DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Oops.

In Minnesota, the wind is blowing but turbines aren’t turning. The machines, bought used from California and installed last fall, are completely frozen in place. Even on the windiest days, the blades sit at a standstill, producing no power. Why should anyone care? The problem highlights some of the less intuitive challenges associated with wind power — long considered to be the most feasible and cost effective source of renewable energy.

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Well, duh.

The problem with Social Security, as with all Ponzi schemes, is that it eventually comes crashing down. The best one can hope for is to cash in before that happens. The window for retirees is shrinking visibly.

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Senator Shelby (former Democrat who defected to the Republicans when it became clear that the Democrats no longer had a lock on power) is doing what Senators do best: holding the government hostage for pork.

Shelby has placed a blanket “hold” on 70 nominations pending before the Senate, nominations for federal agency jobs and seats on the federal bench. Does he have a case against each and every one of the 70? No, he isn’t really talking about any of them.

His problem has to do with a couple of government contracts he wants to see benefit his home state of Alabama. To date, these Shelby “earmarks” have not come to pass, and the senator wants to change that. He is tired of being stiffed. He wants to force the Senate and the Obama administration to cede to his preferences for the granting of these contracts.

There is no mention, of course, in this National Public Radio article, of the Democrat Senators who have not hesitated to work the same extortion racket over the decades — after all, Democrat politicians are of the Crust, and their motives are as pure as the driven snow. These complaints only arise when a Republican dares to use something from the Crustian toolbox.

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

Jerry Pournelle is on the case.

Jerry looks at a Wall Street Journal op-ed by John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil, that appears to be Yet Another Whiny Rant from a high-level American executive about how we don’t have enough government management (i.e. subsidies) of big American companies.

One reason we are not competitive is our regulations. Some are worker safety regulations. Others are economic. Many are “product safety” regulations. Some are environmental protection regulations. All of these are arguably useful in small doses; but need they be Federal? In particular the economic regulations that impose minimum wages and the like do far more harm than good, and are probably unconstitutional in the bargain. By unconstitutional I don’t mean the cases haven’t been decided by the Supreme Court, of course; I mean that the very idea of a Federal minimum wage would have horrified not only the Framers at the Convention of 1787, but everyone in Congress who voted for the Civil War Amendments that the Court uses to justify the enormous expansions of federal power that happened during the 20th Century, and everyone in the state legislatures when the relevant amendments were ratified.

My proposal for an Industrial Policy is to repeal nearly all the federal regulations and leave those matters to the States. Yes, we need some environmental regulation, yes we need some product safety regulations, but we don’t need enormous federal bureaucracies who continuously add more “protections” and thus more expenses to production. Some states like California are likely to continue the insanity, but here and there will be states that have goals other than government by and for government.

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One of the country’s most senior police officers, who tried to counter misconduct allegations by accusing his force of racism, was jailed for four years yesterday after he was finally exposed as “a criminal in uniform”.

‘Ali Dizaei’, there’s a fine British name for you.

He has previously faced allegations of taking drugs, spying for Iran, fiddling his expenses, abusing his police credit cards and fabricating evidence and his conviction at Southwark Crown Court in London vindicated the force’s decision to pursue him. Dizaei has repeatedly accused the Met of racial prejudice to deflect allegations against him, making numerous counter-claims that resulted in previous Scotland Yard commissioners, including Sir Ian Blair, having to apologise to him.

An Informative Chart.

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You can’t make this stuff up.

Jonah Goldberg finds one in the wild and takes a closer look.

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Your future under Islam. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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It’s all about motivation.

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Sounds like a good reason not to have Asian judges in Britain.

But that’s me.

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Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

There’s always the Washington Post’s XX featurette for heaping mounds of Taking Everything Personally….

The star of Precious weighs 300 pounds. No woman is going to be drawn to make an impulse purchase of a fashion and lifestyle magazine because there’s a 300 pounder on the cover.

Capital is mobile.

“In 2004 New Jersey was one of the first states to adopt a ‘millionaires’ tax, imposing an 8.97% rate on income over a half-million dollars,” Forbes reports. The consequence? “In all, the state suffered a $70 billion net outflow in wealth from 2004 through 2008, compared with a $98 billion net inflow in the prior five years.

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

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Congress: Weapon of Mass Destruction.

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In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional  or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one’s own behavior – where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias.

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Nevada’s budget is so far out of balance that by one account the state could lay off every worker paid from the general fund and still be $300 million in the red. The economic downturn has hit so hard that prisons may be closed, entire colleges shuttered and thousands left without jobs.

The chickens of a flawed electoral system come home to roost.

1. Politicians want to keep their jobs, so they value votes above all else.
2. The best way to get votes is to give people government-paid stuff, which a lot of people who are stupid and greedy see as ‘free’ or ‘paid for by somebody else’.
3. Once people start getting stuff for ‘free’ they will dependably vote against anybody who threatens the gravy train.
4. See point 1.

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Let’s start the week off with a little gloom, shall we?

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Well, it’s always been like ‘Adventure’….

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Splendid news on the health front this week, as it has emerged that drinking beer is good for you – and that soft drinks will kill you.

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The attacker struck in the staff car park at the centre which hands down fines and penalties to speeding drivers.

There’s the biter bit, by God. There’s still some spirit left in Britain after all.

“No one could move and people were left stranded, nobody could get home. It’s going to cost me £100 to get my car fixed. What kind of person would do this?”

Oh, let me guess: Somebody with a grudge against the government. That ought to narrow it down.

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Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s pretty impressive.

Possible caption: “And your little Portuguese water dog, too.” She looks like a Mom who is not in the mood to take any shit. Considering how our current President spends most of his time asking the other kids to give him his football back, she strikes me as perhaps a refreshing change.

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“Dude, we can walk around in total disguises and nobody can complain! Is this a great country, or what?”

Any non-Muslim country that lets Muslims across their border has a death wish that will eventually be fulfilled.

Lynn Viehl, prolific writer, argues with Chinese fortune cookies.

Well, she’s a writer. They do stuff like that.

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

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The young men and women of America’s future elite work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life.

Training the Crustians of Tomorrow.

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With his new work, Intellectuals and Society, Sowell has finally made good on his 20-year-old promise to write about intellectuals. He has also made good on his threat. Sowell takes aim at the class of people who influence our public debate, institutions, and policy. Few of Sowell’s targets are left standing at the end, and those who are stagger back to their corner, bloody and bruised.

What makes Intellectuals and Society even more withering than Johnson’s historical-biographical work is that Sowell approaches his subject as an economist, analyzing the incentives and constraints intellectuals face. Sowell defines intellectuals as an occupation, as people whose “work begins and ends with ideas.” This includes academics, especially those in the humanities and social sciences, policy wonks, and, to a certain extent, journalists. This distinguishes them from occupations in which the work begins with ideas and ends with the application of ideas. Physicians or engineers usually start with ideas about how to approach their work, but eventually they have to put them into practice by treating patients or constructing bridges.

An intellectual’s reputation, then, depends not on whether his ideas are verifiable but on the plaudits of his fellow intellectuals. That the Corvair was as safe as any other car on the road has not cut into Ralph Nader’s speaking fees, nor has the failure of hundreds of millions of people to starve to death diminished Paul Ehrlich’s access to grant money. They only have to maintain the esteem of the intelligentsia to keep the gravy train running.

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And we thought the Trial Lawyers’ Association was bad.

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A good trick, if it works.

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Well, so what’s your point?

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Can’t say that I blame them.

In terms of medical software selection, the iPad lags far behind virtually every other tablet on the market. Despite having over 5,000 medical apps immediately available for download through Apple’s App Store, none of those apps are a functional EMR system or even remotely close to one. The vast majority of EMR software on the market today will not run on a Mac OSX operating system. Most require a Windows-based operating system to function.

I don’t see apps per se as a long-term problem. Now that the iPad is an actual product, this situation will change, perhaps rapidly — how may iPhone apps were there available when it first came out? But, baby, look at them now.

As sometimes happens with Apple, though, they’re getting into a market that Windows apps have come to dominate; if Apple intends to be a presence in the medical market, it’s going to have to do some fancy dancing to get up to speed.

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Richard Florida has hopefully labeled this trend “the rise of the creative class.” Florida reports that over the last thirty-odd years we have witnessed an ever-increasing concentration of college graduates around “superstar cities” or “means metros”-San Francisco, Washington, Denver, New York, Seattle, and the like. Thus, while 20 percent of the adult population holds an advanced degree in cities like San Fran and DC, the numbers are 5 percent in Cleveland and 4 percent in Detroit. Florida’s maps show in graphic imagery the hiving of college grads around certain metropolitan areas, a hiving that has emerged most clearly since 1970. Save for a few isolated exceptions, those hives are not located in Middle America, including our many mid-sized middle American cities.

Florida describes this trend as “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places,” primarily because of the high cost of living that results from the Migration of the Talented. The reasons behind this phenomenon, he says, are economic; if you’re very smart, educated, and talented, it pays to live near others like you. “The most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value,” he writes. Florida foresees a future in which the most talented and creative live among themselves in select city cores, and in which they are “catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.” “Accommodating” this new geographically based cognitive sorting, he maintains, “will be one of the great political and cultural challenges of the next generation.”

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Sure, we want more of these people in America. Remind me again why we haven’t sealed our southern border.

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Sea Shepherd founder Captain Paul Watson said by satellite telephone that the Japanese ship rammed the Bob Barker — named after the U.S. game show host who donated millions to buy it — as it blocked the slipway of the Japanese fleet’s factory ship.

Well, what did they expect? These clowns seem to think they’re invulnerable. If you stand between working people and their livelihood, they’re going to run over your ass, and all the whining in the world isn’t going to help.

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Thoughtcrime comes to Luzianne.

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Well, what alternative do they have? Decades of litigation have made it impossible to discipline students except through the formal public justice process.

Jerry Pournelle is not optimistic.

On schools, infra-structure, the whole lobbyist scene, the problem isn’t too few laws and regulations but too many. We can’t build infrastructure projects without allowing lawyers to wet their beaks, not just instantly but for years and years. The nuclear industry in the United States is paralyzed by circling legal buzzards. We all know the schools are broken, but there is no possible way to fix the situation, and any attempt is met by frantic opposition. We can’t fire incompetent teachers or promote good ones. After a while we stop trying.

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Say what you will about Britain, they certainly know how to do whatever it is that they do.

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Hey! I like Spam!