You don't see this very often

From an AFP news story about the famous "national debt clock" owned by real estate developer Douglas Durst:

Durst insists that the clock is non-partisan in its effort to shame the federal government over what he sees as its willingness to gamble away the nation's future.

"We're a family business," Durst said. "We think generationally, and we don't want to see the next generation crippled by this burden," he said.

Imagine, a public figure mentioning that our nation should be "thinking generationally"!

Thank you for my first belly laugh of the day!

... to Steve Sailer, who is reviewing "V for Vendetta":

An ambitious, deeply religious Conservative politician, he had imposed martial law in the wake of a terrorist virus attack, putting society under the thumb of fanatical Church of England bishops. (According to Google, the phrase "fanatical Church of England bishops" has never been seen before.) The government dispatched all Muslims and homosexuals to concentration camps (although the film forgets to mention how these two victimized minorities got along on the inside).

Good Night and God Bless

Buck Owens has passed on.

There are days...

...when I am really glad to be living in PoMo America.

And this is one of them.

Progressives have been hyperventilating over Daniel Edwards' sculpture "Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston," which, according to Salon, is a "life-size piece depict[ing] Britney Spears crouching naked on her elbows and knees atop a bearskin rug," giving birth.

The biggest problem with this piece is that the sculptor is dedicating his work to the anti-abortion movement. Says Laura Barcella at AlterNet, "…Please don't use some nutty, obsessed artist's hypersexualized fantasy of celebrity childbirth as your twisted anti-choice propaganda. On second thought -- do that, if you really think it'll help your cause. I think it makes all of y'all anti-choicers look as crazy as the artist -- which, of course, you are."

The problem is, of course, the piece is a hoax.

Commenter quinnskylark [at the same blogpost, above] pointed to Dan Edwards' other work, which includes a Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy Memorial. He writes, "If I were a betting man, I’d guess that the artist’s point in this sculpture has nothing to do with the pro-choice/pro-life discussion and everything to do with the perception and judgment of pseudo-liberals. The press release is not meant to promote the work; it is itself part of the artwork, intended to provoke reactions like your blog post. Thus your reaction is also part of the artwork. A really good showing of the artist's work would be not only the sculpture, but framed reproductions of the condemning articles written about it. The fact that you were so emotionally affected by this artwork shows that it was successful. It is likely that the artist is not pro-life, but that he’s pro-self-expression. Perhaps he wanted to say that liberals could be as bad as conservatives when it came to reacting to opinions different than their own. If that's the case, it worked. You took the bait and revealed yourself to be a philistine in liberal clothing."

Well done, sir.

What We Have Lost

The WarNerd nails it again:

So much of what made war worth doing died in '45. That's the Nazis' real crime, if you ask me: they ruined it for everybody except the damn suits.

Via Steve Sailer, natch.

Harvesting Federal Students Loans

Expect to see the least among us saddled with increasing student loan debt, thanks to these kinds of "opportunities."

Online Colleges Receive a Boost From Congress

"This is a growth industry and you get rich not by being skeptical, but by being enthusiastic," said Henry M. Levin, director of Columbia University's National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education.

"Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day..."

from ParaPundit:

America's Younger Workers Losing Ground On Income

A new survey shows that median incomes fell for householders under 45, even as they rose for older ones, between 2001 and 2004.

Randall Parker suspects this may be because the U.S. is becoming less white, and the predominate immigrant groups are downwardly-mobile.

He points out that "from 1970 to 1997 men under 35 experienced a 19% decline in income."

• The entry of women into the workforce in those decades has helped push median family incomes up over time. But even when men and women are included together, younger workers (age 25-34) are earning well below what they did in 1970. And at all ages, evidence suggests that families are putting in more hours of work to make their household incomes rise.

• Even with extra time at work, median family income has barely budged since 1995 for householders below 45, up about 5 percent after inflation through 2004.

He writes, "Some libertarians argue that a rising tide lifts all boats. Well, wrong. A large proportion of the boats have leaks and are sitting rather lower in the water. Think of all the technological advances that have boosted productivity since 1970 and then consider these results. Something is going terribly wrong."

Parker also refers to the problems facing the children of America's majority population, most notably raging student loan and consumer debt.

Is the problem really that we are all feckless debtors? I think there is some truth to this, and it has be admitted. We have all been raised with a buy-now pay-later mentality. However, even without the problematic consumer debt saddling younger people, there is the larger issue of student loan debt, due to America's education racket.

In the future, as men continue to eschew higher education, I believe that the student loan problem will fade away on its own. Higher education will not be tenable without men. It certainly will prove to be a bad investment, as future earnings will cease to track with education.

The bigger problem facing Red State America will be weaning our children off of credit.