Don Draper In Love

Feminism, Film, General, Hollywood, Pop-Culture

“It’s refreshing to see a Golden Age of Hollywoodish leading man like tall, dark, and handsome Jon Hamm, who plays creative director Don Draper as the strong, silent type” in “the cable period drama Mad Men.” So wrote Steve Sailer.

The character Hamm plays is a complex character. And he does not talk a lot. My favorite people ration speech.

The nostalgia the production triggers is also “nostalgia for the days when women had soothing, soft voices, spoke in complete sentences, and seemed so much smarter and refined than their modern-day, emancipated shrew sisters.”

Now, Don Draper finds himself in love with just such a lady.

Dreamy.

The Twit Is Atwitter

Elections, Feminism, Gender, Human Accomplishment, Intellectualism, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans, Technology, The Zeitgeist

Meghan McCain opened up her mouth to say nothing. There is nothing new about that. But media are aflutter—a sad fact that simply enforces what you already know about the state of American public life.

“Well, I speak as a 26-year-old woman and my problem is that, no matter what, Christine O’Donnell is making a mockery of running for public office,” McCain told anchor Christiane Amanpour. “She has no real history, no real success in any kind of business.”
McCain, daughter of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said that the message, “that sends to my generation is: one day you can just wake and run for Senate, no matter how [much of] a lack of experience you have. And it scares for me for a lot of reasons.”

Note Meghan’s constant allusions to her tender age. In another universe youth would be a reason to shut up. In the country in which kids are imbued with mythical qualities (Rousseau’s Noble Savage applied to small savages), the words of the greatest ditz to date to emerge from that big tent that Republicans keep touting carry as much heft as said heifer carries on her person.

Meghan is like a dripping tap. If you’ve read the first few lines of any of her blog posts, you’ve read all two diarrheic pages of it. Buzzwords peppered with clichés, and prefaced with “I feel like,” convey Meghan’s mushy, thinking-averse, pop-politics: “I feel like we need to be reaching out to moderates and young people. I feel like we need to be reaching out to minorities.”

The creature gets away with calling herself a writer because America has facilitated her delusions of grandeur. Meghan has “written” for Newsweek, no less, and now adds to the political bestiality on The Daily Beast. Both publications accept Ms. McCain’s version of a premise and a conclusion. For example: “I, like, disagree with that completely, and think that’s, like, completely crazy.”

As hopeless, Republicans have failed to make the only valid case against Meghan, and that is that she is really really stupid. But how can they, when making the case for the GOP are members of the same, hubristic Millennial generation? If smart adults were in charge, they would refuse to address anything Meghan disgorges from her puffy, painted face.

Idiots have come into their own in a big way, courtesy of depraved consumers, and complicit TV producers and publishers, of pixel and paper alike. The duller you are and the louder you crow in contemporary America, the better you do. Meghan McCain is not working with much—and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot.

As for “Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware,” I don’t know a lot about her, except that in the snippets I’ve caught from her debates, she has acquitted herself quite well.

Meghan’s cretinism and cringe factor far outweigh those of poor Christine’s, who seems sweet enough.

UPDATE IV: Forclosure Fracas (Still About Deadbeats)

Business, Debt, Federal Reserve Bank, Law, libertarianism, Private Property, Reason

Vox Day, friend and fellow (libertarian) rebel on WND.COM, has objected to my comments about his bank foreclosure comments in the BAB post titled “Financial Paperwork Crisis (No Conspiracy Thinking, Please).” Vox and I have been exchanging emails on the topic. Vox traces the arguments back-and-forth in his post “A dialogue with Ilana (UPDATED).”

Consider: You’re a homeowners. You have a mortgage with the bank. The title deed is yours; you have a legal right or title to the property. However, this obtains just as long as you honor your mortgage payments. The bank has a lien on the property until you pay-up the mortgage. If you pay your monthly mortgage installments, and the bank has cashed these payments, your bank account will reflect that. If you’ve met these conditions, and the bank, nevertheless, proceeds to foreclose on you—this is an error, and a legal and statistical anomaly; an outlier case.

It is my understanding that Vox refutes the above; says the latter scenario may be the norm, or could easily become the norm due to endemic fraud.

Distilled, I contend that it is almost always true that a necessary condition for a foreclosure is for the homeowner to have failed to make his mortgage payments. It is my understanding that Vox disputes this.

I told Vox that the one article he referred me to “began with a one-case study as its proof. This is statistically worse than insignificant. The article graduated to assertion. Then added another one-case study.” Vox may well be right, “but the data in the column he provided do not prove his case.

I have since Googled some of the terms Vox deploys in his post. One search led me to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. When Ezra does get something right it is only by accident. In any event, the Klein article does not support the Day case (as I understood it), namely that the foreclosed upon are being treated unjustly, even routinely robbed of their property.

Understand: I have no dog in the fracas other than the truth; am quite ready to find for Vox. So far, the hard evidence is missing.

Our debate might be delayed for a while, but it will continue. Stay tuned.

UPDATED I (Oct. 18): Difster’s comment hereunder is mostly waffle unless he is able to address what I wrote in the post: has the homeowner being foreclosed upon been paying his debt or not. He can’t. I really can’t abide argument that doesn’t cleave to reality and evidence. Bring me evidence of all the cases of paid-up homeowners who’ve been foreclosed upon. Present that here, please.

UPDATE II: Judging from this tale of woe, the lawyers for the defaulting borrower are themselves using what they consider irregularities of procedure to try and get their delinquent client’s debt forgiven. I am not saying that “MERS, the electronic mortgage tracking system,” and the banks that use it, are following the letter of the law, but what people seem to be skirting here, much to my horror, is that these borrowers owe money they borrowed. You don’t forgive someone’s debt because the debt-holder’s bureaucracy is bad, or even dubious. And you don’t accuse bankers as a group of robbing home owners of title to their homes, because of problems of paper trail. (As I pointed out here, to argue against the bankers, in this case, on the ground that they are, moreover, embroiled in the fractional reserve system is to make an error of logic, maybe even a categorical error. Along the lines of releasing murderers because justice system is corrupt, etc.)

Note too that nowhere do the delinquent borrowers deny that they have not paid their debts, only that they are struggling “to figure out who owns their loans, who can negotiate loan modifications with them, or even how to get a call returned.”

Also: Borrowers are deploying the very argument the bankers are using: it’s the bureaucracy.

What do you know, it seems that, as outlined in this BAB post, “the latest foreclosure crisis is indeed bureaucratic in nature.”

UPDATE III: The thing to take away from Vox’s WND column today is this line: “the law is very clear on the matter: ‘If the chain of title is broken, then the borrower’s loan is no longer secured by the property.'”

This is the positive law. The fact of the borrower’s debt is unchanged. A took from B in order to buy C. That’s another “chain” to keep in mind.

UPDATE IV (Oct. 19): STILL ABOUT DEADBEATS. From all the reports so far, FBN’s Gerri Willis’ being the latest, it is as I said. The defaulters owe boatloads of money. The bankers bungled the paper work in a manner that verges on the criminal. The reality, in as much as property rights go, comports with my distillation on this post and the one linked to it, “Financial Paperwork Crisis (No Conspiracy Thinking, Please).”

UPDATED: Economic Indices Ignore ‘Century of the State’

Economy, Free Markets, Individual Rights, Liberty, The State, The West

Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada and Chile have leapfrogged over the United States on the Fraser Institute’s index of economic freedom.

“In this year’s index, Hong Kong retains the highest rating for economic freedom, 9.05 out of 10. The other top 10 nations are: Singapore (8.70), New Zealand (8.27), Switzerland (8.08), Chile (8.03), United
States (7.96), Canada (7.95), Australia (7.90), Mauritius (7.82), and the United Kingdom (7.81).”

Forty-two data points are used to construct a summary index and to measure the degree of economic freedom in five broad areas:
1 Size of Government: Expenditures, Taxes, and Enterprises;
2 Legal Structure and Security of Property Rights;
3 Access to Sound Money;
4 Freedom to Trade Internationally;
5 Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business.

With some variation, The Heritage/WSJ’s economically freest countries are these:

1- Hong Kong
2- Singapore
3- Australia
4- New Zealand
5- Ireland
6- Switzerland
7- Canada
8- United States
9- Denmark
10- Chile

Lest you forget, these indices provide important but woefully incomplete data. Long ago, Pierre Lemieux, a libertarian Canadian economist (a friend too) explained:

“If ‘economic freedom’ is inseparable from the rest of human liberty in a social context (using one’s property to express dissenting opinions, travel, have sex, grow marijuana, store one’s firearms, raise funds from “public” investors, etc.), the freedom indexes are off the mark.

“This explains why some countries ruled by hard tyrannies (as opposed to the soft, Tocquevillian brand we know in the West), where nobody in his right mind would want live except to make a buck as a privileged foreigner or a member the local nomenklatura, make it to the top of the list. Who would want to live in Hong Kong (ranked 1st of 151 countries in the HF/WSJ index), that is, under one of the worst tyrannies on earth, and so much so for its very efficiency? Who would want to be a peasant under other Asian tyrannies like Singapore (ranked 2nd)?”

“The selective definition of economic freedom also explains why the indexes show growing economic freedom while everybody who lives in the real world must know that the 20th century, rightly described by Mussolini as ‘the century of the state,’ is continuing in the 21st with a vengeance. During the 12 years of the HF/WSJ index, economic freedom is supposed to have increased. For example, over that period, both the U.S. (now ranked 9th) and Canada (ranked 12th) have improved their scores by 11%, while in both countries (and others) the Surveillance State was growing uncontrollably, including on financial markets. In the U.S., so many business executives are going to jail that perhaps repression will have to be outsourced to China.”

“Thus, the ‘economic freedom’ that is being measured is a rather special animal: it is the freedom to do what is narrowly defined as freedom in the statistics underlying the index. In practice, the freedom indexes encompass some general conditions for economic freedom (like a stable currency, or narrowly defined ‘property rights’), specific government restrictions or controls (on foreign investment, for example), and consequences of state intervention (the informal economy or corruption). And, of course, the weights assigned to the components of the indexes are arbitrary.”

“I am not saying that such indexes are totally useless. They do regroup variables that are correlated with GDP per capita and its growth, but keep in mind that GDP is a very unreliable construct that reveals basically nothing about the general welfare, and is based on arbitrary value judgments (this is pretty standard welfare economics: see my upcoming article in The Independent Review). The indexes may correlate with the difficulties the businessman will have with local bureaucracies. They may even indicate opportunities for investors to make money in limited contexts, assuming the information has not already been incorporated in prices. The HF/WSJ publication even contains some useful country summaries and international statistics.”

“But the freedom indexes have little to do with ‘economic freedom’ as we use the term in politics, economics and philosophy.”

UPDATE (Oct. 17): Interestingly, John Stossel has addressed Myron’s question:

“This evening on Eric Bolling’s show, Follow the Money, when I argued that economic freedom brings prosperity, lefty lawyer Ron Kuby said I was ‘full of it’ because the freest countries are not at the top of a list of the world’s richest countries:

1- Monaco
2- Liechtenstein
3- Norway
4- Luxembourg
5- Channel Islands
6- Qatar
7- Bermuda

But this is deceptive nonsense, like so much of what lefty lawyers say. It’s no surprise that small oil-rich nations, tax havens, and countries with old wealth have the highest per capita income. But the freest counties are all near the top of the list. Here’s Heritage’s list of the least economically free countries:

172- Democratic Republic of Congo
173- Libya
174- Venezuela
175- Burma
176- Eritrea
177- Cuba
178- Zimbabwe
179- North Korea

Do you want to live in any of those counties? I sure don’t.”