Neo-Con Game

Rupert Murdoch’s stable of kept, um, cosmopolitans (yeah, that’s it) stumble into the Roissysphere (H.T.:  Ferdinand).  Don’t miss the party!

Brief Thoughts on the Tim Tebow Ad

• That was it!?! That was what the weeks of "controversy", threats and intimidation were all about!?! Honest to goodness, how was I supposed to even know this ad was about abortion? Absent the publicity, the only thing separating this from any number of feel-good expressions of sentimentality was the Focus sponsorship at the end, and even then the inferences to abortion would require quite a leap. At $3M/30s, I'm surprised Focus even bothered to run it.

• I went to YouTube and typed "Tim Tebow Prolife Superbowl Ad", and guess what? Not one of the first page of results was the actual ad. Ditto at Google Video (but I repeat myself). Ditto at Bing. What I did find was lots and lots and lots of parodies, "responses", and negative commentary on the ad. In fact, it was only after 30 minutes of searching that Icerocket pointed me to a blog (H.T. American Resurgence) that linked the YouTube version.

  As tempting as it would be to blame YouTube (and Google and Bing) for the obfuscation, a more likely culprit is mass-mobilization by the pro-abortion cabal to bury the ad under a ton of false leads in the hope that most searchers would just give up. I don't know how they pulled it off so effectively, but we may have just witnessed the most successful chaff-and-flare campaign in history.

  Wow. I mean, sure, the Left is evil. But I respect the skillz.

Link Love for Justin

. . . who has a post up on the nature of myth:

Identity and values are embedded within communities. A community which does not have heroes who embody its identity and values is not really a community, it is just a collection of people. A practical corollary of that fact is: the first step in destroying a community is to destroy its heroes.

If a people lacks mythological coherence, they cease to exist as a people.

Read the whole thing.

Prom Nite

A prom nite story in two parts.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I wonder vaguely if abstinence education would be more successful if it looked more like this.

Link Love for Ace

If you haven't read it, check out Ace-of-Spades' ripping into Chris Matthews for his I-forgot-Obama-was-black moment. And don't miss his Jon Stewart clip on the same theme.

UPDATE: Also on a lead from Ace, it appears that Lori Gottlieb, who gained notoriety for her Atlantic article "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough", will be coming out with a new book of the same name.

UPDATE2: Okay, this is just DEAD ON:

Also from Ace.

Mental Health Break

Memory Upgrade Follies

I upgraded the memory on my Dell laptop. The laptop had advertised, and Dell had confirmed, that the laptop could use up to 4GB, this limitation imposed by the “memory density”. The laptop has two DDR2 slots, each capable of using a 2GB memory card.

A BIOS blocks off some amount of the available addressing for its own uses. While in theory a 32 bit machine is capable of addressing 232 = 4G memory locations, in practice there will only be some 3.3G addressable locations left for the OS and programs.

But my laptop has a T7200, a 64-bit cpu, so with a 64-bit OS, I should be able to address all 4G, right?

No, actually. It turns out the computer has something called a "chipset". I'm not exactly sure what a "chipset" does, but mine is an Intel 945, which is 32 bits. This turned out to be the limiting factor.

Why would Dell use a 32-bit chipset with a 64-bit CPU?

Parenthetically, I have become less enamored with Windows 7:

• I can't get hibernation to work. This is a fairly common problem. Most users claim to have fixed it with the right combination of power management settings, but I'm not one of them.

• The multimedia playback stutters. Not often, and not for long: only a few times per DVD perhaps, but still: XP never does it.

• It's a memory hog. Windows 7 requires over twice the memory at startup as XP.