And Now For A Comment On Dr. Who's Willie

The many actors who have played the role of Dr. Who since 1963

Not being gay, rare it is when I focus on another man's willie, Anthony Weiner's weiner notwithstanding. And yet, today, I am being forced to focus on the genitalia of Dr. Who, the main character of a wildly popular BBC sci-fi show of the same name. As Wiki explains the series:

The programme depicts the adventures of a Time Lord—a time travelling, humanoid alien known as the Doctor. He explores the universe in his 'TARDIS', a sentient time-travelling space ship. Its exterior appears as a blue British police box, a common sight in Britain in 1963, when the series first aired. Along with a succession of companions, the Doctor faces a variety of foes while working to save civilisations, help ordinary people, and right wrongs.

The show is fast paced, funny, clever and usually quite good, though the quality does vary. Being a BBC production, the show also gets very preachy at times about modern left wing values. For but one example, the show is virulently anti-gun. That said, only on occasion does the show go so overboard in preaching modern left wing values that I turn off the television in disgust.

At any rate, every, year or two, the Doctor undergoes a metamorphosis. His body becomes fatally damaged, he goes into the TARDIS and emerges a wholly new, well, middle aged British actor. It's been going on that way since 1963. And it appears that the next Doctor, whom we will be meeting around Christmas 2013, will be played by a 55 year old Scottish comedic actor, Peter Capaldi.

This news has brought out the most estrogen laden primal scream one can imagine from one writer at The Atlantic. Bemoaning the "misogyny" of the show as well as the "cultural marinade known as The Patriarchy," the fact that the next Dr. Who, like every previous one over the past half century, will have a willie rather than a vagina has the writer's thong in a twist. Here is a taste from what is a masterpiece of gender pc writing:

And yet, not taking a bolder leap in the casting and switching up the gender and/or race of the Doctor feels like a missed opportunity. The Feminism of Doctor Who Tumblr, in anticipation of the announcement, ran a feature called The Time Lady Project, which suggested dozens of potential actresses who could play the part. Some of these were pie-in-the-sky because they were such big stars (Tilda Swinton, Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson), but many of them were in that really-good-but-not-too-big-to-commit-to Who's-grueling-schedule range. And having a woman as the smartest, bravest person in the universe, being able to fix any problem, save the world with her wits, a magical vehicle, and boundless courage--who wouldn't want to watch that show?

But instead, another white guy. The structural sexism of the show remains intact. As this will be the first-ever real-time regeneration since I've become a fan, it's a bit of a letdown. . . .

. . .Flipping the power-imbalanced relationship between a male Doctor and a female companion could have given the show a jolt of new energy and perhaps taken the storytelling in unexpected directions.

Of course, maybe it's for the best that the first female Doctor isn't in the hands of the current showrunner. During the regeneration of Mels into River Song, after all, we were treated to such Moffaty gems as her "focusing on a dress size," weighing herself, and going shopping.

And as we all know, no real women would ever concern herself with a dress size, weigh herself or go shopping. Ah, those unrealistic gender stereotypes that must be driven from polite society. I would note that River Song was a very rounded character, comparable in most ways to her husband - The Doctor. Both she and the Doctor are shown as being admirable and imperfect in their own ways - which is how it has always been with virtually every doctor and most every female companion. What the writer is really bemoaning, like virtually every modern feminist, is not the lack of equality among the sexes, but that we recognize any differences between the sexes and, ultimately, that we do not live in a matriarchal society. I am pretty sure that Instapundit's wife has had something to say on this topic.

Having read through this estrogen laced scream, I looked to the by-line, expecting it to have been written by a radical women's studies prof or a NOW organizer, or perhaps even Sandra Fluk. But no, this was written by one Ted Kissell, a middle aged white male writer and editor out of Southern California. It is my sincerest hope for Mr. Kissell that he is writing things like this simply to get in with the local femenists so that he can get laid. Otherwise, this guy needs reconditioning, testicular implants and an immediate round of testosterone therapy.

Update: The NYT has published an op-ed piece by Jennifer Finney Boylan, likewise bemoaning the fact that the next Dr. Who will have a willie. Boylan - a transgender woman, originally born James, leaves little doubt that she would see the casting a female Dr. Who as an affirmation of his / her gender choice.

Update 2: Powerline is covering a seemingly similar set of arguments being made in regards to who Obama should choose for the next Fed Chairman. I didn't know that Larry Summers had sent infamous race hustler Colonel West packing from Harvard, where he was a professor in African American Studies. Summers gets my vote for that alone.

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Academia, Left-Wing Bias & The Newest Victim Class

John Tierney, writing in the Science section of the NYT, has made a discovery of immense proportions. The newest left-wing victim class among card carrying social scientists is . . . . conservatives. Heh. I don't know about you, but I can't wait to play my victim card to cut short the next leftie diatribe. "Hey, Jesse Jackson, shut up you hate spewing conservativphobe!!!"

This from Mr. Tierney at the NYT:

Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. . . .

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Tierney points out that the left vastly outnumber conservaives throughout much of academia - "six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences." In the social sciences though, those numbers become exponentially more lopsided. So how did this come about and what is the net effect:

In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals. . . .

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. . . . . After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” . . .

So what is the perscription of Dr. Haidt to solving this conundrum: Step one, all social psychologists should start reading the National Review and Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.” Fair enough, I concur. Step two, "a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020." Lolll. Spare me. At this point, I doubt that "affirmative action" is an effective way to cure anything. The real cures are, one, to punish those in the community that try to silence alternative thought, as happened with Larry Summers or Patrick Moynihan, by playing the victim card. Two is to require researchers to look below the numbers to see if there is actual '-ism' at work in any numerical disparities. The rest will take care of itself, particularly as the "race card" loses all of its legitimacy in America - and that is what I believe is happening.

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Utterly Shameless - & Fraudulent

You might have caught this bit of seemingly good news today if you saw this commercial . . .



Or you might have heard the news from an ecstatic White House. This from CBS News:

No one was cheering louder than the White House about General Motors' repayment of $6.7 billion in loans from the federal government.

First thing this morning, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs alerted his 56,000 followers on Twitter of "BIG NEWS."

"GM pays back US $6.7 billion used to save jobs," Gibbs exulted. But he had more.

"BIGGER NEWS," he trumpeted. "Payment was 5 years ahead of schedule."

. . . Later at his daily press briefing, Gibbs didn't wait for a reporter to ask him about the GM payback. He portrayed it as a vindication of President Obama's decision to provide a federal bailout to GM and Chrysler . . .

The amount repaid by GM is less than 13 percent of the $52 billion in federal bailout funds provided to the automaker. The remainder of the bailout was converted into stock, which GM still intends to pay off. Gibbs concedes, "obviously, we're not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination." But he thinks the payback demonstrates that GM is on a path to renewal. . . .

Vice President Biden added his voice to the White House chorus, hailing the GM payback as a "huge accomplishment."

"The President of the United States took a lot of heat for that effort," said Biden of the GM bailout, saying it kept the company alive while it was transitioning.

"And I would just like to point out that I am proud to be associated with the guy who saw the necessity to do this," boasted the VP about his constitutional boss.

Biden said the rapid GM payback "exceeded our expectations."

White House economic advisor Lawrence Summers came closest to telling the critics of the bailout "we told you so," without actually using those words.

"This turnaround wasn't an accident of history," said Summers in a blog on the White House website. "It was the result of considered and politically difficult decisions made by President Obama to provide GM and Chrysler - and indeed the auto industry - a lifeline, if they could demonstrate the will to reshape their businesses and chart a path toward long-term viability without ongoing government assistance."

But the payback also gives the White House ammunition in defense of future government bailouts, should they be needed. Gibbs said it's the White House hope they won't be.

Great news for Obama and GM indeed - until you get the rest of the story. This, courtesy of Jamie Dupree via Q&O:

The issue came up yesterday at a hearing with the special watchdog on the Wall Street Bailout, Neil Barofsky, who was asked several times about the GM repayment by Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), who was looking for answers on how much money the feds might make from the controversial Wall Street Bailout.

“It’s good news in that they’re reducing their debt,” Barofsky said of the accelerated GM payments, “but they’re doing it by taking other available TARP money.”

In other words, GM is taking money from the Wall Street Bailout – the TARP money – and using that to pay off their loans ahead of schedule.

“It sounds like it’s kind of like taking money out of one pocket and putting in the other,” said Carper, who got a nod of agreement from Barofsky.

“The way that payment is going to be made is by drawing down on an equity facility of other TARP money.”

Translated – they are using bailout funds from the feds to pay off their loans.

This is absolutely unreal. This is nothing more than a shell game with taxpayer money, yet it is being presented as if GM is actually becoming a profitable organization again. Its been a long time since I looked at securities law, but I would be willing to bet this incredibly bit of misleading news from GM and its primary stockholder, the Obama administration, easily crosses those regulatory lines that define fraud under SEC regs. This is GM and the Obama Administration colluding to perpetrate a massive fraud on the American people.

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