in captivity. There’s even a medical term for it now: “the Gitmo gut.” Some prisoners have been heard whispering, “If you think Allah is great, you should try these dinner rolls.”

From her humanevents.com column “Watching MSNBC is Torture”, May 6, 2009.

In that column, she makes vicious fun of clowns on MSNBC who—get this—actually thought they could compare Japanese conduct re: American prisoners of war in WWII with American conduct re: enemy combatants in the War on Terror, and come out ahead on that deal.

Q: If ignorant yahoos in the media ignore established historical facts, and run around with their hair on fire screaming at me about things I know are stupid and untrue, not to mention anti-American … do they make a sound?

A: Yes. They sound a little bit like little girls in pretty pink dresses playing hopscotch. But not as cute, and not nearly as bright.

That giant sucking sound? Son, that’s what we used to call ‘The Economist’.

Too bad.

Used to be a nice magazine. As in, “intelligent”, “well-informed”, “fairly centrist”, “not as loony as Newsweek”. I’ve bought it a few times, and subscribed for a while.

Seems to have turned into just another in a long line of “Big Government is Good For You” media shills.  Soon lining a bird-cage near you!

Statism. It even sounds ugly, and the meaning is uglier:

stat-ism [stey-tiz-uh m] -
1. the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty.

Because that’s always worked so well before!

I’ve got a crazy idea. How about another magazine that advocates for—hold on, this is pretty revolutionary—more individual liberty!

Not less Liberty. More Liberty. M-O-R-E.

More Liberty, both economic and personal.

Free markets and free people. I’ve heard it works pretty well.

“Scientists”, “Journalists”, and other Useful Idiots

Someday, when sanity again rules the Earth, some may look back on today as the most ridiculous time in the history of mankind.

Why is that, you ask?  Because lots of otherwise-smart people today waste their time arguing about Artic Sea ice.

“Oh, look!  it’s shrinking!  What are we going to do?”

Here’s what I do:  pour myself a nice cold Manhattan, and flip on the TV.

Blame It On Quants, Don’t Blame It On Me

A few weeks back I wrote about our Economic Reckoning. I wondered how so much bad debt, in the form of credit default swaps backed by risky mortgage debt, could get rated in the AAA tranche by the various rating agencies.

I might have that answer now.

This article, Recipe for Disaster: The Formula that Killed Wall Street by Felix Salmon, explains the story of an industry deathly afraid of unquantified risk, that fell in love with a new formula, and bet the ranch on it.

And lost.

This new formula is called a Gaussian copula function, and it attempts to assign a discrete number X to represent a complete picture of the risk of insanely complicated financial instruments.

A simple, beautiful, and, in my mind, ultimately vain concept.

Impossibly, insanely complicated financial instruments.  Built on layers of other impossibly, insanely complicated financial instruments.  All with basically an unknown level of risk.  These had been confounding Wall St. for years.  But using this new formula enabled entire new markets to open up, which means more revenue.  Lots and lots of revenue.

Unfortunately, it was all based on a correlation model.

Even the credit rating bureaus, like Moody’s and Standard & Poors, bought into it.  A correlation model.

Turns out, there were flaws in that correlation model. Imagine that.

A Good Rule for Sportswriters: Stay Away from Politics. Or, Learn to Use a Search Engine. Either Way.

Hey, look! A sportswriter has stepped in it again, by writing about politics. Riffing on Bush, and slobbering all over Obama. Like we can’t already get *that* from the rest of the paper.

I’m starting to think sportswriters aren’t real well-informed.  Srsly!

Rick Telander, sportswriter, informs us that Obama is a Renaissance Man for the ages, and Bush is a drooling moron.

Plus, Obama plays pick-up basketball! How awesome is that? Coolest. President. Ever!

Mr. Telander knows what he’s talking about, too; seems Obama is a voracious reader, and has even read Telander’s Heaven is a Playground, a book about … pick-up basketball. Which means he is open-minded, and also great presidential material. Bask in the reflection of his awesomeness.

Bush, meanwhile, suffers from countless infirmities, such as not playing pick up basketball, and a “lack of inquisitiveness”.  The bad news for Telander:  Bush is a voracious reader too; he read 186 books in the last three years.

186 books.  That is a lot of frigging books.

Blagojevich Sets New Standard for Corruption

They’re Going to Need a New Word For It, Now

The always-excellent John Kass comments on the Blogojevich indictment here: “He’s the clown, but the joke’s on us”.

But really, how often do you get to read a transcript featuring the governor of a major state saying the F-word a bunch of times?  In reference to a President-Elect?  That’s gold, right there.

Here is the full text of the criminal complaint.

Rumors have been swirling around him for years about being investigated; so, as a rational, intelligent governor, he figures, hey, why not double down and try to sell a U.S. Senate seat for a few hundred grand? What could it hurt?

There’s “corrupt”, and then there’s “corrupt and crazy”, and Blagojevich was apparently the latter.

Oh, well, at least we can take comfort in knowing that Obama is free from any such corruption. After all, the national media spent untold thousands of journalist-hours digging into Obama’s background and possible connections to the cesspool that is politics in Illinois.

What? Oh, right, they didn’t do any of that. They were too busy digging up important stories about Sarah Palin’s clothes.

Never mind.

Have a Nice Tall Glass of “You Worry Too Much”

Victor Davis Hanson says what I’ve been thinking about the economy, and about panics and pessimism in general:

Get a grip. Much of our current panic is psychological, and hyped by instantaneous electronic communications and second-by-second 24-hour news blasts. There has not been a nationwide plague that felled our workers. No earthquake has destroyed American infrastructure. The material United States before the September 2008 financial panic is largely the same as the one after. Once we tighten our belts and pay off the debts run up by Wall Street speculators and millions of borrowers who walked away from what they owed others — and we can do this in a $13 trillion annual economy — sanity will return.

Gas, now below $2 a gallon, is still falling — saving Americans hundreds of billions of dollars. As housing prices settle, millions of young Americans will buy homes that just recently were said to be out of reach of a new generation.

If it was once considered a sign of economic robustness that homes doubled in value in just a few years, why is it seen as a disaster that they now sell on the way down for what they did recently on the way up? If we were recently terrified that gas would reach $5 a gallon, why do we now just shrug that it might fall to $1.50?

Unemployment is still below 7 percent; it was around 25 percent when Franklin Roosevelt became president. Less than 20 banks have failed, not the 4,000 that went under in the first part of 1933.

There is no known use of the word “recession” that matches economic conditions like unemployment at 7%, gas prices falling more than 50% in 5 months, and Black Friday numbers higher than last year:

CHICAGO – The holiday shopping season got off to a surprisingly solid start, according to data released Saturday by a research firm. But the sales boost during the post-Thanksgiving shopathon came at the expense of profits as the nation’s retailers had to slash prices to attract the crowds in a season that is expected to be the weakest in decades.

Sales during the day after Thanksgiving rose 3 percent to $10.6 billion, according to preliminary figures released Saturday by ShopperTrak RCT Corp., a Chicago-based research firm that tracks sales at more than 50,000 retail outlets. Last year, shoppers spent about $10.3 billion on the day after Thanksgiving, dubbed Black Friday because it was historically the sales-packed day when retailers would become profitable for the year.

But this year, many observers were expecting consumers to spend more time browsing than buying, amid contractions in consumer spending and growing fears about economic uncertainty and trouble in the global financial markets.

Did you catch all that framing and context?

A “surprisingly” solid start. But the higher sales came at the expense of reduced profits, so the news isn’t all that good, really. And if the retailers had left prices high, at the expense of sales, that would have been bad, too. Everything is wrong now, can’t you see?!

Retailers didn’t cut prices, they “slashed” them, because they are desperate. You need to worry more, pal.

And some “observers”, and maybe even some “experts”, claim that the season is expected to be the weakest in decades, due to contractions in consumer spending and growing fears about economic uncertainty and trouble in global financial markets.

Sure. Christmas shoppers at Target and Wal-Mart are always worried about “global financial markets”.

Call me crazy, but I think people pretty much look at their own financial situation, and their own bank balances, and plan accordingly. Which, at least for right now, pretty much means people aren’t all that worried.

Reliably Clueless, Part II

The New York Times takes a story with one source, and spins it as “combat veteran goes psycho”.

Yet again.

You have to admire their tenacity, if not their brains.

Once again, let’s stick with the facts: the idea that combat veterans return as whack jobs is wrong.

In fact, an entire book was written about sloppy, biased, factually unsupported, and libelous media coverage of military veterans: Stolen Valor, by B. G. Burkett. My summary of it is here.

Maybe journalists should crawl out of their shells once in a while, and learn something true and useful, so they could start writing articles about the military that are based on facts, instead of emotions and narratives.

Yeah, that is sooooo going to happen.

DuPage County Government: “Be Careful, Winter Can Be Cold”

Is there anybody who lives in the Chicago area that does not know about winter, already? How does that happen, exactly?

Just never you mind all that. It’s Weather Awareness Week! And so our intrepid county bureaucratic government is warning us to wear mittens and scarves because it’s gonna be cold for a couple of months. Of course, it does that every year, since like … ever.

But we’re too thick-headed to have figured all that out.  So to protect us, some bureaucrat in Washington or Springfield put up some cash to promote a Weather Awareness Week, so they could issue a Captain Obvious press release. Which our local paper then printed, word for word, as a news story.

What would we ever do without them?

Sign Me Up

Zombietime is tired of waiting for a public declaration of what is blatantly obvious to those of us paying attention to the war in Iraq: we won.

Rufus says “All We Are Saying … Is It’s Over and We Won”:

So Zombietime is declaring November 22, 2008, Victory in Iraq Day. I’ll gladly participate, keeping in mind those who have died to make this happen, and the leadership of President Bush in committing to winning the damn war.

But lots of people don’t like President Bush, so by their tortured logic, that means we didn’t really win, after all. Or if we did, it isn’t very important. After all, he talks funny.

So never-you-mind that today, Iraq is mostly peaceful, due to both the change in strategy and the people of Iraq finally turning against Al-Qaeda in Iraq about two years ago, after realizing that terrorists care about nothing except killing innocent people by the truckload in order to gain power. And give the people of Iraq credit — lots of credit — because they risked their lives (including the lives of innocent women and children) in order to actively start fighting against terrorist scumbags who blow up little kids running for candy and strap bombs to kids with Down syndrome and then detonate them via remote control.

Just don’t expect much comment on this historic victory over the terrorists and the unmitigated evil they represent. Nah, we live in a post-modern bubble here, where such things can be ignored, because they don’t fit the narrative. It’s cool. You just make up the facts you wish to be true, and ignore the true ones, and voila! A new reality is born.

So no front page headlines in 72 point type announcing victory, no victory parades, and no admission from the 20-30% of the country that suffers from Bush Derangement Syndrome, that they were wrong. That would require intellectual honesty, and in a post-modern world, well … who has time for that silliness?

And they fought so hard, for the other side, these rabid Bush-haters in the media and Congress and various leakers at State and CIA. During wartime, too! How exhausting for the poor dears. Of course, normally, this is borderline treason, but somehow we’ve gotten to a place where it’s “the highest form of patriotism”. Um, sure. OK.

Read the whole thing.

And I’ll be participating, with great pride, in Victory in Iraq Day, November 22, 2008.

And My Endorsement Is …

Well, it’s not so much an endorsement as it is a criticism of the press for using post-modern narratives in place of, you know, doing journalism. Which allows them to decide for us which facts are relevant, and which are not, in covering a presidential campaign, and to build their narratives appropriately.

It’s an essay I wrote today called “The First Post-Modern Presidential Candidate”.

Apparently, the Entire World Has Officially Lost It’s Mind

OK, now this is just stupid:

BARACK OBAMA is poised to win at least one election by a landslide. Voters in The Economist’s Global Electoral College favour the Democratic candidate over his Republican rival, John McCain, by a hefty margin of more than four to one. Some 50,000 readers around the world are expected to have cast a vote by the close of polls at the end of the day on November 1st, with more than 40,000 votes going to Mr Obama. As candidates collect delegates according to the countries won (just as America’s electoral-college system allocates delegates by state), Mr Obama’s victory will be all the more comprehensive: he will claim over 9,000 delegates, compared with a paltry few hundred for Mr McCain.

Wow. 50,000 votes? Why that’s almost equal to the population of the suburb I live in!

Various patterns have become clear during the course of voting. Candidates did best when they picked up backing from heavily populated countries with large tallies of delegates. Mr Obama quickly scooped support from readers in China, India, most of Europe, as well as from the United States itself. In many cases Mr Obama won the support of an overwhelming share of voters: in more than 40 countries he claims the support of 90% (or more) of those who voted.

I thought they hired smart people at The Economist. First of all, the fact that foreigners support a candidate for U.S. president just might be a reliable indicator that Americans — you know, the people who can actually vote in the election — should stay as far away from that candidate as possible.

Nations have competing interests, and voters are supposed to take that into account.  But maybe after decades of being lectured about U.N. supremacy and how we’re “citizens of the world”, too many people have bought into that silliness.

Americans should vote for who they want to lead their country in a world filled with other nations who are actively trying to grab the power that we’ve had for decades.  Even if it means annoying some Europeans, Chinese, or whoever else.  That’s kind of the point:  for an American citizen to care about the opinions of foreigners re: who leads our country, whose interests are you putting first?  Or, is just about being that naive?  Because it seems like it’s one or the other.  Maybe both.

Imagine in the past a similar news story on FDR, or JFK, or Lincoln, Washington, Reagan, or anybody else.  The entire concept is ridiculous, but there are now enough people in the media who buy into the ridiculous that we get stories like this day after day, in media outlet after media outlet.

And call me crazy, but there is no way that McCain loses by a 4-1 margin in the popular vote. News flash: the readership of The Economist is a bit on the liberal side. Seriously! So their poll is both biased and  self-sampling.  Good work!

This election is causing too many people to get all goofy and sideways. Especially in the media.

Hey, whatever floats your boat.  But credibility is earned over a long time. How exactly do you attempt to reclaim that credibility when this is all over?

How to Destroy Your Credibility and Trust, Media Edition

Orson Scott Card, in a must-read essay, takes the media to task about all the things they don’t cover re: the Obama campaign.

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

[...]

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled “Do Facts Matter?” ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let’s follow the money … right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

Read the whole thing.

Note that this is not a partisan issue. Facts are facts. It’s not about whether one likes Obama, or plans to vote for him, or likes McCain, or plans to vote for him.

It’s about establishing what happened in the past, to get us to where we are today. So that maybe, in the future, an educated voting public could put pressure on Congress to avoid future crap-ola like this?

But because the media likes Obama, and believes facts don’t really matter, we are being lied to, on a regular basis. Pause to consider the irony: journalists believe facts don’t really matter anymore.

Do not fall for lies.

But maybe the journalists are right. Maybe facts don’t matter; maybe they have done such a good job of pushing narratives and suppressing information they don’t like that we’ve become, largely, a nation of sheep with no ability to filter out bullshit in our news stories.

This is what noted Education Professor Bill Ayers wanted, you know. A nation of people both dulled by lack of factual knowledge, but energized by a vague need for “change” that just so happens to include Marxist, post-modern ideas at its core.

What a nice coincidence for them.

I am Joe

It sure is curious how the media is more interested in Joe the Plumber’s background than in Obama’s.

Put this episode at the top of the list of Examples Why Jeff Detests the Mainstream Media. You can’t do the bidding of the Obama campaign and still pretend to be objective.

Joe is not running for office. Obama is running for office. This is a pretty clear distinction.

Well, guess what? I am Joe. A very large chunk of the country is people like Joe, believe it or not. And when you attack Joe — a normal guy, asking the questions of a presidential candidate that many of us are wondering about too — then you attack us as well. And we don’t appreciate it.

Some Folks Are Kinda Mad

As rants go, this is a good one.

There. I feel better now.

Obama: Eyes Wide Open

The American public is punishing John McCain for what they think are the sins of the current administration; Obama has gained a few points in the polls lately, largely due to the financial crisis.

This Wall Street Journal headline and sub-head says it all: “Independent Voters Move Toward Obama; New Poll Indicates That Democrat Ticket Is Benefiting From Financial Crisis” (link)

People ought to get out of their cocoons a little bit more. They’d learn lots of valuable things, interesting things, like how Barack Obama used to sue banks on behalf of ACORN, for not making dumb mortgage loans to people who can’t afford to pay them.

Ace Explains It All

If only a journalist or a columnist had the cojones and writing skill to explain the current financial crisis like Ace:

This was a fifteen year campaign by the Democrats, ACORN, and Fannie and Freddie’s executives to loosen up mortgage requirements to the point where there simply where no requirements at all.

Net result? Trillions of federally guaranteed dollars flow into the housing market that shouldn’t have been there — suddenly buying a house becomes the easiest possible purchase you can make. All you need is a signature and a smile.

If the federal government were guaranteeing a trillion new dollars for no-money down car purchases with no credit checks or proof of employment or income, what do you think would happen to the price of cars?