Yay! I have a new mac. I love my job when it gives me a new mac.

It turns out that young people aren't "self-entitled, coddled slackers":

Young Americans have a reverence for national institutions, traditions and family values, a U.S. survey indicates.

A survey of so-called "millennials" -- those between 21 and 29 -- revealed the group overwhelmingly said they support monogamy, marriage, the U.S. Constitution and the military, The Washington Times reported Sunday.

"We were completely surprised. There has been a faulty portrayal of millennials by the media -- television, films, news, blogs, everything. These people are not the self-entitled, coddled slackers they're made out to be. Misnomers and myths about them are all over the place," said Ann Mack, who directed the survey and is the official "director of trend-spotting" at J. Walter Thompson, the nation's largest advertising agency.

Via the Corner, where Mark Steyn notes:

The movie biz in particular seems to believe the big bucks are in unpopular popular culture. One day someone will figure out the flaw in that formula.

May that day come soon.

Steyn on the Democrat circular firing squad:

Alas, Senator Sir Edmund Hillary Danger Rodham Clinton couldn’t have foreseen that the Democratic primary season would dwindle down to the Palm Beach recount replayed as a civil war...

Best journalist in the world.

Via Ace - PANIC:

"Nightmarish...Wreck...Wrenching...Infuriating...Excruciating..." Delicious...

Coptic priest Zakaria Botros is causing a stir in the Muslim world:

A third reason for Botros’s success is that his polemical technique has proven irrefutable. Each of his episodes has a theme — from the pressing to the esoteric — often expressed as a question (e.g., “Is jihad an obligation for all Muslims?”; “Are women inferior to men in Islam?”; “Did Mohammed say that adulterous female monkeys should be stoned?” “Is drinking the urine of prophets salutary according to sharia?”). To answer the question, Botros meticulously quotes — always careful to give sources and reference numbers — from authoritative Islamic texts on the subject, starting from the Koran; then from the canonical sayings of the prophet — the Hadith; and finally from the words of prominent Muslim theologians past and present — the illustrious ulema.

Typically, Botros’s presentation of the Islamic material is sufficiently detailed that the controversial topic is shown to be an airtight aspect of Islam. Yet, however convincing his proofs, Botros does not flatly conclude that, say, universal jihad or female inferiority are basic tenets of Islam. He treats the question as still open — and humbly invites the ulema, the revered articulators of sharia law, to respond and show the error in his methodology. He does demand, however, that their response be based on “al-dalil we al-burhan,” — “evidence and proof,” one of his frequent refrains — not shout-downs or sophistry.

More often than not, the response from the ulema is deafening silence — which has only made Botros and Life TV more enticing to Muslim viewers. The ulema who have publicly addressed Botros’s conclusions often find themselves forced to agree with him — which has led to some amusing (and embarrassing) moments on live Arabic TV.

More of this, please.

Mark Steyn, commenting on the disturbing trend in the UK:

Thatcherism liberated the British economically and, despite ten years of Blair and Brown, they still pay less tax than most of their Continental neighbors. But, lacking any meaningful equivalent to America's social conservatives, values voters, small-government types, Second Amendment gun nuts and other familiar figures of the US scene, Britain has become a land of economic plenty with a welfarist sensibility. The "yobs" who rampage through town shopping centers turn out to be not downtrodden and impoverished but living in suburban cul-de-sacs with two-car garages. This is a very contemporary problem: an underclass that's too rich.

Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn discuss Obama's book, Dreams From My Father. Stanley Kurtz comments:

The Democratic left now believes that the United States is ready for a genuinely "progressive," paradigm-changing president. They are not abandoning Obama, and are not even fully capable of seeing how damaging Obama’s background and underlying worldview seem to many (although they are worried enough to try to cover for him). But the country is changing and we can no longer be certain of the impact all these revelations will have. What I do think is obvious at this point is that cultural issues will not be a sideshow in 2008, but very much at the center of things. And if Obama should win, the culture clash of the Clinton and Bush years is sure to go on at full blast.

...BS:

After 20 years Obama was just about to get up and walk out of the door in protest of Wright’s demagoguery but don’t you know it, the old man goes and retires.

Yeah, right.

Geert Wilders' film on Islam is out. I find it hard to see the film as "controversial" unless one defines controversial as quoting Islamic leaders and their holy book accurately and showing the logical conclusion of their statements. It's odd to think that this film is likely to get Wilders killed, and yet I fear that is the most likely outcome of all of this.

Sad:

Herb Peterson, inventor of the Egg McMuffin, has died, a Southern California official of McDonald's restaurants said Wednesday. He was 89.

Best fast food breakfast ever. That guy was great, if only for that.

the logic board on my macbook died. greeeeaaaaattt.

Richard Kirk reviews Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, and points to the root of many of our modern problems in the US:

Woodrow Wilson is the unexpected villain of Liberal Fascism. Based on a review of his academic writings, Goldberg demonstrates that Wilson was a devotee of power—power utilized according to the pragmatic lights of John Dewey. Consequently, the twenty-eighth president denigrated, with the confidence of a divinely anointed leader, those constitutional provisions that limited his ability to mold the nation into a healthy organism that worked for the good of all. This “evolutionary” vision of history provided the intellectual justification for that modern legal theory that dissolves all governmental boundaries—the living Constitution. It also paved the way for an approach to education that transferred the locus of pedagogical authority from parents to the state. In Professor Wilson’s words: “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life…[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”