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.

Your government at work. Well, if by “at work” we mean “stealing from you”.

 

Hmmm. This seems backwards.

 

Two major things wrong here. Federal civilians not only make TWICE what those in private industry make, thereby pulling money out of the economy with higher taxes, but the rate of increase in their wages and benefits is much higher, too. Compare the slope of the two lines.

Via Illinois Policy Institute.

 

 

This must be what it feels like to wake up in hell

“Health care reform” or, as I like to call it, “another stupid idea from Washington” :

In short, the plan sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus would almost certainly lead to a death spiral in many private health insurance markets.

Insurance death spirals occur when regulators force insurers to offer coverage (“guaranteed issue”) at premiums below the known risk of those they are insuring, without any assurance that the shortfall can be made up elsewhere. When insurers comply with these rules and offer relatively low cost health insurance policies to all comers, quite predictably, many sick people step forward to sign up. When the insurers then try to turn around and charge higher premiums to the relatively healthy to cover their costs, the healthy, also quite predictably, are more reluctant to enroll because they can see the premiums they would have to pay would very likely exceed their health-care costs. So they often say “no thanks” to the insurance and decide to take their chances by going without coverage instead. As more and more healthy people exit the marketplace, insurers are then forced to raise premiums for everyone who remains, which only further encourages the lower risks to opt out. This vicious cycle of rising premiums and an increasingly unhealthy risk pool is called a ‘death spiral’ because it eventually forces the insurer to terminate the plan.

This is not a hypothetical, textbook scenario of what might happen to a poorly run insurance market. It has happened before — many times and in many places. See, for instance, the experience in Kentucky, and in Washington state, and in Maine too. There’s no reason it couldn’t happen nationwide.

The Obama White House and congressional Democrats convinced themselves months ago that they could avoid the fate of these failed state reform efforts by forcing the young and healthy to buy insurance, whether they wanted it or not. And so, all of the bills under consideration in the House and Senate would make government-approved health insurance enrollment compulsory for all Americans. Those not complying would have to pay a new tax, collected by the IRS.

“Bolt the doors! The pre-schoolers are here!”

Apparently, some folks in a neighborhood not far from ours are easily distressed.

A group of neighbors near Park Boulevard and Hillside Avenue in Glen Ellyn are all up in arms about … a Montessori preschool in their neighborhood!

Yikes. What’s next? Gangs and drive-by shootings?

The main concern seems to be traffic. OK, so a few more cars come and go at the same times every day. How big can that “problem” get? It’s a Montessori pre-school, in a town with tons of stay-at-home moms. We’re not talking 200 kids here.

Ron Repking and his wife (name not given) own Diamante Montessori Preschool, and they bought a vacant church to house it in 2007. And it’s been a contentious battle ever since, with yard signs, lawsuits, and everything in between. When driving past the area, I’ve noticed the signs, and wondered just what they were all about.

Now I know, and I think it’s pretty lame.

Who knows, maybe some benefits accrue to the neighborhood from having young kids educated there, Montessori-style? Is that possible? Good kharma, and all that?

And even if the answer to that is “no”, and you have to put up with the auditory horrors of children squealing with delight now and again, we think you just might survive it. We really do.

And if you get supremely annoyed by a few extra cars cruising on public streets, to deliver and pick up children to/from a licensed school run by responsible adults, then maybe it’s time to lighten up a tad. Just a teensy bit.

Or, continue to push hard on an issue that no reasonable person sees your way.

Either/Or.

Getting Wise Down Under

Good Beer and Demanding Evidence: Two Qualities to Admire in a Country

Australia, at least, is starting to ask serious questions about the “science” behind global warming. Heaven and Earth, a book by Ian Pilmer, is credited with starting that global warming backlash in Australia.

Quoting Rick Moran at the American Thinker piece linked just above:

Cap and trade is not about saving the planet. It is about enriching government at the expense of private industry. Obama expects that selling of carbon credits will bring in hundreds of billions of dollars that will finance his health insurance power grab and other schemes. They are not interested in the science. They are interested in the dollars.

And the American family – to the tune of at least $1300 in increased energy bills – will pay for it.

Exactly right. Same as it ever was.

Read the whole thing.

Our governments are lying to us and treating us like idiots while they prepare to forcibly take our money to pay for a “solution” that won’t work.

Putting aside for a moment all the highly-charged emotion about this … why would anybody want that?

So . . . This is Where We Are Today? Really?

Letterman last night made a disgusting joke about Sarah Palin’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

Naturally, like any sensible person, James Lileks nails Letterman to the wall.

Letterman, over the years, has become one of the biggest tools in the entertainment industry. And that is saying ALOT.

What is the matter with people today? So it’s funny now to make jokes about kids of famous people, just to score urban liberal street cred? Wow. That is a hell of a way to make a living. Proud to look in the mirror in the morning, are you?

What a sad, sorry little bunch of whiny jerks. It isn’t enough, I guess, that people are allowed to dislike Sarah Palin and her politics. No, they have to demonize her and her family to make themselves feel better about how awesome their taste in politicians is.

Every time I think we have hit bottom, some idiot comes along and finds a new bottom. Today, Letterman is that idiot. Congrats, Dave!

Too bad I already fired Letterman years ago. Can you fire somebody twice? Hey … just did!

UPDATE: James Lileks expanded the above into a New York Post opinion piece for Sunday June 14, which you can read here.

Driving While Texting = Cleaning Out the Gene Pool

For all the yahoos and moe-rons that just can’t put aside the damn iPhones and Crackberrys whilst motoring a vehicle on public roads: 10 Car Pile-Up! ROTFL!

It’s a must-read.

Apparently, 26% of drivers admit to texting while driving. Um, talk about impaired.

What if 26% of drivers admitted they were legally drunk while driving? Impaired is impaired. Just what the hell is the difference to the unlucky ones that get hit?

When it comes to the types of impaired driving we get all up in arms about, we are curiously capricious.

I wonder … is MADD going to start another chapter devoted to this form of potentially lethal use of a vehicle? And get that PR and lobbying machine all cranked up to demonize “texting and driving”? Care to place a bet?

All that aside, we would do well to remember that driving a car is a public safety issue.

While we are very sorry if it interrupts your busy Twittering schedule, that’s just too f*cking bad.

Deal. With. It.

Pander to Terrorist Sympathizers? Sure!

The White House is siding with the ACLU loons in a battle over releasing more pictures of alleged mistreatment of various thugs and murderers by our uniformed armed forces personnel.

Steve Schippers at The Tank is very unhappy. His viewpoint is mine, pretty much.

Is the President still the Commander-in-Chief?

Because sometimes he seems kind of … I don’t know … anti- military.

Would seem to be a conflict of interest, no?

Out-STANDING

This is the kind of trouble we get ourselves into when we let Congress out of it’s cage.

The case revolves around Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which requires that job candidates and employees be treated equally without regard to race or ethnicity.

But it is frequently difficult to prove that an employer is engaged in intentional discrimination. For this reason, Congress has also empowered victims of discrimination to sue in instances when an employment practice results in a disparate impact against members of a protected minority group.

So you aren’t allowed to focus on race. Except when you have to, to avoid even the appearance of discrimination.

And you’d better follow these contradictory rules, or you’ll get your ass sued!

Memo to geniuses in Congress: you’ve implemented ideas from the wrong revolution. The American Revolution was inspired by liberty for all; it was the French Revolution that used equal outcomes as the guiding principle.

We don’t live in France.

Sometimes I’m not sure where we live, frankly.

Especially when the President of the United States chooses not to visit Normandy to honor the sacrifices of our WWII war dead … because it might offend Germany.

There Are People Who Want to Ban the Comic Sans Font?

… SERIOUSLY?!

.

WELL, SUCK ON THIS, FONT-NAZIS!

We’re From the Government, and We’re Here to Help You … Er, I Mean, Take Your Money by Force

Dustbury notes some problems with red light cameras in Georgia:

Where there are red-light cameras, says Georgia law, there’s supposed to be one extra second of yellow. Much of the time, though, there isn’t, and Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Cassville) wants to know why.

Like I posted in a comment there, it’s basically a tax on driving, at some point. An illegal tax, in this case.

In Illinois we have these red light cameras in some spots; I’m not sure about the law on yellow light times. Need to check on that.

And now some genius in our gubmint wants to implement traffic cameras all over the place to catch speeders.

I’m not such a big fan. 

1. Using technology to entrap de facto “normal” driving is a little too “1984″-ish for me.

2. Not only that, but lengthening yellow lights seems to reduce or even eliminate drivers running red lights.

3. Which, logically would seem to obviate the need for red light cameras in the first place.

4. Unless, of course, red light cameras are primarily a fund-raising tool, rather than a public safety measure.

As Instapundit says:

If all you care about is safety, then, you can accomplish as much by adding a second to the yellow light. If you care about revenue, though, you’ll shorten yellow-light times — as some places have done — even though that’s worse for safety.

Government and business colluding to screw taxpayers? That, like, hardly ever happens!

How Not to Buy Gifts for Royalty

President Obama does it again: to the Queen of England, of all the possible gifts he could give, he comes up with … an iPod.

A consumer toy, targeted at electronics-obsessed music fans aged 18-34. For the Queen of England.

Hey, maybe she wants that cool new iPhone, too! Hell, why not just get her a gift card to the Apple Store? I’ll bet she goes there all the time. Well, she would, if she wasn’t the Queen of England, that is.

On the Queen’s iPod, his crack staff had thoughtfully pre-loaded a wonderous array of Obama photos and speeches. Because, of course, the Queen of Freaking England is totally going to sit around and listen to speeches by a young know-nothing punk like him. On an iPod.

She’s so random, that crazy Queen!

Can’t you just see her swooning, dreamy eyed, with little white earbuds hanging out of her ears, hanging on every teleprompted word?

Mmmmm … nope. Me neither.

You’re Doing It Wrong

The burning question on everybody’s mind, as we approach Final Four weekend, is this: is the Big East the best conference if they don’t win a title?”

The answer: who cares? Why is the entire sports world all a-twitter about this stupid idea, comparing one conference to another?

To even ask the question is to ask the nonsensical. Here’s why: in actual games, conferences don’t play each other; teams do. Srsly!

Therefore, comparisons between teams can be settled on the court, which is the only comparison that matters.

Plus, if conferences did play each other, there’d be like 60 or 80 players on each side. The court would be as crowded as a Tokyo subway car.

Fouls would get totally out of control. You’d need, like, 18 refs.  They’d probably just call three seconds on every possession anyway, with all those players out there, clogging up the lane all the time.

And the substitutions! What a nightmare. Coaches would have to send in 10 or 20 guys at a time. I’m not sure how you’d keep it all straight.

Clearly, not workable.

Yet every time we turn on ESPN, or listen to sports talk, or read articles and blogs on the web, this question about which conference is “better” gets brought up. Over and over and over again.

OK, just for fun, let’s play along for a minute. If a definitive answer to this burning question could be found, what would it change?

Um, nothing. Teams would still play other teams, and sometimes teams from one conference would win. Sometimes, the other. Some years, more teams from one conference would win. Other years, the other.

Starting to see a pattern yet? Me too.

So what all this tells me is that a whole bunch of supposedly smart people like to argue about dumb, meaningless stuff on TV, the radio, and on the Internet.

Hard to believe, isn’t it?

“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.

This Just In … California Government Spends Like Drunken Sailors on Leave … Film at Eleven …

California’s budget deficit is predicted to reach $42B by 2010.

Forty.  Two.  Billion. Dollars.

$42,000,000,000.00

Plus, the state is losing population — a.k.a. “taxpayers” — at alarming rates.  Businesses, too, are fleeing the state because of tax burdens and regulation.  In the face of this declining tax base, California welcomes illegals with open arms and provides them with services like education, health care, and other local services.

A sensible person would look at this economic equation, and within 10 seconds decide it was unsustainable.  Which is exactly why there are so few sensible persons in politics.

If We Need Proof of Insanity, Look No Further!

When backed into a legal corner, some people hire famous attorneys and do everything they’re told.

Others might flee the country, or go underground, or even, sad to say, take their own life.

Still others appear on “The View”, with Barbara Walters and the other legal experts on that silly gabfest.  Against their former attorney’s advice, of course.

See if you can guess which one our soon-to-be-former-governor chose?

UPDATE:  He considered offering the Senate seat vacated by Obama … to Oprah Winfrey?

I rest my case, your honor.

Nothing Says “Happy New Year” Like an Assistant Principal Arrested for Gay Sex in a City Park

Also, “I Didn’t Really Need That Job, Anyway”

Good times.

Lamest Press Release in History

Premier Agribusiness Analysis Firm Replaces IBM DB2 With EnterpriseDB

Agri Stats Selects Enterprise Open Source Database for Reliability, Performance, Support

ISELIN, NJ and FORT WAYNE, IN — (MARKET WIRE) — September 27, 2006 — EnterpriseDB, the world’s leading enterprise open source database company, and Agri Stats, the premier management reporting and benchmarking company for a wide range of agricultural industries, announced today that Agri Stats has selected EnterpriseDB Advanced Server to replace its Xbase and IBM DB2 databases. Agri Stats uses its database to aggregate and analyze operating data from companies in the industries it serves, including the broiler, egg, turkey and swine industries, and prepares reports for its clients containing aggregate industry data. More information and free downloads of EnterpriseDB Advanced Server are available at www.enterprisedb.com.

Agri Stats’ database of industry information, which contains nearly a terabyte of data, has been collected over the past two decades and is growing at nearly 50 gigabytes per month.

Wow, nearly an entire terabyte of data? That’s the equivalent of 10 I-Pods. Woo Freaking Hoo.

Surely, IBM is scrambling right now to avoid losing other, similar “management reporting and benchmarking companies” for the “broiler, egg, turkey, and swine industries”. Big market right there. Big, big market.

In Other News, Sun Rises in East

AA meetings may do more than stop drinking, study says

Binge drinking and violence are related?

Geddafuggouttahere!