Losing major cities? Bad.

Losing oil-rich coasts? Worse.

Losing your paid big-breasted "nurse"? It's over.

And I'm not just being silly -- Gadaffy presumably has much more control over this prostitute than the average man in the street of Tripoli. She's close to him, she's important to him, and as he says, "I either rule you or I kill you."

So now she's splitting. Possibly with his approval, but if that's the case, he knows he's done. And if he's not insisting she go down, Eva Braun style, with him, maybe he's thinking about sparing Tripoli his last bloodbath, too.

Posted by: Ace at 10:37 AM | Comments (99)
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Very interesting (and conservative-in-implication) article at the amateur webzine Slate about the plummeting social costs of sex, which then engenders (ahem) a loss of sexual power in women. Worth a read in full, but here's the gist:

The idea that sex ratios alter sexual behavior is well-established. Analysis of demographic data from 117 countries has shown that when men outnumber women, women have the upper hand: Marriage rates rise and fewer children are born outside marriage. An oversupply of women, however, tends to lead to a more sexually permissive culture. The same holds true on college campuses. In the course of researching our book Premarital Sex in America, my co-author and I assessed the effects of campus sex ratios on women's sexual attitudes and behavior. We found that virginity is more common on those campuses where women comprise a smaller share of the student body, suggesting that they have the upper hand. By contrast, on campuses where women outnumber men, they are more negative about campus men, hold more negative views of their relationships, go on fewer dates, are less likely to have a boyfriend, and receive less commitment in exchange for sex.

A related thought I've had concerns feminists' religious doctrine that social restraints on sexual behavior is all caused by grubby, oppressive, vagina-shackling men. This doesn't make sense at all, and never has made sense, and is an unchallenged meme in the Grrls Rule, Boys Drool leftist feminist culture not because it makes a lick of sense but only because it hangs all the evils of the world on the Designated Sexual Villains in the feminist morality play. Men, of course.

If one accepts the hard-to-dispute premise that, between the sexes, women prefer a higher-sexual-cost regime in which men are supposed to "work for it," as it were, and men prefer a lower-sexual-cost regime in which their sexual needs can be gratified with almost no work whatsoever (compare and contrast female wish-fulfillment romcoms with male wish-fulfillment pornos, or even James Bond movies, actually), then of course it makes sense that women, rather than men, have a sound motive for increasing the sexual penalties for promiscuous sex whereas men have stronger motive for decreasing them.

Any feminist (from the leftist POV, I mean) examination of prostitution -- oh, I'm sorry, "sex worker labor-trade" or whatever we're supposed to call it -- begins (and usually ends, frankly) with the unexamined and unchallenged premise that it is men who wish to criminalize prostitution, dirty men who make prostitutes social pariahs, filthy men who make the term "whore" a hateful one used to keep sex-working labor-traders in their despised place at the bottom of the social heirarchy.

But men, of course, are the primary consumers of sex-work labor-trade. Whether straight or gay, the overwhelming rule is then men pay sex-workers for genital-labor. There is a niche market of prostitution for women, but it is such a tiny market it seizes the public imagination precisely because it is so rare.

The prominent male equivalent of a sex-working genital-trader for women is not in fact a paid prostitute -- that exists, but in vanishingly small numbers -- but a gigolo, who is primarily a consort, a romantic-type companion who doesn't get paid cash-on-the-barrelhead for sexual favors but rather receives gifts and upkeep for maintaining the illusion he's romantically interested in his sugar-momma. Only secondarily, if at all, is a gigolo a stud for hire.

Given this situation, which of the two sexes has a stronger interest in criminalizing prostitution? Which of the two sexes uses the services of prostitution -- is "helped" by the service, in their own minds -- and which of the two sexes is harmed by prostitution?

It seems to me that, rather obviously, it is women who have the strongest motivation to criminalize prostitution, to drive it away and underground, and to make the trade as socially-penalized as possible. It is women who are harmed by their men inflicting emotional distress on them by employing the services of a genital-trader, it is women who suffer second-hand venereal disease, it is women who see a share of the couple's collected wealth being diverted away, outside the couple, to pay for the upkeep of a prostitute.

That's not nothing, is it?

It is worth noting, I think, that the criminalization of prostitution occurred with the rise of women's rights and women's sufferage. Prostitution was famously legal in Victorian England, for example. (A libertarian English writer at NRO liked to quip that he was all in favor of re-imposing Victorian morality on society, given that prostitution, drugs, and guns were not only legal but barely restricted at all.)

This is not to make women the Bad Guys in new morality play -- women have perfectly reasonable and perfectly valid reasons for wishing to make prostitution (and, more importantly, soliciting the services of a prostitute) as rare and as socially unacceptable as possible.

But it is to suggest that left-leaning feminists are rather, what's the word?, silly in their determination to pin this alleged wrong on men.

Leftist feminists of the younger, sillier generation similarly attempt to claim that it is evil, controlling men who use the word whore to not merely brand actual prostitutes but to control the sexual expressions of everyday women. That is, they assert (and these extremely silly third-generation feminists seem to write about little else but this) feel that social disapproval of female promiscuity is almost entirely a male invention, because men, you see, want to keep women from having sex with other men, so we invent the usage of the word "whore" to describe a sexually-liberated woman and by infecting the culture with this disease of whore-branding, make sexually-promiscuous women feel badly about their sexual choices and force them to conform to a male, Christian-fundamentalist (of course) regime of female chastity.

To the extent that women participate in this oppressive regime of whore-deeming, it's only because a false conscience has been imposed upon them by male-dominated media. Women call other women "whores" not because women wish to wound other women (their sexual competition) but because men have hypnotized them to think this way.

To control their scary vaginas.

Once again, I ask: Does this postulate make a lick of sense? Again I ask: Between the two sexes, which of them sexually profits from a regime of low-cost, easily-obtained sex, and which of them is harmed by this regime?

Which of the two sexes would prefer (as a rule) a slower-evolving sexual relationship in the context of courtship, and therefore would have a good reason to brand their sexual competition "whores" for essentially breaking the rules and cheating and therefore attracting and keeping men (for a time, at least) by behaving promiscuously?

Women, I submit, are hurt by what can be thought of a Sexual Arms Race in which other women are willing to overlook the normal rules of courtship in order to rush to gratify a man's sexual urges. This leads to increased pressure on other women to behave, sexually, in a way they would prefer not to. And this, I submit, once again suggests that it is women, not men, have a stronger interest in propagating a social norm of sexual chastity and enforcing it by the tools of social disapproval -- calling women who seem to be gaming the system to their advantage "whores."

Again, there is nothing I think is wrong with this, and I don't think women are bad at all for this -- every social group evolves norms and methods of enforcement. Every guild attempts to hedge out the competition and promote guild-members.

But I do find it extraordinary silly that lefty feminists continue to insist that it is men, of all people, who workin' as hard as they can to keep women chaste. To keep women from having sex with them, in other words. To make women feel bad about the occasional one night stand so that men can't have the occasional one night stand.

Does this sound like men to you? Or does it sound like a fantasy farce of cartoon men, wearing the Black Hats of Insanely-Counterproductive Sexual Prohibition, concocted by a blame-shifting villain-needing sexual cult?

As has been noted many, many times (not that lefty feminists ever notice), we did in fact have a Sexual Revolution, and men won. And the strangest thing about this is that lefty feminists, while claiming (and falsely believing) themselves to be liberating women, have in fact been eagerly liberating men, liberating men from the need of offering any kind of satisfactory trade-in-kind to women for sexual favors.

In their strange inversion of reality, it's men who have the means, motive, and opportunity to increase the costs of obtaining sex and it's women, on the other hand, who have the strong interest in a promiscuity and commitment-free (or even dinner-date free) sex.

And men, who, in this role-reversed alternate reality feminists have concocted, desperately want women to keep their vaginas chaste, can only be "beaten" by giving it all away for free.

And of course keeping abortion not only legal but socially praiseworthy because, again in this comic-book "What If?" issue of reality feminists have concocted, men only want to have sex to produce children and women, of course, are far less game for procreation, viewing sex as primarily a vehicle for erotic gratification. But that's a dementia for another day.

Somewhat Related Note: I never really watched Melrose Place, but I was forced to witness it by proxy (it was a craze when I was younger, all but inescapable if you were dating a woman or, for that matter, a gay guy dating another gay guy).

But I was always struck by soap opera's go-to "What If?" comic-book premise. The clear pattern on Melrose Place was that most of the women, particularly the pro-active, heroic, popular characters, were all sexually liberated and very nearly sexually predatory, whereas men all pined for commitment and courtship and white picket fences and moped about when they couldn't have that.

This is wish-fulfillment; and there's nothing wrong with that. Popular entertainment is built of wish-fulfillment. And when each gender dreams of sex, it dreams that the other gender would behave as they would or they wish. Thus, in female wish-fulfillment, all the men are devoted and can only think of family and courtship and commitment, while in male wish-fulfillment (James Bond, any action movie, any porno) women are just as willing as the guys to have a bit of boning amidst the explosions.

Silly third-generation feminists watched Melrose Place and didn't realize it was fantasy inverted-world wish-fulfillment, but in fact was describing actual reality, or at least the way the world could be and should be, if dirty men weren't screwing everything up by insisting that Heather Loclear settle down and marry someone.

Posted by: Ace at 10:04 AM | Comments (292)
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Training adorable children to go all Honey Badger on gravity and obstacles.

Posted by: LauraW at 10:00 AM | Comments (31)
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Thanks to some quick re-branding by congressional Republicans, there's a new normal in the budget fight: let's cut $2 billion per week. After years of out-of-control spending $2 billion doesn't sound like very much. But, as the old saying goes, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we're talking about everything Republicans wanted for the rest of the fiscal year.

Threats of a government shutdown next week had all but disappeared by late Friday as Democrats reacted favorably to a Republican plan that would keep agencies operating past Mar. 4 while making a first down payment toward a larger budget deal.

...

A first installment of $4 billion in savings would be part of the deal now and Republicans have said they will insist on $2 billion more in cuts for each additional week the talks continue past the new deadline. The novel approach is one devised by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), trying to keep pace with his large freshman class while avoiding the same sort of shutdown that so hurt Republicans in the 1990Â’s when they confronted then President Bill Clinton.

Senate Democrats bitterly resent BoehnerÂ’s approach, saying he is holding the government hostage, nibbling away with weekly ransom demands to placate his tea party supporters. But the speaker carefully confined his first demands to the least painful cuts, and in an amusing turnabout, Democrats rushed to take credit for an idea they had seemed ready to go to war over days before.

Whereas Democrats can piss and moan about $60+ billion in cuts as if it were an outrageously unreasonable sum of money, $2 billion per week sounds absolutely reasonable, even though it comes to the exact same amount when you multiply it over the rest of the fiscal year. Boehner's reaction to Reid's proposal to cut nothing: "You're telling me you think there is no excessive government spending at all." Of course, that's exactly what Reid thinks, he just can't say it out loud.

With the public in a spending cut kind of mood, $2 billion a week is an easy sell. All Boehner has to do is contrast it with the Spendulus to point out just how reasonable he's being. And Democrats have no choice but to go along with it or be seen as the cause of the Government Shutdown of 2011, the horrors of which the President himself has been talking up.

The Democrats thought they were maneuvering Republicans into the hot seat. Instead, they were making their own position harder to maintain. If a shutdown really is as awful as they were making it sound, then they have an even greater responsibility to see that it is avoided. Along comes Speaker Boehner with a reasonable offer and, as Poltico noted, the threats of shutdown disappeared.

And finally, this sets an excellent precedent going forward. If they approved $2 billion in cuts last week, why not another $2 billion this week? And next week? It gets harder to say, "well, the last $2 billion was reasonable, but this next $2 billion is just impossible." Democrats just lost the budget fight.

Nice job, Speaker.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:58 AM | Comments (238)
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Apparently because we need to be somewhere that is visible (4:32). And therefore fair game.

Althouse and her companion* try (kindly, in my opinion) to tell them "this makes you look like assholes, do you really want to look like assholes?" (words to that effect).

Well, yeah, they do. They don't get it. And I really think that's the deal, they are that f'n stupid. At this point the opposition is so into it, they imagine this rallies America to their cause.

Enjoy how it works out boys. Thanks for the soft underbelly.

via Allahpundit on Twitter

* I see from the comments this is her husband, I didn't know his name. My bad. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 07:05 PM | Comments (212)
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It mostly comes at night. Mostly.

Things that Pablo Picasso Was Never Called:

Not like you...

More "dialing it in" below the fold. more...

Posted by: Genghis at 06:30 PM | Comments (594)
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Thus, these movies aren't as money-losing as it seems.

Several questions enter my mind. Given that Hollywood is playing for the anti-American foreign crowd, pandering to them, and calling itself brave for doing so, why can it not also pander to (get this) the American crowd at home? They always tell us they have to make G.I. Joe multinational and Captain America "not a flag-waver" because that would be bad for business overseas.

Isn't it strange they don't mind awful US business if they can recoup costs from an anti-American foreign audience? Huh. Why doesn't that work in reverse?

By the way, "The Kingdom" is used there as a "control" because the analyst says it's "politically neutral."

Let me just say that while this movie was rejected by conservatives when it came out, because it does in fact feature a few lines suggesting "we're just like they are" and "we're part of the cycle of violence," it is otherwise pretty... well, maybe it's not pro-American but it's definitely anti-Al Qaeda. The terrorists are depicted accurately -- by which I mean, monstrously -- and there is a shoot-out in the end, in an Al Qaeda dominated neighborhood of Ridyah (I'm guessing), which is just dynamite, and maybe the movie is trying to avoid easy rah-rah moments but damn if every time one of those bastards got his head ventilated if I didn't feel a rah-rah moment.

The analyst is right, I guess, to call it "politically neutral." And maybe conservatives reject it because they don't like neutrality when it comes to terrorists. (I agree.) But actually mere neutrality, rather than active jihadi-supporting anti-American terrorist-sucking, actually makes it more conservative that just about any movie I can think of in dealing with this topic since 9/11.

All I can say is edit out, in your head, those two or three "cycle of violence" moments and what you're left with is a brutal depiction of how vicious and backwards and ugly terrorists are (and, also, really not very good "warriors," either, so much as barely-competent murderers with make-pretend military-style ranks) and Americans killing the shit out of them.

Thanks to geoff, who had this in the sidebar.

Posted by: Ace at 03:03 PM | Comments (431)
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And I'd be more jazzed about the prospect of Allen West as VP if he hadn't sell us out to vote with the establishment in stopping our cutting of the budget.

When asked about Gingrich's comments [that West could be an effective VP], West asked, "He said that?"

"I have to pray about it and I have to clear it with my wife and two daughters," he added. "I never thought that seven years ago when I retired here I'd be a United States congressman, and that I'd be standing in front of your news camera. So we don't know what the future holds, but I'm always willing to serve my country."

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (234)
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As I said, my main problem with actually doing it is the Arab desire for scapegoats and blame-shifting. "It's my nature," said the scorpion.

One thing I just do not understand: When did the US decide, collectively but silently and all at once, that we could no longer arm indigenous fighters? That's what we did for decades. We didn't join the fighting in a lot of places, but we did fly in guns and ammo.

Why is that off the table now?

I suppose it is because of 9/11. When we arm indigenies, we're on the hook for everything they do with the weapons, and they will almost certainly blow up civilians in what is either an actual terrorist attack or a vicious guerrilla attack which is hard to differentiate from a terror attack. We've got a lot of moral stock in the idea that we're different, so we don't do that.

But it has to be confessed that that is a really, really, really good solution we keep ignoring for that one reason.

So Stupid! CNN's commenters thought Palin's suggestion was so stupid it should not have even have been reported.

I suppose now they will add nuance to their claim -- three days ago it was stupid, but the situation has changed so dramatically that only now is the suggestion humane and brilliant.

Posted by: Ace at 01:17 PM | Comments (108)
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Eh. It's all kind of play-for-the-base-ish.

“Imagine that Governor Palin had become president. Imagine that she had announced that Roe versus Wade in her view was unconstitutional and therefore the United States government would no longer protect anyone’s right to have an abortion because she personally had decided it should be changed. The news media would have gone crazy. The New York Times would have demanded her impeachment.”

GingrichÂ’s comments mark the first time a significant Republican leader has raised the specter of impeachment against Obama.

“First of all, he campaigned in favor of [the law]. He is breaking his word to the American people,” Gingrich says.

“Second, he swore an oath on the Bible to become president that he would uphold the Constitution and enforce the laws of the United States. He is not a one-person Supreme Court. The idea that we now have the rule of Obama instead of the rule of law should frighten everybody.

“The fact that the left likes the policy is allowing them to ignore the fact that this is a very unconstitutional act,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich said it is too early to call for ObamaÂ’s impeachment, but did not rule it out if he fails to comply with Congress and the constitutional process.

“I believe the House Republicans next week should pass a resolution instructing the president to enforce the law and to obey his own constitutional oath, and they should say if he fails to do so that they will zero out [defund] the office of attorney general and take other steps as necessary until the president agrees to do his job.

“His job is to enforce the rule of law and for us to start replacing the rule of law with the rule of Obama is a very dangerous precedent."

To me this just seems to be attention-grabbing for the sake of political posture. To overcome Obama's position, vote Obama out of office -- but I don't think that cause is particularly advanced here.

My Problem... is that this misreads the electorate, I think. It's not 1995.

I think the public wants tangible, realistic solutions. I feel that Gingrich here is talking like he's a blogger, offering up a whole raft of tough-guy posturings we know to a moral certainty will never actually happen.

This to me makes him seem like a politician to me, playing for applause, looking for advantage, and not at all like what I'm imagining a successful challenger to Obama will look like.

I think a successful candidate will be a politician adept enough to know he has to pretend to not be a politician and is ready to have a "grown up" talk with the public. Not someone who seems to be offering partisan-pleasing bluster.

Posted by: Ace at 12:48 PM | Comments (95)
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