Bangs Are Now Illegal

On Sunday, we went to a Welcome-to-School Mass at one of our son's colleges. It was held in the sports center and there must have been 5,000 or more people there, many of them very attractive young ladies.

None of them had bangs.

They all had hairstyles that swept their hair off their faces to one side or the other. Some had it parted in the middle, some parted on the side. No bangs. The bangless look was great for some, not so much for others. It didn't matter, it was as if there were fashion police waiting to arrest anyone with bangs.

This is a sad development as young ladies with bangs can be quite alluring.
I guess this is just one more way I'm out of step with the times. I miss bangs.

Image borrowed without permission from hairstyledesign.com.

Emptying the Nest

Last week we shipped off two of our sons to college. They've both got bright futures and were excited about going. One received a terrific scholarship and the other has a great employment record despite jobs being so difficult to find. Despite plenty of setbacks in their lives, they had navigated the hazards of youth and were moving on to the next step towards living their lives as men.

It was heartbreaking to see them move out.

You tell yourself that they're doing what they're supposed to, you tell yourself that it's a healthy thing, but that doesn't keep it from hurting. Every time I saw a little boy of any age this last weekend I remembered when mine was that age. Ow! We're in a period of mourning where you regret the loss of a phase of life. They'll be back for summers and vacations (maybe), but they've moved out for good for all intents and purposes.

We're all on very good terms, we text them both every day. One is close enough to come home for dinner from time to time and the other is close enough for us to drive up and see once in a while, but the bridge has been crossed and if they're successful, which we hope, they won't be coming back.

This is what we wanted. We worked and sacrificed for this. Now that it has come, parts of us wish it hadn't.

Summer's Almost Gone

So it's time for a little Beach Boys music. Enjoy!

Hilarious!

Watch it all the way to the end.

Blog While You Shop For Groceries!

I saw this at a nearby Vons grocery store. Unreal.

Glenn Beck is a Racist

... or so I've been told. We know this, apparently, because the crowd at his "Restoring Honor" rally was predominantly white.

How does this work, exactly?

Glenn put out an invitation for people to come to this rally on his radio and TV show as well as his website. Everyone was invited. If one particular group chose not to show up, we're to conclude that Glenn is a racist? If that's the case, then you have no control at all over whether or not you're a racist since you can't choose who responds to your invitations.

With this logic, if the whites of Selma, Alabama in 1952 chose not to attend an open BBQ hosted by a black family that would make the black family the racists.

If no Eskimos have ever been to your house for a dinner party, that means you are a racist.
Other Theocraticians blogging about Beck:

• Dean has a quick take on it.
• Secular Apostate claims Beck gives the Left the vapors.
• Our Grand Inquisitor has the racism angle covered as well.
• Our Prelate to the Primates is looking at the size of the crowd, not its racial makeup.
• Holy Scholar Mog looks at the Beck-Sharpton angle.

GIF of the Day

see more Señor Gif

A Question for Dean

Since our Monk of Miscellaneous Musing is a huge college football fan, we're wondering what his take might be on The Big Game coming up on September 2. You know, the Rams vs. the Bulls. Rhode Island vs. Buffalo.

Over to you, Dean!

Honestly, this looks more like a snail shell than a ram to me.

Staying Power

There's a decent article in the WaPo today discussing how a financially destitute and secular Europe is rethinking the whole EU concept. Whether that's true or not, one thing in the article jumped out at me.

The renationalization of European politics is a product, first and foremost, of generational change. For Europeans who came of age during World War II or the Cold War, the E.U. is an escape route from a bloody past. Not so for younger Europeans: A recent poll revealed that French citizens over 55 are almost twice as likely to see the E.U. as a guarantee of peace as those under 36.

The article itself doesn't mention how Europe is no longer Christian, but this little tidbit shows one way that matters. Without a common faith, historical events aren't enough to bind people together. In time, the generation that was affected by, say, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 dies off and the following ones are no longer driven by its memory.

By contrast, faith lives on almost unchanged from generation to generation. Without that as a binding force, you're left with ... what? What lasts across the decades to carry on a culture with any kind of force? It seems to me that in its absence, you're left with entropic decay where the binding elements in society are the means by which appetites can be satisfied with minimal effort. I'm not sure I agree with the article, but it's possible that the effort of maintaining the EU may well become too much trouble in exchange for preventing disasters that no one can remember.

History doesn't seem to have much staying power.

Let us never forget, err, whichever battle this was!
Update: I can hear the argument being made that a common faith didn't seem to stop the wars, but that's not my point. Powerful, ambitious, amoral men still ordered their citizens to kill other people whether they were Catholics (French), Protestants (English) or Atheists (Nazis and Communists). What's interesting to me is that the EU was constructed to bring a permanent peace to Europe, but the desire for permanent peace burns brightly only so long as people remember the horrors of war. As that dims with fading memory as all of history does, it falls away as a driving force, leaving you with ... what?

Link of the Day

This is a must-read piece on what hyperinflation would look like in the US. It's absolutely fantastic. Here's a tiny tidbit.

One of the effects of Chile’s hyperinflation was the collapse in asset prices.

This would seem counterintuitive. After all, if the prices of consumer goods and basic staples are rising in a hyperinflationary environment, then asset prices should rise as well—right? Equities should rise in price—since more money is chasing after the same number of stock. Real estate prices should rise also—and for the same reason. Right?

Actually, wrong—and for a simple reason: Once basic necessities are unmet, and remain unmet for a sustained period of time, any asset will be willingly and instantly sacrificed, in order to meet that basic need.

To put it in simple terms: If you were dying of thirst in the middle of the desert, would you give up your family heirloom diamonds, in exchange for a gallon of water? The answer is obvious—yes. You would sacrifice anything and everyting—instantly—in order to meet your basic needs, or those of your family.

Definitely read the whole thing.

Inequality Caused the Crash

It must have, because our response to inequality was what led to people being given loans they couldn't afford.

But what is the root cause behind the growing inequality in America?

That would make the obvious solution something that is too horrible to see.

What we need is someone to lead us along a new path, where we solve our inequality problems without having to revert to the oppression of the old ways.

Darwinism and the Mosque

This article by James Taranto in the WSJ is loaded with tiny tidbits to analyze and dissect. It's all about how the media and the left hold most Americans in contempt. Here's one bit in particular that caught my eye.

Here's Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's labor secretary, explaining "The Anatomy of Intolerance" to readers of TalkingPointsMemo.com:

Many Americans (and politicians who [sic] the polls) don't want a mosque at Manhattan's Ground Zero. . . .

Where is all this coming from?

It's called fear. When people are deeply anxious about holding on to their homes, their jobs, and their savings, they look for someone to blame. And all too often they find it in "the other"--in people who look or act differently, who come from foreign lands, who have what seem to be strange religions, who cross our borders illegally...

So if some Americans are afraid of people "who have what seem to be strange religions," it must be a totally irrational reaction to "economic insecurity." It couldn't possibly have anything to do with an act of mass murder committed in the name of the religion in question.

And Reich doesn't just fail to see the obvious. He dehumanizes his fellow Americans by treating their values, feelings and opinions as no more than reflexive reactions to material conditions.

Darwinism (and scientific atheism in general) tries to explain the world as a series of logical consequences of previous actions. There is no deeper meaning to anything, everything you see is the product of evolution and scientifically explainable actions. That mental model for explaining the unknown is the same that's being applied here.

The implicit explanation goes thusly: "There is no deeper meaning behind the actions of people who disagree with me, their positions can all be explained away through simple sociological laws and precepts. Economic uncertainty breeds fear. It's a well-known fact. The people that don't want the mosque are simply too ignorant to understand how their views are the products of evolution in a socio-economic sense."

Herein lies the arrogance of all such thinking - the author, in this case Robert Reich, believes himself immune from such effects. He thinks he lives outside the laboratory of life, an observer of the poor creatures trapped within. He's not just a better person than you, he is actually different from you. Where you cannot perceive the evolutionary processes at work upon your worldview and are therefore incapable of preventing your bigotries from flourishing, he lives in a different reality entirely where such forces do not work.

In that way, Robert Reich sees himself as God.

And that's the position all such people hold. Their views are all the product of rational thought, unencumbered by the mundane forces that drive you - greed, lust, fear, vanity. This thought process leads in one direction - the more these people manage your lives, the better off you'll be.

Unless they happen to be wrong and they really are driven by the same forces as you.

See how calmly he listens to your ravings? Truly, he is a Great Man. Bow ye down and worship him and pray that he deigns to guide you.

I Had Always Thought That Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang Was The Worst Car-Related Video Of All Time

... but I was wrong. Dig the Justicialism Dancers gyrating to the hit folk song, "The Chevy Volt*."

* - I don't actually know what the name of the song is. I'm too nauseated to look it up.

Lots of Americans Are Stupid

... that's the only message I can think was intended by the polls that wondered how many of us thought Obama is a Muslim. That thought jumped out at me as I read Peggy Noonan's column today.

For a week all you heard from cable anchors was "PEOPLE think OBAMA is a MUSLIM. It's in the POLLS. How do you EXPLAIN it?" Every time I heard it, I'd think: Maybe it's because you keep screaming it.

Why in the world was this question even asked in a poll? What was the purpose? Given that some of us think the moon landings were faked or the government was behind 9/11, there was never any doubt that this question would get a healthy batch of positive answers.

Why ask it?

The whole purpose of asking questions where you know you'll get an incorrect answer is to show what a pack of morons those people are. I'm trying to imagine the staff meetings in the news media where they discussed how to divide up the 22 minutes of air time they have for their nightly news broadcasts. What was the point of making this poll a big portion of it? "Hey, I know, let's make fun of the dummies in our audience! Let's make them feel small and ignorant!"

And that was a good idea because ... why?

Update: Our Monks of Miscellaneous Musings address the issue, but not the question of "Why?"

Hmmm

Our buddy, Secular Apostate, posted this video. It should give you pause.

If what it says is true - that later sections of the Koran override earlier ones and that the calls for violence come in the later sections, then our perception of Islam is backwards. It's not that the violent Moslems are misreading the book, it's that the peaceful ones are.

Coming soon to my Audible.com - the Koran.

Stubbornly Resisting Reality

The California legislature has not yet made the intellectual leap required of it.

Unfunded public pension liabilities, which a Pew Center on the States report calculates is now as high as $1 trillion nationwide, threaten to bankrupt states that fail to address this ticking fiscal time bomb. But in California, which has an unimaginable $500 billion public pension problem and became the object of national ridicule for outrageous pension abuses in Bell, state lawmakers still couldn’t bring themselves to pass legislation preventing highly paid government employees from using unused vacation and sick days accumulated during their last year on the job to pad their life-long pensions.

The use of leave days is pretty mild stuff compared to the monstrous unfunded liability that's out there, but they can't yet manage to remove even that. They've not yet woken up to the fact that their temporary fantasy world of rights, benefits and entitlements is coming to an end. Their fictional world lasted only as long as the borrowing continued and now that it's winding down, they will have to change the way they see reality. That's going to be a very slow and painful process for many of them (and us).

"Come on, you stupid mule, err, legislator! We've got to cut spending!"
"No! We must increase spending! I won't cut, I won't, I won't, I won't!"

Multiplying by Zero

After the appalling home sales numbers released recently, Bloomberg is piling on with more bad news.

Stocks dropped for fifth day and U.S. index futures declined amid concern Europe’s debt burden is worsening while the American recovery falters. The yen weakened after Japan said it will curb appreciation, and Treasuries rose...The decline in U.S. futures indicated the S&P 500 will extend yesterday’s 1.5 percent tumble to a seven-week low. Orders for U.S. durable goods increased less than forecast in July, a sign that one of the few remaining bright spots in the economy is cooling.

The stimuli are all wearing off and they have accomplished nothing. All they did was devour future demand. The cash-for-clunkers did not generate any new demand for cars at all, it simply caused people who were going to buy cars anyway to buy them earlier. A brief bump in sales was followed by a slowdown. Dittos for the temporary tax credit to buy new homes.

Way back when the stimuli were being debated, I never heard a coherent conclusion to this statement: "After we invest in America with the stimulus, our investment will be paid back with higher profits because American companies will finally be able to ..." With Eisenhower's freeway system, the statement could be completed with "ship goods across country with greater speed and less cost." With the Democrats' Stimuloid Porkgasm™ all you heard was mumbled references to economic models and financial multipliers. This was a smoke screen hiding ignorance.

Financial multipliers are modeling shorthand for an aggregate completion of the sentence above. That is, the multiplier for the Interstate Highway system built by Eisenhower was a summation of the increase in economic activity for everything from chicken farmers who could now ship hens farther and faster to truckers who would get paid to do so. There was a real world event occurring behind every component of the multiplier.

We've finally discovered the Keynesian multiplier for the Democrats' orgy of spending.
What were the real world events supposedly behind the Stimuloid's multiplier? People spending more money on electricity because they were now getting it from less efficient solar power plants? There were no believable real world pay backs ever listed for the Stimuloid. If you can't clearly describe the payback to an investment then it's not an investment at all, it's just spending.

Every binge comes to an end eventually. Let's hope this one drags the profligate charlatans who created the Stimuloid Porkgasm™ down with it.

Cheezburger of the Day

moar funny pictures

Begging for Alms Every Month

... is where we're at. This WSJ video describes just how much the we're borrowing with short-term bonds. If you want to fast-forward, the discussion gets really good at 2:00 and beyond. Remember the size of the debt load - more than $13T. 60% of $13T is about $8T. That's a lot of leverage.

The mechanics of this are interesting, but the larger-scale strategy is the really depressing part. What did we buy with all this debt? We bought entitlements and social programs that have tried and failed to take the place of the family.

Boogie Boarding

... this morning, but not in such huge waves and certainly not to this horrible music. It sounds like a possessed man vomiting while Iron Maiden plays in the background.