Father of the Queen

Homecoming queen that is.

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Female Offspring Unit #2, a Senior this year, was up for homecoming queen at last night’s festivities and, to her great surprise, won.

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It was a big night.

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This Isn't Creepy At All

This YouTube video has gotten quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere today.

Update: The video has been taken down by the producers (for obvious reasons) but you can still find an archived version here.

Aside from the disturbing, North-Korean-style-“Dear-Leader”-worship meets Children-of-the-Corn vibe of the thing . . . the other striking thing about it is that the people who participated, produced and published this thing truly think they’re helping.

Those people aren’t “grass roots” activists from the heartland. As this blogger points out, they’re wealthy Hollywood moguls and L.A. beautiful people types.

Did you notice the big Obama poster on the wall of that room? I thought it looked familiar. Could this have been the inspiration?

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I repeat. These people sincerely think this will help the Obama cause. The truly troubling thought is: “What if they’re right?”

The Law of Unintended Consequences is a Vicious *itch.

A few months ago I explained in this space that I was selling my house and getting completely out of debt because I believed things were about to get weird. Well, I think it’s safe to say that things have officially entered “weird” territory.

So how did we get here?

You can ignore most of the finger-pointing from the media and liberals. The current banking and credit crisis is a direct result of the most merciless of all historical forces–The Law of Unintended Consequences. This law dictates that whenever the federal government takes it upon itself to “fix” a problem, the fix will invariably produce effects (usually negative) that Congress never foresaw.

Stan Liebowitz explains it here.

Mark Krikorian summarized it along these lines: Back in the Clinton years, the federal government purposely began to equate sound lending practices with racism. That’s why he’s calling this “The Diversity Recession.”

Just as the depression was an unintended consequence of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tarriff Act (1930), which was a government response to the stock market crash of 1929; and just as that depression become “The Great Depression” as a result of the wrong-headed government attempts to “respond to the crisis”; so you can be sure that the current problems are a direct result of big government liberal social-engineers efforts to craft utopia a decade or two ago.

And you can be equally sure that any “fix” the Democratic leadership in Congress has in mind today, will blow back with a vengeance a few years down the line.

That lady standing in the shadows as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi craft a government response? That’s Ms. Law of Unintended Consequences. Look closely and you’ll see she’s smiling.

While I'm on a Bad News Roll . . .

[Boy, I’m just “Mr. Cheer” today. Move over Norman Vincent Peale!]

If you love books as I do (actually the word “fetish” comes to mind), or have an interest in the book publishing business, as I do, you my want to take a look at this long esssay from “New York”magazine online:

The End: The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after.

It paints a pretty bleak picture of the future of book publishing.

Not helping is the prospect–highlighted in this USA Today essay–that precious few among the current crop of high school students are likely to be interested in reading anything longer than a text message or Twitter post as adults.