DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

Archive for May, 2009

Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal

31st May 2009

Read it.

That depends on Dad; if he were a liberal….

Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »

Groom jumps into pool in wedding suit to save drowning girl

30th May 2009

Read it.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Groom jumps into pool in wedding suit to save drowning girl

Ohio man arrested for mowing unkempt grass at park

30th May 2009

Read it.

Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Ohio man arrested for mowing unkempt grass at park

Back to The Good Life: thousands take up chicken ownership

30th May 2009

Read it.

Guess they don’t have zoning regulations and Home Owners’ Associations in Britain.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Back to The Good Life: thousands take up chicken ownership

‘See through’ swimsuit to eliminate tan lines

30th May 2009

Read it.

Yeah, that’s always been on the top of my Worry List.

Ladies, any man who is in a position to see that you’ve got tan lines is going to have higher priorities. Trust me on this one.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on ‘See through’ swimsuit to eliminate tan lines

Chicago Alderman Is Indicted

30th May 2009

Read it.

Democrat, of course.

Mr. Carothers is the first alderman to face federal charges since 2007. Twenty-seven city aldermen have been convicted of wrongdoing since 1972.

Mr. Carothers’s father, William Carothers, was also an alderman and was convicted in federal court of attempting to extort a hospital contractor for free remodeling work on his offices in 1981.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Chicago Alderman Is Indicted

The Role Of Abundance In Innovation

30th May 2009

Read it.

No surprise, when you’ve been paying attention. “Necessity is the mother of invention” is essentially the same conceptual framework as the Keynesian “demand-pull” approach to economics, and (as we’ve seen from history) that doesn’t accurately describe how the real world works.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Role Of Abundance In Innovation

An emotional fight over land for Flight 93 memorial

30th May 2009

Read it.

Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on An emotional fight over land for Flight 93 memorial

Blondes don’t have more fun, survey finds

29th May 2009

Read it.

All of my illusions, shattered.

You’ve got to wonder about a newspaper that doesn’t even know what Paris Hilton looks like, though.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Blondes don’t have more fun, survey finds

Office Romance

29th May 2009

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, offers a look at the lighter side of pessimism.

That’s right, stationery with an ‘e’. (The difference was immortalized, at least in England, on one of those vulgar comic postcards George Orwell wrote a famous essay about. A gorgeous female store assistant is being addressed by a callow-looking young man. He: “Excuse me, Miss, do you keep stationery?” She: “Well, sometimes I wriggle a bit.”) Stationery! I love the stuff. Paper, pens, notepads, folders, envelopes, markers, erasers, staples, push pins, paper clips, bulldog clips, poster board, display board, foam board, desk furniture … A stationery store is to me … what? Aladdin’s cave? Pah! — What did Aladdin know? You can’t do anything with a mess of rubies.

Preach it, brother.

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Office Romance

Zimbabwe’s destitute Britons to be repatriated

29th May 2009

Read it.

Bet they’re glad they stayed….

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Zimbabwe’s destitute Britons to be repatriated

What you should know about chiropractic

29th May 2009

Read it.

First, learn how to spell it.

Second, learn the etymology – from “cheiros”, Greek for “hand”, and “praxis”, Greek for “doings”. So basically somebody is doing you with their hands.

No wonder insurance doesn’t cover it….

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on What you should know about chiropractic

Why isn’t the future what it used to be?

29th May 2009

Read it.

Well, let’s see: Nanny-state health & safety laws killed the moving sidewalks and the computer-guided cars (See SEGWAY), climate-scare luddites gave us HOV lanes that killed the congestion-free highways, tort lawyers and government bureaucrats killed the paperless office, etc., etc.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | 3 Comments »

The Case for Working With Your Hands

29th May 2009

Read it.

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

Anyone who has read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance will feel immediately at home. (And anyone that hasn’t is to be pitied.)

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Case for Working With Your Hands

Unforced error in Jaeger story

29th May 2009

Read it.

Quite frankly, the concept “Anglican Dominican nun” does not compute.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Unforced error in Jaeger story

Giant dinosaurs kept heads held high

29th May 2009

Read it.

Say it loud!

I’m exothermic, and I’m proud!

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Giant dinosaurs kept heads held high

‘Buffy’ back on big screen without Joss Whedon?

28th May 2009

Read it.

Now that’s just wrong.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on ‘Buffy’ back on big screen without Joss Whedon?

Mother fits teenage son with GPS tracking device on gap year

28th May 2009

Read it.

It had to happen.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Mother fits teenage son with GPS tracking device on gap year

Explorers, don’t forget your inflatable cloak

28th May 2009

Read it.

Good advice under any circumstances.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Explorers, don’t forget your inflatable cloak

Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can’t be read

27th May 2009

Read it.

Nine, if you count my younger brother’s handwriting.

Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »

Virtual fossils reveal how ancient creatures lived

27th May 2009

Read it.

Presumably they’re more accurate than the climate change models that have lodged themselves in AlGore’s fevered brain.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Virtual fossils reveal how ancient creatures lived

Canada’s governor general eats raw heart after gutting seal

27th May 2009

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Canada’s governor general eats raw heart after gutting seal

The Judge Speaks: A Sotomayor Sampler

27th May 2009

Read it.

Condemned out of her own mouth — and Obama along with.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Judge Speaks: A Sotomayor Sampler

The Rising Marginal Cost of Originality or What is Wrong with Modern____

27th May 2009

David Friedman finds the key to modern culture.

It explains why, to a first approximation, modern art isn’t worth looking at, modern music isn’t worth listening to, and modern literature and verse not worth reading. Writing a novel like one of Jane Austen’s, or a poem like one by Donne or Kipling, only better, is hard. Easier to deliberately adopt a form that nobody else has used, and so guarantee that nobody else has done it better.

Of course, there might be a reason nobody else has used it.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Rising Marginal Cost of Originality or What is Wrong with Modern____

Rising sea levels: Survival tips from 5000 BC

26th May 2009

Read it.

I’m thinking that throwing AlGore into a volcano probably couldn’t hurt. It would certainly  reduce certain gas emissions.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Rising sea levels: Survival tips from 5000 BC

Divers discover wreck of ship sent to help Bonnie Prince Charlie

26th May 2009

Read it.

Guess it didn’t work.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Divers discover wreck of ship sent to help Bonnie Prince Charlie

Millionaires Go Missing

26th May 2009

Read it.

Maryland couldn’t balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O’Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were “willing and able to pay their fair share.” The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would “grin and bear it.”

One year later, nobody’s grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller’s office concedes is a “substantial decline.” On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year — even at higher rates.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Millionaires Go Missing

Dick Cheney’s Second Act

26th May 2009

Read it.

By goading a sitting president into responding to his arguments on his terms, Dick Cheney won the contest with Barack Obama last week before either said a word. And his re-emergence onto the public square seems to be driving everybody nuts.

Fun is where you find it.

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Dick Cheney’s Second Act

Why Christians Accepted Greek Natural Philosophy, But Muslims Did Not

25th May 2009

Read it.

Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Why Christians Accepted Greek Natural Philosophy, But Muslims Did Not

Why Muslims Like Hitler, but Not Mozart

24th May 2009

Read it.

Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Why Muslims Like Hitler, but Not Mozart

How Tech Changes Our Thinking About War

24th May 2009

Read it.

An interesting perspective. Everyone is familiar with the cliché that armies prepare to fight the last war, and history is full of examples of victory going to the side that broke free of that mindset first (WWI is the poster child here). What happens when someone manages to create a “theory of the next war” that looks at technological change and correctly extrapolates that change onto the battlefield? This may be a contribution in that direction.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on How Tech Changes Our Thinking About War

LittleSis

24th May 2009

Check it out.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on LittleSis

Two Great Depressions

24th May 2009

David Friedman does an interesting historical comparison.

We can learn a little more by looking at a different Great Depression—the one that didn’t happen. From 1920 to 1921, the consumer price index fell by 10.8%, more than in any year of the Great Depression; it fell another 2.3% in the next year. Unemployment rose to about its 1931 level. Looking just at that data, it’s obviously the start of a depression.

Harding did what Hoover is supposed to have done, reducing taxes and government expenditure. By 1923 the recession was over. It was the Great Depression that didn’t happen.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Two Great Depressions

Change a-comin’

24th May 2009

Jeff Jarvis is just full of interesting ideas. Unfortunately his thinking on the subject of change seems to be curiously incomplete.

There are three responses to change: (1) Resist it, which is futile. (2) Complain about it, which is unproductive. (3) Find the opportunity in it.

Actually, I can think of two more just off the top of my head: (4) suppress it, and (5) control it. These don’t appear to have occurred to him, and absent dealing with them his discussion is fatally flawed.

One might argue that (4) is merely a species of (1), but it isn’t, really; “resist” is passive, whilst “suppress” is active. Anyone can resist, but only those with power can suppress, and that takes it in an entirely different direction. It is of the essence of the conservative personality type to resist change, and when conservative people hold the reins of power, that resistance is often expressed as attempted suppression. (And that has no connection with popular ideas of political ideology — what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 was a conservative attempt at suppressing change, and was rightly so characterized by the dinosaur media, outraged howls from American “conservatives” notwithstanding.)

That suppression of change never works has embedded itself into popular myth, but it remains a myth nevertheless; the Chinese Emperors successfully suppressed change for centuries, until their society was broken by European technical superiority. That same technical superiority gives any modern state adopting it (North Korea, anybody?) the means to suppress change so long as outside forces refrain from rocking the boat.

Similarly, (5) might arguable be considered a species of (3), but I suggest not. Finding opportunity in change appears to be a “Find the silver lining in every cloud” approach — what the Army calls “embrace the suck”. I see this as qualitatively different from an attempt to control change. Both perspectives view change as inevitable, leaving the only question our response to it; but jumping on the boat is not quite the same thing as attempting to seize the tiller. Jarvis is one of the former, and looks at change in terms of economic opportunity. AlGore and his ilk number among the latter, and their response to change has both economic and political dimensions.

I look forward to Jarvis’s next book, chiefly because I want to see whether this incomplete approach leads him into a defective approach, which I suspect that it might.

Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »

Sharing as a civic duty

24th May 2009

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting view concerning information on social media.

The crowd owns the wisdom of the crowd and to withhold information from that collective knowledge—a link, a restaurant rating, a bit of advice—may be a new definition of antisocial or at least selfish behavior.

This strikes me as statism wearing a Clever Plastic Disguise, the sort of argument one would hear from a communist who had embraced the electronic age. I’m pretty sure Ayn Rand would recoil from it in horror.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Sharing as a civic duty

Mirror on America

24th May 2009

David Brooks demonstrates why, even though he’s a wussy RINO, he’s often worth reading.

Schama was born in Britain and makes documentaries for the BBC, but he has spent more time in the United States than most Brilliant authors, having taught at Harvard and now Columbia. But this is very much an outsider’s book, and if Schama doesn’t come from a strictly European perspective, let’s just say he comes from the realm of enlightened High Thinking that exists where The New York Review of Books reaches out and air-­kisses The London Review of Books.

His book is called “The American Future: A History” (which is a puerile paradox before you even open the cover), and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the American future.

Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »

Businessman hunts down thief in his helicopter

24th May 2009

Read it.

Hah.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Businessman hunts down thief in his helicopter

Court Upholds Searches Of Muslim Groups in Va.

24th May 2009

Read it.

An appeals court yesterday upheld the legality of federal raids on a Herndon-based network of Muslim charities, businesses and think tanks, a case that caused a firestorm in the Muslim community.

I’d certainly like to cause a firestorm in the Muslim community. It is, after all, their turn.

Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Court Upholds Searches Of Muslim Groups in Va.

The Intellectual Property Asshole Competition

23rd May 2009

Read it.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on The Intellectual Property Asshole Competition

Tocqueville Surfs

23rd May 2009

Read it.

Last December’s floods washed out park roads, bridges, and facilities at Kauai’s Polihale State Park. Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) studied the damage and released a statement two months later, declaring, “We know that people are anxious to get to the beach. However, the preliminary cost estimate of repairs is $4 million.” The DLNR’s response to this natural disaster was to look for more state or federal funds. Its main objective was to grab a fee-generated windfall for the department, ironically entitled the “Recreational Renaissance” fund. DLNR’s chair, Laura Thielen, proclaimed: “We are asking for the public’s patience and cooperation to help protect the park’s resources during this closure, and for their support of the ‘Recreational Renaissance’ so we can better serve them and better care for these important places.” An original timeline for the work was set for late summer, but according to local resident and surfer Bruce Pleas, “It would not have been open this summer, and it probably wouldn’t be open next summer.”

From food donated by area restaurants to heavy machinery offered by local construction companies, a project originally forecast to cost millions and take months (if not years) to complete has been finished in a matter of weeks with donated funds, manpower, and equipment. As Troy Martin from Martin Steel, which provided machinery and five tons of steel at no charge, put it: “We shouldn’t have to do this, but when it gets to a state level, it just gets so bureaucratic, something that took us eight days would have taken them years. So we got together—the community—and we got it done.” Cleaning up the park was a major undertaking involving bridge-building, reconstructing bathroom facilities, and use of heavy equipment to clear miles of flood-damaged roadways.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Tocqueville Surfs

Wallaby mother and baby spotted in Cornwall

22nd May 2009

Read it.

A male wallaby which escaped from a petting zoo two years ago found this female mate in the wild – which has now been spotted in a garden carrying their baby.

I wasn’t aware that there were so many wallabies wandering around in Cornwall. I suspect that Prince Charles has something to do with it.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Wallaby mother and baby spotted in Cornwall

Food Web, Meet Interweb: The Networked Future of Farms

22nd May 2009

Read it.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Food Web, Meet Interweb: The Networked Future of Farms

Cruise passengers fought off pirates with deckchairs

22nd May 2009

Read it.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Cruise passengers fought off pirates with deckchairs

How Joe Biden Wrecked the Judicial Confirmation Process

22nd May 2009

Read it.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on How Joe Biden Wrecked the Judicial Confirmation Process

Things That Could Have Killed Me

22nd May 2009

Read it.

It’s amazing any of us survived childhood.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Things That Could Have Killed Me

Wind turbines ‘killed goats’ by depriving them of sleep

22nd May 2009

Read it.

So much for sustainable energy.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Wind turbines ‘killed goats’ by depriving them of sleep

Aussie whiz-kids can cram 1.6TB on a DVD-sized disc, go Outback tonight

21st May 2009

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Aussie whiz-kids can cram 1.6TB on a DVD-sized disc, go Outback tonight

Super-Recognizers Great At Facial Recognition

21st May 2009

Read it.

Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Super-Recognizers Great At Facial Recognition

The Climate-Industrial Complex

21st May 2009

Read it.

AlGore isn’t the only guy getting rich off of climate-change hysteria.

Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Climate-Industrial Complex

1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Finds

21st May 2009

Read it.

An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.

Gee, why is it “unreleased”?

Two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the report was being held up by Defense Department employees fearful of upsetting the White House, at a time when even Congressional Democrats have begun to show misgivings over Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo.

And that’s the way it is in the ObamaNation.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on 1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Finds