DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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Where Judge Walker said that the right to same-sex marriage is fundamental, the Texas decision noted that the key right-to-marry case, Loving v. Virginia (invalidating an interracial-marriage ban), “involved a marriage between a man and woman.” The court also held that “the purported ‘right to marry a person of the same sex’” requires first “asserting that marriage includes the union of two persons of the same sex,” and concluded: “A fatal flaw in this position is that it assumes the truth of the proposition to be proved.” To the claim that same-sex marriage is rooted in the nation’s history and tradition, the court responded, “Plainly, it is not.”

These are the precise points concerning which homosexual ‘activists’ (and their supporters) seem to have insufficient wit to comprehend.

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The problem of forced marriages has since gained greater recognition in the U.K., but a day late and a pound sterling short for Shafiliea, whose body was found dumped months after she died from being “strangled or smothered.”

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Borat would be pleased.

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Union officials said that while they recognize the Postal Service’s precarious finances, they will fight to preserve hard-won working conditions and benefits that include the most generous health-care package in the federal government.

And that tells you pretty much all you need to know about unions.

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Arizona voters overwhelmingly favor even the most controversial provisions within SB 1070, according to a poll released Wednesday Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy.

“What surprised me was the level of support in both Republican and Democratic parties,” said David Daugherty, the Morrison Institute’s director of research. “Even when you sort of tear the bill apart and look at the pieces, people support it.”

“I’ve been doing research for 30 years, and it’s really hard to get any group to have more than 90 percent agreement on any issue,” Daugherty said. “The size of the majority supporting [these provisions] is a little eye-popping.”

Dana Milbank, ordinarily a dependable Voice of the Crust, wanders off the reservation.

Lunch at the National Press Club on Wednesday caused some serious indigestion.

It wasn’t the food; it was the entertainment. Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, was giving what was billed as her “valedictory” before she returns to teach at Berkeley, and she used the swan song to establish four points, each more unnerving than the last:

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: “Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare.”

This person was Chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. After confessing to being totally clueless, she’s off to teach economics at Berkeley. I think it’s time to be afraid.

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The federal government considers the Muslim group founded by Ground Zero Mosque leader Feisal Abdul Rauf to be a tax-exempt church. But federal records show the group obtained that status by claiming to hold prayer services for up to 500 people in a Manhattan apartment building that has no space to hold that many people.

Gee, Muslims wouldn’t lie to the government, would they?

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In Jimmy Carter’s White House, Patrick Caddell was, in the words of Teddy White, the “house Cassandra” — an all-too-candid pollster whose prophecies spooked the president’s other advisors. Three decades later, Caddell again is warning his fellow Democrats about electoral doom. As he sips an iced tea over lunch in midtown Manhattan, Caddell sighs and tells me that the lessons of the Carter years appear to be all but forgotten by the current crop of Democrats in Washington.

“President Obama’s undoing may be his disingenuousness,” Caddell says. After campaigning for post-partisanship, Obama, he observes, has lurched without pause to the left. “You can’t get this far from what you promised,” Caddell says, “especially when people invest in hope — you must understand that obligation. The killer in American politics is disappointment. When you are elected on expectations, and you fail to meet them, your decline steepens.”

The polling data show how restless the country is. “A Rasmussen poll from earlier this year showed just 21 percent of voters believing that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed — an astounding figure,” Caddell says. “Then a CNN poll showed that 56 percent of Americans worried that the federal government poses a direct threat to their freedom.”

“Democrats are aware of this,” Caddell continues. “They know that the general outcome is baked.” As the fall campaign kicks into gear, “the question now becomes whether Obama can mitigate their losses. You see them trying to localize their campaigns and pretending that they don’t know Nancy Pelosi. It’s all rather amusing.”

“With Carter, I would argue that his failures were not of the heart or of intent, but, perhaps, of execution,” Caddell says. “He was never inconsistent with what he originally envisioned. I can’t say the same for Obama.” Successful presidents, Caddell argues, “realize that it is not about them — that the country is bigger than their presidency. With Obama, it is always about him. It’s a terrible thing to have to say, but I think that it has become obvious.”

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A politician’s post on Facebook is often a lazy attempt at propaganda. Take an entry by Pat Miles, a Democrat running in Michigan’s 3rd congressional district. “You can watch Pat in last night’s Democratic Primary Debate tonight at 9:30 pm on WGVU,” it reads — indicating that Pat doesn’t write his own material.

Compare that to a post by Miles’s Republican opponent, Justin Amash: “[I] just voted no on HB 4627, which adds multiple unnecessary regulations to the sale of annuities in Michigan. . . . The legislation makes the seller responsible for all of the decisions of the prospective buyer. We voted on many bad bills today, but none worse than this one. It passed 97-7.”

It is, as Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote, a “strangely beautiful sight.”

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Six years ago today a group of Muslim terrorists took more than a thousand hostages in a school in Beslan, in the Russian Caucasus. That was the beginning of a three-day standoff that became the Beslan Atrocity. Nearly four hundred people were killed, many of them children, and hundreds more were injured.

It was one of the greatest barbarities of modern times, and can be credited — as so many others can — to Islam.

Gina Trapani discovers a Useful Feature in the new Google Voice.

Been getting harassed via telephone by some vacation telemarketing place  in Las Vegas. At first I set my phone to send calls from that one number directly to voicemail. Then, tonight, I re-discovered you can block callers in Google Voce and automatically give them the official “this number is no longer in service message.”

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I’d still take the escalator, but that’s me.

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Will we cease to hear ‘feminists’ whining about it? Of course not.

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ANY reasonable observer might have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword Beach, in Normandy, on June 6th 1944. Unlike his colleagues, the pale 21-year-old held no rifle in his hands. Of course, in full Highland rig as he was, he had his trusty skean dhu, his little dirk, tucked in his right sock. But that was soon under three feet of water as he waded ashore, a weary soldier still smelling his own vomit from a night in a close boat on a choppy sea, and whose kilt in the freezing water was floating prettily round him like a ballerina’s skirt.

But Mr Millin was not unarmed; far from it. He held his pipes, high over his head at first to keep them from the wet (for while whisky was said to be good for the bag, salt water wasn’t), then cradled in his arms to play. And bagpipes, by long tradition, counted as instruments of war. An English judge had said so after the Scots’ great defeat at Culloden in 1746; a piper was a fighter like the rest, and his music was his weapon. The whining skirl of the pipes had struck dread into the Germans on the Somme, who had called the kilted pipers “Ladies from Hell”. And it raised the hearts and minds of the home side, so much so that when Mr Millin played on June 5th, as the troops left for France past the Isle of Wight and he was standing on the bowsprit just about keeping his balance above the waves getting rougher, the wild cheers of the crowd drowned out the sound of his pipes even to himself.

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Who cares? The EcoNazis environmental ‘activists’ will just get some compliant judge to mandate it anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

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How long before Islamic ‘militants’ blow it up?

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A golfer managed to set fire to a course when he accidentally struck a rock with his iron, sending sparks into the Californian rough.

Dangerous game, golf.

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Actually it was Islamic jihadists, yet again. You’d think that this sort of thing would lead groups like the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations to be much more concerned with Muslim-on-Muslim jihad violence than with the largely chimerical threat of “Islamophobia.” You’d think wrong.

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The President’s fashion statement gets no respect across the pond.

I don’t know about you, but I had never considered words on my carpets. Where will it all end? Garage doors with: “Open the gates of new life” (Browning)? A chair with: “Sit thou still when kings are arming” (Scott)? A loo with: “Roses for the flush of youth” (Christina Rossetti)?

It is not that household goods have been quite free from writing. “Bathmat” it says, in a gnomic kind of self-reference, on some bathmats. “Bread” it says on some breadboards, though never “Board”. The next step is the “Welcome” on the doormat.

I have a front door mat that says ‘LEAVE’.

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Sir Peter Gwynn-Jones, who died on August 21 aged 70, was Garter Principal King of Arms, the effective head of the College of Arms, from 1995 until earlier this year; during his tenure as Garter he steered the heralds through a period of technological change, while his designs helped to reinvigorate the ancient art of heraldry.

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In his 20 years as a researcher, first at Stanford University, now at the University of Toronto, Dr. Redelmeier, 50, has applied scientific rigor to topics that in lesser hands might have been dismissed as quirky and iconoclastic. In doing so, his work has shattered myths and revealed some deep truths about the predictors of longevity, the organization of health care and the workings of the medical mind.

An Informative Chart.

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When they don’t have Americans or Jews to kill, Muslims gladly kill each other.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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Of course, Tim Carney went to Yale and his brother Brian writes for the Wall Street Journal, so this is practically straight from the horse’s mouth.

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Unfortunately, The Other McCain doesn’t tell us the name of the movie.

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Someday they’re going to do that to the wrong person, someone Connected who has more balls than the U.S. government, and they’re not going to enjoy the whirlwind that they reap.

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Well, that certainly sounds suspicious to me….

Cringely has had a bad experience.

These are great cameras when they work, but when they don’t work they are simply $7,800 bricks.  Sony clearly doesn’t care about its prosumer customers.  Interestingly you can get customer support on the weekend for Sony’s cheapest consumer camcorder but not for this baby.

Tell a friend.  Tell them that Sony makes fine prosumer camcorders but doesn’t support them worth a damn.  Tell them that Sylvia is a liar.  Tell them to expect to pay $3000 to rent a $7000 replacement camera if they need a repair.

And tell them to do what I probably should have done in the first place, which was stick with Panasonic. ?

I try not to buy Sony when I can help it. My experiences with them have not been … encouraging.

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Gee, I wonder why? Let’s see … this is the same Pakistan military that’s supporting the Taliban in Waziristan and who set up the jihadist massacre in Bombay, right? Somehow I don’t see this as a legitimate complaint.

“The delegation was subjected to unwarranted security checks at Washington airport by the US Transport Security Agency,” the army said in a statement.

Yeah, well, when you come to America, we like to make you feel at home. One of the ways we do this is by subjecting you to the same fascist bureaucracy that American citizens have to put up with.

Steve Sailer likes to point out where your money is being wasted.

Freddie Mac has named Subha V. Barry to the position of chief diversity officer (CDO). In this position, Barry will lead the company’s newly formed Office of Diversity and Inclusion, with overall responsibility for the combined functions of Diversity and Inclusion and Supplier Diversity. She will be responsible for developing business strategies focused on the needs of a diverse workforce, working closely with other members of Freddie Mac’s senior management team to ensure the company is effectively utilizing diverse talent (both within its employee base and its suppliers), enhance the annual diversity planning process and manage performance against the company’s diversity plans.

Needless to day, Subha Barry is a black female, thereby encapsulating in herself the goals of her office. ‘I’ve achieved diversity, and so can you! Or else!’ (Am I the only one bothered by a quasi-governmental body having a ‘diversity plan’?)

Steve also doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to Crustian fashions:

By the way, Subha V. Barry? Is “Subha” one of those oddly-spelled names that African American schoolgirls make up when they’re pregnant? Or is Subha V. Barry an Indian immigrant riding the Diversity Gravy Train, which most Americans naively think exists to benefit the descendants of American slaves?

Judging from her picture, I think it’s more likely the latter. But these days you can never tell.

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Once again, Real Science jerks the tarp off of Modern Whining.

(Funny how many people claim that their genes made them fat or gay or violent or whatever, and how few claim that their genes made them stupid.)

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Watch Britain plunge downhill….

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Slate magazine, a Voice of the Crust, expands on the perennial Crustian meme of ‘First World Bad, Third World Good’.

Scientific American continues its transition from a scientific publication to a Voice of the Crust.

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As John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: Get a government job!

The nation’s capital has more jobs posted online than people seeking to fill them. That is a stark contrast from Michigan, where there are eight unemployed workers for every job posted on the Internet.

Gee, how could that be? Both places are run by Democrats. Is puzzle.

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The big strategy for Democrats in the midterms is to run against George W. Bush, even though he hasn’t been President for almost two years.  Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid hope to use a little misdirection away from their failed economic policies by claiming that Bush policies were so bad that Democrats couldn’t fix them.  However, the centerpiece of Bush’s economic policies were the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that will expire at the end of the year, and now Democrats want to extend at least some of them, and perhaps all of them, in order to keep from making the economic stagnation into a depression.

James Taranto has the solution: Sophistry!

But there’s an easy out. Don’t call it “extending the Bush tax cuts.” Call it “repealing the Bush tax increase.” This would be entirely accurate: Taxes are going up pursuant to legislation enacted by a Republican Congress and signed by Bush.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

Actually quite a lot of the new diesels are in the better-than-battery ballpark, according to UK government figures. The notional battery car considered by the EMPA analysts was a Volkswagen Golf with its normal drivetrain replaced by a battery one: but it seems that you would be doing slightly better for the environment to buy an ordinary new Golf with a 1.6 litre “BlueMotion” injected turbodiesel – which would be a lot cheaper. That would consume 3.8 l/100km, not 3.9.

So would a new Mini Cooper D hatchback or a new Ford Focus, actually. And if you could bear to go for something a little smaller – VW Polo rather than Golf – you’d be streets ahead on the environmental front, down as low as 3.4 l/100km with more than 15 per cent of the car’s in-service emissions clipped off compared to the 3.9 l/100km battery-car baseline. As the Swiss boffins tell us, it’s the in-service energy use and emissions which count most.

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A longtime professor at UCLA, told that he would not be rehired because his “research is not aligned with the academic mission” of his department, says he’s being fired after 36 years at the prestigious school because his scientific beliefs are ”politically incorrect.” But UCLA says Dr. James Enstrom’s politics have nothing to do with its decision.

Sure, I believe that. (I thought that ‘tenture’ was supposed to prevent this sort of thing?)\

Enstrom questions the science behind the new emissions standards, and he has raised concerns about the two key reports on which they were based – exposing the author of one study as having faked his credentials and the panel that issued the other study as having violated its term limits.

Oh, yeah, he should totally be fired for that.

She said Enstrom’s position at the school was non-tenured and was appointed for fixed terms that are renewable subject to established departmental and university review procedures.

Aha. Well, perhaps tenure isn’t such a bad thing after all, in light of the alternative.

Half Sigma examines an inconvenient truth.

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Disgusting. I rather doubt that the Marines make the same choices.

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I can hear Nelson spinning in his grave from Texas.

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Four Israelis — including a pregnant woman — were killed Tuesday near Hebron in the West Bank in a shooting for which the militant wing of Hamas claimed responsibility, officials said.

The incident occurred near Bani Naim junction, the largely Palestinian territory where Jews have settled in places like Hebron, Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibowitz said. The victims were in a car on Route 60, the IDF website said.

Guy Gonen, a paramedic who was one of the first people on the scene, said the car was sprayed with bullets.

Izzedin Al-Qassam Brigades — the military wing of Hamas — claimed “complete” responsibility for the attack, according to a statement on its website.

Abu Obeida, a spokesman for the group, confirmed responsibility for the attack in an interview with the Hamas radio station.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, congratulated the attackers, saying the attack was a normal reaction to what he called “the crime of occupation.” Hamas, which controls Gaza, opposes direct talks and the continued existence of Israel.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace you got there, Mohammed.

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That is the paradox of Fallujah, the city that saw the bitterest fighting of America’s seven years in Iraq. Its inhabitants regard the Americans with hatred, but say they represent their only insurance against the enemies by whom they are surrounded: al-Qaeda, the Iraqi government, and Iranian agents.

Remind me why we’re wasting our time (and money) on these people?

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You know, this actually explains something important, and, yes, I am serious. Paul Krugman writes in re: Isaac Asimov:

Asimov, and specifically the Foundation trilogy, was my great inspiration; I became an economist because I wanted to be a psychohistorian, saving civilization through the mathematics of human behavior.

The psychohistorians use mathematical models to predict the course of human civilization, and the founder of the science of psychohistory, Prof. Hari Seldon, takes on a kind of godlike role in guiding human history. Of particular interest are what are known as “Seldon crises,” which, as Wikipedia sums it up, “are part of the field of psychohistory, and refer to a social and political situation that, to be successfully surmounted, would eventually leave only one possible, inevitable, course of action.” One unique solution to a sociopolitical problem, determined with mathematical precision by a very powerful professor with friends in government. Talk about your fatal conceits!

Fatal for more than the principals.

Asimov and Krugman both believe(d) that human behavior can be (and ought to be) beneficially managed by disinterested technicians who use the Amazing Power of Science to solve all problems, right all wrongs, and immanentize the eschaton.

Asimov makes this explicit in his Lucky Starr novels, where the solar system is ruled by the Council of Science (of which protagonist Lucky Starr is a member), but it runs throughout his work: All we need do is let the Smartest Guys in the Room (of whom the Good Doctor Asimov, ahem, was naturally one) run everything, and the rest of us can get along about our business, in the sure and certain knowledge that everything will turn out as well as it can. Marxists and other proponents of centrally planned economies suffer from the same delusion, with results as we have seen them.

The problem with Krugman’s worldview — the basic problem with managerial statism — is that it calls for masterminds, and we do not have any. But Krugman aspires to the role, and the fruits of his aspirations, and those of others, are all around us.

Hear, hear.

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Of course, they breed every sort of criminal; why should terrorists be left out of the mix?

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In his January State of the Union speech, President Obama woefully declared that “each time lobbyists game the system or politicians tear each other down instead of lifting this country up, we lose faith.” But by the following month, The Hill was reporting that “despite his push to rein in special interests, President Barack Obama sparked a boom on K Street.” Lobbyists for the health care industry in particular were given an enormous boost in Washington as the health care bill rolled slowly through Congress and then moved on to the regulatory phase.

How’s that Hope & Change thing working out for ya?

The Crust takes care of its own.