So This Is What The Internet Was For

The Lord of Truth (currently doing his best House imitation, with cane included) sends us this link to what some might call a greater cause...

So, here's the story... I said to my girlfriend that any stupid website could get tons of hits, simply because people are bored all the time. She said that I was an idiot and couldn’t make a website that could get tons of hits if I wanted to. After a long argument (mostly centered around the fact that she called me an idiot) we made a bet:

If I could not make a website to get 2,000,000 hits, I would agree that I was an idiot; however, if I could make a website to get 2,000,000 hits, she would have a menage a trois (that's a threesome to you non french-speakers) with me and another girl. I thought she was kidding at the time, but then she said she was so sure of herself, that she would even put it in writing. This of course is an ultra-binding contract.

Somewhere out there, other guys are taking notes. Please note that he's already succeeded. Meanwhile, I'm now officially upset that this guy got 2,000,000 hits for this, and I can't get 100,000 for boring the hell out of you.

Um, Senator -- You Just Got a Verbal Beatdown

Let's just echo Instapundit and say ouch. I'd love to see someone say this to Senator Grassley.

Now Here's The Real Story

Best of the Web draws an interesting link between a story they cited yesterday, where the director of Basic Instinct 2 blames the current American political climate on the failure of his film, with a Slate story from 1999 about which Americans have the best sex...

When University of Chicago researchers set out to discover which religious denominations have the best sex, they learned that the faithful don't do all their shouting in church. Conservative Protestant women, their 1994 survey found, report by far the most orgasms: Thirty-two percent say they achieve orgasm every time they make love. Mainline Protestants and Catholics lagged five points behind. Those with no religious affiliation were at 22 percent.

We're pretty sure that Basic Instinct 2 is bombing at the box office because (a) it sucks and (b) if someone needs to see porn, the Internet is cheaper and more accessible. But this other story from 1999 is a real story worth discussing -- who would have expected this? Based on this, shouldn't born-again Christians be selling this to all the atheists out there? Great sex and eternal salvation -- that's a pretty good sell.

All The News That's Fit To Fake

I meant to note this story posted by Michelle Malkin yesterday, but never got the chance. Let's summarize for those who don't want to click on the link: Dateline NBC wants to film a piece on anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias here in the United States, and they're trying to get Muslim men dressed in traditional garb (and apparently women as well) to attend non-Muslim gatherings here and see if they experience any discrimination. For the purposes of doing this investigative report, they want to target things like football games and NASCAR events.

Of all the dumb ideas... there are several issues I have with this.

Look, Dateline and its ilk of trashy "news" magazines essentially try to create the news as much as report it, so it's not like this is surprising at all. But one question would be what NBC would choose to air. If they sent people to nine NASCAR events and had three instances of discrimination, how much do you want to bet that those instances would get repeated airplay?

Even more than that, what does it say that Dateline's focus here appears to be on proving that we're biased here in the United States... yet how many stories has Dateline done or will it do regarding the religious repression by Muslims in the Middle East of other faiths? Here, you have the freedom to worship as you wish, and the government protects you from discrimination or acts of violence against you based on your form of worship.

Michelle had some follow up posts, notably this one, which noted that NBC was confirming their interest in doing such a story and blogospheric reaction. I particularly enjoyed the last email noted, where the guy had a suggestion for continuing "staged" events by NBC. Even better was this post by Lorie Byrd at Polipundit...

I wonder if they would consider sending a professor wearing an “I Love W” button and an American flag pin into the faculty lounge at Harvard or some other liberal ivory tower with a hidden camera. I would love to see that experiment. I can’t imagine anyone at NBC doing that one. Maybe John Stossel at ABC, though?

Instapundit has similar reader comments as well...

And reader Eric Hall offers a new assignment: "Dateline NBC ought to take some Christian-looking people to Riyadh and see how things work out. Don't forget the bikini-clad sister."

The Cranky Insomniac gives a little more context here...

Various people have pointed out that this is particularly bizarre given that NBC Sports currently splits the broadcast rights to NASCAR with Fox, with Fox airing the first half of the season (which is where we are now) and NBC the second half. However, this is the last year of that contract, and ABC/ESPN will televise the races next year. (Also, NBC's coverage is greatly inferior to Fox's in the eyes of most NASCAR fans, for whatever that's worth.)

If I ran Fox, I'd be figuring out who NBC's Muslim "ringers" were and putting a not-so-hidden camera crew all over them during the race. This would totally blow NBC's story out of the water.Also, throughout the broadcast of the race I'd be replaying clips of the original faked Dateline story about the trucks catching on fire and making snarky comments about keeping the Dateline crew away from pit road.

Additionally, now that NASCAR fans are aware that this might happen, I would think the odds of there being a confrontation are quite slim. (I should say that I think the odds would be slim regardless, but now even more so.) This would also kill Dateline's story, since the producers need to prove their "thesis" about bigoted white people (particularly NASCAR fans, obviously) and poor, oppressed Arabs.

My theory -- Dateline wants to fill the market niche for made news, now that Dan Rather's semi-retired. Also, NBC wants to lure Rather as revenge for CBS grabbing Katie Couric, and they wanted to show him that they're as cutting edge at making up stories as he is.

Maybe Matt Lauer Can Succeed Mike Wallace, Too

Man, I never thought I would miss Dan Rather...

NBC executives expect Katie Couric to leave the "Today" show and accept an offer from CBS to become the first woman to anchor a network evening newscast on her own, with an announcement of her departure likely as early as this week, according to well-placed sources at both networks and others familiar with the negotiations.

The tentative plan is for a two-step process in which Couric first announces her departure from NBC, which would like to give her a warm send-off after a decade in which she helped make "Today" the top-rated morning program. Meredith Vieira, co-host of ABC's "The View" and host of the syndicated "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," has been offered the job of replacing Couric and is seriously considering it, some of these sources say.

Okay, I now understand that the days of taking network news seriously are over. The next time the mainstream news media claims that they're serious journalists, they need to answer for this one first. I guess the good news is that this means fewer insipid interviews by Couric. The bad news is that it lessens the chances of someone finally spitting on her in an interview.

Kong Gets Gonged

Lileks dissects the King Kong remake so well, he makes me want to see the movie just so I can participate in the mockery. This is brilliant...

Problem is, I didn’t believe anything. I’m willing to suspend disbelief both piecemeal and wholesale; if a movie requires me to believe that Bruce Willis can fight terrorists on a skyscraper for a night, well, fine. If the Lord of the Rings asks that I believe in ghost riders and evil rings and magic and elves, fine. But don’t ask me to believe that Bruce Willis can take six bullets to the brain, or that Hobbits can grow wings and pee fire, unless you’ve previously set them up as a wing-growing, fire-peeing species. Be careful, in other words. If you want me to believe that someone with no weapons training can use a machine gun to shoot the bugs off someone who’s moving around, okay: you’ve spent all your chits. Unless you don’t expect me to believe anything, in which case: why did you make this movie? Because I don’t care.

Take the battle with the T-Rexes. (Three!) Kong saves whatsername from a T-Rex, who’s just abandoned a nice big freshly-killed fellow-saur to run after what would, in Rex dining terms, be a breadstick. He chases her down through the forest, which she nimbly negotiates, but just as he’s about to eat her – he pauses, of course, to roar, one of those little ticks that evolution finely honed in their predatory instincts – Kong comes flying from the County of God-Knows-Where and picks her up, violently whipping her around, snapping her neck and pureeing several internal organs . . . no, strike that, she’s okay. So he battles the T-Rex, and then another one shows up, and everyone’s Kong Fu Fighting, his moves are fast as lightning, et cetera, until ANOTHER T-Rex shows up.

Kong pretty much dusts the guys, even though he takes a couple of bites on the arm – he shakes it off! He’s okay, folks! T-Rex teeth, which are capable of cutting through a fresh battleship, have no power over monkey skin. Then he pushes them down a slope and they go falling off a cliff, but he falls too, with Faye Rae screaming her head off, but vines cushion the blow. Yes, vines! Special lost-world vines capable of holding twenty tons of ape. Did I say 20? Make that 60, because two T-Rexes are also caught in the vines, and then there’s another fight for, oh, sixteen minutes or so. Eventually everyone falls to the ground and there’s another 48 minute battle, and at the end that’s when the blonde realizes that Kong has saved her, and she loves him.

Yes. She loves him. The heroine and the ape have special moments together. They watch a sunset. (The sun is an odd thing in this movie – it goes down only to pop right back up again; Kong begins his rampage on 46th street at about 9 PM and ends up dying on the Empire State Building at sunrise; I don’t care how bad traffic is, it doesn’t take nine hours to get to 34th street. Gravity also works in an odd fashion; it’s sunrise when Kong falls off the ESB, but mid morning when he hits the pavement. So I guess gravity is lesser around there, which explains why he took so long to reach the ground, and why he landed intact instead of blowing fur and monkey guts for a six-block radius.)

You know, it's a bad thing when I enjoy the review more than I would probably enjoy the movie.

The Police Academy Movies Were Only Slightly More Absurd

The city of Virginia Beach is accused of discrimination against African-American and Hispanic police recuits because of the results of math exams...

Under a consent decree filed Monday in federal court in Norfolk, the city will change the way it scores the police entrance exam.

The Justice Department had complained that the math portion of the exam had an adverse effect on minority applicants and unfairly excluded them from being hired.

The city will offer to let 124 black and Hispanic former applicants resume the hiring process. Those recruits failed the math test between 2002 and 2005 but would have passed under the new standards.

...After an 18-month investigation, the Justice Department found that the police force did not reflect the diversity of the city’s population because of how the math test was graded.

The Justice Department claimed that the test’s pass-fail system had a disproportionate effect on minorities because the passing rates for blacks and Hispanics were less than 80 percent of the passing rate for whites.

From 2002 to mid-2005, about 85 percent of white applicants passed the math exam, compared with 59 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics.

Under the old standard, Virginia Beach required all recruits to score 70 percent on each of three written tests for reading comprehension, grammar and spelling, and math.

The Justice Department questioned whether math is relevant to the daily duties of a police officer. The city agreed to eliminate the 70 percent cutoff score for the math part of the test.

Under the new standard, an applicant must score at least 70 percent on the reading and grammar parts of the test and score an average of at least 60 percent on all three parts of the exam. The new scoring method will take effect as soon as next week, when the next exam will be administered.

...The city will give 124 applicants a chance to resume participation in the hiring process. Of that number, the city has committed to hiring at least 15 – three Hispanics and 12 blacks – who complete the application process. Those recruits could begin the Police Academy sometime in 2007 or 2008.

“I hope that we get more than 15 because we have tried to diversify,” Police Chief Jake Jacocks Jr. said.

(hat tip: John Derbyshire over at the Corner) Okay, this drives me nuts. Look, I think affirmative action is wrong on principle, but this isn't even affirmative action -- it's just practically insane.

I generally agree with the contention that we're not particularly concerned with the math skills of police officers, but here they're essentially lowering the standards for nothing more than the purpose of making sure we get an appropriate number (a quota, if you will) of minority police officers. To me, that's effectively an insult to minority applicants. At the same time, it's a decision to let people you didn't think were qualified -- both whites and minorities -- join the police force. Great -- we're now accepting underqualified cops, regardless of color. I feel so much safer now.

There Are Better Ways to Make Your Point

Oh, this should do wonders for the cause of illegal immigrants -- they've got International ANSWER on their side. As the Washington Times reports, ANSWER is leading the charge for a May 1 boycott from work day. In case you don't know who ANSWER is affiliated with, here's a short list...

ANSWER's steering committee includes the Free Palestine Alliance, the Partnership for Civil Justice, the Nicaragua Network, the Korea Truth Commission, the Muslim Student Association, the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. It denounces as racism attempts to criminalize illegal aliens.

Maybe it's just me, but the Party for Socialism and Liberation sounds like something someone came up with after smoking a particularly bad joint. In any case, Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters notes the significance of May 1 to the socialists and their ilk...

Someone should have warned them about the obvious nature of the date, but then again, the I-ANSWER crowd has always worn its love of Stalinism on its sleeve -- right next to the Che Guevara images it wears on its chest.

It seems like a rather stupid idea, anyway, and one almost guaranteed to backfire on its promoters. For one thing, May 1 is a Monday, traditionally the worst day of the week for retail business anyway. Travel will be light, and restaurants more or less empty regardless of the boycott. Most travelers will have checked out of their hotels the previous day. If one could pick a day with the least amount of impact on the traditional job categories for illegals and their interaction with the public, May 1 has to rank in the top three this year.

And besides its watered-down economic impact, the notion that people who entered the country illegally will now obstruct American citizens and legal residents from conducting their business will generate as much sympathy as the sea of Mexican flags did during last week's protests. It will backfire and polarize the immigration debate, generating more calls for strict enforcement and undercutting reasonable compromise. Why? Because most Americans will not back down when confronted with unreasonable demands, and the demands of the I-ANSWER crowd for unlimited and unfettered border crossings, complete with automatic qualification for the entire range of government safety-net programs, is completely unreasonable.

My guess is that ANSWER will claim that the low level of business being done that Monday will be the direct result of their call for a boycott. But the conclusion of the boycotts will not be good for illiegal immigration apologists and the left in general. The fact that immigration is a hot-button issue this year stems from the fact that many people are upset over the government's lack of enforcement of the law at the border, and simply encouraging illegal immigrants to be louder and bolder makes it more clear that the government isn't enforcing the laws. That doesn't help the cause.

There are reasonable alternatives out there that are possible, but the possibility of establishing a guest-worker program or something similar is not helped by protests such as these. I know the left longs for the days of the 1960's, but perhaps they should rethink their plans.

Since the left radicalized in the 1960's, their numbers have dwindled and they've repeatedly lost elections. Even if the electorate votes to put Democrats in charge of the House this fall (and I'm beginning to think this nugget of conventional wisdom may be wrong), the public doesn't want the policies of the radical left. Bill Clinton, for all his faults, was forced by the public and the GOP Congress to govern substantially to the right of any Democratic President in memory. The left has lost these battles, and part of the reason is that their tactics don't appeal to the middle-class. Most of the middle-class works long hours at tough jobs, and they're not likely to be swayed by people marching in the streets for legalizing illegal immigration, or any number of other left-wing causes.