Real Housewives of Orange County

I watched the first DVD from the first season. Which is all I plan to watch. This show sucked compared to Jersey Shore. I highly recommend watching the first season of Jersey Shore.

The show is about five women, but only one of them is actually a housewife.

KIMBERLY

She is the only actual housewife, but her character was so boring that they replaced her in season 2. At least that’s why I assume she was replaced. Her claim to fame is that she brags about her huge artificial breasts, which don’t look very good on her skinny aging body, if you ask me. She likes to spend her husband’s money.

JEANA

Jeana is not a housewife because she has a job as a real estate agent. She’s married to a former Major League baseball player. Her husband doesn’t appear to have any job.

Her oldest son is stupid and lazy, but women find him good looking, and he does look exceptionally mature for an 18-year-old. In the first four episodes, they are trying to find a junior college from him to attend so he can play on their baseball team, because I guess he’s not smart enough for a real college, and he didn’t get enough playing time in high school to qualify for a high round in the draft, and the reason for the lack of playing time was that his grades were too low and he got kicked off the team.

VICKY

Vicky is a very successful life insurance agent, which show you that you don’t have to be very smart to be successful as a life insurance agent. Her husband is unemployed, so she’s the opposite of a housewife. The husband is actually a househusband.

LAURI

She looks very well preserved for a woman with a 20-year-old daughter. It must be the botox. She’s divorced from her former rich husband, who must have had a really great prenuptial agreement because she’s poor and living in a small townhouse and not in the expensive gated community where everyone else in the show lives. And obviously she’s not a housewife because she’s not married.

Her 20-year-old daughter is a loser who’s not attending college and can’t hold down a simple retail job. Her teenage son is locked up in juvenile detention.

Lauri works for Vicky, but Vicky is not happy with Lauri because she’s not selling much insurance.

JO

Jo is a 24-year-old Hispanic woman who is not a housewife because she’s also not married, but she’s engaged to be married to this white guy who’s in his mid thirties and has some kids from his first marrage. Her fiancé has a really obnoxious personality, and is full of himself because he makes a lot of money in some sort of commercial financial sales job. He wants her to be a stay-at-home fiancée for some reason I can’t understand. It’s not like she does a very good job of cooking or cleaning or anything like that.

THE PROLENESS OF IT AND VALUE TRANSFERENCE

These wealthy people are extremely prole, with their lack of any intellectual interests and their children who aren’t college material.

Despite living in this gated community where all the houses sell for more than a million dollars, and some sell for more than three million, no one in the series does any sort of work that could be considered value creation work. They are all work in sales, or they don’t work at all, or they used to be a professional athlete. There’s no one who works in science or engineering or medicine or does anything else that’s constructive for the advancement of society.

There’s no Mayor Bloomberg conspiracy

At certain other rightwing blogs and in comments, there have been suggestions that there’s a conspiracy that allows Mayor Bloomberg and New York City to get away with certain conservative stuff like the stop-and-frisk policy because it’s New York City.

There’s no conspiracy. The mainstream liberal media publishes plenty of op-ed commentary from the usual left-wing Al Sharpton types lambasting Bloomberg and the stop-and-frisk policy.

Bloomberg gets away with it because (1) he simply ignores it because he knows that’s the best policy when dealing with those types, something that more conservative Republicans often don’t get; and (2) he has genuine bobo cred because he’s pro-abortion pro-gay pro-composting pro-marathon pro-bicycle anti-gun anti-unhealthy food so he has a lot more leeway to tell it like it is.

No conspiracy.

Bobo mayor says whites are stopped and frisk too much, minorities too little

Michael Bloomberg, the bobo mayor, defends the stop-and-frisk policy (according to the Wall Street Journal):

One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be. But it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murders. In that case, incidentally, I think, we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course, or a logic course.

Is Michael Bloomberg the future of bobo politics, taking a more aggressive stance against the bad behaviors of the lumpenproletariat and not afraid of being called “racist” for doing so? Will he run for president in 2016 as a Democrat?

Still under construction

One day it will be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere. That is if it gets finished before some other building on Park Avenue. It’s sure taking a long time.

That’s an unusually cloud-free sky for the east coast.

Zimmerman Trial update

I’ve been watching some talking heads on CNN discuss the Zimmerman trial.

Objectively, the prosecution’s case sucks. The witness who’s supposed to “prove” that Zimmerman was the aggressor, Rachel Jeantel, is one of the lousiest witnesses ever. No one can understand her ebonics dialect, she has a bad attitude, she said that Martin called Zimmerman a “creepy ass cracka,” perhaps making Martin the racist and not Zimmerman, and she admitted to lying under oath at a deposition. And she didn’t hear anything that indicates that Zimmerman started the fight. It’s not illegal for Zimmerman to follow Martin and it’s not illegal ask him what he’s “doing around here.” I am sure the defense attorneys will point that out in closing arguments.

There have been some commenters insisting that the middle-class white woman on the jury will like Rachel because they will sympathize with the poor black girl. I don’t think so. Watching Rachel testify for many hours, over two days, with her bad attitude and ebonics dialect, sequestered and thus without the liberal media to tell them how they are supposed to think about her, they aren’t going to like her, and they may even dislike Martin by association.

We also had Jon testify today. He’s the only witness that actually saw anything, and he saw the guy with the black clothing and darker skin (Martin) on top, and the guy with red or lighter colored clothing and lighter skin on the bottom, getting punched “martial arts style” (whatever that means). And he thought that it was Zimmerman who was screaming.

There was another witness who saw Zimmerman looking bloody, and recounted that Zimmerman explained to him how he had to shoot Martin in self defense.

The talking heads seem certain that the defense attorneys will not let Zimmerman testify. I don’t think that’s a very good idea. For background for those unfamiliar with criminal trials, it’s pretty rare that lawyers let their defendant clients testify. That’s because nearly all defandants really are guilty, so they can’t say anything to help themselves without committing perjury. Also, most defendants are unsympathetic witnesses, and they usually have some really bad stuff in their background that the prosecutors could use to impeach their credibility if they testify.

But in this case, I think that it’s very powerful evidence for the jury to hear Zimmerman explain that Martin started the fight by punching him first, and that he feared for his life because he was on the ground being beaten up by Martin. Zimmerman comes off as a mild-mannered guy and not a thug who goes around looking for fights. I don’t know what the prosecution could have on Zimmerman that they could only introduce if Zimmerman testifies that’s so bad that it would wipe out the benefit of Zimmerman’s testimony.

What does functional illiteracy look like?

The prosecution’s star witness in the Zimmerman case is probably functionally illiterate.

Wikipeda defines this:

Functional illiteracy is reading and writing skills that are inadequate “to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level.”[1] Functional illiteracy is contrasted with illiteracy in the strict sense, meaning the inability to read or write simple sentences in any language.

She was unable to write a letter, or read the letter that she had someone else write on her behalf, but she is literate enough to use Twitter and write simple tweets. I think this is her Twitter feed.

Here are some examples of her wisdom:

Speak ur mind

I feel bless for everything even good n bad

Watching MTV Jams all Tupac videos happy b-day PAC best rap alive

6.still getting my education to open more doors for me 7.I’m going need a lot of drinks for dis summer oh lord

1.add flvs school 2.work out 3.get ready for count 4.deal with the bull come with it 5.try to have a natural life

@_LifeAsKeeKee awww pool baby

Let go Dwade dat my nigga

It’s cute that she thinks attending her senior year of high school, and she will be 20 if she graduates next year, will “open more doors.” Given that the Supreme Court has ruled that it’s illegal for employers to require a high school diploma for jobs, probably not.

Star witness Rachel Jeantel is illiterate

She was unable to read any part of a letter she had a friend write for her. There’s a picture of the letter in the linked article, and while it’s not quite as easy to read as typeset print, I think it’s legible enough.

Trayvon Martin’s friend – and star witness – was forced to admit in court today that she could not read a letter she wrote last year about the teen’s shooting death.

Rachel Jeantel testified on Thursday for the second day in a row, in which she said she thought the encounter between Trayvon and George Zimmerman was racially charged because of her friend’s description of Zimmerman as a ‘creepy-a** cracker’.

In a painfully embarrassing moment in an already awkward and tense cross examination, defense attorney Don West asked her to read the letter aloud and she said she could not.

He asked her: ‘Are you able to read at all?’

She appeared sheepish and bowed her head as she mumbled into the microphone: ‘Some but not all. I don’t read cursive.’

The only thing she could read was her name. West then read the letter to the court.

It’s obvious that the reason why she didn’t write the letter herself in the first place, and couldn’t read any of it at all in court except for her name, is that she’s illiterate. So the star witness in the case is both illiterate and a proven liar. (She lied about her age, lied under oath about why she didn’t attend Trayvon’s funeral, what else did she lie about?)

Zimmerman trial update

Prosecution’s star witness admits on stand that she committed perjury. LoL.

How the gays won

I was never a big fan of gay marriage. Why do gay people need to get married? But it’s over. The gays won. Conservatives and Republicans should give up on this issue and move on.

Rather than read today’s Supreme Court opinions, let’s examine the much more important reason why gays won.

Thirty to forty years ago, gays were seen as disgusting perverts. No one would have ever supported gay marriage. There was a big brouhaha about whether gays should even be allowed to be school teachers.

But what gays did to change all this was that they took over Hollywood. Just about every single popular TV show had one or more cool and sympathetic gay characters. It’s impossible to watch any decent TV today without watching gays. Even TV shows aimed at young people have gay characters in them. Shows like Gossip Girl or Pretty Little Liars. All these gay people on TV creates powerful social proof that convinces everyone that gays are awesome and should have the same “rights” as straights. Only “haters” could be opposed to gays.

If Republicans and conservatives want to take back the country from the liberals, they need to take over Hollywood, remove the gay and liberal messages from the TV shows, and replace them with conservative messages. But don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen. Conservatives don’t get what they’re doing wrong. They just want to double down on their loser strategies that aren’t working.

There’s no such thing as a “free market”

When people use the term “free market,” they mean a laissez-faire economy with perfect competition. And among the libertarian types, it’s taken on faith that the former causes the latter.

First of all, there’s no such thing as complete laissez-fairism. The world has seen many collapses of central government authority, and the result has never been the anarcho-capitalism imagined by libertarian types. The result has always been warlordism, which is the modern term for what used to be known as feudalism. Living under warlordism sucks unless you’re the warlord.

Some people may argue that warlordism only seems to appear consistently because central governments collapse in countries where there the people have low IQ. But the term warlordism was first used to describe the disintegration of central authority in China, and China is a nation where people have high IQ.

So we see that the natural state of humanity, in the absence of a strong central government, is feudalism or warlordism, not anarcho-capitalism.

Regarding perfect competition, the existence of billionaires proves that we don’t have perfect competition. In an economy with perfect competition, no one can become very rich, because as soon as people see that activity X produces more profits than other activities, people jump into activity X and the competition from more participants brings down the profits. No one could ever become a billionaire in an economy with perfect competition.

* * *

What we do have are “market economies,” where for the most part prices and levels of production are set by business entities seeking profit rather than by central government command. And a fully centrally-planned government-commanded economy is never something I would argue in favor of, because it didn’t work out very well where it was tried. However, market economies have a lot of room for government regulation.

* * *

Entrepreneurialism: a contest in which the winner gets a monopoly and doesn’t have to deal with profit-reducing free-market competition.