DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Widespread violence broke out in Mysore Thursday after somebody threw a dead pig into the compound of an under-construction mosque, city police commissioner Sunil Agarwal told CNN.

I’m waiting for some Muslims to throw a dead cow in a Hindu temple.

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The Brits just don’t understand.

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A car salesman used his kung fu expertise to kill his partner, an executive with Mercedes, after she announced she was leaving him for her married boss.

Soon to be a major motion picture.

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Think “post office”.

I wanted to get out of there as quickly as humanly possible so I hoisted my large package up onto the counter.  The post-person weighed it.  I saw $32.96 appear on the scale readout.  Cool, I can handle that.  Then he measured the package.  20? by 20? by 26.”

“Your total is $97.50.”  Straight faced, no joke.  I stared at him until I re-entered earth’s atmosphere and managed a, “Uh…I’m sorry.  Say what?”

It turned out the weight was a thirty-six buck charge, but the large(?) size added an additional sixty-four.  The value of the contents, a broken speaker, which if it had been working right, which it was not, was still worth less that the cost of shipping it.

With a sigh I lugged the package out of the post office, trundled down the street to the local UPS station…and ended up sending my package to Tennessee for forty bucks and change.

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Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

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Of course.

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The document, which is in perfect condition, is believed to be one of only 200 ever printed and was found among files at the National Archives in Kew in Richmond, Surrey.

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Yesterday, relatives of the woman attacked the hospital, smashing the entrance lobby and an ambulance with rocks. They said the woman had died from an electric shock while using the bathroom.

The Chinese obviously take these things seriously.

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No, not that one — the other one.

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When he turns in his papers, I have the perfect person to replace him: his wife Jenny Sanford. She has been reported to be one of his top advisors and has experience in business and government. I also think she gives the other Republican Party hottie, Sarah Palin, a run for her money in the looks department. Here is what I like most about Jenny Sanford; she was not standing next to her husband when he gave his apology for his Argentine adventure. I have often wondered where these politicians find women who are willing to walk out behind them after they have been treated like doormats. She gave her husband a chance to straighten up when she found out about the affair a few months ago but now she is telling him to go suck eggs. She cares more about herself, herself self-respect and her values than the power of being First Lady of South Carolina with the possibility of moving up in a few years. If Hillary Clinton had that kind of spine, she would be sitting in the big chair right now instead of hoping that she can hang on and get her shot in 2016.

Hear, hear!

An Informative Chart.

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The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.

I’m sure glad we re-elected Bush. That Obama guy sounded pretty scary.

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I’m thinking Bigmouth Billy Bass here.

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Who are you going to believe, Amnesty International or your lying eyes?

Tyler Cowen boils it down.

The case against is simple too.  Say that previously unprovided health insurance would have cost the employer 60 and would have been valued by the worker at 40.  You’re imposing a tax of 20 on the employment relation.  In the short run firms will hire less labor and during a recession is an especially bad time to produce that effect.

In the longer run, if the market is competitive, wages will fall by 20.  We’re forcing relatively poor workers to consume more medical insurance, and more medical care, than they wish to, at the expense of their cash income.

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In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

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What would we do without scientists?

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A top Iranian cleric said Friday that some of the detained Iranian staffers of the British Embassy in Tehran will be put on trial, and he accused Britain of a role in instigating widespread protests that erupted over the country’s disputed presidential election.

In London, a Foreign Office spokeswoman said of Jannati’s comments that British officials are “very concerned about these reports and are investigating.”

Yeah, that’ll be a great help.

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It didn’t have to be like this. Obama’s $787-billion so-stimulus plan should have been more about creating jobs, rather than a vehicle to fund “every liberal, entitlement cause under the sun.”

As James Pethokoukis wrote, Obama’s stimulus boondoggle was a ruse. Some two-thirds of the Obama stimulus is not intended to be spent until after 2009. Obviously, immediate “stimulus” was not the primary intent of Obama’s stimulus. If it had been, the plan would have been front-loaded. The main goal of the Obama stimulus was to make a down payment on Obama’s health care, energy and education agenda.

Oh, no! You mean … the Obamassiah lied to us?!

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Hmmmm. Who could these “unidentified people” be? Methodists on an anti-Presbyterian crusade? Militant vegetarians? Renegade Buddhists? It’s a mystery!

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How soon before they use this technology to identify handwriting in court cases? (No, the special effects in HIGHLANDER don’t count.)

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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This explains a lot about dinosaur media coverage of the Middle East.

Walter Olson casts a jaundiced eye on the Ricci case.

MORAL of the day: If you’re going to give white job applicants the shaft, don’t be blatant about it. Moral No. 2: Don’t annoy Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

It’s not often that Supreme Court opinions go into such detail to criticize the way a city is run. Some high-profile figures in Connecticut’s Elm City must be quite embarrassed right now — if they’re capable of embarrassment.

New Haven was run by a corrupt Democrat machine when Wally and I were undergraduates in the 70s, and apparently hasn’t changed all that much since then.

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It’s always instructive to watch professionals in action.

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And once again we depend on foreigners to do the jobs Americans won’t do.

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Americans who refuse to buy affordable medical coverage could be hit with fines of more than $1,000 under a health care overhaul bill unveiled Thursday by key Senate Democrats looking to fulfill President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.

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Of course. Spending all that other-people’s money is hard work.

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Let the machine do the work, that’s what I always say.

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“And such small portions!”

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Time for a little progressive buyer remorse, sounds like.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

That Justice Ginsburg’s dissent in Ricci managed to get four out of nine votes points out major flaws in both American intellectual life and in the Supreme Court.

Some of what’s wrong with the Supreme Court is structural. Justices used to drop dead of heart attacks before they aged too far into mental decline.

A more subtle defect in the Supreme Court is the lack of adult supervision. We still have the obsolete system of ailing Justices such as 76-year-old Ginsburg (cancer surgery in February) and extremely elderly Justices (Stevens is a ridiculous 89) being assisted solely by clerks who are largely in their late 20s: the senile being aided by the puerile.

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Well, that’s the Religion o’ Peace™ for you.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, never fails to satisfy.

Iran’s election. My gut reaction to the disturbances in Iran was, I regret to say, RonPaulian: Let the buggers fight one another. None of our business.

…

I don’t care enough to immerse myself in the minutiae of Iranian politics, though, and I can’t see any reason why I should.

The premise underlying the “disparate impact” doctrine is that tests can be devised on which all human groups, of any deep ancestry, will produce scores that are statistically identical: same mean, same standard deviation. The uncomfortable fact is that nobody has yet been able to devise such a test in 40 years of trying. This rather strongly suggests that the premise may be false, in which case the doctrine that rests on it is gibberish. Who wants to be the first to say this out loud, though? Not the justices of our Supreme Court, obviously.

If people can’t be bothered to educate themselves, it’s not my job to educate them.

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The designer sweet potato, grown for its anti-cancer purple pigment, is also said to contain anti-ageing and antioxidant chemicals.

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So even though I tend to focus on under-the-radar euphemisms in this column, sometimes you have to take your radar and throw it in the bathtub, rubber duckies be damned. Hiking the Appalachian trail is too good to pass up, and if we’re lucky, it may describe cheaters far into the future, even during the long-prophesied era when the right to gay-marry Martians is hotly contested.

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The issue is TARP: recall that the banks that received TARP money are supposed to repay it to the Treasury, along with dividend payments. President Obama has held out hope that the taxpayers may, in the end, make money on the TARP program. Recall, too, that TARP was billed as an extraordinary response to an unacceptable risk–that the nation’s financial system might come crashing down. So the federal government bailed out the banks, but the banks were supposed to repay the money and the TARP statute provides that when the money is repaid, it “shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for reduction of the public debt.” Which, of course, benefits the taxpayers who put up the money.

The greedy Congressman Frank apparently can’t bear the idea of taxpayers getting their money back, so he has proposed to divert the money to a more politically appealing purpose.

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For the first time, the Army is using wikis to update its doctrine. The pilot program—Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (ATTP)—converts the contents of field manuals into a wiki format and posts them online. Anyone with an AKO account can edit the manuals by submitting changes in the wiki system.

The software powering ATTP is the same software Wikipedia employs. Users can submit changes, review changes proposed by others, search documents and view previous versions of the field manuals. By converting manuals into wikis, the Army hopes to make doctrine a living document and reduce the traditional three to five year period it takes to staff and write field manuals. This system will allow lessons learned in the field to become an immediate part of doctrine, with rapid dissemination. More than 200 manuals are slated to be converted into ATTPs.

I always have to laugh at the movies that have government agencies, be it the Army or the CIA, with the latest and greatest gosh-wow hardware. In reality, government is typically about five to ten years behind the private sector in every respect. Here’s another illustration of that basic fact of life.

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Wal-Mart buys protection by selling out its competitors.

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One of the purported benefits of nationalized health care is that it will be more efficient than private insurers since it would lack the profit motive and have lower administrative expenses, like Medicare. But one reason entitlement programs are so easy to defraud is precisely because they don’t have those overhead costs — they automatically pay whatever bills roll in with valid claims numbers.

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Those of us dedicated to the zoology of celebrity should have known it was over when the death of next-to-nobody Anna Nicole Smith filled the airwaves in 2007 for a week. Celebrity had lost its meaning. We will bury its golden age in Jacko’s tomb.

South Carolina and New York can have only one deranged governor. Mass marketing can’t produce politicians and cheapen them further. Most of the time they don’t do much of anything, just like celebrities. Meet Senator Franken.

A poll in the last election found that most people think they could do a better job than their own Member of Congress. So I expect that TV will soon create a reality Congress show. Average people could pretend to run a whole country, just like the celebrities who are pretending to run Washington.

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When President Obama signed legislation in mid-June to bring tobacco under FDA regulation, few seemed outraged that the legislation had been co-written by Philip Morris USA (PM). The bill was designed, critics say, to stabilize the place of cigarettes in our society: to diminish the threat of health-related lawsuits, to prevent competitive yet possibly safer products from being introduced, and to lock in Philip Morris’ market share. It’s not just the Harvard School of Public Health leveling these charges but even Sen. Bob Bennett, Republican of Utah, a supporter of the intent of the bill who was nonetheless “convinced we would do better if we told Philip Morris to stay out of the process of writing tobacco legislation.”

Five years after the tobacco buyout, and with the second prong of tobacco legislation newly passed, it’s worth checking in. As with other crops, the government had for years been paying some farmers not to grow tobacco to maintain prices for those who did. By the time 2004 rolled around, nearly 85 percent of tobacco permit holders weren’t growing tobacco at all. The permits were being bought and sold for their annual cash payments, like some sort of strange tobacco bond. The quota system, which could have been used to end domestic tobacco production altogether, worked in that it kept prices high and kept small farmers in business.

According to one story on the buyout, some farmers have stopped growing commodity crops like corn and wheat to switch to the wildly more profitable tobacco crop. “A reasonable profit for an acre of corn is about $100. For tobacco,” T.J. Vaughan said in that story, “it’s $1,000 to $1,500.”

With this new FDA move, no doubt tobacco will soon be added to the War on Drugs. I’m sure the Mafia is rubbing its hands and counting up the potential profits, with memories of Prohibition fresh in everyone’s mind — except that of the bureaucrats in Washington.

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

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Well, he’s thinking with the wrong head, for one thing.

He’s an idiot, for another.

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As state Democrats convened around noon to hold a one-party session, Republican Sen. Frank Padavan of Queens walked through the chamber on a hunt for the soda machine — a caffeine quest that would later result with him being tallied as voting with the Democrats.

Padavan reportedly claimed he was taking a short-cut to the members’ lounge, but the 31 Democrats seized the opportunity to count him as their 32nd vote and unanimously passed 125 bills in three hours with Republicans absent — the latest attempt to break the 3-week-old stalemate that has caused a power struggle in Albany.

When Bureaucracies Collide.

National Park Service Regional Director Jonathan Jarvis warned in a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that six parks that could be closed to help reduce the state’s ballooning budget deficit occupy former federal land that could revert to the U.S. government.

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Well done, good and faithful servant, say the Hamas-linked unindicted co-conspirators to Obama for his disastrous Cairo speech. Will he refuse their gift of this Koran, in light of their unindicted co-conspirator status, their refusal to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups, the jihad terror convictions of several of their former officials, and the Islamic supremacist statements made by some of their other officials? What do you think?

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Moley was the leading figure in the “Brains Trust” that guided Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy thinking and speaking during the 1932 campaign and, to a lesser extent, during the interregnum between Roosevelt’s election and his inauguration as president and, to a still lesser extent, even later (but then not as an organized group). Although Moley’s association with FDR grew somewhat strained after the president’s first year in office, he continued to work as a close adviser and speechwriter for several years until, in 1936 and 1937, he could no longer countenance the direction in which Roosevelt was taking the New Deal.