The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:56 AM | Comments (93)
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30 Years of MTV

It was 30 years ago today that the video began to play. And music was never watched the same again.

Sadly in the years since MTV has moved away from music to reality and game shows. And so now we're once again in need of a cable channel that plays music videos. But in their heyday MTV was the channel to watch if you were young and into music.

So to commemorate their 30th anniversary here are the first few minutes of MTV as it went live at 12:01 am on August 1st , 1981.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:27 PM | Comments (943)
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75% content-free snark.

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:43 PM | Comments (287)
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Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer are voting for the bill, but they're not whipping votes.

Enter the fightin' fightin' progressives:

House Democrats don’t want to carry Republicans’ water, though. Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., said every Democrat who votes for the bill takes a Republican off the hook — he urged colleagues to wait until Republicans put at least 200 votes on the board “before we give them cover.”

I love it. Don't vote for it. Let's shut it down, then.

Allah guesses that as few House members as possible will vote "yea," and we might see some vote-switching based on whether it's safe to vote "nay" or not.

It's possible, still, some of these idiots might get a little too cute and vote it down.

And what will happen to the media's favorite value -- "compromise" -- then?

Oh, and it must be time for Sheila Jackson Lee to say something stupid. And maybe infected with unaware self-parody. Today she announced something awful to behold -- we are now witnessing "the tyranny of the minority."

Posted by: Ace at 02:41 PM | Comments (599)
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The message is the medium here -- the most obnoxiously Obama-boosting leftwing major media outlet in the country.

Friday's news on GDP shows the double dip has arrived — an expansion of only 1.3 percent and consumer spending up 0.1 percent in the second quarter. Astonishingly low by any account. The debt ceiling trouble and lack of a longer term resolution to the deficit will make it worse.

The U.S. has entered a second recession. It may not be as bad as the first. Economists say that the Great Recession began in December 2007 and lasted until July 2009. That may be the way that the economy was seen through the eyes of experts, but many Americans do not believe that the 2008-2009 downturn ever ended. A Gallup poll released in April found that 29 percent of those queried thought the economy was in a “depression” and 26 percent said that the original recession had persisted into 2011.

In more DOOM, manufacturing activity has hit its lowest level in two years.

The Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing executives, said Monday that its index of manufacturing activity fell to 50.9 percent in July from 55.3 percent in June. The reading was the lowest since July 2009 — one month after the recession officially ended.

It gets a little worse. Not only did the new corrected GDP figures show we're in the President's favorite metaphor -- a ditch -- but these new numbers also demonstrate there's been none of the assumed "surge" of productivity for the past two years.

It had been believed, based on these faulty numbers, that while US growth was sluggish, at least workers were increasing productivity, which would eventually herald a jump in wealth should we ever exit the slump.

But no -- productivity is as lame as actual production (last item).

Thanks to krak, in the sidebar.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (56)
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Liberals often whine that conservatives go looking for external enemies to fight.

You know what's worse than making war with an external enemy? Making war with an internal one -- the preference of the Left.

Understanding never runs out for Islamist killers, but there are limits to how much tolerance they can gin up for American Taliban.

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit.

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists,” according to several sources in the room.

BidenÂ’s office declined to comment about what the vice president said inside the closed-door session.

Earlier in the day, Biden told Senate Democrats that Republican leaders have “guns to their heads” in trying to negotiate deals.

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (474)
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Gallup, via Hot Air.

I'm never sure what to make of this, since the fraction of "conservatives" (41%) exceeds the fraction of Republicans (around 32%), and the fraction of Democrats (around 38%) greatly exceeds the fraction of "liberals" (21%).

So it seems to me that some self-identified conservatives are not all that conservative, and that many liberals refuse to categorize them as such and call themselves "moderates," even while voting for Nancy Pelosi, Jim McDermott, Harry Reid and so on.

Gallup offers five responses: Very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal.

I'd like to see the question with five different responses: Conservative, Moderate but more conservative than liberal, moderate, moderate but more liberal than conservative, and liberal.

To me the more intriguing question is what those calling themselves "moderate" really think.

Everything in elections is about the leaners and weakly-attached voters. It matters less which fraction of conservatives are "very" conservative and which fraction are merely conservative. What matters a great deal is how those voters in the middle are leaning.

Posted by: Ace at 11:40 AM | Comments (276)
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First of all, I think it would require an amendment to permit the federal government to lay a point-of-sale sales tax on good sold to the public. I'm not assuming Congress can just claim "Commerce Clause" and implement such a tax of their own authority.

The reason I am thinking about a national sales tax is due to a point many conservatives are making: With 51% of the population paying no federal income tax whatsoever, they have no "skin in the game." They have no "tax sensitivity;" increased taxes on "the rich" (that is, the 49% paying federal income taxes) are pure win for them, at least as far as primary effects. (Secondary effects, like retarding growth, are a matter of argument and theory and are not as powerful a driver of behavior and belief as primary effects.)

So how do you get more of the public to have "skin in the game" as far as increasing taxation?

As a starting point, I do not believe it is politically possible to raise tax rates on those not paying taxes right now (aka "the poor," even though most are not really poor as we've historically defined it).

To some extent I suppose this can be done, sort of invisibly, by freezing the level of the personal deduction, etc, to let inflation do its work, so that in ten years a smaller percentage of the public will not be immune to taxation any longer,

I'm not sure that'll work, though.

But a widely-collected national sales tax would capture virtually everyone and make most people taxpayers, at least to some extent, even those in black market occupations. With some money coming in on the sales tax side of things, income level rates could be lowered a bit, to make it all mostly revenue-neutral. (As a practical matter, it wouldn't be actually revenue-neutral, but revenue-raising, because why else would Democrats vote for it?)

There are several conservative objections to such an idea:

1. A national sales tax could be increased at any time and is an "invisible tax," scarcely noticed by the public, and therefore gives the government license to tax the hell out of the public. So the government could extract more and more from the public, without the public noticing, and the public would be left with the mystery of why their economy has faltered; there would be no "fingerprints" recoverable in the crime to pin it on taxation.

I don't believe this objection is close to true. Some sorts of sales taxes can be well-hidden from the public by incorporating those taxes inside the base cost of a product; I think that is the point of the Value Added Tax, and thus why liberals so love the idea of it. (I think.)

But a national sales tax -- 3% or whatever -- imposed at point-of-sale is plainly visible to everyone. It isn't hidden.

It's actually annoying. No one likes a sales tax. That is a good thing about them, that they're visible and annoying.

I don't think these taxes are "invisible." When states increase (or impose for the first time) sales taxes, it's generally fairly contentious, about as contentious as any tax-hike plan. I don't think it's true that a national sales tax, added to the top of any bill, and clearly indicated on a receipt, is a "stealth" tax the way other taxes (such as the value added tax) might be.

2. You don't want to impose a tax on such a vital activity of the economy -- consumer purchase of consumer goods -- because taxes always, inevitably, retard the activity taxed, by making it more costly to engage in this activity.

This is true, but this is true of virtually every tax laid. We want people to make higher incomes, but of course we penalize those higher incomes with higher taxes. We want people to buy and sell property, but we impose taxes on the sale of property; we want people to own their own property, but we impose taxes every quarter or year on that property.

Apart from sin taxes or the death tax, every tax we lay on the public is actually on an activity we'd wish to encourage, not discourage. So when this objection is laid, it has to be evaluated in context -- true, we don't wish to discourage consumerism, but then we also don't wish to discourage capital gains, and yet we tax those, and we don't wish to discourage investment income, and we don't wish to tax income from interest on savings, and yet we tax that, and so on and so on.

The argument would have to be made that consumer purchases are unique among economic activities in being so sensitive to taxation that we do not dare lay a tax on it, even while taxing virtually every other exchange.

So, if those arguments are not strong, should we think about this?

Now, I'm not sold on this idea, and have just been thinking about it for a week or so, so this is very first-draft and first-blush.

But I am worried about that old bromide about the country going to hell when 51% of the country realizes it can vote itself all the income of the other 49%, and am wondering how on earth we can make a good-sized majority of 60 or 66% concerned about government spending again.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (305)
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Ah, Norah. A reliably reflexive liberal know-nothing, endlessly promoted through the ranks simply because she had Beauty Queen looks.

Finally she interrogates an administration official fiercely.

There's a catch, of course. Norah O"Donnell of MSNBC and Chris Matthews' Spank Bank demands to know why Obama sold us out.

Beauty fades but stupid lingers.

Specifically, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell peppered Carney with terse, accusatory questions about the lack of tax revenue (read: tax increases) in the debt ceiling deal. O’Donnell complained about how many GOP demands were met by the deal, and then said to Carney: “You gave them everything they wanted and we got nothing.” That “we” is very telling. It was a tense moment in the room, and O’Donnell seemed to give voice to frustrated liberals who feel the deal gave significantly more to Republicans than Democrats, and included no tax increases–something President Obama had demanded be included for most of the negotiations.

There is an argument about whether that "we" is as telling as it seems -- some defend Norah O'Donnell, claiming at this part of her question, she was asking a question from the point of view of the deal's progressive critics, and not in her own voice, necessarily.

I'd make three points: First, she's got some emotion invested in this question. You can hear the frustration in her voice. I don't think she's a talented woman, so I don't think she's just conjuring up some channeled dramatic pitch here.

Second, it is telling, to me, how solicitous she is of the progressive caucus' concerns. Throughout this entire debt deal, I have heard again and again how Republicans' concerns are either illegitimate or possibly borderline, arguably legitimate but will simply have to be put aside for the good of the country; but note that when it comes to a progressive whine about tax increases, she's on board in trumpeting that complaint.

Because that complaint, you see, is objectively superior to the conservatives' complaint. It must be, because no objective reporter would otherwise behave as if it has been objectively determined that one side is objectively right and one side is objectively wrong.

Third, and this really is just a variation of the last one, but it's important: Throughout this we have heard the MFM scream at the tops of their lungs that conservatives must compromise their principles away, and be less willing to fight for their agenda, because compromise trumps conservative values.

But what's Norah O'Donnell's implication here? Liberals and liberals alone should have fought harder for their agenda.

I thought fighting for principles was bad, no? It turns out I've missed yet another nuance.

So, objectively, we can rank the three values here in objective order, and we know this is the proper prioritization of these values because objective reporters, who are completely objective, have objectively ranked them thus:

1. First priority: the progressive agenda

2. Second priority: compromising for "the good of the country"

3. Third and last, absolute-bottom-level priority: the conservative agenda

So, there you go, an objective explanation for this seeming inconsistency in the MFM's attitudes, reporting, questions, and advocacy.

It is objectively determined that Progressivism > Compromise > Conservatism.

That's not bias. That's just the objective truth, and you know that must be true, because the objective reporters in the media are telling you so.

Thanks to Slublog.

Posted by: Ace at 10:20 AM | Comments (119)
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First theory: the drenching of the world in pornography might actually be reducing sexual assault. (Full article at Townhall.)

I have to note this is actually an old, old article by Steve Chapman, from 2007. It seems to have been republished now because Chapman is on vacation, and they're printing some old, less-time-sensitive columns.

[I]n the past two decades, we have essentially conducted a vast experiment on the social consequences of such material. If the supporters of censorship were right, we should be seeing an unparalleled epidemic of sexual assault. But all the evidence indicates they were wrong. As raunch has waxed, rape has waned.

This is part of a broad decrease in criminal mayhem. Since 1993, violent crime in America has dropped by 58 percent. But the progress in this one realm has been especially dramatic. Rape is down 72 percent and other sexual assaults have fallen by 68 percent. Even in the past two years, when the FBI reported upticks in violent crime, the number of rapes continued to fall.

...

In a paper presented at Stanford Law School in 2006, he reported that, after adjusting for other differences, states where Internet access expanded the fastest saw rape decline the most. A 10 percent increase in Internet access, Kendall found, typically meant a 7.3 percent reduction in the number of reported rapes.

For other types of crime, by contrast, he found no correlation with Web use. What this research suggests is that sexual urges play a big role in the incidence of rape -- and that pornographic websites provide a harmless way for potential predators to satisfy those desires.

I'd skip republishing an old piece except that Naomi Wolfe is writing about porn too. She claims the ubiquity of hard-core pornography is making men crazy, or at least screwing with their brains to de-sensitize them to normal (and real) sex.

She alludes to the Internet adventurism of Anthony Weiner and Chris Lee -- why are what appear to be normal men taking what would previously be thought to be insane risks?

Six years ago, I wrote an essay called “The Porn Myth,” which pointed out that therapists and sexual counselors were anecdotally connecting the rise in pornography consumption among young men with an increase in impotence and premature ejaculation among the same population. These were healthy young men who had no organic or psychological pathology that would disrupt normal sexual function.

The hypothesis among the experts was that pornography was progressively desensitizing these men sexually. Indeed, hardcore pornographyÂ’s effectiveness in achieving rapid desensitization in subjects has led to its frequent use in training doctors and military teams to deal with very shocking or sensitive situations.

Given the desensitization effect on most male subjects, researchers found that they quickly required higher levels of stimulation to achieve the same level of arousal. The experts I interviewed at the time were speculating that porn use was desensitizing healthy young men to the erotic appeal of their own partners.

Both claims make sense to me. Not that any policy implications flow from that -- a study may be true, and yet no law or government program need be created due to the consequence of that study being true.

It's odd that I have to say that, but we are in an age when the default assumption seems to be "We have a study, now we need a law."

The nation has become itself addicted to such instant-gratification, impulse-driven political pornography.

Not every damn problem requires the intervention of the state.

This is actually something I've begun internalizing, based on commenters' arguments, over time. My first impulse used to be to make arguments based on the futility or imprudence of such measures. Little by little I've begun beginning with the more elemental question: What business is this of the state? Who authorized the state to patrol for this? Where did we collectively agree to even entertain a state function in such affairs?

It's a good starting question. One that I've only lately begun to start with.

I used to deem these sorts of questions "theoretical" rather than practical. Well, they are theoretical. But they're also foundational.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (182)
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