Ben Shapiro, rhymes with Cuck Hero, talks so fast all I can think of when he comes on is motormouth John Moschitta Jr.

It's amusing. For one or two minutes, three minutes max. Then it's suddenly annoying as hell.

This never comes up in Vanity Fair's recent “LET ME MAKE YOU FAMOUS”: HOW HOLLYWOOD INVENTED BEN SHAPIRO, which is all about how his makeover artist used video to make Shapiro into a brand.

Shapiro is set to replace Michael Savage on the radio for two hours everyday next year, a strictly aural medium which Shapiro has already shown he can't resist filling up with more words in a half hour than most hosts use in a week.

Savage listeners are going to be very disappointed.

Vlogger Louis Cole aspires to become the new Walter Duranty, not for The New York Times but for YouTube

Here:

In the description section of one of his North Korea videos, Cole writes, “I’m trying to focus on positive things in the country and combat the purely negative image we see in the Media.” Which, O.K., sure. But as another vlogger shows us in his own video from the DPRK (vloggers seem to be going there en masse), these videos are meant to capture a very carefully curated vision of a country whose human rights abuses are “without parallel in the contemporary world,” according to Human Rights Watch. Cole has, so far, not really made mention of any of that, choosing instead to go for a light tone, oohing and ahhing over abundant food in a country ravaged by hunger.

Megyn Kelly pretends she would be on the cover of Vanity Fair, and on camera at FOX, if she looked like this

 “But every so often, as all [women] know, you have to stop and slap somebody around a little bit who doesn’t understand that we are actually equals and not second-class citizens.”

Sure Megyn.

Story here. 

Vanity Fair trots out follicularly-challenged author of 1997 hit piece on Trump to append an attack on Trump's hair, in 16 slides

There's no there there as far as Mark Bowden, here, is concerned, who has his own reasons to be jealous:

"He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. "

The Date Your Home Became Just Another Commodity: August 5, 1997

When you could begin to sell every two years and avoid the capital gain.

The chart here shows the first stirrings late in the year of what was to become the housing bubble.

August 5, 1997 marked the date when the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 was signed into law by President Clinton.

"When the bill passed in the summer of 1997, it stipulated that married couples would pay no taxes on the first $500,000 in profits from the sale of a house. At the time, this wasn’t seen as an incentive for people to start trading up or flipping houses—although, according to the National Association of Realtors, single-family-home sales jumped 13 percent the year after it passed, and some economists have said it instantly added value to homes, and fueled their rise in prices. But if you drove over that bridge, into the 21st century, and combined this windfall with record-low interest rates and lower down-payment mortgage requirements, the synergy changed the way people bought homes: Instead of looking at how much house they could afford, people started looking at how much mortgage they could carry. (In other words, you could roll the profits into a pricier house, put less down, and still wind up with a lower monthly mortgage payment.) Taken by itself, the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 didn’t cause the economic meltdown. But it was one more piece of kindling on the cord that would eventually become the bonfire of all our vanities."

-- Bruce Feirstein, here

The mortgages behind those houses had started to become mere commodities, too, at about the same time:

Securitization accelerated in the mid-1990s. The total amount of mortgage-backed securities issued almost tripled between 1996 and 2007, to $7.3 trillion.


Hurting us where we live.