DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

Archive for the 'Dystopia Watch' Category

The world is rapidly going downhill. Unfortunately, we can’t get off.

Thousands in St. Louis Rally to Protest Violence

2nd June 2008

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Savor the irony of Black Panthers participating in a rally to protest violence. I guess we can expect the Saudi royal family to start investing in pork futures next.

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Songs in the key of death

2nd June 2008

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One of the UK’s current favourites, according to a recent survey, is Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

No wonder Britain is falling apart.

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Airport staff stop passenger boarding for wearing Transformers T-shirt

2nd June 2008

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His top showed the Transformers film character Optimus Prime holding a gun.

I’m convinced that these people do this sort of absurd stuff just to amuse themselves, and don’t really care that it makes them look like pettifogging morons.

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Is the recession causing a birth dearth?

2nd June 2008

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Well, it can’t be “the recession”, since there isn’t one. Wonder what it could be?

Gee, seems to me that Mark Steyn wrote a book about this not too long ago….

And since when do leftoids care about low birth rate? I thought that they were all worried about overpopulation?

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Marine Who Was Killed On Leave Is Buried

2nd June 2008

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There you go — Iraq is safer than Cleveland. And yet no calls for withdrawal from Cleveland from the Chattering Class.

City administration? Democrat.

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Massachusetts Legislators Threaten To Tax College Endowments

2nd June 2008

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That would be amusing. It’ll never happen, but it’s fun to think about the Overclass being subjected to the same government importunities as Flyover Country.

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If McCain Wins, Sarandon Threatens (Promises!?) to Leave U.S.

2nd June 2008

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Yeah, promises, promises….

Eight years of George W Bush, and Alec Baldwin is still hanging around like a bad smell.

What do we have to do, elect Dick Cheney? Not that I would mind, you understand; but still. These people are just all mouth and no action.

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Playing Golf Extends Life 5 Years?

31st May 2008

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No, it just seems like five years.

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National Cathedral In Fiscal Squeeze

31st May 2008

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Note that the “National Cathedral” in question is Episcopalian, which tells you a lot about American culture.

Unfortunately, both the Episcopalian church and American culture are unravelling at an ever-increasing pace.

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The “I’ll See You in Hell” Syndrome

31st May 2008

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Not surprisingly, players in all countries chose to give up some money to punish freeloaders. The difference was in how the freeloaders reacted to being punished. In prosperous countries, the cheaters tended to respond to punishment by mending their ways. In the more uproarious countries, however, the bad guys just got mad and hit back.

In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.

That explains a lot about the Middle East.

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Tiny Towns in N.J. May Have to Merge

31st May 2008

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And the octopus draws its tentacles ever tighter.

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Carbon’s Power Brokers

31st May 2008

George Will points out that whenever politicians come up with a complicated “solution” for a problem that exists primarily in the media-fueled fantasy world of public opinion, it’s all about money and power for the Overclass.

AlGore isn’t bleating about Global Warming because he’s worried about the fate of the earth — if he were, he wouldn’t have a carbon footprint as big as King Kong. He’s pushing it because it stuffs his pockets with dollar bills.

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CHICKEN OF THE SEA

31st May 2008

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Ships, helicopters … what is Greenpeace’s carbon footprint these days?

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Soros Publisher ‘Shaped’ McClellan’s Hit Job

31st May 2008

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At American Thinker, William Tate observes that other publishers approached by McClellan don’t even recognize it as the same book.

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The Few, the Brave, the Other

31st May 2008

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Modern Western culture, dominated as it is by status striving among whites to score points off each other by most fervently embracing “The Other,” has largely become dependent upon a tiny handful of Others to say the things that need to be said.

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Cambridge students tested on Diana biography

30th May 2008

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Prof Mary Beard admitted some of her colleagues were “a bit dubious” about the academic value of the history course, which ran for three years.

Oh, ya think?

This is what happens when universities go all hip-and-trendy.

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Man convicted of assault with a hedgehog

30th May 2008

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Tourist bitten on penis by deadly brown snake

30th May 2008

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Mugabe will keep office, wife says

30th May 2008

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Well, duh. That’s what dictators do. I’m surprised he even went along with having elections.

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Earl of Devon bans gay marriages at his castle

29th May 2008

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Let the whining begin.

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California tolerance.

29th May 2008

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But only for the Right Sort.

Suppose you are a government employee in California, authorized to conduct civil marriage ceremonies, and you object on moral or religious grounds to same-sex marriage. According to the plain logic of the California Supreme Court’s decision earlier this month, you are simply a bigot; the spring of your objection is irrational prejudice. There is no ground for tolerance for your views, precisely because your views impinge upon the fundamental rights of others. Recall that even someone (like Senator Obama) of the view that while marriage should remain an institution exclusive to a man and a woman, civil unions should be established for homosexuals, is also a narrow-minded bigot, again according to the force of the Court’s logic.

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What’s Important to Google? Answer: Mountain Climbing

29th May 2008

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Rioters demand lower caste status in India

29th May 2008

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Thousands of protesters have besieged India’s capital New Delhi demanding their caste status be reduced to secure government benefits.

Incentives work.

Or sponge, as the case may be.

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Acorn: Another Radical Group in Barack Obama’s Closet

29th May 2008

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The keffiyeh kerfuffle

28th May 2008

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If you get an outfit, you can be a terrorist too. (Or at least pretend — without having to go to the trouble of, like, maybe blowing yourself up or breaking a nail or, you know, something gross like that.)

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D.C. Council Crafting Plan to Pay $150 Million for Soccer Stadium

28th May 2008

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Can you think of a bigger waste of taxpayer money in a city where the crime and the quality of the schools would suggest better ways to spend those resources?

Run by Democrats, of course, like most urban behavioral sinks.

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So You Think You Can be President? Revisited.

27th May 2008

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I favor a series of exams ending in a cage match. But that’s me.

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Countries to decide on Arctic Ocean ownership

27th May 2008

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Funny how even governments that do everything they can to interfere with property rights among their subjects seem to be at the front of the line to claim such rights for themselves.

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Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion of the world today.

27th May 2008

Freeman Dyson doesn’t approve.

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British yachts break out of French blockade

26th May 2008

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“Well, damn the French.” — John Cleese

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Six-year-olds sexually abused by UN peacekeepers

26th May 2008

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Ah! I knew that something was occupying their time other than investigating Arab terrorism.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term “peacekeeper”, doesn’t it?

Note that the nationality of the “peacekeepers” involved isn’t identified, which means that they weren’t Europeans. Had they been Europeans, of course, they’d have been identified immediately.

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Desmond Tutu to investigate killing of Palestinians in Gaza

26th May 2008

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Funny how the U.N. never seems to get around to investigating the myriad occasions on which “Palestinians” in Gaza kill Israelis.

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What’s Important to Google?

26th May 2008

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I guess they do think that California is a different country and not part of America at all.

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Why Does Jimmy Carter Hate America?

26th May 2008

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A very good question.

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Lessons from al Durah

26th May 2008

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If you are not familiar with the al Durah incident, you need to be.

Richard Landes has invented a new word, “Pallywood”, to describe the tactical practices they employ, the staging of news events, intimidation and manipulation of foreign journalists and the infiltration of the western mainstream media by local “stingers” (many of whom are nothing more than operatives of the palestinian propaganda ministries) This “weaponization” of our media can no longer be denied.

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Funeral Duty

26th May 2008

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Kick a pacifist for Memorial Day.

It’s not as if they would do anything about it.

Except maybe whine.

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City job loss sees trophy wives seeking divorce

25th May 2008

Read it.

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Divers who survived night in shark-infested waters have to pay for their rescue

25th May 2008

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Seems reasonable to me.

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British sailors trapped by French port blockade

25th May 2008

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French police have so far made no attempt to quell the protest, according to the trapped sailors.

And that’s the key to the whole situation. How would French police react if, say, the British people trapped started fighting back? Jail time galore, I suspect.

The first function of government is to keep the peace. When the peace is not kept, then there is no government, no matter how many fools parade around in uniforms.

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Race Odyssey: history in black and white

25th May 2008

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Since the 1960s, humanities and social science faculties have been the last redoubt of the Left, whether in its Marxist totalitarian or post-modernist, multicultural incarnations. Academics have been allowed to have their way in imposing a stifling political correctness.

Mary Lefkowitz is a retired classicist who until recently taught at Wellesley College, a women’s liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Her troubles involved an Afro-Caribbean colleague called Anthony Martin from the Africana Studies department. By all accounts, he had done much to advance the careers of young black women under his tutelage.

One evening in October 1991, Martin was part of a group reading Twelfth Night in a college hall. He wanted to pee. On his re-ascent from the men’s room, Professor Martin was stopped by a student dorm officer, one Michelle Plantec, who had been trained to ask all non-resident visitors: ‘Excuse me, sir, who are you with?’ This seemingly straightforward challenge, evidently heavy with undertones that Martin was similarly attuned to spot, prompted the professor to respond by screaming at Plantec that she was ‘a f—ing bitch, a racist and a bigot’.

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NICE shows off prototype electric car; Liberty plans an electric Range Rover

25th May 2008

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I’ve never understood the attraction of cars with doors that swing up. Do they anticipate parking in extremely narrow spaces? Imagine the complexity — the NEEDLESS complexity — of the hinge.

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‘Environmentally friendly’ cars are worse polluters than five years ago

24th May 2008

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

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IT Wars: When we fight over IT, nobody wins.

24th May 2008

Cringely is always worth reading.

Most of the problems of IT start and end with bad management. I speak fairly often to technical audiences and one question I like to ask is simple: If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your boss do your job?

The answer is almost always “no.” By “almost always” I mean 97-99 percent of the time.

Think back on all the stories you’ve read about strikes at manufacturing firms where “essential functions are being performed by managers”. How many companies could do that if their IT staff walked out?

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What did CPS think it was doing?

24th May 2008

David Friedman does a job that American bureaucrats won’t do.

It is worth noting that the only justification offered by the CPS for seizing male children was that they were being brought up to be child abusers—which is to say, being brought up in their parents’ religion. It sounds from some news stories as though the implicit deal being offered to parents was that if they would accept suitable psychological counseling, they would eventually get their children back. Combine those two and it looks as though the idea was to force people to renounce their religion, holding their children hostage until they did.

Your tax dollars at work.

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ACLU suing middle school for single-sex classes

24th May 2008

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I’m curious as to why the ACLU is involved in this issue. It would appear to be somewhat far afield from their core business of making sure that American life sucks.

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The “Pacifascists” among us. Dawn of a brave new word

23rd May 2008

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The latest examples of the “pacifascists” among us would be those that raised the howl last week demanding that the US Armed Forces supply Burma’s suffering millions with aid even if they had to go in at the point of a gun with massive air cover.

It has texture, and scope.

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Programming is destroying my capacity for reflective thought

23rd May 2008

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It is always soul-satisfying to have some external object that rationalizes what we would otherwise have to admit are merely character flaws. Hence the Guardian, noted socialist rag, is an appropriate venue for this article — after all, that’s what socialists do best.

The truth is that programming improves the quality of reflective thought, because it requires attention to detail — you can’t just say “whatever” and have code work. The same goes for ideas, although the feedback is less immediate: If a professor or a pundit were confronted with a Blue Screen of Death every time he said something stupid, the world would be a better place.

As Francis Crawford of Lymond famously said, “You must carry polish and precision into everything you do.”

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What Hillary Wants

23rd May 2008

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Eugene Robinson is a Negro, so he ought to know, right?

(So far as I can tell, that’s his only qualification for writing in the Washington Post, so it has to be worth something, right?)

Some commentators have speculated that she wants to have the votes counted simply so that she can semi-plausibly claim to have had more popular support than Obama, a distinction that would serve her well if she ran again in four or eight years. I say dream on; the Clintons don’t do moral victories.

Hmm. He may have something there….

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Good fences make less homicidal neighbors

23rd May 2008

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

A lot of ethnic struggles aren’t driven so much by mass hatred as by thugs, most of them young, who get into scrapes with the other side. In the meritocratic uplands, it all seems irrelevant. But down in the lowlands, where social ties are less determined by having unusually high IQs or particular talent, but by blood and neighborliness, the young thugs are nephews and cousins and neighbors’ nephews and cousins. While they may be sons of bitches, they’re our sons of bitches.

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Can You Own Stripes?

23rd May 2008

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The whole concept of “intellectual property” needs to be re-thought.

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