End of the world for some, just another day for others, but all are welcome at the ONT party.

Long Live the American Dream Or Why India and China Have Nothing On Us

Amid the drumbeat of DOOM and our tendency to see all of our flaws in 20-20 it's easy to become overly pessimistic on America. But just remember that the countries that everyone is convinced will supplant us have their own flaws that are officially discouraged from ever being talked about in public.

Meanwhile the strengths of US tend to be quiet ones that you don't even think about until you've lived for a while in a country that lacks them. Yet they can make all the difference in whether a society prospers over the long run or not.

America wastes no talent

Conventional wisdom holds that America’s global competitiveness is driven by geniuses flocking to its shores and producing breathtaking inventions. But America’s real genius lies not in tapping just genius — but every scrap of talent up and down the scale.

A 2005 World Bank study found that the bulk of a peopleÂ’s wealth comes not from tangible capital like raw resources and infrastructure. It comes from intangible wealth: effective government, secure property rights, a functioning judiciary. Such intangible factors put the equivalent of $418,000 at the disposal of every American resident. In India and China, it's $3,738 and $4,208, respectively.

By contrast, when AmericaÂ’s government responds ineffectually to the recession, Americans go into panic mode. Grassroots movements like the Tea Party emerge to rein in the government. Pay Pal founder Peter Theil has even given $850,000 to the Seasteading Institute to establish new countries on the sea to experiment with government. This might be wacky, but it puts an outside limit on how out-of-whack Americans will let their institutions get before they start fixing them.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:45 PM | Comments (667)
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With 100% less fighty-fightiness.

Posted by: Ace at 03:47 PM | Comments (300)
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Not as dramatic as his earlier effort but an effective introduction.

Yeah, all campaigns say they are going to tell tough truths. Of course, with Iowa the first stop, I'm guessing "Ethanol subsidies and mandates should go", won't be one of them.

Unless Ryan, Christie or Pence has a sudden and completely improbable change of heart, 2012 is going to involve laying back and thinking of England.

Posted by: DrewM at 02:42 PM | Comments (501)
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Not running for President, he says.

Posted by: Ace at 02:03 PM | Comments (136)
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And I was going to give it a chance.

But explain to me what all the shabby surroundings and dim, dark camera work are doing in a movie that wants to be bright, fun bloodsuckers' ball. r

On the other hand, I looked up the trailer for the original, and it also seemed to imply this was a dark horror film. I've included that after the new one.

But even if that's how they sold the old one, the franchise (to extent it is one) is now established as the "fun vampire comedy that's actually a pretty damn solid vampire movie in addition to being a comedy."

So what's with all the darkness and heaviness? What's with the ugly fluorescent lighting in some kind of urban-sprawl hallway? The original was set in the sunny green suburbs for a reason.

Eh, I guess it's just that you have to sell a movie as a single popular genre, something we keep seeing again and again. I'm sure it is still a comedy; they're just lying about it.

I guess I'll still give it a chance. I loves me some Fright Night.

Oh I'm Totally Going: Okay. Thanks to buzzion. I missed this.

The Roddy McDowell role of "Peter Vincent" is now played by... the Tenth Doctor, David Tennant.

Okay, I guess they just lied in the trailer. Fine, I'm used to it. I'll see it opening weekend.

David Tennant... playing a new version of Peter Vincent, this one an assumedly cheesy Chris Angel style mentalist/illusionist/fraud. And based on the half-second you see Tennant in the trailer, probably an alcoholic.

I assume this is supposed to be funny.

Thanks to Miss80sBaby for that.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:27 PM | Comments (125)
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Was this song really that heinous? Sure, it's all sappy and sugary but that's kind of what this type of song is.

It's not like love songs usually have a great deal of dark nuance to them.

I don't know. I know that it got played... a lot. And that it became a joke in the 70s.

Anyway, the composer has written a new anthem, "I Switch Off My Lights."

Joseph Brooks, who notched an Academy Award for his hit "You Light Up My Life," but faced charges in a string of casting-couch rapes, was found dead of an apparent suicide this afternoon in his Upper East Side apartment, authorities said.

The 73-year-old Brooks — whose troubled son is in jail in the grisly slaying of his girlfriend last December — penned a suicide note in his 15th floor apartment on East 63rd Street.

...

The songwriterÂ’s head was encased in a dry cleaning bag that had a tube attached to a helium gas tank nearby. A towel was wrapped around his head and neck.

Maybe he was just doing a Chipmunks version of the song.

This is where I would link the Chipmunks version of the song, except I don't know if there is one. So this isn't really a good joke, but you can see what I'm going for here.

...

The 73-year-old was awaiting trial on charges of molesting 13 women who were lured to his apartment for supposed acting auditions.

You know what your acting is lacking? Two things: Emotional depth, and rape.

Now let me show you how to sing from your diaphragm.

...

Brooks' son Nicholas is currently facing charges that he strangled his gorgeous girlfriend, Sylvie Cachay, in the posh Soho House hotel last December.

A funny comedian named John Mulaney makes a joke about the New York Post's determination to tell you every single woman murdered is hot. And then he confesses that, having been promised "hot," he then has to evaluate them for hotness.

"BEAUTY SLAIN," a cover of the Post says. "Ummmm..." Mulaney says. "How about 'Body Found'?"
.
So really, the NY Post has to stop doing this. You can check the pictures yourself. I speak no unkindness of the dead.

But the New York Post really does need to stop.

Brooks also had a daughter Amanda, who has been openly bitter toward her
father.

"I am grateful to know he is finally facing the consequences of his actions and that there is some justice in the world," she once told New York magazine...

She said that in connection to his sex charges, not his suicide. But I don't think she's choked up about it.

Wow. Lotta love in this room.

Thanks to Sassy.

Posted by: Ace at 01:04 PM | Comments (91)
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Beldar on Obama's "pathetic" "dog ate my homework" non-justifications for flouting the War Powers Act.

Via Instapundit.

I don't think Beldar is right about the WPA being unconstitutional. I think what he means is that the President has an inherent power, as C-i-C, to order the troops to war in some circumstances, and the WPA, claiming as it does to govern all circumstances, is overbroad.

I don't think I buy that though. We know the Constitution plainly, plainly requires Congressional authorization for war. Beldar's position, in strong form, would render that dead-letter.

So what do we know? We know the Constitution requires and foresees a president seeking authorization for war in some circumstances (most likely most, or close to all); we know, or think we know, the President has some inherent -- unstated, but logically necessary -- power to order troops to action in some limited circumstances. We can guess those would be "a direct attack on the territory of the U.S.," but as the Constitution does not say exactly, this is all gloss and interpretation.

Given a cloudy constitutional scheme, but given that the Constitution, to the extent it makes a clear declaration, declares unambiguously that the President shall seek a resolution from Congress in case of war, I don't believe it's unconstitutional for Congress to clarify, through legislation, their understanding of the scheme.

Further, it has to be noted that the WPA actually affords the President a fair amount of latitude for unauthorized, personally-selected wars. 60 days of our troops in harm's way is not really a terrible stricture on the president's power.

(Plus, 30 more days to wind it down, after that.)

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (200)
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I often talk about the New Aristocracy, but I usually mean it more in a metaphorical way.

Mark Steyn doesn't say this, exactly -- he's talks around it, but I'm not sure how committed he is to it as a serious idea -- but his new essay makes the case that this isn't a metaphorical New Aristocracy, but a literal one.

Once you assert the right to rape the occasional peasant, you've basically declared yourself to be a member of an independent sovereign nation -- the nation of elites, which deigns to visit other nations and boss them around -- with full diplomatic immunity, as any important dignitary from a foreign land might have.

The New Aristocracy isn't made by blood but by credentials. The aristocracy is "born" in each countries two or three most elite schools, and the formal induction into the class occurs in key international/financial government bureaucracies.

And then?

Then you can stop paying taxes with no fear of the consequences the commoners face, and you can forcibly rape (or, actually, sodomize) the help and know that an entire nation's aristocrats will defend you and criticize those lowly prosecutors who charge you.

It has always been the case that the nobility in one country supported the nobility in other countries, even countries with whom they were at war, because national ambition is always well, well secondary to personal ambition. Perpetuating the rights and privileges of the new class is more important to the members of the new class than any transitory policy goal.

Or even war. Bernard Henry-Levi, the philosopher who, as Steyn says, talked Sarkozy into talking Obama into war, now drops his agitation for the liberation of Libya to turn his full talents towards agitating for the liberation of Strauss-Kahn.

Wars of adventurism and world socialism are nice goals, Old Chap, but let's not ever forget that it's this network of new aristocrats and its credentials serving as patents of nobility* that pay for our $3000 per night rape-suites in New York City.

Worth reading in full. Here's the conclusion:

Yes, they Kahn. You, not so much. After Charlie Rangel, chair of the House committee that writes America's tax laws, was "censured" by Congress for multiple infractions of, er, America's tax laws, a Washington Times reporter invited him to imagine what punishment the "average American citizen" would have received had he done what the Congressman did. "Please," Rangel told her. "I don't deal in average American citizens."

If only.

* A made-up concept from A Knight's Tale but forget it, I'm rolling.

Yeah, I'm Kind of Serious: I have forgotten more about history than you have ever known (assuming you dropped out your second year of high school, I mean), but I do remember two major meta points:

1. Things change and they evolve rather slowly, but at some point, something is now definitely different, and we can now talk of an established order even though it's difficult to say with precision when this new order came into being.

Dates of coronations and wars are essentially just trivia, ephemera. But when did all the important, enduring stuff actually happen? When did the yeomanry or middle class actually arise? We can say, maybe, that it did not exist before the 1100s and that it definitely did exist in the 1500s, by in between then, what was it? A trend, and evolution. No hard date on when it came into being. But when it came into being, whenever that was, it changed everything.

2. History repeats, relentlessly. The same external circumstances and personal ambitions that created the formal aristocracy before are present now, because they never went away in the first place. Men will never lose the ability to seek their fullest possible personal freedom and luxury, even if it comes at the price of hypocrisy or the creation of patently unfair structures of class distinction and control; no advantage in your favor is ever perceived as "unfair."

"Unfair" is some guy having a privilege you don't. If you have a privilege that someone else doesn't, that's just the way the world works, Old Chap, nothing to be done about it, really.

Posted by: Ace at 08:33 AM | Comments (491)
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Well, this has been an interesting Sunday morning for news.

“In the end, I was able to resolve every competing consideration but one, but that, the interests and wishes of my family, is the most important consideration of all,” Daniels said in a statement emailed to supporters early Sunday morning. “If I have disappointed you, I will always be sorry.”

There must be even more to the wife leaving-returning story than we see on the surface (and that's quite a bit already).

We'll you have to respect a guy who puts his family first.

So far this primary season doesn't seem as much about picking a candidate as it does about dodging bullets (Trump, Huckabee, Newt, Mitt).

Tim Pawlenty better start growing on me fast.

Added: Here's the confluence of two stories (Israel and GOP field).

Herman Cain doesn't seem to know much about the Mideast.

“I don’t think Israel has any problem with Palestinians’ returning,” he said.

Um, yes they do. A really big one.

He did say he doesn't think the Palestinians want peace and he'd give them nothing in any negotiations.

Here's the thing...a lot of candidates can say crowd pleasing things but in the end we are trying to find a President. As we see on a daily basis, having a President that gives exciting speeches but is bad on those darn details is a recipe for disaster.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:57 AM | Comments (310)
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Basically a lot of, "What was the big deal about Thursday?"

He just said that there was nothing particularly original in his proposals. This must have hurt President Unprecedented.

He's basically slapping Bibi back.

Very interesting.

There was a lot of confusion on Thursday about whether Obama's reference to "67 borders with mutually agreed upon swaps" was news or not. A lot of pro-Israel folks on Twitter (but granted not all) didn't seem to think it was a big deal at the time. I think two things played into the reaction.

One, the left, led by the New York Times, played this is up as a big change and that an American President was finally standing up to Israel.

Second, the language choices Obama made and the fact that no one doubts in his heart of hearts Obama would throw Israel under the bus if he could. The fact is, Presidents don't always have full freedom of action. It's like there are checks and balances or something (thank God).

Now, he's walked back or clarified his stance (depending on your point of view). The anti-Israeli left will say "the Jews got to him". Many on the right will say, "Bibi got him".

I think the fact is, reality got him.

Obama is simply doing what many other Presidents (Carter, Bush, Clinton and even G.W. Bush gave it a shot) have done...try and build a legacy by solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He'll fail just like the rest simply because the Palestinians don't want to solve it by any means other than the destruction of Israel. Until that changes, this will always be a Siren's Song that winds up with everyone crashing on the rocks.

Just a reminder...Obama has a history of flip-flopping and pandering on this stuff in front of AIPAC.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:17 AM | Comments (93)
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