Maggie's Farm

Do the Hokey Pokey and go to jail in Scotland. Well, it is a dangerous song.

Sex in the Middle School stairwell? Dang, I grew up too early.

There is no hangover cure.

Teen morality today.

Chavez: Stop buying what you want

The death of Deep Throat and the crisis of journalism. Stratfor. The case that Woodward and Bernstein were Felt's tools.

I didn't know Bison had beef cattle genes. If they interbreed, does that mean they're races of the same species? (h/t, Jungle Trader)

My Republican Party was the town party girl. Am Thinker

From News You Can Lose in The New Yorker:

Newspaper readership has been slowly dropping for decades—as a percentage of the population, newspapers have about half as many subscribers as they did four decades ago—but the Internet helped turn that slow puncture into a blowout. Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century—a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology. In a famous 1960 article called “Marketing Myopia,” Theodore Levitt held up the railroads as a quintessential example of companies’ inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Levitt argued that a focus on products rather than on customers led the companies to misunderstand their core business. Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.

The above was linked at a Buzzmachine piece about the decline of newspapers, Downbeat.

Nyquist, with a parade of stupidities. One quote:

The president indirectly proposes that the government knows better than the market. He is saying that the government knows how to save the market, namely, by violating the market. By way of analogy, this amounts to advocating promiscuity as a means for preserving virginity. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. “We’re in a huge recession,” said Bush, “but I don’t want to make it even worse.”

But President Bush has made it worse by throwing good money after bad, by redistributing the market’s losses, pronouncing in favor of moral hazard, and by making massive decisions for the market. What comes next is hyperinflation. According to a senior economist at Decision Economics, quoted in an AFP news story titled “Fed cuts rate to virtually zero, will expand stimulus moves,” the government is “pulling every lever and pulling them hard. They are going to print money until they get a reaction from the economy.” Well, the reaction has begun. The good faith and credit of the United States is over. Who is going to loan money to a government determined to inflate?

Consider the parade of stupidities we’ve seen since the crisis began in September: the bailout of Wall Street, the bailout of the banking system, and now the bailout of Detroit. This is what the president means when he says, “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” So the solution is to spend trillions to save trillions. But nothing is saved!

White House rightly slams the NYT for attempting to blame Bush for the housing bubble. Related: Quoted at Belmont:

...in an attempt to increase home ownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent, virtually every branch of the government undertook an attack on underwriting standards starting in the early 1990s. Regulators, academic specialists, GSEs, and housing activists universally praised the decline in mortgage-underwriting standards as an “innovation” in mortgage lending. This weakening of underwriting standards succeeded in increasing home ownership and also the price of housing, helping to lead to a housing price bubble. The price bubble, along with relaxed lending standards, allowed speculators to purchase homes without putting their own money at risk.

Sowell reminds us once again about the facts on the Great Depression. People love the comforting myth that government helped.

Myth or scam? Green jobs, at Coyote

LaShawn wants this book: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism 

Photo via Theo, who knows how to celebrate Christmas